Greetings engineers, tank builders and other parts of our community.
Get ready to get a feel of the new update that will include many qualitative changes to your gameplay: better missile gameplay , more realistic approach to your crew members & more.
Missile update
- Improved the logic of missiles increasing their lethality. Due to this, along with the missile update itself, the warheads of all Surface To Air and Air To Air missiles can now be reduced so they don't double as dual purpose anti tank artillery missiles.
- Added an input to launchers to detonate any currently launched missiles
- Added an output to launchers to display the position of the last fired missile. This is meant to help make creating custom guidance more accessible.
- Added reduction ECCM for missiles. Once a missile has acquired a target it will reduce the size of the area it seeks making the missile less prone to being flared.
- Added SEAM(Seeker Expanded Acquisition Mode) to missiles. Missiles will expand their seek radius to 3x of the base seek cone when they don't have a target. This is to emulate using the gimbal to search for a target expanding the search area. Technically this search area would only be 2x without any gaps in coverage (double the radius of the seek angle) but this area could be larger if one tolerates gaps.
- Overshoot guidance will now detonate after arming if it loses sight of the target. This should allow command guide missiles to detonate on passing an aimpoint or help missiles without memory detonate after overshooting a target.
- Anti missile guidance now filters out your own missiles
- Added basic logic to allow anti missile guidance to spread out its targeting and target missiles not engaged by other missiles.
- Made it so the minimum distance requirement for seekers is disabled after 0.5 seconds of launch. This should allow missiles to continue to seek even when close to the target.
- Removed the caliber requirement from missile tubes. It just needlessly complicated adding missiles to a rack since you already have to specify allowed racks
- ALL CALIBERS NOW MATCH ITS REAL LIFE VALUE. Which may impact some of your existing dupes.
Missile Stat Changelog: Surface To Air missiles and Air To Air missiles were given their realistic warhead sizes
This will hopefully reduce their usage as dual purpose anti-tank artillery missiles
IR Sams were also given additional sensitivity to better help with engaging helicopters increasing the effective range of their seekers
Highlights:
- FIM-92 Stinger — Reworked with IRCCM, datalink, booster, and reduced drag for better close-range reliability
- Mistral — Longer burn time for engaging distant targets
- 9M311 Tunguska — Significantly faster, reducing travel time to helicopters at the cost of total maneuverability
- AIM-120 / AIM-54 / Meteor / MICA — Added advanced reduction seeker ECCM
- R-73 / Strela — Added reduction seeker IRCCM
- A long standing issue with missile caliber has been addressed - it is now possible to make missile explosive match its real life stats. It is now less "patch-work on a vibe", more welcoming for a better balance to come.
Full missile stat changes available in the pull request .
Improved Explosions
- Reworked explosion visuals and scaling for more punchy but less abusive blasts
- Extended cookoffs are now way more common, and more rounds are shot out of your crates when they're going up
- This means most explosions will straight up gut your tank! No more finnicky ammo wet racks, or inconsistent death mechanics. Protect your outside not your inside!
- Overpressure now only kills crew (more realistic)
- Ammo cookoff logic reworked — triggers when a single hit exceeds 3% of crate HP up to a certain amount
- Decreasing HP now reduces ammo count proportionally
- Smoke and machinegun cookoffs no longer explode
- Refills vanish cleanly without triggering blasts
- prop2mesh entities are now ignored by all traces in ACF
Refactored Point System The old point system has been completely rewritten into a hybrid fighting power + cost model.
Which means that we have now more metrics for competitive people to look at or for a better gamemode handling of balance.
- ACE Points and Money are now separate concepts
- ACE Points represent a combination of the expected combat power of a vehicle (through the effective armor and expected penetration output), while still leaving some room for players to build smart. Engines, for example, have a flat cost based on performance and as your mass is no longer a factor that is represented by points, your hp/ton is entirely up to you!
- Money is a slight rework of the legacy points system. Everything has a flat cost in mm based on the following protection formula that the effective armor system uses as well: ( KE*0.8 + CHEM*0.2) . You then get a cost reduction of up to 80% down at 3HP, or up to a 20% cost increase up there at 75HP (numbers subject to change).
- However, money has no effect on legality at this time . That's right, build as terribly as you'd like! All that matters is your performance!
- Same 10k points limit as before, which gets re-calculated if you change things on your vehicle and respawn. if you double click r on your vehicle you can see preview values though (with a cooldown for lag reasons.) Since it only redoes the full calculation on a respawn, if you mess with your vehicle a message will be sent in chat and you will be marked whenever anyone checks your vehicle's armor out.
- The idea is that things around the same points have similar combat ability, where as things around the same cost have similar levels of building prowess, or might just be really really squishy!
