Hello everyone.

It's been almost three months since the last update! If you've read the last development update, you'll know that I've been overseas, then came back to work, study and the band as normal - all of which were backlogged thanks to the trip. Unfortunately, I think the total amount of time I've put into working on ASE has been only 3 or 4 weeks. I sincerely apologise for the wait on this patch. To help avoid the radio silence, I'm going to reactivate my X/Twitter account, which you can follow by using the link.

Thankfully, outside of my lack of time, development is progressing well. In fact, I think I've only got one (visual) problem left to fix before I can add in a floating point offset solution to the game. I've been whining about this particular problem since last year, so fingers crossed I can fix it next patch! ASE 0.08a introduces some of the last few gameplay features I've been planning to add, and I think the game's in a better spot than ever before.

Bug Fixes

• Audio sliders should now save correctly when you exit the Options Menu
• Voice warnings should not repeatedly trigger when approaching mission boundaries (in fact, I removed them altogether)
• Loading a mission with an air-to-air or air-to-ground only missile should correctly mark untargetable enemies with the X target UI.

Known Bugs

• Enemy planes jitter/stop briefly on being hit with gun fire
• Missiles launched at high speeds may have weird looking, very sparsely placed trail particles
• No collision for the terrain in Operation Starhound
• Voices  get stuck upon pausing/unpausing game, or get cut out shortly before finishing.
• Enemy aircraft don't avoid a certain obstacle correctly in Operation Starhound
• Color on HDR monitors gets blown out. Turn off HDR if this occurs.

New Content and Other Changes

• Voice acting system
  A reconfiguration of lunetis's existing radio framework to integrate with the mission system designed in ASE 0.05a. Enjoy the dulcet tones of AWACS Panopticon as he shouts in your ear!
  
  Please note: All voices are placeholder assets in order to demonstrate the functionality of the system. Due to timing and budget constraints I used  and will continue to use AI-generated voices for the purposes of the itch.io demo, but intend to use human voice actors should development on a full product continue.
  
  Please also note that voice acting is currently available on Operation Argus, Operation Desert Fury, and Operation Starhound only because I forgot my elevenlabs 2FA number.
  
  
• New aircraft: NRP-20
  A snappy, responsive light fighter equipped primarily for air-to-air combat. Features excellent acceleration and handling performance, with a generous ACM window,  but carries a light payload and doesn't have a lot of HP. The NRP-20 is sort of a proof of concept of how I envisage lighter aircraft balancing within ASE - specialist dogfighters emphasising close range engagement, but limited by poor ammo endurance.
  
  
  
  
• New weapon: SCAR
  A semi-active air-to-air aerial rocket designed as a primary weapon alternative for light fighters. Very high performance, but extremely limited range. 
  
  
• New HUD
  Shifted elements of the HUD around to make it more distinct from other arcade flight sims out there.
  
  
• Massive map rendering
  Placed a huge, low-resolution terrain underneath the current map system to give the illusion of a very large world. This forms one of the key parts of the upcoming floating-point offset solution.

• Improved aircraft AI
  Aircraft will see and evade missiles earlier, no longer requiring me to artificially buff their mobility when evading missiles. This doesn't mean that they'll evade missiles all the time - the game still rolls a die to see if they evade or not. 
  
  
• Improved Ace AI 
  Aces used to be just extremely buffed regular enemies. Now, the generic ace AI type will attempt to stay on your tail, but will still mess up occasionally to give you a chance to fight back. However, if  they see an opportunity, they'll drop flares and use a Pugachev's Cobra maneuver to get behind you!

• Turret targeting system
  Previously, AA guns needed to be positioned the right way up in order to correctly track their targets. This system was rewritten so that 'turrets' can be placed sideways or upside-down and fire in a cone 'above' them depending on their local orientation.
  
  
• New flare effects
  Migrated flares to the VFX Graph.
  
  
• Submunition system
  Weapons may deploy other weapons, either on detonation, timer or proximity to a target.
  
  
• New AI mission: Form on Player
  The AI will fly in a set formation around the player. To demonstrate this, I added Polaris Team to Operation Magnum Major, but they just kind of follow you around at the moment, not shooting at things. You can think of them as a cute pet. This feature will receive further work in a later patch.
  
  
• Optimisation!
  I figured out how to use Unity's frame profiler yesterday and quickly identified some quick wins that should hopefully improve performance for people with weaker rigs.
  
  
• Added a hangar to the Hangar scene
  Will appreciate in value so we can make a profit once we sell the land.
  
  
• Increased enemy tank numbers in Operation Desert Fury
  So that there's a bit of challenge involved.

• New Mission: Operation Starhound
  ????

What's Next?
Operation Starhound proved that complex scenarios involving several moving parts and trackers can now be constructed within ASE's mission framework. This is pretty close to an MVP by my standards. The last mission-critical thing I need to do now is investigate a way to efficiently render thousands/millions of trees over terrain in a performant way, and of course clean up the last visual bug with floating point. 

With work on features likely to soon come to a close, there will be a focus on general code clean-up, bug fixing and optimisation. As you know, I'm not a programmer by trade, and these last few updates have really been pushing me in terms of experimentation and learning - on top of reactivating some of lunetis's old code which I might have built alternative arrangements for earlier. This means that ASE is a bit messy code and bug-wise at the moment, so I'd like to spend some time just cleaning things up.

THE STORY
It's also about time for me to address the elephant in the room - there has been a lot of questions about story and setting and while I tried not to think about the story before I knew what the game was going to be capable of, I think development has progressed to a state where I can start having a think about this stuff. It's no fun if I just straight up come out with what I've been thinking of, so instead, I created some magazine excerpts below (open in new tab to view). 

Please note: There isn't a formal link to the missions contained within the game to this lore material. Or there is. It's up to you!

I'm also very very very bad at names, so you can expect some of the terminology and nation names in this stuff to change as I think of better ones.

Hopefully, this answers some of your questions, and raises some others. 

That brings us to the end of this very lengthy update devlog. Thank you for your constant support via all the channels I get contacted on. I hope I can continue to work on ASE to the very best of my abilities.