MattScott

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

Hi all, I'm going to ask that you reserve judgment on STFU. We have a slew of information and articles coming out that will explain our "Web 2.5" hybrid approach. I'm tempted to remove the word "NFT" from anything connected with STFU, because they have such a bad reputation. STFU is a big experiment, but we're well aware of the market. It's would be folly to try and do what everyone else is doing. We have no interest in creating meaningless assets to make a quick buck. I am very interested in establishing clear ownership of content created by players so they can earn real revenue from it - if they want it. Stay tuned. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, I know it's been a while. I didn't get sick or die. I've just been buried with the studio and getting some work-for-hire projects shipped. Little Orbit is very close to announcing a couple new things we've been working on, but I'm way overdue for an update on APB. I finally unpinned the APB 2.0 thread, and I'm starting this one. Here is my first APB update in a long time to explain where we're headed. https://www.gamersfirst.com/apb/news/2022/8/5/message-from-matt Thanks, Matt

Glad you guys had fun!

Hey everyone, Sorry about the outage. We are back online. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, I hope you enjoyed the Thanksgiving holiday. We had some days off, but still made decent progress. At this point everything in Social is working except for collisions on the skinned meshes like statues. We started work on Financial this week as well. There are some issues with streamed assets that are getting loaded twice due to older and newer code running at the same time. We'll dive into that next week. For now, here's another video with progress. Working collisions are: Joker Ammo vending machines Mailboxes (specifically, the spot in Social where people gather most often) Marketplace Kiosks Static Meshes Streamed Terrain 2021-12-03 15-42-55.mp4 Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, Apologies to the community. It's now been 45 days since my last update. I have been in Europe for the last 5 weeks, and my schedule was been incredibly busy during the trip. If I had to choose a single word to recap progress, it would be: "frustrating" Back on October 2nd, we had a big breakthrough, and I was feeling really good about next steps. You can see from the screenshots in that post that we had finally gotten collisions working on the sidewalk. That update was posted minutes after we got a build that worked. What we didn't realize at the time, was that if you stepped onto the grass, you immediately fell through the world again. Additionally, several different types of placed props and static meshes in the map also had collision problems. During the weeks that followed, we fell down a lot of rabbit holes attempting to find the issues. While we could have individually made those objects conform to the new collision system, doing so would have been wildly unsustainable. Once we start work on Financial, there are thousands of objects and checking everyone of the them would be a nightmare. Instead, we chose to take additional time to step through line by line in the collision code on the current live version of the game versus the engine upgrade. We need the conversion process to properly rebuild each map and all of the collisions in one pass. After a bit of digging, we were able to identify the core issue for terrain, so that is working properly now. As with all things APB, of course there are still issues. For some reason we have some oddball props and items that still aren't colliding properly. So the team is still working on restoring old 1.20 collision code to handle every specific case. Below is a video running around Social with nearly all of the collisions working. As I stated in the last update, ignore the lighting, we haven't turned that code back on yet, so everything is either fully lit or not lit at all. You can see once we get to the placed crates, those don't work. And the statues don't have collisions. As soon as we have those sorted out, we will reprocess all of Financial to see how that district does. apb-engine-update-2021-11-19.mp4 Thanks, Matt

The game is back online!

Hi everyone, Sorry about all the maintenance and downtime. We've been adding pieces to help with performance. I was notified about the downtime that started this morning, but it slipped past me and I didn't get a chance to post it. We're currently down for a bit longer. I'll post when the game comes back online. Thanks, Matt

Apologies. This one slipped past me. There was another resource increase scheduled that I forgot to post.

We are back online!

All everyone, We have just started some maintenance to add more resources for the game. Be back soon. Thanks, Matt

As previously confirmed. Servers are back online.

Hi everyone, We've taken the servers down for maintenance to address a couple issues that popped up. I don't yet have a time estimate, but we'll try to be quick about it. Thanks, Matt