Update 25 is live!

Hey there AFF Community!

Have a spooky space Halloween everyone!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/367270

For the duration of the Halloween sale you can get AFF at 40% off. Business as usual. Now for the exciting stuff:

New map - Poranti

A brand new Incursion map consisting of 4 diverse phases to shake things up. ULA is on the offensive again and required to destroy a heavily fortified asteroid-mining installation from the inside. Then the action moves out into space and concludes with a battle for a second asteroid base.

The map features a lot of close-quarters combat within a network of intricate corridors and lots of flanking route. Dogfighting in space can prove challenging here as well - watch out for all those spacerocks!

Countermeasures, knives and shields

This update brings a lot of balance changes, reworked mechanics and interesting additions.
Knives now feature elemental mods so you can not only roast your enemies but also electrify or corrode their armour. Nasty.

Vehicle shield mechanics have been completely reworked - they’re now an extra passive, recharging layer over the armour and only apply to ships and the AIA hovertanks, putting it closer to the AFF lore. Generally vehicle drivers should be less penalised when catching minor stray fire now and be able to recover more quickly from engagements - but at the same time the shield will be much more of a timing act instead of a “press to stop all damage” button. To synergize with this we reworked and added the other vehicle countermeasures back into the game.

We’ve also rebalanced a lot of guns, ships and vehicles, reworked lock-on mechanics to be more skill-based, brought the EMP status to be more in line with the rest of the elemental effects and more. Full, lengthy, changelog below.

Experimental DX11 mode

After months of hard work we finally have our new DX11-based renderer fully functional. We’re not setting it to be the default mode for the game yet, we’d like to do some public testing first. You can opt into using it by either selecting “Experimental DX11 mode” when launching the game from Steam or by adding “-dx11” argument to your shortcut.

What does it mean that it’s experimental?
Will it explode? Probably not. Will there be bugs and glitches? Definitely! The plan is to make it the default mode when it proves to be acceptably stable.

Why are we doing this, though? What’s the advantage of DX11?
There will be a small performance improvement across the board from it. It should also help with some instances of abnormally low framerates on AMD hardware.
More importantly though, it makes improving the looks of the game so much easier. We’re working on a bunch of graphical features that’ll make AFF look more like a proper modern game. For now the DX11 renderer will closely mirror the looks of the old renderer - we have however already improved the quality of a bunch of post-processing effects, made lighting and shadows more crisp and added a multisampling anti-aliasing option (MSAA) - it’s faster and looks much better and stable than post-process AA we had before.

Do give the DX11 mode a spin, let us know how it works for you and have a lovely, spooky long weekend everyone!

Full changelog:

