Patch and Updates Notes

[INovaeFlavien]

0.2.5.1 ( Sunday, 4 March 2018 )

This patch iterates on the previously released major version 0.2.5.0 which introduced the new weapons system.

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Gameplay

• Modified missiles behavior: will now enter detonation mode within a threshold distance, no longer related to a timer. The missile will try to close the distance to the target but if that distance starts to increase the missile explodes.
• Added critical hit for weapons systems - these can now be broken like other ships systems. Will repair automatically over time.
• Improved missiles interception AI
• Some weapons can now lock on another weapon group’s reticle - for missiles, this now means the primary reticle is used for locking
• Visual tweaks to armor, shields, speed and energy bars - now moved closer to the screen center as a curved arc meter
• Reticles are now smaller and more transparent unless locked or firing, which should make it easier for new players to aim or see which reticle corresponds to which weapon group

Bug fixes

• Weapons lock is now disabled in warp
• Missiles lock now have a maximum distance (50 Km) - can no longer target a planet or far away station
• Missiles no longer kill each other due to explosion splash damage
• HUD no longer shows reticles for weapons that have no reticles
• Weapons/missile launchers cannot lock anymore if there’s no ammo left to fire

Balance and tweaks

• Increased bounding box size and thrust parameters for missiles
• Tweaked muzzle and projectile lights to improve performance in certain scenarios
• Made angular thrust and turn rates more asymmetric on most ships besides the interceptor. Pitch is now slightly stronger and yaw slightly weaker.
• Revamped propulsion overcharge: now gives more boost to the side thrusters (+100%) than the main thrusters (“only” +50%)
• Turbo boosting is now incompatible with (but takes priority over) propulsion overcharge
• Turbo boosting no longer provides a constant boost over time; the boost is now slightly higher when the booster is engaged, and decreases a bit over time
• Auto-aiming turrets no longer fire when the target is out of the firing cone
• Improvements to bots AI: closer separation distance, more variation in flight tactics, improved accuracy etc…
• Tweaked projectile effects size (especially for blasters, that looked too long)

Assets

• Removed annoying “locked” buzz sound; replaced by a target-acquired and target-lost sound
• Artistic tweaks to the capital ships explosion effect
• More tweaks to dying/death explosion effects, the interceptor’s or missile’s should now be more visible

Misc improvements

• Removed some debug code that spammed some non-critical information to the log file
• Added additional check for stuck bots - after a time, they will now explode / disappear from the server
• Added multithreading to particle systems simulation updates

[INovaeFlavien]

0.2.6.0 ( Friday, 9 March 2018 )

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Alpha play-test week-end

Welcome to the latest alpha play-test week-end. We’d like to remind you that we’ll be hosting two community events during this week-end:

• Saturday 10 March at 20:00 UTC ( http://bit.ly/2Fwqfeb )
• Sunday 11 March at 20:00 UTC ( http://bit.ly/2Fwf1Xc )

You can join our public Discord here: https://discord.gg/0ZdJkZXn7z3Ij6tV

If you have any trouble installing or running the game, feel free to post or leave us a message on our forums: https://forums.inovaestudios.com/

Finally, one of our artists, Dan Hutchings, will be streaming in our youtube channel ( https://youtu.be/bZwKAE1OZkk ).

And remember, this is a pre-alpha, so it still looks bare-bones (untextured ships, placeholder effects…). Expect issues, but most importantly: have fun !

We’re hoping to see you in game,

-The I-Novae Studios team

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Gameplay

• First iteration of warp drive updates
• Experimental: Added max turn/rotation rate based on absolute speed
• Added automatic warping when reaching speeds of 2 Km/sec
• Entering warp now requires the ship to be aligned with its velocity vector (and have low or zero angular velocity)
• Warping is interrupted when taking damage or colliding objects
• The ship now loses controls temporarily during the warping warmup sequence
• Propulsion overchage can no longer be cumulated with warp
• Randomized initial spawn location when entering the game for the first time (note: can also spawn at neutral bases)
• Locked weapon targets are now instantly lost when the player switches to another target
• Added spawn locations in military base hangar’s on planets (up to corvette-sized)

HUD

• Tweaked lead reticles transparency; they now alternative between 3 states (dim, normal and highlighted) based on firing states
• Lead reticles are also now a little big bigger
• Locked weapons are no longer displayed as red in the weapons group on the HUD. They now get a “locked” warning text next to them
• Broken or unavailable weapon groups are now displayed as red
• Experimental: showing actual team colors for indicators to help with team awareness
• Turrets “aim-at” dots projected movement is now smoothed
• Experimental: Revamped displayed targets in exploration versus combat HUD. This should make the HUD less cluttered, and hopefully combat HUD viable
• Note that combat HUD doesn’t show threats yet (incoming missiles or enemies targetting you) - this will come in a future patch
• Added player name and team color to the HUD (top-right corner), only in cockpit and exploration mode
• Added warp exit speed next to the speed meter
• Added automatic HUD mode: switches between exploration and combat, based on the presence of enemies within a 20 Km radius
• Note that the game still defaults to manual exploration mode - press F3 to cycle between modes
• Fixed altitude and maximum air speed indicators near the speed meter

Bug fixes

• Fixed a bug with damage model: previously, broken weapons could still fire
• Fixed a major crash bug when selecting a far-away target
• Tentative fix for OpenAL infrequent crashes
• Fixed ambient sounds (like spawning hangar’s) being loud and annoying while still on the loading screen
• Missiles splash damage should now be counted towards kills/stats/getting credits
• Fixed a bug with warp warmup sound continuying after warp gets interrupted

AI commander

• Massive improvements to AI commander: it now has the ability to start battles over ground bases/installations
• Better management of team resources/credits
• Overall, this update should make the battlefields a lot more fluid and dynamic
• Team credits are now split into 3 pools (scouting, battle and for-players)
• Added an admin command to show bots statistics
• Revamped warp-in algorithm for bots, to make them look like they come from a close base
• Warp-in algorithm now takes into account planets curvature/horizon and avoids to spawn bots underground
  *¨Tweaked attack priorities for capital ships versus bombers

Assets

• Added new weapon effects for LMK2 and above machine guns and blasters
• Added placeholder / experimental music tracks from Alexandr Zhelanov ( https://soundcloud.com/alexandr-zhelanov )

Misc

• Added music director: a system that plays music tracks contextually (space versus planets ambiences versus battle action tracks)
• Added a way to toggle the music in game (F9 debug/options menu)
• Added a slider in the game launcher dialog to change the music volume (defaults to 30%)
• Note that music selections can be modded by editing the Music.xml config file in the game’s data folder
• Removed voice-chat random spam from bots

[INovaeFlavien]

0.2.7.0 ( Saturday, 24 March 2018 )

This patch introduces many performance tweaks, AI improvements (especially related to planetary battles) and new battle locations. Also includes many tweaks to warp mechanics to make it more reliable / easy to activate.

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Gameplay

• Warp improvements: emergency warp out was severely nerfed, now only happens when getting armor damage

• Fixed target warp speed that could be under minimum warp speed accidentely set by the player and which cancelled warp as soon as it engaged

• Warp speed can now be modified while in warmup phase

• Default warp speed is always set to 50.0 km/s upon initiating warp

• Warp is now interrupted upon collision not just in warmup, but also after warp is engaged

• Warp is now interrupted upon more than 10% damage or any amounts of damage in warmup

• Warp now automatically repairs after 30 seconds of no damage

• Minimum warp speed increased to 500 m/s

• Removed energy requirement to enter warp

• Warp conditions are only checked upon initating warmup, not once the drive is engaged. This change should make the warp drive a lot more reliable and not fail accidentely all the time

• Side thrust is now disabled in warp warmup but main target thrust is maintained

• Warp exit speed no longer equals entry speed; it is now set to a constant of 500 m/s

• Introduced smoothing and randomization to anti-gravity vector generation, which should make the ship feel more like it’s hovering over the planet

• Anti-gravity model physics updated: all thrusters can generate an anti-gravity force excepting the top thrusters, which should prevent the ship from flying upside-down in flight-assist mode off

• Introduced maximum turn speed limit (assuming the flight assist is not damaged) to prevent infinite turn rates

• Introduced maximum angular velocity upon collisions (note: the value is set pretty high)

HUD / input

• Fixed selected target loss when actor transitionned to an indicator
• Minor fixes to text localization that wasn’t utilizing UTF-8 in the UI
• Setting target speed now shows a decimal value in the UI message, instead of being rounded to integer (ex.: 2.5 km/s appeared as 2 km/s )
• Modified HUD graduations on the speed bar and shields to match the number of target speed level
• Target speed number is now displayed on HUD above the current speed
• Added next / previous target speed cycling input events
• Added a cycle / switch team option in the escape menu

Bug fixes

• Fixed collisions for missiles/torpedoes: they will now explode on direct contact with a planet or structure
• Fixed Eupraxia (ring) station around Rethe Prime) respawn death loop for capital ships
• Fixed camera orientation / smoothing that wasn’t reset upon dying and respawning
• Fixed new players very likely to be starting in the blue team. Probabilities are now equal for all teams

AI commander

• Introduced ship quotas per battle. This means that lesser important points of interests will generate smaller battles than highly strategic ones
• Introduced limits to how many bots can gang up on a single target
• Destinations under planet surface are now ignored (example: during a warp out to a station that’s on the other side of the planet…)
• Commander can now transfer battle credits into scouting credits and vice versa, if the credits are unbalanced
• Intoduced atmospheric flight conditions to AI component: max air speed, min flight altitude, keeping orientation towards horizon…
• Inreased probability for AI to launch missiles
• Introduced warp in/out checks for AI (to avoid spawning/arriving inside a planet)
• Revamped target attack priorities / threat levels for AI. This should change the flow of battles quite a lot.
• Fixed a bug with AI warp out on planets: it was not aiming at the sky
• Reduced timer on stuck bots check
• AI commander now uses target / destination position to form battle clusters
• Fixed major bug when establishing ships quotas per cluster. Previously, quotas were not respected
• Lowered AI scouting frequencies, to avoid re-igniting finishing battles

