Crossfire - Upcoming changes, upcoming content

The deactivation of the new plugins happened yesterday.

The reactivation of the old plugins will happen with the next server restart.

No expected risks, except that for a few hours anticheat will trigger a few bans that I will have to remove manually.

Potentially with a plugin. Considering that our anticheat seems to cause problems with new plugins (we still have no solution), this might be a problem.

But what is wrong with the 3 colored bars?

Going to quote myself on this one:

Quote from SWAT_OP-R8R

The next update is already being worked on.

It will focus on the 2nd part of the workaround: removal of the LOD issue with applying a final fix. While the first part did fix playable ships, the 2nd part will deal with NPC-only ships and also solar objects. In total I expect to modify ~240 3D models.

Also part of this upcoming update will be further hitbox improvements for ships, resulting in more consistent hit detection, better performance, and generally better game stability.

These kinds of changes also might rebalance the ships a bit since hitboxes, of course, have an influence on how ships perform. Some less favored ships might turn out to be good options then.

This update is most likely being released in May or early June.

I want to focus atm on such under-the-hood improvements before I focus on new content again later this year.

Display More

Well... May or early June. *cough*

Fortunately, I did not mention which year.

Long story short. I did not have any time to work on this stuff in the past 5 weeks; therefore, I am WAY behind schedule.

I am pretty much back working on that update at the moment but can't tell for sure how much time I need.

The good news is that ~180 ships are already done. The bad news is that I decided to go more into detail, and the estimated 240 3D models, well... that number most certainly is going to get much bigger than originally planned.

Many ships will benefit from much more accurate hitboxes. Inconsistencies with shield bubbles are going to be fixed, which eventually has a balancing aspect, since certain ships that had disadvantages might become more interesting, while other ships had an unfair advantage that will be balanced out.

In some cases the more accurate hitboxes will have a minor impact on the data the game and the server have to handle. However, this is just a very minor load increase, limited just to a few ships. The majority of ships will even have more lightweight hitboxes (sometimes 50-80% less data). The server load will certainly benefit from that.

I also expect certain collision bugs to be gone and generally smoother gameplay.

short status update.

I meanwhile managed to remodel about 350 hitboxes/surfaces... which is about 95% of the ships and 50% of the stations/solar objects.

A release of the update in early/mid-August seems possible.

In almost all cases the new surfaces are more accurate and also less demanding when it comes to performance. In a few cases however, the higher detail grade also will cost a bit performance. This will be the case for specific Inner Core stations. I expect the impact to be minimal since the amount of objects are sparse and certain vanilla 3d models are even more demanding.

Also worth to mention might be that I might have found a way to reduce the performance issues we had, when doing the Nomad planet killer event test. So at least this part of the issue should be fixed. That means further tests can be done to get the event running with working rewards drops maybe.

Last week I came to the conclusion that having a rough roadmap for the planned updates is a pretty good idea.

I can not tell at which point which update is going to be released but it certainly helps to understand what future updates are being worked on. By default I do not manage to release updates in the originally estimated timeframe (RL always comes between) but eventually there will be progress.

Open communication always has been key here if people know what to expect it will be beneficial for the community.

The roadmap will be updated more frequently.

Roadmap:

• performance and gameplay update (rework of all 3d assets in the game to improve stability, performance and gameplay accuracy) - release TBA soon
• streaming update (performance improvements related to server communication) - release TBA soon
• minor feature update (detailed information about it soon)
• Nomad Planet Killer event (performance improvement; 2nd event test planned for persisent reward drops)
• activation of automatic server event (feature is in theory ready, but requires Nomad Planet Killer event and/or Blackstar Fleet event to be functional)
• 2nd part of the Coalition update (first part -> station update was already released), 2nd part is going to redesign the Coalition systems to be more interesting
  • more tradelanes
  • more points of interest
  • combat zones between Coalition and Coalition Rogues
  • trade and mining opportunities
  • special loot
  • more lore
• Blackstar Fleet
  • singleplay story update (Bonus mission)
  • new systems in Sol sector
  • Canis sector expansion
  • Black Star Fleet event
  • new equipment
  • high-risk loot
• OpenGL update 2
  • update interior lightsources to compensate lighting issues
  • potential workaround to some objects not being rendered with the new lighting system
• graphics improvements on the vanilla FL shader
• new standalone installer release containing all updates (release CF version 2.0.2)
• potential improvements of the launcher / server software - ???
• display world state events from the server on the launcher (dynamic event system)
• statistics update

Will have to figure out how that works.

The plan was to test the new update this week and release it on the weekend.

Unfortunately initial tests showed some issues with a few of the ~200 reworked 3d models. I don't know how many of them are problematic yet (during the short test so far not all of them are messed up). I need to do further tests to figure out how big the problem is.

Good part of that is that I know what went wrong and there are options. I can exclude the models from the update since the removal of the workaround is just optional (explained earlier on this thread) or try to fix in a different way which unfortunately will take time.

No matter what... i need a fresh reinstall of the mod now... and will check each of these files individually now to figure out how deep this problem goes.

For clarification. This issue only is related to the visual 3d models.

The ~570 newly modeled hitboxes seem to work fine. Also the other updates to the game engine seem to be running stable.

I'll need a few days to check the files and depending on the results will make a decision on how to preceed.

short update on the issue

I got about 50% of the problematic assets working correctly. Going to work on the others next week. I meanwhile have a fairly good method of fixing them. It just takes a bit time.

The update in theory can be released this weekend.

I am currently working on the last (pretty complex 3d model) and if the final tests are successful I can start to write update instructions.

The size of the update will be about 600-700mb and will contain about 850 files.

Content:

• 235 improved 3D models
• A workaround for wireframes on complex 3D models got removed and was replaced by a better implementation
• 594 newly created hitboxes added
  • This will fix certain freezes in Renaissance, Coalition and Inner Core space
  • It provides more accurate hit detection
  • It is going to be less performance demanding both on Client and Server
  • It is going to slightly rebalance most ships
• Solar type of Deimos got changed to correctly display the correct shape
• Solar type of Phobos got changed to correctly display the correct shape
• Reshade was updated to the latest version
• Custom edits were done to various Reshade shaders to fix some annoying issues when launching the game
• Multiple infocard updates
• Version update (player request)
• Fix to a rare call sign error
• Various improvements to multiplayer streaming
• Additional prevention of sudden frame drops
• Interface improvements (positioning, refresh rates, shapes, etc.)
• Multiple UI fixes on high resolutions
• Various changes to MP-specific UI elements
• Optional cutscene skipping
• Improvements to audio options and audio playback
• Fix to an issue where certain UI elements got displayed in a resolution lower than intended
• Improvements to error logging
• Anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering are now active by default on all shader options
• Changes to file structure (as preparation for future updates)
• Minor texture updates
• Missing equipment and license hardpoints added to Fury VHF
• Missing equipment and license hardpoints added to Angel Wing
• Missing equipment and license hardpoints added to Hammerhead
• Missing equipment and license hardpoints added to multiple Mining ship variations
• Missing equipment and license hardpoints added to Large Freight Train
• Fixed missing hardpoints on the Spectra Gunboat
• modified Inquisitor engine effects

update got released