With our first major update behind us, we're shifting back onto a somewhat regular schedule of minor updates while we continue our work on the second faction and begin laying the foundation for Conquest. The first of these minor updates is to provide enhanced modding support to our awesome community of modders. An incredible number of map, weapon, and ship mods have cropped up since early access and we want to continue supporting these as much as we can.
Custom Factions
NEBULOUS has always had a faction system built into it, but as a number of hull mods sprung up the creators elected not to use it because all of the vanilla weapons were locked to the existing Alliance faction. This would have required them to create a full suite of weapons as well as hulls in order to have their faction be playable, which was an unfair obstacle to impose on them. The faction system has been enhanced to allow factions to borrow equipment from other factions, making it much easier to create a dedicated faction for your custom hulls while still being able to use the base game's weapons and other components. Weapon and other component mods which leave the "Faction Key" field blank will still be available to all fleets regardless of faction.
Additionally, the roundel for a fleet's faction is now displayed next to the fleet name in the game lobby so you can proudly fly the colors of your preferred faction. This roundel is also displayed in the fleet select list.
Please note: If modders choose to update their mod to use the faction system for their hulls, keep in mind that any existing fleets you have will still be marked as "Alliance" and will be detected by the game as having a mix of hulls which is not permitted. Opening these fleets in the fleet editor will allow you to re-assign their faction, and will remove ships which do not fit that selected faction.
Dependency Tracking
Mods can now have dependencies between each other, allowing enhanced support for community toolkit and foundation mods without the need to duplicate assets or DLLs between multiple mods. Mod loading order can now also be automatically sorted in the mod manager list.
These dependencies can also be tracked when loading mods from a multiplayer lobby, and will be iteratively discovered and downloaded as they are needed.
Mod-Friendly Lobbies
The delicate nature of balance in a game like this means some players don't like playing with mods, and that can mean players who want to play with their modded fleets can struggle to find a group to play with. Lobby hosts can now mark their lobby with a special "mod friendly" tag, which will show a badge in the match browser indicating that lobby is accepting of fleet mod use.
Full patch notes follow:
Changes/Features:
- Added the ability for modded custom factions to share equipment from other factions on either a per-component or pattern basis.
- Opening the fleet editor with multiple factions available will present a list to select the fleet's faction from.
- Fleets with mixed-faction hulls can no longer be used in skirmish games, but can be converted to one faction or the other in the fleet editor.
- Added a faction badge to the currently selected fleet in the lobby and to each item in the fleet selection list.
- Added a "Mod Friendly" option for hosting a new multiplayer lobby, which marks lobbies with a special badge on the match browser.
- Added mod dependency tracking in ModInfo.xml files.
- Added auto-sorting of mod dependencies in the mod manager window.
- Loading mods in a lobby will now iteratively subscribe and download all dependencies as they are discovered.
- Hovering over the mod badge (crossed wrenches) next to a player's fleet name will show a list of mods the fleet uses.
- Hovering over the mod synchronization pane of the lobby will show all mods in use for all fleets, maps, scenarios, etc.
- The default fleet when entering a new lobby will now be the first non-modded fleet, even if a modded fleet preceeds it in the list.
- Mod developers can now use the console command "ReloadLocalMods" to reload any non-workshop mods when they have made changes, without having the restart the game to test.
- The confirm button when exiting a game early as host now needs to be held for 3 seconds to prevent skipping the warning.
- PD Controller now checks for obstacles between the ship and the PIP before launching AMMs.
- Friendly ship icons now fade out as the camera gets close to them.
- A separate heading line is now visible in the tactical view for all friendly ships and enemy tracks identified as ships.
- Made further adjustments to spinal weapon aiming PID.
- Rebalanced difficulty of heavy cruiser target in Tutorial 6.
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed bi-directional sequential buttons (e.g. for ship posture) not transitioning visual states when being right clicked.
- Players who have a modded fleet selected and switch to spectator will no longer count towards mods that need to be loaded.
- Fixed the player ship in Tutorial 8 firing on the enemy spotter if it was hit by a missile.
- Fixed Intel report for enemy ships showing "Pending..." far longer than it should.
- Fixed AI firing missiles at targets which are occluded.
- Fixed AI firing missiles at targets which are out of range, or will move out of range before intercept.
- Fixed bug in time dilation controller resulting in timescale stuttering between 10% and 100% when under stress.
- Fixed extra newlines in ship card debuff list tooltip.