Assets, visual effects, performance

• New sound effect for heavy blasters on capital ships
• Updated two space station modules with improved geometric details and texturing
• Anti-gravity now properly makes the side thrusters effect fire
• Tweaked contrails and damage smoke effects for quality and improved performance, especially on planets;
• Revamped wind grid and dust/cloud effects in atmospheres
• Gas giant now utilizes wind grid and dust effect as a cheap “volumetric” effect
• Various parameters in the wind grid are now read from config files insteaed of being hardcoded
• Planets now make better use of the dust effect: “sand” storms on Aresthia, “ash” storms on Cinder, etc… Note that the field density is pseudo-randomized, so there might be locations without dust and locations with a highly dense storm
• Also please note that wind currently does not affect the flight model - this will get reintroduced in a future patch
• Dying explosions effect is now attached to the parent actor (previously it simply spawned with the same velocity, but the actor could change orientation or velocity and it wouldn’t properly follow it)
• Reviewed parameters and massive performance improvement for station module lights
• Reviewed and made coherent energy emissions and sensor power for various actors
• Lights / emissive intensities tweaks for ship thrusters
• Performance / quality tweaks for lights on ship hulls

Locations

• Added Gemini floating station in atmosphere of Rethe Prime (the Gas giant) - a nice new place to visit
• Added Ackor space station orbitting Semnoz (the Icy planet)
• Added 3 new station outposts to the solar system
• Added 5 new factories to various planet surfaces
• Revamped team owners for each location, to make teams more balanced in factory/bases/stations types and numbers

Server

• Added a public/test command called “/ghost” (to type in chat) so that AI is not agressive towards you
• Added a command to show the position coordinates of the player: “/position”
• Lowered network range threshold: it was set too high by default and caused too many entitie to be sent through the network

Misc

• Introduced priority system to audio module. Musics now have a higher priority (at equal volume) than 3D sounds. This should avoid hearing the music being “cut” during explosion/damage-heavy scenes
• Added more debug code for a certain OpenAL crash
• Reduced Destroyer’s max energy pool

[INovaeFlavien]

0.2.7.1 ( Saturday, 7 April 2018 )

This new patch includes a couple of quality fixes for planets and projectile effects, as well as massive improvements to the input system, including better support for controllers and HOTAS.

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Gameplay

• Tweaked angular accelerations on the smaller ships. The main change is a reduction of angular acceleration on the interceptor to give some momentum to turning. The bomber and corvette are also affected in a smaller way.
• Increased survivability of all ships: small shields boost on bomber, medium boost on corvette and huge armor/shields increase for capital ships (up to +50% for cruiser/carrier).
• Emergency warp out condition tweaks: slightly above air speed, armor <= 75% and shields <= 5% (these conditions were too harsh previously, you had to fly to twice air speed for emergency warp to activate)
• Reduced minimum warp speed to 495 m/s instead of 500 m/s (to better match target speed 3)
• Relaxed max turn speed in direct flight mode

HUD / input

• Fix for players not showing up in exploration mode: the “player” indicator was accidentaly switched between exploration versus combat modes.
• Added support for dual controller inputs in the launcher settings dialog (note: these are mapped to Joystick0 and Joystick1 respectively)
• Added support for OEM key 102
• Introduced new game events supported by the input mapper: specific formation events (Ex.: SwitchFormationMatchVelocity), overcharge (SwitchOverchargeShields), toggling weapon groups (WeaponGroup3)
• Added an input mapper profile editor to the launcher settings dialog
• Added SetTargetSpeed event
• Added support for throttles (events declared as throttles return values in 0…1 instead of -1…1)
• Added support for controller vibrations in XInput - currently this means the XBox controller will vibrate on impacts, collisions, damage etc…
• Added/moved deadzones/curve power settings for both controllers to the input mapper editor. Same for mouse sensitivity. Revamped default settings to be more coherent.
• Added relative versus absolute navigation cursor modes. The absolute mode (SetCursorX and SetCursorY) allows usage of an axis to directly set the target velocity (you don’t need to move the actual cursor on screen for that)
• Also added SetViewYaw/Pitch events to set the absolute camera-view angle. This should be helpful for TrackIR users.
• Also, to improve TrackIR usage, the View (previously called “Head”) event no longer needs to be assigned. When unassigned, it returns true all the time. This allows TrackIR users to simulate a head-look without having to hold the view key
• Fixed View event affecting direct-mode flight model
• The roll axis event is now usable with the navigation cursor flight model (previously, only the roll left/right keys were used)
• Swapped some axis names between XInput and DirectInput. This change made all previous input mapper config files using Joystick0AxisN events incorrect. Please discard/rebuild them using the new input mapper editor
• Added experimental support for DirectInput force feedback. If somebody has a FF-enabled joystick, please test this build and let me know if you can feel a rumble/vibrations on the stick. Also, please send me the log file in PM, thank you
• Renamed “joystick sensitivity” to “power”. Note that the curve power is simply applying a pow(input, value) in the 0…1 range
• Introduced the notion of “idle” value for joysticks calibration. This part of the code is still not robust, due to the way DirectInput works
• Improved the key detection mecahnism. Added a 5 seconds timer to hitting a key.
• Updated support for arrows/POV/hats on controllers. 8-directional POVs should now be fully functional
• Introduced event types: AxisX and AxisY to replace Axis. These are used as hints for arrows/POV/hats when used as an axis input (the angle gets projected on the given axis type). Example: using an arrow with a value of 45° on AxisX will return 0.707
• Added filtering by event types/keys to the detection mechanism. You can’t input an axis into a ToggleButton for example.
• Fixed a rare bug where keyboard input could be lost upon loss of focus of the game (during an alt-tab for example)
• Moved controller settings to the input mapper config file; so they are now profile-specific
• Joystick axis values are automatically reset to their idle values when the game loses window focus
• Added event groups and support for groups exclusion to avoid certain false conflicts between some events
• Cleaned up and change names of some events to be more coherent
• Sensitivity settings should now make input more coherent between mouse and joysticks
• Introduced navigation sensitivity in relative cursor mode. Note that if the mouse sensitivity is different than 1.0, these two settings will get multiplied for incremental mouse movement. It is recommended to keep mouse sensitivity in the input profile to 1.0
  and change the navigation cursor sensitivity instead.
• Fixed navigation cursor being incorrectly shown or hidden in direct flight mode
• Reverse axis state for an event can be toggled by double-clicking on the reverse column in the input profile editor
• The input profile editor shows conflicts/issues to the user before saving and exiting the dialog
• Added ability to clear a row, clear all rows, or reset/reload the parameters in the input profile editor
• Fixed cycling formation events which stopped on Fixed
• Navigation cursor settings are now only applied in relative mode. Absolute mode (basically, using SetCursorX and SetCursorY) bypasses those settings, as it is assumed that deadzone/power have already been applied from the input controller already
• Radial menus are now functional with gamepads/joysticks

Bug fixes

• Fixed a bug that duplicated planets in video ram and forces cpu overhead by tesselating them, even if they were not rendered
  Note: to be clear, planets were NOT rendered twice. They were generated twice (which has a performance cost, but not in terms of average framerate).
  This saved around 600 MB of video ram usage.
• Fixed a camera smoothing glitch in third-perso view mode

Assets, visual effects, performance

• Introduced an experimental tweak to projectiles particles to provide some cheap anti-aliasing. Particles in the distance should also preserve their brightness longer now.
• Implemented planetary terrain quality settings. Planets tesselation should be higher around ground level in high or extreme quality mode. The planet should also retain a higher tesselation from space.
• Optimized planet material shader compilation; this should save up to a total of ~30 seconds of loading time when you start the game
• Fixed emissive on static actors, which stayed to zero (black) if the static actor didn’t have a power generator
• Fix for cockpit shadows; due to a wrong setting, cockpit shadow maps used a range that was too far away. The closest shadow map should now better cover the cockpit, which should dramatically improve shadows quality in cockpits

Locations

• Moved factory 8 into a crater on Sarake
• Added space whale easter egg around Semnoz (warning: might be hard to detect)

[INovaeFlavien]

0.2.7.2 ( Saturday, 14 April 2018 )

An important patch that addresses a long-time issue with networking interpolation and error-correction smoothing and which was made more noticeable in the form of rubberbanding since patch 0.2.6.0. This patch also includes some new gameplay experimental changes.

Gameplay

• Reduced angular momentum in direct flight mode, to make settings coherent with navigation target cursor mode

• Tweaked angular accelerations and maximum return speeds for capital ships (mostly carrier)

• Implemented an automatic throttle option. It is disabled by default. It can be enabled in the launcher settings dialog. In this mode, manual forward/backward thrust (W/S) sets the target speed to the current speed.

• Added two new input events: “ResetTargetSpeed” and “MaxTargetSpeed” which respectively set the target speed to zero and max. The profile xml files version was not increased in this patch, therefore if you want to make use of these experiment events and
  the automatic throttle, we recommend that you copy/paste them with double-tap=true from the official xml file into your user/documents file. You can assign them to forward/backward thrust (W/S) as double-tap.

