Hello! While you may not see many changes to the client this week, and admittedly these release notes are a tad small, we've been working to improve our server performance since the last update, and provide more stability to the gameplay experience.
Server/Gameplay Performance
A big focus was spent on fixing and improving some performance issues that arose during the last server lifecycle. These were starting to affect user-actions which involve the Docked UI (such as equipping new weapons) and also heartbeating with the server. In addition, the NPC Factions were being a bit unruly, they've been tamed and told to sit on the naughty step for causing some of the server issues.
Through our soaks of watching the server, they're behaving a lot more as we expect them to, improving the reliability of the ingame experience.
HUD reacts to your ship loadout
The In-Game HUD now shows you slots for your available loadout, rather than showing every slot in the UI regardless of if the ship could handle it! Tidies up the UI and doesn't mislead.
Fixes to the weapon visuals in-station and in-game
Your guns/special systems that you have equipped now display correctly again on your ship, whether docked in station or in space! In addition, bullets now appear from their designated muzzle points on each weapon now, rather than a floating point just infront of it.
FTUE/Tutorial Modifications
Some of the tutorial messages were appearing too early, we've modified the pacings for a few of these to be in sync with the tutorial! We've also patched an issue around receiving non-tutorial lootcrates too early via enemy/asteroid kills,.
Protocol/Connection logging to help us diagnose connection information
In order to help with analysing connection issues, Lazarus now writes out anonymous connection events (connection, disconnect, queue status etc) to /Connections/connectionLogs. These files will aid us seeing what's occurred without the mess of the unity output log file. Currently these do not get automatically uploaded to us, but running LogUploader.exe will prompt if you wish to send us logs. We'll be working this into the game in the next release so you don't need to go here to send us the files.
When you connect you should also be seeing two launch options now. If you're struggling to connect, please select the RakNet option and try again. If both options fail, then do get in touch with us.
The Future...
The other reason why this update seems a bit small is because we're working on a couple of larger changes/updates, which involves working on them in isolation until we're ready to roll them in. As of yet they're not ready, but hopefully will be in by the next update!