Patch and Updates Notes

Patch 0.8.6.0 (Wednesday 27th October 2021)

Hey everyone. Today’s patch is transitory, as we’re still heavily working on the squad/fleet system and VOIP. It introduces a brand new way waypoints/flight plan system. At the moment, its usage is quite limited but it will eventually become the foundation for other important systems such as the squad system (you’ll be able to share your waypoints or targets with your teammates), AI improvements (fleet coordination), tutorials/mission editor (following a path…).

But as those features are not available yet, the waypoints system has currently limited purposes. You are able to use it from the starmap (or tactical view) by right-clicking and using the context menu to clear/add or set a waypoint as active. The current active waypoint also shows up on the HUD and on radars.

Speaking of radars, we revamped them to be more coherent between each other, added new information (the velocity now shows up in the radars) and we introduced a new radar type (available in game through the MFD-edit key: F4): the dual parabaloid radar. It merges the front and back radars into one view, where the iner circle represents what’s in front, and the outer edge what’s behind. We are experimenting with some tweaks to make the gimbal weapons more skill based (reducing their angular range and spread), added a lag pip (some players have been asking for it for years!) and introduced a HUD minimalistic mode for experienced players that know how the HUD already works and want to declutter it a bit. Let us know in the comments if you find these useful or not.

Finally, this patch includes a rework for the smog (battle smoke) effect, to make it look more impressive, at the cost of more performance. If you find your performance has degraded too much inside big battles, we recommend switching the smog quality setting back to “medium”, which should more or less correspond to the old setting. We’ve also added an option to display short smoke trails behind small ships in space, which could be useful to see small ships in the distance in a big battle, especially if they don’t show up on your HUD as targets. Last but not least, we’ve completely revamped the death sequence for all ships with new visual effects, explosions and debris, and shortened the small ship’s explosions to be instant.

We are planning on releasing the patch focusing on the squad system and VOIP in about a month, after which we will resume work on new core gameplay systems.

-Flavien Brebion

General features

  • Added support for mission/flight plan with waypoints. At the moment you can only add waypoints, but later on in the mission editor you will be able to add targets or objectives between waypoints

Balance / gameplay changes

  • Reduced gimbal weapon’s angle by more than half, and increased their spread. We are experimenting this change to make the game more skill-aiming based, keeping in mind that new players still need to have a chance at killing a target without pixel-perfect accuracy…
  • Missiles/Torps no longer detonate when too close (< 1 km) of their source upon expiring (lifetime exceeded or target lost)
  • Reduced pushback force caused by massive explosions shockwaves

Radars

  • Polish pass over HUD radars: increased size of front/back radars by +30% (to fit the MFD page), targets are now bigger when closer, more readable… added waypoints to radars
  • Introduced new radar MFD page: Dual radar, which merges the front+back radars together into one single view (the iner circle is what’s in front, the outer circle is what’s behind the ship, aka. dual paraboloid projection)
  • Fixed radars not rendering on cockpit MFDs with HUD mode disabled
  • Fixed broken sensors and HUD targetting not behaving properly on radars

HUD / UI / menu fixes or improvements

  • Fixed negative rating change going to a large number after a battle
  • Fixed top 3 scores in battle reports showing up as large numbers when they’re negative
  • Improved layout of HUD/MFD target information around the right HUD center (name, distance, speed etc…) to be cleaner and more compact (horizontal alignment was messy)
  • HUD is now displayed in third-person capital ship control scheme, even if applied to a smaller ship like the corvette (this allows the corvette to be playable with the cap ships control scheme)
  • Introduced ‘navigation’ color into HUD color theme (currently used to show navigation points). In the default green color-scheme, navigation-related targets show up in orange/yellow
  • Added lag pip to HUD
  • Added a setting to switch between lag and lead pip/reticle (default is still lead pip)
  • Added a keybinding to switch between lag and lead pip in game (default: unbound)
  • Introduced HUD Smart (Minimalistic) experimental mode that automatically hides some HUD elements based on the context
  • Reduced minimum combat, ring and navigation targets setting to zero (sliders in HUD settings) (previously, the minimum number of displayable targets was 3 for all of these)
  • Updated default MFDs for small ships in anticipation of the new Dual radar and the future Squads system
  • Loadout MFDs at the bottom of the screen now packs the weapons list downwards to save space
  • New experimental set of aim reticle icons for lead/lag pips (the previous one was too opaque and cluttered the target)
  • Modal dialogs (or context menus) can now be closed by clicking outside the window area

Visual effects

  • Improvements and new effects for capital ship’s death sequence + tuned death sequence parameters
  • Small ships death sequence was shortened: the explosion is now instant, to have more immediate feedback
  • Dying ships now play their engine/power damaged sound ambiance loop
  • Added small ship’s trails in space + an option for it (default: off). This allows to see small ships in the distance, especially if you’re playing on a limited amount of navigation/combat displayable targets over the HUD
  • Improved smog and added a quality setting dedicated to smog: denser/more opaque, darker, wider particles, to give a better sense of “terrain in space”

Disclaimer: the new smog settings can be more performance-hungry than the old one. A rough equivalent of the old smog would correspond to “medium” quality. High and Extreme quality will consume more performance than before

6 Likes

Patch 0.8.6.1 (Saturday 30th October 2021)

A minor update with a few bug fixes and HUD targetting improvements that were suggested by the community.

  • Improvements to HUD targetting: added H key to target incoming MTB (missile/torpedo/bomb), added alt+H to target closest support ship (for repair/resupply)
  • Added message notifications when HUD targetting fails for some reason
  • Target hovered by mouse cursor is now always selectable (previously, it could sometimes fail in some conditions due to being in the wrong HUD mode, like combat vs navigation)
  • Loadout MFD will now dim a weapon group that has no weapon ready to fire (ex.: on cooldown)
  • Improved dual radar frontal view angle distortion (targets in front will be less cluttered at the centered of the radar)
  • Revamped target selector to prioritize dynamic targets like ships instead of static targets with modules (ex.: it was hard to select a flying ship in front of a base module/building)
  • The target selector will no longer ignore targets that currently do not have an indicator (due to the limitation in max navigation/combat indicators displayed in the options menu)
  • The target selector will now ignore selection of static modules that are too far away (> 50 Km) at the expense of their “parent” base
  • Added more persistent ship shrapnel/debris on the battlefield
5 Likes

Patch 0.8.7.0 (Saturday 18th December 2021)

Hey everyone. This is the last big patch before the end of the year. This patch introduces the first iteration of the squad system (only as a flat list of squads for now, but in the future we want a full hierarchical system with wings and fleets).

This also includes voice-over-IP (VOIP). There are a lot of technical considerations behind VOIP, so make sure to report any audio issues you might encounter. Also of interest, this patch revamps the weapon projectiles effects (going from simple 2D billboards to 3D in most cases), an update to the bloom filter (there’s also a slider to tone it down in the graphical options, if you don’t like it), a new active ability for the corvette to repair targets at a range (the repair beam) and much more. One limitation is that due to lack of time, the waypoints system isn’t squad-shared yet, but note that we’ve introduced a new squad-target mechanism (default: ctrl-T if you’re the squad leader) that shares the leader’s target with all the squad members.

As usual, please report any bug you’ve found and have fun. Most of the game systems have now been implemented into the game, so next year we’ll be moving on to the major gameplay loop upgrade, introducing new shields mechanisms, rebalancing some weapons, adding orbital bombardment (nukes, already in WIP), the carrier revamp + new hauler, massive AI improvements (AI attacking bases, flying in squads…) and battles sub-objectives/staging. It will likely take the first half of the year, at least, to implement all of these. During the second half of the year we’ll finally start the polishing phase, tutorials and mission editor, with a tentative release date in EOY 2022 or H1 2023.

-Flavien Brebion

Squad system

  • Added the squads menu to the in-game menu system (TAB)
  • Players can create their own private or public teams, or quickly auto-join any squad that has an open position
  • The first player to create a squad becomes its leader, and has leader-restricted management options over the squad
  • The leader can promote another member as the new leader
  • The leader can rename the squad, or write a new description that will show up in the squads list
  • The leader can kick/ban a member, but also clear all the bans. Note that this is persistent only until the server reboots
  • The leader can change the squad access rights (private/public)
  • Note that it will be possible to password-protect squads, but this is not implemented yet (option is disabled for now)
  • The player can mute/unmute any squad member. Note that this is persistent only until the server reboots
  • Implemented the squad MFD to show the list of squad members, including name, distance, rank, ship class (colored by health status)
  • It is possible to target a squad member’s ship via hotkeys alt-1 (leader) to alt-8 (other squad members)
  • Added a key for the squad leader to share a target amongst all squad members (default: ctrl + T)
  • Squad members show up as icons + their name in the starmap
  • The waypoints system is not compatible with the squads implementation just yet (but this is coming…)

VOIP Implementation

  • Added a control to select the recording device in the audio settings menu (the game will default to Windows’s default recording device)
  • Added a voice meter in the audio settings menu to see the recording volume level
  • Added a loopback option in the audio settings menu, to listen to yourself talking
  • Added the ability to mute players
  • Added the ability to toggle voice chat/VOIP in the audio settings menu
  • Added a push-to-talk option + a key binding. If left unused/unassigned, voice recording will be permanent. By default push-to-talk is enabled and the default hotkey is “C”
  • Due to moving the push-to-talk key to “C”, we had to move around the other radial menu keys. “X” is now the voice commands menu (previously on “C”), “B” is now the flight menu (previously on “X”) and the formations cycling mode was moved to the “N” key.
    Basically we shifted all the radial menus one key to the right to leave room for the push-to-talk key “C”.
  • Added an audio slider for the sound effects volume, and another one for the voice playback volume

Balance / Gameplay

  • Reduced Flak canons generated heat by -20% when firing
  • Reduced Flak canons spread by -15% (this should improve their precision a little bit)

Note: some technical problems were detected with Flak detonation, which due to the physics step does not always explode at the accurate/predicted target location. This will be investigated and fixed in a later patch.

  • Introduced a new MK4 “weapon” ability for the corvette: the repair beam
  • This beam can repair the hull or turrets of a selected target at a pretty fast rate
  • Multiple beams can stack, however this will draw energy faster
  • The beam repairs weapons at a faster rate than the armor/hull
  • Added a “beam booster” weaponry upgrade that increases even more the repair rate, reduces the energy cost, at the expense of shields regeneration
  • Fixed typos in AMS laser damage upgrade (this was overheating way too quickly, making the upgrade useless)

HUD / UI / menu fixes or improvements

  • Fixed modal dialogs that could be clicked outside of window to get closed (note: contextual menus can still be clicked outside to close them)
  • Fixed quick mouse right-click (rotation) on starmap that caused waypoints context menu to open accidentally, it should now be more stable
  • Damaged weapons can now be sub-target selected again (this is needed for the corvette repair beams)

Visual effects

  • Remade all weapons projectiles. The new projectiles are no longer simple billboards, and most of them have some extra 3D geometry to better show their shape in the distance, making them more easily recognizable in battles. They also have extra animations, twitling tails and more details, making them have a higher visual impact during battles.

  • Improvements to HDR bloom filter: better fade off/range, better quality

  • Added a slider to control bloom intensity in the graphical settings menu

  • Fixed smog streaks (smog particles being strangely aligned) due to a floating-point precision issue

  • Fixed smog being sometimes rendered on top of other projectile/effects, hidding them despite them being closer

  • Fixed bouncing projectiles not having a proper offset off the hit surface, intersecting geometry

  • Added new Moon bobblehead (bobbleheads are currently randomized every time you spawn. Later they’ll be tied to your account’s persistent rewards)

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a server crash related to the mission system
  • Fixed issue with mapping of ground bases that was repeated multiple times per second, causing some slowdowns/framerate stuttering at spawn times
  • Fixed server crash bug if an admin tries to kill a planet/moon
  • Fixed ships that could still fire their weapons during their death sequence
  • Fixed collision issues happening between ships and geometry in the hangar/spawn locations

Other

  • Fixed localization issues in keybindings menu and weapons/loadout MFD
  • More localization/strings updates for 0.8.6.0
4 Likes

Patch 0.8.7.1 (Monday 20th December 2021)

A small patch that contains many improvements and stability fixes related to 0.8.7.0.

Gameplay

  • Warp jam cooldown now only affects ships that were in warp (previously, ships not in warp had their warp cooldown activated if they were in the jam bubble). This should make it easier to catch up a fleeing ship
  • Fixed lasers (AMS and repair beam’s) precision issues when targetting turrets on a capital ship (half the time, no hit was detected);
  • Fixed being able to control the ship (turn it around etc…) while dying

HUD / UI / Menus

  • Fixed incorrect default deploy base after a death / despawn. This will now properly select the closest base to your death location
  • Fixed target info MFD not showing target’s hull percentage when it’s between 0 and 1%
  • Fixed floating objectives on HUD (mission targets, closest resupply base/ship, etc… ) still being displayed when sensors are damaged/broken
  • Fixed viewed station appearing highlighted in yellow on the starmap when the player is dead
  • Added a new keybinding (empty by default, but recommended keybind would be on SPACE if you’re not using the brakes) to “Show all targets”. When holding this key, all targets within a 1000 Km distance will be displayed on the HUD
  • Increased max limit number of displayable navigation and combat targets on HUD from 50 to 200 (note: the ring radar’s limit remains 50)
  • Fixed HUD still being rendered / powered on while dying;
  • Fixed “server connection trouble” icon not being rendered at the bottom-left corner of the screen as it should
  • Added a notification text + sound when the squad leader selects a new squad target
  • Fixed a bug with the selection order of a squad member when using alt-1 to alt-8 when the squad leader isn’t the first member of the squad
  • Squad MFD now highlights lightly-damaged ships (50-75%) in yellow (previously, it used the same color above all >50%)
  • Fixed trade routes appearing as ghost objects in the ship, stats or squad menus

General / Misc

  • Fixed audio bug with ambient looping sounds that fade off after a while, never returning during the game session
  • Fixed client crash bug in squad MFD
  • Fixed a bug in the automatic keybindings profile upgrader that caused a mess with some events due to an incorrect version (Note: if you have trouble with your inputs in this patch, try to reset them to defaults)
  • Reverted change for max network packet size from 4K back to 1K bytes. Suspecting issues with players unable to connect to servers
  • Push-to-talk now has a “buffer” of 1 extra second when it’ll continue recording voice after releasing the push-to-talk key (often players released the push-to-talk key too soon and their voices was cut at the end of a sentence)
  • VOIP is no longer consuming bandwidth when a player has voice chat enabled but isn’t in a squad yet
  • Fixed order of rendering smog effect vs planetary wind/dust effects vs asteroid ring’s mist/dust effects
  • Fixed voice chat volume not being affected by the global audio volume
  • Fixed a client crash related to multithreading + networking + VOIP
4 Likes

Patch 0.8.8.0 (Saturday 12th March 2022)

This patch mostly focuses on gameplay balance changes, including a major damage model update. Meanwhile we’ve started our gameplay redesign/revamp phase to tighten the match loop and improve the battle experience. We’re not ready to communicate on these yet (we need to implement the changes internally first and playtest them) but as soon as we do, we’ll make a major announcement. This means that the next few months are probably going to slow down in terms of public patches: we’ll mostly focus on balance updates (the damage model change in this update will probably mess up with the balance quite a bit, and need further adjustments), bug fixes and UI improvements.

