APB's 2023 Roadmap Progress

[NotTheEnforcer 222]

Hiya kids, I'm feelin like havin a laugh at LO's expense right now so seeing as we're 3/4 of the way through 2023, figured I'd dust off LO's 2023 roadmap and see all of the 0 progress theyve made, point by point.

 

Key: Completed(this literally isnt used anyway), Partially Finished, Nowhere In Sight.

 

Highest Priority

- Hosting Upgrade #1 64 bit implemented. Partial EAC support. Epic Services fell through as far as Im aware.

- New Car Pffft nowhere in sight. Who honestly expected a new car to happen?

-We also want to use the release of a new car to do some balancing on all our vehicles to make sure each one has a solid use case. The goal is to use a series of small buffs and adjustments to improve less utilized cars.

Also absolutely lmao. No balance passes for any of the other cars are anywhere in sight.

 

- Hosting Upgrade #2 – New Mission Queueing System, Improved Matchmaking, Phasing 

Fucking lmao do I even need to say anything here?

 

‘Mission Queueing’ -This means players can mess around with friends, spend time upgrading their items, or even editing symbols and clothing while they queue.

Rather than taking a year to get the full system working, we want to roll this out in multiple smaller steps:

Step 1: Matchmake across all other players queueing in your world. Force an exit from your current district upon accepting and into a lobby which allows players ample time to load into a new district. When all players are available, start the match, and force them to spawn on the map screen.

Step 2: Do step #1, but with limited phasing where we keep the district type in memory along with all art assets. This means if you’re queuing for a Financial mission, and you’re already in any Financial district, your loading time will be significantly less. Once the lobby is full, we force all players to spawn on the map screen.

Step 3: Do step #1, but with full phasing where we place the character in the same exact position the player was previously in, accounting for collision issues in the new district, eliminating the need to return to the spawn screen. Players coming from other district maps would go through Step 2.

All of this is is vapor/non-existent.

 

- New Contacts, Lynette and Lucas have already been revealed to the community, and we are hoping to release them after EasyAntiCheat and Hosting Upgrade #1.

These contacts will be added as optional Tier 3 contacts with requirements similar to Tier 5 contacts – they are meant to fill the gap on existing content that hasn’t been historically available through progression (The NSSW, OCA Nano, and HVR ‘Scout’) and to offer new progression points for veterans (new modifications, cars not normally available through progression, etc)

Contacts are a lot of work – they require a lot of data entry, voiceover efforts, lore creation, and most importantly rewards. The last time APB: Reloaded released mainline progression contacts was nearly a decade ago with Gumball and Aletta.

 

Nothing to be seen here at all either.

 

- Hosting Upgrade #3: Multi-World District servers

We will migrate the existing worlds to ‘regions’. Each region will host their own game servers and characters. These are grouped by location and latency to keep things as fast as possible. The idea is to have more, smaller regions vs. less larger worlds.

 

Ditto as above.

 

High Priority

- Anti-Griefing Options / Streamer Mode 

Kek.

Teamkilling is another serious problem – for streamers and regular players. While these issues can eventually be handled by customer support, there is generally no immediate resolution to a situation and often it’s easier for a player to log off and not play the game than it is to have it properly dealt with it.

Kek x2

We need to make sure that the moment a player enters a mission, that they are not harassed by outside sources or intentional in-mission abuse.

We’re looking into options such as: - Disabling out of mission collision contextually to prevent objectives being blocked. - Disabling collision on player-commandeered cars nearby that players have not interacted with in-mission interfering with objectives. - Hiding out-of-mission players while in streamer mode. - Flagging players as griefers so they are deprioritized from matchmaking – and potentially placed with other griefers until their behavior changes over time.

Kek x3

There are potential abuses outside of these cases that we know we cannot address fully – no system is infallible – but with queued matchmaking combined with better cheat detection and deprioritization of griefers, we hope to lessen the impact on streamers to help the game grow.

Kek Kaioken x4 or some shit idk

 

- New Events and Holidays

In 2018 and 2019, Little Orbit tried some rather unsuccessful ideas to replace our holiday events. I’m not afraid of making mistakes or trying new things, but I think it’s a tragedy that we didn’t iterate and try again. It’s time to try some new ideas and give you guys new rewards to earn.

