0.3.2602.24 UI scaling, career mode prototype improvements
This release publishes some previously shelved work and a smaller UI improvements pass to make this possibly final build more usable. What’s included: Full DPI/UI scaling support for modern displays. Implemented more proper UIs for career prototype, showing player fleet and facti
This release publishes some previously shelved work and a smaller UI improvements pass to make this possibly final build more usable. What’s included:
Full DPI/UI scaling support for modern displays.
Implemented more proper UIs for career prototype, showing player fleet and faction status.
A career setup screen with options for generating your own universe with many options and some presets.
Display settings can now be applied without restart, but not while in-game.
This doesn't make the career prototype into a finished mode, but it is now more accessible and replayable.
Minor changes and fixes since previous patch notes:
These new 2x2 modules are beam turret, plasma turret, and shield generator. They function similarly to the existing smaller versions, but with about 10 times the raw damage output and resource usage they form a new significantly higher tier.
The large plasma and large beam are intended as main weapons of large ships that can provide enough energy and cooling to reach their potential. Normal shields are not adequate to defend against these weapons, which is where the large shield comes to play.
Large beam turret has slow rotation speed but can fire a perfectly accurate 4-second burst with medium range. If the firing ship and target stay still enough, the beam can drill its way through multiple modules. The large beam can be very effective against heavily armored ships, because the core modules can usually be sniped with a flanking attack.
Large plasma turret fires relatively slow plasma projectiles with medium to long range. It is effective against slower and larger ships that it can hit reliably. The large plasma shots destroy armor plating on impact and do additional explosive damage if they penetrate, which can damage multiple modules. Like the medium plasma module, the projectile size can be tuned from module options.
Large shield generator has double the max shield radius of the normal shield generator, and the shield is also tougher. The large shields are very effective against medium plasma, kinetic and beam weapons, being able to nullify even large amounts of incoming fire if the ship can provide enough electricity. Missiles, super gauss and large weapons may still get through. Note the difference between energy and kinetic shield variants also added in this update.
The new modules currently use existing audio effects, but the plan is to eventually have specially made individual effects that convey their greater power.
Until now the shields have provided protection against all weapons, while being better against plasma and beams. This is now changed by having separate "energy" and "kinetic" shield variants with different properties. The choice can made using module options in ship editor.
The energy shields are effective against plasma projectiles and beam weapons, but have almost no effect on kinetic projectiles. They have same max diameter and visuals as the generic shields previously.
The kinetic shields are effective at stopping and deflecting kinetic projectiles, but do little against plasma and beam weapons. In addition, the kinetic shields stop relative motion of other ships and asteroids, guarding against collisions. Motion away from the center of the shield is not affected, so its hard to get further into a kinetic shield but easy to get out along the radius. Kinetic shields can be identified visually by their lighter color and larger max diameter compared to the energy shields.
Fixes
Please let me know what you think. It has been quite a while since last update, so I thought releasing this in the current state is better than just continuing the radio silence while making slow progress.
Side note: Refactoring to allow selecting and giving commands to missiles was pretty major effort requiring changes to some 20 classes because those were made to only work with the Ship class.
Synchronized ship movement
This feature is a limited implementation of "move in formation" type command for ships only. Optimal (fast) movement in formation is a difficult problem in Battlefleet Engineer because all movement is physics driven, acceleration is generally very low, and each ship's performance can't be estimated very accurately as it changes over time.
This implementation calculates motion solution where all selected ships reach their target positions at the same time and then executes that plan. If ships deviate too much from their expected intermediate positions during execution the plan gets revised. Further, the plan is calculated so that (when possible) the acceleration, coasting and deacceleration phase changes of all ships are synchronized in effort to maintain relative positions (formation). The multi-degree-of-freedom synchronized motion solution calculation is done by industrial-grade Reflexxes Type II library.
To give a synchronized move command, enable the synchronized move command mode from the formations menu or using its keyboard shortcut, select two or more ships, give a movement command normally using right mouse and modifier keys.
Limitations: