Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop, the free-to-play co-op game, received some interesting changes, thanks to the July 31 patch. It brought changes to computer interaction, improved the visuals of Gas Grenade, and added Brazilian Portuguese translation to the game.
The patch also updated the translation of Chinese, German, Italian, Japanese, and Russian. Computer hacks no longer start after four seconds automatically, and the showbudget is now usable in multiplayer. The audio menu received the Advanced Volume Settings tab, and the default FPS limit is increased by 1.
You can read the highlights of the update below.
Campaigns
- Tears for Tarnor: Abandoned Maintenance Tunnels: Added a constraint group to the crane platform to avoid strange physics interactions.
Aliens
- Added an experimental system where aliens can be controlled by players. There is currently no gameplay or UI associated with this system. Aliens can be inhabited using the asw_inhabit_npc concommand and spectated using the asw_spectate_npc concommand. Both of these concommands are cheats. In this initial version, rangers and harvesters have the ability to attack in this mode.
Weapons
- TG-05 Gas Grenades: The visuals for this weapon have been updated.
- The gas cloud and grenade trail are now yellow rather than green.
- The gas cloud now visually fills the entire area of effect.
- The gas cloud is now culled based on a visibility proxy rather than by map geometry. (The same way that glows from light sources are culled.)
- There is now a red circle on the floor where the gas grenade is dealing damage.
- Fixed the HUD damage indicator not appearing for damage caused by gas grenades.
Misc
- Fixed a server crash during instant restart (ED_Alloc) when precaching entities pushed the edict number over the limit.
- Reorganized the alien class hierarchy in the code to facilitate the addition of future features.
- Moved the USE prompt to the side when hacking or using a computer.
- Walking away from a computer after interacting with it no longer logs out of the computer. (The computer still returns to the main menu.)
- Added convars (rd mixer *) that affect the volume of various types of audio.
- Mission chooser titles can now wrap to the next line.
- Made a bit of shaky text in net_graph less shaky.
- Increased the default FPS limit by 1 to avoid rounding errors (on a 60Hz monitor, the limit will now start at 61, etc.)
Mapping
- Added a developer warning at mission start if any spawners are inside terrain.
- Camera rotation is now enabled rather than disabled by default. Mappers who want to disable camera rotation for players who haven't set a preference need to update their asw_gamerules entity.
The complete patch notes are available on Steam.