Gameplay

Damage model

The most important gameplay change in this patch is an update to the damage model. All weapons now deal both kinetic (versus hull) and energy (versus shields) damage. Weapons that were previously considered kinetic (ex.: the machine gun) will deal a lot more kinetic than energy damage meaning that
kinetics are no longer the most effective way to weaken shields. In the same way, blasters can now damage the target’s hull and even finish it off. The weapons stats and DPS were rebalanced so that a mixed composition between kinetics and blasters is viable, versus all-kinetics configurations that
we saw in previous versions of the game (ex.: 4 Halcyons on the interceptor). The most kinetic damage a weapon deals and the less effective it will be against shields, and vice-versa. The extreme example of this is with railguns and plasma cutters, which still have a high DPS assuming you’re using
them against the right type of target.

  • Updated damage model for missile/torpedoes/mines explosions and splash damage: distribution of damage is now proportional to shield percentage (Ex.: at 50% shields, 50% of the total damage will be dealt to the shields and the remaining 50% to the hull)
  • Updated ship loadout/info cards to show both kinetic and energy DPS. Revamped a bit the weapons info panel to be less cluttered and only show the significant stats (note: still a WIP, missing a description for each weapon)
  • Updated AI to be smarter about weapons selection. They will now properly switch to other weapons when on cooldowns, over-heating, damaged or low on energy; expect the bots to frequently switch between kinetics and energy weapons on offense
  • Collisions damage is now purely kinetic and will ignore shields
  • Auto-firing AI turrets on capital ships will no longer ignore low-damagable targets if they have no better targets (previously, a kinetic turret wouldn’t fire on a target with high shields and a blaster turret wouldn’t fire on a target with low shields)

Weapons balance

  • Increased precision of all auto-aiming weapons (note: this will make capital ships more dangerous, be careful)
  • Updated hardpoint class of some weapons (flaks are now MK4 and can no longer be mounted on MK5s; same for railgun turrets)
  • Capital ships can no longer mount normal missile/torpedo launchers (only the array variants)
  • Railguns have been rebalanced with a higher firing rate and the ability to hit targets from a higher distance (up to 8 Km) which could give it an edge over standard weapons (which typically have a max range of 4 Km)
  • Capital ships MK4 repeater guns/blasters have been improved and should now feel more useful against small targets
  • Capital ships MK5 turret guns/blasters were also previously in a bad spot. They now deal significant and almost continuous damage against capital ships
  • Fixed gimbal turn speed and radius for Halcyons and Plasma cutters which was set far too high. They are now similar to other gimbaled guns

Ships balance

These changes were done to further refine these ships into their respective roles:

  • Removed all MK7 turrets from carrier (carriers are supposed to stay on the defensive side, therefore MK7s are not fitting their role)
  • Significantly increased carrier’s maneuverability (linear and rotational thrust) and small increase of speed cap (we felt the carrier was dragging the whole fleet behind in terms of movement)
  • Removed 8 MK4 turrets from cruiser (we felt it had too good defensive small ships capabilities, which is supposed to be done by destroyers)
  • Small updates to default loadouts for capital ships (due to refitting the hardpoint classes of some weapons)

Upgrades

New available upgrades for ship loadouts:

  • Shield regen II: Boosts the shield regen rate by +50% at the expense of reducing the shield capacity by -30%. While the shield capacity reduction seems a huge downside, the faster regen might be very interesting especially in combination of the damage model update that will make kinetic weapons far less effective against a quickly recharging shield
  • Piercing ammo: Reinforced ammunition for kinetic weapons, negating a certain amount of armor plating points. Has no effect on targets without armor plating (like the interceptor) or shields
  • Gyro boost: Boosts gyro thrusters rotational acceleration by +50%. Does not affect maximum turn speed, making turning your ship more reactive, not faster

Flight Model

  • Fixed flight model for roll in most control schemes: when going back to idle (you stop rolling the ship), the torque force did not go down to zero as fast as it could, taking slightly too long
  • Removed ramp up propulsion factor in the flight model that often acted quirky. Replaced it by a speed cap when flying inside hangars (60 m/s) and garages (20 m/s)

We adjusted rotational thrust on small ships to better match the max rotational speed and feel a bit more responsive. This will mostly affect the roll axis:

  • Slight increase (+27%) to Interceptor’s roll acceleration and slight decrease (-15%) in max roll speed
  • Large increase (+60%) to Bomber’s roll acceleration
  • Large increase (+50%) to Corvette’s roll acceleration

Flight plan

Flight plans are now functional when you’re in a squad. The squad leader’s flight plan is automatically shared in real-time amongst the squad members. The squad members can still show or edit their local flight plan, by toggling a mode in the right-click context menu on the starmap.

They can toggle back any time this mode to display again the squad leader’s flight plan.

HUD / UI / Menus

  • Fixed starmap’s filter options window which duplicated after toggling an option on/off
  • Updated ship info panel (on the left side) in the ship tab menu. We cleaned the panel, split it into two tabs (one for general info, one for detailed stats) and revamped the way the stats show up as a bar (they will now all default to the middle, and show relative increases/decreases bonuses based on ship upgrades). We think this will make it easier to see at a glance what stats are affected by an upgrade
  • Chat box now shows up in ship info panel in the bottom-left corner. The chatbox utilized a lot of layout space in all the menu tabs. We’re considering removing the chat box from all these menu tabs, and instead replacing it with an icon that can be explicitely opened when you want to chat. This might get implemented in a future patch unless we see feedback that having the chat box opened at all time in all menus is requested from players
  • Added options to show FPS, Tricount, Ping, Network stats and Input thrust in general settings

Input / Controls

  • Updates to input mapper and key detection: added new options for key combos in key bindings menu
  • Fix for square vs circular-shaped joysticks axes
  • Fix for paired axes when applying power curve
  • Fix for deadzone in square axes corners
  • Added a new Legacy control scheme specifically for mouse (was old Direct control scheme for mouse)
  • Introduced a new control scheme specifically for Joysticks/Gamepads/HOTAS (was old Direct control scheme for joysticks). The game should automatically upgrade the old “Direct control” into this one when you launch the game with this patch the first time

General / Misc

  • Fix for Chinese IMEs (mouse clicks no longer work, Win32 message loop does not receive mouse events anymore)
  • Tweaks to default input configuration for XBox controller
4 Likes

Patch 0.8.9.0 (Sunday 10 April 2022)

This patch contains improvements, bug fixes and tweaks mostly related to the damage model changes introduced in 0.8.8.0. It should also improve client and server stability as 3 important crash bugs were identified and fixed.

Please also note that we decided to shut down the US West and Australia servers to consolidate our player base as these two servers sometimes saw no players for entire days or weeks. We may reintroduce them for 1.0 if there is demand for it.

Gameplay / Balance

  • Fixed warp interruption that was getting triggered on environmental damage even if the shields were at 100%. It will now only trigger when shields are depleted
  • Fixed AMS laser not being affected by shields. Since they do no energy damage, AMS lasers will no longer affect any target that has shields up;
  • Fixed damage model’s energy depletion that happens when energy damage hits depleted shields. It should now be coherent for all weapon/damage types
  • Fixed AI corvette kinetic/blaster turrets all firing at the same time, which players cannot do
  • AI rank/skill level will now be taken into account for the reactivity time to switch between weapon types (kinetic vs blasters) on smaller ships (previously it was a constant time no matter the AI skill level)
  • Added a reactivity/delay factor for taking the target’s acceleration into consideration for turret’s lead auto aim. This should make the turret’s aiming less precise but still take their target’s acceleration into account. The problem with not taking acceleration into account at all is that ships are constantly moving and adjusting their course, meaning that they’re always under some form of acceleration. If turrets do not take acceleration into account, they basically have almost no change of hitting their target unless it’s very close. That was the problem in the previous versions of the game. Now the turrets will try to estimate their target’s acceleration, but with a delay, which should feel more human-like/natural, while still giving them the chance to hit a far-away target that moves in a predictable course
  • Updated battle rating calculation after a battle ends: the number of points gained/lost is no longer symmetrical. The higher your rating, the more difficult it will be to increase it further. The lower your rating, the more difficult it’ll be to decrease it further. This means that players with a very high rating will not be able to increase it higher all that much, but will easily lose their points when they die/lose in a battle
  • Added 4 new propulsion loadout upgrades: lateral boost, forward boost, pitch boost and yaw boost
  • Reverted converging angle rotation speeds on converging weapons (halcyons and plasma cutters). Increased their spread a bit to be less binary at distance; Increased their projectile speeds and max range (now 5 Km)

Bug fixes

  • Introduced fall backs if crashes do not generate a minidump/log file, as many users had reported crashes that did not generate a dump file in their documents folder
  • Fixed a client crash related to a short desync between client and server information, which caused the HUD to look up for an icon that does not exist
  • Fixed two server crashes related to the squad system when a player is leaving a squad or disconnecting from the game while still being in a squad
  • Fixed “show input rotation forces” that could still get displayed on the tactical view screen, or in third-person camera. It will now only show up in first-person/cockpit view
  • Fixed ship debris spawned upon despawning at a hangar/docking bay
  • Fixed issues when loading obsolete/no longer coherent hardpoint layouts
  • Fixed energy weapons that were able to pierce/bounce off hulls like kinetics when they shouldn’t

HUD / UI / Controls

  • Fixed target selection utilizing hidden navigation cursor in joystick control scheme. Now utilizes the screen center as the reference
  • Fixed dot reticle displayed at screen center when looking around with the camera or in TrackIR mode
  • In the ship loadout menu, the details stats will be the default tab (instead of the ship’s general info) if the player is sufficiently experienced
  • Swapped social/squads and stats/leaderboard tabs in the main menu

Misc

  • Replaced repair beam impact sound effect with a new one
  • French localization file update thanks to Argopeilacos
5 Likes

Development update

Hey everybody. Before I get into the defailts of this new patch, I would like to take just a bit of time to explain where we are in the development process and where we are heading in the coming months.

As you may have noticed, we have recently released a new major update to the game. This update revamped the entire match loop, progression system and introduced asymmetry in the battles through battle staging. Each faction has to accomplish a number of objectives (attacking or protecting various structures around bases) to lead their team to victory. The feedback we have received from players on the new battle staging system has been overwhelmingly positive, but we are still fighting against a number of issues, mostly related to balance. The new update has introduced a lot of new factors to the equation and balancing has become much more difficult than before. We feel like we still have ways to go (probably until the whole 1.0 release, to be fair) before balance is in a good place, but we’re doing progress every day, and that is why players feedback is very important.

We haven’t posted a full patch note for the new 0.9 version, as there were too many changes to be listed. However, starting from today’s patch we’ll resume posting patch notes as usual. If you haven’t played for a while and want to understand the big picture about what has been changed in 0.9, you can still read the update that we posted a few months ago:

So where does that lead us ? First of all, the 0.9 gameplay revamp version took a lot of effort (and continuous crunch for many months) so we’re using summer to slow down the pace a little bit, recharge our batteries and finish various gameplay experiments (for example, in today’s patch we’re introducing shield crossing penalties).

In parallel we’ve been working on the Cruiser’s spinal weapon canon, which should be available in a patch before september (we’re also aiming at finishing the carrier revamp and AI coordination/improvements by september). Once september comes, we’re going to shift our focus towards shipping the game. That means a lot of development related to the database systems/backend (the progression system working accross servers for example), more UI improvements, and starting the work on tutorials/sandbox/solo mode.In parallel, our artists will start working on progression-system related rewards (medals, skins, bobbleheads, statues etc…) and we’ll integrate them into the game.

We are looking at a 1.0 release some time in the first half of 2023.

Patch 0.9.3.0 (Wednesday 10 August 2022)

There are three big changes in this patch. The first one is a change in the targetting behavior of turrets, to increase their efficiency. They will now pre-rotate towards their target even if it’s out of view
(below the turret’s view horizon, or slightly out of range) to be ready to fire at it the instant it becomes hitable. In practise, this means that turrets deal damage sooner than before. AMS were already powerful, but this change to turrets behavior made them even more overpowered, so we had to nerf AMS. As a consequence, we also nerfed a little bit torpedoes by reverting some experimental changes we did in earlier patches. Please provide feedback on the new balance of AMS versus torpedoes and whether the bomber is in a good place versus capital ships.

The second big change introduces a penalty for attackers crossing an enemy base (or carrier’s) spherical shield. The penalty instantly drains shield points (more for bigger ships) as a function of shield status, and also causes the shield generate rate to go down while staying within the shield.

For example, if a station’s shield is at full capacity (100%), an enemy interceptor crossing the shield will lose 20% of its shield points, while a cruiser will lose 100% of them. As the shield gets damaged, the penalty gets weaker as well. This will give an edge to the defenders in the early stage of the battle which might help to balance the victory odds between attackers and defenders. It is possible that attackers are still favored, so please let us know if the balance of attackers vs defenders during battles is going in the right direction or needs more drastic changes as we suspect.

