Summary
This build has a lot of new stuff for seek and destroy (pirates) as well as various fixes, misc. changes, and additions.
Multiplayer video
Changes
- Added Ship AI
- Added Pirate Frigate to seek and destroy
- Added Pirate Submarine to seek and destroy
- Added Pirate Dreadnought to seek and destroy
- Added Pirate Tanker to seek and destroy
- Added Aircraft AI
- Added Pirate Scout to seek and destroy
- Added Pirate Interceptor to seek and destroy
- Added Pirate Chopper to seek and destroy
- Added max additional vessel setting to performance tab for pirates
- Added more nonsense messages
- Added Steam Workshop support for Part Groups
- Added some performance settings for weapon UI aimers
- Fixed a bug where pirates would aggressively fire at their own vessel after killing the player onboard
- Fixed a problem with ragdoll collisions
- Fixed a bug that could cause loading pirates to fail if saved while being destroyed
- Fixed missing destruction for shipping engine
- Fixed missing destruction for large ship anchor
- Fixed a bug with island view when clicking/hovering while loading
- Fixed a bug with spawn positions of activity vessels that could occur when flying
- Fixed a problem with deck controls material group settings
- Fixed a bug where rejecting a starting activity removes the row even though it is not cancelled and is readded later
- Fixed a bug with target lock audio when using missiles and torpedoes
- Fixed a problem firing missiles and torpedoes at the same time
- Fixed a lock on UI shaking issue when firing at moving vessels with deck missile launcher.
- Fixed a bug where firing a stupid amount of missiles could sometimes fire a missile without collision detection
- Fixed some problems with particles and moving through the world
- Fixed a config issue with helicopter stabilizer that prevented it from appearing under airfoils filter
- Fixed a timing issue with handheld harpoon launcher that could cause it to fire inaccurately
- Fixed a bug with point-blank projectile collisions
- Fixed a bug with mixed fixed weapon lock on related to torpedo's targeting above water targets they can't hit
- Fixed a bug with locking on to specific locations on vessels sometimes failing
- Fixed some problems with firing fixed missiles when some are destroyed
- Fixed a config issue with plane engine materials that cause material to not be applied sometimes on launch
- Fixed some redundant behavior with Seek and destroy generation
- Fixed a config issue with jet landing gear front material groups
- Fixed a bug in activities UI where tooltip does not close when accepting / rejecting activities
- Fixed a bug where reused activities rows did not update tooltip descriptions
- Fixed a problem where Treasure hunts could cause a game freeze when attempting to spawn treasure too deep in the water
- Fixed some bugs with timing for pirate spawns in multiplayer
- Fixed a ladder position on large pirate base
- Fixed a bug with distant explosions appearing nearby
- Fixed a momentary bug where server could accidentally control gas / ballast when vessels where spawning on clients
- Fixed a bug where sea monsters could spawn under islands
- Fixed a timing issue where server would not notify clients when activities were completed immediately
- Fixed some cleanup issues with monster hunts when completed
- Fixed a bug where countermeasures work without fuel
- Fixed a bug with saving when you close the menu quickly
- Fixed a bug where using switch seat keys after a vessel is destroyed can cause problems
- Fixed a bug where activities can hide beacons
- Fixed a bug with rotated network parts spawning on clients incorrectly in multiplayer
- Fixed a bug where missiles would not lock on due to gaps in vessel designs
- Fixed a bug where activities UI elements do not display if started by the server while the client is doing other things
- Fixed a bug where tooltip can remain active if the UI element is no longer there
- Fixed a bug where you can get stuck in activities view while in a destroyed vessel
- Fixed a bug where missile cameras where not cleaned up while using other missile cameras
- Fixed a bug where recalling as observer from map does not turn off Nautikin HUD
- Fixed some problems with underwater lock on targeting
- Fixed a bug where client cannot deploy build areas in the correct location
- Toggling parts no longer works on pirate vessels
- Reduced active collisions on Nautikins when seated
- Dead pirates will now be cleaned up after one minute if they die before the end of the mission
- Seek and destroy activities can now include multiple threats
- Changes to size of seek and destroy areas
- Changed rewards for seek and destroy
