As well as bugfixes, we've made some changes to the gameplay and we're looking forward to all the feedback.

Highlights:
By pausing the timer while certain objectives are under attack in Incursion mode, we aim to incentivise defenders to defend harder but also to reward attackers for pushing harder. It also gets rid of the annoying issue where the match would end on defense timeout even with an objective being currently captured.

Space Incursion maps should also feel more dynamic, the attackers are now able to win via a dramatic last boarding action. After the attacking carrier is destroyed, the game doesn't end until the defenders get rid of all the enemy boarding pods.

To incentivise human players to keep teams balanced, and to create extra challenge if they do stack on one team, the respawn timer for the team with fewer humans now gets decreased by up to 50%

Also you'll probably be glad to know that flashbangs should no longer blind players through walls.

We're also throwing another map into the mix:
Fortress Territories


It's a work-in-progress map based on an older layout with light vehicles - transports, mechs and gunships.


Changelog:

• Fixed low quality shaders not compiling for release (global detail level < 3, black Errah terrain bug)
  
• Rewritten Incursion map timer code, fixing maps not timing out
  
• Fixed several dropship animations
  
• Fixed bad warp location in Lellebah-Territories
  
• Fixed mech weaponlock location
  
• Fixed issues with objective replication when joining an in-progress match
  
• Fixed turret AI struggling to use lockon weapontypes (eg. Heimdall Destroyer)
  
• Fixed friendly fire scales
  
• Compensated for and incentivised human player team balance by decreasing the respawn timer for the team with fewer humans by up to 50%
  
• Objectives under attack by the attacking team in Incursion mode will pause the match timer
  
• Space incursion maps should only end by 'no deploy points' when all carriers and dropships/modules are destroyed
  
• HUD should no longer incorrectly display 0% health
  
• Ships should no longer spam component destroyed messages on core breach
  
• Added what weapon probably killed you to death popup box
  
• Added laser pointer to RID which displays while it is charging
  
• Added a postprocess effect on taking damage
  
• Dropships in Territories mode will not become available for 5 minutes after being destroyed (increased dropship health to compensate)
  
• Replaced ULA Frigate with a Destroyer in Meudeverre
  
• Ship warp-in effects and vehicle explosions played by chunks will no longer trigger all at once for newly joining players
  
• Flashbangs should no longer blind through walls
  
• Medkit healing should update HUD health indicators correctly
  
• Tapping out or bleeding out of infantry incapacitated state should increase the kill counter of the last person to injure the incapacitated player
  
• Shield materials shift to a red tint as their health decreases
  
• Torpedos and such should be resupplied from carriers again
  
• Reduced gunship homing missile damage
  
• Reduced RID and SM54 accuracy
  
• No longer possible to attempt a respawn during intro matinees or commander vote
  
• Replaced ULA frigate in Meudeverre with destroyer
  
• Reduced detpack frag charge damage
  
• Reduced detpack auto-splosion damage when player dies
  
• Various tutorial fixes
  
• Fixed some wayward comms squawks
  
• Fixed issue where AI could sometimes spawn two fighters, leaving empty ones floating around
  
• Added Fortress Territories map

HAPPY EASTER!

As well as bugfixes, we've made some changes to the gameplay and we're looking forward to all the feedback.

Highlights:
By pausing the timer while certain objectives are under attack in Incursion mode, we aim to incentivise defenders to defend harder but also to reward attackers for pushing harder. It also gets rid of the annoying issue where the match would end on defense timeout even with an objective being currently captured.

Space Incursion maps should also feel more dynamic, the attackers are now able to win via a dramatic last boarding action. After the attacking carrier is destroyed, the game doesn't end until the defenders get rid of all the enemy boarding pods.

To incentivise human players to keep teams balanced, and to create extra challenge if they do stack on one team, the respawn timer for the team with fewer humans now gets decreased by up to 50%

Also you'll probably be glad to know that flashbangs should no longer blind players through walls.

We're also throwing another map into the mix:
Fortress Territories


It's a work-in-progress map based on an older layout with light vehicles - transports, mechs and gunships.


