Patch 0.10.3.0 ( 6th of February 2024 )
Greetings Everyone and happy 2025 ! We're starting this year with a new patch, featuring the new weapons presets controls. We added a free flight mode to the sandbox mode, and gameplay modifiers that can impact the game's challenge or rewards. Some of the modifiers can be used by new players to playtest various features by temporarily unlocking all upgrades/weapons, or enabling the "ghost mode" which prevents enemy ships from targetting you. Other gameplay modifiers can modify the stats of all ships (including yours) like adjusting the damage scale, projectile speeds or shield levels.
The weapons presets allow players to customize groups of weapons groups, named presets, in the ship loadout panel. In this new tab, you'll see a grid. The columns present presets, with a matching number at the top, and rows for weapons groups/abilities. The weapon or ability can be added or removed to the preset by clicking on the state at the grid intersection. For capital ship weapons, it is possible to click multiple times on the state to cycle through the various firing modes. The presets can then be invoked in game through a new radial menu (not: no default bound key, so if you're interested in this feature you'll have to bind a custom key) or directly through RightAlt + #preset ID. Note that you can also assign custom names to each preset. And to anticipate the question that a lot of people will surely ask: no, presets do not allow you to mix weapons groups of different types on small ships. Those still use the exclusive groups system. However, we changed the corvette to no longer have exclusive groups for manual firing modes, as automatic firing modes were allowed concurrently already.
The new ship loadout tab also displays ammo statistics, so that you can more clearly see how payload upgrades affect your ammo.
The EMP torpedo was reworked, and we've introduced a new dedicated kinetic torpedo. The standard torpedo is now an hybrid type, dealing slightly less damage. The specialized variants deal a lot more damage, but only on targets with the specific weakness (ex.: Kinetic torpedoes will deal very little shield damage, and EMP torpedoes will deal very little hull damage, whereas the standard torpedo can deal significant damage to both). A new EMP Field ability is now available for the Destroyer, with two variants: one focused on high-risk high-reward heavy energy damage, the other dealing a lot less damage but in a larger range can be used as defense against smaller ships or even incoming missiles/torpedoes.
We're still working on the polish pass (with no ETA for when the next patch will be) and will soon start on our next important phase: a huge backend/database rework, which will finally allow us to support accounts persistency accross servers and prepare the infrastructure for the game's official release.
-Flavien Brebion
Offline Sandbox mode
- Added Free Flight game mode to the sandbox
- The sandbox environment's seed is now restricted to a 7-digits number
Added 12 gameplay modifiers to the sandbox mode:
- ghost mode makes enemy ships ignore you if you do not aggress them, reducing the risks of dying on the battlefield (note: you can still get killed by accidental splash damage or if you attack enemies..)
- elite mode increases the rank of all ships, making them more accurate and smarter
- SP rate modifies the speed at which you accumulate ship points
- hardcore mode increases your rewards, but you instantly lose the match if you die or suicide
- SP start at zero or maxed
- unlock all weapons or upgrades, allowing new players to test weapons or upgrades temporarily
- multi battles: allows a defense battle to happen at the same time than an attack battle
- damage scaling
- projectile speed scaling
- shields scaling
We'll add more modifiers at a later stage, but feel free to suggest ideas if you think you got an interesting one, thank you.
Weapons Presets
- Added weapons presets, which can be customized in the ship loadout tab
- Added a radial menu for weapons presets (note: no default key bound). Presets can be invoked directly by default with the RightAlt + #preset ID key.
- Added the ability to rename weapons presets (by clicking on the preset ID at the top of the grid). Those will show up in the presets radial menu
- Added payload (ammo) info in the loadout tab (Note: only shows the maximum ammo capacity, not the current ammo if you're spawned in game)
Gameplay/Balance tweaks
- Corvette weapons are no longer exclusive in manual firing modes (the automatic firing modes were already non-exclusive, so we wanted to unify that behavior and be coherent)
- Default cruiser no longer has torpedo launchers (we felt torpedoes on the cruiser were in an odd spot and were better staying dedicated to the bomber)
- Added EMP Field ability for the Destroyer. Two variants exist (EMP Field I and EMP Field II). The first one deals heavy energy damage in a 2.5 Km range, while the second ability deals medium energy damage in a 5.0 Km range. Only one of those abilities can be mounted at once
- Missiles/Torpdoes/Mines can now have their thrust & targetting disabled by critical hits
- Decreased extra missiles upgrade mass from +70% to +40%
- Increased extra torpedoes upgrade mass from +150% to +250%
- Reworked EMP torpedoes and added Kinetic torpedoes. Those are specialized variants of the standard torpedoes. They use a new damage model, where energy damage deals damage to the shield (as usual) but kinetic damage is weighted by the shield ratio to damage the hull. For example, a 1000 kDmg + 8000 eDmg EMP torpedo hitting a ship at 50% shield will deal 4000 shield damage and 1000 * 50% = 500 hull damage
- Reduced standard torpedoes damage from 6000 to 5000. They still deal hybrid damage (ex.: if the hit ship has 50% shield, the torpedo will deal 2500 shield damage and 2500 hull damage). This means that EMP and Kinetic torpedoes can deal up to 60% more damage than standard torpedoes if their target has the right weakness (low on shield for kinetic torpedoes, and high on shield for EMP torpedoes)
- Splash damage (= shockwave effects) no longer cause accidental griefing of nearby allies
- Fixed a bug that causes high-velocity targets to go through expanding explosions/shockwaves without taking any damage
HUD/UI/Menus
- Text edits now properly scroll horizontally in the sub-window if the text length is too long to fit
Generic Bug Fixes
- Fixed controller independent deadzones on non-paired X/Y axis (Note: X/Y axis were all paired even if the events were unrelated, like roll+accelerate. Now the game should automatically pair deadzones only for pitch/yaw/roll axes)
- Fix for infinite light (sun) flickering when there are other bright point lights in the scene
- Fixed XInput controller arrow button being detected as an axis when used in combo of another axis on an axis keybind (the arrow button should be a key modifier, not an axis itself)
- Fixed new shield impact effects sometimes not displaying properly on the player's own ship
- Fixed dependency of basic combat tutorial on advanced flight that was supposed to be optional