MattScott

Hi everyone, I couldn't think of a better way to illustrate what stage we just hit with 1.30, so I'll just leave this here. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, Time for another update, and this time it's a bit more exciting. Going into last week, we had hit a number of irritating issues with byte alignment blocking our progress, so our engineers brainstormed through a task to revert a slice of our changes and focus on keeping only the memory management from the 2.x. This meant going back and revising code to try and stay inline a bit closer to 1.20 - except in situations where 64-bit or VS2017 compatibility was required. We worked on that task last week, and it proved to be very successful. The code is much more reliable than what we were trying to do before. We were able to complete the serialization and UnrealScript building part of the 1.30 upgrade on Monday. Now that we’re finally able to build the game’s UnrealScript packages, we can finally begin the process of attempting to load the Editor and the game’s content. I'm happy to report we are finally booting the Editor and working through ensuring shaders build properly! I'll report more progress next time. It's worth noting that separately I have created a series of forum threads for the Open Letter that was sent to my team. The plan is to work on responses to each issue and then schedule a Live AMA with the community soon. Thanks, Matt

Last but not least is the topic of actually enforcing what config edits are allowed and which aren’t. We already know that config edits that edit .ini files are fair game while things such as the Nofog shader and Localization edits are more of a grey area. However, we also know that the removal of particles such as grenade smoke, muzzle flash or other things that edit .upk files is absolutely not allowed, but this front is not being enforced whatsoever so please sit down with the customer support team and train them which edits are not allowed and which are. Right now you may as well not even have a config ToS seeing as most people streaming nowadays are openly using edits that are against the ToS. Alternatively, use your client side anticheat to perform file checks on .upk files to see they have not been altered and replaced with empty files. “This is a puzzling one. Certain things are supposedly not allowed, but you only have to turn on a stream to see things like no smoke, no muzzle flash, no ambient sounds, etc. It's led to the common advice "no that's not allowed, but honestly, no one is getting banned for it". I think clarification is needed and seeing as though it would take little time to write up a post explaining the situation, I don't understand why it hasn't been done yet.” -Community Member

As mentioned at the start, it would be nice to ramp this up again, reflect on why communication on many of the topics mentioned above has died down and try to do better in the future. We care about the game, we want to hear about it whether it's good or bad news. My personal suggestion would be to do blog posts a few weeks ahead of a seasonal event not only announcing said event but also talking about things that LO wants to do and where they want the game to head. The sooner you mention ideas, the sooner we can give feedback. Many of us love to read about the things you have planned and hope for a bright future for APB so please don’t make us go out of our way to beg on the forums or LO discord about any updates in regards to seasonal events or the general state of the game. You can use the broadcast feature to keep players informed and simply be transparent. Also honestly, once work on APB ramps up again, please create a Trello page and keep things updated, it's such a great way to keep players informed about what projects are in the works and which are actively being worked on and where progress has been made. Here’s an example of a Trello page by PixelTail Games who work on Tower Unite. Another thing you could do in order to strengthen the trust between the systems in place and the community would be to do monthly update posts talking about how many cheaters the Anti-cheat has banned this month, how many player mutes have happened, how many account restrictions happened for toxicity, griefing etc. No one is asking for name and shame – APB has already seen its fair share of it and it’s not something we should be going back to – but it would be encouraging for the playerbase to know and see that action is being taken to keep the game clean. “We need more communication between the devs and the everyday players regarding what's happening with the game and with Little Orbit as a whole.” “I think the players that still game this on a daily basis deserve to know what's the real state of APB and where it is heading.” -Community Members

I purposely put this topic far down the list as it reflects on many of the topics above, it really comes down to this, what is Little Orbits vision for the state of the 64Bit upgrade when they release it, do you plan on massively improving the game, fixing many of the issues mentioned above to hopefully keep players around this time? Or do you plan on releasing 64Bit as a “QoL” update to fix the RTX crash issue, increase the memory ceiling as well as increase game performance by a bit and then use their 64Bit tools to begin tackling the issues above? This is an absolutely massive question in everyone's mind when they think of the 64Bit update and it is one that has to be answered. “64-bit is a good direction. We need this for quality of life for sure. However if it is taking longer to get it out then please give more updates. (PLease do not make promises and dates but please consider keeping players better informed.) Otherwise they feel abandoned.” -Community Member

