Patch 0.7.6.0 ( Saturday September 12th 2020 )
This is the final patch primarily focusing on the star map and mission screens. It contains a lot of improvements to these screens, including an improved representation of conflict zones or bases under attack. This patch also replaces and introduces a bunch of new sound effects, with more to come later (we'll be revamping the sounds over the coming months, and are also in the process of doubling the amount of musical tracks in game). There is still a lot of work to do related to the UI and menus, however we'll be refocusing our efforts on gameplay starting this next patch, and work on the UI will take the back seat from now on.
Gameplay
- Active mission's objective's location is now automatically pre-selected on HUD upon entering the game
- Fixed ship movement being on hold while menus/UI are opened (this caused players to overshoot or collide with planets in warp)
Audio
- New interceptor thrusters sounds
- New small machine gun and blaster sounds
- New gun and blaster projectiles impact sounds
- New small ship and missiles explosion sounds
- New mk4 (corvette) turret machine guns and blasters sounds
- New shotgun (bomber) sound
- Added sound effects for AMS lasers and rotating turrets sound loop
- Rebalanced volume of various sound effects
- Thruster sounds now have a dynamic pitch based on the ship's angular speed, which should feel more immersive
- Sound effects range and performance optimizations, which should reduce clutter that deteriorated sound quality during large battles
UI / HUD
- Added mission symbols (letters: A, B, C etc..) in starmap/mission screen's viewports. Each mission is given its own unique color ( with a different hue and saturation ) to help differenciate missions
- Added quick-deploy buttons floating over the starmap/mission screen's viewports
- Added a panel for filtering and rendering options to the starmap and mission screens. It is now possible to filter the map by entity type (ex.: bases, players, teams, logistics like haulers) etc..
- Added a "heat map" (colored halos around team assets) to map's viewport, which should emphasize areas of conflict (blue for allies, red for enemies, so it turns purple in areas of conflict)
- Added threat/under-attack indicator dots (orange = threat, red = under attack) to map's viewport and entities panel
- Added back "Select on HUD" buttons in mission menu and star map for the selected item in the info panel at the bottom-right
- Added arrows on starmap and mission screens showing the direction between your ship and the closest allied base (blue arrow), or to the selected mission (green or orange arrow)
- Added the selected mission's symbol and objective type to the ship's HUD floating below its target location's icon (this should make it extra obvious to new players to see where their objective is)
- Current mission can now be deselected on mission screen (default: backspace)
- Minor UI tweak: tighter tooltip positionning when opening a tooltip around the screen borders
- Minor UI tweak: checkboxes can be toggle by clicking on the text too (not just the check icon only)
- Minor UI optimization: added screen culling to icons rendering
- UI is now properly refreshed when changing the color theme or the language
- Tweaks to UI style in the mission and starmap screens (ex.: new icons for mission categories, improving coloring coherency, etc..)
- Fixed icons located in the back of the camera appearing on screen as mirrored ghost icons
- Fixed HUD and menu icons to be fully resolution independent
- Selected mission's objective's indicator is now always enabled on the HUD even if not actively selected (before: it was hidden if it was far away)
- Distances in starmap and mission's targets list is now calculated as the distance between the player's ship and the target's (if in game)
- Fixed coherency of mission names + locations in UI
- Top 3 missions in deployment panel now selects the mission in the mission screen and focuses the camera on it instead of starting deployment
- Improved representation of the selected/active mission in the missions panel
- Fixed trade routes not showing up in mission screen
- Fixed trade routes randomly appearing in team screen
- Deployment panel is now also fully available from the ship screen
Assets
- Updated 3 station modules with improved geometry and materials
- Updated map icons to differenciate between planets, moons and asteroids (they now use different icons)
Bugs fixes / Misc
- Fix for the shield visual effect not being played when a projectile bounced off a shield
- Optimization fix for internal cockpits being loaded/attached and updated for all ships and not just the player's ship, which wasted cpu resources for no good reason
Misc
- Increased game's default camera's vertical FOV from 70° to 80° to see more of the cockpit in small ships
- Server admin commands now dump information to the chat box instead of the HUD's info MFD (which was too limited in size)