Finally, the rewards system was rewritten. Objective points now get rewarded for accomplishing objectives, and the player will receive a credits bonus when the battle ends. Objective points are also given as a reward for protecting objectives (by destroying enemy ships that were previously attacking the base and damaging it) or as support for repairing/resupplying allies. Here again please let us know if it is too easy or hard to obtain objective points depending on your actions.

Gameplay changes

  • Multiple turrets targetting behavior changes that should make them more reliable, and prioritize more than primary target that was selected (also: turrets will pre-rotate towards their target even if it’s out of view or slightly out of range.
    Previously, the turret was resetting its orientation to idle the moment the target become out of view or range, which made a lot of turrets ping-pong between idle orientation and a new target). Overall, turrets should now anticipate their rotation towards their target before they start firing at them.
  • Laser AMS turrets will now pre-oriente towards an enemy bomber before it has fired a torpedo, maximizing damage time on fired torpedoes as soon as they’re launched
  • Repair field is no longer interrupted when target is using its weapons
  • Resupply field is no longer interrupted when target is being damaged
  • Note that these two last changes also apply to spawns/hangars. This change should make the repair/resupply fields more reliable as they tended to easily get interrupted. This also means that you can use your weapons while you’re getting repaired
  • Missiles and torpedoes no longer detonate on death (only on direct impact or near their target) (Note: mines still detonate on death and cause splash damage). They simply explode, causing minimal damage, instead of causing massive splash damage as before
  • Implemented shield interference system (shield points and regen rate are reduced when crossing an enemy base’s shield)
  • Revamped behavior of “G” key (select nearest threat) to priority ships attacking or targetting you (hopefully this time it’ll be more in line with players feedback);

Rewards / Battle reports

  • Revamped reward system to give objective points when accomplishing objectives (and also a credits bonus when the battle ends)
  • Protecting objectives (killing enemies that have been attacking objectives) now provides objective points
  • Repairing/resuppling allies now provides objective points for support
  • Revamped battle reports graphs (now showing attack vs defense power momentum, but there’s also a graph for objective points earned, and differen colors)
  • The battle reports dialog is now modal (takes priority over the rest of the UI)

Balance tweaks

  • Updated default cruiser hardpoints layout (especially the position and orientation of MK4 hardpoints);
  • Doubled HP of station core reactor (to make it more difficult to get destroyed by attackers)
  • Reduced HP on missiles
  • Torpedo changes: small reduction of thrust power; decreased activation time to 3s (from 4s)
  • Added Phalanx MK4 CIWS turret (high DPS but low range)
  • Reduced damage of Railgun MK4 turret to 6 (from 8); reduced its turn rate to 25°/s (from 30°/s); slightly increased its lifetime to match the range of the fixed railgun variant
  • Reduced bomber’s default torpedo capacity to 10 (from 14)
  • Increased Repair crew’s mass to 10% (from 5%) and added a negative effect on energy recharge rate (-10%)
  • Increased carrier’s Heavy repair field’s range to 2 Km (from 1.5 Km)
  • Increased Flak MK4 turret’s DPS (fire rate and burst damage) and reduced its mass to 30t (from 50t)
  • Reduced Laser AMS MK3 turret’s damage by half; incrreased its turn speed to 60°/s (from 45°/s) (Note: AMS became too powerful with the turrets targetting/behavior change)
  • Increased Repair Beam MK3’s turret rotation speed to 45°/s (from 25°/s)
  • Tweaks to Heracles MK7 Turret: reduced yaw range to 50° (from 60°) and increased its DPS (also reduced heat generation)-
  • Tweaks to Thunderbolt MK7 Turret: reduced yaw range to 50° (from 70°) and increased its DPS significantly

Bug fixes

  • Fixed chat box that could be opened through escape sequence conflict ctrl+m
  • Fix for respawn countdown with large value (hours of waiting) upon ship refund, after the match has restarted

HUD / UI / Controls

  • Added weapons descriptions to ship menu
  • Weapon DPS showed in ship menu now takes into account damage rate (for lasers/beams)
  • Counter-measures count is no longer displayed on HUD when CMs are not available (like on capital ships)
  • HUD now displays the amount of mines left below counter-measures (will also flash orange when under cooldown)

Misc

  • Added new Thunderbolt MK7 and Heracles MK7 projectiles effects
4 Likes

Patch 0.9.4.0 (Thursday 24 November 2022)

Orbital bombardment has cometh ! Fear the spinal cruiser and its long range spinal canon. In this patch we’re introducing a new chassis system for all ships. The different chassis change the base stats (some chassis have a higher amount of hitpoints, or armor, but less shields, and so on) and provide a different hardpoints layout. Some chassis will favor lighter hardpoints with maybe more upgrade slots, while a heavier chassis would have higher mark hardpoints with less available upgrade slots. We tried to provide at least one new chassis variant per ship, but we have ideas to expand on the chassis system in the future.

The spinal cruiser is a variant of the default cruiser. A massive spinal canon, dealing 40K damage per shot every 30s after charging, can be mounted on its bow. The spinal cruiser only has light defense turrets, so it is weak to stronger capital ships and becomes an important target to take down during battles.

The land base assault gameplay loop has been revamped. Our previous implementation, back in June, was only half of the puzzle, as we were missing the orbital bombardment stage as we had envisionned. With the spinal cruiser able to bombard the base from low orbit, the battle gets split in two areas of operation: smaller ships mostly focus on ground objectives while capital ships stay in orbit, to protect or attack other capital ships.

As you can imagine, all those changes have made the high-level balancing equation much more complex. We still need months of work to tweak values everywhere and take all scenarios into account. At the moment, it is possible that a side is favored more than the other one, or that battles with pure AI get stuck or progress awfully slow. We’ll try to address those problems as soon as we can, but we can only do so much in our local tests with only AI, so any feedback you provide in terms of balance with players involved is precious to us.

In this patch we’re also introducing a bunch of new weapons and upgrades. See the list below for details. A gray HUD color theme is now available for players with information overload. And as usual, a long list of bugs have been fixed (and new ones introduced, no doubt about it… ).

You may be wondering what’s next ? After we stabilize this new version (with a minor patch addressing the most urgent bugs or balance issues in the coming days or weeks), we’ll move on to the final piece of gameplay: the carrier revamp (and the ability to deploy and give orders to AI squads). This will require heavy improvements to the AI, especially in the way they (currently don’t) coordinate with each others or with players. There is no ETA for the next major patch, but heads up: it is unlikely to be by the end of this year.

We’ve seen a rise of players in the past few months and sales have been increasing, despite our lack of marketing (which we reserve for our 1.0 release next year). We’re pretty happy about that and to see more activity on the servers. Let us know your feedback about the game, what could be improved, what confused you the most at first (unfortunately tutorials will probably be one of the last features we work on) and what you’d like to see in the game in the future. See you in battle and have fun !

-Flavien Brebion

New Chassis System

  • Introduced a chassis variant system for all ships. They are available for customization through the loadout system. You can select a loadout with a non-standard chassis variant and customize it as before in the ship menu
  • Different chassis have positive or negative effects on your base ship stats (base stats here meaning when the chassis is naked, with no mounted hardpoint)
  • The following loadouts are available on non-standard chassis: Heavy interceptor, Light bomber, Tank corvette, Low tech destroyer, Heavy cruiser and Spinal cruiser
  • The heavy interceptor has 2 points of armor, giving a nice reduction of damage versus other interceptors, at the cost of some of its mobility
  • The light bomber loses its torpedo pod, but has mobility rivaling an interceptor with some more hardpoints
  • The tank corvette is very slow, but has more armor and the ability to launch heavy missiles (as opposed to light missiles on the default corvette)
  • The low tech destroyer loses its MK6 hardpoints but now has more MK4 hardpoints and more mobility
  • The heavy cruiser trades any hardpoint below or equal to MK5 for 7 MK7s… and a lot more mass
  • The spinal cruiser is the only loadout/chassis that can fit the new spinal canon. It has a very high amount of armor, no MK7 hardpoints, which make it bad against other capital ships at near range. It can compensate its lack of firepower with the spinal canon, either against other capital ships or land base’s infrastructure. It also has light missile pods to mount SSM batteries
  • AI ships can make use of the new loadout/chassis variants as well

Spinal Cruiser Canon

  • Added Spinal Cruiser’s long-range canon: fixed aiming, charging for 10s (with a red aiming sight laser), dealing massive 40K damage at up to a 150 Km range
  • The deadly projectile travels at 5 km/s
  • The spinal cruiser loses -80% mobility while charging
  • The aim laser deals no damage, and is only there to signal the battlefield (and especially the land base) that a devastating shot is incoming. It might also signal the firing direction to other capital ships to dodge the shot, however please note that like any other projectile, it takes time for the shot to travel, so the lead aim might offset from the target but still hit it
  • The cooldown is 30s, and the canon can get interrupted if it doesn’t have enough energy anymore to fire (requires about 75% energy capacity), or if it gets damaged, or if you turn power off/disable the weapon group

Land Base Assault

Land assault gameplay loop revamp: the primary objective is now (for attackers) to destroy the power plants. Their force-fields are powered by shield generators. Orbital canons are now a secondary target and not the primary target anymore. A part of the fleet now spawns in low orbit in land assault. Spinal cruisers AI tries to take down the land base from orbit. A part of the defender’s fleet tries to engage the attackers in low orbit to destroy their spinal cruisers. The idea is a competition between the two fleets to see which side will take down the spinal cruisers/carrier first (defenders) or the land base’s infrastructure (attackers) first.

Guiding System for Missiles/Torpedoes

  • Revamped guided weapons (missiles/torpedoes): added tracking cone, target gets lost if it goes outside tracking cone
  • Unactivated missiles (guided by the parent ship before the guiding system takes over) generate no smoking trail, until it starts thrusting
  • Reduced chaff duration to 8s (down from 10s)
  • Close-by chaffs now appear on HUD with a small icon
  • Smart Retargetting upgrade now takes its tracking cone angle into account to switch to a new target candidate
  • Added a notification message when Smart Retargetting gets activated (when a missile switches target)

New Weapons

  • (Heavy Interceptor) Added a rocket launcher (experimental, might need tweaks). Fixed unguided weapon, firing a burst of low-damage rockets. Hard to use against other interceptors but useful against heavier variants or ships with lower mobility
  • (Interceptor & Corvette) Added a decoy missile launcher. Deals no damage, but appears on the HUD as a torpedo, confusing enemy AMS laser systems. Has the same mobiltiy than a torpedo. Has a shorter life time (10s)
  • (Tank Corvette) Added a fixed heavy missile launcher on the corvette “shoulders”. The heavy missile has the same stats than on the destroyer’s launchers and are primarily aimed at heavier ships/small damage on capital ships
  • (Spinal Cruiser) Added SSM battery, an auto-aiming/firing battery that auto-aims and auto-fires light missiles at enemy interceptors

New Upgrades and Other Tweaks

  • Introduced a new category for ammo and renamed the categories to be: light (<=MK3), medium(MK4-MK5) and heavy(MK6+) ammo
  • Added a “medium ammo” upgrade for MK4/MK5 turrets that increases ammo capacity by +25%
  • Added a passive “stealth” upgrade for the interceptor: reduces energy emissions so that enemies do not detect a stealthy interceptor that is more than 2 Km away, provided that it doesn’t use its weapons/warp/boost/show any agressive behavior. Has a cooldown of 10s
  • Added “weapons durability” upgrade (increases weapons HP by +25%
  • Extra chaffs upgrade now has a +5% mass negative effect
  • Fixed repair crew turrets repair rate (due to a missing timer in the code it was x10 too fast); Some more nerf to the repair crew’s hardpoints repair reate (now halved)
  • Repair crew upgrade’s repair rate reduced to 25 HP/s (from 40 HP/s). It can only stack 2 times max (down from 3 max)
  • Heat dissipator upgrade can now be stacked 2 times max (up from 1 max)
  • Faster turret rotation upgrade now applies to MK5 turrets too (previously: only applied to MK4 turrets)
  • Changed gyro boost upgrade rank requirement to 3 (down from 5), making it available to new players sooner

Corvette and Other Ships

  • Added the ability to turn automatic firing on (+auto tracking) on corvette weapon groups. Manual groups are still exclusive (you can only select and fire one at a time) but while doing so, the groups previously set on automatic will track and fire at the same time
  • Added back Flaks to the corvette
  • Phalanx CIWS can now be mounted on the corvette
  • Due to adding support for autofiring groups, AMS laser can now be turned on passively and target missiles/torpedoes while the player focuses his attention on something else
  • Increased heat capacity for carrier to 3K (from 2K)
  • The corvette(/and carrier)'s repair field can now repair partially damaged hardpoints. Same improvement for hangars/docking bays

General Gameplay Changes

  • Revamped knockback upon projectile impact to be physics accurate (Note: the previous implementation was a hack). This should result in more natural knockback forces when getting hit by a massive projectile
  • Ship hull’s armor damage reduction is no longer applied to weapons on that ship (heavy cruisers have so much armor that interceptor’s miniguns could no longer damage them). A weapons durability upgrade has been added instead
  • Updates to automatic turrets tracking systems, to be more reliable and prioritizing certain ship classes over other ones (ex.: laser AMS will no longer try to fire at bombers if there are missiles/torpedoes in range)
  • Revamped rank and credits requirements for most weapons other than the default ones: the idea here is to have a more uniform distribution of new weapons to unlock at lower ranks on both major playstyles (small ships and capital ships)

General Balance Tweaks

  • Increased warp interruption threshold as damage % so that interceptor blasters cannot interrupt a cruiser entering warp
  • Increased minimum amount of time between battles to 3’ (from 2’)
  • Overheating now dissipate heat 25% slower than the normal heat dissipation rate (Note: this should incentivize players from not overheating by accident, versus letting heat dissipate purposedly)
  • Balance pass over max ammo count and energy cost vs dps efficiency for most weapons
  • Balance tweaks to small energy weapons (blasters and plasma cutter) to deal more energy damage
  • Halcyons and Railguns now have a lower ammo capacity and must be used more carefully
  • Increased firing rate of Phalanx CIWS by +50% (but reduced burst cooldown to compensate and maintain an equivalent DPS)
  • Reduced orbital canon’s MK10’s hit box size and total hit points, as it is now a secondary objective in the assault loop