• Implemented experimental damage model. In this new model, kinetic damage gets absorbed by the shields ratio. Ex: if a ship has 80% shields remaining, 20% of the damage will be applied to the hull armor while the remaining 80% will reduce the shield points

• Energetic damage gets 100% absorbed by the shields and does not deal damage to the hull armor. However energetic damage on a naked hull (when shields are down) now depletes energy points at a 1:1 ratio and causes a chance of critical damage to internal ship systems

HUD / input

• Doubled camera view max sensitivity
• Fixed a bug in the input profile xml version check, which caused a crash if a user manually edited the xml file and introduced a syntax error. This will now cause a warning, but execution can continue
• HUD icons like the crosshair now take into account error correction smoothing
• Added a camera view roll strafing effect toggle in the launcher settings dialog
• Fixed invert pitch toggle bug which wasn’t working with the navigation target cursor
• The input profile editor now retains the selection and scroll position upon acting on the events or detecting a key
• Reduced vertical size of the input profile editor dialog

Bug fixes

• Fixed camera smoothing glitches for internal cameras (capships) (Note: the camera glitch fix from the previous patch was only applied to the external view)

Networking / server

• Fixed a bug that caused client/server input mismatch around planets, which in turn caused error corrections to happen all the time when they should theoretically be exceptionnal
• Fixed a bug with error correction smoothing that conflicted with physics keyframe interpolation, which in turn resulted in “rubberbanding”/jittering of the player actor
• Increased precision of player snapshots for client-side error correction checks, which also reduces the amount of error corrections happening
• Added a higher priority system for checking for client-side error corrections upon collisions

Assets, visual effects, performance

• Updated carrier geometry placeholder (Note: will no longer spawn on docking ports at stations, as the carrier is now bigger. Will be spawned in a random location around a space station)
• Minor performance improvements on the server

Misc

• Added code signing certification which should stop Windows from showing a warning for executing from an “unknown publisher”

[INovaeFlavien]

0.2.8.0 ( Tuesday, 1st of May 2018 )

This new patch is an important step towards releasing the alpha, as it introduced the spectator game mode and various game states which currently act as placeholder (such as the main menu). There are also tweaks for the HUD and various sytems.

Game states

• Introduced the main menu. Currently is is empty, just click on any key to initiate the connection to the server
• Introduced the spawn menu. Currently is is showing your team bases at which you can respawn at. If a base does not have a spawn point, it will not be shown. Bases can be cycled (default bindings are left/right mouse buttons). You’ll respawn at the currently selected base.
  Note that this spawn menu can make the camera jump from a planet to another very quickly and there’s no collisions on the camera. Ultimately, the spawn menu will not show a 3D view of each base, but the solar system’s strategic map with menus to select your ship/loadout. So the
  current implementation is a placeholder until after the alpha is released.
• Introduced a kill-cam feature. The view switches to the ship that killed you a few seconds before you explode. After 10 seconds, it automatically switches to one of your ally’s viewpoint. Just like in the spawn menu, you can cycle through ship allies.
  This mode only cycles through ships that are in the current battle zone (it will not cycle to a ship that is thousands of Kms away for example).
• Introduced a spectator mode. There are currently no restrictions on what can be observed, but restrictions will be added later on. You can enter the spectator mode at any time by selecting a target on your HUD and pressing F8 (default key). Note that your ship is still alive
  during that time and will continue to fly through its current course. If you get killed while observing another actor, the spectator mode will be interrupted and you’ll be back to the spawn menu.
• Introduced experimental record/replay system. Since this is a heavy WIP, there is currently no way to launch a replay. This will come in a future patch

Gameplay

• Doubled pitch/yaw angular accelerations for the interceptor, to reduce rotationnal momentum
• Increased probabilites of some critical hits
• Reduced random aiming spread for bots AI

HUD / input

• Fonts now dynamically adapt to the screen/window resolution
  Note: fonts were set up for 1440p, which caused players that are in 1080p (or below) to have text that is too big
• Information window has been moved from top-center to the bottom-right corner of the screen
• Revamped indicator types for actor classes; now using small / medium / large size indicators (respectively: triangular, diamond and hexagonal icons). Structures/bases ues a square icon. Planets still use a circular icon
• New icons have been added in various spots of the HUD (ex.: when exceeding air-speed, an icon is shown instead of the old “AS” flashing text)
• Ship systems status icons are now displayed on the left side of the HUD. When a system is broken, it will be shown as a flashing orange alert until the system gets repaired
• Non-ship actors such as missiles no longer cause a bleep sound when popping in/out on the HUD
• Experimental changes for HUD target indicators transparency and sizes; should now be more clear and improve tactical awareness
• Fixed an old bug with HUD indicator target directions radar/ring which was incorrect when camera view was rotated compared to the ship’s front direction
• Automatic version upgrade of input profile config file (plus, catching exceptions due to invalid config files)
• Added rotation animation to missile/torpedo HUD indicators
• Revamped indicators management, now server driven, which should fix many indicator-related bugs such as “?”
• Detection status of a newly spawned actor is instantly updated (there’s no longer a second of latency)
• Same for HUD indicators creation: the latency has been removed
• HUD no longer shows crosshair and velocity indicators when the viewed actor isn’t a ship
• Tweaks to cursor icons for HUD
• Added arrow to link center of screen to cursor on HUD

Bug fixes

• Fixed atmospheric particle effects no longer affected by scattering color
• Fixed sudden change of music volume after a loading screen
• Fixed a crash when launching the game when an input profile in the data folder had an obsolete version
• Fixed a bug with velocity indicators always showing up in third-person camera mode
• Fixed a bug with normal calculation for a dynamic actor’s bounding box hit which could cause impacts to be displayed at the correct orientation
• Fixed wind grid leak when a planet gets deleted
• Fixed a bug with atmosphere objects pooling that sometimes gave the wrong (or no) atmosphere to a planet
• Fixed planet-engine related resource leaks
• Fixed bugs related to power critical hit ( loss of power ) which didn’t use the repair timer
• Fixed potential crash on client related to planet raycasts for projectiles

Assets, visual effects, performance

• Shadow uprate rate has been set to zero in extreme quality mode. This should help to prevent z-fighting flickering on shadows on dynamic entities, however the downside is a performance hit of 10 to 20%. Other quality settings are unaffected by the tweak
• Added a shield impact particle effect, and introduced “surface types” to actors. Weapons configuration files can now specify a different effect for each impact surface type
• Revamped a bit the normal and offset calculations for projectile hits
• Added a max texture resolution setting affecting loaded assets. Currently set to 1024 for at low quality, 2048 at medium quality, 4096 at high quality and 8192 at extreme quality. Note that these are maximums. If an asset texture has a resolution of 2048x2048, then only
  in low quality will this texture change to 1024x1024.
• Added different hit feedback sounds for shields versus hull;

[INovaeFlavien]

0.2.8.1 ( Monday, 14 May 2018 )

This intermediary patch includes a network fix for ships orientation stuttering, the missing shield impact effect from last patch, new base/factory lights, new damage sound effects, and most importantly: the ability for turrets to automatically select a new target if the primary
target is out of view/range.

Gameplay

• Added engine critical hit to damage model ( reduces propulsion by half )
• Added automatic repairing for broken warp and anti-gravity
• Added automatic independent turrets tracking for corvette and capital ships weapons. A turret prioritizes the selected main target on the HUD; however if that target is too far away or out of the view angles, it will select and aim at the closest enemy target instead
• Auto-aiming turrets no longer fire when their target isn’t in the fire cone
• Tweaked turret weapons stats: fire cone spread, fire rate, damage, projectiles speed/lifetime etc…
• Made a pass over all hardpoints of capital ships to assign correct and more uniform type of weapons (ex.: the carrier underside had only one blaster). Also, some capital ships had too many hardpoints. The number of active hardpoints on capital ships has been reduced by ~30%
• Made a pass over ships hitpoints and shieldpoints. Interceptor stays the same, however other ships were boosted (massively for corvette and capital ships)
• Tweaked separation distance for bots AI
• Doubled interceptor angular momentum to levels close to what they were before last patch’s experimental change

HUD / input

• fix for not showing trailings other than selected actor in combat mode
• Added ship status icon for broken engine
• Auto-aiming turrets aim-at points on HUD are now displayed in orange when they’re out of range/view

Bug fixes

• Fixed transition bug on server player state which could cause duplicated ships when a player suicides
• Fixed server-state crash bug when respawning asap in kill-cam mode
• Fixed a bug that caused incorrect auto-turrets default orientation on ships when there’s no selected target or the target is out of firing range
• Fix for turrets not firing in default/neutral orientation
• Fixed various target acquisition / loss bugs related to new free-targetting turrets code
• Fixed a bug with orientation of impact self-hit effects

Assets, visual effects, performance, sounds…

• Added missing impact shield effect from last patch
• Reduced rejection size for weapons geometry. This should allow to see weapons/hardpoints from a higher distance before they’re getting culled. The change affects all graphical settings.
• Disabled mipmapping for HUD icons / texture (experimental)
• Added sound effects for new critical hits and for broken shields
• Added sound variations and fading parameter to audio manager
• Default sounds are not loaded anymore in audio component ( many actors actually do not need these sounds, like a shield broken sound for a missile… ). This avoids creating / instancing sounds which stay at a zero volume forever, but still consume cpu…
• Fix for warp sound ambience: pitch stayed constant. It will now vary with warp speed…
• Added and tweaked smoke damage effect size parameter to ship configs
• Added experimental ambient occlusion to stations and military base hangars. This should reduce IBL leaking in the hangars, which didn’t look good
• Added lights around factories and military bases

Networking

• Network quantizer quaternions massive improvements: fixed stuttering caused by lack of precision when encoding orientation

[INovaeFlavien]

0.2.8.2 ( Saturday, 19 May 2018 )

This patch introduces counter-measures ( chaffs ) for small/medium ships ( up to destroyer ) as well as some bug fixes.

Gameplay

• Initial implementation for counter-measures on small/medium ships (chaffs). Default key is Left Alt
• AI bots can launch chaffs when they’re being targetted by a missile
• Added a friction damage type that prioritize damage on shields over hull. This damage type is used when exceeding max air speed in atmospheres, which previously caused hull damage even if shields were up

HUD / input

• Added failure check when firing missiles / chaffs and the player does not have enough ammo left (in previous versions, the client sent the request to the server and the server silently rejected it)
• Remaining chaff count is displayed next to weapon groups on the HUD

Bug fixes

• Fixed a server game state related crash bug when player accidentely killed himself ( ex.: via missiles splash or torpedoes )
• Added a check to the source actor in the damage function to avoid self-kill messages, friendly fire etc…

Assets, visual effects, performance, sounds…

• Added assets (particle effect and sounds) for chaff/flare effect
• Added more lights to the military base hangar interior
• Fixed some gamma-correction issues with transparency/alpha channel of some particle effects. This is a WIP, more will be fixed later

Networking

• New experimental implementation of input queue snapshots for the server. In previous versions, a missed client input snapshot made the player’s ship temporarily static. This in turn indirectly caused strange physics behavior where a single interceptor ramming into a carrier could deflect or make bounce the capital ship. This should no longer be possible; ramming is still doable, but respective physics masses and momentum should make it hard for a lighter ship to affect the trajectory of a heavier/bigger ship
• Added a server side command /SetInputBufferSize <value:0 to 10> to change the input buffer size. Default is 2. Lower values might reduce input lag but cause issues with ping variations. If you experience high ping fluctuations and see a lot of error corrections as a result (yellow icon on the bottom-left corner of the HUD), you might want to try increasing this value to 3 or 4 as an experiment. Please let me know if you have any trouble with this value.
• Experimental change for network bandwidth precision, now only based on actor distance and not screen size

[INovaeFlavien]

0.3.0.0 ( Friday, 15 June 2018 )

Welcome to Infinity: Battlescape - Alpha 0.3

If you experience any trouble with the game, or simply want to fly and chat with other players, you can join our Discord server at:

Join the Infinity Battlescape Discord Server!