- Bots no longer register with the vegetation grid
- Mission status will now update immediately after accepting
- Missile lock alarms will now trigger on vessels for targeted uncontrolled subvessels if the parent vessel is controlled
- Missile lock alarms will now trigger for subvessels if the parent vessel is targeted
- Missile lock UI can no longer be hidden by other fixed weapons
- Adjustments to sound priority with alarms vs explosions
- Adjustments to sound priority for explosions
- Crashing vessels into other objects will now do explosive damage at high velocities
- When parts explode on vessels they will now create violent explosions
- Fuel tanks are now extremely volatile to projectiles
- Pirates will now give up when out of fuel by self destructing
- Put a cap on mass vs damage to prevent massive vessels from being near indestructible
- Destruction is now based on the mass of the impacted part rather than the vessel as a whole
- Submarines will no longer be damaged when ramming through schools of fish
- Removed some WIP labels
- Main menu UI audio now respects volume settings
- Vessel aimers will now automatically center groups
- Extended range for various weapon aimer UI
- Pirates will now attack sea monsters
- Activities objectives will now hide when selecting detail regarding an available activity
- Weapon aimers will no longer turn red to targets above / below water when below / above water respectively
- Changed delivery mission description order
- Battle music now works on clients instead of just on the server
- Can no longer recover pirate vessels if you were on the vessel when it was destroyed
Build mode
- Fixed a bug where workshop images are not deleted when you delete a vessel
- Fixed a background error related to deleting mirror parts in build mode
- Fixed a bug cloning complex parts and undo stack
- Fixed a bug with part groups where initial adjustment states are active but invisible preventing selection
- Fixed a bug with part groups where undo does not work for initial state
- Fixed a bug with part groups where ids were not unique when creating multiple instances of a group
- Fixed a bug with global adjustments on rotated parts
- Fixed a bug where rotation adjustments do not update with global adjustments
- Fixed a bug where undo stack changes the global adjustment orientation
- Part groups will now save mirror part configs
- Cloning parts no longer clears child mirror configs
- Changed file structure for part groups from "PartGroups" to "PartGroup"
- Part groups can no longer be placed until the root part has been placed.
- Part groups now save higher resolution "ForWorkshop" previews similar to vessels
- Part groups are now sorted alphabetically
Optimization
- Deck weapon parts
- Dramatically reduced complexity of deck weapon colliders
- Many bot Nautikins
- Seek and destroy
- Vegetation grid ignores bots
- General refactoring for speed
- Minor build mode UI changes
- Vessel network sync
Notes
Personally I like having very detailed colliders when possible so you get that nice crisp feeling when things match up and the object feels more defined rather than just a blob. The problem with that is that Unity (and PhysX, the physics engine) cannot handle it in many cases and there is no way for me to add special handling for performance, only to remove quality in favor of performance. In this case I have dramatically reduced the complexity of the colliders for Deck weapons. Honestly you can't really tell unless you are trying to climb on it. Previously, the player(s) could operate a deck weapon and it would consumes some CPU time, which was fine because there would only be 1 or 2 moving at any given time. Now that I have added AI, the bots will all be looking around and if you have several bot ships that percentage starts to add up quick and causes a severe bottleneck between Unity and PhysX. One of the other reasons I do this is to support deformation of colliders when the vessel is damaged, which may not matter too much on the weapons. Visually it will still take damage, but the collisions will not always change now. I may do this for other parts that really don't need that much detail for 90% of cases.
The seek and destroy save formats have changed, any previously saved in progress missions may appear incorrectly until completed.
Bots are now ignored by the vegetation grid which means when you are not there, they will not be able to crash into trees and rocks. This is mainly for performance reasons.
The tankers can be pretty tough to sink and you may have to get creative. This may become easier later when heavier weapons are added like bombs or sea mines.
