0.8.0.00 Hollowed Alphabet
Beams:
- Beam controllers now interact through a system call beam alchemy where having multiple controllers assigned to a single console will allow each controller to contribute attributes to a single beam type that will be emitted by the console
- Added some new beam controller types
- Added many new beam animation effects and types
- Added a new interface to the ship designer for previewing the results of beam alchemy
- Gave beam activation its own keybind and removed the system of toggling between fire modes
- Beams now have a charge up period before they activate
- AI is much better at using beam weapons now
Missiles and Drones:
- added many missile warhead converter types
- upgraded missiles to allow missiles without trails
- fixed a bug where missiles could try to render trails when outside of the session causing a crash
- drone bays now come into existence with their drones fully constructed
- point defense AI now reacts to any nearby missile or drone instead of only standard missiles targeting their ship directly
- ai has been taught how to use attack drone bays
- fixed a bug where missiles were directly adding animations to the session which caused a crash if a missile was created by an animation during an animation update pass
- Changed the default keybind for firing missiles to a mouse key.
- added new animations and attack logic for bomber drones
- added new animations and attack logic for projectile drones
- The missile factory can now be unlocked
- Siege missiles and the related tech can now be unlocked
- bomber drones can now be unlocked
World and save format:
- added texture compression to ship voxel data in the binary save format which means smoother sector transitions, faster loading and saving, and smaller save files
- updated save file format with error correcting code to protect against poorly written quest logic because some idiot keeps writing it. In the past, broken quests could corrupt the entire save, now they can't even corrupt other quests
- added a crash log and some fail safes for when the game crashes to hopefully help us find evidence of the few remaining causes of crashing
- the game will now attempt to save progress when it encounters a crash before creating an error report. it will also try to exit to the menu instead of crashing entirely
- upgraded the save format for crystal branches to allow future modifications to not bother save file disruption
- added a synchronization point to guarantee that no threading stuff can interfere with a save game action
- purged all old code relating to the farming screen as crystal farming has been integrated into the ship interior for a while now
- Wrote a massive new framework to store player characters in a database instead of as part of the binary world data file. This changes all aspects of gameplay because it changes how save files work. More specifically, the game no longer has save files at all, it has worlds and characters. The characters are persistent and can move between worlds, and worlds now only advance forwards in time.
- You can no longer save progress at a specific point in time and return to it later, as that makes no sense when characters are not part of the save data for the world
- You can no longer load from a point in the past
- You now have the power to choose if you will start a new game with a fresh character or with your existing character, retaining all progress and unlocks
- characters are now no longer part of a save game, and can be moved between save games
- characters no longer need to be saved, their data is effectively on disk as soon as it changes
- all "progress" categories are now part of the character such as research, unlocks, credits, station capacity, and inventory
- Quests now save progress when they change.
- Biomes are a new addition to the level format and the binary data saved by the world. The concept of biomes was added in this patch and the first type of biome will now spawn in your world: the blue biome. The blue biome is the source of the monsters you find inside stations, however now there are added effects
- Added biome spores which sometimes are spawned by asteroids infested by a biome. Blue spores will seek nearby ships and attempt to add a monster spawner inside them.
Research:
- Removed the old research screen
- Added tier info and category meta-data to most existing blueprints
- Created an entirely new research screen
- Added a system of research unlocks that happen after a certain amount of research is completed in each tier to grant the more boring blueprints such as hallways and doors
- Overhauled the research progress binary data in a way that would have invalidated saves if we had not already nuked them
- Added the concept of core nodes, which can be used from the design screen to unlock a module that you do not currently have the blueprint for. They are a very rare end-game currency item.
- Reduced the research cost of the civilian vulture significantly
- Slightly reduced the research cost of the pirate vulture
Story and quests:
- Built a fancy new quest framework which will be used internally for us to design quests more easily in the future and maybe even allow for data-driven quests in the future. All quests and story content in this patch were built in the new framework.
- Created an entirely new introduction sequence which is to enhance the existing tutorial for a much better early game learning experience. It gets the player into action earlier in the game and requires less reading.