Changelog:

• Fixed low quality shaders not compiling for release (global detail level < 3, black Errah terrain bug)
  
• Rewritten Incursion map timer code, fixing maps not timing out
  
• Fixed several dropship animations
  
• Fixed bad warp location in Lellebah-Territories
  
• Fixed mech weaponlock location
  
• Fixed issues with objective replication when joining an in-progress match
  
• Fixed turret AI struggling to use lockon weapontypes (eg. Heimdall Destroyer)
  
• Fixed friendly fire scales
  
• Compensated for and incentivised human player team balance by decreasing the respawn timer for the team with fewer humans by up to 50%
  
• Objectives under attack by the attacking team in Incursion mode will pause the match timer
  
• Space incursion maps should only end by 'no deploy points' when all carriers and dropships/modules are destroyed
  
• HUD should no longer incorrectly display 0% health
  
• Ships should no longer spam component destroyed messages on core breach
  
• Added what weapon probably killed you to death popup box
  
• Added laser pointer to RID which displays while it is charging
  
• Added a postprocess effect on taking damage
  
• Dropships in Territories mode will not become available for 5 minutes after being destroyed (increased dropship health to compensate)
  
• Replaced ULA Frigate with a Destroyer in Meudeverre
  
• Ship warp-in effects and vehicle explosions played by chunks will no longer trigger all at once for newly joining players
  
• Flashbangs should no longer blind through walls
  
• Medkit healing should update HUD health indicators correctly
  
• Tapping out or bleeding out of infantry incapacitated state should increase the kill counter of the last person to injure the incapacitated player
  
• Shield materials shift to a red tint as their health decreases
  
• Torpedos and such should be resupplied from carriers again
  
• Reduced gunship homing missile damage
  
• Reduced RID and SM54 accuracy
  
• No longer possible to attempt a respawn during intro matinees or commander vote
  
• Replaced ULA frigate in Meudeverre with destroyer
  
• Reduced detpack frag charge damage
  
• Reduced detpack auto-splosion damage when player dies
  
• Various tutorial fixes
  
• Fixed some wayward comms squawks
  
• Fixed issue where AI could sometimes spawn two fighters, leaving empty ones floating around
  
• Added Fortress Territories map

HAPPY EASTER!

Hey there AFF Community!

Some bugs resurfaced after the last patch under certain rare conditions and you immediately caught what we missed in internal testing. Thanks guys and girls, you're the best!
We're releasing a small hotfix, official servers are already running it. Changelist:

• Fixed unranked servers not applying match scoring
  
• Fixed warped capships weapons not initialising properly on net clients
  
• Fixed Igneous phase messaging
  
• Fixed bomber plasma fire sound
  
• Reduced heavy plasma splash damage
  
• Reduced capship death explosion damage radius
  
• Reduced AI useage of AV weaponry on infantry
  
• Fortress phase two hack objectives made consistent with the rest
  
• Fixed Mazikeen maplist preview
  
• Buffed underslung shield
  
• Turret AI line-of-sight calculations adjusted

ONWARDS AND UPWARDS!

Hey there AFF Community!

Some bugs resurfaced after the last patch under certain rare conditions and you immediately caught what we missed in internal testing. Thanks guys and girls, you're the best!
We're releasing a small hotfix, official servers are already running it. Changelist:

• Fixed unranked servers not applying match scoring
  
• Fixed warped capships weapons not initialising properly on net clients
  
• Fixed Igneous phase messaging
  
• Fixed bomber plasma fire sound
  
• Reduced heavy plasma splash damage
  
• Reduced capship death explosion damage radius
  
• Reduced AI useage of AV weaponry on infantry
  
• Fortress phase two hack objectives made consistent with the rest
  
• Fixed Mazikeen maplist preview
  
• Buffed underslung shield
  
• Turret AI line-of-sight calculations adjusted

ONWARDS AND UPWARDS!

Hey there AFF Community!

Phew, it's been a while. Hope we didn't blow anything up by making such a giant update at once this time.

And yeah, we're going to call these "updates" instead of "patches" now. Seems more accurate, as the usual bugfixes and optimization will be accompanied by new content.

