ASE 0.07a

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.

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!