Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop News

A hotfix has been released with the following changes:

• Fixed a crash related to a server becoming empty mid-mission.
  
• Made changes to addon loading to hopefully address some servers not showing challenges they should have enabled.
  
• Marine bots now remember if they were infested or on fire before the bot took over for damage calculations. Removed the restriction on "take a break" while infested.
  

We're hard at work on next year's major update, but in the meantime there were some issues we wanted to address more urgently. This release fixes some crashes, oddities with weapons, and issues with new maps, and also contains an improvement to mapper control of objects marines can pick up.



We're a little more than a third of the way to the deadline for our first annual mapping competition. With two months left, there's still plenty of time to make an entry, even for someone who has never made a Source Engine map before!

• Research 7: Research 7: Fixed incorrect music playing.
  
• Research 7: Illyn Forest Fixed incorrect music playing.
  
• Tilarus-5: Yanaurus Mine: Fixed an instructor hint persisting through mission restarts.
  
• Tilarus-5: Yanaurus Mine: Fixed terrain in the mines area that marines could get stuck in near the button.
  
• Accident 32: Fixed the campaign map being blurry on some graphics configurations.
  
• Reversed Rydberg Reactor: Replaced infinite buzzers with a one-time spawn near the mission start.
  
• Reversed Rydberg Reactor: Spread out or removed alien spawn locations near the opened airlock door.
  
• Reversed Rydberg Reactor: Prevented hordes from spawning behind closed airlocks.
  
• Reversed Cargo Elevator: Added a snow wall in the area just after the elevator to avoid seeing out of bounds with a rotated camera.
  
• Reversed Cargo Elevator: Reduced the size of the AI navigation graph and fixed aliens spawning in unreachable locations.
  
• Reversed Cargo Elevator: Removed alien spawn location randomization.
  
• Reversed Cargo Elevator: Fixed drones spawning outside the elevator car or falling under the floor.
  
• Reversed Cargo Elevator: Added logic to clean up aliens left behind when entering the elevator.
  
• Reversed Cargo Elevator: Reduced the number of aliens that spawn when exiting the elevator.
  
• Reversed Landing Bay: Fixed alien spawn locations blocked by terrain.
  

• v45 Electric Charged Armor: Fixed the deployment count being listed as a duplicate "Damage Blocked" stat. Added a note to the Swarmopedia entry clarifying that this armor blocks 75% of melee damage while active.
  
• PS50 Bulldog: Fixed sending a weapon_fired scripting event every frame when the fire button is held.
  
• IAF Medical Amplifier Gun: Fixed this weapon not having enough secondary ammo capacity for Bastille's default ammo count, causing the gun to become reloadable, which would cause primary ammo to be discarded.
  
• IAF Medical SMG: Fixed this weapon highlighting potential heal targets based on whether it had primary ammo.
  

• Fixed a crash when starting the game with a version of Proton or the Steam Client that is too old. Added a message explaining how to change the Proton version.
  
• Sending too many commands at once to the server will now disconnect the client rather than soft-locking. The game will write a file that can be used to help figure out what's causing this. We believe this is what has been causing the mission success/failed screen to hang for some players.
  
• Added a workaround for the workshop campaign "Revenant - The Lost Voyage" not loading due to a syntax error in its campaign file.
  
• Delayed demo recording by 50 frames after an instant restart to avoid creating demos that cannot be played back. Configurable with the rd_auto_record_delay_start_frames convar.
  
• Fixed asw_custom_skill_points being classified as a setting rather than a challenge variable.
  
• Changed the default value for rd_chatwipe to not clear chat after a delay.
  
• rd_reduce_motion now disables briefing cameras. You can also set rd_disable_briefing_camera if you want this functionality without the other changes rd_reduce_motion makes.
  
• Fixed joy_pitchsensitivity and joy_yawsensitivity not being used when using a controller in first person.
  
• Fixed the VScript/SourceMod menu persisting through mission restarts.
  
• We've added more options to donate to Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop contributors, this time adding artists, programmers, server hosts, and translators.
  

• rd_weapon_generic_object can now be assigned an icon (see Haikü's tutorial for how to make weapon icons).
  
• rd_weapon_generic_object now has ForcePickUp and ForceDrop inputs as well as OnPrimaryAttack, OnSecondaryAttack, OnReload, OnPickedUp, and OnDropped outputs in Hammer.
  

An update has been released for Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop.

• Added several community challenge modes to Heroes of the Interstellar Armed Forces.
  
• Fixed a bug causing anti-cheat to fail to initialize on the sg-servers and Steampunk ranked dedicated servers.
  
• Added ASRD Tennessee to the Heroes of the Interstellar Armed Forces server list.
  
• Fixed menuselect commands not being forwarded to VScript.
  
• Fixed menus created by VScript or SourceMod disappearing after 5 seconds even if their timeout was longer.
  
• Updated Steam API to version 1.57.
  
• Prevented servers from running non-whitelisted console commands on clients. Please report any case where this breaks something.
  

An update has been released containing the following changes:

• Accident 32: Confined Facility and J5 Connector: Reduced networking overhead from minecarts.
  
• Tilarus-5: Yanaurus Mine: Fixed scripted doors not visually falling.
  
• v45 Electric Charged Armor: Improved visibility of this gear. No longer disappears immediately when using last charge (similar to Assault Jets).
  
• AVK-36 Marksman Rifle: Fixed zooming causing auto-reload to become disabled.
  
• PS50 Bulldog: Fixed this weapon using visual effects meant for dual weapons.
  
• Menders no longer heal biomass when it is on fire.
  
• Fixed a crash when starting a mission without a key bound to "use offhand item".
  
• Fixed medals not appearing in lobbies hosted on dedicated servers.
  
• Weapons with aiming improved by crouching now work on moving platforms. Fixed stationary marines being detected as moving due to rounding errors.
  
• Fixed lighting issues with marine gear in areas with complex shadows.
  
• The 8th marine is no longer hidden on the HUD for certain values of asw_hud_scale.
  
• Fixed marine bots aiming throwable items at the player's crosshair even if it had moved since the command was given.
  
• Uber drones now use the model set for them in Hammer.
  
• Improved gib positioning for marines and sentries.
  
• Heroes of the Interstellar Armed Forces medals, starting at the end of this month (season 11), will use an updated design. You will no longer receive multiple medals per season if you are in the top 100 or top 20.
  

An update has been released to address the following issues. Some of these issues were addressed in hotfixes yesterday and today.

• Firing projectiles causes lag.
  
• Marine bots in follow mode cause lag.
  
• The Hot Enough achievement is unobtainable. There's no special trick needed to earn the achievement; just escape the volcano zone without any marines dying.
• Players who completed Accident 32 missions on the beta branch are stuck at 6/6 on the campaign difficulty achievements. Players in this state can un-stick the achievements by completing any Accident 32 mission.
• The capsule model in Accident 32 missions has broken rim lighting.
  
• Rich presence shows an untranslated string for official missions and challenges.
  
• Item descriptions for Heroes of the Interstellar Armed Forces medals render incorrectly.
  
• Combine Striders produce an error particle effect when firing their gun.
  
• Marine combat rolling unintentionally changed.
  
• Medical weapon ammo count unintentionally changed.
  

Addons can now include a file named cfg/autoexec_[workshop addon id].cfg, which will be run when the addon is loaded on the client. For example, an addon that replaces the marine model and uses the backpack body group to give each class a unique model could add an autoexec file with:

rd_marine_gear_hide_backpack 0