HUD / UI / Controls

  • Revamped speed meter to be coherent across ships in terms of soft speed cap vs throttle (so that all ships have the same sensitivity in how much time it takes to reach their target speed)
  • Note: the speed meter has room for speeds above the cap, for cases such as exceeding the cap temporarily (boosting) or without flight assist
  • Added a checkbox to toggle head-tracking in third-person camera views
  • Fixed a bug when showing a weapon’s hitpoints HUD icon color status (the wrong red color was sometimes used as it’s being repaired)
  • Friendly fire warning is no longer raised for hitting a friendly base shield with a low damage weapon
  • Weapons MFD now shows maximum count for missiles/torpdoes and other specialized ammo (Note: this way you’ll know when being resupplied if you’re close to the max replenished or not)
  • Fixed capital ships not having HUD in third-person views when using the virtual-cursor control mode
  • Revamped coloring rules for weapons MFD and weapons aiming direction “dots” in the viewport: they now share the same coherent set of rules, which are: red = all weapons damaged or out of kinetic ammo ; orange = none of the weapons can currently fire due to some reason (overheating, under cooldown, charging…) ; normal color = at least one weapon in the group can fire
  • Added a gray HUD color theme (Note: this makes colored alerts and targets pop more. If you find the HUD overwhelming, we advice that you give this color theme a try)
  • Renamed bomber’s “shotgun” into “shredder”
  • Renamed “storage” upgrade category into “payload”
  • Tweaked base module’s icons for turrets/defenses to be smaller/appear at a lower range, to avoid cluttering complex bases with too many icons. Some of the more important base modules now have bigger icons too
  • Fixed a small bug which caused destroyed turret icons to appear in yellow instead of red while highlighting hardpoints status on a target ship
  • Fixed altitude meter not showing in the 100-200 Km range

Bug Fixes

  • Fixes/tweaks related to previously implemented features (ex.: gimbals not working anymore, weapons not auto-aiming anymore, ams laser range going through shields etc…)
  • Turrets no longer target nearby enemy ships under their detection range (ex.: stealth more or powered off)
  • Fix for a rare occurence of a Direct Input device’s driver incorrectly reporting the max amount of buttons, resulting in a client crash
  • Fixed a rare server freeze when two mines collide with each others
  • Fixed asteroids around space stations being destructible and causing negative credits from griefing from friendly fire
  • Fixed multiple issues related to beams/lasers, not properly hitting the closest actor, or not showing anymore after some time
  • Fixed a problem with alt-tabbing and throttle (via a HOTAS) going to 100% while the game is in the background
  • Fixed AI getting stuck at enemy base’s weapons max range at a bad orientation
  • Fixed a rare client crash due to extreme attractor forces in some particle effects
  • Fixed an exploit with the corvette’s repair beam that could get support objective points while using the repair beam on a ship at 100% hull
  • Fixed a visual glitch with all laser types, which made the laser beam rotate away from a dying target instead of stopping to fire instantly

Misc

  • Updated network visibility range to take into account a ship’s max firing range (Note: ships that were far away sometimes were not rendered on the client, despite their weapons being able to hit at a longer range)
  • Fixed shields transparency glitches when the shield is fading out (the shields was darkening the background)
  • Bombing AI corvettes that have targetted base modules will now fire their torpedoes at them more frequently than before
  • Capital ships AI now fire their missiles/torpedoes more frequently than before
  • Decreased audio muffle in dense atmospheres
  • Visual tweaks to missiles and torpedoes (they’re now bigger and their thrusters are visible from a higher range)
  • New audio effects for Halcyon, Plasma cutter and Railguns
  • Fixed plasma cutter projectile effect (white rectangles causing HDR to blow up). They now have their proper visual effect
  • Torpedoes now have a thruster effect
  • Reduced incoming transmission “typing” audio loop volume
5 Likes

Hotfix 0.9.4.5 (Saturday 26th November 2022)

Bug fixes

  • Fixed land base objectives getting impossible to resolve due to some base modules falling outside the shield after surface remapping (the shield now moves or expands to fit all critical modules)
  • Fixed a bug with shields and force-fields not rendering anymore (at the sub bases) despite still being up on the server
  • Improved AI so that it goes for a final attack despite shields or weapons threat, when it reaches the last reinforcement wave;
  • Increased budget of small ships AI in battles (slight decrease in capships count);
  • Experimental improvement to minimum altitude on planets for AI bots, to avoid having them crash into the ground as often;
  • Fix for a rare server crash

Balance tweaks

  • Revamped battle reports scoring and bonus points calculation;
  • Support points no longer count towards objective points, but still provide a credits bonus (and still count in the total score of course)
  • Decreased Flak canons range to 5 Km (from 6 Km)
  • Slight increase of spread on Phalanx CIWS to make them less accurate at longer ranges
  • Decreased rocket launcher’s heat by -50% and increased max rockets capacity by +50%
  • Decreased by 10-20% the probability of static base defenses to spawn an AMS laser turret (bombers felt useless at doing objectives in early battle stages where there’s still too many defenses up)
4 Likes

Patch 0.9.5.0 (Thursday 5 January 2023)

We’re starting 2023 with a new patch, introducing various AI improvements and battle AI budget fixes that should help balancing the battles better, especially when players join a battle late after it has started. Also of note, a few nerfs to AMS systems, which felt pretty overpowered (the introducing of the new chassis system in the previous major patch, meant that corvettes can now fit auto AMS turrets, increasing the laser spam in battles and decreasing the chance for torpedoes to deal damage).

We’re also happy to unveil our new planet, Tersac, which will remind you of Cinder in many ways (lava oceans, dark ridged mountains). Note that atmospheric glitches can be visible at low altitudes. Fixing those will require some major update work to our atmospheric scattering shaders during the polish phase. This year we want to ramp up a bit on planet environments production to have more variety during our future release, so new planets should be patched in more regularly.

Coming up next we still have to finish the carrier gameplay revamp, which requires more AI work (especially in terms of cooperation between AI ships). You’ll already have a taste of it in this patch, as corvettes now properly form up on allies they want to repair/resupply, and should no longer stick to capital ships like parasites. If you notice any more AI behavior issues, please let us know.

Battle balance

  • Revamped battle AI budget allocation: it is now dynamic and better takes into account players at the start of a battle, or joining and changing balance in the middle of a battle. This should result in more balanced battles, especially when players are involved
  • Updated AI reinforcement budget system to be more balanced between the two sides until reinforcements get exhausted. In practise, this should make battles feel more “alive” and dynamic than before
  • Fixed AI turrets not firing or targetting structures/modules anymore despite them being selected as the primary target (both for AI and player ships) (Note: due to this bug, AI capital ships could not finish off remaining base infrastructure, dragging the end of battles)
  • Fixed an issue with the match loop where a reactor or plant core could award match victory points after the battle at this base had already ended
  • Increased repair rate of damaged base modules after 5 minutes of not taking any damage (this should allow bases that are no longer under attack to repair faster)
  • Exposed reactor or plant cores will take a small (0.1%/s) amount of damage over time to ensure a stuck battle will eventually end (ex.: AI only that have run out of ammo, or are blocked by asteroids) (Note: this continuous damage may increase if victory adds favor the attacker)
  • Fixed a rare case of battlescape generation that allowed two bases to get located near each others, messing up the balance of battles happening at those locations
  • Reduced HP on Orbital canons and central base’s shields as it was draging battles too much to deplete them

AI

  • Fixed an AI bug that made corvettes AMS sometimes fire at interceptors when there were no other targets
  • Fixed an AI bug that made corvettes only fire one weapon group at once, despite allowing concurrent automatic weapon groups in the previous patch (Note: this will make AI corvettes more deadly overall, as they can now fire both kinetics and blaster turrets at once)
  • Corvette AI improvements: avoid bumping into capital ships; avoid cluttering on the same target to repair/resupply; avoid repairing targets that have a repair field themselves (ex.: other corvettes or carrier)
  • Corvettes can now actively fly & repair an ally; ships can actively go and fly towards a corvette (or carrier) to repair/resupply themselves…
  • Fixed AI not firing at the base’s shield from outside when a target is inside the shield, but outside of the firing range (despite the shield itself being within firing range)
  • AI ships will try to avoid overheating by temporarily shutting down kinetic weapons when reaching high heat levels
  • AI attacking ships will no longer stay away from a base’s main defenses when outnumbering those
  • AI attacking ships will be more agressive towards finishing off a base despite main defenses being up when the victory odds are favoring the attackers (>60%)
  • Orbital-range attacker AIs will now prioritize high-importance defense modules (such as shield gens and plants) over other modules
  • Fixed bugs related to AIs flying and crashing into the ground at low altitudes

Gameplay and balance changes

  • AMS lasers no longer fire at unactivated missiles/torpedoes
  • Reduced AMS laser damage by -25%
  • Mass modifiers are now based upon the initial mass of the ship, and not multiplicative when stacking ship upgrades that affect mass
    Ex.: A ship of mass 500 tons has 2 upgrades that add +10% mass, previously it ended up at 500 * 1.1 * 1.1 = 605t, it will now end at 500 + 500 * 0.1 + 500 * 0.1 = 600t
    This means that some ships, despite the loadout being unchanged, might end up with a slightly different mass (ex.: carrier’s mass in default loadout is lighter, so itsspeed cap was increased by a few m/s)
  • Repair fields now repair hardpoints on a target by increasing HP order/priority (small damaged turrets first, then bigger ones next, then MK7+ last)
  • Reduced gimbal angle on railgun to 0.25° (down from 0.5°)
  • Tweaks to alternative ship’s chassis base stats to make them more balanced (and coherent with other loadouts)
  • Added an Extra Rockets upgrade
  • Missile retargetting upgrade now properly affects the corvette’s missile array
  • Extra missiles upgrade now properly affects capacity of EMP missile launchers as well as SSM batteries

Warp jam

  • Warp jam visual effect is now played over on every affected ship and toned down on the source ship/player
  • Engaging warp jam now informs the player on how many enemy targets were affected
  • Successfully warped jammed enemies now generate 150 support points per affected target
  • A jammed warp drive that the player tries to engage now properly shows a warning on the HUD (with remaining cooldown) instead of nothing
  • Increased warp jam’s range to 10 Km (up from 5 Km)

Bug fixes

  • Tentative fix for “AcquireCredentials” error when connecting to a server from Windows 7 without TLS 1.0 support
  • Fixed left/right sound asymmetry when firing weapons (left/right, sometimes weapons on left side could not be heard)
  • Fixed a server crash when an administrator manually starts a battle at a neutral base
  • Fixed a multithreading server crash bug in the players state manager
  • Reduced desync that caused an error correction snapping the cruiser’s orientation back by a few degrees when starting to charge the spinal canon (Note: the root problem is not totally fixed, but should be more subtle now)

Misc

  • Added a new planet: Tersac, a Cinder-like volanic planet with large lava oceans and dark ridged mountains
  • Added officer portraits during incoming HQ transmissions
  • Added a transmission notification when orbital canons are destroyed
  • Fixed misplaced floating shield generator on Xanthar Stn
6 Likes

Beta-branch - Patch 0.9.6.0 (Saturday 7th January 2023)

For a few weeks we’ll be running out an experimental version of the game on the Beta branch on Steam to test some community-suggested drastic gameplay and flight model changes (to test this version, right-click on Battlescape in your Steam’s library, go in Properties -> Betas and select the Beta branch).

The outcome of those tests may or never get applied to the live version of the game. As we’re getting closer to the entering the polish phase, this will be the last opportunity to do drastic changes to the game in terms of gameplay settings and balance.

For this reason, experimental changes will only be considered candidates to apply to the public branch if they bring enough value (in terms of fun) to the game, as they will likely upset the balance in many subtle and not-so-subtle ways and cause more work for us to fix.

This is why community feedback is very important: we need to know which changes move the game in the better direction and which ones do not. Please let us know on Discord or the forums which changes you like, or even suggest more changes to test.

To start with this week’s changes (Note: more are coming later):

Interceptor

  • longitudinal linear thrust massively increased by +200% (x3)
  • horizontal linear thrust increased by +75%
  • vertical linear thrust increased by +200%
  • speed cap increased by +50%
  • rotational thrust increased by +50% (pitch, yaw)
  • removed turbo boost initial jolt
  • turbo boost provides a constant +50% thrust bonus (significant nerf, down from +250%)

These changes increase the interceptor’s maneuverability significantly and allow it to reach high speeds very quickly during normal flight, at the expense of boosting which is no longer a hard requirement to change course.

We are primarily looking for feedback in terms of the flight model, especially in interceptor vs interceptor dogfights. Those flight model changes may affect the game balance, especially the weapons, but we’re not trying to address those just yet.

Bomber

  • longitudinal linear thrust massively increased +100% (x2)
  • horizontal linear thrust increased by +100%
  • vertical linear thrust increased by +116%
  • speed cap increased by +35%
  • rotational thrust increased by +25% (pitch, yaw)
  • removed turbo boost initial jolt
  • turbo boost provides a constant +75% thrust bonus (significant nerf, down from +150%)
  • increased turbo energy cost per second by +25%

Corvette

  • longitudinal linear thrust massively increased by +66%
  • horizontal linear thrust increased by +66%
  • vertical linear thrust increased by +40%
  • speed cap increased by +20%
  • rotational thrust increased by +40% (pitch) and +40% (yaw))
  • swapped rotation speed cap between pitch and yaw (the ship will now turn faster on yaw than pitch)
  • removed turbo boost initial jolt
  • Note that turbo boost thrust bonus remains unchanged (+100%)
  • increased turbo energy cost per second by +50%

Other

  • removed GyroBoost upgrade on all ships (it would be redundant with the rotational thrust increase changes)
  • removed formation modes on enemies
  • increased AI aiming precision on small ships (small ships being more mobile, they also need to be more dangerous for the game to not get more boring)
2 Likes

Patch 0.9.6.4 (Thursday 16th March 2023)

As you may have noticed, for the past 3 months we’ve been experimenting with a bunch of major gameplay/balance-related changes on the PTR (beta branch) test server. We focused on improving the feeling of flying with small ships, making them more nimble as many players were hoping for. The interceptor in particular has received a massive linear thrust buff. As a result of small ships (interceptor, bomber and the corvette to some extent) being more maneuverable, we significantly nerfed the turbo boost on all these ships and removed the “jolt” boost. We also introduced asymmetrical thrust to add depth to the flight model and removed the ability to form up on an enemy. A simplified damage model was introduced for propulsion (losing thrust as your ship gets more damaged) and we improved various issues related to the spinal cruiser’s canon.