For support inquiries, please send a private message to INovaeKeith on the forums (installation/launcher/pledge issues) or to INovaeFlavien (gameplay feedback and bugs) or by email to contact@inovaestudios.com

Log files can be found in C:\Users\YourName\Documents\I-Novae Studios\Infinity Battlescape\Logs

Please keep in mind that we’ve barely reached the alpha stage. The game lacks proper menus, UI, feedback/mission objectives and assets are still untextured or placeholder.
We will be iterating on the gameplay features and balance from now on.

Most importantly, even if the game is barebone we are hoping that you’ll have fun and see the potential. If you feel we are going in the wrong direction, do not hesitate to post your feedback on the forums.
See you in game and good luck !

Gameplay

• Introduced scouting gameplay for permanent detection of enemy installations. Installations can be detected when they enter your ship’s sensor range (many thousands of Km away). However, if you fly away from that installation, it will disappear from your HUD. To make installations
  permanently detected, they have to be scouted. To do that, a member of the team has to stay within a short range of the target (5-10 Km) and fly at low speed for 30s to one minute without dying. A scouting progress bar will charge up. Scouting enemy installations provides credits.
  Note that detection is shared amongst all members of the team, so if you see an enemy ship or installation, everybody else on your team can, too.
• Introduced installations per-module hitpoints and damage effects. Each individual module of an installation can now be destroyed. When a certain threshold/percentage of all modules of an installation are destroyed, shockwaves propagate and destroy all remaining modules. At this
  point the installation is considered permanently destroyed and will change team to neutral.
• Installation modules affect some gameplay elements and functions. Every module gives some credits reward to the primary damage source player if he’s still alive at the moment of the destruction. Destroying an entire installation also gives a massive team credits bonus
• Some installation modules currently have no function (but can still be destroyed for credits). Some destroyed modules will affect the way the installation behaves:
  – Defense towers and stations: turrets will pop out (no damage effect there yet) and stop firing
  – Reactor: stops providing energy to the installation - currently this doesn’t affect much
  – Sensors/communication tower: the installation can not detect long-distance incoming threats anymore
  – Shields: currently, installations do not have shields, but in the future, shields will go down permanently, allowing capships to damage the hull of the installation
  – Hangar: ships cannot spawn there anymore
  – Docking bay: capital ships cannot spawn there anymore
  – Storage tank/tower: reduces resources generation/efficiency on a factory
  – Supply bay: not implementation yet, but the bay will no longer repair/resupply parked ships
• For this alpha, the number of playable teams has been reduced to two. Note that this is just a server setting - opening up the game to three teams when we reach a larger playerbase is still possible
• Added team auto balance when a new player joins or is in an invalid team
• Added full match game loop: warmup and finish phases (with a countdown timer), victory and defeat conditions (all installations of the enemy team have been destroyed), plus score calculation based on installations owned by the team
• Player statistics (kill/death) and credits are now reset upon a new match starting
• Added auto-turrets static defenses on installations (land bases, space stations and factories)
• Added line-of-sight occlusion check to hardpoints targetting logic. Turrets will stop firing if the target is hidden behind something else
• Warp has been revamped. It now uses a nearby mass limitation system and will automatically adjust its maximum warp speed based on the distance to the massive bodies. Warp physics should feel more natural and navigation through the star system a lot easier for beginners.
  It is still possible to set the target warp speed to lower values manually, or to override the limit to warp faster. However after a certain limit above the warp speed, the ship might get damaged due to micrometeorites/space debris.
• Added new critical hit: HUD targetting system. Indicators on the HUD will blink and might disappear for a couple seconds when this system is damaged. Repair is automatic over time
• Added new critical hit: sensors. Damaged sensors no longer detect incoming threats/installations. This sytem will also repair automatically over time
• Factories generate resources over time, which get automatically converted to team credits. Note that haulers have not been implemented yet. The amount of generated credits can be reduced if storage tanks have been destroyed in the factory
• Team credits now get distributed between players and the AI commander every few minutes. The distribution is based on the number of players in the team. A higher amount of active players means less credits get allocated to the AI. In the extreme case, when the server
  player population reaches its limit, the AI commander no longer receives credits to spawn new bots
• Added scavenging objectives. A damage installation module has a low probability (which increases based on the volume of the damaged module) of generating a precious metals crate. Collect these crates for a credits bonus. In the future, players will have to store them in
  their cargo and convert them to credits by returning to a friendly base, but this is not implemented yet
• Added basic pseudo-randomized battlescape match generator. When a match is reset, the server generates a new star system with one or many battlescapes (in alpha, due to low player population count, a single battlescape is used). Each battlescape contains one or many
  planets and moons with pseudo-randomized parameters, locations, installations etc…
• Added a check for auto-aiming turrets, to switch to another target if they’re the wrong type/cannot damage their current target
• Torpedoes now have a tracking system and a small amount of auto-aiming
• Added ammo resupply mechanics to corvettes. They now have a certain amount of supply points (max: 100) which charges over time. Use the weapons radial menu (X) or the hotkey (N) to spawn an ammo crate. Ammo crates can be collected by anybody on the battlefield (including
  enemies), however they only show up on the HUD of your allies

HUD / input

• Added a popup notification system to the user interface; informs players of various team objectives, rewards and match states
• Installation and planet names now appear on HUD even when not explicitely selected. A distance range check is also done to avoid cluttering the screen
• Added score bar/balance (white indicator) to the top of the screen
• Added faction icons to leaderboard and score
• Fix for UI font size becoming too low in lower resolutions
• Dying actor destroys its indicator instantly, so you can switch to another target asap

Bug fixes

• Fixes related to input buffer queue and chaffs updates
• Major precision fix for ODE raycasts. ODE is our physics library. The default/official implementation had multiple bugs related to raycasting in 64-bits coordinates which caused incorrect hit locations when firing weapons at millions of Kilometers away from the scene origin
• Fixed a precision issue with convertion angles between degrees and radians: this caused some turrets to have a degree or two of imprecision when trying to aim at a target
• Fixed a bug which prevented lights from blinking when damaged
• Fixed memory leak in indicators cleanup
• Fixes for planet occluders, they’re now sorted by importance
• Fixes for nearest planet computations: wasn’t taking into account planet radius
• Fixed lack of gravity being applied to actors not having a propulsion component (ex.: crates
• Missiles and torpedoes now properly damage hit installation modules
• Destroyed modules no longer generate hit sounds / critical hits etc…
• Fixed roll stability in space and nerfed atmospheric roll unstability on planets

Assets, visual effects, performance, sounds…

• Star light direction and intensity is now properly updated based on location. Getting closer to the sun will increase light intensity to very intense/bright levels - to the point everything would look white-burned. Getting very far away (tens to hundreds of millions of Km) from the sun
  will dim lighting to the point the star is as small as other stars in the background and direct light cannot be seen anymore with the naked eye.
• Added ambient transmittance color, used as modular color for various effects
• Added victory/defeat musics
• Added new visual effects for weapons, explosions and impacts
• Added damage effects to installation modules
• Tweaks to galaxy background brightness to work better with HDR

Networking, AI, server

• Added minimum movement speed to bots AI component (avoid getting stuck)
• Fixed snapshot precision that wasn’t correctly reset when switching to spectator or kill-cam mode
• Added full persistency for the match state. If the server crashes, the match will be reloaded in the state it was a few minutes ago. Players might still lose their current ship though
• Fix for properties network packets sometimes being too long, which resulted in a server crash. These packets will now be propertly split into sub packets
• Reduced missile spam from AI
• AI bots/turrets no longer fire both kinetic and energy weapons at once. Bots now alternative fire between kinetic and energy weapons. Bots now fire in bursts with pauses, instead of firing constantly
• AI commander now has a chance to scout enemy installations automatically (costs team credits)
• Bots AI corvettes now generates supply crates every once in a while

Misc

• Added friction damage type that prioritizes shields damage over hull. It’s used for collision and air speed damage;
• Added a dynamic system to mount/unmount weapons on hardpoints. The current setup is still static, but server-controlled. This is the foundation for a future implementation of weapons customizations/loadouts
• Added a buff to small ships strafing, around +10 to +15%
• Added a buff to corvette and capital ships hitpoints and shields

[INovaeFlavien]

0.3.0.1 ( Sunday, 24 June 2018 )

This patch is mostly a “quality of life” patch for the alpha. It includes various crash bug fixes, Direct Mode flight control fixes, a new small Battlescape (with two giant asteroid bases) for shorter matches and a number of balance adjustments.

