MattScott

For the record, I completely own the situation with console. I feel bad about it. I've been talking about console upgrades for years. I was excited to show PS4 running day/night when I posted that video on Twitter. When we got involved with APB, it was a simple plan: - Remove Joker Mystery Boxes and make Legendaries accessible through Joker Tickets - Finish APB 2.1 with upgraded lighting, 64-bit compatibility and better performance - Upgrade the anti-cheat - Finish the Battle Royal mode that would add some spice to the game - Add 2 new contacts, new clothing, new guns, and a new car - Upgrade console once we had PC merged onto the console code base Unfortunately nearly every part of that plan was all flawed. And it took us more than 3 years of wasted dev time to realize that. These are painful lessons as a CEO. It wasn't for a lack of trying. 20 months ago, we threw away most of that plan because it wasn't working. We started over from the APB 1.20 code base. Unfortunately the current situation with console was the casualty of having to start over. Thanks, Matt

I've seen the couple of requests for controller support. I'm adding that to our "todo" list. I know it will help console players who are transitioning, and it will make the eventual port of 1.30 back to console easier. @apdnoo asked a lot of good questions, so I'm going to try and go through them one by one here. You can merge multiple console accounts down to a single PC account. We even raised the f2p cap on the PC account so that you can merge in more than the default 2 character slots. There are account theft / security issues involved in merging PC accounts which is why we dont current allow that. This is an active conversation internally, and it's something I want to do. We just haven't come up with what the reward will be yet. Stay tuned. We tried to pull across as much as is technically feasible. These are still older systems on the backend, so there were a couple limitations. I honestly have no idea if the spending from console counts towards PC loyalty rewards at this point. I'm checking on that. In theory, all the symbols should work. However, we've noticed in the past there were some distortion issues between console and PC. My guess is that the 2.0 console code had slightly different math for projecting the symbols. So there is a decent likelihood that there will be some rework necessary. Honestly, I would love to get your feedback once you log in and check things out so we can get a sense how things came across. This entire process had to happen relatively fast for business reasons between PLAION and Little Orbit. We didn't get to test things as much as I would have liked. Generally, we've been stuck recycling events due to the focus being on Matchmaking and Cross-District play. But I'll make sure to highlight this for the event team so that we make sure older rewards are offered as we go forward. I'll go on record saying that I would love to release a clean, updatable version of APB on console. The 2.0 version from Reloaded was a mess. I've said it before, but it bears repeating, I have no idea how Microsoft and Sony approved it, because any changes we wanted to submit required a full "resubmission". Ignoring all of that, the current district setup for APB is problematic for low populations in general. We've seen that with both Xbox and Playstation 4. The gold, silver, bronze threat system really breaks down if you can't fill even a single district. Having said that, the 1.30 64-bit upgrade was a big step in supporting modern hardware. All of our upcoming matchmaking changes are aimed at fixing some of the backend issues. And cross-district matchmaking will take that a step further. If we were to add controller support at that point, then there wouldn't be too much left to do in order to resubmit back to Microsoft and Sony.

The key requirement is that your PC account has to have logged into the game at least once. Other than that, you can migrate your Xbox progress over to an existing PC account (it doesn't have to be made specifically for the migration).

Please open a ticket with support. They can figure out what happened. You can reach support at: https://support.gamersfirst.com or can email support@gamersfirst.com

This is a great question. We tested a variation of this scenario and it worked. We will make sure that players can select the same PC account to merge their PS4 characters to.

We are allowing players to move their characters to PC. The migration page is already up for XBOX (although I think it's having some issues, so you may want to wait for a day or two). You can check out the guide here: https://www.gamersfirst.com/apb/news/2024/1/2/xbox-console-2024 The Playstation 4 migration page will be up on February 4th. I know unspent G1C, weapons, clothing, and other items will transfer over. Not sure about JTs.