We will be redesigning the yearly cadence of events alongside expanding our LiveOps team to make sure we have enough new content in the pipeline to keep things interesting.

There are plenty of mechanics that we created for Epidemic, Slay Bells, and RIOT that I would like to revisit to see if we can polish them a bit more.

Lets be fucking honest here, out of all of the possible options listed here, we all expected LO to go straight for the only progress point that could generate actual potential income regardless of how greedy and predatory it'd make them look. (cough cough midsummer sale with desperation Temptress and FFA sale) Even though RIOT was hot fucking trash and just a dumpster fire attempt to piggyback off of PUBG.

 

- Upgraded Tutorial / First Time User Experience (FTUE)

Our current tutorial simply isn’t great past character creation. The tutorial itself needs to be modernized.

Players are thrown into the Financial district after character creation with a menu that explains a bunch of text but never teaches them what to do contextually. They are also bombarded with popups and get lost and overwhelmed with all the information they are given. We currently rely on other players to ‘fill in the gap’ on information.

We need something interactive that players can complete, while also teaching them about the game and mechanics that aren’t properly explained in-depth, such as leaning.

This is a tricky area to improve. We will post more details as we get closer.

Something that could actually help newbies? Whattttttt? Lmao, that could never happen. They have to suffer like everyone else.

 

- Server-side anti-cheat alongside EAC

The plan is to re-integrate FairFight as a server-sided solution to compliment EAC as our client-side solution.

While there is never a “silver bullet” for cheat detection, we feel that multiple anti-cheat solutions can operate in different avenues to help us keep the game clean.

Server-side analytics gives us a full anti-cheat loop to help inform the client where to look better and detect cheaters who slip through the cracks. We want to detect, prevent, and deter cheaters from entering and interrupting our game, and FairFight fits the bill of that process. However, we will not be publishing any individual public ban lists – we feel that the previous usage of FFBans glorifies cheaters, and doing so only increased the level of toxicity of the game.

I legitimately almost shot my coffee out of my nose laughing at this one.

 

 

- Vivox Reintegration

Vivox used to be integrated as our voice chat solution.

Vivox changed their hosting configuration and we needed to upgrade our libraries to fit their new hosting platform – we were historically unable to do that, as Vivox did not have 32-bit versions of their new services.

A lot of the work on Vivox has already been done in APB Reloaded 2.x – we need to backport this work to 1.30, as being on 64-Bit allows us to seamlessly integrate the required work.

Everyone just uses Discord now, chief. Although an ingame voice chat would be nice, Vivox is hot garbage and always has been.

 

Medium Priority

- DirectX12 Rendering System

We would like to eventually replace our existing DX9 rendering pipeline with a DX12-based rendering system.

Newer operating systems are supporting DX9 less and less, and our engine will continue to show its age until this gets completed.

Lmao.

 

- Xbox and Playstation Ports of 1.30

Hand in hand with the upgrade to DX12, we want to re-port the console versions of APB: Reloaded.

The current console ports are based on a code base we have abandoned due to its bugs and performance. It is our hope that by adding console support to 1.30, we can significantly improve the performance and stability of those platforms.

Lmao.

 

- Premium Revamp

We have made APB’s premium subscription model free since early 2020. We did that because I feel like the game is much better for all players when they have all the Premium features. Historically, APB’s premium system was based on how ‘freemium’ games operate which slow down progression or gimped design layers for non-premium players. We don’t want to do that.

Premium players will get a special bundle of Joker Tickets equal to the cost of the subscription.

Premium will also be able to queue in ‘Premium Only’ matches that we hope will free of reroll cheaters.

This reeks of corpo-speak. Also, if they really wanted to fix the game feeling like shit for non-premium players, they couldve just upped the fucking rewards instead, right????? Im just confused here.

 

Low Priority

- Player vs Environment (PVE) Missions

They can barely get one task done, the fucking ice sheets will melt before APB will get PVE.

- Physically Based Rendering Pipeline

 

PBR is already supported by later versions of Unreal, and to some extend in APB for clothes and cars.

Our goal will be to convert the current models, textures, and lighting to a new PBR lighting pipeline. This means redoing high quality versions of map assets and to optimize the existing maps in the process while increasing visual fidelity and modernizing the look.