Gameplay

• Updated match defeat conditions so that a team loses when there aren’t any spawns are left available
• Fixes for Direct Mode flight controls: DM has been broken for many patches now. It should be back to a good, playable state
• Revamped warp travel times by adjusting warp speed to be asymmetrical: getting away from a mass allows faster speeds than approaching a mass
• Friction damage now interrupts warp as soon as the hull is getting damaged
• Weapons damage now interrupt warp no matter the type ( even due to blasters impact on shield damage )
• Removed automatic warp engage; Replaced it by a warning over twice the minimum warp speed
• Ships now have different minimum warp speed. It’s still set to 500 m/s for the interceptor, but it goes lower and lower as the ship category increases. Capital ships only need 150 to 250 m/s now
• Increased default destruction ratio on installations from 40% to 50%
• Set team victory condition score ratio to 20% instead of 1% so that the match ends faster
• Increases strafing / side thrusters power on all small ships. The interceptor got a decent boost and now has the same strafing power than the main thrusters. Bomber and corvette also received a small strafing boost
• Adjusted hitpoints on all installation modules to reduce matches duration. Reduced a lot the hitpoints on defense towers and stations, so that a single interceptor or bomber can destroy many of them. Previously, the defense towers and stations were in a weird spot where
  they were too buffy and required all the ammo of a single interceptor or bomber to get destroyed, but were still too small to get targetted by capital ships…

HUD / UI / input

• HUD now shows distances as mega-meters and giga-meters instead of kilo-kilometers and million-kilometers
• Fixed throttle / SetTargetSpeed in warp, wasn’t implemented, so it was causing a constant failure sound with joysticks
• Added support for more buttons + arrows to joysticks interface
• Reduced vertical size of edit profile dialog
• Fixed UI not being rendered on the spawn menu
• Reviewed alert display priorities so that interrupted warp shows up before air speed warning

Bug fixes

• Fix for incorrect invariant locale when starting up the engine, resulting in a crash if Windows didn’t have an english locale installed
• Fixed a client crash related to receiving an incorrect/non-existing target indicator
• Fixed incorrect mapping / collisions of some installations on the asteroid surface (the installation had no collisions)
• Fixed a bug that caused factories to generate credits in the game warmup / finish states
• Voice command no longer generate a “deleted” messages when the source player is undetected
• Modules hit by a blaster weapon no longer generate a hit sound despite zero damage
• Fixed a bug where credits were consumed when failing to spawn a ship
• Fixed carriers spawns at station
• Capital ships can no longer spawn at military bases on planets
• Fix for deleted target name in spectator mode
• Destroyed installations now properly update their HUD indicator as the neutral team instead of showing up as the original team
• Minor fix to avoid destroying indestructible modules upon installation death (like asteroid surfaces)

Assets, visual effects, performance, sounds…

• Added back Glimmerfall as giant station / factory hybrid
• Introduced another giant asteroid for the opposite team, also acts as a station / factory hybrid

Networking, AI, server

• AI no longer missile spam at point blank range
• Fixed a server crash related to recreating an already existing indicator
• Potential crash fix for server sending property changes to a player that disconnected
• AI no longer attacks / generates a battle around a destroyed installation

Misc

• Added a mapToPlanet flag and a mapped altitude to make actors mapping consistent (previously, some installations had their “indicator” floating had different altitudes)

[INovaeFlavien]

0.3.1.0 ( Sunday, 16 September 2018 )

This is the “haulers” patch, which revamps the resource generation side of the game by introducing haulers that fly between factories and stations to turn their resources into team credits. As usual, this is a first implementation which will probably introduce a fair number of small bugs, please do not hesitate to report them on our forums.

Of particular interest is watching the behavior of haulers and checking that they have no trouble ferrying resources along their path. If you notice any funny behavior, we would be interested in a description of the behavior and some screenshots.

Gameplay

In the previous versions, factories generated credits every few minutes. The amount of generated credits depended on the factory category (small, medium, large) and the amount of tank storages destroyed or alive in the factory.

In the new system, a hauler spawns every 5 minutes at each factory hangar. An algorithm decides a destination installation which will typically be one of the space stations in orbit of the same planet. The same station will be chosen all the times a hauler spawns, until that station gets destroyed, at which point the algorithm will switch to another station. Haulers follow the same path, slowly taking off from the surface, accelerating to reach low orbit then jump into warp. They’ll exit warp a dozen kilometers away from the destination station, then transition to docking mode and will disappear once docked, turning their ferried resources into team credits.

Team credits then get split amongst players and AIs as previously, preferring players over AI when the player count is sufficient.

When flying along their course in warp, haulers will stay in orbit around the planet and fly at 50 km/sec. Since it is not possible to attack when in warp, we’ve introduced a “warp jam” equipment, currently available on corvettes and destroyers. To use them, you need to be in warp yourself, closely following the hauler (< 20 Km away from it) at the same speed of 50 km/sec. To activate warp, open the ship system menu wheel (default: V) and select “Warp Jam”. It will generate a bubble around your ship, which will force out of warp any ship within the bubble (of radius 20 Km). The cooldown is 30 seconds. Warp on affected ships will stay down for the same amount of time.

Hauler taking off a planet from a factory hangar at sunset

Another change is the introducion of manual firing towards the mouse cursor for capital ships MK1 and MK2 weapons. Smaller weapons still aim at enemy ships automatically. The goal here is to introduce player skill to capital ships (rather than the more passive select-hold-fire-and-wait). Feedback on this new mode is also welcome.

HUD / UI / input

• Introduced auto-aim versus manual aim and updated HUD to show reticles when manual aiming
• Disabled weapon groups no longer display the weapons aim-at dots on the HUD;

Assets, visual effects, performance, sounds…

• Added hauler assets and lights
• Added warp jam particle effect and sounds

Networking, AI, server

• Server crash fix when player does not exist anymore but a property was set
• Crash fix for socket sending an ack packet despite being closed
• Fixed a bug with AI that used incorrect propulsion parameters during warp
• Revamped AI orientation on planets, should now look more coherent with their travel direction

Misc

• Minor fixes for warnings and dumping settings to the log file
• Fixed a bug that caused shaking/alerts when observing an actor in space

[INovaeFlavien]

0.3.2.0 ( Saturday, 6 October 2018 )

This new patch introduces spawning at carriers and update the repair/resupply mechanics available on corvettes and at spawns.

Gameplay

• Carrier spawns are now available; the carrier owner must fly under 100 m/s and turn slowly (or not at all) for spawns to be enabled
• Removed resupply crates mechanism on corvettes. It has been replaced by a repair/resupply aura (currently 1 km radius). Players have to match their velocity with an ally corvette and stay within a 1 km radius and will be repaired and resupplied in ammo at a constant rate
• Repairing hull and resupplying ammo is also available in hangar spawns (for fighters and corvettes) and docking spawns at stations (for capital ships)

Bug fixes

• Fixed incorrect warp jam section in ship systems radial menu
• Fix for crash due to large characters in chinese fontset
• Fixed haulers flying towards infinity when they bypass their destination
• Removed forgotten debug code associated to M key on client (was spawning a test effect at origin)
• Fix for reticles (unlocked when out of range, and showing reticles for auto-aiming turrets)
• Fix for Prev/Next target speed event while in warp (it wasn’t functional before)

Assets, visual effects, performance, sounds…

• Added spawn markers to hangars and docking bays
• Spawn markers are color encoded: blue for default (available), green when your ship is occupying it and red when another ship is occupying it
• Added warp entry and exit visual effect
• Increased size of aim helper dots for turrets on HUD

Networking, AI, server

• Fixed server crash bug when server is shut down as a player is logging in
• Fixed end-of-game condition when a team no longer has available spawns
• Improved empty input queue by repeating last input packet instead of assuming zero input
• Fixed error correction smoothing when flying at high velocities like in warp

Misc

• Added a fallback to create a DirectX 11 device with debug flag for more information when creating a device fails
• Added a CameraNextMode event that cycles through camera modes
• Added experimental alternative collision mesh to body components for more accurate small ship vs capship collisions; this feature is currently disabled but will be enabled later on when it becomes more robust
• Added support for dynamic mesh bodies to the physics engine (same)

[INovaeFlavien]

0.3.3.0 ( Friday, 12 October 2018 )

Welcome to the Infinity: Battlescape beta week-end.

We would like to remind you that the game is still in alpha (beta backers only have access this week-end) with full beta scheduled for early 2019.
Many assets are placeholder or work-in-progress. Ships are untextured, gameplay features are missing and UI is basic (no star map, no missions menu, no ship selection or upgrades menu). We will be
iterating both on the visual effects and gameplay in the coming months.

Although the current version is rough around the edges, we sincerely hope that you will like what we are trying to achieve and have fun.

A community event is planned on Saturday 13 at 19:00 UTC on the server. Players will gather and try to play objectives to complete a full match (or two) in order to stress the server and test
the gameplay. We hope to see you in game !

Patch 0.3.3.0 changes:

Gameplay and balance tweaks

• Spawning at a carrier now gives 25 credits to the carrier owner
• Tweaked splash damage formula for missiles / torpedoes. The old formula used a too soft ramp, resulting in heavy damage (>50%) even at max splash radius !
• Increased splash damage radius for torpedos and missiles
• Increased initial velocity of missiles and torpedoes from 200m/s to 400m/s. This change should make them easier to use when the ship is strafing
• Torpedo tweaks: increased acceleration, so that a torpedo has a bit of auto-aiming and becomes useful against heavy moving targets like capital ships. If lucky it is even possible to hit smaller ships like a corvette.
• Reduced missile damage and increased missile acceleration, making the missiles more agressive
• Reduced turn rate of light and heavy turrets
• Turrets now allow a small amount of negative pitch (below the view “horizon” of the turret) of -10° to allow projectiles convergence
• Tweaks for bomber “shotgun”: reduced spread and increased damage and fire rate. This gun should now be useable against enemy interceptors and deadly against bigger ships
• Increased max ammo capacity on cruiser and carrier
• Increased fire rate of heavy anti-capital ship guns mounted on station floating defense modules
• Revamped and massively increased shield recharge rate on all ships. The interceptor shields in particular, now recharges in a minute (or 24 seconds with shields overcharge). Capital ships recharge almost ten times faster, making it impossible for light-damage ships like a lonely interceptor to out-pace the shield recharge rate.
• Interceptor max hitpoints increased from 50 to 75
• Interceptor max shieldpoints increased from 100 to 120
• Increased repair and resupply rate of corvette aura
• Increased spread angle of turrets to make them less deadly to interceptors