This is, and always will be a hot topic in the community and something the game has quite frankly lacked a direction with, recent updates were received with mostly mixed results, some like them, some don’t, but the most recent balance update was followed by a healthy boost in population. Balancing simply needs to happen more frequently and now would be the best time to buff a crap ton of weapons. I personally have already created a 18 page document with weapon-related and some car-related changes which are all buffs except for one thing which is a nerf to the DMR-AV. Another issue lies with map balance. There are countless spots that make for unfun missions – for example, areas such as the buildings in Financial that the community calls “German fortress” as well as many other spots that only have one or two ways to get to, often linked to climbing ladders which in most cases means certain death. Waterfront also needs a lot more cover around common spawn areas such as the big boat and has some nasty areas where spots can only be reached through to props that can be destroyed, this is something the community could be very helpful with when it comes to looking for places to start and getting feedback. “I would like to see a much more aggressive approach when it comes to weapon balance. Progress has most certainly been made, and imo the meta is in a better place when compared to before LO's balance passes, but more needs to be done. If it is possible, I would love to see more rapid-fire changes, or at least faster than the months-long periods between balance passes we have had. The same goes for vehicles though I think vehicles are in a pretty good spot.” -Community Member

This is yet another huge thing that the game needs but communication on this front has been completely silent for a while. This is one of the things on this list where most of the responses were understanding of the fact that this is a large undertaking and could possibly not even be possible to do until 64Bit, however with the shift away from 3.5 but rather updating to 64Bit it has become unclear whether or not the tools required to make this work would be a part of the 64Bit upgrade and whether or not this is still something LO wants to do. “Would be really really good, but also takes a lot of engineering effort. Understandable that it would not come before 64bit. But I hope the topic has been explored internally for how this could be implemented as it would be huge for the game.” -Community Member

While I already mentioned some things LO could do above it simply cannot be stressed enough how much QoL changes can do for a game and how important they are for a game to not make it feel as if it has been abandoned. These are the things that have to happen sooner or later if LO wants the 64Bit update to be another big shot at reviving the game. When LO took over APB saw an insanely large surge of returning players, as a company LO has to sit down and understand why these players left and start tackling the reasons why, whether that’s things such as the tutorial being poor or the matchmaking not being in a good state. The gap between what the system considers enough for gold threat and how well the best gold players actually perform in-game is astronomically large. As such, a threat rebalance would be one of those things that would improve the experience for all players across the board by bringing them closer to matches against their skill equals. “The tutorial might be a good start, but that's not enough. Furthermore there should be a detailed guide for new players where they can understand most of the mechanics in the game.” -Community Member

Toxicity has always been one of APB’s biggest issues and this is yet another thing where things are simply getting out of control because of the fact that the Live game seems abandoned. I can’t go for 30 minutes without seeing someone being blatantly racist, homophobic or otherwise discriminating whether thats through chat, clan names or names themselves, in now 13 years of playing online games, mainly shooters, I have never seen a worse example of toxicity than in the recent year or so of playing APB it is simply out of control. This isn’t the only form of toxicity either, a lot of members of the community that have a name for themselves whether it's through streaming or being parts of programs like SPCT get targeted by harassment or griefing every time they open the game. Things have gotten so bad that many of us who want to enjoy the game can’t stream and have to play on hidden characters, meaning we’re locked out of any meaningful endgame progression such as maxing roles. This form of harassment comes in the form of stream sniping, griefing or things such as toxic whispers etc. Not even GM’s are spared from this, making their life and volunteer duty miserable. Toxicity is something that LO can fix now and it has been left to fester for way too long. Stricter rules and punishment handed out by both GM’s and Support are one of possible methods of handling this problem. Even if they don’t show it, people care about their accounts and I could almost guarantee you that a lot of the racist things that are being spewed would go away if it came with severe penalties to their accounts such as a 30 day ban for first offenders and a permanent ban for repeated offenders. Wipe everyone's ignore list and make it so ignoring players ignores ALL characters on their account rather than just the one, combine this with a GTA 5 inspired passive mode of sorts that lets you ignore collisions tied to that players player-owned car or car he’s currently in for a few hours of recently ignored players and you have a solution against targeted griefing that doesn’t require GM’s to step in. “People are too used to it to a point where it has become part of the game. There are ways to be toxic that aren't even considered as violations. Huge changes and stricter rules, maybe stronger punishments that mean something are required in my opinion.” -Community Member

