Patch 0.9.8.0 ( Wednesday 28th of June 2023 )
This patch is focusing on stability (3 client crashes were fixed), an upgrade to the mission system and many AI improvements. The mission system now supports side missions, and to "validate" its implementation, we are first testing it with two kind of side missions: bounty hunting and nemesis NPCs.
Bounty hunting already existed in the game previously, but was sort of hidden to new players as it didn't have proper exposure to the missions list. The new system shows up to 5 bounties, and prioritizes the ones matching the selected player's ship class. Bounties are fully optional, but provide a small credits bonus if you successfully accomplish them. It is now possible to place a bounty on to an enemy player in the leaderboard menu (right-click on an enemy name and select the bounty you want to place on him). Only one bounty can be placed on each enemy at a time.
Nemesis missions are a variant of the bounty system. Every few hour or so, a powerful AI/bot is deployed to hunt the player. This "elite" AI has a higher skill level, is more precise and will exclusively focus on the player until he dies. Killing the nemesis provides a nice credits reward, but if you die to it it will stop hunting you and focus back on the rest of the battlefield.
In the future, we'd like to experiment with this new side missions system and react dynamically to various events on the battlefield to provide more focused directions to the (new) players. Examples: a mission to destroy an enemy spinal cruiser's canon; a mission to launch a torpedo on an isolate capship that has no AMS, etc..
Note that side missions are optional, so you can fully ignore them and continue to participate to the battle as normal. They only serve as to provide more objectives and small rewards to the players that want to get involved with them.
This patch also includes a long list of AI fixes and improvements. Some of these can affect the balance of battles (offense vs defense power) quite a bit, so it may require further iterations or a hotfix if we get feedback that a side gets reliably favored in battles versus the other side.
Also please note that the voice-overs (computer and transmission voices), as well as showing the max amount of HUD targets during combat, are now enabled by default.
-Flavien Brebion
Missions system
- Added support for Bounty hunt missions
- It is now possible to place bounties on other players (Note: right-click on the leaderboard on an enemy player and select the bounty to place)
- Added support for Nemesis missions (Note: requires rank 3, and fairly rare, to not be too distracting. If players like them, we might increase their frequency in the future)
- Updated missions menu with updated descriptions and details panel (for new missions too)
AI
- tweaked aiming precision, improved dodge boosting, improved energy management
- Fixed a small bug related to AI targetting priorities based upon rank differences
- Fix for AI spinal cruisers not firing their spinal canons
- Improved pathing and nagivation to attack fixed objectives (this should make the AI's capships more easily attack static objectives and finish battles instead of getting frozen in space)
- Improved capship's pathing around base shields
- Improved players targetting priority, now better taking the rank difference into account, and giving more challenge (higher ranked AIs) to higher-ranked players. Overall, players should find the AIs to be more proactive at attacking them
- Improved warping AIs to avoid bumping or dying into obstacles as they slow down
- Improved turbo boosting behavior of AIs
- Increased turn rate of interceptor and bomber's AIs, so that they can track fast-moving targets more easily
HUD / Menus / Controls
- Fixed transmission popup being incorrected centered on star map in certain screen resolutions
- Fixed behavior of cycling groups, it is now skipping abilities and only works on manual weapons
- Fixed tooltips twitching by a few pixels when touching the edges of the screen
Bug fixes
- Fixed a client crash related to empty weapon groups displayed on HUD, which then caused a crash while in spectator mode
- Fixed a client freeze when trying to cycle weapon groups with an empty loadout
- Fixed a rare crash related to some space stations spawning too many asteroids around them, exceeding the client's capacity
Misc
- Added support to loading FMOD assets by guid in audio config file
- Player max credits are now capped to 100K
- The game now defaults to showing max (200) combat targets
- The game now defaults to voice-overs enabled
- Tweaked gravity attenuation formula, as it was too weak around the gas giant
- Reduced gas giant's mass
- Added 2 station battles in low orbit of the gas giant
- Small reduction (-15%) of hitpoints on station's large shield generators