This is very much a ‘nice to have’ features. But it’s on the roadmap.

Just......no, I cant even laugh at this one. This would be far too much work for such a teeny tiny company.


So uhhhhhh in summary whats been achieved? Oh right, jack and his good ol' buddy, shit lol. I didnt make this post for anyone in particular, or even to rant, I just made it cause it made me laugh as I wrote it 

[R3ACT3M 489]

Im gonna huff some of that copium and say that it might get bundled up into one large patch.

They need to continue those weekly or biweekly updates again. 

Either way who cares, I uninstalled and can wait until I'm dead for an APB update.

[NotTheEnforcer 222]

5 minutes ago, R3ACT3M said:

Im gonna huff some of that copium and say that it might get bundled up into one large patch.

They need to continue those weekly or biweekly updates again. 

Either way who cares, I uninstalled and can wait until I'm dead for an APB update.

Lmao yeah thats definitely some pure Heisenberg-grade copium right there. Theres a reason they stopped doing the devblog updates too lol, cause they have fucking nothing to show for it.

[Frosi 722]

Matt has mentioned that the roadmap is quite ambitious and that they will not get everything on it done this year and while development is definitely on the slower end the current developer that is single-handedly carrying the games future on their back is working tirelessly on the new matchmaking system which the game will need to keep those returning players for when the new contacts drop for example.

 

I would personally like to see more balance to be done, especially buffs to all the crap guns to keep the game more fresh while other things are being worked on but if said balance comes at the cost of the dev not being able to work on matchmaking then that's likely just not worth it. Hopefully all these sales allow them to expand the team in the near future to accelerate things.

 

At the end of the day they are very aware that APB has many issues and that one dev isn't going to be able to solve them all in a timely manner, they need at least another 2~ people on the team, including someone that understands the game in and out if they wanna turn things around, until that time comes I'm just happy that Secrets is working so hard to keep this game alive, without them we likely wouldn't even have a game to play right now as Matt mentioned in the past that they should've just shut the game down until they managed to fix many of these issues and cut their losses till then.

[EerieEric 21]

2 hours ago, Frosi said:

Matt has mentioned that the roadmap is quite ambitious and that they will not get everything on it done this year and while development is definitely on the slower end the current developer that is single-handedly carrying the games future on their back is working tirelessly on the new matchmaking system which the game will need to keep those returning players for when the new contacts drop for example.

 

I would personally like to see more balance to be done, especially buffs to all the crap guns to keep the game more fresh while other things are being worked on but if said balance comes at the cost of the dev not being able to work on matchmaking then that's likely just not worth it. Hopefully all these sales allow them to expand the team in the near future to accelerate things.

 

At the end of the day they are very aware that APB has many issues and that one dev isn't going to be able to solve them all in a timely manner, they need at least another 2~ people on the team, including someone that understands the game in and out if they wanna turn things around, until that time comes I'm just happy that Secrets is working so hard to keep this game alive, without them we likely wouldn't even have a game to play right now as Matt mentioned in the past that they should've just shut the game down until they managed to fix many of these issues and cut their losses till then.

I gotta admit your admiration and hope for the game is sorta uplifting.  But I feel like they've beaten this horse into a fine red pulp about now.  I don't see APB making a huge comeback, even if they get the extra manpower and goals knocked off.   People here (including me) are jaded as hell.

[cowhorseman 441]

you can look up LOs status as a company

 

so far i found they got not alot of people working there generally unfavorable reviews and they live in LA making give or take 5m yearly (i could not find an exact number)

 

so i bet they can not get anything done on FE APB etc due to the fact there paying ungodly fees to keep the lights on at best dim

 

or a certain someone has a habit to feed

 

or they can not amit they bit off way more then they could chew

[EerieEric 21]

1 minute ago, cowhorseman said:

you can look up LOs status as a company

 

so far i found they got not alot of people working there generally unfavorable reviews and they live in LA making give or take 5m yearly (i could not find an exact number)

 

so i bet they can not get anything done on FE APB etc due to the fact there paying ungodly fees to keep the lights on at best dim

 

or a certain someone has a habit to feed

 

or they can not amit they bit off way more then they could chew

they won't and you know that.  Admitting stuff like that for a company is usually suicide, more so when LO is trying to make new games.

