Hello everyone!
Pi day brings about a new patch for the game. While we're working on some bigger stuff, we wanted to continue regularly delivering smaller improvements on the side.
I realise we're getting quite far into the alphabet in terms of the version, we're still figuring out the right balance to keep it meaningful, but for the time being we wanted to limit the numbers to additions of noteworthy size.
Before I go further, I am excited to announce that we are soon getting some new music tracks from our composer, Nolan Markey!
1.04e Changes
Added
- When dealing damage to non-player ships, the amount of damage dealt is now displayed to help visualize scored hits and the magnitude of their impact. Similarly, getting repairs from the space station now displays green numbers to help communicate its benevolent nature
- A permanent compass arrow has been placed into the minimap corner of the screen (bottom right) to help visualize the ship's orientation
- 1 new billboard on space stations
Changed
- An ingame font has recieved shadowing effects to make it easier to read on certain backgrounds
- While in chase camera mode, the movement controls have been changed to work relative to locked view angle, rather than ship orientation (ie. Looking towards the left and pressing the strafe right key will throttle the thrusters, while pressing forward makes the ship strafe left) An option to revert to the old behaviour should be added very soon.
- The launcher will now filter out resolutions that are not supported in fullscreen mode. In a future update, these resolutions will be listed seperately for windowed mode only.
Fixed
- Fixed a bug that happened when starting a new game during warping
- Disabled the "pirates attacking space station" mission during the tutorial so it doesn't interfere
The "known issues" and "coming soon" paragraphs have remained unchanged since 1.04d in case you've already read them.
Known issues as of 1.04d / 1.04e
- Some players are unable to select systems in the galaxy map after saving and loading the game.
- The music slider does not update the volume until the options menu is closed.
- Larger ships are rather intensive on performance right now
- Task and chat windows can appear off-screen on large resolutions (2560x1440 and above)
Coming soon(™):
- We want to streamline the broadside view experience: Locking on targets, toggleable on-screen hints for switching back to a forward-facing angle.. these are some of the ideas we're looking into regarding that.
- HUD overhaul We wish to make the heads-up-display more informative and easy to read. Some of our ideas include adding a hotbar for picking up nearby floating modules, adding numbers for energy/shields, making the ship statistics more meaningful and easy to understand, and so on
- Overhauling the tutorial Users have expressed their distaste for being blown up (gasp!) Thus we'll revisit the tutorial to not give the impression that you've lost the game just because your ship got destroyed (and other improvements are to follow)
- Tweaking difficulty and rate of spawning enemies The game has a steep learning curve and is generally difficult to survive in, for now. The current way of handling enemies is only temporary, we are working on a new system which will be much more fair and enjoyable for players.
- Enhancing the mission system There are relatively few tasks to complete right now, they repeat too frequently and are generally somewhat glitchy and unfriendly towards the player's ship size and play style - we're aiming to improve upon it
- And of course, all previously mentioned features are still on our list of things to do (ie space station building), but we're taking things one step at a time.