19/3/2017
Patch 0.11
Here are the patch notes for the current patch! The patch will go live on the beta branch until tomorrow, and if everything goes well, we'll set it live tomorrow.
Flight Mechanics Revisited
There have been a lot of adjustments to flight mechanics and the pancake thrusters mechanic/exploit has been removed, since it was never meant to be used the way people used it. Thrusters will now scale with volume. While cleaning up the (very old) code thruster stats calculations, I removed several artificial enhancements to thrusters and flight behaviour of the ships. For example, thrusters had several enhancements that ended up giving them 6 times the power that they should have. These enhancements have been removed, but in turn I buffed thruster strength so while it shouldn't cancel each other out, thruster strength hasn't just been reduced to 1/6 of your ship. There was a similar restriction to engines, which I removed, but in turn reduced the power of a single engine. So your ships should accelerate worse with less engines, but a lot better with more engines.
However,
YOU WILL HAVE TO REDESIGN YOUR SHIPS.
In order to make up for the changed thruster mechanics, and since I think that thrusters were kind of an uber-strong block that does everything (which I'm not a fan of), I added a few new blocks: Directional Thrusters, Gyro Arrays and Inertia Dampeners. The old thruster block still exists.
Directional Thrusters will work just like normal thrusters, but their power will be along a single (configurable) axis, so you have more and better control about the stats of your ship.
Gyro Arrays will only affect the rotational speed of your ship. Their placement is not as important as with thrusters, since they apply torque directly to your ship. On the other hand, you don't have lever mechanics (like with thrusters) that will allow you to get better stats depending on the distance to the center of mass of the ship. They also scale with material strength, so you might want to upgrade them along the way to the center of the galaxy.
Finally, Inertia Dampeners are a block that creates subspace friction and that has a very high energy consumption. Due to the special properties of Iron and Avorion, Inertia Dampeners can only be built out of these two materials, and they scale with material strength. Since they create subspace friction, they will reduce drifting and can brake your ship, but they won't be able to accelerate your ship.
So your ship will feel different after this patch, but with the new blocks I'm giving you the tools to get the old flight feeling back. I tested a few community ships from the forums and found that the changes required to get the old feeling back were not that intrusive and could be made in a couple of minutes.
In order to not let the newtonian-flight-crew feel left out, I split up gyros, inertia dampeners and thrusters into several subsystems and you can now disable the (energy-intensive) flight assist for a boost in available energy. So if you like the feeling of drifting through space, you're going to love this. And configurable pro- and retrograde markers.
Groups
In this patch I'll introduce groups. You'll be able to invite other players via the chat or a new menu entry when interacting with their ships (however, since this is done by a script, this will only work on new ships and drones). Players of the same group will be highlighted in the UI and on the map. Please keep in mind that this is not the Alliances update, we're currently working on that, but I found it important to release the current development progress since it has a few important changes.
Server Browser
Last big feature (but not least): I added a server browser and servers with the "listed" option enabled will be listed here. You can also configure passwords for your server if you want to play by yourselves.
Patchnotes
So here are the full patch notes for this patch. I've been typing these up from the last patch to the default branch, not the last patch to the beta branch, so you might see some features again in these patch notes.
Gameplay
- Flight mechanics have been revisited
- Improved the flight behaviour, especially related to ship inertia (your ships might drift more now)
- Removed artificial 6x power boost to thrusters
- Increased power of thrusters
- Rotational speed cap is now 4.0 rad/s (from 2.0 rad/s)
- Docks regenerate on stations as long as there are less than 2 docks
- Added a new repair mode
- Added a window that shows repair costs
- Repairs to blocks can be discarded from this window
- Repairs can be done block by block
- Client sided ships steer more precisely
- Mines buy a range of goods
- Energy systems can be toggled on and off one by one
- Players can now set a repair dock as their reconstruction site where they will respawn on death
- Added "neutral zones", sectors where no attacks will happen and where players can't deal damage to each other
- Ships are protected while changing sectors and while loading screen is visible on client (this can be disabled with a server setting)
- Added an AI command for salvaging
Groups
- Players can invite other players to groups
- Use /invite [player] to invite players to your group
- Use /join [player] to join a player's group
- Use /leave to leave a group
- Players can also interact with ships of another player to invite them (works only for new crafts and drones)
- Members of the same group are shown in the top left of the screen
- Members of the same group are highlighted on the map
- Members of the same group are highlighted in the sector
UI
- Resources are no longer shown during flight mode in favor of the group UI
- Resources are shown when interacting or in menus (basically whenever you might need to know exact numbers)
- Total and relative resources are shown when picking up resources and money
- Camera is reset to front-view when leaving building mode
- Ship tab shows missing blocks
- Mail window has a filter + combo box for players
- Improved calculations for ships being too big to fit through wormholes/gates
- Added display of center of mass in building mode
- Added preview for thruster holes in build mode
- Added pro- and retrograde markers
- Fixed and improved visuals of systems upgrade tab
- Loadingscreen tips are no longer bold so they have better readability
- Added tooltips stating what turret control systems actually do
- Added explanation to m/s in loading screen
- Added scrolling to F1 online players list
Graphics
- Implemented new visuals for thrusters
- Shields no longer obstruct particle effects like fog, shots, sparks etc.