[cowhorseman 441]

7 minutes ago, EerieEric said:

they won't and you know that.  Admitting stuff like that for a company is usually suicide, more so when LO is trying to make new games.

what are they going to do to me? ban me from the fourms for the 15th time? tell me no? yell at me in messages? i no longer play there games becuase of there lack of content and will to even do anything

 

so go ahead bring it you can not even try to harm me in a way that would inflict pain, all you would do is free me of being around this fourm as i have nothing left to do here.

[EerieEric 21]

Just now, cowhorseman said:

what are they going to do to me? ban me from the fourms for the 15th time? tell me no? yell at me in messages? i no longer play there games becuase of there lack of content and will to even do anything

 

so go ahead bring it you can not even try to harm me in a way that would inflict pain, all you would do is free me of being around this fourm as i have nothing left to do here.

you've misinterpreted what I meant.   It would be suicide for LO, not yourself.  Besides, no one cares enough here to do really anything.  (Inb4 I am struck with a ban)

[cowhorseman 441]

1 hour ago, EerieEric said:

you've misinterpreted what I meant.   It would be suicide for LO, not yourself.  Besides, no one cares enough here to do really anything.  (Inb4 I am struck with a ban)

to me it sounded like they get mad for stating company info. you know what a google search. they have a habit of getting annoyed about...well anything. theres a few names in there ranks that get provoked off anything you say to them and well threaten bans or tell you off. you know the normal professional way of handling users and customers of your products

[TheMessiah 430]

I play another f2p shooter game with problems similar to this one and theres already existin the cross world play.When players from other continents are connected to ur server-u cant kill them.They sort of teleport or lag on u and the company behind dat game is bigger than LO.Not to mention the disconects everybody have.I doubt LO new netcode will be some miracle never seen before so if u think this new matchmaking will be the solíd ground they gonna step on and keep addin stuff after dat-i doubt dat.

Will be the thing which will finish this game simply because LO will not do It right.Cant wait for this mess..

[R3ACT3M 489]

16 hours ago, Frosi said:

Matt has mentioned that the roadmap is quite ambitious and that they will not get everything on it done this year and while development is definitely on the slower end the current developer that is single-handedly carrying the games future on their back is working tirelessly on the new matchmaking system which the game will need to keep those returning players for when the new contacts drop for example.

Yea mad respect to that one dev. Just a bummer they can't afford at least a small team of like 7 or so. 

[cowhorseman 441]

2 hours ago, R3ACT3M said:

Yea mad respect to that one dev. Just a bummer they can't afford at least a small team of like 7 or so. 

one man 1 day 80 hour work week. progress?

 

 

zero

[ninjarrrr 255]

the fact that matt basically abandonded this game for a NFT game with zero potential still baffles me, you'd actually have to be fucking stupid to do that

[AlienTM 138]

33 minutes ago, ninjarrrr said:

the fact that matt basically abandonded this game for a NFT game with zero potential still baffles me, you'd actually have to be fucking stupid to do that

and i think he got robbed with nearly 1m dollas from some guy with this nfts..one guy mention it in some video

[Frosi 722]

37 minutes ago, cowhorseman said:

one man 1 day 80 hour work week. progress?

 

 

zero

64Bit? EAC? And hopefully soon the new matchmaking.

[cowhorseman 441]

47 minutes ago, Frosi said:

64Bit? EAC? And hopefully soon the new matchmaking.

oh wow. theres a song for this. it goes like this

 

999 promises on  the wall 999 promise on the wall take 1 down pass it around 999 promises on the wall

[BlatMan 711]

I'm gonna nitpick and criticize because that's what I like doing.

 

TLDR; We got some car balance and a new anti-cheat client sided.

 

 

Hosting Upgrade #1

 - We're still using Path Network, Inc. for DDoS protection. I can't tell if their service sucks, if Little Orbit have it configured wrong, or if most major ISPs don't route properly to them. My upload packet streams are messed up. I don't know the specifics, because there's no way for me to test upload issues outside my ISP. In game packet loss only counts the download. Download packets appear to arrive in order, going by the packet ID in Wireshark.

