Note for custom ships creators:
This update makes big changes to the shield and weapon power stats and how they interact with weapon damages. This results in custom ships now being damage sponges in comparison to the vanilla ships. To make the transition easier for anybody who wants to maintain a balance with the vanilla ships, all of the updated ship stats are now provided in the Unity Tools packages as XML files. The stat prefab system now uses these too!
Bling Pack
Bling up your ship and show off with 4 new shiny liveries! This small pack introduces Gold, Iridescent, Platinum and Psychedelic liveries for every standard ship.
If you were previously a donator in the game's Patreon days and already have the gold liveries then these new liveries are available to you at no cost!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/580180/BallisticNG__Bling_Pack/
Modding
The Unity Tools have had a few updates, see the documentation for more information: https://ballisticng-documentation.readthedocs.io/en/latest/unity_tools/whats_new.html
We're also pleased to announce the introduction of workflow tools!
We're switching to Blender for our asset development so there's currently plenty of work being done to build tools to aid with the BallisticNG workflow. These tools are being built with the community in mind so they are free to download and to use however you like, even for non BNG related projects.
A URL shortcut is now provided in the modding folder to link you directly to the downloads, or if you just want the link now: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1zeO7PK-6nkatEN6sd0rTuJKbU_lzOdTG
Right now these tools primarily consist of utilities to speed up UVing from an atlas texture, similar to what sprytile lets you do, but we'll be adding new stuff as we go.
1.2.2 - The Balance Update
BallisticNGs combat is a system that hasn't had much attention in recent times. In singleplayer this has been fine as the AI were always at a disadvantage and the game was always balanced around that, but we've seen clear problems with how everything was balanced in multiplayer and this update has been long under consideration.
This update focuses on adjusting combat to standardise the singleplayer and multiplayer experience, make needed changes to ship stat distributions, touch up the AI and give you a whole lot of new gameplay and HUD options.
We've also scrapped the pilot assist and replaced it with separate AI assists. More info this below!
Ship Stats
Ship combat stats have been updated to bring the roster much closer together. This means every ship is now a lot more consistent with every other ship and firepower/shields makes much less of a difference then before. You'll still be able to bully a Tenrai using a Diavolt, but it's no longer a difference so great that it makes sense to just stick with Diavolt for that one trait alone.
Weapons
Weapons have been made weaker so the focus can now be more on the race then on combat. Modes like eliminator and team race are of course still focused on combat and the scoring for these are still the same.
If you're interested in all of the stat changes, see the full changelog below.
Ai
The AI has seen a huge backend overhaul that completely rewrites how they navigate the track. This has also allowed us to also introduce new ways to control their difficulty more like how a human players skill differs, instead of just telling the AI to accelerate at certain speed thresholds to simulate difficulty.
We've also introduced rubber banding so the AI can keep pace. The rubber banding has limits so you won't be seeing them shoot down the track at lightning speeds, but you should now feel the pressure in the higher AI difficulties.
If you don't want the rubber banding we've also introduced an option to turn it off in the new assists options menu. This option is completely optional and does not restrict any of the game's functionality if it's turned off.
Finally one thing we've seen in reviews and people doing lets plays is some people not understanding why the AI take off the start grid really fast so when playing in Novice, like at the start of the campaign, the AI start boost is now disabled to better represent the understanding of mechanics that a new player will have.
Assists
We've killed the old pilot assist option and instead rewrote it and split it into three separate options, available in the new assists options in the game options menu.
These assists give you a speed handicap, disable online functionality and in some modes such as Survival won't be available.
Steer Assist: An AI will provide a steering assist. This scales with your input, so fully turning will disable the assist so you still have complete control of the ship when you need it.
Pitch Assist: An AI will provide a pitch assist. Like the steering assist this scales with your input so you can maintain manual control.
Airbrake Assist: An AI will provide airbrake tap assists. This doesn't scale to input and the AI will always be providing inputs for this sit it just flips the airbrakes on.
Utah Dam
Utah Dam is a new free track that takes you back to Utah Project to race on an alternative circuit that drops you underground into the water processing chambers below. Simply update to 1.2.2 to get this track.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pq6ZTTblyM8
Changelog
Music
- Added Xpand - Menu 2 to the OST folder
- Added Paused Playback option (enabled by default)
- Fixed various issues with custom track music when continuous playback is enabled
Audio
- Custom sounds are now read from their absolute path instead of their relative path (fix for regression of soundpacks not working on MacOS since 1.2)
Tracks
- Added Utah Dam
- Fixed survival disable and survival ignore track not working on custom tracks
- Fixed the AI not using racing lines on Arrivon Peak
- Fixed start line position tracking issues on Luna
- Fixed incorrect wall tiles on Tokyo Bowl and Hydrome Bed
- Fixed the music visualizer advert replacements scaling their layout with the screen resolution
Ships
- Rebalanced shield and weapons stats. The frontend combat stats are now also accurate.