Bug fixes

• Fix for spawn markers compatibility: the spawn will be marked in red if the ship type isn’t compatible (ex.: a corvette flying in a capital ship dock)
• Fixed unbalanced team scores at match startup: teams should now start with the same strategic score and same amount and type of installations
• Fixed hauler docking port damage effect/material not showing up when the module is destroyed
• Fixed haulers traffic jam at destination docking port
• Fixed a rare case of a carrier spawning at infinity
• Fixed carrier hull being invulnerable

HUD / UI

• When controlling a carrier, the number of players awaiting to spawn is now displayed on the HUD
• Added trade route path visualization (requires to be in warp and both endpoints being detected on the HUD)
• Added a few more tips to help beginners (turbo boost, warping and powering up hints)
• Increased size of mouse navigation cursor on HUD, to be more easily noticeable during combat

Assets, visual effects, performance, sounds…

• Assets loading optimizations and caching: spawning an actor on-the-fly is now x5 faster in average, resulting in more stable framerates and smaller micro-freezes when entering an actor range
• Fixed invisible spotlights on various ground installations
• Added resupplied aura effect: a bunch of green fireflies will be displayed on top of any actor being resupplied/repaired by a corvette aura
• Corvette resupply aura now fades out when camera is close to the effect to avoid cluttering the view
• Updated keymap helper (F9)
• Tweaked hauler death effect: previously, the hauler instantly despawned when dying. It should now properly explode like other ships
• Updated carrier mesh to latest version, including a lot more geometric details

Networking, AI, server

• Added warp jam ability to AI bots
• Bots can now use chaffs even when they’re not on attack (there is some downtime when a bot switches to a new target, during which it couldn’t use chaffs)
• Experimental revamp of credits redistribution to AI commander. Instead of using a global pool, the AI commander now splits its credits according to the strategical score of each potential objective.
  Once a certain threshold is reached (per objective), a battle is triggered.

Misc

• Added fallback to DirectX 11.0 if 11.1 is not available on the client
• Failure to create a render device now throws an exception, which gets caught later on and displays a warning box to the user

[INovaeFlavien]

0.3.4.0 ( Friday, 17 November 2018 )

This patch introduces a massive HUD rework as well as some assets and weapons projectile speed updates.

Gameplay:

• Added a spawn for interceptors and bombers are factory towers. It can be used for quick defense of factories. Note that it’s still pretty weak and can easily be targetting / destroyed by enemies. The tower does not have room to spawn corvettes.
• Voice commands are now only transmitted to the team allies and can no longer be visible to enemy teams
• Voice commands now also displays the selected target name in the chat box

HUD:

• New narrowed and taller font with better readability
• Added a black outline effect to various text elements of the HUD
• Added a helmet cylindrical deformation effect: the HUD is now projected to the helmet in front of the player’s eyes
• Added indicators highlighting and a bloom shader around bright HUD elements
• Added a threat (or high-priority targets, including important allies) detection to highlight important targets
• An enemy is displayed as a threat if: 1. It hit you in the past 30 seconds or 2. It is currently targetting you or has been targetting you in the past 30 seconds
• Added “out of range” warning to lead reticles when firing over a target from a distance higher than the weapon’s max range
• Selected target is now emphasized with a double-indicator icon
• Revamped the ring radar to be more clear. The distance is also displayed next to high priorty targets
• Added an Elite-style spherical radar at the center-bottom of the HUD
• This radar can also be opened in a larger version at the center of the HUD by holding the QUOTE key (right above TAB)
• Added a front / back dual hemispherical radar on the top left / right corners of the HUD
• Missiles are now properly emphasized as threats, both in the viewport and on all radars
• Revamped the alarm / warning system to correctly prioritize messages from a queue (the top priority one is the one being displayed at any time)
• Added nearest missile distance to the incoming missile alarm
• Reverted team colors to green for your own team / allies, or red and orange for the two potential enemy teams
• New HUD crosshair and reticle icons
• Added red blinking of reticles upon hit detection of the selected target
• Various HUD layout updates
• When the amount of credits increases or decreases, its color is now temporarily emphasized
• Team score bar was moved to leaderboard screen (TAB)
• Revamped / decreased size of radial menus
• The key (default: G) to select the nearest hostile target now prioritizes enemy threats over enemies that are no threat
• Swapped color in team score bar, it is now coherent with the team side
• Info text area was moved to top-center of screen
• Moved carrier spawn text to top cente

Game balance:

• Decreased weapons projectiles speed. Slightly increased life time. The goal here was to reduce the attack range of interceptors so that they have to take more risks when targetting capital ships, as they have to get closer. At the same time,
  corvette vs corvette fights get a bit more interesting with a chance to dodge.

Bug fixes:

• Fixed a server crash related to destroying a player that is disconnecting
• Fixed invalid atmospheric bounding object, causing a crash when server rebooted
• Fix for text areas text not scaling well with resolution
• Fixed input mapper conflict between joysticks

Assets:

• Interceptor cockpit has been partially retextured (cockpit shell) and some materials were darkened
• Capital ships explosions “glow” effect is now slightly blue
• Increased speed of lightning for warp jam effect
• Fixed incorrect lighting on Glimmerfall asteroid, due to flipped Y normal map channel
• Increased front light’s cone angle for small ships

Audio:

• Replaced voice commands with updated voice lines and radio effect. Increased voice lines volume
• Fixed OpenAL listener front/back orientation (was swapped)

Misc:

• Increased version of input profile config file (large spherical radar can be opened with QUOTE key, right above TAB)
• Number of teams can be configured on server in the game config file

[INovaeFlavien]

0.3.5.0 ( Friday, 07 December 2018 )

Welcome to the second limited Infinity: Battlescape beta week-end.

We would like to remind you that the game is still in alpha (beta backers only have access this week-end) with full beta scheduled for early 2019.
Many assets are placeholder or work-in-progress. Ships are untextured, gameplay features are missing and UI is basic (no star map, no missions menu, no ship selection or upgrades menu). We will be
iterating both on the visual effects and gameplay in the coming months.

Although the current version is rough around the edges, we sincerely hope that you will like what we are trying to achieve and have fun.

A community event is planned on Saturday 8th December at 20:00 UTC on the server. Players will gather and try to play objectives to complete a full match (or two) in order to stress the server and test
the gameplay. We hope to see you in game !

Patch 0.3.5.0 changes:

Gameplay:

Armor points implementation (reduction on hull damage model)

All ships now have armor points, which reduce incoming damage on the hull. The interceptor has no armor. Capital ships have a high armor which will cancel most of the damage from smaller ships.
Note that energy weapons (blasters) are not affected by armor, and obviously generate full damage on the shields

Introduced heat mechanics to engine component

All kinetic weapons produce heat points. Each ship can sustain a maximum amount of heat points. The heat bar is shown on the bottom-right part of the HUD ring, next to the energy bar.
When it reaches out 100%, kinetic weapons will be unusable for a few seconds. Energy weapons consume energy points and aren’t affected by heat mechanics.

This is an initial implementation. The idea is to add more external factors (environment, overcharge etc… ) that will eventually affect your ship’s heat dissipation rate.

Revamped (again) voice commands playback volume rules

Allies using a voice command should now be heard now matter the distance.

Physics:

• Large ships now use dynamic mesh physics bodies. This should allow players to fly very close to the hull of capital ships. There are two important notes:

1. As ships are constantly moving, you’ll probably be sent flying like a pinball if you hit a moving ship. Networked collisions can also cause interesting behaviors…
2. Projectile hits are still performed using the ship’s bounding box. In the future we will replace it with more accurate collision meshes, too

• Added quick dampening of angular velocity when it’s over maximum angular speed threshold
• Revamped ships masses. They were not coherent before (a destroyer was only 3 times more massive than a corvette). This should result in more realistic behavior in ramming scenarios

Controls

Initial implementation for the new capital ships control scheme is underways. This is a massive work-in-progress. The current state is not satisfactory, however we’ve decided to release it publically to gather feedback on it in the early stages. So before testing it, please take into consideration that it’s only half playable and will still need major improvements to be considered a decent state.

By default, capital ships still use the old navigation-cursor based control scheme. To enable the new control scheme, use F4 to cycle through control schemes ( it’s after Direct mode ). Note that it’s possible to play in small ships with the capital ships control scheme too - it might even be a fun ride.

The way the new control scheme works is by decoupling camera orientation and ship orientation. You don’t need to hold any key to turn the camera around the ship. By pressing forward, you align your ship to the camera’s orientation, instead of accelerating. You can still strafe with the other keys, however to accelerate and start moving you have to use the target speed controls ( 1-9 or mouse wheel by default ).

At the moment, there are 2 main issues with this control scheme:

1. If you want to orient your ship, you need to point the camera at the direction where you want to turn.
2. The ship is in the way of the camera and often blocks the aiming marker, used for the large guns. More work on the camera behavior is planned in a future patch.

