v7.1 Update news - SWAT: Elite Force mod for SWAT 4: The Stetchkov Syndicate

Current Status

Hello all. It has been a long time since I have last updated the page. As some of you may be aware, I have had some real life issues keeping me away from the keyboard. Most notably, my fourth child has been born, and I have been scrambling to get things ready for the new baby. That, and I was hospitalized fairly recently with a severe case of pneumonia. Thankfully, I've been lucky enough to avoid catching COVID-19. Both my wife and I are high risk groups that would be severely affected by the disease. I have been meaning to return to the mod, but I honestly have just been exhausted by everything going on.

That being said, the short bursts that I have been developing in have been very fruitful, since a large part of this next patch is going to be bugfixes. I've received a lot of reports about bugs in v7, and the next patch, v7.1, has been laser-focused on addressing them. The following are some of the more major problems that have been fixed:

• Lots of crashes fixed.
• Many cases of misaligned ironsights have been corrected.
• Suspects now have a cooldown timer for penalties. Previously, if you shouted at a suspect who was firing a weapon at you, and they became compliant, it was possible to receive a penalty if your projectile hits them even one frame later. This isn't fair, especially when considering weapons such as the ARWEN which have projectiles that don't travel instantaneously. There's now some wiggle room added to accommodate for things such as slow projectiles, lag, hitches, etc.
• Suspects can't be "juked" by running around all over the place any more. Previously, it was possible to run in circles around low skill suspects to avoid being shot. This isn't possible any more, because suspects now don't need to lock on to their target in order to start shooting. (SWAT AI still need to, because SWAT need to be accurate!) As a result, you might notice that the suspect AI is significantly more dangerous than before...
• Lightsticks don't fall through the floor anymore, for real this time. Using the power of physics®, lightsticks have been engineered to not fall through solid surfaces. And even if they did, the old fix (having them respawn back in bounds) still exists.
• MP5SD6 will now reset from lowready position properly and won't block the sights.
• Nightvision goggles are now visible in third person.
• Suspects now shoot at doors again when barricading.

Other changes

There have been a number of other changes and minor feature additions. For example, custom skins can now alter your first person hand textures. There is now a "round in the chamber" system for added realism.

Two of the new features that I want to talk about in depth are changes that I want to expand on in the future: target acquisition and weapon variations.

Target Acquisition

In SWAT 4, AI in the level are either suspects, civilians, or SWAT. There's no overlap between the roles of suspects and civilians. If you've memorized the way that suspects and civilians sound, you'll know instantly if someone is a suspect or a civilian. And if you aren't sure, the zipcuff prompt will always tell you. When diving into the code a bit further, there does appear to be some intent by Irrational Games to make the lines a bit fuzzy at times. Consider the bodyguards for Hyun-Jun Park for example. They actually won't fire upon you if you announce yourself as being police (go ahead and try it in the vanilla game if you don't believe me). Even if their morale is set to maximum, they always do this, because they follow a strict Guard archetype. Likewise, Carl Jennings on The Wolcott Projects will never actually attack you, even if you don't announce yourself first. Despite this, they're both dumped into the same category as suspects.

When you consider challenges in policing, probably one of the biggest is knowing whether a contact will act with intent to harm. It is why all targets on a level in SWAT 4 need to be handcuffed, regardless of whether they have a weapon. So with v7.1, I'm going to start blurring the lines a little bit with what is considered a suspect and what isn't considered a suspect.

Prior to v7.1, if SWAT saw a civilian, they would announce that the target is unarmed. If SWAT saw a suspect, they would announce that the target is a suspect. In v7.1 this is changed: if a target is armed, SWAT will announce that they've spotted a suspect, otherwise, they will announce that the target is unarmed. This applies to both mirror results and approaching targets. I will be making further changes to blur the lines at a later point in time.

Weapon Variations

There are a lot of weapons in SWAT: Elite Force. Some of them are just minor variations of one another. Consider the M4A1 - in v7.1 there are twelve different ways to pack this weapon. That's a lot of entries in dropdown boxes. Finding the exact weapon you want through all of the noise is going to be chaos.

I've already shown off screenshots of this feature, but the list of weapons will be reduced to just base weapons, and you'll be able to pick variations of that weapon. For example, Submachine Guns might include the MP5A4 and UMP45. From the MP5A4 choice, you'll be able to pick options such as No attachments, Holographic Sights, Suppressed, or Suppressed + Holographic Sights. Each of these options has different drawbacks, such as a change in weight or how the weapon handles.

This seems like a really minor change, but I'd like to open this up to modders. Inevitably, people are going to want their own custom weapon skins to be a feature, and that's where weapon variations can come in. One really interesting mod I've seen lately has the ladder sights opened up for the HK69, and that's just one example of what a user-created weapon variation can do.

Closing Statements

I know it has been a long time since I've posted anything, and I will certainly make good on releasing v7.1 in a timely fashion. In the meantime, you can keep track on our official Discord (see the link ingame, or in the mod description), and you can always view the most recent changelog on GitHub. The link I've provided will always be the most up-to-date version of the changelog.