Hello everyone.

It's been a hot minute. I've been getting my ass kicked by work (end of financial year stuff) but was working on ASE wherever I could. Unfortunately, it turned out I was being very optimisitic when I said that there was only visual stuff left to fix for floating point offset, and it turned out I had no choice but to wait for a bug fix from the Unity team as it ended up being a issue with the engine itself. I sincerely apologise for the delay in getting this update out.

In any case, the problems with floating point have been fixed now, and this solves one of the major technical issues I needed to, and I've taken this opportunity to add in a few more core mission features I wanted to get in. However, I'm running into a few more blockers that I'll need to fix in the next patch that I'll outline below. Let's get straight into it:

Bug Fixes

• HDR monitors should now be capable of running the game (hopefully, I don't have an HDR monitor)
• Aircraft should not get stuck in AOA mode and drift into the ground (!!!)
• Aircraft should not spawn slightly stuck in the ground and have their taxi speed halved
• The F/A-18 should no longer randomly refuse to take off
• AI aircraft should now correctly avoid terrain collisions as before
•  Fixed bloom not working as intended
• Various bug fixes to weapon inventory in-game
• Audio sliders should now affect mission audio
• Flares should now properly decoy incoming missiles instead of just looking pretty
• HUD should remain in place when switching cameras
• Water should no longer be too transparent
• Runway resupply should now reset weapon cooldowns so they can be used after restock if completely out of ammo
• LRSM should fire motor consistently and avoid dropping into the terrain
• As per usual, a whole bunch of other stuff that I don't remember

Known Bugs

• Missiles launched at high speeds may have weird looking, very sparsely placed trail particles
  
• VFX objects like missile smoke and damage smoke ignore post processing and always render in front of clouds
• Voice balancing is very quiet for certain lines (I just haven't properly put them through Audacity sorry)
• Terrain textures in larger maps can look low-res when slightly far away from player
• Tutorial input prompts for missiles and allied support are incorrect (will need to talk to the author of this particular asset to fix this)
• Tutorial input prompts are hilariously difficult to read due to their size (will also need to talk to the author about this)
• Screwing too much with the hangar buttons may duplicate missile loads
• Setting minimum throttle doesn't actually minimise your throttle input - you need to hold it
• I broke the cloud quality settings and couldn't get them back to where I wanted them so they look very pixelly atm
• Allied missile smoke trails may disappear upon impact
• AI may shoot missiles at nothing (might be related to the floating point offset stuff, I'll need to dig into it)
• Allied fighter support may wiggle around depending on the player's flight characteristics

New Features

• Floating Point Error Compensation
  Resets the aircraft's position to (0,0,0) once it moves past a certain tolerance range, shifting the map, and all other game objects in the opposite direction to provide a seamless transition. This was a major blocker that was preventing larger maps from coming in. To implement this, it involved:
  • All AI and weapon targeting positions and waypoints, etc. are updated with the offset
  • All VFX and trail particles have their positions updated with the offset (this is what I had to wait for Unity on)
  • Clouds and weather effects have their positions updated with the offset
  • Aircraft stats are updated, e.g. altitude 

• Huge Maps
  Floating point error compensation allows us to bring in larger maps which in turn means bigger missions.

• Unit Sleep/Wake Up
  Since maps have gotten bigger, units which are too far away from the player deactivate themselves and turn off their AI to reduce CPU load. This was very fiddly to implement, as the units needed to detach their minimap icons and keep them on while the unit was sleeping.

• Operations
  Allows the division of a mission into multiple smaller operations. Units within the operation are given their own missions and prefer to target opposing operation units. Operations which are far away from the player enter a "passive tracking" state where the operation controller periodically destroys allied and enemy units to simulate the operation's progress.

• Allied Support
  Allows the use of the D-PAD to request attack support from allied units in certain missions. Support is divided into aimed and non-aimed items, with aiming requiring a targeting reticule to be placed at the point of attack.

• GPU-Instanced Trees
  Adding GPU instanced trees, which are handled outside of Unity's GameObject processes and batched into very efficient draw calls by the GPU, allowing rendering of forests. I'm still working out how much I can push this, so have kept things relatively low for now.
  
