Patch 0.8.4.0 (Saturday 26th June 2021)
Greetings everybody. We apologize for the delay in releasing this new patch. Production has been going slower than anticipated due to a combination of technical factors (we had to change our certification company, we cleaned up project organization and assets for the first time in years, etc..) and new game features (the new sub-targetting system is now in, and allows you to target structural modules on bases or hardpoints). We also reworked the engine's texture compression, which should lead to an increase of textures quality (no more blocky compression artifacts up close) and saving up VRAM usage.
On the content side, this patch introduces new military ranks, 6 new space stations and 3 new weapons. The flaks were also reworked to be more effective and a new pass has been made on the starmap (yep, again..) to make it interactive (you can now click on icons to select a target instead of having to scroll in the targets panel) and make the camera behavior more intuitive. As this patch has a lot of new content and features, expect new bugs and issues to get addressed in a future patch (this time sooner!) and let us know in the comments section or forums your feedback. Also note that a community event is planned in a few hours this Saturday. See you in game,
-Flavien Brebion
General / Gameplay
- Added 6 new space stations: 2 large ones (including a remake of the Kickstarter's Skycrane 35-Km-sized station), 1 medium one (an asteroid processing space factory) and 3 small ones (outposts with no capital ships docks)
- New light weapon: the railgun. Available on small crafts (MK1/M2 hardpoints), the railgun is a fixed non-converging weapon with a blind zone at short range. It deals a lot of damage but has a low firing rate. The electromagnetic launcher allows very high projectile speeds (3 Km/s, double the typical gun) with no spread and little heat generation at the cost of extra mass, making your ship less maneuverable. The lack of gimbals makes and the low firing rate makes the railgun a powerful but specialized weapon
- New turret weapon: the railgun turret. This heavy MK4 variant can be mounted on capital ships for point defense. It retains most of the advantages of the light variant, but has a low turret tracking rotation speed and a higher spread
- New missile launcher: EMP missiles. When these missiles detonate they generate an energetic blast (causing splash damage in a radius of 500m) causing 100 damage to shields and energy reserves
- Added 2 new default loadouts, one for an interceptor with railguns and an EMP missile launcher; the other one for a railgun-mounted destroyer
- Implemented docking mechanics to refund/change ship when standing inside a hangar/bay. This can be done through the system menu (escape key) or via the deploy panel in the starmap. This features requires your ship to be fully repaired and not be under fire. Full credits will be refunded
- Introduced 10+ new military ranks (new low-level officer ranks and new high-level admiral ranks)
Targetting System
- Added the new sub-targetting system, allowing to target an individual structural module or a hardpoint on a ship or a base
- A structural module (on a base, for example) can be targetted via the select-target under cursor key (default: T)
- New input events and keybindings are now available to target a sub-system or a hardpoint on the current target (if there are no targets, these keys do nothing). The defaults are alt-T to select the sub-target under the cursor, alt-Y and alt-U to cycle through the previous/next sub-target respectively
- A new input event was also added to select the nearest ally (default: alt-G)
- When a sub-system or hardpoint is targetted, a red square will appear on the current target. The lead reticle and distance indicators will use it as the point of reference
- Modified the behavior of the unselect-target key (default: backspace) to go back to the parent actor if a module or hardpoint had been targetted
- Note that the AI currently does not make use of this feature, but this will be a point of focus of an upcoming patch
Balance
- Revamped explosions splash damage/radius curve: the old curve was so abrupt that it almost never generated splash damage from missiles. The new curve should generate more splash damage from detonating missiles and be a bit more dangerous to being close to a dying capital ship
- Doubled repair rate of capital ships when docked at spawns. Also slightly increased shields regen rate
- Repair/resupplying (from a corvette aura or inside a hangar/bay) now gets interrupted for 10 seconds after firing weapons (so you need to wait 10s without firing your weapons before you start getting repaired/resupplied)
- Rebalanced Flak canons: they now fire in burst with a cooldown (DPS is similar to what it was before) and have a higher projectile velocity, at the cost of splash radius. This should make them more effective against light crafts
- Tweaked warp speed limit to take into account custom loadout mass changes (this should make it easier for a heavy cruiser to navigate in warp)
HUD
- Added an alert message on the HUD when your ship is standing in the wrong hangar/bay type and repair/resupply/docking isn't available
- Target/throttle speed is now represented as a filled arrow on the HUD's speed'o'meter
- Speed'o'meter background color is now darker for speeds above the speed cap, making it easier to see what the cap is
- Fixed some layout issues with match score and ranks in the main menu or the ship menu (sometimes the font size was too large and text was clipped)
- Hit feedback icon will now blink and play the ding sound even upon dealing low damage (this was sometimes confusing, as you thought you didn't hit the target)
- Fixed interceptor scanner not matching the HUD's transparency during power fluctuations
- Added a "reset MFD" button in the general options to reset the MFD layout of a given ship
Deployment Panel
- Revamped deployment buttons to be more coherent. In the mission map, the deploy button will now properly match the selected mission's objective (if it's an allied based) or the starmap's selected base
- Deployment buttons from the deployment panel now have better titles to reflect the behavior of the button (you'll now know if you're taking over an A.I., or spawning at a carrier..)
