BETA 2 is now available. The latest BETA brings several new improvements to Space Impossible. The long overlooked Ownership and Access aspect of the game has been overhauled. Ticeroy and Druminence factions see their return, now balanced and further fleshed out to meet new BETA level of content. Additionally, some new components have been added and tweaking of existing engines has taken place.
You can discuss BETA 2 on Discord or as usual on the Steam Discussion Topic
Patch Notes
Ownership & Access
Ownership and Access has two elements to it. The first is the ability for players to own multiple things at once, and the effects that ownership has on an vessel. Second is the ability for access, either for other players (in multiplayer) or for general faction linked activities. In Singleplayer, when a player takes control of an vessel, they immediately become owner of that vessel, if it was unowned. Should the player leave control, they will still remain owner. In Multiplayer, Ownership and Access gets more detailed, where players will be able to choose to take Ownership of an vessel, and once they do that, they can choose several levels of access for certain activities:
- Control - Ability to fly the vessel
- Construction - Ability to alter vessel in building
- Assembler - Ability to use any equipped Assembler on that vessel
- Docking - Ability to dock into and undock from Hangars on the vessel
- Inventory - Ability to take or add items to inventory
- Manufacturing - Ability to queue manufacturing recipes on Labs
- Components - Ability to take, add or replace components
This also applies to factions, where most factions will allow players unrestricted access if they are of a certain faction standing or higher. This means, when you are an Ally now, it can have a big benefit, like free Construction, free control of factioned vessels and more. It also means if you're playing with friends, you can let them do things like fly your ships, but do not let them steal the components (at least, not easily).
Ownership also sets the groundwork for what will be coming in the near future, which is player factions. Player factions are organizations for players will be able to form in Multiplayer, and allow things like sharing of resources and more. We are still hashing the fine details, but it is now on our development radar.
Content Updates
Ticeory and Druminence are back in as promised. They took a little hiatus to retool and expand their catalogue of ships and stations, and are back with more than ever.
The Ticeroy Navy are a rigid and organized military faction, that values law and order above all else. They are initially apprehensive to new captains, but with some work, their trust can be earned. Their vessels are unique at this time in that they are the only faction to use Slip Drive engines.
The Druminence Federation are a very alien faction. They do not speak everyones language, and rely on computer translations to communicate. No one has ever seen a Druminence species and lived to talk about it. They are generally aloof, but can be seen in groups engaging in interstellar trade and resource gathering. Their ships (and seemingly whole mentality) seems to be circular in fashion, and their vessels feature well generalized designs, and they will prove to be very challenging enemies in combat.
Finally, we have added a number of new engines, including the Slip Drive type of engine (high trust, low acceleration), new weapons like the Magnatronic Blastor, and new tile types, like Energized tiles that have an inherit baseline amount of energy.
Detailed Breakdown
Additions
- ADDED: 'Energized' tile variants - these tile provide energy without need of a reactor
- ADDED: Slip Drive engines - Engine with high thrust but lower acceleration
- ADDED: Magnatronic Blastors Weapons
- ADDED: Warp Core "engines" - these purely enhance max warp factor
- ADDED: 9 Druminence ships
- ADDED: 9 Ticeroy ships
- ADDED: 12 Ticeroy stations
- ADDED: 10 Druminence stations
- ADDED: 9 Druminence turrets
- ADDED: Extra ship spawns to some construction outposts.
- ADDED: "View Tutorial" button to Esc Menu
- ADDED: Unique AI dialogue for the "untrusted" standing for all factions
- ADDED: Bulky Reactors can now be found in loot and trades
Fixes/Updates
- CHANGE: Further reduced "Abandoned Region" template from being picked. This will result in less blown up stations, and more useful stations.
- CHANGE: All regions can be entered from warp via mouse input (similar to ship regions). Head on collision still works as well.
- CHANGE: Rebalanced Plasma Drivers, now high acceleration with lower thrust
- CHANGE: All existing engines received minor thrust boost
- CHANGE: Overhauled item filtering in inventory and construction -All parts of the filter that are separated by spaces unless in quotes must match to return the desire result. -The exclamation point (!) used to invert a search term must now be before any special terms. -Ex: "!cat:weaps !Laser" in the inventory filter will return ALL items that are not weapons and does not contain the word 'laser'.
- CHANGE: Tweaked sized and color of Notification UI (the indicator at top of the screen when picking up items, etc)
- CHANGE: Made loading a universe from the Multiplayer menu function the same (both visually and behind the scenes) as loading a universe in Singleplayer. E.g. upgrading the universe etc.
- CHANGE: Improved logging backups on game shutdown for more accurate error catching.
- CHANGE: Rotation now requires engines OR reactors components to be present in a mount.
- CHANGE: Enhanced "You are here" label on star system map to improve visibility
- CHANGE: Added some error checking logging to Docking mechanics to help track down some player reported bugs.
- FIX: Added missing entry for Acceleration time to Engine tooltips
- FIX: Added some missing Docking related entries.
- FIX: Several fixes related to ship regions moving or not disappearing even when the region has been emptied of AI vessels -Regions wont move if all AI vessels are missing engines -If all AIs have had their bridges destroyed or warped away, when leaving the region it will change the region to a "Debris Field" that will last 30s by default. The Debris Field can be re-entered. -If the region is left completely 100% empty of all items and tiles, the region will disappear as soon as the last player leaves.
- FIX: "Hailing effect" graphics are no longer glitched
- FIX: Mount energy icons no longer cause possibly excessive log prints
- FIX: An issue with faction evaluation when the internal numbers were less than 0. This is a pretty significant bug fix for factions, and should make improving (or losing) faction more reliable now.
- FIX: Issue with projectiles file loading where certain projectiles where incorrectly being saved to universe data. Projectiles that are short lived (like most torpedoes) will not be saved between game sessions.
- FIX: Issue when the Recovery vessel has no mounts causing a game error. However, this vessel will still probably be unflyable upon respawn.
- FIX: Server setting changes should now properly be sent to clients at all times. Settings like sv_gamemode should now function properly on all clients even when toggled on and off quickly.
- FIX: An issue that was a major cause of duplicate ships. A duplicate player ship is a symptom of an issue, not the actual cause, but we are slowly tracking them all down.
- FIX: An issue with hidden factions that was causing an error when doing anything that affected those factions. Ex: It is now possible to again split tiles off your Starter Station. It is not recommended however.
- FIX: Server errors at the start of Construction now get properly communicated to the client. The player should no longer get stuck in the "Pick Assembler" screen.
- FIX: Energy blobs should now always show correctly on ships
- FIX: Mass text labels to use up to 2 decimals instead of the previous non rounding display.
- FIX: Hails from muted players will now be ignored
- FIX: Auto-enter undocked vessel should now work 100% of the time
- FIX: An issue that was causing items to vanish during Construction
- FIX: Hopefully 100% fixed an issue with AI continuing to drift even once the vessel's bridges are destroyed. We found a difficult issue to reliably reproduce and debug, but initial tests suggest it has been eliminated.
- FIX: You should no longer be able to enter a vessel someone is currently editing
Removals
None
COMING IN BETA 3
The next BETA we will be focusing on Star System level of content. We will be looking at Star System size, region density, region types, how the regions within the star system appear to players and how the game behaves or reacts to a player within the star system (spawning aggressive fleets, possible special events, etc).