However, all these changes might have introduced some new balance issues, especially in relation to weapons (some of them might need an accuracy boost to better track the more nimble ships now). As usual, any feedback on these changes is appreciated so do not hesitate to let us know on the forums or comments. As for the next step in development we are looking at a patch in 1-2 months for the first iteration on the carrier gameplay changes and, hopefully, a new planet/moon. Once this is done, we’ll probably consider the core gameplay near completion and move to finalizing the rest of the game/content.

Interceptor

  • longitudinal linear forward thrust massively increased by +100% (x2)
  • longitudinal linear reverse thrust is now asymmetrical (-40% of forward thrust)
  • horizontal linear thrust increased by +20% (still symmetrical)
  • vertical linear upwards thrust increased by +100%
  • vertical linear downwards thrust is now asymmetrical (-30% of upwards thrust)
  • speed cap increased by +20%
  • rotational thrust increased by +50% (pitch, yaw)
  • removed turbo boost initial jolt
  • turbo boost provides a constant +50% thrust bonus (significant nerf, down from +250%)

Bomber

  • longitudinal linear forward thrust massively increased +90%
  • longitudinal linear reverse thrust is now asymmetrical (-25% of forward thrust)
  • horizontal linear thrust increased by +60%
  • vertical linear upwards thrust increased by +120%
  • vertical linear downwards thrust is now asymmetrical (-25% of upwards thrust)
  • speed cap increased by +10%
  • rotational thrust increased by +25% (pitch, yaw)
  • removed turbo boost initial jolt
  • turbo boost provides a constant +75% thrust bonus (significant nerf, down from +150%)
  • increased turbo energy cost per second by +25%

Corvette

  • longitudinal linear foward thrust massively increased by +70%
  • longitudinal linear reverse thrust is now asymmetrical (-10% of forward thrust)
  • horizontal linear thrust increased by +60%
  • vertical linear upwards thrust increased by +40%
  • vertical linear downwards thrust is now asymmetrical (-15% of upwards thrust)
  • rotational thrust increased by +40% (pitch) and +40% (yaw))
  • swapped rotation speed cap between pitch and yaw (the ship will now turn faster on yaw than pitch)
  • removed turbo boost initial jolt
  • Note that turbo boost thrust bonus remains unchanged (+100%)
  • increased turbo energy cost per second by +50%

Gameplay

  • it is no longer possible to get in flight formation with an enemy
  • it is now possible to accelerate over the combat speed with flight auto-assist (previously holding forward was capped to max combat speed)
  • implemented a simplified propulsion damage model based on HP damage (-25% thrust between 15% and 30% HP and -50% thrust below 15% HP)
  • removed ability to share credits or ship points between players
  • removed GyroBoost upgrade on all ships (it would be redundant with the rotational thrust increase changes)
  • removed speed cap option

Spinal cruiser’s canon

  • added auto-zoom to spinal canon’s charge
  • added 3 seconds of warmup to charge sequence (not affected by propulsion dampening)
  • spinal canon’s charge sequence is now exclusive to other weapons firing
  • increased damage by +25% (25K damage per shot)
  • improvements for network jittering when firing the spinal cruiser’s canon
  • added a charging progress bar on HUD when firing the spinal cruiser’s canon
  • fixed being able to charge the spinal cruiser’s canon in invalid match state (starting/ending match)

General Balance changes

  • reduced torpedoes max locking range to 50 Km (down from 100 Km)
  • increased base defense’s MK10 Orbital Canon aiming precision and range (to 150 Km, now equal to the spinal cruiser canon’s)
  • interceptor’s shield regeneration rate decreased by -20% (to 1 SP/sec from 1.25 SP/sec)
  • increased corvette’s heat capacity by +16% (to 350 from 300 heat points)
  • decreased Phalanx/CIWS heat generation per shot to 3 (from 4 heat points)
  • increased min warp entry speed (~66% of combat speed on all ships)
  • added a per-ship warp speed coefficient to better tune warp speeds per ship
  • loss of propulsion while warming warp now also applies to longitudinal accelerations

HUD / Controls

  • reduced depth scaling for HUD indicators, to make markers scale more naturally with depth. Also applied depth scaling to selected target’s marker. Increased transparency over distance to make distant targets more easily noticeable
  • camera zoom is now applied to third-person camera modes too
  • weapons aiming direction dots are now smoothed before and not after projection on HUD, which should remove the “latency” in their movements when moving the virtual head around (or with TrackIR)
  • added thrust buff/debuff change below throttle indicator on HUD (ex.: loss of thrust when damaged, or thrust increase when boosting)
  • renamed some MFDs to be more clear (ex.: EW is now Ship Systems, Chat is now Comms; System is now Notifications)
  • increased HUD’s default number of navigation and combat targets since small ship indicators are now smaller on screen at a distance

AI

  • increased AI aiming precision on small ships (small ships being more mobile, they also need to be more dangerous for the game to not get more boring)
  • AI capital ships are now allowed to fly 15% below the max base defense’s range

Other

  • experimental network change to improve stability of players input queue
  • added ship debris/wreckage for all small ships as well as cruiser (Note: all ships should have their unique destruction/debris now except the carrier)
  • added smoke trail behind ship debris
5 Likes

Patch 0.9.7.0 ( Thursday June 1st 2023 )

Hey everybody,

We are introducing a new patch today to improve game systems related to our future carrier update. Radial menus have received a polish pass, with a new design and description details, and should now properly reflect the state of each sub system or weapon (like cooldowns). Abilities have been reworked and integrated to the loadout/weapons MFD and can now be used with their group number keys instead of their own dedicated keys. This allowed us to clean some obsolete keybinds and introduce a few new ones for targetting primary or secondary mission objectives, or auto-targetting sub-systems on the target (this should massively improve the value of interceptors vs capital ships).

We’ve also been experimenting with voice-overs for incoming transmissions and computer alerts. They are currently disabled by default, so if you want to give them a try, make sure to turn the options on in the audio settings. Some of the abilities have been tweaked or reworked to make use of the new ability system.

Coming next, we’ll probably release another intermediary patch by the end of June with tweaks and improvements (mostly ability-related) before the main carrier update (likely in July). After that we’ll pretty much be done with core gameplay and move on to the rewards system (medals, achievements, skins, cross-server persistency etc…).

We aren’t sure yet how the single player mission editor, tutorials or modding will fit in terms of development priorities, but they’ll probably keep us busy at least until the end of the year. After that we’ll have to do a final polish/optimizations pass and we should be good to go for the release. It’s been long coming (better late than never) but it seems like we’re finally seeing some light at the end of the tunnel. We appreciate your patience and support in that adventure.

-Flavien Brebion

Radial menus / Controls

  • New visual design
  • Info details displayed at center of the wheel
  • State are better displayed, including cooldown/requirements notifications, associated hotkey etc…
  • Radial menus can now be opened/closed by tapping a key and clicking on one of many items (holding and selecting an item is still possible though)
  • When hovering over a weapon group on the weapons radial menu, the corresponding group is now highlighted in the loadout/weapons MFD
  • Added a new targetting radial menu (accessible through holding T, G or H keys). Mostly convenience for people that do not want to learn all hotkeys (or on gamepads with limited buttons)
  • Added a new targetting keybind: auto-target best sub-system/hardpoint on target (will automatically choose a hardpoint to destroy, and switch to the next one upon destroyed). Default hotkey: Y
  • Added a new targetting event: target closest primary objective. Default hotkey: U
  • Added a new targetting event: target closest secondary objective. Default hotkey: I
  • Removed hotkeys from unused targetting modes: cycle through previous/next targets (default hotkeys on Y and U, now been replaced by the new targetting events)
  • Removed hotkey to deploy a mine (default: M)
  • Added a dedicated overcharge radial menu (default: holding B)
  • Added a dedicated formations radial menu (default: holding N)

Abilities / Upgrades

  • Abilities are now bound to weapon groups and will be accessible through the 1-9 keys like weapons. Their state is also displayed in the loadout/weapons MFD as well as the weapons radial menu (default: RMB)
  • Ship/loadout menu now displays the ability type in the preview card (if any)
  • Removed targetting assist upgrade (Note: you can still toggle the assist option in the gameplay settings)
  • Fixed repairing hardpoints on an ally using a repair-field, not providing repair notifications or rewards
  • Revamped Stealth upgrade to be a toggle (now depleting energy over time)
  • Fixed being able to engage Stealth while in warp
  • Stealth no longer gets disengaged while turbo boosting
  • Warp jam no longer affects allies in standard (Note: removed Warp Jammer II upgrade as that’s what it provided)
  • Warp jam now costs 150 energy points for every use
  • Introduced a new warp jam boost upgrade that increases the jam duration (at the cost of a small range reduction)
  • Introduced a new energy regen rate upgrade that increases the regen rate at the cost of max energy (Note: not available on bombers and cruisers, and incompabile with the capacitors upgrades)
  • Improved reliability (mobility + slight hitpoints buff) of proximity mines (this should make them more of a threat)
  • Improved AI usage of mines (they will no longer waste mines at large distances, or if the enemy isn’t a cap ship, and increase the mines drop frequency when fighting against a nearby capital ship target)
  • Increased mines launch speed, so that they get away from the source ship more quickly before they’re fully activated
  • Unactivated mines without a target no longer get shot at by turrets

Voice-overs (experimental)

  • Added a male and female officer voice over for HQ transmissions (Note: some of the female transmissions are not complete yet, so it is possible that not all transmissions will have a proper voice over)
  • Added a synthetic female computer voice for alerts and warnings
  • Both of those options are turned off by default. We need to evaluate if they’re too spammy and cause audio fatigue before we promote them to be the standard. Feedback here is appreciated
  • If you want to give them a try, turn the settings on in the audio menu
  • Renormalized audio volume (Note: this will reset the volume settings other than general volume)

General Balance changes

  • Hardpoints now have a min repair time of 3 minutes

HUD / Menus

  • Added an option in controls settings to toggle the keyboard helper screen on first deploy
  • Fix for extended MFD title name
  • Empty MFD pages no longer show their title on the HUD (exemple: an empty squad will no longer show “squad” floating on top of the MFD on the HUD)
  • Fixed formatting of text in loadout/weapons MFD (not properly aligned to bottom MFDs, and could not fit 10 groups before)
  • Removed beeping sound when lock is sub-optimal
  • Locking HUD’s circle now gets bigger as target is aligned and differencial velocity is minimized (note: the logic also got swapped, previously the circle was getting bigger when the aim was inaccurate)
  • Fixed guided weapons (missiles/torps/mines) indicators not properly highlighted on HUD when they’re targetting the player (their color/brightness should’ve been increased)
  • Improved reactivity of “incoming” missile alert: there was up to 1/4th of a second of network delay for the alert to trigger after a guided weapon got activated/detected. There is no delay anymore
  • New notification added to depleting ammo on a weapon (+chaffs, mines etc…)
  • Tweaks to alerts/warnings priorities
  • Volume levels are now locked behind a “customize” checkbox in the audio settings (the goal here is to have players avoid touching them by accident unless they really want to)
  • Tweaks to HUD color themes
  • Updated help screen (F9)

Bug fixes

  • Fixed crash bug when loading old/obsolete input profile XML files (Note: this could have affected old returning players)
  • Fixed a bug that caused the locking HUD to disappear while the ship is being repaired/resupplied by an ally
  • Fixed guided weapons triggering “incoming” beeping alert despite not being detected by the player target (note: the alert text did not show up, but the alert beeping sound did, which wasn’t coherent)
  • Fixed incorrect welcome transmission being sent when selecting Scoria instead of Havok upon first joining a match
5 Likes

Patch 0.9.8.0 ( Wednesday 28th of June 2023 )

This patch is focusing on stability (3 client crashes were fixed), an upgrade to the mission system and many AI improvements. The mission system now supports side missions, and to “validate” its implementation, we are first testing it with two kind of side missions: bounty hunting and nemesis NPCs.

Bounty hunting already existed in the game previously, but was sort of hidden to new players as it didn’t have proper exposure to the missions list. The new system shows up to 5 bounties, and prioritizes the ones matching the selected player’s ship class. Bounties are fully optional, but provide a small credits bonus if you successfully accomplish them. It is now possible to place a bounty on to an enemy player in the leaderboard menu (right-click on an enemy name and select the bounty you want to place on him). Only one bounty can be placed on each enemy at a time.

Nemesis missions are a variant of the bounty system. Every few hour or so, a powerful AI/bot is deployed to hunt the player. This “elite” AI has a higher skill level, is more precise and will exclusively focus on the player until he dies. Killing the nemesis provides a nice credits reward, but if you die to it it will stop hunting you and focus back on the rest of the battlefield.

In the future, we’d like to experiment with this new side missions system and react dynamically to various events on the battlefield to provide more focused directions to the (new) players. Examples: a mission to destroy an enemy spinal cruiser’s canon; a mission to launch a torpedo on an isolate capship that has no AMS, etc…

Note that side missions are optional, so you can fully ignore them and continue to participate to the battle as normal. They only serve as to provide more objectives and small rewards to the players that want to get involved with them.

This patch also includes a long list of AI fixes and improvements. Some of these can affect the balance of battles (offense vs defense power) quite a bit, so it may require further iterations or a hotfix if we get feedback that a side gets reliably favored in battles versus the other side.

Also please note that the voice-overs (computer and transmission voices), as well as showing the max amount of HUD targets during combat, are now enabled by default.

