Greetings Captains
I’m breaking radio silence to show you some new things that are coming in the next few weeks.
The latest patch has been all about making you feel more engaged with the events that are happening and feel more involved with the enemies. This build is called the Follow-That-Enemy patch. It was originally called the Shaky-Shaky-Shaky patch because of the new rumble features however there is far more content now and maybe telling people it was a shaky patch didn’t sound so good?
Here's The Big Things:
> New camera that highlights where the action is
> Rubble support on gamepads
> Hit markets that show where you hit the enemy
> Crosshair laser showing where guns are pointing
Hitmarkers are displayed whenever you do damage to an enemy, they solve a few problems; knowing if a shot connected, knowing what damage that shot did, knowing what type of damage was done and displaying how much health the enemy has left.
Before this patch to know the enemies health you had to use various tricks. I've put an image below where you can see damage on the hull and those energy orbs getting smaller. Other ships would have lights that would flash faster but it wasn’t very intuitive.
Coming Soon:
I have 3 patches almost ready to deploy however to make them more manageable I’ve decided to deploy them one at a time, that way I can get feedback on changes for each one and it's easier to catch and fix any bugs.
3 upcoming patches are:
Follow-That-Enemy patch
- New camera
- Help popups
- Markers when you hit enemies
- Laser crosshair
- Gamepad vibrations
You-Destroyed-My-What? patch
- Better destruction on enemies
- Enemy parts that get destroyed are displayed to player
We're-Off-to-Jordaria patch
- New mission with 7 new enemies
- Lots of other things
List of all changes so far in the upcoming patch:
> More changes than I can list to how the camera moves around
> Made all spaceships faster in a balancing change
> More changes to make the AI driving feel less twitchy (still not totally fixed so even more changes will have to come)
> Balances to the sine wave gun
> Rumble on gamepads
> Cursor gets hidden when in game (I might bring this back if one or more people complain about it)
> Etten bug - Pressing numpad minus would lock gamepad players in a room which they couldn’t get out of (this happened because it was a left over debug key)
> Etten bug - Some additional onscreen help for people using push-to-activate or lock-in-room controls.
> Jesse bug – Steam Cloud would move encrypted save files over which could crash on a different computer
> Kata/Setheng/Ascander bug - Intruders not pathfinding so warping to the top left of the screen (0,0). Also known as the “Green Man in Top Left Problem” Also known as the “Holomedics not working Bug” Also known as the “Cant Pathfind Glitch” Also known as “Whats that up there Dave?”
> Changes to how the enemies behave when off the camera (now that two networked players might have slightly different camera views
> Pathfinding fixes and improvements to Elonsium defenders
> When displaying crew HP there was no period in the font file so it would display 90.5 health as 905hp. This should be rounded to solve this
> Restoring energy when the ship has full energy used to lose the stockpile and get nothing from it, now the stockpile it preserved
> Small graphical error when pausing, I’m sure no one spotted it but it was made worse by the new camera
> Slightly resized the buttons on the pause menu because I was trying to put off fixing the camera to GUI bug
> On Elonsium your defenders also benefit from any movement speed buffs
> Changes to how enemies are assigned network IDs
> When enemies teleport they are flipped 180degrees, this stops them getting into a loop where they spend their whole time trying to turn around just to get teleported away the moment they do
That's all for now, I will try posting updates more often. You will see the first of these patches deployed onto the beta branch in the following days.
Lots of Love
> David Strachan