Hi everyone,
It has been a crazy few weeks since Little Orbit was hit by ransomware in mid August. We’re now a month out, and every server involved in hosting APB was reinstalled from the ground up. We’ve also been working on pushing the game forward, but most of our effort has gone into things you can’t see in a screenshot.
I am reworking our maintenance approach to the game to minimize downtime. Over the coming weeks that will include updates that allow us to dynamically manage and move players around on the servers, and patch in real time.
Before I get into the details, the important part.
Downtime
Servers will go down on Wednesday, September 16 at 06:30 UTC (Tuesday, September 15 at 11:30pm Pacific). We haven’t done a full maintenance cycle in a month. So this will be a bigger update than usual on the server side. I am budgeting about 4 hours of downtime. North American districts come back first, then Europe. If we finish early, we will open the doors early.
Servers going down:
Servers coming back up (expected):
The launcher will download the new client when the servers return. If you use Steam, Steam handles it.
1. New World Server
The first major part of this patch is the one you will never see: we have replaced the World server.
That is the piece that sits behind every district, running matchmaking, groups, clans, friends and chat. We are finally replacing the version built on the same technology the game launched with fifteen years ago. The new one has been running on our test world for the last few weeks, and it does two things for us right away as soon as it ships:
It is more stable
And when something goes wrong we can see it better
Both worlds will now report what they are doing in detail, so we find problems from the data instead of from your forum posts. It also clears the road for what I have been talking about since the 2023 roadmap. Cross District matchmaking was the first step. Cross World matchmaking, where the entire player base queues together regardless of which world your character lives on, is next. That was never going to happen on the old server. It can happen on this one.
I want to set expectations. Swapping the server every world runs on is exactly the kind of change that finds edge cases only with real players on it. We tested it hard, but if groups or missions do something strange in the first few days, that is probably why, and we will be watching closely and patching quickly.
2. Voice chat, rebuilt
This patch also brings back an old feature! Voice chat in APB has been broken or barely working for a long time, and I know a lot of you gave up on it. We have now moved the game onto a current version of Vivox and rebuilt everything around it on the client side. The goal was simple: log in, talk, be heard, with no toggling anything off and on to make it work.
Here is what is new in Options > Audio:
Push To Talk or voice activation, your choice. With Push To Talk on, the key is the only thing that gates your mic. With it off, there is an activation slider so quiet rooms don’t broadcast your keyboard.
Hold To Test: hold the button and speak, and you hear yourself back so you can set levels without bothering your group.
Voice Volume and Microphone Volume now read in real units, from Mute up to +10 dB. 0 dB is exactly what Windows gives us.
Microphone auto gain is on by default. Turn it off if you run a hot interface that pumps under automatic gain.
Per-channel volume for World, Group, Team and Clan, so you can keep your group loud and the district quieter.
Device selection for your microphone and output.
Game Audio Ducking: when someone talks on a channel you are in, the game mix dips for the duration.
In the world:
The speaker icon on the HUD and in the player list now lights in the colour of the channel the person is talking on.
A “Talking:” line in the subtitle bar shows who near you is speaking on district voice, up to four names. Mission voice-overs always take priority over it. There is a separate checkbox if you want it off, and the Subtitle Position setting finally does what it says (Bottom, Above chat, Top, Under reticule).
Chat commands: /vc prints the state of all four channels, and /vcdistrict, /vcgroup, /vcteam, /vcclan switch a channel on or off. They mirror the Options checkboxes and the change sticks across relogs.
/ignore with no name now ignores the player under your crosshair (or the driver of the car under it), and ignoring someone mutes their voice reliably.
We ran this through seven rounds on OTW over the last two weeks with our test group, and I want to thank them for the punch lists and especially for the client logs.
Again, I want to set expectations. This is a rewrite of our voice system with a new set of controls, and we have only tested it with a few dozen people at a time. If a channel stays silent for you, or you hear someone you should not, please report the issue. That is the fastest way we can chase it.
3. Districts and quality of life
Choose Your District now sorts the list by your measured round trip to each region, fastest first, and shows the time on each row. Regions that did not answer go last.
Small spawn adjustments in Waterfront to improve some of the worst spawn spots, and a small Health Damage nerf to the ISSR-B after its previous buff.
Fixed a crash that could hit players using the Vault.
Fixed a client stability issue tied to the anti-cheat component that could cause stalls.
4. Crash reports reach us again
For a long time, when APB crashed and you clicked Send on the report dialog, that report went nowhere. As of this update it arrives, and we symbolize it against the exact build you were running. This does nothing for you in the moment, but it means the crashes you hit this week become the fixes in the next patch. If the game crashes, please click Send.
Known issues
A few audio regressions from the 64-bit upgrade remain (some effects too loud, clipping at low volume, the radio filter) and are being worked on separately.
The 0 dB mark on the volume sliders sits at about 70% of the track rather than the middle; the label is the reference.
That’s it! Not super flashy. But probably the one that took the most work given that the new World Server has been in development for well over a year.
If voice chat gets you talking to the people you play with again, it was worth it.
Thanks, Matt