patch 0.6.3.00 next weekend
We are in the final stages of polish and debugging for the 0.6.3.00 patch, lets do a rundown of everything that's new because this patch is getting released in a week.
But first, look at this explosion!
You can see the new targeting UI and missile trails in this one.
World upgrades
Simply put the world looks a lot better now. We've removed the seams when travelling between sectors, and the backdrops have been overhauled.
The new backdrops don't just take advantage of the seamless nature of sessions, they also include all new art and new code designed to explode your mind with epic vistas of volmetric 3d clouds that process both reflected and transmitted light accurately in 3d.
They look like this.
It feels like a completely different game world now.
New modules
We've got some new gameplay mechanics in the form of new interactive modules.
Engineering rooms allow you to transfer power from the systems you don't care about to the systems you need most. They add a new layer of depth to ship customization hopefully without making ships too complex for the average gamer. The interface is simple and easy to use, but also unfinished because I added a new screen and now Jan has to design yet another UI. Oops. You can use them to transfer power from life support to weapons, in fact that's the only suggested use. They will make your guns reload and fire faster, and if you don't blow up the other guy you're just going to lose all that air anyways.
We have also added a new type of missiles, siege missiles, who's launchers are much larger and who's attacks can be devastating but hard to land. They are in the engine and have fancy new graphics but we are still tweaking their functions. Expect to see large ships lobbing unguided torpedos at eachother and pummeling eachother from long range with cruise missiles in the near future.
New missions
We finally created some content which has been planned forever and is long overdue: NPC missions. In economic sectors of space you can expect to sometimes find NPC characters in bars who want things from you. Talk to them to find out what they want.
These missions, in addition to fleshing out the content in the orange sectors, are aimed at helping the overall pacing of the game. There are two types and each solves an existing problem with the game that has been subject of much discussion in the forums.
The first type is Taxi missions, namely crew which will ask to be flown somewhere. These guys sometimes offer to unlock a new technology, and they are smart enough to not offer tech you already have unlocked. That means if you are hunting for that one last blueprint and all you ever find are duplicates, maybe try some taxi missions. Oh, and make sure your ship has a spare bedroom.
The other type of mission is going to be more exciting for people who play with mods, because one of the most requested features since we released flotillas was the ability to figure out where the heck those things have spawned. Well assasination missions will do just that, because usually (but not always) the people who need to be assasinated will be chosen from spawned flotillas. This system comes with a warning however...ships spawned from the workshop are not guaranteed to be a fair fight.
New game mode
We've noticed that a lot of players want to just play around in the ship editor for shorter game sessions. We don't mind. Also, since we just overhauled session logic, suddenly it becomes very easy for us to produce new types of game mode which take advantage of custom session logic. Because it was so easy, we created a new one for this patch where you fight endless waves of ships of increasing difficulty inside a single smaller size sector. It doesn't offer much for story, but it is a great way to test your ship designs against real enemies without needing to spawn them yourself.
In other words it lets you take a ship design and jump directly into the action. We also fixed mastery points so they can be used outside of singleplayer. It was a needed architectural improvement that happens to benefit the test arena.
Quality of life improvements
If you recall raging about how broken the "simple" feature of EVA remains after all this time, well then I sure hope you appreciate this update. Seriously, EVA is one of the most complex things in the game and we worked on it a lot this patch so we really hope it stops being broken once and for all...please? Anyhow in testing it seems to work without issue so I'll cross my fingers and hope that this one hasn't evaded me again.
We also added some other requested features, spawned ships now remember your previous weapon selection for instance. You all can thank the guy who sent me a screen shot of a ship with like 200 turrets on it for that one. I had no idea.
There's also lots of bug fixes and optimizations. The optimization pass was needed because the game now runs multiple session simulations at once and because one person sent me a save game where so much of the universe was explored that it actually began lagging the game. In the end I hope that the game will run even smoother than before even though we have technically increased the simulation complexity.
If it doesn't I'm going to ask why you are still running WTF on integrated graphics...that was never advised. go to the settings screen to see what GPU your OS has chosen for you, you might be surprised by the results!
New UI
Good news everyone: Jan has officially grown frustrated with making art for my crummy UI code and has started directly rewriting parts of the UI. The results are fantastic. He has stolen logic from his own mod tool (which we have linked on our workshop) and gone on a UI overhaul rampage. It's great.
Check out the new targeting GUI and the new conversation dialogue GUI for prime examples. Also we have better font rendering now. Though most of us engineer types will likely never notice I have been assured that the new text kerning is top notch and that all artist types with a sense of aesthetics will notice the improvement immediately.
Other stuff?
I might have done some work on improved workshop support for adding locations and terrain and worldgen and...well all sorts of stuff. News of that later.
We will probably upload the patch right before the weekend.