- Added a warning when you're about to take over an A.I., with a confirmation dialog
Leaderboard Screen
- Fixed incorrect centering of report screen in ultra-wide resolutions
- Fixed player's stats going over a billion on report screen
- Fixed player's ships damage stats in report screen not taking armor points reduction into account
- Fixed leaderboard caching issues when switching to a different server
- Leaderboard panel now remembers previously selected options after changing to another menu tab
Tab Menus (Starmap, Mission, Loadouts..)
- Merged star map and mission map view/camera. This should be less confusing, as previously each screen had its own independent camera position/orientation
- Default star map view will now center on the current Battlescape (=Rethe Prime at the moment)
- Arrow leading to mission area will no longer be displayed before you haven't spawned yet (a 'ghost' arrow was displayed from the center of the map)
- Changing the selected mission will no longer change the selected target to be the mission objective's in the star map list
- Improvements to starmap's camera: it will now stay at the same elevation above the grid plane, making it easier to move around when the view is rotated
- Starmap (/and mission map, as they've been merged) is now interactive. It is possible to click on an icon (either a target or a mission) to select it and center the camera on it
- Double-clicking on an icon will now focus the camera on it and also automatically zoom around it
- View-reset key (default: double tap left-ctrl) now resets the camera to focus on a target
- Select-target key (default: T) can now be used on the starmap to select a target
- R/F keys can now be used on the starmap to zoom in/out on the selected target
- Mouse wheel will now zoom in/out at the cursor location (so not necessarily on the screen center) which allows to zoom on a location of the starmap and panning the camera at the same time
- The grid plane is now automatically set on the selected target (previously, it stays on the reference actor, which had to be manually set, and was usually forgotten)
- Revamped the floating/3D texture size around actors in the starmap's viewport to be more coherent with the target size
- The selected target's name in the viewport is now highlighted in yellow, like in the actors list panel UI
- The selection sound is now played when changing the selected target or mission on the starmap
- The ship menu will now show the available system/weapons upgrades even while in-game and not just during spawn. By default, the game only displays the systems currently mounted on your ship
- Added failure sound when trying to fit a component/weapon on a ship layout while in game (loadouts can only be edited on spawn);
Technical
- Revamped texture compression to support grayscale, BC5, BC6 and BC7 formats. Without being too technical, these newer compression formats allow the game to reduce VRAM usage while increasing textures quality at the same time (you'll see less blocky compression artifacts when being close to a texture). Internal tests show a reduction of about 1 to 1.5 GB of VRAM in high/extreme quality settings, or about 10-15%. There might be some light performance increases on VRAM or bandwidth-starved video cards.
- Updated FMOD API to latest version
- "Default" loadout name text can now be localized in the strings table
- Fixed "GenericAction" missing sound from log files
Bug fixes
- Fixed a major client crash/memory corruption issues due to incorrectly calculating a compressed texture's storage requirements for non-power-of-2 textures
- Fixed capital ships control scheme not working after being changed on-the-fly in the options menu
- Fixed camera view instantly jumping around when changing control scheme to capital ship on-the-fly in the options menu
- Fix for particle child emitters that stopped to work after a few seconds (child emitter's data was not properly reset after a particle gets recycled from the pool). This caused some hierarhical particle effects to look wrong
GFX
- Fixed various assets related to cleanup of project
- Tweaks to 'space dust' effect, to make it more noticeable and better take into account the environmental density (aka. no space dust in deep space but more dust in rings!)
- Fixed shrapnel effect quality when dying: the shrapnel debris will no longer get ejected at crazy speeds near your ship when dying
- Added a new slider to control the space/skybox background's brightness in the graphical options
- Added major ship debris/junk for exploding capital ships. More specialized, larger pieces are also in the workds for a future patch; These debris last 5 minutes on the battlefield before fading off. They can even be collided against or destroyed by firing at them
- Weapons on light crafts will now better synchronize their firing timing (previously, the left/right guns for ex. on an interceptor could be staggered)
- Revamped visual effect for: ship explosions, counter-measures/chaffs (they should now be more visible), warp-jam, impacts/sparks, smoke, shrapnel (red glow is less noticeable)
- Updated glowing material for surface destruction, to make the UV tiling/repetition patterns less noticeable
- Fixed flak canons mesh size
- Doubled projectiles brightness, to make them more easily noticeable against busy backgrounds