Hello everyone.

It's been about 2 months since ASE v0.10b was released and I wrapped up content releases for this iteration of the game. However, as I noted in the v.10 development update, I've been spending some of my free time exploring how I could expand the game into a fully fledged product.  Let's have a look at what's going on.

• Landscape Creation
  The majority of my work has actually been around improving my map-creation techniques. This involved:
  • Resolving a problem preventing trees from working properly with floating point offset
  • Implementing a road-generation solution that I can use to create various road meshes linking points of interest
  • Exploring combining open-source satellite imagery with AI content creation tools to generate okayish-looking textures. 
  • Shifting from using the old Unity Terrain System to a bespoke landscape creation tool, allowing me to create more realistic and better-looking scenes. 
  • I would show pictures, but I've accidentally overwritten my test scene this morning and I'm encountering a lot of bugs, so I'll leave it for now.
    
    
• Flight Model Rewrite
  The flight model has been further modified to support a more logical simulation. While it's far from a simulator, it now models drag and thrust, allowing aircraft to gain or lose speed depending on their pitch, turn-rate and gravity. This should hopefully increase the distinctiveness of each aircraft when you fly them.
  
  
• Afterburner Effects
  Shifted from the old particle-based system to a mesh model. This provides a much cooler and realistic afterburner visual!
• AI Unit Optimisation
  Improved ground force AI logic to simplify things like movement, target selection, target engagement, and other various things. Naval forces can move very unnaturally as a result of this, but I think I'm gonna be lazy and just design something that won't have them move as a formation.
  
  
• Missile Tracking Improvements
  Added a logarithmic mobility penalty to missiles to limit their tracking ability in the first few seconds of their lifespan. This penalty can be fine-tuned between different missile types, and I'll use it to further differentiate between long range munitions, which need a few seconds to get going, and short range ones, which start tracking almost instantly after going off the rail. In addition, I also added a drop time for certain missiles like the MTAM, SRAM and LRAM. 
  
  
• HDR Colors
  Added HDR coloring to bullets and explosions. These interact with bloom post-processing to dramatically increase the glow emitted by these effects.
  
• Camera Shake Refactor
  The previous camera shake code was quite unoptimised, especially when firing guns. This refactor greatly streamlines things as well as supports 'shake stacking', where multiple shake sources can simultaneously apply to the camera.
  
  
• Menu Localisation Support
  Refactored the main menu and options code to pull from .xml files which can be swapped out for different languages. 

There's a bit more being worked on behind the scenes which I'm not confident enough to show at this point in time. The problem with VFX sorting with clouds still remains and I've got that on the backburner while I tackle other aspects of the game. It still feels like driving a car missing one of the wheels, but hopefully I'll be able to make some progress on it in the new year.

Hopefully this sheds some light on what's going on right now, and I hope everybody has a great, safe holiday season. 

I'll see everybody in the new year!