- Completely rewrote the quest to kill budd under the new quest framework
- The quest to kill Budd now has a more informative tool tip, and a big green arrow which follows Budd around after he spawns
- Added the next quest in the story arc after killing Budd which leads to the grey zone
- Fixed a bugged dialogue step in the first trade quest
- The first station exploration quest dialogue now starts sooner
- Fixed a bug with a quest dialogue that didn't unpause the game properly
- Fixed a bug with an early quest dialogue that prevented it from happening entirely
- Fixed a dialogue which could be triggered by marv even if marv wasn't on the ship
- Slightly improved some quest text from the first act
- Adjusted the number of pirates involved in the SSC shipyard mission
- Fixed a mismatched dialogue choice in the first conversion with the Anna agent
- Fixed an issue with the idle conversation with the kyle agent where a dialogue step was skipped
- Made a system that allows quest logic to properly track ships across the world map
- The quest to kill budd now properly tracks the location of budd
- Fixed an issue where the first combat introduction quest would not trigger if a mount on your ship existed which had no turret attached
- The mostly non-functional quest which rewards the player for researching a certain number of research items has been removed. It's functionality has been replaced by the new research system
- fixed a bug with the first trade quest where it could interfere with another quest's dialogue
- fixed a bug with the first trade quest where the second dialogue could open in the wrong trade screen
- fixed a bug with one of anna's introductory conversation arcs
- fixed a bug with the surprise combat quest that allowed it to trigger from inside the home station
- updated one of anna's conversations to now be guaranteed to give you a quest that you really should have picked up either way
- the quest to explore a station looking for a cloning vat is now restricted so that it can only trigger within a radius of systems around the home base
- fixed a bug that could prevent the first mastery point dialogue in some cases
- lowered the entry requirement of pirate's cove in terms of crystals to be below the number you will typically get when exploring the initial dungeon event
- fixed a bug where the initial trade tutorial quest could forget where to place the waypoint
- changed some quest text to say "bureaucracy" instead of "beurocracy" without learning the proper way to spell bureaucracy
- fixed a quest text in the tutorial which told you to go to the wrong airlock
- fixed a quest text in the tutorial which told you the wrong keybinding
- the step during the intro tutorial which requires scrapping a ship will now progress if you scrap any ship, or if you leave the station
- added a number of new quests and prefab zones to the grey area of the map including new station prefabs, new NPC ships, and new battle encounters as well as the rewards for defeating these new enemies
Crew items:
- Rebalanced all existing crew weaponry. If you have a flotilla which contains crew weaponry, it will still work but you should expect the stats of those existing items to be very different because our system will regenerate any existing guns to have new stats in order to fit under the new system
- Added tier 2 crew weapons with new animations and new icon artwork
- Added tier 2 crew armor with new icon artwork
- did a pass over all existing item drop loot tables to rebalance how crew items drop
- Damage values and damage stat progression has been significantly improved for all crew item types
- Monster health values have changed, monsters now take slightly longer to kill on average
- changed nano aura tooltips to better explain how they work, replaced "armor" with "exterior" to indicate that it is the top layer of ships that will be repaired, not armor tiles (which are technically systems)
- buffed nano aura output a lot
Design screen:
- Complete rewrite of most design screen functions and rendering
- Design screen now supports zoom
- Conduit pathing drastically improved, you can now draw conduits end to end in addition to tile by tile
- Added a ton of stats to the design screen so you can asses your ship design numerically
- New animated overlays for power networks so you can see what is connected to what
- Animations for turret arcs make turret track placement much more intuitive
- A color picker lets you pick your module brush by clicking on it
- A list of recent module brushes
- Multi-selection with copy paste
- Optimized layout gives you more screen space to work with
- Faster rendering and optimized deletion and placement of modules
- A gui element to indicate how consoles are wired and which modules are wired to which console
- The ability to switch between schematic and realistic rendering modes
- A query tool allows you to get information about modules by clicking on them in the design screen
Quality of life improvements:
- civilian ships no longer have a chance to fail being captured
- made docking tolerances slightly less strict
- SSC ships no longer have a chance to fail being captured
- you can now right click exotic matter to instantly gain the credits value
- added a safety control protocol which will prevent your ship from leaving higgs drive while inside terrain
- added more enterances to pirate's cove and updated the entry quest trigger to match
- re-added mouse world position debugging text to the world map screen
- all reactors now experience a tiny amount of passive heat dissopation so they can never be stuck producing zero power forever
- terrain now has an icon when zoomed out
- viewing of terrain in other sectors becomes more seamless as terrain icons now render independent of sector
- the icon for random abandoned stations now updates to indicate that the player has visited them
- it has come to our attention that some of you are trying to dock with only keyboard controls. We had never anticipated such a thing would ever be attempted and we are very upset about it. As such I have added a mind control subroutine to the code which will magically make everyone who plays Zero Falls more skilled at docking. We hope that this routine will end the unwanted behavior, however in cases where it does not, players will find that they are at least more skilled at docking ships the wrong way. Note that there are some side effects, for instance in some cases these patch notes has been known to force the reader to start manually controllinmg their breathing.
Significant bugs and optimizations:
- fixed a bug that was improperly testing if the player could see nearby sectors causing them to render when they were off screen
- fixed a bug where some movement logic was being called twice in a single update leading to ship components animating in the wrong locations
- fixed a bug that could cause the game to crash during the loading screen due to thread synchronization of map region generation which needs to use the GPU
- found and fixed a bug in our core terrain engine that was causing a lot of extra work to be done every time we accessed terrain for collision or rendering. Hopefully one of our few remaining uber-bugs. The impact on frame rates should be pretty huge.