Other changes:

• It is now possible to cycle through control schemes in spawn or spectator modes
• Radial menus are now usable in direct Mode control scheme
• Formation resets to free when the target is lost

HUD / Camera:

• Added radar type preference to launcher settings dialog (ring, front/back, or both). Spherical radar is always turned on. The default is ring (no front/back radar)
• Team scores bar now shows up temporarily on HUD for 30 seconds when scores change
• Lead reticles are now displayed on top of other HUD 3D indicators (previously, they were below all other indicators!)
• Added low damage feedback warning on reticles
• Limited HUD negative FOV that made helmet go out of screen
• Turrets aiming helper dots are no longer displayed in spectator mode
• Increased opacity and brightness of information / meters in the HUD ring center
• Third-person camera is now reset to default view distance when the view changes
• Added parameters to control smoothing of camera movements in third-person mode
• Improved smoothing related to accelerations and angular velocity in third-person mode
• Removed hard-coded parameters for min/max view range, now set up in actors config files
• Updates to camera component for relative vs absolute mode
• Select nearest (default: G) will only target hostiles; will expand range and type to stations when there are no more hostile ships around…
• Increased navigation cursor’s max screen radius
• Reticles used for locking are now displayed even for turrets
• Added heat meter to HUD
• Added a heat alert when heat reaches its maximum and dissipates
• Auto assist and reverse mode now blink the system on the HUD
• Added alert when exceeding safe warp speed
• Added tip for opening the large zoom
• Minor HUD color tweak
• The spherical radar’s range dynamically adjusts based on the ship’s speed ( so in warp, the range might be hundreds or thousands of Km ). Default range is still 25 Km

Game balance:

• Increased voice command notification duration from 7s to 15s
• Tweaks to navigation cursor settings (deadzone, sensitivity), so that interceptor is slightly more precise to beginners
• Reset weapons cooldown to zero when ammo type is missile or torpedo
• Added a repeater gun. This gun, as its name says, fires shots in quick succession, then cools down for a few seconds. This is now the default light anti-aircraft defense for stations and the destroyer
• Added MK5 guns to Cruiser;
• Added Armor points to all ships;
• Weapons stats tweaks (spread, turn speeds, damage) to rebalance taking into account ships armor reduction
• Increased Destroyer roll dampener

Bug fixes:

• Cockpit alert light now takes power state into account
• Fixed collision damage localization which was calculated in world space instead of object space
• Fixed potential crash with deferred light pipe and shaders that don’t use atmospheric settings
• Fixed issues related to ghost keyboard help screen on initial spawn menu: escape or ctrl or chat were not working
• Debug menu (F12) can now be opened in spawn or spectator modes

Assets, graphics, performance:

• Reduced holographic scanlines in HUD composite shader
• Added client caching of mesh bodies for body components
• Added shadow map resolution power curve setting to better control shadow maps transitions agressivity
• Tweaked geometry rejection default settings
• Reduced max shadow pipe processing queue budget time from 5 ms to 3 ms per frame (will gain an FPS or two around stations)
• Gas giant color tweaks (config can now specify a user-defined color table)
• Tweaked clouds transparency function for gas giants (now based on camera distance for smoother transitions)
• New weapon meshes to replace the old placeholders
• Implemented LOD for weapon meshes / objects
• Weapon impact effects now scale depending on weapon parameters
• Tweaks to lights for station modules. They are now appear bigger
• Added placeholder lights to capital ships (destroyer, cruiser and carrier)
• Revamped impact effects and colors, now different for metal / shield vs kinetic / energy
• Tweaks to team paint colors
• Updates to hauler lights (they were incorrectly offset and appeared out of the ship)
• Swapped cap ship spawn dock’s default Z orientation
• Improvements and optimizations to lights in fighter and corvette bays
• Various stations materials upgrades and improved textures

Networking

This patch introduces a series of massive networking improvement, mostly affecting players with high latencies and/or unstable connections ( high packets drop ). The network stack was modified to increase redunduncy of packets in case of packets loss. Players with high-latency connections ( > 200 ms ) might consequently notice an increase of bandwidth, however the game’s stability and network smoothness should have vastly improved.

• Decreased orientation tolerance for error correction, for improved accuracy
• Implemented an adaptative server input buffer queue which grows or shrinks dynamically based on the client’s latency and connection stability. This should reduce error corrections and unwanted “loss of control” when the network is unstable
• The input buffer queue can still be set manually with /SetInputBufferSize N command, where N=0 to 64 which represents the queue size in server ticks. A value of 0 (the default) means “use adaptative mode”.
• Added a /GetInputBufferSize command to query the current input buffer size
• Added client network interpolation delay parameter, which can be changed with command /SetUPSDelay. Default value is 2.0. This affects how much in the past the client displays server actors
• Increased server lag compensation max history from 32 to 64 ticks
• Increased server max input queue size from 10 to 64
• Added client error correction smoothing for velocity
• More tuning for adaptative input queue on server side ( will now estimate initial connection latency )
• Added more information ( input queue size, framerate, tricount averages ) for server players list dialog

Misc:

• Added max AI speed limit ( 500 m/s ) to avoid having bots fly at many km/s when engaging each others
• Matrix inverse optimizations
• Warning when damaged material does not exist (instead of an exception)
• Added minimum tesselation depth to terrain engine
• Renamed classification of hardpoints from MK1 to MK6

[INovaeFlavien]

0.3.5.1 HOTFIX ( Saturday, 08 December 2018 )

An optional hotfix is available for patch 0.3.5.0. As it is very light and optional, we’ve decided to skip the full patch reinstall and go for a manual installation.

Download hotfix 0.3.5.1 here

Installation instructions:

Simply unpack and overwrite contents of the .rar in the Bin folder of Battlescape ( default: C:\Program Files\I-Novae Studios\Battlescape\Bin )

This should be a safe operation, no need to do backup of original 0.3.5.0 files.

The server was already patched earlier and is still compatible with 0.3.5.0.

This patch addresses 2 major issues related to the new capital ships collision meshes:

• Fixed precision issues with our physics library that caused capital ships to be ejected at high velocities and spin away from contacts with any kind of installation / station
• Fixed major framerate slowdowns when colliding with installations / stations in a capital ship

[INovaeFlavien]

0.4.0.0 ( Saturday, 09 February 2019 )

Welcome to the Infinity: Battlescape BETA.

Please keep in mind that many assets are placeholder or work-in-progress. Most ships are still untextured, gameplay features are missing and UI is basic (no star map, no missions menu, no ship selection or upgrades menu). We will be
iterating both on the visual effects and gameplay in the coming months.

Have fun and let us know your feedback about the game on our forums, thank you !

Gameplay

• A heat alert now shows on the HUD when reaching over 70% of the heat capacity
• Heat decharge delay reduced to 0.25s ( from 1s ), resulting in less waiting for heat to decharge
• Heat points now decharge 20% faster on the interceptor
• Energy points now recharge 50% faster on the interceptor
• Added an activation delay for missiles (2s) and torpedoes (4s). During that time, the missile/torpedo will fly straight without thrusters
• Formation mode is no longer dropped when the target is invalid. Instead an alert is now notified to the player
• Fix for kinetic damage on almost depleted shields not affecting hull points, hence not dealing their full damage
• Primary and secondary fire groups are now mutually exclusive. Players will have to select the best weapon for the given situation
• Doubled scouting speed of installations

Flight model changes

• Turbo boost can now have asymmetrical scaling. Most ships now use this feature to make turbo boost more effective on the lateral sides, than in the front/back axis. As a result, most ships are still nimble in terms of strafing
  but will not reach forward high velocities as quickly as before
• Added a soft speed cap for target speed ( flight assist ). It is currently set to the equivalent of ten seconds of main thrust. Ex.: the interceptor can accelerate at 3.4g, resulting in a cap speed of 340 m/s
• It is still possible to accelerate faster than the speed cap, but you have to override the target speed manually
• Warp entry speeds are now set to be around 75% of the speed cap
• Reduced linear accelerations by around 20% for the interceptor, 10-15% for the other ships. No changes to turning speeds/angular accelerations

Capital ships control scheme

• Tweaked dampening factors for capital ships orientation. They were too low, which resulted in orientations taking forever to stabilize
• Every ship now has a default control scheme that it used in “automatic” mode; Small ships will default to target cursor mode while capital ships will default to capship mode. This way you don’t have to change the
  control scheme back/forth every time you change ships
• Capital ships now default to external camera view upon spawning
• Updated capital ship control scheme to be able to manually pitch/yaw/roll
• Strafing is still possible by holding CTRL. In this case, movement keys can be used to strafe in one of the 3 axes

Weaponry

• Introduced MK6 and MK7 guns
• Rescaled down other guns. Those might appear too small now - we’ll review the gun sizes in a future patch
• Rebalanced weapons in general. Reduced projectiles speeds to match lower accelerations and speed caps
• Added burst effects to most turret weapons
• Added more slots to the weapons menu wheel, due to capital ships having more weapons groups
• Revamped type and locations of hardpoints on destroyer, cruiser and carrier, to be more coherent/logical
• Defense towers on stations/bases are now weaker (~40% less hitpoints), as their weapons have become more deadly

HUD / Camera

• Revamped HUD to blue/red color theme; players get a different color too ( cyan for allies, yellow for enemies )
• Revamped battle HUD to be smarter about which targets to highlight ( it now takes into account weapon range, distance or screen-size to targets etc… to avoid cluttering the screen with too much information )
• Revamped curve for HUD indicators size. Indicators should now be bigger and avoid obscuring a small target
• Fix for color of heat bar on HUD
• Fixed lack of bloom shader over HUD due to a missing shader asset
• Added a gray bar to represent the soft cap speed in flight assist mode
• Increased thickness of speed bars of various types, to make them easier to notice
• Updated position of name / distance helper next to a target indicator (moved to the right of the icon)
• Reticles and lead indicators are no longer shown while warping
• Moved camera a bit further away from ships in third-person views

Bug fixes

• Fix for ODE trimesh vs trimesh precision bug
• Fix for showing score on main menu screen
• Fixed a bug that prevented getting a locale (language) ID from its name
• Fixed delay of updating bounds of a particle system, resulting in the first 100 milliseconds of a particle effect to sometimes not show up
• Fixed particles with a very shoft lifetime not showing up
• Fixed a bug where some particles effects were still linked to an old “ghost” planet object, forcing the planet object to stay alive in memory for no good reason
• Fix for incorrect weapon fire muzzle effect orientation on turrets. It wasn’t matching the orientation of the turret gun/barrels
• Fixed a major bug with AI commander spawning battles without cruisers or carriers

Assets, graphics, performance

• Thrusters activation distance now takes quality settings into account
• New explosion effect
• New counter-measures effect
• Some elements of these effect should be affected by gravity if the effect spawns near a planet
• Added a space debris effect to replace the old obsolete HUD “velocity lines”. These debris get deformed by speed, giving a good sense of speed, especially in warp
• Added support for changing skins in game. Use the “/SetSkin SkinName” command in the chat box. Currently, these skins are available for the cruiser:
  CruiserDarkRed, CruiserDarkGray, CruiserDarkGrayLine, CruiserDarkGrayLine2, CruiserGoldLine, CruiserWeird, CruiserBlueCamoStriped, CruiserBlueCamoDigital, CruiserDarkGrayLine3, CruiserDesertCamo or CruiserTurquoiseBolt
  Note that skins are network propagated (other players can see your skin). At the moment there are no limitations for changing skins. Later on, these will be tied to the progression system and will have to be unlocked as rewards
• Experiment: darkened galaxy background by 25%
• Cruiser is now textured
• New weapon projectile effects (small, medium and large for kinetic and blasters)
• Added back cockpit glass material ( was accidentely removed in a previous build )

AI changes

• Due to lack of time, only half of the AI changes were included
• Bots can now turbo boost
• Improved target selection algorithm / priorities: cap ships should now favor attacking other cap ships, etc…

Misc

• Added ability to override locale / language in application config file for testing purposes
• More UI text elements can now be localized

[INovaeFlavien]

0.4.1.0 ( Saturday, 16 February 2019 )

This is a “quality of life” patch for the BETA which aims at fixing some of the most urgent issues, and applying a small polish pass to the HUD. The capital ships control scheme also received another iteration.