- Reduced wall collision damage by 30%. (survival mode has been accomodated for so damages are still the same)
- Ship cannon fire rates are now determined by an option on the ship instead of being automatic
- Decreased threshold for ship to ship bounce collisions
- Rewrote airbrake drift code to properly respond to analog inputs
- Reduced Orbitronix's grip from 10 to 5.75
Weapons
- Removed AI to Player damage reduction multipliers and rebalanced weapons around multiplayer player vs player
- Increased minimum integrity threshold for the emergency pack from 10% to 25%
- The energy wall is no longer collidable as it plays the fade out animation
- The warning for AI missiles is now triggered when the AI picks the missile up
- Fixed tremors flinging ships high on sections marked to allow out of bounds
- Tremor damage now deals 8% first impact damage instead of 0.7 damage per physics tick
- Increased tremor effective height
- Increased tremor slowdown
- Increased tremor distance from 75 sections to 120 sections
- Reduced rocket damage from 35 to 12
- Missiles now ignore gravity if they're flying and have a lock-on
- Reduced missile damage from 30 to 15
- Reduced cannon damage from 0.8 to 0.5
- Decreased difference in cannon type fire rates
- Reduced hunter damage from 30 to 8
- Increased velocity loss from hunter impacts
- Reduced hellstorm damage from 36 to 15
- Reduced plasma damage from 90 to 70
- Reduced tremor pickup weighting from 30 to 12
- Reduced energy wall pickup weighting from 25 to 5
- Reduced slowdown from cannons
Multiplayer
- Fixed mines being spawned with the wrong rotation
Code Mods
- All assemblies are now loaded before executing mod registers, removing the need for ordered loading if sharing data between DLLs
User Interface
- Fixed scaling issues with the custom race menu on ultrawide resolutions
- Added handling of an edge case for the resolution selector where Unity might not return a resolution
- The AI difficulty is now shown on the campaign event details box
- Ship information overlays now scale with distance and are correctly depth sorted
Options
- HUD and Assists sub-menus have been added to the game options menu
- Removed pilot assist option from the pause menu
- Added thrust toggle option to the controls menu
- Added option to toggle the low energy warning voice. Defaults to on
- Added option to toggle the critical energy warning voice. Defaults to on
- Added option to toggle AI rubber banding. Defaults to on
- Added options to enable new steer, pitch and airbrake assists. Defaults to off.
- Added option to set the units the speedometer uses. Defaults to metric.
- Added option to show the racer position list in singleplayer. Defaults to off
- Added option to show all ships on the position bar. Defaults to off
- Added option to show shield bars in races. Defaults to off
- Added option for the default camera mode when starting in zero-g (Kuiper Overturn). Defaults to rear chase
AI
- Increased minimum shield before pitting from 25% to 50%
- Ai now spread themselves apart more at the start of the race
- Reworked AI steering to simulate steering the ship instead of forcing their rotation towards where they're heading
- AI ships now slow down if they're exceeding the capabilities of the ship they're piloting
- Removed Ai grounding force. They will now fly just as high as the player can
- Ai now brake if they're about to hit another ship in front of them
- Rewrote Ai track navigation to be based on time instead of section offsets
- Fixed an issue where AI would use airbrakes and/or slow down on track sections like maglock drops, loops and corkscrews
- AI wall avoidance forces now slow the ship down and worsen the AIs racing line for a brief moment
- Implemented optional rubber banding
Engine
- Section floor widths are now cached on track startup
- A warning is now thrown to the output log when there are racing lines but none are available to be used (for track creators)
- Fixed an issue where the position tracking would not correctly track two ships on different routes if their section index was the same
- The buffer for custom music playback is now re-used (small performance boost)
Commands
- Added test_damage
- Added gm_timescale
Campaign
- Reduced AI speed on the base game 1v1 events
- Rebalanced the first half of the base game campaign to introduce experienced and expert difficulties earlier on, akin to the expansion campaigns (novice is now super easy)
Photo mode
- Player ship trails are now swapped over to the AI trail
Outer Reaches
- Fixed the pitlane on Caldera not being marked as a pitlane for the AI