- Reduced brightness of thruster flames
New Blocks:
- Directional Thruster
- Similar to thrusters, but their forces only work in one dimension
- Gyro Array
- Strength scales with material
- Gyros increase rotational speed of the ship in a specific direction
- Placement doesn't matter (in contrast to thrusters), except for how the center of mass of the ship is shifted by the mass of the gyro
- Inertia Dampeners
- Creates subspace friction that brakes your ship
- Only Iron and Avorion can provide the physical properties required to generate subspace friction
- Inertia Dampeners can only be built from Iron and Avorion
- High energy consumption
Balancing
- Thrusters now scale with volume, not surface
- Surface only affects the distribution of forces created by thrusters
- Large surface -> large portion of force in that direction
- Increased strength of thrusters
- Thrusters are about ~62% as strong as engines
- Rebalanced engines
- Removed artificial restrictions on engine scaling with volume
- Reduced power of engines
- Engines are now worse when you have few engine block volume, but better when you have more
- Military outposts buy electromagnetic charges
- Adjusted reputation loss when destroying crafts of an AI faction
- Loss for destroying fighters is 1500, down from 20000
- Loss for stations is 50000, up from 20000
- Relation loss for other non-ship objects are 5000
- Ships remain at 20000 reputation loss
- Reduced factory sale ratios from up to +-50% of good price to +-30%
- Factories no longer have abundant amounts of very valuable goods on creation
- Solar panel price depends on surface area as well now
Server Browser
- Added a server browser for steam servers
- Servers that have the "listed" property enabled will be listed in the browser
Server
- Added password protection for servers
- Implemented binding to IPs with steam networking enabled
- Several commands now work with player indices and steam IDs
- Affected commands: /ban /banip /unban /give /groups /kick /teleport
- Added a /playerinfo command that prints indices and other info about players (mods only)
- Added a /status command that will print some status and profiling infos about the server
- Added a /selfinfo command that will show a player administrational info about himself
- Administrators don't undergo whitelist, blacklist or password check when logging in
- Amount of generator threads are configurable via command line and server.ini
- Added the console input command handler for windows
- Implemented reconstruction of faction index from files on error
- Implemented pruning of bad ips from blacklist
- Implemented adding of IPs to steam network server clients
- Added some warning messages when potentially problematic server settings are detected
- Improved deletion of large wreckages
- Deletion disabled for generated station wreckages
- Deletion time of large and small wreckages is configurable
- Improved wreckage despawning behaviour
- Profiling of sectors on server can be enabled and disabled with a server setting (disabled by default)
Scripting API
- Implemented a sector.lua script that is always present and that can be used for sector-static initialization
- Tooltip of ui elements can be reset by passing nil as tooltip
- Respawn sector of players can be set and retrieved
- Player to player damage can be disabled for sectors
- Added a script command for sending chat messages on client
- Added server-sided chat commands that can be issued from scripts
Misc
- Client waits for server to start up in singleplayer
- Improved data writing and securing for less file corruption
- Removed some output from shader compiler when not needed
- Limited the amount of chat messages that can be sent per 5 seconds
Known Issues
"These issues will be resolved until tomorrow, when the patch will move over to the default branch for everybody."
- Ship generator not using gyros
- /leader command to make another player the leader of the group
- Scrolling of turrets in current ship tab
Bugfixes
"As usual, user bug reports are marked with [UBR]. Thanks to you guys and keep it up!"
- Fixed a rare server stall when a player is written to file
- Fixed typos in german localization
- Fixed a server crash when loading corrupt data
- Fixed several typos in lots of places
- Fixed a crash in mouseover for UIListBox
- Sector changes have to be confirmed by the server before they're marked on the map
- Fixed thruster strafing being unaffected by energy efficiency
- Fixed Hyperspace Core processing power to normal
- [UBR] Key bindings no longer reset with each update
- [UBR] Fixed Steam achievements related to Steam stats not working on Windows
- [UBR] Fixed a few issues related to Windows UI scaling
- [UBR] Fixed smuggler mission targets being generated inside the ring
- [UBR] Fixed rename squad input window
- [UBR] Fixed a massive performance issue with miners when no more asteroids are present
- [UBR] Fixed scripting data not being saved on server shutdown
- [UBR] Fixed scrolling in cargo tab
- [UBR] Fixed scrolling in cargo transfer window
- [UBR] Fixed wormholes going into the ring
- [UBR] Fixed crash in trading overview
- [UBR] Bottan no longer jumps away only because relations are bad
- [UBR] Fixed building preview stats (especially brake stats) being buggy
- [UBR] Fixed an exploit related to chat
- [UBR] Fixed several server crashes when receiving garbage
- [UBR] Fixed a crash related to faulty deadlock detection on Windows
- [UBR] Fixed headquarters not showing up in sector overview
- [UBR] Fixed a crash in UITextBox when a new text was set and scrolling was too far right
- [UBR] Fixed swoks not attacking on one dialog option
- [UBR] Fixed allied ships attacking each other when escorting
- [UBR] Fixed an error where players would get recreated each time they log in
- [UBR] Fixed broken interaction with wormhole diverter and endboss
- [UBR] Fixed broken reach of factory-produced weapons (ScriptWeapons's reach modifier works as intended now)
- [UBR] Fixed rigid beam weapons not working on ships that have shields
- [UBR] Fixed black shields on low-end GPUs
- [UBR] Fixed performance issues on galaxy map
- [UBR] Fixed overflow in crew numbers
- [UBR] Fixed naming of newly founded stations
- [UBR] Fixed mission coordinates going out of bounds of map in several missions
- [UBR] Fixed gates crossing the barrier to the center
- [UBR] Fixed missing translation in tooltip of trading overview
- [UBR] Fixed boosting when engine is disabled
- [UBR] Fixed holo blocks getting destroyed by craft decay
- [UBR] Fixed an error/crash in convoi distress signal mission