We reached a settlement with PLAION to end the *current* versions of APB Reloaded on XBOX ONE and Playstation 4. Both versions of the game are plagued with severe performance and gameplay issues. There is very little we can do directly. Most of the updates have to be done through PLAION. The XBOX version has already reached a point where several items are no longer supported and the system cannot be brought back online. Unfortunately, there is no way for PLAION to transfer the games to Little Orbit's control where we can better troubleshoot issues. There isn't even a way for us to directly message the console players due to GDPR rules. We're just hoping this announcement reaches as many people as possible, so they can explore migrating their characters if they want to. This was the only way to reset things. Just so I answer Skitty's question clearly. Little Orbit is clear to republish the games at any time under our own publishing account. However, we have a pretty full plate at the moment, so I don't see that happening any time soon.

Dear APB Reloaded Console Community, After careful consideration and evaluation of various factors, Little Orbit and PLAION have decided to sunset APB Reloaded on console platforms. This decision was not made lightly, and we understand that it may come as disappointing news to our dedicated console players who have waited patiently for upgrades and fixes to the game. The decision to discontinue APB Reloaded on consoles was driven by a combination of technical challenges, resource constraints, and the evolving landscape of gaming. We want to ensure that our players have the best possible gaming experience, and unfortunately, sustaining the game on console platforms has proven increasingly challenging. For Xbox players, we previously experienced issues preventing players from making any purchases, but we were able to keep the servers online. Unfortunately, you will have noticed that APB Xbox is currently experiencing technical issues, and the game is currently offline. Unfortunately, we are now unable to bring the game back online. For PlayStation 4 players, we will begin the sunset phase starting February 1st through August 2nd. As of February 1st, we will be disabling all monetization for these players. This wasn't an easy decision, and we understand the impact it has on our gaming community, but it was unavoidable. As a small consolation, we have created the ability for console players to migrate their characters to PC. APB Reloaded will continue to be available and supported on the PC platform. We encourage console players who wish to continue their APB Reloaded experience to consider joining the PC community. For Xbox players, you can start migrating your characters to APB Reloaded on PC immediately at https://gamersfirst.com/apb/news/2024/1/2/xbox-console-2024 For PlayStation 4 players, the migration page is not ready yet, but on February 1 you will also be able to start migrating your characters to APB Reloaded on PC. Instructions will be at https://gamersfirst.com/apb/news/2024/1/2/ps4-console-2024 We want to express our sincere gratitude to the APB Reloaded console community for the creativity, dedication, and support you have shown over the years. We are here to support you through this transition, and our customer service team is available for any questions or concerns you might have. You can reach support at: https://support.gamersfirst.com or can email support@gamersfirst.com Thank you for being a part of the APB Reloaded community. We appreciate your understanding and continued support as we navigate these changes. Thanks, Matt

We're listening. Matchmaking is getting a complete overhaul right now. We've done two community tests so far.

The honest answer is that I don't know. I saw that question and attempted to check in with them and didn't get any response.

Players have every right to be critical, frustrated, and skeptical. That's generally why I haven't given updates. But, this time I'm going to stream a couple things and show where we are. Then players can make up their own minds.

You are 100% correct. But if we release content with terrible matchmaking, players won't come back either. So releasing matchmaking + new content is the goal.

These are legitimately good questions for me to answer on the stream.

