Task Force Patch Notes — May 13, 2024
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
This update includes a ton of new Unreal Engine 5 assets that we're testing. Here's an example of a new map we're planning for a petrochemical plant:
There's also dynamic weather that we've setup so the map is sometimes party cloudy, raining, or even an all out thunderstorm.
We plan to add a lot more assets over the coming weeks as well. This should make the game feel fresh and up-to-date prior to re-releasing back on the store.
The update also makes some critical changes to explosive forces, which will apply most specifically to grenade damage priorities. The previous system would just randomly loop through each player on the map and didn't provide any concrete output in terms of the order that players were killed.
Now explosive forces will apply any and all damage to each hostage or VIP inside the damage radius before applying damage to each individual player based on their distance. This means an explosion will damage the closest player and then work outwards applying damage as a real explosion would. However this also prevents players from abusing the mechanic by killing a player first even though that explosion would have actually killed the hostages or VIPs as well.
The update implements a new system for console messages that allows dedicated servers to redirect output to clients. This is very important to admin commands as there was previously no information being provided when a command was submitted, which made it quite difficult to know why a command wasn't actually working.
We've added an automatic AFK kicking system that monitors whether or not players are actually playing each round. If a player is AFK for a certain period of time the server will kick this player while still allowing them to rejoin, whereas the admin kick command would prevent the player from rejoining for a certain period of time. There's also a custom disconnect message that says that player was "kicked for being AFK" rather than "disconnected" so other players can know when someone was kicked automatically rather than by an admin.
There's now a physics restriction on weapons when dropping them to the ground which limits the speed at which they can move. This should prevent weapons from flying very far or unrealistically whereas they should now fall to the ground more appropriately. We've also added some important debug output for the new user interface system as more DirectX 12 functionality is built out behind the scenes until we make the switch back from DirectX 11 later this year.