-Flavien Brebion

Missions system

  • Added support for Bounty hunt missions
  • It is now possible to place bounties on other players (Note: right-click on the leaderboard on an enemy player and select the bounty to place)
  • Added support for Nemesis missions (Note: requires rank 3, and fairly rare, to not be too distracting. If players like them, we might increase their frequency in the future)
  • Updated missions menu with updated descriptions and details panel (for new missions too)

AI

  • tweaked aiming precision, improved dodge boosting, improved energy management
  • Fixed a small bug related to AI targetting priorities based upon rank differences
  • Fix for AI spinal cruisers not firing their spinal canons
  • Improved pathing and nagivation to attack fixed objectives (this should make the AI’s capships more easily attack static objectives and finish battles instead of getting frozen in space)
  • Improved capship’s pathing around base shields
  • Improved players targetting priority, now better taking the rank difference into account, and giving more challenge (higher ranked AIs) to higher-ranked players. Overall, players should find the AIs to be more proactive at attacking them
  • Improved warping AIs to avoid bumping or dying into obstacles as they slow down
  • Improved turbo boosting behavior of AIs
  • Increased turn rate of interceptor and bomber’s AIs, so that they can track fast-moving targets more easily

HUD / Menus / Controls

  • Fixed transmission popup being incorrected centered on star map in certain screen resolutions
  • Fixed behavior of cycling groups, it is now skipping abilities and only works on manual weapons
  • Fixed tooltips twitching by a few pixels when touching the edges of the screen

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a client crash related to empty weapon groups displayed on HUD, which then caused a crash while in spectator mode
  • Fixed a client freeze when trying to cycle weapon groups with an empty loadout
  • Fixed a rare crash related to some space stations spawning too many asteroids around them, exceeding the client’s capacity

Misc

  • Added support to loading FMOD assets by guid in audio config file
  • Player max credits are now capped to 100K
  • The game now defaults to showing max (200) combat targets
  • The game now defaults to voice-overs enabled
  • Tweaked gravity attenuation formula, as it was too weak around the gas giant
  • Reduced gas giant’s mass
  • Added 2 station battles in low orbit of the gas giant
  • Small reduction (-15%) of hitpoints on station’s large shield generators
2 Likes

Patch 0.9.9.0 ( Friday 29th September 2023 )

The carrier gameplay patch is now available! The carrier needed some love for a long time and was usually considered the most boring ship to fly in game (it had the lowest mobility due to being a mobile fortress, so its gameplay was more situational). We’re introducing AI squads management to its
gameplay like in a simplified RTS game. We wanted to stay away from too much micromanagement so you cannot assign orders to individual ships, only to squads as a whole.

Orders include attacking, escorting, search & destroy and of course (un)deployment and are available in the new orders radial menu (default key: O). A hangar MFD was added to the HUD when flying the carrier, showing the state of ships in every squad. In hangar mode, the 1-9 keys can be used to individually (de)select active squads, while F5 allows to switch the interactive MFD (loadout or hangar). Alternatively, it is possible to switch between MFD modes in the weapons radial menu too (default: RMB).

Also note that a spectator mode is available through the orders radial menu. This allows to quickly observe the battle from a squad’s ship’s perspective. On escort/protection orders, the AI flies into simplified conic-shaped formations until an enemy enters its attack range. Search & destroy allows
ships to select a target individually. Squad ships will always prioritize defending themselves when attacked and may ignore the assigned order temporarily. The only exception to this rule is the emergency docking mode, which forces all squads to come back to the carrier and undeploy as quickly as possible.

The carrier update also comes with a bunch of new upgrades, most of which are dedicated to the carrier gameplay (see the list in the patch notes).

As AI behavior is becoming pretty complex, we have no doubt there will be bugs and strange occasional behaviors. Do not hesitate to report them on the forums so that we can investigate the conditions in which they happen.

While the focus of this patch was the carrier gameplay, it also includes an upgrade to the Interceptor asset (texture optimizations and new skins). As we’re entering the last quarter of the year, we’re entering the final development phase before our full release. We still have a lot of work to do but in terms of gameplay, the carrier was the last major feature that was remaining to be implemented. We now consider the game to be more or less gameplay feature complete and will start to focus on to polishing the experience, introducing tutorials/training, cosmetic content and the offline sandbox mode.

-Flavien Brebion

Carrier gameplay

  • Introduced the concept of Carry Points (CP) in the carrier hangar. The default budget is 30 CP
  • In the ship loadout menu, added a hangar management tab to the ship panel
  • In this hangar management tab, you can see the current amount of CP used by all ships in the hangar, and the max amount
  • Use appropriate buttons to create new squads or delete existing ones. A new squad is initially empty. Click the “add ships” button to open the ships loadout selection panel. Only standard ship loadouts (not user-customized ones) are available
  • Each loadout has a different cost (typically: 1 CP for interceptors, 3 CP for bombers and 5 CP for corvettes). Select the loadouts you’re interested in to add them to the selected squad
  • In the squad panel, it is also possible to click the up/down icons to add or remove ships of the same loadout, without having to open the loadout panel manually every time
  • Note that default loadouts names are displayed in green
  • There is a limit of up to 4 carriers in play per faction, so not all players may be able to fly one at any time
  • Each squad can have up to 6 ships, and there may be up to 9 squads in the hangar. While this may allow up to 54 ship slots, keep in mind that you’ll be limited by the max CP budget sooner
  • Some upgrades may increase or decrease the CP budget
  • A new hangar MFD is available on the carrier HUD. Each line shows one squad, starting with its ID number (corresponding to the selection key 1-9) and the current order’s target name. Then comes the status for each of the 6 ships slots (the ship icon shows the ship type, the coloring the health status. A red cross is displayed
    if the ship has been destroyed. Finally, on the right side of the line, an icon shows the order type
  • When the hangar MFD is interactive (use F5 to switch between the hangar MFD and the loadout MFD), the 1-9 number keys can be used to individually (de)select squads
  • Press O to open the orders radial menu. One or many squads must have been selected. Then select one of the orders to assign to the squad(s). Some order types (attack, protect) will use the current carrier’s target to assign as the squad’s
  • Alternatively, it is possible to use the loadout radial menu insteead of using F5 and O. A new entry is available in the loadout radial menu, to toggle the MFD modes. The orders radial menu will contextually open instead of the loadout’s if the hangar MFD is selected
  • It is not possible to (un)deploy squads while in warp
  • It is possible to replace destroyed ships while repairing the carrier in an allied base’s docking bay (this is also partially possible in game via the salvage upgrade)
  • Docked ships that are damaged but not destroyed will repair automatically over time
  • Squad’s ships that are under escort/protection orders will fly in conic shape formation next to their allied target
  • Damage kills, assist and stats from a squad ship gets credited to the carrier owner
  • While this is currently not implemented yet, we have plans to make squads, orders and targets selection available through contextual menus in the tactical screen in the future

General AI tweaks

  • Fixed AI ships occasionally firing random shots on allies they’re escorting (ex.: corvettes on ships they’re trying to repair)
  • Bomber AI from carrier squads are more agressive than normal bomber bots

General gameplay changes

  • The ship points distribution curve is now inverse exponential instead of being linear
  • Our design goal here was to make it faster to accumulate SP if you’re low on SP and want to reach the more expensive ships more quickly, but also to help new players struggling with burning their SP on small ships too frequently
  • Under the old distribution model, players received a constant +30 SP every minute
  • Under the new distribution model, players receive a variable amount of SP every minute. This amount is high (up to +60 SP) when the total amount of SP assets is low. This amount is about identical to the old number (+30 SP) when the total SP is around the 1000. This amount goes lower than 30
    the higher you go. The minimum amount of SP received is 10.
  • Under the new model, it takes as much time as before to reach a carrier’s cost (2500 SP) from scratch (about 84 mins). It is slightly faster to reach a cruiser’s. It is 10 minutes faster to replenish a destroyer’s (20 mins instead of 30 mins). It is a few minutes faster for the smaller ships.
  • One key difference is that the new model uses the total amount of SP assets owned, which is the sum of the SP account and the SP value of the currently flown ship. This should make it impossible to abuse the system by refunding the ship after profiting from a low SP account to earn SP at a faster rate

New upgrades

  • New upgrade: Detonate (all ships): provides an active ability to instantly detonate all activated MTBs (missiles, torpedoes, bombs, mines) currently in flight.
  • New upgrade: Launch tubes (carrier): doubles the rate at which ships get deployed, by using the launch tubes system at the sides of the carrier instead of the main hangar. The repair crew and heavy repair field’s effectiveness (optionally used) are reduced by 10%
  • New uptrade: Repair rate (carrier): doubles the repair rate of damaged ships docked in your hangar. Does not replenish destroyed ships (you need to fly back to an allied space station’s docks for that). The repair crew and heavy repair field’s effectiveness (optionally used) are reduced by 10%
  • New upgrade: Hangar capacity (carrier): increases by 50% your hangar carry points (CP) capacity. The repair crew and heavy repair field’s effectiveness (optionally used) are reduced by 25%
  • New upgrade: Veteran pilots (carrier): increases the military rank from AI ship squads deployed by the carrier. They originally range from level 1 (RCT) to 10 (MPO) and are deployed with a random rank in that range. This upgrade increases the minimum range to 5 (PO3), making the AI more experienced and agressive
  • New upgrade: Salvage parts (carrier): recycles 3 wrecked ships of the same class from your hangar into one brand new ship, once per minute. The recycled ship has half hitpoints. The remaining wrecks become unsalvagable. Due to storing extra salvage parts, your hangar capacity is reduced by 15%
  • Note: all new carrier upgrades require a fairly high military rank (13+)

Bug fixes

  • Fixed abilities that do not consume any type of ammo
  • Fixed a rare client crash related to projectiles multithreading
  • Fixed a rare client crash bug that happened when a missile would lose its target the same time it got destroyed

UI / Menus changes

  • Tweaked the HUD’s central information (speed bar, status, target info) max separation to the left/right so that it can’t overlap with center left and center right MFD
  • Fixed a bug which caused damaged guided weapons (missiles/torps/mines) to be displayed with the “damaged” status below their HUD indicator. This now only applies to ships

Misc

  • Updated interceptor asset: optimized UV coordinates and improved the texture/material. It should react better under various lighting conditions, and look less clean than before
  • 7 interceptor skins are now experimentally available (use “/SetSkin SkinName” in the chat box with SkinName being one of the following: InterceptorScoria, InterceptorHavoc, InterceptorFire, InterceptorBee, InterceptorGold, InterceptorIndustrial or InterceptorMilitary
  • Added 2 new external camera views (F2) to the interceptor
  • Reduced volume of rotating turret loop sfx
3 Likes

Patch 0.9.10.2 ( Monday 18th December 2023 )

Greetings everyone. In this update (most likely the last one of the year) we’re bringing you the next iteration and improvements to the carrier gameplay. The behavior of the squads under orders was changed to be more reactive and consistent (for example, ships in escort mode shouldn’t fly dozens of Km away from the carrier anymore).

We revamped ramming damage as well as griefing which were often a source of frustration for new players. We started some preparations for our future modding support plan and replaced old placeholder weapons meshes with new, unique ones. A quality-of-life pass was applied to the UI, including a speaker icon for voice chat or an automatic radar/tactical view zoom-out at high velocities.

Starting from january we will focus our efforts on the major remaining missing features such as tutorials, the single-player sandbox mode or the private/dedicated servers hosting. These may take a few months of development (probably at least until Q2 2024) during which regular patches will be lightweight (bug or balance fixes, but no new major feature). After that we’ll start our final polish pass and prepare marketing for our 1.0 launch around (estimated) Autumn 2024.

Happy winter holidays,

-Flavien Brebion

Carrier gameplay

  • Carrier ship points (SP) cost now has a base cost with an empty hangar (1800 SP), and a cost per hangar’s carry point (CP) (+15 SP/CP). An empty or default (unupgraded hangar) carrier now costs less SP to deploy (previously the cost was set to a fixed 2500 SP)
  • Rebalanced AI budget reinforcement waves during battles to better take into account carrier hangar costs and to be more stable (the value no longer fluctuates based on deployed/undeployed ships)
  • Fixed some carrier hangar loadout changes lost when switching menus
  • Carrier squad rewards (xp, credits & damage stats from kills/assists) reduced to 25% for the carrier owner (previously, the carrier owner received full rewards for its squad kills/assists)
  • Carrier orders should now be more reactive to squads when changing targets
  • Carrier squads now retreat (warp out) after about 30s once the carrier has died/undeployed. This addresses the problem of players deploying their ships, then undeploying the carrier, and repeating the operation to spawn an infinite amount of ships
  • Carrier squads in escort mode should now be less agressive and stay within a 10 Km defensive range of the carrier (or of the protected ship)
  • Carrier squads on orders to attack a target (ship or base structure) that gets destroyed should now return to the carrier instead of switching to search & destroy
  • Corvettes in carrier squads should now prioritize repairing/rearming ships in their squads, and then ships in other squads, over “foreign” ships not belonging to the carrier at all
  • More tweaks to obstacle avoidance AI, as capships like the carrier sometimes had a massive (30 km+) avoidance range causing allied fleets to fall apart
  • Carriers can no longer replenish their lost hangar ships at the base under attack during a battle (they can still replenish their ships at another allied base though)
  • Removed 8 MK4 turrets from carrier hardpoint layouts (now that the carrier can manage squads, we want it to be more vulnerable to small enemy ship assaults and to use its squads more actively to protect itself)

General gameplay

  • Revamped collision/ramming damage to punish more severly the rammer. Damage is now capped, so a smaller ship at insane ram speeds (many km/s) cannot destroy a bigger ship anymore (ex.: destroyer vs cruiser)
  • Fixed a bug with collision damage that was incorrectly calculated for a warping rammer, due to warp interruption cancelling out the contact speed before damage was calculated

A minority of players sometime do griefing for fun. We obviously want to discourage this behavior, so we’re increasing the penatly for the griefer while refunding his victim

  • Griefing now refunds ship points (SP) to the dead player
  • The griefing count no longer fully resets after a match restarts (previously, griefing was forgotten after every match, it will now stay persistent accross matches, but decrease slowly over time)
    (As a reminder: after a grief count of 3, a player gets auto-kicked from the match, then auto-banned if he continues griefing)
  • Added a more explicit griefing automatic warning notification

Modding

We do not have any plans to support modding before our 1.0 release, however in this update we made some preparations for future modding (mostly code architecture changes). We’ve added support for a C# .NetCore plugin system as well as a C# SDK. In the future we plan on supporting config files (XML) modding, assets modding (through our engine editor/cooker) and audio modding (already partially supported with FMOD).

Both the client and the server can be modded and we’d like the mod system to automatically download missing client mods when connecting to a modded server. This is a lot of work so keep in mind that the extent of our modding support will largely depend on the success and popularity of the game after our 1.0 launch.