 

New Car

- We did not get a new car, but we did get some vehicle balance. The latest I can remember are:

• Mikro and Vaquero storage capacity increased.
• Mikro and Vaquero top speed increased.
• Coywolf vehicle speed fixed for VIP and mission objective.
• Vegas G20 suspension fixed.

Hosting Upgrade #2 – New Mission Queueing System, Improved Matchmaking, Phasing

- Zero progress from the player's perspective. TBF, matchmaking will always have problems with the low population and average low skill of the current playerbase.

 

New Contacts

- Nothing.

 

Hosting Upgrade #3: Multi-World District servers

- Nothing.

 

Anti-Griefing Options / Streamer Mode

- I'm kinda happy there were no changes. This mode will kill the fun of dodging granny drivers and grief trucks while racing to the objectives. You want people to stop griefing? How about stop promoting streamers who best fit the word for a whiny female K9.

- As for teamkilling, yes this is a serious problem. There's also the problem with idiots waiting for opposition instead of finishing the objectives. They team kill you if you try to finish them. Due to the current reward system, players cannot unlock symbols in opposed missions. The Joker Ticket rewards prevent them from being unlocked. The only way to unlock them is to enter an empty district with a friend or second account. New players can't customize their characters, which is the main feature of this game.

 

New Events and Holidays

- There were some events but idk if they count. I'm not an event fan. When I want a different gamemode, I play another game. Shoving every mode into the same game is the best way to ruin a game. It's like the saying "Jack of all trades, master of none." Games that fit a wider spectrum tend to suck. This being a free to play game, you can't rely on idiots making a one time purchase to try the game.

 

Upgraded Tutorial / First Time User Experience (FTUE)

- Nothing.

 

Server-side anti-cheat alongside EAC

- There was no announcement for FairFight being activated, so I don't know if any progress was made. A month ago I reported the teleport speed bug with directions on how to reproduce. I got the basic response from support, but nothing seems to have been done about it.

 

Vivox Reintegration

- Nothing.

 

DirectX12 Rendering System

- Another feature I'm glad that there is no progress. You will drastically hurt the performance of this game and limit who can play. I bet you'll add extra bloom, blur, and screw up the lighting, just like every other developer that switched from DX9 to DX11.

 

Xbox and Playstation Ports of 1.30

- DROP THE CONSOLE VERSION. It was obvious the console version will be DOA back when Reloaded announced it. It's impossible to patch in a timely manner due to microsoft and sony needing to approve patches, and both companies take a paycut. Why bother wasting dev time on something that will be net loss and a pita each patch week?

 

Premium Revamp

- I did not see a problem with the old premium system as far as progression went. You got a bonus for supporting the game. The modification cooldowns weren't right, but you changed that so everyone has the same cooldowns. It's no longer an issue. This game is free to play. Someone needs to pay the bills. If whales want to blow their money on premium to progress their contact standing, let them.

 

Player vs Environment (PVE) Missions

- No progress, but this sounds like a stupid feature, minus the tutorial. Stop catering to idiots. They downloaded a PVP game. If they can't handle PVP, that's their own problem, not yours. An upgraded tutorial will be nice, but not necessary atm.

 

Physically Based Rendering Pipeline

- "increasing visual fidelity and modernizing the look" aka this comic: https://vgcats.com/comics/images/070119.jpg

- The console version looks like the 7th panel, maybe the 8th. By the time you get around to this, "modern' games will have gone back to the basics.

- Currently, the PC version looks like the 6th panel, except it's blue instead of brown. It's ugly af without custom shaders. Oh wait, we're not suppose to use those anymore, guess we should ban all those Twitch streamers eh?