• Poranti is now released! The map consists of 4 phases; First two fighting for the first asteroid station’s destruction, then a space section, and finally a battle for the second asteroid’s destruction.
• Knife now has the option for elemental mods
• Vehicle mines are now lobbed in the direction of the crosshairs, rather than placed behind the vehicle. Hold to throw further - will show a charge bar.
• Lock-on will now be penalized for not hovering the target. The closer to the target, the less penalty. Perfectly aiming at the target for the duration should be equal to the loadout stat.
  Over a ~3s base, the penalty will roughly amount to another 1.5 seconds lockon time (for a total of about 4.5s). Maximum penalty that can be achieved by any weapon is 1.7s
• Improved performance about showing spawnpoints on HUD a lot
• Vehicle shields significantly weaker but with fast and constant (unless damaged) regeneration. They reactivate once regenerated at least 10% of their healthpool
• Removed shields from all ground-vehicles, except hover-vechs (Basta, Dhaka). Gunships are ships so they have shields too.
• Vehicle shields are now only visible when damaged or on resurrect (since shields are now always-on, this is to make them less noticeable when they’re not relevant)
• Added shield amp body-slot mod for shielded vecs (+500 shield, - 500 armour, -20% boost regen)
• Reimplemented flares and point defense drone as faction-specific countermeasures (note, countermeasures is still a separate loadout slot):
  - Flares are for ULA, and work against MLI rockets, but not C30i (homing missiles)
  - PD drones are for AIA, and work against C30i, but not RID (dumbfire and homing)
• Capital ships point defense is now an active in line with other vehicle countermeasures (capital ships have passive shields, but the point defense is activatable in intervals)
• Made damage interrupt scale by damage taken and stacks (longer recovery time from heavier damage). Maximum recovery time is 10s for infantry, 15s for everything else. (This is how long it takes for shields/armour to start regenerating)
• Armour and health damage interrupt both shield and armour regeneration (shield damage only interrupts shield regeneration)
• Added regeneration delay text to health module (How long till the armor/shield starts regenerating again)
• Removed hidden EMP integrity, and streamlined it to behave like the other elemental effects
• EMP duration can now be extended by re-triggering the effect
• Suit insulation mods now only reduce the duration of elemental effects (by 25% each), rather than reducing the chance for an elemental to trigger
• Elemental effects are now pseudo-random for a more reliable distribution of triggering. The chance have been bumped up to roughly ~15%. Intention is, that together with the insulation mods, the effects of elemental ammo should be more reliable.
• The duration of elemental effects is determined by how difficult it was to obtain; ie. they last considerably longer on a capship than on a fighter, since it on average takes a lot more shots to trigger on it. The duration spans between 6 and 60 seconds.
• Healing should now correctly remove EMP as intended
• Fixed EMP not preventing infantry from swapping weapons
• GU-34 now accepts magazine mods
• Ion beams should now show the correct loadout stat for range
• Detpacks should now properly behave with ammo mods, rather than having them subtract from your amount available
• Shotgun pellets should now have more sensible spread behaviours
• Tweaks to how the UDP handles and feels
• Multiwrench should no longer be so inconsistent sound-wise for impacts
• Mods for Chons’ H-Ion should no longer be available as intended (None of them are affecting the weapon)
• Helmet armour buff increased to 20%
• Dhaka projectiles damage increased from 340 to 400, but reduced splash radius slightly
• Partisan projectiles damage reduced from 800 to 600
• Added feedback sounds to trying to use countermeasures (Z) - success + failure
• Holding shift should now re-engage boosting in vehicles, once about half of the boosting have replenished
• Reworked global homing missile behaviour
• Visiting TacMap while incapacitated should no longer reset 3rdp view
• Fixed various oddities and optimized functionality underlying a lot of ‘can X see Y’ checks
• Territories maps now factors in a vehicle bleed rate approximation when calculating match duration vs obj income rate. Should generally result in shorter vehicle-territories matches
• Units will now have a small indicational arrow on top or below on minimap, indicating if they are above or below you.
• Clientside tagging should be more reliable in identifying enemy players
• Extended the radius for visual identification (friend/foe)
• Spaceships FOV have been increased some again (FOR THE SPEEEEEEEEED)
• Boosted volume of your own footsteps
• Improved Katana’s and Salamander’s turn speed
• Further improved AI’s weapon selection and firemode selection logic
• Bots should no longer use underslung without meaning to (should, amongst other things, fix bots vaguely flaming towards their distant target)
• Bots are now discouraged from using multiwrench against hostile destroyables and infantry