Misc Bug fixes

  • Fixed warp-in AI bots slowdown failing in atmosphere of gas giant, causing capital ships to fall to their death shortly after being spawned

UI / HUD / Menus

  • Added a dedicated UI sound effects volume slider (this can be useful when recording a video)
  • Leaderboard now displays the ship class icon for every player (if spawned)
  • Fixed death/skull icon being displayed for the player on the starmap despite being well alive
  • Tactical screen and radars now automatically zoom out in warp or at high speeds (> 1 km/s)
  • Added a speaker icon to VOIP (squad menu and squad MFD)
  • Player VOIP chat volume is now independent of global volume (if global volume is set to zero and voice chat isn’t, you can still hear people talking in squads)
  • Cleaned squad MFD (removed player role and rank icons)
  • Replaced all isometric ship class icons in menus with top-down ones (more coherent and easier for new players to recognize the ship’s shapes?)
  • Fixed “ammo” instead of “energy” warning flashing on active low-energy weapons stats on HUD
  • Minor fixes to default MFD layouts for some ships
  • Added a credits page (Note: backers list is a huuuge vertical flat list and needs to be adapted to multiple columns at some point)

Misc

  • Fixed server shutdown notification popup not showing up
  • Added proper unique meshes and materials for all weapons in game
  • Removed launchers placeholders
  • Added skin-specific paint colors to weapons materials
  • Russian localization update thanks to whirsil
3 Likes

Patch 0.10.0.1 ( Thursday 24th of June 2024 )

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Hey everyone, time for another update and a major patch. As we mentionned a few months ago, we entered a relatively uneventful phase of development for Battlescape, focusing our efforts on polishing the experience, especially for new players.

We’re happy to report that we’ve made significant progress on that front, with the first implementation of our custom internal scripting system which allowed us to build the first tutorials. Basic Flight, Basic Combat and Advanced Flight are now available in the Training menu (we got ride of the old & mostly outdated Youtube links, finally !). Each training mission ends with a trial, a small challenge for players to test their skills on (the flight tutorials have racing courses in an asteroid field, while the combat tutorial a small wave defense against some Interceptor drones). The pacing is relatively slow but each training mission sets up all the concepts needed to understand 6DOF space combat mechanics. We intend to add more tutorials in the coming months prior to the 1.0 release.

We’re also happy to release a new ship in this patch: a Support-class frigate that can repair and rearm capital ships. Support ships are considered capital ships, slightly smaller than Destroyers but more industrial. Some of you may notice that we’ve recycled the Hauler, which was an NPC-only ship from a few years ago when the game had a factory/resource system. They’re now player flyable. Supports have a very asymmetrical design: weak hull but very strong regenerative shields, making them hard to
pick up by interceptors. They have light MK4 defenses, mostly on the upside, with an almost empty belly. Their movement lies between the Corvette and the Destroyer as you’d expect. They are equipped in standard with auto-aiming, manual-firing repair/rearm beams as nearby support (up to 3 km) and repair/rearm guided drones for long range. They can repair/rearm a capital ship, even a cruiser, to 100% in a minute or two, so they can be pretty powerful in the right hands to help the capital fleet survive longer.

This patch also includes a number of new weapons & upgrades. Worth mentionning, an Active Shield ability for the Interceptor allows players to recharge their shield to 100% instantly at will… but the shield decays instead of recharging over time ! Needless to say, finding the right timing to use it will require experience, but may be powerful. Note that AI/bots can now spawn with randomized loadouts and also use those abilities (Stealth bots may surprise you out of nowhere occasionally !)

Speaking of AI, this patch introduces major AI changes in terms of Battle flow & Strategies. The AI commander should now be smarter and battles more balanced. Stategies involve being more or less agressive and adapting the reinforcement wave’s composition to the dynamics of the battle. Pathfinding was improved especially around structures or asteroids, which should prevent some unfortunate… accidents from our automated friends. There are still some known issues with the AI (especially related to Spinal cruiser’s AI having difficulties aiming at long distance) which we’ll try to address in the next patches.

Coming next, we’ll be working on the Sandbox mode and various UI “quality of life” improvements such as Weapons management. We still have some content to add (new planet environments, weapons & upgrades) but this Summer we’ll focus most of our efforts on the next big visual polish phase, including some new new special effects (atmospheric re-entry, warp jam…) and the missing tutorials. Stay tuned and as usual, do not hesitate to provide us with your feedback on the forums. Have fun,

-Flavien Brebion

Training Tutorials

  • Added Basic Flight Training (basic controls & navigating around an asteroid field, using boost, tactical view, etc…)
  • Added Basic Combat Training (targetting, weapon types, switching weapon groups, fighting drones, using missiles & chaffs and dogfighting in 5 waves of increasing difficulty)
  • Added Advanced Flight Training (flying without flight assist)
  • Removed old Youtube tutorial links
  • More tutorials to come later this year (ex.: Warp Navigation, Starmap, Advanced Combat, Flying capital ships…)

New Ship: the Supply

  • A small capital-ship class/Frigate Support ship that can repair/resupply bigger Capital ships (yes, even including the Carrier)
  • Has limited Hitpoints (weak Hull) but has the stronger Shield Regeneration rate in the game, making it very hard to be damaged by Interceptors
  • Has chaffs, but is weak to Torpedo’s splash damage
  • Asymmetrical Hardpoints design: all MK4 defense hardpoints are situated on its top, leaving the underside exposed
  • Has medium mobility, between a Corvette and a Destroyer
  • Doesn’t have boost
  • Has manual repair and rearm beams in standard. 3 Km range that can repair/rearm a capital ship in a few minutes. Can also almost instantly repair/rearm smaller ships as well, provided they’re in this range. The beams are single target (unlike the passive Corvette’s repair/resupply field aura)
  • For long-range repair/rearm, uses guided drones that have mobility and range equivalent to those of a torpedo. Can repair 8K HP instantly as the drone hits the allied target

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New weapons

MK5 Trigun Turret:

  • Fires a small burst of 3 shots in a conic shape dealing a good amount of damage
  • Has a limited forward-facing 180 deg firing arc

MK6 Flakball:

  • Fires 20 flak projectiles at once over a huge area (1+ km)
  • Low firing rate (every 5 seconds)
  • Its low precision makes it bad against isolated small ships, okay against a clump of ships in a small zone, and good against bigger targets like corvettes or destroyers
  • Can also be used as a last resort solution to hit incoming torpedoes/mines
  • Almost feels like a low-range brawling weapon against capital ships (ex.: Destroyer vs Destroyer)

Note:

  • Removed MK3 Repair and Rearm beams from the Corvette. Medic Corvette is no longer a standard loadout
  • Added MK5 Repair and Rearm beams for the Support
  • Added Repair and Rearm drones (they act like guided weapons, except they work on allies instead) for the Support
  • Added the ability to repair weapons on static base defenses with the repair beam

New upgrades

Active Shield:

  • Transforms the passive shield to a manual, active ability. Shield points decay over time by -20%/s but activating the ability instantly recharges the shield to 100%
  • Ability’s cooldown is 5s
  • Energy cost: 60
  • Designed to be a high skill, high reward upgrade, forcing you to pay attention to who’s firing at you at every moment and requiring a lot of attention. In exchange you can recharge the shield very often
  • Only available on the Interceptor and Bomber

CIWS Cooling:

  • The cooling system on CIWS Turrets (Phalanx MK4) is upgraded which allows them to fire as a continous stream instead of bursts. The firing rate is reduced by -50% and the max range by -20%
  • Note: the heat generated per projectile decreases significantly (-40%) however the fact that this weapon now fires continuously means that it still generates a huge amount of heat

Overflak:

  • Doubles the splash radius of Flak canons and increases the range by 20%. The projectile speed is reduced by -20% and the ammo cost increases by 1

Spinal Cooldown:

  • increases the fire rate of the Spinal canon at the cost of DPS and range, making it an anti-capital ship weapon instead of a long-range artillery weapon

Firewall:

  • passive upgrade that prevents enemies from seeing your hull and shield status when targetting you. Mostly used in PvP - does not really affect bots in any capacity

Analysis Computer:

  • passive upgrade that allows to see enemy target stats when they’re protected by a Firewall
  • also gives extra info on allied ships (Energy and Ammo supply status)

General Gameplay changes

  • Rebalanced the cost of certain upgrades (credits) in relation to their required rank
  • Tweaked credits & rank requirement for some advanced weapons
  • Fixed (removed) credits penalty and warning when carrier squads accidentally cause griefing on other allied ships
  • Reduced a bit the base frequency of apparition of nemesis
  • All weapons now firing in a circular arc shape (previously it was in a square shape)
  • Projectile hits on a sub-targetted hardpoint/weapon will now also damage the hull of the target-
  • Powering off a ship now increases the damaged system’s (ex.: Flight assist, Radar, Sensors, Engine…) self repair rate by +30%
  • Improved precision of missile launch aiming system (instead of snapping the reticle on the target when there is no interception solution, an estimated firing solution is now computed, providing a better aim reticle)
  • Battlescape generator now allows more land battles around sunsets

Weapons & Upgrades Balance tweaks

Repair Crew:

  • Increased repair crew max repair cap to 33% of max HP (from 25%) so that it can repair higher than the propulsion damage debuff (set to -25% thrust below 30% of max HP)

Plasma cutter:

  • Increased firing precision (spread reduced by -33%)

Decoy missile launcher:

  • Decoy missile launchers are now available on the bomber
  • The decoy missile now has the lifetime of a real torpedo (60s up from 10s)
  • The decoy missile now has less HP (75 HP down from 150 HP)
  • The decoy missile now has the emission range of a torpedo (25 km up from 10 km)
  • The decoy missile now deals a bit of damage (50) when hitting a target (from 1)
  • There are now 8 decoy missiles per launcher (up from 5)
    Our goal here was to make the decoy missiles a soak up a little bit of damage from AMS defenses, giving a higher chance for torpedoes to hit their targets

MK4 Flak Turret:

Flaks were reworked to deal more reliable damage and not just act as an area detractor

  • Flaks now fire at a slower rate (2/s instead of 5/s) but with twice the amount of projectiles before the cooldown starts
  • This means that instead of firing a whole bunch of flaks in quick succession, the flak turret now spreads firing flaks over a longer period of time
  • Increased turret rotation speed to 80°/s (from 40°/s) to more easily track quick nearby targets
  • Increased firing precision (spread reduced by almost -50%)
  • Increased ammo capacity to 1500 (from 1000)
  • Slightly reduced damage per projectile (kinetics by -20% and energy by -25%)
  • Increased splash radius to 200m (from 150m)
  • Decreased heat generation when firing by -50%
  • Introduced a minimum detonation range of 1.5 km. Flak projectiles cannot detonate at a lower range for safety reasons. Direct-hit damage is still dealt at a 50% rate. This was meant to introduce a short-range weakness to the weapon

MK4 Railgun Turret:

The railgun turret was rebalanced to deal more damage per projectile, but at a lower firing rate, resulting in the same overall DPS. Projectiles are faster and precision was increased, making it easier to reach longer-range targets

  • Reduced firing rate by -50% and burst count from 4 to 3
  • Firing cooldown increased to 2.25s (from 0.85s)
  • Kinetic damage increased to 16 (from 6) and energy damage to 3 (from 1)
  • Increased firing precision (spread reduced by -33%)
  • Increased projectile speed to 3 km/s (from 2.5 km/s) and reduced projectile lifetime to 2.67s (from 3.20s). As a result, the range remains unchanged (8 km)
  • Decreased heat generation when firing by -33%
  • Decreased max ammo capacity to 2000 (from 2500) and increased ammo cost to 3 (from 2). Slightly reduced energy cost to 4 (from 5). Due to the lower firing rate and increased cooldown, this nerf still results in being able to use this weapon almost twice longer before it runs out of ammo

MK4 Phalanx Turret:

  • Slightly nerfed kinetic damage per projectile to 8 (from 10) while increasing burst count to 10 (from 8), resulting in a similar DPS
  • Slightly increased firing precision (spread reduced by -25%)
  • Increased max ammo capacity to 3000 (from 2000), allowing the Phalanx to fire for a longer time before depleting ammo

MK5 Gun Turret:

  • Reduced heat generation when firing by -33%

Missile Retargetting:

  • The missile retargetting upgrade now also applies to torpedoes and SSM battery (note: despite the description saying so, this upgrade didn’t apply to torpedoes before…)
  • Fixed guided weapons that keep their spinning momentum after losing their target, causing random re-acquisitions of new targets with the smart retargetting upgrade

Defense towers on bases:

  • reduced MK7 defense towers DPS to match those of normal MK7s
  • new MK9 Space canons replace the small defense platforms floating away from space stations. They now act as long-range artillery against space fleets composed of spinal cruisers, up to 150 Km range. They have similar stats to their ground equivalents (MK10 Orbital canons)

MK7 Heracles:

  • Reduced firing arc from 50° to 40°
  • Reduced kinetic damage by -33% and energy damage by -6%

MK7 Thunderbolt:

  • Reduced firing arc from 50° to 40°
  • Reduced kinetic damage by -50% and energy damage by -36%
    Both Heracles & Thunderbolt were far more powerful than the MK7 Titan canons. The limited firing arc was supposed to be the main tradeoff, but in practise doesn’t seem to be that limiting. So here we’re nerfing the damage and add a bit more constraint on the firing arc.
    Those canons should still feel good alternatives compared to Titans, without being a must anymore.