Hi everyone, We're calling this an End of Year Update or "Showvember" to be cute, but it's really just a long overdue update on the game. https://www.gamersfirst.com/apb/news/2023/11/17/end-of-the-year-update There wasn't really space in the blog to get into more details, so I'll also be on Twitch to talk and answer more questions. Tuesday Nov 21 - 7pm UTC / 11am PST. https://www.twitch.tv/littleorbit Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, I'm going to make tomorrow's patch announcement. A patch is going up on the Live servers for PC. This patch will be happening on Thursday 4/27/2023. The patch is scheduled to start at 2am PT / 9AM UTC and will last 4-6 hours. GENERAL CHANGES: Easy Anti Cheat is now fully implemented in APB! Launching the game will install EAC automatically. Please continue to use the /report command to report cheaters, as always! Players can now choose to disable fog. This option can be found in the Advanced Video settings (note that keeping fog enabled slightly impacts performance) Day/Night cycle added back to Asylum Added the ability to disable Muzzle Flash and Magazine Casings. These options are in DefaultGame.ini, under APBGame.cVisualFX_Weapon called: m_bEnableMuzzleFlash=true m_bEnableMagazineCasings=true BALANCE CHANGES: Previously when nerfing the Colby .45, an extra 5m was accidentally taken off the range. After testing we’ve decided to keep this, meaning the Colby .45’s range will stay at 45m. Vaquero Gear 5 Topspeed increased: 1700 -> 2200 Coywolf VIP torque slowdown adjusted: 0.8 -> 0.94 (fixes ineffective modifier) FAR jump modifier changed: 20 -> 15 BUG FIXES: Implemented a fix for the ‘car bug' (the issue where exiting a car while drifting caused players to visually desync for everyone else) Fixed an exploit involving objectives and crouching at the same time KNOWN ISSUES: The achievement “Kind of a Big Deal” does not increment if you are already gold threat and your character existed after your account achieved gold threat Stalls can occur upon entering the Clothing Kiosk with “NEW!” items Tattoo layers are inversed, meaning tattoos lower on the list will cover ones above Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, I'm going to make tomorrow's patch announcement. A patch is going up on the Live servers for PC. This patch will be happening on Thursday 4/27/2023. The patch is scheduled to start at 2am PT / 9AM UTC and will last 4-6 hours. GENERAL CHANGES: Easy Anti Cheat is now fully implemented in APB! Launching the game will install EAC automatically. Please continue to use the /report command to report cheaters, as always! Players can now choose to disable fog. This option can be found in the Advanced Video settings (note that keeping fog enabled slightly impacts performance) Day/Night cycle added back to Asylum Added the ability to disable Muzzle Flash and Magazine Casings. These options are in DefaultGame.ini, under APBGame.cVisualFX_Weapon called: m_bEnableMuzzleFlash=true m_bEnableMagazineCasings=true BALANCE CHANGES: Previously when nerfing the Colby .45, an extra 5m was accidentally taken off the range. After testing we’ve decided to keep this, meaning the Colby .45’s range will stay at 45m. Vaquero Gear 5 Topspeed increased: 1700 -> 2200 Coywolf VIP torque slowdown adjusted: 0.8 -> 0.94 (fixes ineffective modifier) FAR jump modifier changed: 20 -> 15 BUG FIXES: Implemented a fix for the ‘car bug' (the issue where exiting a car while drifting caused players to visually desync for everyone else) Fixed an exploit involving objectives and crouching at the same time KNOWN ISSUES: The achievement “Kind of a Big Deal” does not increment if you are already gold threat and your character existed after your account achieved gold threat Stalls can occur upon entering the Clothing Kiosk with “NEW!” items Tattoo layers are inversed, meaning tattoos lower on the list will cover ones above Thanks, Matt

Getting to this a tad late, but its a holiday here in the US, so I have some free time. I've been pretty upfront about the APB 2.x effort. No amount of Player Help would have saved it. The issues were purely technical, and the game was never going to run well. So we scrapped it to start over with 1.30. Now that 1.30 is Live, everything is back on the table. I will be posting a Roadmap soon for both new features and content. I get flooded with PMs on the forums and Discord - mostly players wanting help with their bans. My customer service team does an absolutely heroic job dealing with those, and I stay out of their way. I don't over turn bans. But if players want to offer help, then you're welcome to reach out and I'll do my best to respond.

I love your sarcasm. Last time I checked 64-bit was Live. All the code we have in 2.x is now compatible.