NEW MAPS
Lellebah - Territories
Mazikeen - Territories
NB3345 - Territories
Lacroix - Incursion and Territories

YinTaoShan - Territories
Igneous

LIGHT MECHS
ULA Velius and AIA Gheist


Note - mechs are still heavily in development so expect work-in-progress animations and various other quirks in visuals. We'd rather not hold back giving you guys access until the visuals are finalised, as we greatly value your gameplay feedback and comments on overall feel. Let us know your thoughts when you take them for a jog!

We've also added fighter-grade ion beam weapons to be equipped in the loadout. We're shifting some of our manpower more towards content now but that's not what delayed the patch for so bloody long. We hope the list of fixes (see below) justifies the long wait - we invested a lot of time in rewriting some low-level systems to optimize the game. This means both in terms of performance (AI is significantly less CPU-intensive now) and network lag. Network optimization is an ongoing process and we'll keep reducing the amount of data the game sends back and forth, but it should already feel noticably smoother online.

We are also going to start a kind of a devblog soon-ish, to highlight some of the interesting things going into the game (and raise the awareness of existing features). Not sure what the form will be yet. We're big fans of how Rust does it so maybe something like that, reports by team members with some short videos and screenshots. We'll see.

We've been keeping this under the radar so far, but we also invested some time into what seems to be the bane of AFF - the UI. We don't have anything to show off yet, but amid all the other work we've been building a new framework for the UI, a completely new pipeline. This basically means that soon we won't have to use the 3rd party tools we built the current UI in. This will not only result in better looks for the UI but most importantly in far shorter iteration times - so creating a new HUD and menus should be a pretty rapid process once this is done. A quick thought experiment for all you curious Early Accessers by the way - try running the game without the HUD some time and see how pretty some of the space maps are. Just punch "togglehud" in the in-game console

On a side note, we're getting more and more reports of weird behaviour on Windows 10 where the game performs much worse than it should. We're still investigating the issue but it seems to be at least partially related to Nvidia drivers somehow. I suggest if you guys and girls are running Win 10 (especially upgraded from any previous version) make sure to try a clean reinstall of all your Nvidia drivers \ accompanying software if your framerate is in the 20's with decent hardware (have a look at our "Solutions for common problems" thread)

As for the fixes and improvements in this patch, the list literally didn't fit into the Steam announcement character limit. So CLICK HERE to see it in all its glory.

Hey there AFF Community!

Phew, it's been a while. Hope we didn't blow anything up by making such a giant update at once this time.

And yeah, we're going to call these "updates" instead of "patches" now. Seems more accurate, as the usual bugfixes and optimization will be accompanied by new content.

NEW MAPS
Lellebah - Territories
Mazikeen - Territories
NB3345 - Territories
Lacroix - Incursion and Territories

YinTaoShan - Territories
Igneous

LIGHT MECHS
ULA Velius and AIA Gheist


Note - mechs are still heavily in development so expect work-in-progress animations and various other quirks in visuals. We'd rather not hold back giving you guys access until the visuals are finalised, as we greatly value your gameplay feedback and comments on overall feel. Let us know your thoughts when you take them for a jog!

We've also added fighter-grade ion beam weapons to be equipped in the loadout. We're shifting some of our manpower more towards content now but that's not what delayed the patch for so bloody long. We hope the list of fixes (see below) justifies the long wait - we invested a lot of time in rewriting some low-level systems to optimize the game. This means both in terms of performance (AI is significantly less CPU-intensive now) and network lag. Network optimization is an ongoing process and we'll keep reducing the amount of data the game sends back and forth, but it should already feel noticably smoother online.

We are also going to start a kind of a devblog soon-ish, to highlight some of the interesting things going into the game (and raise the awareness of existing features). Not sure what the form will be yet. We're big fans of how Rust does it so maybe something like that, reports by team members with some short videos and screenshots. We'll see.