- This may be turned into a full ACE BR system in the future! Stay tuned.
THE GOAL OF THIS SYSTEM IS TO HELP BALANCE CUSTOM TANKS. Realistic late 20th century tanks should never have to worry about the system, and in a vast majority of situations realistic tanks are well under the point limit by default. Vehicles with big weak-spots like the CATTB (which is a very modern tank) are still legal as well because despite the 1000mm turret, the hull is large and has considerably less armor, evening it out! If your replica tank is illegal with the scan confirming it's realistic stats , please submit a report! Remember: everything your realistic tank can do, a custom could do as well.
Crewseat Rework The rework brings us closer to a more realistic approach, gforce, sitting position, tilt - all of these variables now impact your gameplay. Another important part of this update is that crewseats were finally moved to its own menu, which makes it more organized compared to before.
Pose System Crewseats now support multiple pose models:
- Sitting, Sitting Alt, Standing, Jeep, Airboat
- Pose selection available in the ACE menu with preview
- Poses save and restore on duplication
Pose Effects Role
Sitting
Standing
Driver
Standard stability
+50% G-force/tilt penalties
Gunner
Standard accuracy
+20% base accuracy penalty, +50% G-force effects
Loader
-20% penalties, +10% slower loading
Standard penalties, +15% faster loading
G-Force System While we couldn't bring in autoloaders to balance this issue out and propose another way of making your vehicle more suited for high g-force environment. This change makes it more closer to real life, we don't think any of the games (like war thunder) has implemented such thing, so expect autoloader entity to appear one day. Now its better to stay and shoot.
- Loader: High G-force reduces stamina regen
- Gunner: High G-force reduces accuracy
Canary version of ACE & New ACE Team steam account We have finally made it that you can try out dev version way easier, so we get more feedback coming from regular community that doesn't want to mess with github or other software to keep dev version up-to-date.
Keep in mind that it still requires a little of manual actions due to account limitations (we need steam guard for the website, but for auto updates it requires to not have steam guard on the account, so it conflicts within itself). A unified steam account lets us be the proof of quality, if we get to publish more systems / tools, it will be under our name.
Feel the power here
SWEP Rework
- Added viewpunch with accurate crosshair to all weapons (more dynamic camera behavior and a better shooting experience; previously, there was no viewpunch or accurate crosshair)
- Changed the crosshair size to a more reasonable size
- Reworked the recoil of all SWEPs
- Bringing bullet velocity to real values (for almost all weapons, the velocity was set based on the caliber, without taking into account the barrel length and other factors affecting the final bullet velocity)
- Decreased penetration and increased damage by +-1.5 (for all except Sniper rifles and special) (the reduction in penetration is justified by the standard bulletproof protection of 6-8mm steel, therefore, regular firearms should not penetrate such armor)
- Changed the caliber of shotguns from 12.7 to 7.25 mm (each pellet was 12 mm, now 7.25, which is the average buckshot size)
- Fixed AT4 exploding inside the player.
- Fixed the AT4 trail to a more accurate one - before the smoke trail was coming off the side of the missile, now it comes from the correct place.
- Added spread on the move for the Anti-Material Rifle (there was no spread while moving, which could negatively impact the gameplay experience)
Added Mine Sweeper You are now presented with a small game that you need to win, otherwise there's a chance that the mine will fight back and explode. Different mines have different difficulties. There's also a bonus level that is quite rare, making it really hard to win the game.
New Entities Added to the new Entities category in the ACE menu:
Wind Sensor ( ace_wind_sensor ) — Detects wind direction/speed. While it is hardly usable at this point of time (the only thing affected by wind is smoke), expect to see more changes in regards to round ballistics, that will impact long range artillery and spread.
ACE Wind Sensor G-Force Meter ( ace_gforce_meter ) — Measures G-force. While g force doesn't impact players, it impacts crew. Potentially might be useful for plane builders. We're exploring more ideas and ways to balance future plane gameplay out. This entity along with wind sensor, sets up a foundation.
Other Changes
- Bigger ammo sizes — Fixed ammo sizing to fit all calibers
- ACE logo prop — Added as a spawnable model for map makers, builders.
- Short cannon weight fix — Short cannons now increase in weight appropriately
- GLATGM fix — Now fires from the gun barrel properly instead of from the side
- LOSAT fix — Now has actual penetration!
- Radio fuze fix — Radio fuze works again! Yay!
- Crew seat swap fix — Fixed driver replacement reactivating the engine
- Global chat fix — Fixed messages not showing in some MP/SP scenarios
- Linter fixes — Moved to GLuaLint official reusable workflow
- Miscellaneous back-end fixes — A few things very few people will ever have to worry about are fixed as well, such as archived ACF convars being applied on startup, safezone filename sanitization, etc.