Hi all, I'm going to unpin this thread since we're moving onto the next phase of development. I appreciate everyone who followed along on this part of the journey. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, I'm watching this thread and taking some notes. I appreciate the feedback so far from testers. There have been a couple statements from players that certain things are "unfixable" because they are related to the old version of Unreal that APB is based on. I will go on record saying that nothing is unfixable at this point. It may be unrealistic to fix or incredible hard to fix, but we have long given up maintaining upgrade compatibility. So, the team is actively looking at each and every one of the things that have been reported. For those that have brought up matchmaking and other items outside of stability - that's where we are headed next. I just want to close out this first effort and get 64-bit into production. Then I'll work with the team to create updated roadmap that we can share with the community. We are bouncing ideas around the right format that we can publish in. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, For those that don't follow my 64-bit updates, I'm creating a new thread here where players can discuss testing issues. We have opened a public test server that is now online for APB 1.30, the 64bit upgrade. We had a group of community players in test districts yesterday. Before I give notes and links below, I do want to set expectations. This is our 3rd attempt to upgrade APB and it's massive codebase. The first attempt was to finish off work that was started on APB 2.x before we took over. That entire attempt was flawed because the underlying code was the APB console code. They skipped major parts of 1.20 when they did that upgrade, so getting to better performance was never going to be possible. Our second attempt was to start with APB 1.20 and pull down all the functionality from APB 2.x. That effort was also met with failure, because there were simply too many moving parts. So we decided to slim things down and simply upgrade the codebase to 64-bit. This gives us native compatibility with RTX cards, but my hope is that this doesn't feel any different than APB 1.20. This is just us getting to first base instead of continuing to strike out trying to hit a home run. From here, we can cherry pick features out of 2.x and migrate them one by one into 1.30. "I dont want Perfect to be the enemy of Good." The community has waited too long for forward progress. So I'm anxious to get us a decent foundation to build off of. Notes for the test: Effective this evening, we have opened access to all players. There is no whitelist or NDA for the test. Anyone may download the client and provide feedback on the forums. You can hop on to OTW by downloading the launcher here: https://apb.patch.ot.gamersfirst.com/APB_OTW_Installer.exe Streaming and open discussion of the test is allowed as of this post. EasyAntiCheat is currently present – but we are using Battleye for the time being. As previously mentioned, our plan is to integrate EasyAntiCheat as quickly as possible. Known Bugs: If you are encountering issues running the game, run the launcher’s repair tool. There is an issue with BattlEye and multiple APB directories that running “Repair” on the OTW launcher will fix. There are known issues involving doors respawning in specific parts of maps. There is an issue with Joker Ammo machines repeating audio. Baked shaders and lighting may be incorrect in certain areas of the maps. A highly specific crash related to the music player known to exist. (EDITED: Thanks Skitty) A highly specific crash related to the clothing editor is known to exist. Provided there are no major blockers during the test, we plan on cutting over to LIVE with 1.30 as soon as possible. We hope to see you in-game testing! Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, We have a very exciting announcement this week. First, a majority of 1.30 work has been completed. We have run tests internally, and things seem to be holding together. Second, a test server is now online for Beta Testing the 64bit upgrade. We had a group of community players in test districts yesterday. I am going to be making a separate post on how to join this effort, but here is a quick rundown. Notes for the test: Effective this evening, we have opened access to all players. There is no whitelist or NDA for the test. Anyone may download the client and provide feedback on the forums. You can hop on to OTW by downloading the launcher here: https://apb.patch.ot.gamersfirst.com/APB_OTW_Installer.exe Streaming and open discussion of the test is allowed as of this post. EasyAntiCheat is currently present – but we are using Battleye for the time being. As previously mentioned, our plan is to integrate EasyAntiCheat as quickly as possible. Known Bugs: If you are encountering issues running the game, run the launcher’s repair tool. There is an issue with BattlEye and multiple APB directories that running “Repair” on the OTW launcher will fix. There are known issues involving doors respawning in specific parts of maps. There is an issue with Joker Ammo machines repeating audio. Baked shaders and lighting may be incorrect in certain areas of the maps. A highly specific crash related to the music studio is known to exist. A highly specific crash related to the clothing editor is known to exist. Provided there are no major blockers during the test, we plan on cutting over to LIVE with 1.30 as soon as possible. We hope to see you in-game testing! Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, Time for another 1.30 update! We’ve made progress this week on various tasks from the last two weeks. We created a workaround for the localization problem we encountered and have continued progress on all other tasks. Out of those tasks, the following need to be completed before we can ship 1.30: Fix an issue where a crash occurs on exit during the build process. (This is an irritating bug, because our continuous integration build system thinks the build didn't work - but it did. Its some other crash at the end of the process throwing things off) Resolve an issue relating to a third-party library responsible for loading intro movies. Test EasyAntiCheat integration. Deploy the builds from the build server to a 1.30 environment that Beta Testers can use. Perform internal QA on the 1.30 build. Deploy & test the build with Beta Testers. Process regressions encountered during the Beta Test. We still intend to get a build to our Beta Testers on schedule. As previously mentioned, we may opt to keep the NDA for the test. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, I am traveling this week in Europe, so my schedule is a bit off, but I think I can just barely squeak this update in on time. We’re chugging along with 1.30. Every map now has lighting built, and we have been able to get into all districts in our production (shipping) build. If you missed my Twitter update, we did a very quick comparison of APB 1.20 (LIVE) and 1.30 (the x64 Upgrade) and there are some solid performance improvements, notably with regards to stutters. So good news there. The following tasks still need to be completed before we can ship 1.30: Integrate 1.30 into existing Continuous Integration systems for automated builds. Find and fix an issue relating to specific localized strings in production builds. Resolve an issue relating to a third-party library responsible for loading intro movies. Test EasyAntiCheat integration (yes, EAC is back. I mentioned this in my AMA) Ensure the crash dump reporting system from 2.x is implemented and works as intended. Create the 1.30 environment that community beta testers will use. Perform internal QA on the 1.30 build. Deploy & test the build with community testers. Process regressions encountered during the community test. The build for our community beta testers is still a couple weeks away. Depending on the severity of the issues encountered, we may opt to keep the NDA in place for some of the early tests. But we are excited to get 1.30 in your hands as quickly as possible, so the team is pushing as hard as they can. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, It’s been another 2 weeks since my late update (1 week since the sphere), and what a two weeks it has been! First, I hoped everyone enjoyed the AMA today. We had over 1,000 unique viewers who tuned in to listen to Frosi and I, ask questions, and get a sneak peek at 1.30. I want to personally thank everyone who showed up. If you’ve missed the AMA, you can watch the VOD on Twitch here: https://youtu.be/K2MGdEOhbKY As I mentioned earlier on the livestream, we’ve made it past the Editor stage and into the game. Next, during the last 2 weeks, our team has completed the following (in order of completion): Fixed a critical bug relating to DirectX 9 and 64-bit compatibility while running under Visual Studio 2017 Ability to launch and run the Editor using 1.30’s codebase Ability to use Editor tools, such as the Skeletal Mesh Viewer, and the Static Mesh Viewer Built a sphere Load Editor assets properly Save Editor assets properly Load District Maps in-editor Fixed a few merge-related issues related to backporting 2.x memory work into 1.30 Re-baked Lighting for 1.30 within Social and Baylan Shipping Storage Re-built PhysX meshes for all assets Completed PhysX compatibility work Ability to run a test level offline Ability to enter the test level networked Created a workaround for compressed textures that resulted in player character meshes appearing transparent Ability to enter the Social district networked Ability to enter Baylan Shipping Storage networked Implemented a fix for a crash issue in DirectX related to a depth pass shader. Ability to enter the Financial district (!!) Implemented a fix for traffic lights which was causing a crash when recalculating whether a car could pass through a light. Implemented a fix for pedestrians which was causing a crash. Implemented a fix for various allocation issues within the audio subsystem that prevented the game from playing specific sounds due to being out of memory. Needless to say, I am extremely happy. There was no way I could have planned for us to have video ready for today's AMA. Just saw more progress than I expected in the last two weeks. We are now in Financial running tests. You can see the footage here: https://youtu.be/MqQUjXlITJI Our remaining issues are as follows, and will be tackled in the following order: Get the video player working Re-bake lighting for all maps (Only Social, Financial, and the Baylan Shipping Storage districts have been fully baked) Test missions and ensure they work Implement the crash dump reporting system from 2.x Upgrade the production configuration for the game’s code and assets and make a "Shipping" binary that has all the optimizations that are in the Live build. Get the testing environment back online Our target is to get 1.30 in the hands of our beta testing group no later than February. As mentioned in the AMA, we may also opt to remove the NDA for 1.30 testing so more people can see results for themselves on Twitch in a couple matches between testers. As mentioned elsewhere on the forums, San Paro will have its annual Holiday event starting tomorrow! You can get all the details about that event here: https://forums.gamersfirst.com/topic/20504-holiday-event-2022/ We hope you enjoy the Holiday festivities into the new year, and hope you are as excited about 1.30’s progress as we are! Thanks, Matt