We've been keeping this under the radar so far, but we also invested some time into what seems to be the bane of AFF - the UI. We don't have anything to show off yet, but amid all the other work we've been building a new framework for the UI, a completely new pipeline. This basically means that soon we won't have to use the 3rd party tools we built the current UI in. This will not only result in better looks for the UI but most importantly in far shorter iteration times - so creating a new HUD and menus should be a pretty rapid process once this is done. A quick thought experiment for all you curious Early Accessers by the way - try running the game without the HUD some time and see how pretty some of the space maps are. Just punch "togglehud" in the in-game console

On a side note, we're getting more and more reports of weird behaviour on Windows 10 where the game performs much worse than it should. We're still investigating the issue but it seems to be at least partially related to Nvidia drivers somehow. I suggest if you guys and girls are running Win 10 (especially upgraded from any previous version) make sure to try a clean reinstall of all your Nvidia drivers \ accompanying software if your framerate is in the 20's with decent hardware (have a look at our "Solutions for common problems" thread)

As for the fixes and improvements in this patch, the list literally didn't fit into the Steam announcement character limit. So CLICK HERE to see it in all its glory.

Hey there AFF Community!

We just wanted to do a quick update on the state of things here.
Right off the bat: the next patch is a few weeks late and you guys and girls are probably somewhat frustrated by that. We had a couple good reasons to delay the thing though:

We fixed some low-level issues with spaceship (and gunship) physics desynchronizing between server and client. That itself needed quite a bit of work to get it right. But it also exposed some more issues with how we handled interactions between ships and debugging that took a good week.

Thanks to our awesome Community we've also been able to recently run some tests on the servers. That helped immensely in optimizing some aspects of the game - we're in the middle of an on-going netcode optimization but we also managed to make the AI a lot less CPU-intensive. Implementing those optimizations obviously took some time so there's that other part of the delay.

So, what's holding back the patch now? One thing is we're mopping up some camera issues that also got exposed by the spaceship state fixes. The other is we're mulling over how much new content we can finish before actually releasing this patch. As we've mentioned in the Holidays update we have quite a few new maps lined up and those could take a few more days or weeks to wrap up. We still haven't decided which of those are finished enough to be included right now. Same with mechs.

So, long story short, the next patch is coming probably within the next 2 weeks, which is way overdue, but it's going to be massive. In addition to the low-level fixes mentioned above we've done a ton of gameplay-related improvements (my favorite probably being how much more dynamic the Territories gametype feels now, thanks to every action contributing to the overall progress). Not going to spam the Steam announcements with the whole list right now but you can see a rough one here

Thanks for your patience and stay tuned for more space awesomeness!
ONWARDS AND UPWARDS!

Hey there AFF Community!

We just wanted to do a quick update on the state of things here.
Right off the bat: the next patch is a few weeks late and you guys and girls are probably somewhat frustrated by that. We had a couple good reasons to delay the thing though:

We fixed some low-level issues with spaceship (and gunship) physics desynchronizing between server and client. That itself needed quite a bit of work to get it right. But it also exposed some more issues with how we handled interactions between ships and debugging that took a good week.

Thanks to our awesome Community we've also been able to recently run some tests on the servers. That helped immensely in optimizing some aspects of the game - we're in the middle of an on-going netcode optimization but we also managed to make the AI a lot less CPU-intensive. Implementing those optimizations obviously took some time so there's that other part of the delay.

So, what's holding back the patch now? One thing is we're mopping up some camera issues that also got exposed by the spaceship state fixes. The other is we're mulling over how much new content we can finish before actually releasing this patch. As we've mentioned in the Holidays update we have quite a few new maps lined up and those could take a few more days or weeks to wrap up. We still haven't decided which of those are finished enough to be included right now. Same with mechs.

So, long story short, the next patch is coming probably within the next 2 weeks, which is way overdue, but it's going to be massive. In addition to the low-level fixes mentioned above we've done a ton of gameplay-related improvements (my favorite probably being how much more dynamic the Territories gametype feels now, thanks to every action contributing to the overall progress). Not going to spam the Steam announcements with the whole list right now but you can see a rough one here

Thanks for your patience and stay tuned for more space awesomeness!
ONWARDS AND UPWARDS!

Hey there AFF Community!

As 2015 is drawing to a close we'd like to thank all of you for participating in the awesome experience AFF has been so far! We are still overwhelmed by the warm reception we've received, despite the game clearly having numerous problems on launch.