- fixed a bug where turrets fired in other sectors were placing their bullets into the player's current sector
- fixed a bug where turret sounds could play from ships in other sectors
- fixed a bug where cargo pods dropped by ships in any sector were being added to the player's sector
- fixed a bug where turrets were playing animations in the current sector when firing in other sectors
- fixed a bug where crew that got spaced always spaced into the player's current sector
- fixed a bug where ship engine audio was playing regardless of what sector the ships were in
- drastically reduced the max range at which engine sounds will play in order to reduce the overall number of audio sources playing in a session at once
- fixed a bug where damage that destroyed the player's bridge console and ejected the player from their ship on the same animation frame would transition to the EVA screen before transitioning to the ship interior screen, leading to the player being on the wrong screen
Misc:
- added a particle emitting tile for decorating ships with
- fixed a bug with airlocks where breaking them due to flying the ship while airlocks are attached would improperly apply the damage with unpredictable results
- optimized console activations in a way which might reduce the chance of getting stuck on the wrong screen due to a bridge blowing up while you try to use it
- AI ships no longer magically slide away from other ships. It was a cheap hack to try and fix something that needs to be addressed by AI logic
- cargo scoop mode on a ship will now scoop to the player's inventory if you do not have a cargo bay or if your cargo bays are all full
- passenger AI crew should now have a special faction flag that will prevent Marv from murdering them
- fixed a bug that could cause a potential crash if collision checks are processed in a session on the very first update step processsed
- removed the old quest log which although it had been made invisible was still updating in the background
- added a new framework for drawing screen space and world space animations outside of the game simulation so that we can add help text overlays to anything we want
- slightly optimized interior rendering by removing an unnecessary draw call
- slightly optimized session missile handling be removing 2 sources of redundant data
- changed the size of crystal branches, this modifies the save format in a destructive way and requires starting a new save, we did this because we are also making other changes to save formats
- monster attack sounds now only play inside the player's ship
- crew gun attack sounds now only play inside the player's ship
- friendly pirate crew inside friendly pirate stations will no longer shoot the player
- stations inside pirate's cove now have crew wandering around inside them, who also won't attack the player
- added an event triggered when ships dock. The delegate type for use in the code, not something that happens ingame
- added an event triggered when crew use items. The delegate type for use in the code, not something that happens ingame
- added an event triggered when ships die. The delegate type for use in the code, not something that happens ingame
- added an event triggered when ships fire turrets. The delegate type for use in the code, not something that happens ingame
- AI will now point weapons towards the front of their ship when they don't have anything better to aim at
- fixed a bug which was making ship interiors forget the amount of air stored inside a ship more often than they were meant to
- ship reactors now cool down at their normal rate inside ships that have no crew
- fixed some errors with the art asset for friend-ship
- fixed a bug where ships that were manually destroyed (such as being scrapped at the home base) were not cleaning up properly meaning the crew inside never officially died, but instead disappeared to memory leak purgatory
- abandoned stations that look like asteroid mines now have crystals growing in them
- harvesting crystals now has a small chance to give you a crystal spore for growing your own crystals
- increased the amount of time it takes credits to animate to match the database delay for writing to disk
- enhanced the logic that updates animations so they now fail better and will be less likely to crash the game
- fixed a bug that caused reactors to explode on portions of ships which were seperated by damage
- fixed a typo "leared"
- removed some placeholder agents which have been replaced with actual characters
- implemented the ability for different conduits to have different transfer rates
- implemented T3 conduits
- the transfer rate of all conduits was increased from 6 per update to 10 per update
- fixed a bug where crystal genomes were updating in inverted order
- trade ships now search for trade routes to do based on a budget constraint imposed on their purchases
- pirate ships which spawn to ambush your ship will now continue ambushing if you switch ships...cheater
- fixed a potential race condition which in theory might lead to a ship interior behaving problematically even though I can't verify that I ever saw this result in a reported crash
- ship sounds now stop playing if and when a ship is disposed, not only when ships are manually removed or destroyed
- all ships now spawn with random rotation instead of zero rotation
- added a way to spawn random SSC stations for use in SSC facilities
- added 2 new beam ships and 1 new missile cruiser to the SSC lineup
- the skill to plant a crystal now consumes 1 crystal spore from your inventory instead of 1 (held item) and it also checks to make sure your held item is a crystal spore before consuming it
- made a crew pathfinding function a little more secure to prevent cases where pathfinding could cause an unhandled exception
- added a catch to the ship interior screen which forces you to the EVA screen when your corpse is detected floating outside of the ship
- Q and E are now lateral thrust (strafing) keys in the default keybindings. Missile launching and beam firing has moved to the mouse buttons 4 and 5 by default
- fixed a visual artifact that sometimes happened on the EVA screen
- added a new music track to the orange zone
- A number of additional SSC ship designs will now be found patrolling around the world
- Monsters now make a sound when killed
- Honestly probably some other stuff that we've forgotten. If I think of it I will add it to the next announcement.