Patch 0.6.7.0 ( Saturday February 8th 2020 )
This patch mainly aims at laying down the foundation to revamping the weapons groups / management system and introduces a number of important changes. On small ships (up to Corvette, included) weapons are now exclusive (you can only select one weapon group active at a time). On capital ships, it is possible to toggle automatic vs manual firing and aiming. The locking system for missiles / torpedoes has been updated to be less constraining (locks are acquired instantly so that you can fire as soon as you select a target). Finally, we updated the radial menus and assigned a new weapons selection contextual menu to the right mouse button (for keyboard profiles). The goal of all these changes is to prepare for the upcoming HUD update.
Weapons groups
- Weapon groups are now exclusive on small ships: for ex. selecting blasters will unselect guns
- Weapon groups on capital ships can now cycle between disabled, automatic and manual firing
- Revamped missile locking system and alerts. To fire a missile, just select the missile's weapon group and press fire. Locking is instant as long as the conditions are met (enough ammo, in range, not on cooldown etc..). The angle restriction has been rempoved
- Revamped HUD weapons list (now showing group ids, name and ammo as a bar)
- Reduced amount of heat generated by laser AMS by half
- Most weapons groups are now active by default on capital ships (default configuration: automatic)
- Cleaned up corvette groups: there's now only one group for kinetic guns and one for blasters
- Changed ordering of some groups on destroyer to go in increasing power
Input/Controls
- Revamped keyboard input profile for weapon groups hotkeys (1-9 activates the matching weapon group, instead of ctrl 1-9). Note: ctrl 1-9 is now used to set the throttle.
- Chaffs have been moved to the middle mouse button instead of left-alt (for keyboard profiles)
- Removed "Secondary fire" and "Missile fire" input event
- Revamped radial menus: introduced the Flight mode menu (default: hold X on keyboard, which is the ex key for weapons)
- Cleaned up other radial menus and reduced their content so that they fit into 10 slots
- Moved the weapons radial menu to the right mouse button (for keyboard profiles)
- Radial menus now resize dynamically according to the amount of slots they contain (ex.: a 4 slots radial menu will look smaller than a 12-slots)
- Added an optional event to cycle through active weapon groups ( "CycleWeapons" ). Currently left unassigned by default
Bug fixes
- Fixed music volume slider in audio options that required a game restart to take effect (it can now be changed on the fly)
- Fixed camera free-look not working when spectating / in kill-cam of a capital ship
- Fixed missiles/torpedoes still locking and tracking a target even when satefy lock is off
Misc
- Increased a bit AI probability to fire missiles/torpedoes
- Revamped AI to actively manage weapon groups in a smarter way. The AI now takes into account more parameters, such as heat (for ex. interceptors switch to blasters when kinetics are overheating), ammo depleted, damaged weapons, etc.. They try to switch to the weapons with the best DPS according to their target.
In this image you can see the weapons group HUD update. For each weapon group, from left to right:
- Weapon group ID ( matching the number hotkey )
- Number of usable weapons ( not damaged, having ammo, not under cooldown ) over the total number of weapons in that group
- Name of the weapons in that group
- Brackets+asterisk if the weapons are automatic
- A bar showing the average amount of ammo for weapons in that group. Note that energy weapons ( blasters ) share their ammo together ( so the bars will be synced ). Kinetics use per-hardpoint ammo, so it's technically possible that some hardpoints have exhausted their ammo while others still have some ammo. The bar represents the average. The orange portion represents the ammo already exhausted. When the whole bar is orange, none of the weapons in the group have any ammo left.