Hey there AFF Community!
It’s been a while, hasn’t it?
You’re all probably wondering what happened, what caused this almost-2-years-long hiatus in AFF’s updates. Truth be told, there’s no single reason - some team-members got more busy at day-jobs, some switched jobs, some got covid troubles, some moved away from AFF to other projects, stuff happens.
However, it doesn’t mean there hasn’t been any progress made. Despite not being able to afford the concentrated effort of releasing an actual update, we very much kept working on the game itself (shout-outs to Exa, who largely led the development for those past months/years). And thus here we are with a changelog that spans something like 16 pages and extends or polishes pretty much every system there is in AFF. Highlights can be found underneath.
Capital ship turrets rework
We’ve changed how capital ships’ turrets are controlled and behave, to make the capship gameplay more engaging and simply give the captain more to do - while still maintaining the importance of the crew maintaining the systems inside the ships. The primary turrets are now under the captain’s direct control, with several of them linked together. All the secondary turrets are now tied to a single gunner seat, which also has access to missiles on most ships, to enable engagement at various ranges for all players manning the ships. The gunner’s view is also not tied to any specific turret anymore, but rather the ship itself for a better overview of the situation. All the turrets, and that also applies to those on ground vehicles, should now have more sensible constraints and rotate in more predictable fashion too.
AI upgrades
AFF’s bots were already very versatile but we’ve continued to make further improvements to their behaviour. Their pathing across all the maps should be more consistent now and their piloting skills less erratic. They will also react in more player-like ways to getting shot at and prioritize deployables, reviving and other non-combat actions more effectively. Equally numerous tweaks have been made to the team-wide MILNET AI for more sensible order issuing and better utilization of commander powers, especially in space.
Boarding improvements
We polished a number of visual and functional details around boarding - the boarding pods should now look more sensible and consistent between sitting on a dropship and being attached to a target ship. The bots should now also be less confused by both the boarding operation and piloting the dropships, resulting in less failed attempts. We also fixed a number of desyncs between the server and the clients regarding boarding - the pods should now be less likely to drift off the target ship visually and even less likely to dump the boarding party out into the void.
Performance and the DX11 renderer
We still consider the DX11 renderer an experimental feature but that’s mostly due to the old UI glitching out a bit in that mode. Gameplay-wise it should be the better-looking and faster option already, with several new performance improvements introduced in this update. Many of those are not only specific to the DX11 mode though - the game should perform better now in general, both in terms of GPU and CPU load. We fixed a whole bunch of oddities happening with guns, ships and deployables in multiplayer too. If you guys and girls encounter any further performance issues give us a shout through our Discord.
Spectating improvements
A lot of the cameras when viewing infantry, vehicles and other objects in the spectator mode (and while waiting for respawn) have been improved. We also reworked the controls for those, with mouse-buttons now more intuitively switching between spectating targets, being able to hotkey locations or players to quickly return to for video recordings etc. Spectators can now also use a basic version of the scoreboard to view some information about players and a lot of the UI pieces around spectating, waiting for respawn, killcams and so on have been polished.
Map polish
Practically all the maps have been tweaked and improved in some way - graphical oddities and annoying collision getting fixed, AI paths getting redone, lighting and meshes being optimized, more cover and flanking paths added.
There are many more changes accrued over all this time, map-related or otherwise. Everything’s listed in detail in the changelog linked below. More importantly though, we still have a myriad of other things in our backlog, at various stages of completion. At the moment we’re trying to figure out how to prioritize these and what should be our course of action regarding AFF’s future in general. We’d very much like to invite all of you to discuss that with us on our Discord.
Onwards and upwards!
FULL CHANGELOG (which is, after all this time, like 16 pages long and doesn't nearly fit into a Steam post)