Dear all, first of all sorry for such a long delay. I was down with a viral infection that had effectively halved my productivity. Secondly, there were some urgent bugs found that had to be fixed and I had to conduct extra tests to ensure that nothing else is broken after the fix.
BuildID : 522155
In any case, this is a reasonably huge patch and will have quite a few things packed in it.
Foresight OST
As a token of appreciation towards those who had supported Foresight when she was first launched, we've included 2 original soundtracks of Foresight in 256kbps mp3 under your main game folder \OST.
1) Cloudy Cosmic.mp3
2) Suspicion.mp3
These 2 tracks are available for free. More tracks may be included in future patches BUT they will be removed at a certain point in time. Therefore, if you like our OST, please save them elsewhere to continue to enjoy them.
Cloud Cosmic - Written originally for mission 10, depicting its situation
Suspicion - Written originally for mission 15, also depicting its situation.
For those who've played these missions, you might notice that they're always the 1st song on the list to be played whenever the mission starts at the beginning.
Implementations
1) Implemented Fleet View that represents the view of a fleet when you select your fleets. It has several important features in it, ie,
a) (prompt) Evacuate!
b) Auto-assignment of Fleet Advisors (a free officer must be onboard one of your ships in the fleet)
c) ETA timer for estimated time to arrive at destination that you've set. It could also be a patrol craft you've crafted. The timing is based on the slowest ship in the fleet.
d) Viewing of ships in its situation, ie, alike multi-selection view, except that you can't choose individual ship types due to the possibility that they may be at different sectors at one time.
2) Multiple construction/spawning system. You could now select multiple builders and assign individual build/morph orders to them. The game will automatically seek the nearest builder and assigns it to an order and deselecting it from the selection.
(As shown in the V1.06 preview video)
3) Now structures of the same type in general can be grouped.
4) Deployment positions can be assigned to multiple shipyards
5) Multiple shipyards can be selected at once and a single click builds N-number of vessels. Ie, if I select 4 shipyards and click on "Build UNC Frigate" button - 4 frigates will be built AT ONCE.
6) Informed the need for port forwarding to be done for multiplayer games. Ie, now players will know which port Foresight is using for multiplayer.
7) Implemented a fair system in which when a ship's stats are being changed, the player will retain the stats by percentage. Ie, if a frigate's stats was 500/1000 - now if i reduce that max hp to 800, the player will get 400/800 stats. Likewise if I increase the max hp to 1200, the player will get 600/1200.
8) Added auto-correct for range in option menu to avoid out of range crashes.
Balancing
The following balancing has been done to Foresight. SS players will hate me for it but will thank me when playing against another SS player in the future.
1) NSAU Punisher - reduced 5 hull points to 60
2) NSAU Gaunlet - reduced 10 hull points to 45
3) SS Seeker - reduced 300 hp, from 750 to 450.
4) SS Salvager now requires 2 more seconds to spawn
5) NSAU Explorer reduced 100 shields points to 350
6) Normalized ALL command point usage:
- All harvesters and runner class vessels now take ZERO command points
- All anti-fighter class vessels take 2 command points
- All Frigates-class (excluding NSAU Lens Cruiser) takes 3 command points
- All Carriers-class vessels take 5 command points
- All Siege-class vessels take 6 command points
- All Destroyer-class vessels take 9 command points
7) Corrected the size of UNC Democracy hangar. Should have been 6 instead of 16.
8) All special ships in the game will no longer take up command points. I can't mention here due to potential spoilers.
9) SS Bastion and SS Citadel will both take additional 4 seconds to spawn
10) SS Bio Turret now requires an additional 2 more seconds to be built
11) SS Salvager is now slower by 16%. (max speed)
Fixes
- FIXED the problem where players alt+tab out of Foresight under Steam Overlay and tries to click to return to the game; nothing happens and the player is FORCED to terminate the game via a task manager. This is now fixed - at least for Windows 7 (since I've tested and can only test on Win7). When you alt+tab out and want to return to Foresight, just click on the icon below and wait. Don't click too many times. The game will automatically resume itself at most by 10 seconds.
- Fixed a bug in mission 22 where the skybox isn't created IF a game is loaded to enter that mission.
- Fixed a bug in default options where the EVA Frequency option is given at the wrong index. As evidenced in SMASH's video on Foresight, his EVA Frequency option is MISSING. This shouldn't be and has since been fixed.
- Fixed a bug where the total fleet capacity is not properly updated when a ship leaves.
- Fixed a bug where operations relying on a shuttle-flag doesn't work. (internal operations that might affect fleet behavior)
- Fixed a bug where strange particles may appear out of nowhere or not appear at all. This is evident when SS Pulvizer fires its secondary weapon and hit - no hit particles were generated.
- Improved skirmish AI and adjusted some behavior. Now they'll come after you if you attack their base.
- Fixed a bug when you return to main menu or restart the mission, the icon flag of a deployment position still remains.
- Fixed the weird edit box highlights and cursor position. Engine-level fix.
- Fixed a bug where you can't follow your own ships, enemy ships or move to your own ship.
- Fixed a bug where pressing special keys along with the action key can still trigger an action. Now it's much stricter and ONLY dormant mode can get away with special keys (due to the fact that it needs CTRL and SHIFT to switch states).
- Fixed a bug where you try to build a structure, a temporary placement structure appears (the green/red semi-transparent preview) and then you suddenly press a group number or select a fleet, the preview structures goes into a limbo and follows your cursor despite not being able to be placed.
- Prologue cutscene cursor is now hidden and disabled until the cutscene skipped or finished.
- Fixed a bug in the skirmish AI when you load from saved game fresh from a new start, the AI goes limp. This doesn't happen if you were playing the same skirmish map before and you reload the mission.
- Multiplayer: Scoreboard now will print your given NAME (before you join or host a server).
- Multiplayer: Found deployment position flag appearing all over the place (FIXED)
V1.07 Preview
- Further improvement of skirmish AI (phase 1)
- Fixing of known bugs that can't be fixed for now.
- Implementation of a stats collector, in which will be used for achievements in the future.
- Beefing up multiplayer to be more self-sustainable, ie, can connect without the need to manually do port forwarding.
(As of now, no more UI will be implemented, except the multiplayer lobby which will be done later)
Developer badly needs a rest to recover from his viral infection. Therefore, any work will only start this Friday (13th Feb) or next Monday. (16th Feb)
P.S. - The Foresight team will be resting on the following Chinese/Lunar New Year holidays: 18th - 25th Februrary.
P.P.S. - Foresight and the Foresight team will be at GDC 2015 San Francisco, starting from 27th Februrary till 11th March. Support during this period will be sproadic at best. We seek your understanding for this matter. Work will still be done while we're there, though the work rate will not be as high as normal.