HUD / UI / Menus

  • New main menu entries for Challenges, Workship or Join a game (currently placeholders)
  • Added a slider for HUD color saturation in the general settings (Note: will default to 50%, so new players won’t get an over-saturated HUD)
  • Exiting or pressing escape on the options menu now resets the settings to their previous state (like the cancel button does)
  • Ships displayed in the deploy panel or in the loadout screen now get sorted by ascending SP
  • Player’s XP info is now displayed as a progression percentage instead of the flat number (those numbers still appear in the tooltip though)
  • Changes to loadouts are now automatically saved on disk for custom loadouts. The undo system now works from the previous checkpoint in memory (which can be updated with the save icon in the loadout management panel)
  • Updated the notification/popup panel (match start/end, battle start/end, ranking up etc…). It now displays in game menus as well
  • A “!NEW!” notification is displayed in the loadout panel for newly available weapons/upgrades after ranking up
  • Transmissions now wait until the audio voice has finished speaking if the audio was longer than the text… (might be useful for localization in other languages)
  • Added a new icon for manual-fire auto-aim weapons in the loadout/weapons MFD
  • Removed opaque black panel backgrounds in options menu
  • Added fallback to other fonts when a glyph does not exist in a specific font
  • Repair/rearm impacts no longer cause the reddening of the screen sides as if taking damage
  • When selecting a hardpoint, the HUD’s target info now displays “destroyed” when that hardpoint is under non-repairable cooldown, and “damaged” later when it can be repaired
  • Fixed display units for rearm beam/drone in weapons info details panel (was showing “DPS” when they’re not dealing damage, but repairing/rearming…)
  • Weapons with a large cooldown between shots now show their actual hit damage, instead of the DPS, on the ship loadout weapons info panel
  • Visual improvements to the objectives MFD (checkbox, color pulsation, target icons)
  • Added more zoom levels to the tactical view
  • Added randomization of splash screens when loading a game
  • Waypoints now blink when they’re obstructed
  • Supply ships can now see an indicator under the nearest ally with low supply

Controls

  • Cleaned up the display names of keybindings (they will be more explicit, and better match the actual symbol on the keyboard)
  • The selection cursor is now visible on screen center at all times when using head tracking
  • Revamped nearby threat (‘G’ key) prioritization, should now behave much better and more often target enemies closer to you in your class range
  • Fixed an auto-turn bug in the capships control scheme that made the ship continue rotating in the wrong direction after manually overriding its orientation
  • Fixed capital ship automatic alignment mode not working when rotation assist is turned off
  • Fixed a small bug that prevented allied support ships to be selected via the “nearest support” key when they were further than 30 km away

Bug fixes

  • Tweaked carrier spawn position in docking bay to avoid collisions with station when spawning
  • Fixed stereo sound imbalance on x4 firing weapons sounds on small ship configurations
  • Fixed a bug that caused out-of-ammo hybrid weapons to drain energy very quickly when firing, despite not generating a shot
  • Fixed weapons overcharge mode not affecting the burst cooldown between salvos of multiple shots (this will affect the most weapons that fire a lot of shots at once with long cooldowns, such as the shredder, flaks, mk6/mk7+ etc… )
  • Fixed a rare client crash that can occur when a planet gets destroyed right after being created, causing a memory corruption leak in the atmosphere rendering pipe
  • Fixed a client crash happening when a carrier loadout references a ship loadout file that doesn’t exist anymore
  • Fixed a turret targetting bug that prioritized the out-of-view primary selected target over secondary in-view target candidates
  • Fixed flooding of log files with warning notifications from server
  • Fixed a bug that caused the background scene to not be properly displayed on the main menu after an error popup has occured
  • Client no longer crashes when trying to spawn with an actor that has no hardpoint, engine or propulsion component…
  • Fixed a bug that caused the “undo” icon to be available on an old, custom loadout despite doing no change to it
  • Fixed warp jam effect position not properly centered around warp interdiction towers on bases
  • Fixed a bug that didn’t apply some changed graphics settings until the next restart
  • Fixed warp jam crash & jam duration incorrectly applied
  • Fixed a bug that prevented manual firing on manual-firing, auto-aiming turrets on the corvette when there is no selected target
  • Fixed a bug that prevented critical ship systems to get repaired over time when they’re being repaired/resupplied by a beam or a drone
  • Fixed a couple of small tooltips bugs
  • Fixed “out of ammo” alert sometimes incorrectly popping up when firing missiles
  • Fixed a bug that prevented the main menu from showing up after you changed a graphics option and had the “this operation requires a restart” dialog popped up
  • Potential fix for a bug that caused the camera cockpit view mode to be stuck enabled after alt-tabbing while joining a game

AI

  • Fixed chaffs sometimes being fired by AI right after it gets spawned (this was particularly noticeable when deploying AI carrier squads)
  • AIs now have a chance to get a randomized loadout and abilities (including active shields or stealth) when they spawn
  • Massive improvements to 3D pathfinding of AI bots around base structures or asteroids
  • Bots now have new tactics (ex.: Bombing Run for bombers or Spinal cruisers)
  • Space Assault was revamped: the assault fleet is now further away (120-150 Km range), forcing the defenders to go on a counter outside the safety of station shields all while defending the station structures from small ships. This change should make space battles feel more dynamic,
    with both sides switching from attack to defense depending on the progression of the battle
  • Improved AI commander’s Battle strategies in Assault mode, which should bring more stability in the balance of battles
  • Improved reinforcements waves during battles: the AI commander will now try to adapt the fleet composition dynamically to match the chosen strategy’s

Visual / Sound Improvements

  • Implemented new shield mesh enveloppe effect around capital ships (previously, the shield impacts used a flat cross-quad particle effect, which looked bad when it was too big)
  • Fixed slight blurriness in UI shader. Text should be a bit sharper than before
  • Added lateral inertia camera movements to cockpit view (+ sliders in the graphics settings)
  • Added cockpit stress (shaking) when speeding in normal flight
  • Improvements to visibility/size of space dust effect, to have a better sense of flying speed
  • Visual improvements to the tactical view (new shader “holographic” effect, background less dark etc…)
  • Smog (battle smoke) effect tweaks (density, culling, lighting…)
  • Increased lights intensities for bigger weapon projectiles and muzzle effects
  • Reduced a little bit the visual size of the projectiles for the biggest weapons (MK6, MK7s & variants)
  • Reduced opacity of bubble shields around bases by -80%
  • Reduced opacity of spawn markers holograms by -75%
  • Base “bubble” shields are now powered off by default until a battle starts around them
  • Scaled repair/rearm beam’s impact effects to avoid blinding the player under a flood of visual effects
  • Replaced repair beam sound fx (new welding sound)
  • Added sound effects when clicking buttons or tabs in the UI
  • Improved ship’s ambient sounds (side thrusters, idle ambiance, speeding)
  • Added or replaced many Weapons sound effects (machine guns, shredder, halcyon, many turrets, mine explosion…)

Misc

  • Optimized Carrier collisions
  • Exceptions occuring while loading an XML config file are now better reported and show the error’s location
  • Improved error messages presented to the user in case of network or authentication issues
  • Added a /EditPath mode for recording cinematic cameras when editing a mission script
2 Likes

Patch 0.10.1.0 ( 1st of July 2024 )

Gameplay Tweaks

  • Increased by +33% the AI SP budget for space battles, to make them have more ships
  • Increased the turn rate of the repair/rearm beams from 30°/s to 60°/s
  • Increased firing rate of MK9 Defense Space Canons, to make them more of a threat to incoming enemy capital ships
  • Slightly decreased spread (= increased precision) and increased negative horizon firing angle of the MK9 Space Canons

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed an authentication bug with the I-Novae Launcher that prevented from connecting to online Multiplayer
  • Fixed a rare client crash bug that happened when you selected a proximity mine as a target right after it got spawned
  • Fixed gigantic repair beam impact effect when hitting a station/structure
  • Fixed a bug that incorrectly offset projectile impacts when hitting the corvette
  • Fixed a bug that inflated by dozen of times the amount of support points generated by the repair/rearm beams/drones on the Supply ship
  • Fixed a bug with proximity mines that didn’t cause any splash damage from their explosion after their lifetime expires

Tutorials/Scripts

  • Added the ability to skip transmissions dialogues
  • Mission runtime cinematic bug fixes (special effects like explosions did not appear during cinematics)
1 Like

Patch 0.10.2.1 ( 1st of November 2024 )

In this patch we’re introducing the first version of the offline Sandbox mode. It allows players to configure a single battle, a series of battles or an entire match (assuming you’d want to spend an entire day to play it) and select a battlescape environment (small, medium and large).

The match is hosted on your local server, and in time we are hoping to extend it to local coop or dedicated hosting. By changing options it is possible, for example, to play a single battle in a large environment (randomizing where the battle takes place), and that battle will take place around a space station on defense. It is also possible to play around with the various ship classes that the AI is allowed to spawn during these battle(s). More options as well as gameplay modifiers (ex.: all enemies are elites, all weapons are unlocked from start, etc…) will come in a future iteration.

We’re also doing a lot of tweaks to the Support ship’s gameplay & balance. We’re introducing the concept of Resource crates, which the Support ship must collect on a regular basis to replenish its Resource points, which are consumed by the repair/rearm lasers. Picking up resource crates also
replenishes a certain amount of repair/rearm drones, which come in a more limited amount than before. Their effect is now applied over time instead of being instant. We also reduced the Support ship’s shield generation rate and amount of countermeasures (chaffs) to make it weaker to enemy small ships.

We are hoping that those changes will make the Support’s gameplay more dynamic and less abusable than before, while preserving all its potential for saving friendly capital ships in battles.

An EMP torpedo has been added to the game and we’ve revamped all the warp effects (charging, field and exit) and got rid of the previous “tunnel” effect.

In the next major patch (ETA: winter holiday) we are planning to introduce the weapons loadout/groups management screen, iterate on the sandbox mode (more options and gameplay tweaks) and focus on our next visual polish pass. This will include decals, new planet environments, an update to the gas giant’s visuals and some more UI polish, before focusing next year on our 1.0 release.

-Flavien Brebion

Offline Sandbox mode

  • The sandbox mode is now availabe to play from the main root menu
  • Note 1: The sandbox mode runs a server locally which may affect performance, especially in massive battles
  • 3 game modes are available: single battle, multi battles and full match
  • single battle is pretty straightforward: you play a single battle, and whoever wins the battle (offense or defense) wins the ‘match’
  • multi battles plays a maximum of 3 battles, switching between offense and defense. Each battle is worth one victory point. The first team to 3 VP wins the match. It is a limited part of the full assault mode
  • full match plays the full assault loop over an entire battlescape, from 8 to 32 battles
  • the environment can be selected, from small (8 bases) to medium (16 bases) to large (32 bases). The selected game mode will play a randomized subset of all potential bases
  • it is possible to enter a “seed” number for the generated battlescape. The same seed will generate the same battlescape (planets, moons and bases) every time. If you encounter any bug/issue related to the battlescape or bases layout you can communicate the seed to us to help us debug it
  • various options are available: selecting the faction/team, the starting side (offense vs defense), the type of battles (space and/or land bases), and which ship classes the AI can spawn during the battles
  • Note 2: trying to play a battle with Carriers only, or Support ships only, may not work as intended. Carriers are by design limited in amount by the AI, and Support ships do not have their AI implemented yet, so will not spawn
  • Note 3: while it is possible to try playing a massive battle with Interceptors only, the local server’s load may result in unpredictable performance. Disabling certain ship classes may result in some battles being unbalanced, or difficult to complete objectives (but, well, that’s kind of the purpose of a sandbox mode, to play with various things, I suppose… but just be warned…)
  • we have plans to add more options and gameplay “modifiers” to the sandbox in the next iteration

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Support ship changes

Our feedback and internal tests clearly show that the Support ship, which we introduced right before summer, was easily abusable (infinite repairs/resupplies, or Supports repairing each others…). Its gameplay was also very passive, following the capital ships fleet. In this patch we’re trying to make
its gameplay more dynamic and require more effort from the Support player.

The Support ships now carry a limited amount of “Resource points” (displayed on the bottom-left central part of the HUD, right below countermeasures) which the repair/rearm lasers consume over time. The amount of repair/rearm drones was also drastically limited. All of those can be replenished by collecting “Resource crates” from the battlefield. Those crates spawn from destroyed capital ships (allies or enemies). This will force the Support ship to move away from the fleet and introduce some danger from times to times.

  • Added resource points (used to repair/rearm targets). They can be replenished via dropped resource creates from destroyed capital ships during battles (or on an allied base’s docking bay as usual)
  • Resource crates are automatically collected by the Support ship on nearby (< 1Km) range like a tractor beam
  • Repair/rearm drones now apply their effects over a duration of 15s (instead of instantly before)
  • The “select nearest support” key (default: alt+H or menu entry in the Targetting radial menu) can now also select the nearest resource crate if flying on the Support ship
  • Increased acceleration and speed of repair/rearm drones so that they can reach a far-away target a bit faster
  • Decreased Support ship’s shield regen rate by -25%
  • Decreased Support ship’s chaffs to 5 (from 25)
  • Decreased Support ship’s drone reserve to 8 (from 15), but increased the firing rate to 10s (from 30s)

Gameplay/Balance tweaks

  • Warping-out speed is now capped to combat speed cap (ships will no longer retain their warp-entry speeds at exit). The target speed is set to the minimum warp entry’s speed
  • Added EMP torpedo launcher on the bomber and on the cruiser. EMP torpedoes deal 50% more damage compared to normal torpedoes, but their damage is pure energy and will only affect the target’s shield
  • It is no longer possible to fire a missile/torpedo on a friendly target with safety lock enabled (same for repair/rearm drones on enemies)
  • Decoy missiles now have a reduced firing rate (1 decoy per 10s instead of 2s), generate less heat, and have a max lock distance reduced to 25 km (from 50 km)

HUD/UI/Menus

  • Ships that have a resupply ability can now see any friendly target’s ammo ratio on their HUD target info by default
  • Leaderboard panel now defaults to “Match Only” instead of showing “All” players
  • Fixed hangar MFD being available on ships without a hangar and defaulting weapons groups to hangar mode
  • Added an error notification message when trying to select an invalid squad group in hangar mode
  • Switching audio devices now gets instantly applied (previously, you had to press the “apply” button to hear the change)
  • HUD “Blood” effect on screen sides no longer shows up when HUD is turned off (F3)

Generic Bug Fixes

  • Fixed a bug that allowed a Support ship player to target itself through the tactical map, to launch a drone to repair/resupply itself
  • Fixed a bug that prevented the Support ship’s MFD layouts from being loaded from/saved to/reset in the general options menu
  • Fixed a rare multithreading crash bug when switching audio devices

Misc

  • Added new warp charge, field and exit effects. Removed the old purple “tunnel” warp effect
  • Added extra log file errors when failing to open or create a local DB when launching the tutorials
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