Patch 0.8.6.0 (Wednesday 27th October 2021)
Hey everyone. Today's patch is transitory, as we're still heavily working on the squad/fleet system and VOIP. It introduces a brand new way waypoints/flight plan system. At the moment, its usage is quite limited but it will eventually become the foundation for other important systems such as the squad system (you'll be able to share your waypoints or targets with your teammates), AI improvements (fleet coordination), tutorials/mission editor (following a path..).
But as those features are not available yet, the waypoints system has currently limited purposes. You are able to use it from the starmap (or tactical view) by right-clicking and using the context menu to clear/add or set a waypoint as active. The current active waypoint also shows up on the HUD and on radars.
Speaking of radars, we revamped them to be more coherent between each other, added new information (the velocity now shows up in the radars) and we introduced a new radar type (available in game through the MFD-edit key: F4): the dual parabaloid radar. It merges the front and back radars into one view, where the iner circle represents what's in front, and the outer edge what's behind. We are experimenting with some tweaks to make the gimbal weapons more skill based (reducing their angular range and spread), added a lag pip (some players have been asking for it for years!) and introduced a HUD minimalistic mode for experienced players that know how the HUD already works and want to declutter it a bit. Let us know in the comments if you find these useful or not.
Finally, this patch includes a rework for the smog (battle smoke) effect, to make it look more impressive, at the cost of more performance. If you find your performance has degraded too much inside big battles, we recommend switching the smog quality setting back to "medium", which should more or less correspond to the old setting. We've also added an option to display short smoke trails behind small ships in space, which could be useful to see small ships in the distance in a big battle, especially if they don't show up on your HUD as targets. Last but not least, we've completely revamped the death sequence for all ships with new visual effects, explosions and debris, and shortened the small ship's explosions to be instant.
We are planning on releasing the patch focusing on the squad system and VOIP in about a month, after which we will resume work on new core gameplay systems.
-Flavien Brebion
General features
- Added support for mission/flight plan with waypoints. At the moment you can only add waypoints, but later on in the mission editor you will be able to add targets or objectives between waypoints
Balance / gameplay changes
- Reduced gimbal weapon's angle by more than half, and increased their spread. We are experimenting this change to make the game more skill-aiming based, keeping in mind that new players still need to have a chance at killing a target without pixel-perfect accuracy..
- Missiles/Torps no longer detonate when too close (< 1 km) of their source upon expiring (lifetime exceeded or target lost)
- Reduced pushback force caused by massive explosions shockwaves
Radars
- Polish pass over HUD radars: increased size of front/back radars by +30% (to fit the MFD page), targets are now bigger when closer, more readable.. added waypoints to radars
- Introduced new radar MFD page: Dual radar, which merges the front+back radars together into one single view (the iner circle is what's in front, the outer circle is what's behind the ship, aka. dual paraboloid projection)
- Fixed radars not rendering on cockpit MFDs with HUD mode disabled
- Fixed broken sensors and HUD targetting not behaving properly on radars
HUD / UI / menu fixes or improvements
- Fixed negative rating change going to a large number after a battle
- Fixed top 3 scores in battle reports showing up as large numbers when they're negative
- Improved layout of HUD/MFD target information around the right HUD center (name, distance, speed etc..) to be cleaner and more compact (horizontal alignment was messy)
- HUD is now displayed in third-person capital ship control scheme, even if applied to a smaller ship like the corvette (this allows the corvette to be playable with the cap ships control scheme)
- Introduced 'navigation' color into HUD color theme (currently used to show navigation points). In the default green color-scheme, navigation-related targets show up in orange/yellow
- Added lag pip to HUD
- Added a setting to switch between lag and lead pip/reticle (default is still lead pip)
- Added a keybinding to switch between lag and lead pip in game (default: unbound)
- Introduced HUD Smart (Minimalistic) experimental mode that automatically hides some HUD elements based on the context
- Reduced minimum combat, ring and navigation targets setting to zero (sliders in HUD settings) (previously, the minimum number of displayable targets was 3 for all of these)
- Updated default MFDs for small ships in anticipation of the new Dual radar and the future Squads system
- Loadout MFDs at the bottom of the screen now packs the weapons list downwards to save space
- New experimental set of aim reticle icons for lead/lag pips (the previous one was too opaque and cluttered the target)
- Modal dialogs (or context menus) can now be closed by clicking outside the window area
Visual effects
- Improvements and new effects for capital ship's death sequence + tuned death sequence parameters
- Small ships death sequence was shortened: the explosion is now instant, to have more immediate feedback
- Dying ships now play their engine/power damaged sound ambiance loop
- Added small ship's trails in space + an option for it (default: off). This allows to see small ships in the distance, especially if you're playing on a limited amount of navigation/combat displayable targets over the HUD
- Improved smog and added a quality setting dedicated to smog: denser/more opaque, darker, wider particles, to give a better sense of "terrain in space"
Disclaimer: the new smog settings can be more performance-hungry than the old one. A rough equivalent of the old smog would correspond to "medium" quality. High and Extreme quality will consume more performance than before.