[Optimus_Crime 81]

i'd hate to pile on the negativity in here so i'll just say i'm thankful for the awful state and progress on this game throughout the years, at least i'm not nearly as addicted to video games anymore and the lack of alternatives for apb was pivotal in me actually doing more productive things in my spare time, i wish you folks the same

arigato

Edited August 5, 2023 by Optimus_Crime

[NotTheEnforcer 222]

2 hours ago, Optimus_Crime said:

i'd hate to pile on the negativity in here so i'll just say i'm thankful for the awful state and progress on this game throughout the years, at least i'm not nearly as addicted to video games anymore and the lack of alternatives for apb was pivotal in me actually doing more productive things in my spare time, i wish you folks the same

arigato

Negativity is ironically good, because it helps them to recognize that their stupid fucking FOMO scummy desperation sales where they drag out the FFA and Temptress to milk whoever is left, wont fuckin work lmao. The silence is deafening. There hasnt been any progress in years. The only "progress" they ever made was the 64 bit. Even the "legendaries" they made were old G1 templates that were just never released lmao

[cowhorseman 441]

38 minutes ago, NotTheEnforcer said:

Negativity is ironically good, because it helps them to recognize that their stupid fucking FOMO scummy desperation sales where they drag out the FFA and Temptress to milk whoever is left, wont fuckin work lmao. The silence is deafening. There hasnt been any progress in years. The only "progress" they ever made was the 64 bit. Even the "legendaries" they made were old G1 templates that were just never released lmao

come on you know how it is these days. your suppose to reward everyone for doing the bare of bare minimum everyone is a winner everyone gets a reward. you know this!

[BlatMan 711]

1 hour ago, NotTheEnforcer said:

Negativity is ironically good, because it helps them to recognize that their stupid fucking FOMO scummy desperation sales where they drag out the FFA and Temptress to milk whoever is left, wont fuckin work lmao. The silence is deafening. There hasnt been any progress in years. The only "progress" they ever made was the 64 bit. Even the "legendaries" they made were old G1 templates that were just never released lmao

I mention how their routing or something server sided is screwed up, and now US East is a Charley Foxtrot.

 

Issues:

- Players are randomly teleporting.

- I'm randomly teleporting.

- Most of my shots fired from automatic weapons do not hit.

 

Why I know it's not on my end:

- In-game latency is about 20ms.

- Packet Loss is 0.

- FPS is 150+ when unlocked. 120 fps when locked using config file.

- CMD Ping to server IP (205.220.227.76) is at worst 12ms.

- Traceroute shows less than 7ms variance.

- Waveform.com bufferbloat test is A+.

- Devina.io bufferbloat test shows 0ms increase for download and upload.

- Wireshark shows all packets incoming from the district server to be in order, going by packet ID.

 

An odd thing is when US West has a good connection with no issues, the server goes offline within a few hours. That might be biased, since I normally don't bother playing if US West is the populated district. Regardless, US West has crashed too many times, while US East rarely crashes.

[Boba 51]

On 8/5/2023 at 3:34 AM, Frosi said:

Matt has mentioned that the roadmap is quite ambitious and that they will not get everything on it done this year and while development is definitely on the slower end the current developer that is single-handedly carrying the games future on their back is working tirelessly on the new matchmaking system which the game will need to keep those returning players for when the new contacts drop for example.

 

I would personally like to see more balance to be done, especially buffs to all the crap guns to keep the game more fresh while other things are being worked on but if said balance comes at the cost of the dev not being able to work on matchmaking then that's likely just not worth it. Hopefully all these sales allow them to expand the team in the near future to accelerate things.

 

At the end of the day they are very aware that APB has many issues and that one dev isn't going to be able to solve them all in a timely manner, they need at least another 2~ people on the team, including someone that understands the game in and out if they wanna turn things around, until that time comes I'm just happy that Secrets is working so hard to keep this game alive, without them we likely wouldn't even have a game to play right now as Matt mentioned in the past that they should've just shut the game down until they managed to fix many of these issues and cut their losses till then.

Just open source the game at this point. It's a sinking ship, you got nothing to lose. APB has had enough media coverage for angel open source devs to chime in and try to save it.

Edited August 6, 2023 by Boba

[AlienTM 138]

1 hour ago, Boba said:

Just open source the game at this point. It's a sinking ship, you got nothing to lose. APB has had enough media coverage for angel open source devs to chime in and try to save it.

They can do that if they sold the IP?

[Frosi 722]

25 minutes ago, AlienTM said:

They can do that if they sold the IP?

Not just that but I doubt there are even many ppl (if any) in the apb community that would be able to work on the game outside of possibly clothing / balance / map changes. The games code is written in a deprecated coding language as well as heavily modified to the point where it may as well be its own engine and not Unreal 3.