Catgorl

Armas character selection is working now, guess something's fixed

Come on, pleeease! Let us in!

So close... and yet so far...

Maybe the servers are constantly restarting.

As much as I also want an update, they might be resting a bit at the moment and it would honestly be for the better. They've been up and working on this for so long...

I don't like to bite the hand that feeds me, but these couple of hours are really taking a while. It makes me a little scared about what time the EU servers will come back on...

It's a security put in place to counter (mainly) the Meltdown and Spectre exploits, which effectively allow any program to read any data inside your RAM - including credit cards and login information. You cannot turn it off, it's embedded into the Windows kernel.

Use https://will.io/apb/ to check whether the servers are live or not in real time. Not sure if it's working proprely after the server transition but if it's emulating an APB client it should be fine.

Thanks a lot for the work the team is doing to ensure the game will run on all four cylinders in the future. I'm going to buy stuff on Armas the second the game comes back online as a token of gratitude.

I don't trust people who have longer signatures than their messages!

Yes, I agree.

People are performing satanic rituals in hopes that it might bring the servers back online faster. May God have mercy on our souls.

I assume if they could, they already would have. There's always problems you didn't expect to occur when you deal with a game this complicated - I'm surprised the database hasn't been lost or broken since they took over.

it's the russians

Thank you so much for the work being done for the community - which I assume is overtime, too. I know we're not going to see positive changes right off the bat, but I'm very glad to know these downtimes will produce great changes in the future for a game that desperately needs them.

Title - The maintenance was yesterday, wasn't it?

Was a very fun time, I'm glad this is a weekly thing.

I've recently found that while crouching and holstering weapons, character arms get slimmer. Not sure if it proves anything but it's definitely part of the same mis-aligned animation issues. https://i.imgur.com/GyTN5yu.mp4

Thanks a lot, that response is honestly all I needed.

Still no update on this, and I've been seeing more and more players talking about it in the ingame chat. Since day one APB has had a very contrasted look, it's part of the game's visual style. I can understand people wanting that not to be the case but huge contrasts between shadows and light are part of the game's original design, and are one of the most useful features when you're sneaking around the objective.

I guess ultimately it is up to personal taste, but to me the current lighting just looks fullbright - in other terms, it looks like there's no lighting system in place at all. This could be okay if we didn't have dynamic lights and baked shadows layered on top of it. It's like half the map is trying to look good, and the other half just gave up on shading at all... When the engine upgrade drops, this will very likely be fixed given that the lighting system in 3.5 is drastically different (and more modern), but I'm kind of sad to see this glitch appear now that I was on a non-stop playing spree in this game, taking lots of screenshots to immortalize it in doubts related to the future of it... I just can't stop looking at the weird lights now. This is Half-Life 2 with fullbright lighting - this room is supposed to be dark.

Even after manually deleting the shader cache, thus forcing the game to recompile it (Which took forever), the game looks the same. Deleting the newly made file and replacing it with the one provided by LO doesn't change anything. Here are some more screenshots to illustrate my point. Screenshot on the left was taken nearly a year ago, screenshot on the right was taken just now after recompiling shaders. Notice that the trees don't have shadows on their leaves anymore. Same story here, screenshot on the left is what it used to look like, screenshot on the right is what it looks like right now. It's really, really distracting.

UPDATE : As pointed out by members of the SPCT team at the bottom of this thread, this glitch will disappear once the Halloween event ends. As the title says, sunlight/moonlight and it's shadows no longer looks right in mission districts. A lighting glitch that has always been present on Social can sadly now be found in both Financial and Waterfront after the Halloween 2019 patch. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, I'll show what's going on trough the use of screenshots : Here's a screenshot from the previous patch (1170) (Left), and a screenshot from the current live (1177) (Right) : Same thing, a screenshot taken in the previous patch (Left), and a screenshot taken right now, at the same exact time of day (Right) : Screenshot on the left is what characters look like with natural map lighting, screenshot on the right is the same character without any changes under dynamic lighting. (The maps use a mix of both, and constantly switching between the two when one of them is broken is very, very ugly) Characters & vehicles now have a constant white light shining up from below them instead of sunlight, unless they're in an area that specifically has no sun. (Jangma Square cafe, pictured below) This bug isn't AMD-specific - This is a screenshot sent to me by a friend using an Nvidia card. It's pretty clear that something's wrong with the lights, even during nighttime. Large portions of the map are affected too, as all sections underneath the Financial bridge are now fullbright (as an example). This glitch disappears indoors. I am running APB Reloaded on an AMD RX 580, and I use the Advanced Launcher with the "High Quality" preset. I have started the game both with and without the launcher's config files, and I get the same results. I suspect it has something to do with the way the halloween event plays with lights. This might be nitpicky but I personally can't get over this. It makes the game look far too ugly compared to what it looked like just before.

I would agree if this was a very large fix, like reworking the lighting system or something heavy like that, but in this case (With my limited knowledge of the Unreal Engine) I feel like it really is just a case of opening player animations, opening the game script that handles them, then making sure that, first, there really are two different working registers for male and female animations, and then that the female animation set has the correct ones defined. If the E3 2009 build had them ingame, and the animation system has seen no change in the years gone by (Which I doubt it has), I can't imagine a lot of other bugs would spawn from fixing this. Glad to know other people noticed too! I don't believe it's an important fix in the grand scheme of things, but it's a tiny detail that really grinds your gears when you put hundreds of hours into a game like this.

Indeed, this animation has been present since day one of the original game. I don't think it was intended to be this way though, I think nobody ever looked into this because nobody had any reason to believe something was off if they'd never seen it be any other way. Let's also not ignore the fact that this is probably a really, really unimportant thing to fix in the eyes of a developper since it's purely visual and nobody was complaining. As a bonus, here's some proof that this was intended to be : In the E3 2009 trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMkBwHJaSkw @ 1:47), the animation I showed was used on idle female characters. They're seen from the side rather than the front, so it's not as easy to notice, but I can guarantee you that's not what we have in the game currently.