Patch 0.9.10.2 ( Monday 18th December 2023 )
Greetings everyone. In this update (most likely the last one of the year) we're bringing you the next iteration and improvements to the carrier gameplay. The behavior of the squads under orders was changed to be more reactive and consistent (for example, ships in escort mode shouldn't fly dozens of Km away from the carrier anymore).
We revamped ramming damage as well as griefing which were often a source of frustration for new players. We started some preparations for our future modding support plan and replaced old placeholder weapons meshes with new, unique ones. A quality-of-life pass was applied to the UI, including a speaker icon for voice chat or an automatic radar/tactical view zoom-out at high velocities.
Starting from january we will focus our efforts on the major remaining missing features such as tutorials, the single-player sandbox mode or the private/dedicated servers hosting. These may take a few months of development (probably at least until Q2 2024) during which regular patches will be lightweight (bug or balance fixes, but no new major feature). After that we'll start our final polish pass and prepare marketing for our 1.0 launch around (estimated) Autumn 2024.
Happy winter holidays,
-Flavien Brebion
Carrier gameplay
- Carrier ship points (SP) cost now has a base cost with an empty hangar (1800 SP), and a cost per hangar's carry point (CP) (+15 SP/CP). An empty or default (unupgraded hangar) carrier now costs less SP to deploy (previously the cost was set to a fixed 2500 SP)
- Rebalanced AI budget reinforcement waves during battles to better take into account carrier hangar costs and to be more stable (the value no longer fluctuates based on deployed/undeployed ships)
- Fixed some carrier hangar loadout changes lost when switching menus
- Carrier squad rewards (xp, credits & damage stats from kills/assists) reduced to 25% for the carrier owner (previously, the carrier owner received full rewards for its squad kills/assists)
- Carrier orders should now be more reactive to squads when changing targets
- Carrier squads now retreat (warp out) after about 30s once the carrier has died/undeployed. This addresses the problem of players deploying their ships, then undeploying the carrier, and repeating the operation to spawn an infinite amount of ships
- Carrier squads in escort mode should now be less agressive and stay within a 10 Km defensive range of the carrier (or of the protected ship)
- Carrier squads on orders to attack a target (ship or base structure) that gets destroyed should now return to the carrier instead of switching to search & destroy
- Corvettes in carrier squads should now prioritize repairing/rearming ships in their squads, and then ships in other squads, over "foreign" ships not belonging to the carrier at all
- More tweaks to obstacle avoidance AI, as capships like the carrier sometimes had a massive (30 km+) avoidance range causing allied fleets to fall apart
- Carriers can no longer replenish their lost hangar ships at the base under attack during a battle (they can still replenish their ships at another allied base though)
- Removed 8 MK4 turrets from carrier hardpoint layouts (now that the carrier can manage squads, we want it to be more vulnerable to small enemy ship assaults and to use its squads more actively to protect itself)
General gameplay
- Revamped collision/ramming damage to punish more severly the rammer. Damage is now capped, so a smaller ship at insane ram speeds (many km/s) cannot destroy a bigger ship anymore (ex.: destroyer vs cruiser)
- Fixed a bug with collision damage that was incorrectly calculated for a warping rammer, due to warp interruption cancelling out the contact speed before damage was calculated
A minority of players sometime do griefing for fun. We obviously want to discourage this behavior, so we're increasing the penatly for the griefer while refunding his victim
- Griefing now refunds ship points (SP) to the dead player
- The griefing count no longer fully resets after a match restarts (previously, griefing was forgotten after every match, it will now stay persistent accross matches, but decrease slowly over time) (As a reminder: after a grief count of 3, a player gets auto-kicked from the match, then auto-banned if he continues griefing)
- Added a more explicit griefing automatic warning notification
Modding
We do not have any plans to support modding before our 1.0 release, however in this update we made some preparations for future modding (mostly code architecture changes). We've added support for a C# .NetCore plugin system as well as a C# SDK. In the future we plan on supporting config files (XML) modding, assets modding (through our engine editor/cooker) and audio modding (already partially supported with FMOD).
Both the client and the server can be modded and we'd like the mod system to automatically download missing client mods when connecting to a modded server. This is a lot of work so keep in mind that the extent of our modding support will largely depend on the success and popularity of the game after our 1.0 launch.
Misc Bug fixes
- Fixed warp-in AI bots slowdown failing in atmosphere of gas giant, causing capital ships to fall to their death shortly after being spawned
UI / HUD / Menus
- Added a dedicated UI sound effects volume slider (this can be useful when recording a video)
- Leaderboard now displays the ship class icon for every player (if spawned)
- Fixed death/skull icon being displayed for the player on the starmap despite being well alive
- Tactical screen and radars now automatically zoom out in warp or at high speeds (> 1 km/s)
- Added a speaker icon to VOIP (squad menu and squad MFD)
- Player VOIP chat volume is now independent of global volume (if global volume is set to zero and voice chat isn't, you can still hear people talking in squads)
- Cleaned squad MFD (removed player role and rank icons)
- Replaced all isometric ship class icons in menus with top-down ones (more coherent and easier for new players to recognize the ship's shapes?)
- Fixed "ammo" instead of "energy" warning flashing on active low-energy weapons stats on HUD
- Minor fixes to default MFD layouts for some ships
- Added a credits page (Note: backers list is a huuuge vertical flat list and needs to be adapted to multiple columns at some point)
Misc
- Fixed server shutdown notification popup not showing up
- Added proper unique meshes and materials for all weapons in game
- Removed launchers placeholders
- Added skin-specific paint colors to weapons materials
- Russian localization update thanks to whirsil