  
• Helicopter AI
  Added helicopter AI, which will approach ground targets, attempting to stick close to the ground before engaging with guns and missiles. Still a WIP.

• Weather
  Added rain and lightning features. Rain will turn itself off once the player passes through the cloud layer.
  
  
• Better Water
  Slid a blue mesh under the water to give it a more realistic appearance.
  

• Better Explosions
  Added more varied explosion sprites

New Content

• New Aircraft: I-23
  High speed swing-wing interceptor designed with long range air-to-air engagements in mind. Middling maneuverability.
  
  

• New Aircraft: I-21
  Multirole light fighter equally suited for dogfighting or ground attack, but carries traditional light fighter limitations of limited payload capacity.
  
  

• New Aircraft: RPN Mk. 1D 
  The first original aircraft! A design that strikes the middle role between light and full capacity fighters.
  
  

• New Weapon: LRAM
  Long range air-to-air radar guided missile. Limited mobility but can target out to 5KM.

• New Weapon: GPBM
  Functions exactly the same as the other unguided bomb, just smaller.

• Allied Support: MLRS Strike
  A barrage of 4 rockets from an allied MLRS unit, destroying a small area around the designated target point.

• Allied Support: Rocket Airstrike
  An attack run by two allied aircraft who will saturate a rectangular area around the target point with  unguided rockets.

• Allied Support: Fighter Formation
  Request assistance from two allied aircraft who will fly in formation with the player for 20 seconds, engaging targets of opportunity with high performance missiles. Air-to-air only. Targets who are locked by the allied aircraft are marked to avoid double-targeting.

• New Mission: Operation Grand Slam
  A mission demonstrating all of the new features, such as weather, operations, big map, mid-mission resupply and allied support.  Assist allied units in recapturing territory.  Operations may give access to resources like an airfield or allied support.

• Tutorial
  Added a tutorial option to the main menu to run players through flight maneuvering, throttle management, and weapons. The input prompts are a bit cooked atm, I need to work on it a bit more.

• Human Voice Acting:
  Replaced AWACS Panopticon AI voice acting with human alternative. Voice acting kindly provided by FlyAwayNow & Conor Bushoven.
  
  
• Other Mission Voice Acting
  Added some AI lines to the remaining missions which needed them. 

What's Next?

I've received some questions recently about what my longer term plans are for ASE. I need to stress that this is still a personal project I'm working on in my free time, and my first attempt at programming an actual game, rather than a learning project.  I have no guarantee that I have the skills or resources to fully expand ASE into something that I would be happy to call an actual product (say, with better production values and actual content). With this in mind, I've avoided making plans for story, content and further development considerations and used only placeholder/free assets until I have confidence that I have developed something akin to a minimum viable product (MVP) - that way, I avoid wasting my time and resources, and those of other people I may call in to help. While I have made signficant progress in the 1 year that I have spent working on ASE, including floating point origin, there are still some really big questions in the air that I will need to tackle.

For example, I figured out that my volumetric cloud system is not capable of rendering vfx depth correctly - that is, it can't tell whether or not clouds should be in front or behind vfx objects like my missile smoke particles. This is a very niche problem as the vast majority of games will take place on the ground where you always know the clouds will be behind everything else. In fact, it's so niche that getting it fixed won't be a priority for Unity or my cloud asset provider - but for a flight game, obviously it is very important, a core requirement, in my opinion. This is just one of the blockers that I'm not sure whether or not I'll be able to fix  - and unless I have confidence that I can either fix it or find another way, I won't make any serious content plans for now. I will try my hardest, of course, but I can't say for certain I'll be able to do it. I hope you can understand where I'm coming from.

With that being said, floating point, big missions, and allied support represent the end of my planned scope for ASE gameplay mechanics.  Patch v0.10a will incorporate a rework of the hangar, which is finicky and buggy, and I'll target HOTAS support for that patch too.  And of course, I'll take a look at the cloud problem and a few other blockers, and we'll see what else we can fit in.