December is upon us! With the last month of the year incoming, we're going for a pretty amazing bucket list for the final month of the year.
Sirius Online 1.1b will contain the following:
The New
- For those battling with Resolution Issues (Hey, @BigRowdy!), I've written a new Screen Size Detector, reading the Screen Values directly from the Windows API instead of asking your GPU what it can do, mostly resulting in 1080p Fudgery everywhere.
- From 1.1b onward, the Market will get a few new Items, high in Cost, but very useful. And, while No Mans Sky is teasing it all along, I made the same, just faster: Bases. Once you bought a base (2 Mil Creds upwards), you can call construction drones, coming from the next station and assembling your defense tower. This defense tower cannot be constructed within 50km of a Station, a Pirate Hub or any Belt. It will recharge your Shields and repair you for free, can, however, be shot down by other players while you're online. Future Stations will include refineries, updating your resources into higher tier resources and defense platforms, shooting players of the opposite faction or NPCs.
- The UI gets a basic revamp - Color Scheme gets toned down to a black/grey with better readable Icons, better Unification along the way.
- Global Mission, a makeshift way to do things together, is getting removed, for network stability reasons. However, the new Missions Window will be, instead of its former refinery, holding up to four missions and a Progress bar. These missions WILL Reset on each relog! Do them in your session or lose them. The Missions on the Sidebar are gone for Visibility.
- Treasures are back with a few changes: New Ship Graveyards, giant scrap fields can be scoured for lost freight (on Saran), or entire Ship Hulls (Bullpup) to salvage. Be prepared for some fun stuff in the unexplored space.
- [Experimenting with this] Police NPC may be roaming the belts by random chance, fighting the AI. Don't shoot them by accident if you don't want an aggression timer... even though... they might drop fancy loots...
The Changed
- Space is big. In this case, not big enough. So again, I extended the universe fourfold, so there should be content from -2000 | 0 | -2000 to 2000 | 0 | 2000. This will make space much more explorable.
- The Transporting NPCs are not freeloading anymore, but actually doing their thing. They are transporting goods from Station to Station, are in a neutral faction and are influencing the market.
- Every station has now neutral defense turrets. If you attack a freighter, you'll get an aggression timer and are no longer able to recharge inside the forcefield. You will be attacked by the station turrets and any eventual Police Ships.
The Nerfs
- Fun thing, The AI Transports are a bit tougher than your usual Transports, sacrificing their HSD Engine for 4x Armor.
- Removed the Profanity from the AI getting killed.
- Updated T.O.A.St. to Version 3.5. T.O.A.St is the short version for "Tactical Oriented Assistive Stupidity", our self-written AI.
The Patch should be launching around the first December week, if we manage to get everything just right.
I hope you are looking forward to this as much as we do, and already wish you a nice First Advent (the last 4 Sundays before Xmas are called Advent here in Germany!)
*waves excitedly* Dex