Gameplay

• Warp interruption is now damage percentage based ( 2% ) off the max hit/shield points, instead of interrupting warp for negligible damage
• Reduced ratio of player credits versus AI in credits redistribution
• Added allied infrastructure griefing checks and malus ( set to -33% of credits worth )
• Battlescape generation improvements: score balance checks, new parameters to control location of stations
• Added check to avoid spawning ground installations on the night time of planets

Controls

• Match velocity in warp will now match warp speed to target
• Ship will now be powered on and have front lights enabled by default upon spawning
• Added support to up to 4 input devices / joysticks
• Added camera offset to capital ship views to unblock the ship from the view (the camera will offset perpendicularly to the ship’s spherical volume)
• Swapped WS and RF for capital ship control scheme. WS will now pitch
• Added a “Set target orientation” for capital ship control scheme. R will set the target orientation forward, F backwards. The ship automatically turns around to face the target orientation’s direction.
• Fixed pitching orientation on capital ships not correctly preserving world-space direction
• Added input profiles for Logitech X52 Pro and X56 HOTAS, thanks to the community

Weapons

• Rebalanced heat points on bomber and corvette (they could not reach max heat points even firing 100% of the time without stopping)
• Added back some hitpoints to the static defense towers on installations
• Rescaled up most of the weapons projectile effects due to community feedback
• Slightly increased projectile speeds for the large MK6/MK7 kinetic guns
• Increased missile launch speed from 200 m/s to 250 m/s

HUD

• The HUD is now available in third-person mode for capital ships
• New version of the HUD center crosshair ( triangular ) to unclutter the center of the view
• HUD crosshair will now flash to orange when aligned with lead reticles
• Reduced size of lead reticles by 25%
• Shield or hit meters now flash upon taking damage
• Energy emission graph ( top-right corner of the HUD ) no longer has a black background
• Added credits bonus message upon destroying generic enemy infrastructure
• Tweaked HUD bloom effect
• Added a more visible alert when HUD automatic level changes
• Planet / Installation names are no longer fading off based on distance on HUD
• Fixed a bug which caused distant planet / installation names to still appear in HUD combat mode
• Fixed player indicator names ( was incorrectly located at the top of the icon )
• Tweaks to HUD target indicator colors to be less chaotic
• Popups and alerts no longer show up when HUD is disabled
• Added a target orientation symbol on HUD for capital ships automatic orientation mode
• Separated camera views for “external views” in target navigation mode, and capital ship camera. They can now have different view parameters

Bug fixes

• Minor fix for warp charging falling below minimum warp speed, accidentely cancelling warp

Visual effects, graphics, performance

• Added slider in launcher dialog to control space debris strength. Defaults to 50%
• Reduced length and intensity of space debris overall

Server

• Added server economy scale (default to x2.0) as a server setting
• A bunch of server settings are now properly loaded from server config files instead of beind hardcoded
• Fixed server crash due to lack of multithreading in access of network properties;
• Fixed issue with warping AI bot getting killed before reaching its destination due to speed cap change
• Added gas giant and Galia asteroid to the “Small” Battlescape

[INovaeFlavien]

0.4.2.0 ( Saturday, 02 March 2019 )

This new patch for the beta version introduces the new audio system: FMOD Studio (goodbye OpenAL !) and as such, modifications to sounds are experimental and haven’t been fine tuned yet. If you notice any audio issue, please let us know on the forums, thank you !

The patch also introduces a new targetting system for capital ships and static defenses. MK4 Auto-turrets are now auto-tracking AND auto-firing. This means that you no longer need to manage these auto-turrets at all; they’ll select the most relevant target and fire at it automatically, even if you do not press the primary or secondary fire button. If you’re short on ammo and want to disable this behavior, simply toggle the MK4 Auto-Turret hardpoint group off in the weapons radial menu.

This patch also contains a major balance pass over the ships (especially capital ships weapons, hardpoints and sockets locations) as well as the bomber (the shotgun is now classified as MK2; we also added the Interceptor MK1 guns as an alternative primary weapon, which you can select in the weapons radial menu). We’ve also revamped all the credits rewards for scanning (nerfed), destroying installations (nerfed), passive resources generation (buffed) and active kills (buffed). Please let us know if the game balance has improved as a result, and report any major imbalance you can notice. Thank you and have fun.

New default Havoc cruiser skin

Gameplay / Balance

• Target’s hitpoints and shields status percentage now appear next to the indicator ( for allies or close enemies )
• Reduced minimum warp speed threshold from x10 to x2 when matching speed in warp ( this prevented matching a target in warp at lower speeds )
• Shield overcharge power reduced from 150% to 100%
• Propulsion overchage power reduced from 100% to 50% (sides) and 50% to 30% (main)
• Small generic building modules will no longer give any credits upon destruction (before: they defaulted to 10 creds per small building)
• Rebalanced all weapons; large turret projectiles now move faster; Revamped all damage points, heat points etc… on all weapons
• Separated ship weapons from static defenses weapons, so that they could be balanced separately
• Floating platform turrets are now more deadly - beware to enemy capships that would try to attack a station when these platforms are still up !
• Tower defenses on stations have low damage and precision but will fire more frequently - beware to stationnary targets !
• Removed MK3 turrets from all capships. They now start at MK4 auto-firing turrets. MK5 are mostly anti medium ships (corvettes/destroyers), and MK6/MK7 are anti-capships but have a slower turn rate. As a consequence, positionning in capital ships should have become more important
• Bomber now has an alternative MK1 (interceptor’s gun) in addition to the shotgun, however only one can be active at the same time
• Corvette’s turrets damage has been reduced a bit
• The Destroyer now has two more MK6s at the top and bottom (the ones at the sides caused too much of a blind angle)
• The Cruiser now also has extra MK6s and MK7s (previously, it only had 2 MK7s at the bottom, always hidden from the camera, not ideal)
• Rebalanced capital ships hit points and shield points; same for energy and heat, which should limit firing all weapons at once (the player might have to select only 1 or 2 weapon groups active at a time, and not everything)
• Nerfed most ship’s shield recharging rates to be less overpowered, especially in combination with shield overcharge
• Slight reduction to capship’s vertical thruster rates
• Rebalanced credits rewards for destroyed installations, especially on defense towers or factory storage tanks
• Increased (almost doubled) credits rewards for killing enemy ships
• Nerfed (almost halved) credits rewards for scanning
• Decreased ( halved) activation time for missiles and torpedoes, right after they’ve been launched ( missiles and torpedoes fly in a straight line until they’re activated, then only do they start tracking their target )
• Increased damage for missiles ( slightly ) and torpedoes ( a lot )

Controls / Input

• Added mouse wheel sensitivity setting, defaults to x5
• Renamed “Separator” key into the official “Backslash” key (note: if you used “Separator” in a custom profile, you’ll have to reassign or rename it)
• Updated input profile to version 0.0.1.1: auto-assist key was moved to RightShift (Azerty) or BackSlash (Qwerty and others)
• Added a “CapshipAutoTurn” event, default is now the Space key;

Weapons

• Implemented auto-fire for capital ships; Weapons in hardpoint groups that allow auto-fire will automatically track and fire at their auto-selected target
• Made auto-tracking behavior of turrets more consistent
• Added minimum and maximum target size range to weapons, so that they are smarter about which kind of target they should fire at ( ex.: huge turrets should not fire at interceptors… )
• Kinetic defense turrets now have the ability to fire at a target even when its shields are up

HUD

• Obstructed target indicators ( behind planets ) will now blink and display “Obstructed” on top of the indicator
• Small reduction of crosshair size at HUD center
• Formation target is no longer lost when far away while flying in warp
• Harmonized team names and colors in leaderboard / scores (previously, they were using the old team colors; now they’ll be consistent with the HUD: blue=your team, red=enemy team)

Bug fixes

• Fix for incorrect gun offset with some forward-facing weapons;
• Fixed crash upon cycling control schemes ( F4 ) in spectator mode;
• Fixed a bug in the match win conditions not checking destroyed spawns

Visual effects, audio, graphics, performance

• Replaced OpenAL with FMOD. Note that the sound setup and attenuation formula is different, which might result in sounds behaving a bit differently than before. If you notice anything that sounds like a bug, please let us know
• Tweaks to audio with FMOD
• Fixed destruction material on floating defense platforms and turrets (there was some weird pop-in going on before, due to a mesh not having been updated properly)
• Tweak to particle debris, small debris will now fade out at a larger distance
• New sound effect for missile lock
• New explosions sound effects with multiple variations
• New shield impact sounds
• New MK6/MK7 gun fire sound effects
• New cruiser Havoc skin (default, yellow-gray). Scoria now uses the red-white stripe skin by default. This is a move to give more character/unique style to the different factions. We’re no longer following at all the old team 0 = red, team 1 = green, team 2 = blue pattern
• Added MK2 forward weapon mesh placeholder ( used for bomber’s shotgun )
• Updates to various textures and paint materials on the Cruiser
• Decal pass on the Cruiser materials

Misc

• Added version check and upgrading to launcher user settings. The new crosshair wasn’t available to old users in the previous patch, but it should now auto-detect the version and upgrade the settings when needed. Everybody
  should have the new triangular crosshair now
• Removed crash files ( they were redundant with log files )