• Slightly increased range at which bots will prefer the underslung flamethrower
• Fortress updates:
  - Destroyables should no longer be sparkling as if they were destroyed, before being destroyed on Fortress
  - Added additional capture objective to Phase 3
• Yin Tao Shan updates:
  - Phase 1 building got a secondary way upstairs
  - Phase 1 building objective was moved
  - Various cover tweaks
  - Added roofing over Point C in Phase 2 of Incursion
  - Mirrored structure over from Incursion variant to the Territories variant for consistency
  - Last AIA spawn have been moved back a significant distance
• Tannhauser updates:
  - Grates should now be more consistent with other fences for bullet penetration
  - Fixed droppods lighting
  - Fixed second stage droppods objectives being called B1, rather than B1 and B2
• Delta updates:
  - Added central structure to bring some CQC combat to the most central point in Delta (objective E)
  - Modified top-right ULA spawn location to reduce travel time biases towards middle of the playable area
  - Added a smattering of structures/tents and cover on the barren top right ULA side of the map to help against snipers
  - Added some barrel-rails going from the central structure outwards on the map to bring more coherency
  - Few tweaks around to add more verticality to the map
  - Added more lights throughout
  - Experimentally added a plateau structure under parts of the pump objective; Intended to improve the tank experience around here
• Small cover tweaks to Errah and Igneous
• Lukather territories have received a layout rework - now consists of 7 objectives
• Fixed some collisions in Ixion station and Lukather
• Added flavortext on phase-changes to Kerrat incursion (should help with understanding the map)
• Ixion Station’s fighters should no longer behave oddly
• Disabled the secondary defender spawn in Igneous P1 (Tower spawn, closest to objectives)
• Various corrections to map descriptions for consistency
• Weapon platforms used in various space-maps have regained a missing weapon
• Optimized warp tunnel effect a bit
• Properly zeroed the MLI scope
• Removed inaccuracy from MLI shots when zoomed (secondary firemode should be slightly more viable again)
• Slightly increased RIDs inaccuracy when zoomed
• RID recovers aim slightly slower
• Reduced RID damage by 15%
• Destroyables should generally be more consistent with their healthpools
• Fixed breachtube animation and network synchronization on Huginn and Ranger
• Various fixes and improvements to breachtubes’ collisions and behaviour
• Bots should now be able to rearm dropships at battleships again
• Bots should no longer get confused about weapon ranges when swapping to/from capships
• Fixed bots clumping up on the same spot after planting a hackspike
• Fixed spawnpoints unintentionally removing corrosion for everyone map-wide
• Fixed land-maps minimap carrying over incorrect scaling after being in flight-mode
• Jitters from vehicle nose/weapon aim cursor should mostly be corrected
• Fixed being unable to tag enemy carriers (when they are marked as objectives) if the driver wasn’t spotted for team
• Fixed boarding related interaction prompts showing when taking control of a ship that existed prior to joining the server.
• Fixed some collision holes in Ranger
• Confirm/broadcast/command now only allowed if either no menu is open or the TacMap is open (and not allowed when picking a warp-exit)
• Fixed AIA bombers’ plasma icon
• Fixed slow MILNET initialisation on map-start
• Enemy destroyables’ elemental effects from bullet impacts should now be governed by the same chances and rules as for infantry
• Fixed lockon weapons starting the lockon cycle despite needing a reload
• Going to loadouts and/or spawning a vehicle should now properly work with infantry camo (ie. use the proper one, rather than setting you to default)
• Fixed some desyncs with swapping and reloading weapons clientside where sometimes the visual would be wrong, or the swap would be swapped back (on higher latency)
• Fixed some desyncs with not starting to reload when swapping away from a vehicle weapon that is supposed to reload while inactive
• Fixed issue where fighterbases would plant fighters at roughly the same spot when exiting warp. This could cause fighters to collide with eachother, or spawn inside a capship
• Potentially fixed issue where warp-screen could partially persist once level is loaded
• Spaceships should now properly remove corrosion when restocking
• Fixed corrosion mines
• Fixed deployable shields not reactivating after being downed
• Fixed visual effect not matching the actual radius of corrosive effects - radius decreased to match visual
• Losing and regaining focus to game will now disable free-looking (should deal with the residual freelook that often happen when alt-tabbing)
• In some cases, “attacking objective X” (capturing) would be visible despite the client not contributing to progress. Should be more accurate now.
• Fixed shotgun visual effects having wrong direction client-side

For feedback, or just a lovely chat with the devs, post on AFF's Steam forums or contact us directly through our Discord!

Onwards and upwards!