Now let's head into the most universally agreed on topic at a staggering 95% which is Anti-Cheat. The Live game is severely suffering in this regard and players are at a point where it feels like no one half decent at the game can be trusted anymore. It is seriously worrying and the issue is getting worse every day. Matt has already said that EAC will be returning with 64Bit but that felt like a very disappointing reply to arguably the biggest issue the game is facing right now because 64Bit could be in a few months, a year or possibly never. As far as I understand it EAC is not an option anymore as they have dropped support for 32Bit but sticking with BattlEye will further drive legit players from all skill levels away. Why should I play a game where someone can pay a few euros a month and pretend they’re good at the game and go on cheating rather blatantly for a closet for months, if not years? I can log into a district today and within an hour of playing face multiple cheaters some of which get to R100 and beyond while running shawcopter-like settings. Just the other day I saw a R90 speedhacker min-TTK’ing everyone, something that would’ve been detected and flagged within a few missions by FairFight and banned shortly after. APB desperately needs a server side anti cheat seeing as BattlEye is far too slow at detecting a cheat if they’re able to detect it at all. If cheat providers brag about having 150+ active users when your game peaks at around 300-400 players you have a serious issue and it has gone neglected for way too long. APB is the only game I have ever played in which players brag about cheating, play with cheaters like it's normal or even have clans advertising to sell cheats or painting themselves as cheaters. Furthermore, support needs to be trained to detect forms of cheating such as signs of macros and blatant trigger botting or even aimlocks and silent aim, it is beyond sad that there has been multiple known zero second delay trigger botters playing on the daily for the past 4+ years without being banned when any decent player would be able to tell you without a doubt that they are cheating but ideally it shouldn’t be up to the players or support to ban cheaters. Please look into other solutions even if it is only till 64Bit releases. Sticking with BE is a quick way to make sure that you continue to haemorrhage players and as faithful and loyal many of us APB players are, there’s a certain line in which even we lose hope in the way the game is managed – and the current Anti-cheat solution is one of the biggest reasons for many players as to why that line was crossed for them. “This is a big one, I would even argue it's THE BIGGEST ONE. Out of all the problems APB has ever had in its life cycle (of which there are countless) the biggest one remains the cheater problem. The only time we were actually doing well in that regard was during EAC, that's when the game was most playable. BE has been in the game twice now, we know it doesn't cut it, especially not on its own without a server side anti-cheat monitoring every player. The moment a cheater breaches BE pretty much everything is fair game until someone reports them and even when you report them with undeniable evidence it seems like LO's support team are being paid to be lenient about cheating instead of being paid to do their job. It seems like none of them have ever played a shooter game in their life and they can just not tell a blatant aimlock caught on video apart from normal footage to save their lives. No one wants to play a game where not only is there no new content to login for but you're also getting rolled by max rank rage hackers on veteran accounts on a daily basis who also love trash talking. Overall, makes the entire APB experience a billion times more miserable than it needs to be.” -Community Member

