Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop News

We're still preparing for the big celebration of Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop's birthday on April 20th, but in the meantime, there are some bugs that need fixes sooner rather than later. There will be more fixes in a few weeks, but for now, here are the changes:

• Fixed several crashes.
  
• Added medals for completing the Outstanding Execution achievements for each campaign.
  
• Added the ability to donate $1 to the author of an official campaign. Currently, there are 3 campaigns on the list. We will add more campaigns to this system as soon as we are able to contact their authors.
  
• Added support for SourceMod plugins that display a menu.
  
• Fixed func_rd_no_director_aliens not setting its model on spawn.
  
• Fixed the left bumper / L1 button on some controllers getting stuck or not working.
  
• Fixed players who are not in a lobby being displayed as "playing a different version".
  
• Fixed stats not being recorded for workshop missions that are not part of a campaign.
  
• Fixed mapper-placed decals duplicating on every instant restart.
  
• Fixed NPC character portraits remaining active after an instant restart.
  
• Fixed the workshop uploader not correctly recording campaign, mission, and challenge titles.
  

Today marks the start of Heroes of the Interstellar Armed Forces season 8, and we're adding more missions and challenges from the Workshop to the list of content you can play on participating servers.


The following Workshop campaigns and missions have been added to the list of content available in ranked play:

• Blitz Campaign by _Vertigo_, jhheight, and Dmitriy
  
• Reduction by XFunc_CaRteR (note: Mission 5 is not scored as it contains no combat)
  
• Crude Infestation by jhheight
  
• Nitro Canister MR by Tien and Orange
  
• Warehouse by Sergei 'STALKER4732' Lavrinenco
  
• Chemical Facility by Apairofkings
  
• Delusion by ShadowsInRain
  
• Ground Zero by Spectre13
  
• The Beginning by Kenny_WWE
  
• Nest by Dmitriy
  
• Absolute Madness by Orange
  
• Ancient Ruins by Cryora
  
• Edge by Jester_prince
  

The following Workshop challenge modes are now available in ranked play:

• Bounds by Reit
  
• Darkness by jhheight
  
• Kill or Die by Orange
  
• Invisible Aliens by jhheight
  
• ASBI 3.0 by Revenant
  
• ASBI Kill or Die by Orange
  
• ASBI Bounds by Reit and jhheight
  

Additionally, we are changing how diminishing returns from playing the same map over and over works.

Diminishing returns happen in Heroes of the Interstellar Armed Forces when you play the same mission multiple times in quick succession. If it has been 2 or more hours since your last HoIAF mission, or you have not repeated the mission within 6 the last missions you have played, you are considered to have not repeated the mission.

We are changing the score multiplier for diminishing returns so that it scales with the number of times you have repeated the mission recently.

A hotfix to address issues in ranked play has been released.

• Fixed grub stomping counting as alien kills in places it was not intended to, such as the achievements Smoking Barrels and Damage Amped.
  
• Fixed marines getting stuck in fire extinguisher particles, staircases, and terrain.
  

Hot off the tail of last week's update, here are some fixes for bugs reported by the community.

• IAF Medical Gun: Fixed collision being oriented differently than the visible model.
  
• CR18 Freeze Grenades: Fixed collision being oriented differently than the visible model.
  
• Flashlight Attachment: Fixed a long-standing issue with this equipment's center of gravity.
  
• FG01 Hand Grenades: Fixed collision being oriented differently than the visible model.
  
• IAF Medical Amplifier Gun: Fixed collision being oriented differently than the visible model.
  
• TG-05 Gas Grenades: Fixed collision being oriented differently than the visible model.
  

• Fixed doors sometimes surviving a single large hit that dealt more than their max health.
  
• Fixed a rare ragdoll-related crash.
  
• Fixed a crash when killing aliens without a Steam client connection on a map loaded via console commands.
  
• Fixed a crash when leaving the mission settings screen with a dropdown menu open.
  
• Fixed a duplicate in-game voting menu being visible during briefing if a briefing camera is in use.
  
• Added convar asw_blip_color_parasite_egg for setting the color of unhatched parasites on the minimap.
  
• Fixed being unable to join lobbies for certain missions through the game UI.
  
• Fixed the list of disabled workshop addons not being loaded at startup.
  
• Fixed wanderers and hordes spawning behind vault doors.
  
• Added a workaround for the engine sometimes forgetting which players are voice-muted.
  

• env_sprite_clientside now changes to server-side env_sprite if it has a targetname or parentname defined. A warning is printed to the console if this happens.
  

