Hello everybody.

It's 2024! I hope you all had a safe and relaxing holiday break. I took advantage of the time away to catch up on a lot of things, including some ASE development - but once again, we're well into uncharted territory and I'm actively experimenting with how to support larger maps, missions and units in order for the game to hit the mechanical and visual fidelity I have in mind.

Bug Fixes

• Selecting an empty loadout from saved loadouts should remove all weapons from equipped loadout
• Missile minimap sprites should occasionally show up
• Missile alert sounds should play correctly
• Missile warning UI should disappear immediately after missile loses tracking
• Aircraft AI should be less susceptible to flying into terrain and getting stuck
• There were a lot more bugs than that, but I didn't write them down sorry.

Known Bugs

• Enemy planes jitter/stop briefly on being hit with gun fire
• Clouds may randomly start following the player around
• Missiles launched at high speeds may have weird looking, very sparsely placed trail particles
• Weapons may occasionally fail to be removed from aircraft loadout after replacement with another in the hangar
• Caution voices may play multiple times & continue to mission end when approaching a mission border
• MLRS rockets may spawn in sideways momentarily before correcting themselves
• Water can appear dark/too transparent 

New Content and Other Changes

•  Swapped from CPU-driven to GPU-driven visual effects for missile smoke, damage smoke and explosions.
  The legacy system utilised Unity's Particle Effects which is calculated by the CPU, which also needs to do all of the important CPU stuff like running the game. I've moved it to the GPU-powered VFX Graph, which should handle it much more effectively than the CPU.

• Dramatically increased smoke trail lifetime for missiles
  The offloading of smoke effects to the GPU allows me to keep them hanging around for much longer than before. While it's still not perfect, it's much closer to the original style I wanted for ASE.

• Improved volumetric cloud rendering and performance
  I've updated the cloud shaders to their latest versions, which have improved both rendering quality and performance. They're still the biggest performance eater, so I'll keep working with the asset developers to improve in this area.
  
• Added Aurora Borealis to Operation Fortitude
  This visual effect was included by the cloud guys, so I may as well put it in.

• Added 'Disable Target' functionality
  Disabling targets will keep the entities active on the scene, but sets their target type to a new 'None' setting and removes their targeting box. This prevents the player, or other units from attacking them.
• Target boxes get small when they're far away, so the HUD isn't so cluttered.
• Added Ground Forces AI
  This is a significant step forward for the mechanics of the game, which now supports teams of ground units who can move around on the surface and assume different formations. They aren't animated and snap to the terrain when moving, but it should be sufficient for the movement speed/altitudes you'll be flying at. 
• Ground Force AI State Machines
  I repurposed the aircraft AI state machines for ground teams. At the moment, teams only have a Stop and Move function, which honestly might be all they need.
• Added Artillery System & Artillery Team
  This is a standalone piece of code that can be added to a ground vehicle to turn it into a combat unit. The artillery system can fire different projectiles in a parabolic arc to hit targets at any range, and includes proper target leading code as well. The artillery team is a type of ground unit capable of engaging other ground units. It reads the list of individual vehicles comprising its target unit, and then assigns targets evenly amongst its own guns. Artillery teams fire in sequence, one gun at a time. 
  • Added Tank unit
  • Added MLRS unit
    
    

• Added Naval Forces AI
  Naval forces act like ground forces, except they don't snap to terrain! I can also add the artillery system to them to make them combat capable.
  • Added Destroyer unit
  • Added Frigate unit
• Added subtargets
  Subtargets are components of larger vehicles (like a large ship) which can be independently targeted and neutralised to disable certain capabilities.
  
  
• Added new weapon archetype: Sea-Skimmer
  A type of missile that free-falls until it's a certain distance above the ground, then fires its motor to fly at low altitude towards its target.
• Added new weapon: LRSM
  A long-range, low-speed implementation of the Sea Skimmer. Available on the BG-18E on heavy hardpoints.
  
  
• Added VLS missile
  Despite their name, VLS missiles don't necessarily need to be vertically launched - they just head in a straight line for a few seconds before beginning to track.
  
  
• Added 3D explosion audio
  While this creates directional audio, the main reason for adding this is to ensure that explosions aren't played at full volume regardless of how far away they are from the player.
  
  
• Remade Operation Desert Fury
  Some players were encountering a bug where their aircraft would lock in a certain direction and crash into the ground and for the life of me I couldn't find what was causing it, so I decided to just remake the mission to show off the new ground forces stuff.
• Added new mission: Operation Blindside
  Support your allied fleet and destroy the enemy at port!

What's Next?

I'm continuing my investigations into performance, larger map sizes, and more units on map. Some of the stuff that came out of this experimentation, e.g. the VFX graph smoke effects, were ready to be added to the public build of ASE. The floating point stuff is significantly more complicated, and involves a lot of moving parts and delicate processes that I still need to work through, but I have been making good progress. While I don't want to promise anything, hopefully I can get these core changes implemented in 0.08a. 

Outside of this area of focus, I'm experimenting with a long-overdue dialogue system and the HUD, so those should be in the next update too. 

I'm also going overseas next week for work, so whatever happens, the next update might take an extra month or so to come out. I will see you then!