Hi everyone, Over the next week or two, I plan to go point by point through an open letter that many of you participated in creating. For the purposes of transparency, I'm going to post the intro of the letter in its entirety here without any modifications, and then I'm going to post each sub section in a separate thread under the newly create "Community Open Letter" sub forum. I'll leave each thread open for comments, and then I'll edit the original post with my responses. EDIT: I want to schedule an AMA where I can talk directly about some of these topics after we have had a chance to let players weigh in. It's my understanding that a online form was created and that community members voted on various topics to help craft each section. I respect not only the effort that was involved in creating the letter, but also the way in which it was presented to me. Hopefully this will act as the springboard it was intended to create the dialog around each area that you guys asked about. Before I jump in, I also want to acknowledge that I am super late getting this posted. My schedule has been a mess for a while now (something I'll have to write a separate post about at some point). But this letter was initially brought to my attention in October, and I intended to get things started in November, but I ran out of time before my vacation. I got back late on Friday, and I committed to getting to this first thing, so I'm posting it now. Here goes. Thanks, Matt ------ An Open Letter from the APB community As we're getting close to 5 years since Little Orbit started to manage APB and its future, I on behalf of not only myself but also a total of 36 other community members wanted to sit down and reflect on the state of the game. This post will feature many questions and concerns that were commonly raised by us, the APB Community ahead of the writing of this post. Over the few years APB has received a couple of updates, new features such as a Trading System and a complete overhaul to its ingame report system, reworks of the Armas Marketplace and a complete removal of Joker Boxes with a significant update to the ingame Joker Store to go along with it. We have seen the introduction of three new Legendary guns as well as a regular shotgun sidearm, we’ve seen a couple of balance patches, including a complete pass on vehicles and vehicle related mods as well as adjusting and balancing missions to make the general gameplay flow of APB better as a whole. While many of these updates were happening Little Orbits primary focus was on upgrading the games engine to make creating new content easier by providing them newer tools as well as a better, less tangled foundation to work with, this was seen as something needed by just about everyone in the community. However, as the updates kept happening at a slow pace and the results were rather lacklustre leading to the eventual cancellation of first 3.5 and then 1.2 the community has grown more and more weary about the actual state of the game seeing as the only updates it has received in recent years were very infrequent balance updates. This as well as the general confusion regarding many topics I will write about below were the primary reason that incited me to approach many members of the community and talk to them to see if they felt the same way, many of which have shared the same feelings or worries, eventually leading me to widening my search and gathering as many members of the community I could reach to ask them if they wanted to help in writing this letter and had them fill out a Google Form to gather their opinions and feelings about certain topics. Before I get into the many topics I want to emphasise that I myself and every single one of the participants are doing this out of love and care for the game and its future. This is NOT a collective effort to bash Little Orbit and their efforts to improve the game and provide a future. We care and we want to see the game succeed, we simply have a lot of questions and concerns that have gone unanswered for too long. We love the game and appreciate Little Orbit for their tireless efforts to improve APB so please do not see this as an attack of sorts, we write to you because we care! This Letter is going to be a very lengthy one so once more before I head into the list of topics I want to reach out and offer Matt the ability to respond to this in a possible AMA Livestream. This was something I have also asked about in my Google Form and the responses universally agreed on the fact that this would be a good thing, it's been far too long since we have heard from you in a way that felt personal Matt and we would really appreciate it if you could sit down for an hour or so and respond to these topics for us. Now let's get to the topics and results of the Google Form, these were the common things brought up by myself and the many members of the community I talked about during the initial stages of creating this letter and are what this letter is going to be all about. ● Promises made during or shortly after Little Orbit acquired G1. ● Neglect towards the Live game as part of working on some sort of major Engine Upgrade. ● The state of the previously mentioned console update that meant to be released alongside 3.5 for PC which has since been cancelled. ● Keeping more players informed about what's going on, especially those that don't visit the Forums. ● What happened to the EU/NA server consolidation and whether or not it is still planned in the future. ● The lack of new content as well as other things that would make players want to play at least a little everyday. ● Anti-Cheat issues. ● The overall toxicity of the community, whether it's ingame or outside the game. ● The lack of quality of life changes to improve the overall quality of the game as well as make it more new player friendly. ● Cross District Matchmaking / Phasing and whether or not it is still planned in the future. ● Game balance, this includes Mission, Weapon, Car, Mod and even Map balance. ● The scope of the 64Bit update and what LO's plans are for its release, whether it'll be its standalone thing or include things such as new content, qol changes or meaningful updates that make returning players stick around. ● Transparency and the overall communication frequency between LO and the players. ● Enforcement of edits that are against the ToS (such as editing .upk files to remove particle effects) And here are the results of the Google form that asked all 36 participants which of these points they feel strongly about. [NOTE FROM MATT: I have taken the liberty of creating separate threads on each topic that includes that part of the letter, and I linked each top above for easy reference.] Closing words First of all, thank you from the bottom of my heart for making it this far and reading through this absolutely gigantic letter. In the month or so of working on this letter I had the pleasure of speaking to so many different members of the community, many such conversations lasting hours and exceeding simply asking them if they were interested in making such a letter and subsequently filling out a google form to gather their opinions. As I was chatting to all these players it became clear that many of us still do care and want APB to be the game we all know it can be with a bit of work. I also want to sincerely apologise if anything came off as too harsh, if it did, please know that the intent wasn’t to be mean but rather to show you that we truly care for the games future. So once more, I on the behalf of not only myself but many members of the APB community want to thank you for reading and we hope to hear from you soon. Sincerely, The APB Community