Today's update fixes some inconsistencies in various weapons and campaigns. It also adds the ability to assign screen effects to individual marines, and a new trigger to apply different HDR settings to different areas of a map.

• Jacob's Rest: Timor Station: Fixed NPC pathfinding near the end of the mission.
  
• Research 7: Jericho Mines: Fixed objective markers failing to update with objective completion.
  
• Research 7: Jericho Mines: Fixed lag caused by physics calculations for falling pipes.
  
• Tears for Tarnor: Abandoned Maintenance Tunnels: Fixed walls having unexpectedly tall collision, negatively affecting grenades.
  
• Tilarus-5: Yanaurus Mine: Fixed walls being invisible with a rotated camera.
  
• Tilarus-5: Forgotten Factory: Fixed walls being invisible with a rotated camera.
  
• Lana's Escape: Lana's Bridge: Made performance optimizations to lighting and cinematic alien spawns.
  
• Nam Humanum: Platform XVII: Removed a tech marine requirement after the last hack is completed.
  
• Nam Humanum: Groundwork Labs: Fixed the countdown objective ending early.
  
• Nam Humanum: Groundwork Labs: Fixed lighting being unexpectedly bright.
  
• Nam Humanum: Groundwork Labs: Improved marine bot navigation.
  
• BioGen Corporation: Operation x5: Fixed death traps not being deadly enough.
  
• BioGen Corporation: Operation x5: Fixed aliens being able to spawn inside the ending elevator, causing it to get stuck.
  
• BioGen Corporation: BioGen Labs: Removed invisible ceiling collision.
  

• IAF Minigun: Fixed reloading with an odd ammo count resulting in 499/500 ammo.
  
• Flashlight Attachment: This weapon now reflects light like other weapons do.
  
• Grenade Launcher: Fixed a bug causing grenades to explode twice if they hit an alien directly. Instead, grenades now do double damage if they hit a character (marine or alien). This fixes splash damage from a direct hit bypassing one-hit protection and slightly increases grenade launcher damage (the first explosion would previously push enemies slightly away from the grenade before the second explosion).
  
• Desert Eagle: This gun has been renamed to PS50 Bulldog and has a new appearance and sounds.
  
• IAF Medical Amplifier Gun: Updated skin to differentiate it from the normal medical gun.
  
• TG-05 Gas Grenades: Updated the grenade box to match the style of other grenade items.
  

• Made grubs reflect light like other aliens do.
  
• Harvesters no longer spawn xenomites when they are killed by a direct grenade hit that deals more than double their remaining health.
  

• Updated Chinese translation.
  
• Updated European Portuguese translation.
  
• Updated German translation.
  
• Updated Italian translation.
  
• Updated Japanese translation.
  
• Updated Korean translation.
  
• Updated Russian translation.
  
• Fixed translations being silently truncated after 1023 bytes. Translations can now be up to 4095 bytes and a warning will be printed to the console if they are longer.
  

• Changed how animated props are networked. Reverted the change in the last update that makes the server drive animations. Instead, specific props are always visible to the client regardless of distance. Joining a game after an animation has started will play animations late, but this should fix the stuttering.
  
• Improved controller navigation in advanced settings.
  
• Added some example color correction files.
  
• Explosions now deal full damage within a small radius of their epicenter, and damage falloff only starts beyond that distance.
  
• Tech marines can now manually override the boot-up sequence of an unlocked computer that has downloadable data, and will automatically start the hack on a locked computer after 4 seconds.
  

• Added trigger_tonemap brush entity. This trigger overrides the active tonemap controller for characters inside its volume, and is overridden by the new SetTonemapController VScript function.
  
• Changed fog_volume to be based on the position of the currently-controlled character's eyes rather than the camera position. Some maps may need to be edited to shift their fog_volume entities north if they were originally made to compensate for the camera shift. fog_volume can now be overridden by the new SetFogController, SetPostProcessController, and SetColorCorrection VScript functions.
  
• Added an option to asw_spawner to ignore carnage scaling, for spawners where the number of aliens being increased due to higher difficulty is undesirable (eg. spawners used for cinematics).
  
• Additional colonist models are now available for use as ragdolls.
  

• CASW_Marine::GetMarineName() no longer leaks memory on every call and now properly translates the name.
  
• Added GetCommander method to inhabitable NPCs (eg. marines).
  
• Added SetFogController method to inhabitable NPCs.
  
• Added SetPostProcessController method to inhabitable NPCs.
  
• Added SetColorCorrection method to inhabitable NPCs.
  
• Added SetTonemapController method to inhabitable NPCs.