Having released 6 pretty hefty patches we feel like we have addressed a lot of the critical issues. The game is much more stable now, performs better and some of the silly mistakes (like the tutorial being broken) are gone. 7th patch is right around the corner fixing a lot of collision bugs, ships de-syncing online, turret aim being off and more.

However, we are very aware of the remaining problems:

The UI is getting a total makeover - we're currently preparing a completely custom back end to speed up the creation of the new HUD and menus - a new system that lets us assemble the UI directly inside the game.

The servers are often seen as empty. We are not particularly worried about that at the moment, but we have some ideas on how best to address this.
We believe a big part of the problem is that people are going into the server browser (and we see in the Steamworks back end there's a couple dozen people just hanging out and not going online), seeing low player counts and assuming they are not gonna have a good game. So they don't join and as a consequence the player counts never increase. A self-fulfilling prophecy!

One solution is to just promote the game more intensively. Whilst this could remedy the issue in the short-term we're holding back for now as we want to avoid the post-release situation repeating itself. We don't want new players to bounce off the remaining technical issues with the game. A more involved marketing campaign will come in time - closer to when the game has fewer bugs and is about to leave Early Access.

NEW STUFF!

Okay, we've been talking a lot about problems and fixes, but what about new things coming in 2016? We don't have exact deadlines on those things yet but here's some upcoming content tease:

Maps - So many maps in the pipeline! Here's a few nearing completion to whet your appetite:

NB3345 - Space Territories
Green and dusty nebula mining outpost. Watch out for that battleship...



Mazikeen - Space Territories
A ton of hexy platforms for complicated space fights...



Mirnoide - Space Incursion
Raid a pair of contrasting hydroponic habitat stations, one desert, one lava!








Fortress - Territories
Territories with tanks and castles! A new layout and a different mood for this familiar map.



YinTaoShan - Territories
Free for all with all vehicles by the light of the silvery moons. It gets dark in the pink mountains!



and lastly, a wild mech appears...



Thanks again for your support with AFF.
ONWARDS AND UPWARDS!

Hey there AFF Community!

As 2015 is drawing to a close we'd like to thank all of you for participating in the awesome experience AFF has been so far! We are still overwhelmed by the warm reception we've received, despite the game clearly having numerous problems on launch.

Having released 6 pretty hefty patches we feel like we have addressed a lot of the critical issues. The game is much more stable now, performs better and some of the silly mistakes (like the tutorial being broken) are gone. 7th patch is right around the corner fixing a lot of collision bugs, ships de-syncing online, turret aim being off and more.

However, we are very aware of the remaining problems:

The UI is getting a total makeover - we're currently preparing a completely custom back end to speed up the creation of the new HUD and menus - a new system that lets us assemble the UI directly inside the game.

The servers are often seen as empty. We are not particularly worried about that at the moment, but we have some ideas on how best to address this.
We believe a big part of the problem is that people are going into the server browser (and we see in the Steamworks back end there's a couple dozen people just hanging out and not going online), seeing low player counts and assuming they are not gonna have a good game. So they don't join and as a consequence the player counts never increase. A self-fulfilling prophecy!

One solution is to just promote the game more intensively. Whilst this could remedy the issue in the short-term we're holding back for now as we want to avoid the post-release situation repeating itself. We don't want new players to bounce off the remaining technical issues with the game. A more involved marketing campaign will come in time - closer to when the game has fewer bugs and is about to leave Early Access.

NEW STUFF!

Okay, we've been talking a lot about problems and fixes, but what about new things coming in 2016? We don't have exact deadlines on those things yet but here's some upcoming content tease:

Maps - So many maps in the pipeline! Here's a few nearing completion to whet your appetite:

NB3345 - Space Territories
Green and dusty nebula mining outpost. Watch out for that battleship...



Mazikeen - Space Territories
A ton of hexy platforms for complicated space fights...



Mirnoide - Space Incursion
Raid a pair of contrasting hydroponic habitat stations, one desert, one lava!








Fortress - Territories
Territories with tanks and castles! A new layout and a different mood for this familiar map.



YinTaoShan - Territories
Free for all with all vehicles by the light of the silvery moons. It gets dark in the pink mountains!



and lastly, a wild mech appears...



Thanks again for your support with AFF.
ONWARDS AND UPWARDS!