As the Live game has not received any updates in a long time people have less and less reasons to login and play at least a little every day which is likely a key reason as to why players are leaving, APB is stale, there hasn’t been something new in way too long. Players could really do with those two new contacts that were meant to bring the EMP grenade, new clothing, old refer a friend reward weapons and so on. Joker Tickets are also worth more than ever so possibly bring back the old Armas Events page with daily missions that award Joker Tickets for simple activities that require you to just play for a bit every day, examples would be get 30 Kills, get 5 Grenade kills and so on. “I think we can all agree that at least when it comes to returning players, adding content would be a surefire way to boost pop. When the engine upgrade was being worked on it made sense to wait until it was finished before adding new stuff. That has changed. Unless there is simply no one left to work on anything outside of 1.3, adding content should be a top priority.” -Community Member

“As an NA native, I cannot stress enough how much consolidation would mean to me, and to all NA players. I also think being able to keep playing on their NA main characters might bring more than a few Jericho players back.” -Community Member Yet another thing that could have been a huge factor when it comes to keeping players from leaving which was also hyped up with multiple blog posts and eventually dropped / postponed till some sort of Engine upgrade happened. Here’s the simple question, is this still planned in the future? NA players long to play on their mains which are sadly stuck on a server that is basically unplayable for most of the day, some of them only want to design and sell their works too but can’t really do that due to the lack of players on NA and the market being basically dead. We understand that LO postponed this to try and develop a solution that makes the naming fair so people don’t lose their names as part of the merge, however, NA will likely die off completely in the coming months as the games overall population on both servers continues to dwindle and some players simply don’t feel like levelling a new character on EU or flat out don’t have the character slots to do so.

A lot of players don’t visit the forums or use external things such as APBDB or the bot to go with it to keep themselves in the loop with APB, these players are completely left in the dark about the direction the game is heading, this has allowed for extreme levels of toxicity to fester where many players are spreading false information about the game being completely abandoned to people that don’t know any better. The only thing that at least attempts to keep players informed are the infrequent visits by a GM which nowadays find themselves in a position in which the uninformed players see GM’s as witches trying to feed them poison, it is not a healthy situation and something has to be done here as soon as possible. The most simple thing would be to bring back the broadcast system to broadcast news to those players that are unaware of Matt’s Bi-weekly update on the forums. These messages shouldn’t be long but should serve as a reminder that the game is receiving at least some form of communication over at the forums, schedule them to run for a week starting from the day that Matt posts his Bi-weekly update on the forums and make sure to change the message every time so players see there was a new update from Matt.

Heading into the third topic of the list which has received less responses but still some is the big question of what is up with the previously mentioned console update that meant to go Live alongside the since cancelled 3.5 Update for PC. We haven’t heard about any updates on this for far too long, when 3.5 was officially cancelled the release window for the console updates was also forgotten with it, initially the idea was to have console and PC run the same code base, with 3.5 off the table that is clearly not happening anymore so what are the plans for console and will that update ever release? Console players have been left in the dark for way too long and there was some serious content in this update for them that they could really do with having. “I feel bad for consoles. As bad as things have been for PC, at least we haven't been completely abandoned. I wonder, what does the death of the PC engine upgrade mean for consoles? Will they get any updates at all? Are there any employees who can even work on consoles?” -Community Member While on the topic of console APB it could really do with its own set of balance, especially in the recoil department, it's just not a good experience right now which is why the console meta is primarily made off of guns that have little recoil like the ATAC.

Heading into the next topic on the list, 70% of participants feel strongly about the neglect that the Live game is receiving. The engine upgrade / 64Bit upgrade or whatever you want to call it nowadays has to happen, that much is clear, but the Live game has basically been in maintenance mode aside from what feels like yearly weapon balance for too long at this point. This doesn’t sit well with players and makes them feel as if Live has been completely abandoned in hopes that some sort of Engine upgrade will succeed in the near future. There are MANY issues the game is facing every day that could be fixed in todays engine and then ported over to whatever LO is hoping to build the games future on, things like making it so the out of bounds system only applies to players in a mission, account wide versions of the Criminal Nulander Pioneer or Enforcer Seiyo Espacio as well as a account wide Han Coywolf, things such as lowering the Rank restriction of R195 mods to somewhere around R80-85, a Inventory and Mail system overhaul, changing how inventory expansions work by setting a new baseline so every player has the same amount of space and it doesn’t differ from character to character, UI modernisations such as making the Weapon stats UI easier to understand instead of using outdated bars, account wide roles, balance of any kind. There are MANY things that can make the day to day gameplay of APB better while players wait for 64Bit, many of these things have to be done regardless, many even by the time 64Bit releases if LO wants to increase their chances of players sticking around making the whole thing a win-win situation for us the dedicated players still playing and those returning whenever 64Bit launches. “Once LO had to choose between working on the live game or working on the engine upgrade I was initially supportive of their decision to put all their eggs in the engine upgrade basket. It sounded like the new engine was just around the corner, and it seemed silly to change things once for the live client and then have to do it again for the new engine. As the delays began to pile up and the population continued to dwindle, the community continually asked for QoL changes; more weapon balance, new contacts, phasing, etc. At first, I did my best to defend LO, but it became harder and harder over time until I couldn't defend them at all. Once the engine upgrade was abandoned, QoL changes should have become a top priority. In the spirit of fairness, upgrading to 64bit does, I think, count as a QoL change. We can only hope this is the start of things getting back on track.” -Community Member Here is a document that lists many of these QoL changes that LO can do now that I myself together with the community have put together.

