Captains, be advised that issuing a hail order now automatically sets your ROE to Defend. This was done to minimize the number of interstellar incidents that were occurring as warships cruised up on enemy ships intending to talk, and their overeager crews opened fire before communications could begin.
You can now filter the ships in your fleet! Ships can be selected by crew, passengers, ship types, damaged status and cargo type. So… no more hunting around for that ship with the Irenic passengers, or that time-critical fuel cargo. And you can quickly toggle the filter on and off at the bottom of the fleet list. There’s a little tweaking yet to be done on that, so expect some additional polish there, and for the time being if you find the filter window doesn’t want to go away, hover any ship in your fleet.
In preparation for upcoming minefield events (yup), we made mines targetable. You probably know that you can recover your own unused mines for ore. Well, enemy minefields can now also be cleared if you have a minelayer (gaining you ore). So we’ll probably rename that command to “Minesweep” or “Sweep mines” for the next version. Head over to our Discord and vote for that and other things as well!
Trade and repair events are now more evenly spaced throughout the universe. Rejoice.
I expanded our emergency events to include one for each faction.
If you choose a lifeboat to leave behind due to a water riot, an appropriate dialog now displays instead of a blank one.
The collider for the cargo container was improved, making it easier to select.
We lifted an artificial limit on the number of missions that can simultaneously run.
We added a couple more save points to feedback and automatically reported bugs to help us track down those pesky bugs. We also increased the amount of info saved to our logs.
I created an animation for the Maroon action, added a proper icon for the Rover Hideyhole, and mocked up the ‘ship joining the fleet’ animation.
If the player is playing from the tutorial or has asked for hints, there’s a new bit of dialog that pops up letting the player know they’ve unlocked higher level ships when the faction’s relationship goes to neutral.
I have a new event action, clearOrders, which allows me to issue the equivalent of an Abort action on any ship. Armed with that I made some adjustments to several events.
I improved a few events in other mysterious ways: The Hunt, The Unexpected, all cache events and The Farmship Quest.
New content: The Family Farmship (quest).
I also have another event action, isROE, which allows me to set triggers based on the ROE of a certain ship. I’ve used these primarily for testing, but I’m sure I can think of some entertaining ways to use them in events.
User Interface
Scouting results are a little more clear thanks to some tooltips when you hover them. We added several tags based on the quality of each resource, as well as tags that should invite players to scout when they hover unscouted resources.
We added quite a number of tooltips, including showing a warning when the selected ship has no free cargo space. The speed slider now has a tooltip, and so does the cargo transfer action.
I made quite a few behind-the-scenes adjustments, finally replaced the checkbox and X with final art, tightened up some window placement, and added two new animations: confiscate and maroon.
The attack command is now greyed out and a tooltip displays if you try to attack an armored ship with a mining laser.
Hovered cargo items persist the same way that weapons do, allowing the player to compare more easily.
We did a little work preparing for localization, pulling a few stray instances of non-localizable content into the system. This is ongoing work.
If you protect an enemy ship (as you might need to in certain missions) a tooltip warning is shown.
A good bit of work was done cleaning up the contextual commands for crew, rescue, evacuate, maroon, cargo and crew transfer. They’re all the same command but context is used to give better cues for what is possible. These commands should now appear as designed.
Bugs Kasmunched
I was really disappointed that we deployed with a couple of nasty bugs last week. So I spent a few days creating a large suite of interlocking events that help me QA the game before we deploy. I continue to add to those tests.
We rushed out a couple of updates after deploying 1.34 last week. One had to do with the new quest system. Another one took care of a problem with attacking with missiles or shields.
Some bugs related to minefields were fixed.
Waypoints are getting better about being cleared, but they’re not quite there yet.
A bug related to transfer orders on shieldships was also taken care of.
Some glaring errors in the scan dialog were fixed.
Heru nuked a bug that cropped up when hovering ship slots.
The battleship orbiting your current destination on the starmap has returned.
Ships briefly didn’t appear in the fleet list when they joined, but that’s all fixed now.
You can now destroy ships with missiles, muhuhahaha.
The transfer window overrides custom event tooltips, instead displaying appropriate contextual tooltips when hovering crew and cargo.
Stations were incorrectly showing operating crew in scan and transfer dialogs, that has been taken care of. Passengers were also briefly not showing correctly when doing a crew transfer.
Duplicate triggers in The Unceremonious were fixed.
Found and fixed a duplicate tag that was wreaking havoc on a contextual tooltip.
Shieldships were not disabling ships, but they do now.
Made a minor tweak to The Decoy fixing a timer that shouldn’t have been visible.
An event was throwing strange hail messages, but that’s been corrected.
An inconsistency in our event tags was corrected, which corrected some lingering issues.
Right mouse button icons should appear as designed in transfer dialogs.
Known issues
The fleet filter dialog can stick; hovering a ship in the fleet filter unsticks it.
The fleet filter button sometimes doesn't register a click; clicking the scroll down arrow below it first should help.
Known issues, Linux edition
When submitting feedback in Linux the game says “no Internet connection” but we still receive your feedback.
When alt-tabbing from the game in Linux, the sound can go wonky. Restarting restores sound to normal.