Lots of pirates active at once will cause more and more of a performance impact. It is recommended you never have more than 1 mission running at once. There is also a setting that allows you to adjust how many additional pirate vessels can spawn for each mission which you can adjust as desired, just know that if you start one with 3 ships it will be slower than with 1 ship. Other performance settings will also have a heavy affect on this, if you want lots of ships you may need to turn down other settings. I will be working on more performance optimization for this stuff in the future.
Previously if a missile lock occurred on a deck weapon that was not operated by the player no alarm would play but you would obviously still be under attack, so now the alarm will trigger for the main vessel even if you do not currently have control of the deck weapon.
I just want to note that fixing the the global adjustments problem was particularly challenging in terms of determining the problem and how to fix it. It involved a lot of math trial and error for preventing Euclidean poles from flipping while still allowing the adjustments to be positioned relative to the build area and allow adjustment in both directions of the axis at all times. This required many hours. It was sort of a "minor" problem with global adjustments that still worked but inverted the input sometimes. It should work now regardless of the orientation of the part now.
Mirroring parts that have mirrored child parts will still clear mirrored parts, so if you use a part group while mirror mode is on, any mirrored parts saved in that group will be cleared. By the same principal, saving a part group while mirror mode is on will not save child mirrors.
Because of the file structure change with part groups all the files saved that directory will no longer be found by default, however the game will automatically migrate them to the new folder and delete the old one, but I am going to remove that code in a later version of the game because it will never have to run again after a while and become dead code. These files will be moved from "PartGroups" to "PartGroup". This change was made because I intend to add workshop support for part groups and I don't want to confuse the consistency of the tags with "s" when the rest are "Ship", "Aircraft", and "Structure". This was also an issue with consistency in the code I wanted to fix prior to making the part groups more complicated and doing other work related to part groups in this build because it would become harder to change later.
Kamikaze attacks on pirates are now more powerful than missiles.
Pirates may occasionally blow themselves up due to incompetence. I guess that's fine.
Exploding vessels have a certain amount of random damage penetration to emulate shrapnel and save on performance. Sometimes explosions will result in chain reactions that destroy entire ships.
More of a comment about how the fixed weapon aimers work. If they are close enough together the game will join them as a single aimer to prevent overlap, however there is a "sweet" spot where they can be just on the edge of that measurement that the aimers may disjoin or flicker momentarily on the edges of the screen. This is sort of not a bug, it is rather an artifact of how the camera FOV interprets the positions when near the edge of the view portal and is technically showing the correct positions. If this occurs, it is an indication that you need to move your weapons closer together if you want to prevent this flicker / separation or further apart if you want them to always be separated. I have added a note to the backlog to add some options for this such as "Don't join aimers", "Join always", or "Always centered" or maybe change this behavior all together, but it mostly works as intended.
There were some work in progress labels (WIP) on the Activities UI and Controls Keybindings UI, both of these are mostly done now, things may change still so they are still technically WIP, but that final state will be close to this so the WIP has been removed (plus EA is WIP). The Activities UI may be improved over time. The Controls Keybindings UI does everything it needs to do for the time being.
In campaign, pirate aircraft will not be available as a option for seek and destroy until the runway is unlocked.
When sinking a pirate vessel, they will usually be destroyed. It is however possible that they will get stuck on the sea floor somewhere above the pressure tolerance such as near the beach or on a underwater cliff, in cases like this the pirates will slowly fill with water and drown at the same rate you would normally before the mission will complete, so your options are to wait for them to die or send a torpedo. This is especially true for submarines which will not explode underwater until they get very deep.
Note on price and progress, the final price of the game is planned to be 30 USD, the game is currently 25, so the price will go up one more time for release. I was planning on doing this at release to maximize savings for participation in early access, it seems I will have to do that prior to release in order to have a launch discount (a larger form of savings to customers). The price increase and the discount cannot be in proximity per Steam rules so I will increase the price at an arbitrary milestone prior to/near release and that will be the final price. This may be reflected as 1.0 or 0.9.x I have not decided yet, so the actual release may be 1.x. I may simply keep the versioning consistent with work performed rather than scrunching up the numbers at the end and having 0.9.100x.
Guides will be updated soon. I may also upload the pirate vessels to the workshop so you can play with the pirates ships / aircrafts.