I will be working my way down the list so let us start with the first point mentioned. During Little Orbits Open letter to us the APB Community the most important line to many of us was this: “I will however make one simple commitment right now. From here on out, I promise to communicate with the community on a regular basis. No more silence. Good, bad or ugly I will share where we are at.” This commitment has done wonders for Little Orbit, especially during the first year or so, however, as the focus shifted more and more away from the live game in hopes that the engine upgrade is “just around the corner” the communication and transparency has died down and at this point is basically dead apart from Matt’s Bi-weekly post about the progress their Team is making on the 64Bit upgrade. “Promises made as well as overall game direction has all been forgotten and are now “in the distant future”” -Community Member A lot of topics I will go into below are topics on the list because of the fact that communication has died down almost entirely, the most exciting news APB players have gotten in the recent year or two were plans to add a fourth, cosmetic mod slot to let players customise things such as their muzzle flash to be different colours and even that was more of a passing by comment made by a Little Orbit employee made on their discord rather than something talked about more openly such as in a blogpost. It feels as if we have to beg for info about just about anything going on with the live game, will there be more balance changes? Will there be any more updates? Will there be a Halloween event?

Hi everyone, It’s been another 2 weeks, and it’s time for an update. We’re progressing through UnrealScript crashes. We’ve managed to complete script serialization work for all non-APB packages, and now have moved to APB-specific UnrealScript. This is great progress, and we managed to get as far as trying to load an Audio package as part of serialization this week. The team ran into a 32-bit/64-bit alignment issue with the Audio package. We believe we have a grasp on the issue now, and it should be addressed shortly so we can keep moving forward. UnrealScript compiling and serialization is required to get into the Editor. The game primarily runs off "packages" which contain all the assets and scripts. But since the UnrealScript serialization process includes all of the package serialization, it’s my hope that the team will not need to spend as much time getting other types of packages loading. Also, I'm running a bit behind on the community letter. I promise I'm not avoiding it. I just ran out of time before I left for vacation. (It was important to me to keep our cadence of updates, so I took time away from my break to post this.) I am hoping to get the community letter threads up as soon as I'm back in early December. Then we can do the AMA after everyone has had a chance to engage on the threads. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, The last couple weeks had unfortunate timing as several of our staff had vacation time scheduled, and we were blocked on a fairly tough crash. However, everyone is back, and the team has resolved the blocking crash in 1.30 as of Monday of this week. We’re continuing progress on the remainder of 1.30’s UnrealScript changes. We hope that we can quickly move past these changes to loading the Editor and working to ensure existing packages load correctly. Other members of the team aren't back till tomorrow, and there was a problem with removing Halloween, so we will be extending that event one more week. As mentioned in the previous update, I'm still working through a series of forum threads and scheduling a Live AMA with the community to walk through the community letter from several concerned APB community members. We’ll be sure to post information regarding that AMA so you can tune in and participate. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, It’s a very spooky Tuesday in San Paro, and with the event comes another update on the progress on 1.30! We’re still working on crashes since the last update. We’re in the process of narrowing those crashes down and have a few leads on the root cause. Unfortunately, this crash is about exciting to share with you guys as it is to fix, and it's also a blocking crash. The rest of the 64-bit upgrade is dependent on resolving this crash. For the moment, I have our most senior engineer working through the issue. The nature of the crash itself means that we need to complete the fix before the rest of the project works. Allocating multiple team members to an engineering task like this does not speed up the work in question. Other APB team members are working on creating new rewards and enabling the Halloween event, which is scheduled to go live later this week, while the team allocated to working on 1.30 continues their work. We’re still progressing. Once we get over this irritating hurdle, we will complete the rest of the tasks necessary to get the Editor loading. Still hoping that once we have the Editor loading, the rest of the components should ‘just work’, due to the nature in which we have been careful while upgrading the engine. NOTE: I've received a community letter from a group of the players that I'm working on addressing in a much larger post. We're working through the strategy of possibly splitting each section into separate forum threads that the community can weigh in on, and I'll do a live AMA as part of my response. Stay tuned. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, Tuesday is here, and it's time for another update. We’ve completed the work to get the editor’s script generation commandlet working. We’re in the process of making the UnrealScript ‘source’ files match the headers we’ve manually modified in various places of the engine so that 64-bit support will work. This process is honestly more complicated than it needs to be, but that's just the way it is working with this version of Unreal. Essentially, it's a chicken or egg problem. Unreal compiles scripts to generate mores source code. But the old scripts wont compile with the new version of our 64-bit source because they are incompatible. So we have to create all source code that would normally be generated to get the source to compile. Then we can process all the scripts which will replace our manually generated code with the correct version. It's a complicated process filled with potential ‘rabbit holes’, but at least it's mostly straightforward and mostly grunt engineering work. We’ve also completed the work to regenerate the “Core” project’s scripts. As of Friday, we ran into an issue parsing the source version of the script themselves that we’re investigating that currently results in a crash. Unfortunately, due to the age of the engine and the way older Unreal outputs text to logfiles, this has been a particularly painful issue as logging doesn't finish dumping once a crash occurs. So there's no help there. We’re currently in the process of identifying that crash, using a combination of three elements – working copies of the codebase that function as intended, debugger output messages, and our gut intuition on what the problem may be (insert all the community jokes here about how bad our gut intuition is). Once this issue is resolved, we will likely have to fix the rest of the project’s UnrealScript package compilation. As I mentioned above, these UnrealScript files will be processed to generate native c++ source code that needs to match the files we’ve manually merged into the 1.30 codebase. It's a crucial step so we can continue forward and launch the editor. We’re hoping to be done with the UnrealScript portion of 1.30 by the end of the month. After that, we can begin work on loading existing content packages. Our current benchmark is still to get APB’s Social District map loading. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, It's that time again - we have reached another two weeks since my last update. We are still at the ‘get the editor running’ stage of the build process. The script generation commandlet needed some unexpected additional work. We identified several new issues while building the scripts mostly related to serialization of classes. SIDEBAR "What is Serialization?" I don't like using jargon that isn't easily understood by everyone, so since this update is pretty short, I'll explain what "Serialization" is. At a high level serialization is the concept of translating structured memory into a format that allow us to store it - more specifically APB data is stored in files on disk. Structured memory is another way of saying data structures or in-game objects. These are things like 3D mesh data, Gun stats, or data that controls how parts of a district show up in a mission. The critical (and exhausting) part of serialization is making sure that each member of a data structure is translated at the proper size into a format that can be reversed back into memory giving us the same original value. There are a lot of different reasons why sizes can be problematic or truncate data such as 32-bit -> 64-bit conversions that might have smaller or larger definitions of a memory block. This is made worse by the fact that many parts of APB had hard coded block sizes set at the top of the data structure. So we have to go in and find every one of them to make sure they are all handled the same. END SIDEBAR And of course... there are lots and lots of data structures for APB (and Unreal). To address some of the issues we found, we spent some additional time pulling across relevant code sections from the 2.x upgrade back to 1.30. Our plan has not changed, but this process of pulling across code is still going so that serialization works properly. Then we can rebuild and regenerate APB: Reloaded’s Unreal scripts.. and then the editor will load. Our current benchmark is still to get APB’s Social District map loading. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, It’s been another two weeks since my last update. Here’s another update on our schedule. We did pretty well. At this stage, every project compiles and links under 64-bit without warnings or errors! This is a significant milestone, as it means most of our time will no longer be spent merging in code, but instead debugging and getting the editor, game, and servers running. We are now at the ‘get the editor running’ stage of the build process. This involves resolving startup / initialization issues with dynamic link libraries, initialization, and instantiation of core engine components. Then, we will ensure that we can rebuild and regenerate APB: Reloaded’s Unreal scripts. After that, we will deal with existing disk-serialized package misalignments that would prevent maps from loading. So right now, the focus is on instantiation of core engine components. When we have all the items above sorted, then we will be able to attempt to load the Social District map. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, It’s been exactly two weeks since our last update. Our progress continues with APB 1.30, and I promised to give more frequent updates on a bi-monthly schedule. My hope is that keeping that schedule will provide some insight into how the team is coming along. Firstly, we have cleaned up all of APB’s dependency projects to compile under 64-bit. For the most part, we tracked down the appropriate libraries that would work with 1.20’s codebase out of the box in 64-bit, and in some cases, we modified existing libraries ourselves to fit the older version of Unreal. Between middleware integrations (such as Scaleform and Wwise), a rewrite of some 32-bit specific optimizations and texture utility code written in assembly, APB’s custom Music Studio and Web Browser libraries, Windows API support, and APB’s User Interface and Editor modifications, there has been plenty of work completed. A total of about 3,000 warnings and errors have been resolved to date. Next, there is only one more project to finish converting to 64-bit – the gameplay code for APB itself. After the entire codebase compiles without warning or error, we will have to resolve issues that may arise from the process of linking the projects together. And then we can fire up the Unreal Editor and load a district. From there, we expect to find problems with serialized package structure alignment similar to what we encountered with the 2.x upgrade. Since most of these issues were already resolved in 2.2, I'm hoping we can reuse that work to do an ‘in-place’ upgrade of APB 1.20’s serialized content packages to support 64-bit architecture. Even though we missed our previous mark of wanting to be in editor attempting to load packages by the next two-week update, we still completed a significant amount of work in a small amount of time, and we have not encountered any unknowns that we haven’t overcome before. I’m hoping that we will be in-editor resolving issues with APB’s Social District map for the next two week update. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, I've locked this thread similar to our original Engine Upgrade thread, so that I can post on a regular basis for people to follow. This week I'm traveling to Europe in prep for Gamescom next week. Then I'm staying over another week to wrap up business there before I return in early September. With that in mind, I'm setting a goal of posting every 2 weeks. Right now, we’re progressing nicely through with APB 1.30 (also known as the 64-bit port of APB). We’ve been monitoring feedback after my blogpost came out, and I get it. There is a lot to be frustrated with ‘yet another engine upgrade’ and the lack of tangible progress for players. Here is my update this week on exactly what actual work has been completed: 1) We have finished porting most of the core engine functionality, excluding APB-specific gameplay code, over to 64-bit. This involved a lot of different changes, most of which are backports from the 2.x code, however, some are entirely new changes to the codebase so that 1.20’s functionality is fundamentally preserved. The engine code had thousands of errors and warnings that we had to work through. At this point, I'm assuming that any warnings are really errors that need to be resolved before we ship 1.30. Here are specifics for some of what we had to do: Set up projects to have a consistent struct member alignment across the entire project (backport from 2.x) Ensure compatibility with the VS2017 toolchain. Identify and set up versions of third-party libraries, such as Scaleform and PhysX, that will suit a 64-bit client build of the 1.20 codebase Changing hard-coded, casted pointer types from implied 4-byte pointers to implied 8-byte pointers. Clean up declarations of local variables hiding class variables. Clean up declarations of local variables hiding other declared local variables. Modify the codebase to support newer versions of specific middleware libraries and ensure functionality is not compromised 2) We’re in the process of cleaning up the ‘core’ components of APB, such as the middleware made specific for APB. This is mostly complete but may need further adjustments. 3) We are beginning to do the same conversion process for the Unreal Editor components. Our next steps will be to finish converting the Unreal Editor components, and the APB-specific components. Once that process is done, we will attempt to launch the Unreal Engine Editor and attempt to get a map loaded in-editor. This was the same strategy we successfully implemented for the APB 2.x upgrade before we started beta testing and realized that the underlying implementation in 2.x was never going to perform very well. This time, we have taken the right steps to ensure (crosses fingers) that the Editor process will go smoothly. My hope is that there will be minimal time from getting a map loading in-editor to having it running in our actual client/server setup. That will allow us to do some performance and stability testing on both the APB client and its district servers. I'll be looking for opportunities to share ‘client havoc’ as it comes up, as that seems to be a community favorite. It's been a little over a week and a half since my last update. I'm hoping to do my next update in 2 more weeks once we are in the editor resolving issues with APB’s Social District’s map. Thanks, Matt