# Ravenfield EA29 - Game Fixes & Modding Groundwork

- Product: Ravenfield (https://whatsnew.fyi/product/ravenfield)
- Vendor: SteelRaven7
- Date: 2024-05-14
- Original notes: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/636480/view/4184484271480497367
- Permalink: https://whatsnew.fyi/product/ravenfield/releases/2024-05-14-ea29-game-fixes-modding-groundwork

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'.

---

- **added** — Enhanced instant action preview screen with background that changes based on map metadata tags
- **added** — Map metadata can now be edited in the ingame map editor via Level Details -> Metadata
- **added** — Named trigger signals that allow communication between sender and receiver components without direct connection in map tools
- **added** — Camera smoothing to player movement while on foot to prevent jittering at high refresh rates
- **added** — Spawn point offset values for vehicles to prevent clipping into the ground
- **changed** — Data container component preprocessing now runs once per asset at load time instead of once for every instance
- **changed** — Non-actor-collision layer will now produce impact decals correctly
- **changed** — Objective indicator now fades in/out based on what you're currently aiming at
- **changed** — Target seeking missiles now have a one second grace period after thruster ignition during which they cannot lose tracking
- **changed** — Vehicles can now be assigned a driver halt strategy to stop when a passenger is engaging a target
- **changed** — Squad leaders can now halt when engaging preferred targets
- **changed** — Razorback MG will now halt when engaging preferred targets with the turret
- **changed** — Prowler quadbike will now halt when the passenger is engaging a preferred target
- **changed** — Camera movement reduced when leaning right while standing to better align with third person animation
- **changed** — Third person stance changing animations sped up slightly
- **changed** — In spec ops mode, bot count now sets the number of teammates directly when balance slider is set fully to player team
- **changed** — Level geometry updated in citadel mission including a more detailed destroyed hangar area
- **changed** — Terrain updated on dustbowl near Raven controlled airport to make it easier for bots to get onto the tarmac
- **changed** — Occlusion culling data updated on dustbowl to fix props turning invisible in certain areas
- **fixed** — Bug where changing a missile target via Ravenscript would not cause the targeted vehicle to register the new missile

EA29 is finally here! While a lot of my time since the last update has been spent working on campaign assets (which are not quite ready to be shown yet), I have been polishing up the base game with quality-of-life fixes and improving Ravenscript and the Trigger System. This should get the two scripting systems ready for the planned addition of custom game modes which I hope to get working very soon.

_**IMPORTANT:** If you're running into any weird main menu or ingame bugs that prevents you from playing the game after updating to EA29, make sure you remove any mods that modify the original game files such as RavenM._

One of the new features in EA29 is an enhanced instant action preview screen, where the background will change based on the metadata tags of the map that is currently selected. Map metadata could previously only be changed via the RF modding tools for Unity, but is now also available through the ingame map editor (via Level Details -> Metadata). In addition to tagging levels, metadata also allows map makers to control other map information such as display name and recommended bot count.

The dynamic instant action preview screen may seem like a superfluous feature at first, but the data that drives the preview screen will be exposed to Ravenscript in a future update. This will allow modders to find maps with specific tags (City, Desert, Airport, Coastline, etc) and load them - essentially allowing modders to create custom campaigns spanning all maps that are currently subscribed (moddable conquest mode on custom maps, anyone?). For this reason, I highly recommend that you tag your custom maps using the new metadata features.

I would also like to highlight one of the new Ravenscript/Trigger features, the addition of named trigger signals. Named signals are sent from a sender component to a receiver component just like regular Trigger System signals, but the modder does not need to directly connect the sender to the receiver inside the map tools. Instead, the modder assigns a name to the sent signal, and any receivers that are listening to signals of the same name will receive the signal. Named signals can be sent between maps/game modes/vehicles/weapons loaded from different files, including different mods, allowing for easy inter-mod logic. Before this addition, this type of communication was difficult to do inside Ravenfield.

Finally, you can check out a few improvements to the citadel story mission such as a more detailed destroyed hangar area. This in an example of the power of the trigger system, where you can dynamically change areas of a map based on story events. Unfortunately I have not been able to implement the remaining cutscenes for the citadel mission yet, which is something I was planning on doing for EA29. Expect these to come in the next one or two updates, finishing up the first story mission in the official campaign.

-- Full change log --

Game improvements:
- Added camera smoothing to player movement while on foot. This should prevent jittering when running close to bots or when playing the game at high refresh rate displays
- Various updates to level geometry in the citadel mission.
- Data container component preprocessing, will now only run once per data container asset at load time instead of once for every instance in Awake().
- Non-actor-collision layer will now produce impact decals correctly
- Objective indicator now fades in/out based on what you're currently aiming at.
- Target seeking missiles now have a grace period of one second after thruster ignition, during this time period the missile can never lose tracking of the target. This allows target seeking missiles to track targets that are behind them on some custom vehicles.
- Vehicles can now be assigned a driver halt strategy, which allows the driver to stop when a passenger is engaging a target according to the passenger weapon's halt strategy configuration.
- Squad leaders can now halt when engaging preferred targets.
- Razorb

_[Truncated at 4000 characters — full notes: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/636480/view/4184484271480497367]_