# Ravenfield EA27 - Story Mission Update

- Product: Ravenfield (https://whatsnew.fyi/product/ravenfield)
- Vendor: SteelRaven7
- Date: 2023-07-28
- Original notes: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/636480/view/3649655808287407620
- Permalink: https://whatsnew.fyi/product/ravenfield/releases/2023-07-28-ea27-story-mission-update

What's New is an index, not a publisher: every entry below links to the vendor's own release notes, which are the authoritative source. Entries are labelled where they are hand-curated sample data, pre-releases, or drawn from a secondary source such as a developer blog.

Reuse: the summaries, labels and curation here are © What's New. Quote freely with attribution and a link back; wholesale republication of the corpus is not permitted — terms: https://whatsnew.fyi/terms. The vendors' own release notes remain their publishers'.

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- **added** — Story mission on the Citadel map where you assault the Citadel and sabotage enemy air capabilities
- **added** — Fully-animated character cutscene at the start of the Citadel mission
- **added** — Trigger System for mission design that connects logic components using signals without requiring code
- **added** — Hangar area to the Citadel map
- **added** — Support for moving platforms such as elevators
- **added** — Ability to stand on top of vehicles without being rammed up to a speed threshold of 20 m/s
- **added** — Support for custom game modes bundled inside maps
- **added** — Slight spread to Rhino MG
- **added** — Cassowary missile tracking and lock sounds now play in bomb sight
- **added** — Follower invisibility system to the Citadel mission where squadmates are invisible to enemy detection while following you
- **changed** — HUD design with modern and clear style that is modular for custom overrides
- **changed** — AI streamlined with improved weapon usage and better cover utilization
- **changed** — Navmesh generator now fully supports terrain holes and uses highest detail representation of terrain
- **changed** — Optimized Germanic house models on Citadel map to drastically reduce drawcalls
- **changed** — Improved soldier animation culling and animation state machine transitions for smoother stance transitions
- **changed** — Player third person lean animation transitions improved
- **changed** — Flag capture progress updates every frame for smoother appearance
- **changed** — Kill cam now moves slightly when the direct path between player and killer bot is obscured
- **fixed** — Bug where alt weapons would not animate correctly after getting up from ragdoll
- **fixed** — Bug where option menu values like mouse sensitivity and FOV would randomly change while playing
- **fixed** — Bug where weapons using patched animations would sometimes spam error messages
- **fixed** — Bug where maps with multiple identical flag pairs in the neighbor manager would not start
- **fixed** — Bug where bots could sometimes shoot through walls
- **fixed** — Bug where flag capture volumes sometimes would not initialize correctly at the start of a map
- **security** — Friendly fire cannot be dealt by players at very short ranges under 1m to mitigate friendly bots running in front of the player during firing

Hey hey everyone, EA27 is finally here! Holy smokes this took a long time...

So what's new? Basically I have been working on getting story missions to work with the game. On top of creating a story mission I have spent a lot of time refactoring the underlying game tech so that it works with both the original instant action style sandbox gameplay and the new designed style of the story campaign. You can see the results of this in the new story mission available in the instant action menu. This mission is a part of the story campaign I announced a while back, and while it is still a work in progress (this is Ravenfield after all...) it is still playable from start to finish. In this mission, you're tasked with assaulting the Citadel and sabotaging the enemy air capabilities. It even opens with a cutscene featuring shiny new fully-animated characters :O

The idea behind this mission is to bring together parts of both Spec Ops and Battle gameplay, so you will play as both Talon and your standard Eagle grunt in the same mission. All game logic that drives this mission has been designed using the new Trigger System - a set of logic components that can be connected together using signals in the RF Mod Tools for Unity. The point of this system is to make story mission map design much more approachable for modders. One of the primary goals for the Citadel mission was to design the Trigger System itself along with the mission, making sure that similar missions can be created using only Triggers - zero coding required!

This Trigger System is not limited to story missions, however. You can attach Trigger System components to any modded GameObject, meaning it can be used to drive game logic on your modded maps, vehicles, weapons, projectiles, etc. While the Trigger System can be viewed as an alternative to Ravenscript, more complex logic are usually easier to design using Ravenscript, but the choice is left entirely to the modder. The two systems are completely interoperable as you can send and receive Trigger System signals from a Ravenscript ScriptedBehavior component. Along with the Trigger System, there are other mission-related components that can be used to manually set up AI paths, detect player entering triggers, trigger cutscenes and more.

On top of the new game systems, you will probably notice that the AI has been streamlined quite a bit, and that the game plays a lot better than it did in EA26. This is due to the numerous AI changes that had to be made in order to accomodate the new trigger system and custom game mode tech. You should see the AI using their weapons in a more sane way, and utilizing cover better. The game HUD has also received a much-needed makeover, and now has a more modern and clear style. Additionally, the new HUD is modular, so custom HUDs can override specific parts of the official HUD as needed.

Now that this update is out, what's next? Most of the very time-consuming task of redoing the game infrastructure to support story missions and the Trigger System is now done. This means that you can expect much more frequent updates in the future, mainly focused on adding more official story missions and eventually becoming the story campaign. These tools are also being made available to modders right away, so modders will be able to create playable custom game modes or story missions inside level files. Eventually, modders will be able to create fully fledged custom game modes playable on any map, but we are not quite there yet, maybe for EA28 :D!

##### Full Change Log

**Game changes**
- Added WIP story mission that takes place on the Citadel map
- New HUD design!
- Added hangar area to the Citadel map
- Navmesh generator now fully support terrain holes
- Forced navmesh generator to use highest detail representation of terrain while generating.
- Optimized the germanic house models used on Citadel map, drastically reducing the drawcalls
- Fixed a bug where alt weapons would not animate correctly after gett

_[Truncated at 4000 characters — full notes: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/636480/view/3649655808287407620]_