Patch and Updates Notes

[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 )

[INovaeFlavien]

0.4.3.0 ( Saturday, 16 March 2019 )

Hey everybody, welcome to Infinity: Battlescape patch 0.4.3.0

This patch contains a lot of gameplay and audio improvements. Following patch 0.4.2.0 we continued to iterate on FMOD integration and added support for doppler and space-muffle effects and address audio glitches in larger battles.

The interceptor is now textured and we added a new capital-ship explosion effect, as well as a bunch of new sound placeholders.

On the gameplay side, the new AI battle system is in, and battles will now start and stop based on specific credits accumulation conditions by the AI. It isn’t balanced very well yet, so if the AI generates too many battles and bots at once, we’ll probably have to hotfix the server sooner than later.

This patch contains some architectural changes, probably unoticeable for the player until we integrated a proper menu system. But the game now allows mounting/unmounting ships equipments and various upgrades dynamically. The ship loadouts are still static for testing purposes. The new scanner (Interceptor) and proximity mines (Destroyer) are in.

Finally, we introduced a bounty system, currently controlled by the AI. Enemies that do particularly well will be flagged and killing them will bring you a credits reward. Bounty-tagged enemies have a star icon on top of their HUD indicator.
Note that they cannot themselves see if they have a bounty on their head, but they’ll get a notification when they get killed, if they had one.

Of course, this patch contains the usual quality-of-life improvements and bug fixes amongst many other things. Enjoy !

Gameplay / Balance

• Unscouted installations now appear as “Unknown” and need to be permanently scouted for their name to appear
• Added the ability to dynamically mount / unmount equipments to Ship components
• Warp jam has now become a ship equipment
• Introduced scanner equipment. This scanner can detect energy emissions across a long range and give basic information such as intensity, physical size or relative speed
• It is possible to highlight a scanner echo that will get highlighted on the spectrograph ( it is possible to jump to the previous or next echo with Ctrl+Y or Ctrl+U
• Introduced proximity mines. See Weekly Update #135 for more details about how they work
• Upon dying a missile, torpedo or mine will now detonate and cause splash damage instead of simply dying
• Introduced per-installation modules scoring system, installation destruction threshold is based on score and no longer on absolute hitpoints of an installation’s modules
  (Previously, the scoring was based on hitpoints. As an unwanted consequence, increasing hangar hitpoints made them the only targets that you really had to destroy if you wanted to destroy the station. The scoring is now independent of hitpoints)
• Explosions now generate a shockwave effect which causes splash damage. There is a delay in how long the shockwave takes to reach you (it travels at 1 km/sec) so sometimes the effect of the shockwave might have some latency compared to the visual effect.
  This is no bug. In addition, shockwaves can generate a velocity bump if you get caught too close in a light ship like the Interceptor
• Heat increases energy emission signature
• Scouting now requires a scanner, and the scanner has to be active. Using the scanner also doubles your ship’s energy emissions
• Mine fields are generated around space stations when a match is generated
• Introduced atmospheric decay for thrusters, nerfing big ships in atmospheres. This will make the capital ships ( cruiser, carrier ) impossible to take off / fly away from planet’s gravity
• Implemented bounty system. The AI commander will now place bounties on targets that cause of a lot of trouble / deaths
• The bounty system is based on ranks, which can level up as the number of kills increases. At each rank the bounty doubles
• Increased AI attack priorities on targets with a bounty rank
• Finished implementation of the new AI commander battle system. Battles will now start/stop after a certain credits threshold has been accumulated from haulers and other team rewards
• Revamped credits distribution to installations, now taking into consideration limits, and distribution is no longer linear
• Revamped battle / mission notifications. Added a countdown system so that players will know when a new battle is starting
• Increased hitpoints on various installation modules like energy reactors or hangars
• Adjusted scouting / scanner ranges on all installations and adjusted rewards to take into account scanning difficulty
• Doubled atmospheric density decay on all planets, so that warping to the ground level is much faster

Controls / Input

• Fixed a bug with capital ship control scheme: pitch down ( S ) was also reverting thrust !
• Fixed input issue with some keys not responding after an alt-tab
• Input improvements regarding conflicts between key combos ( ex.: ctrl-X vs X, both events were firing at once )
• Implemented Orbital formation mode. Note that Orbital mode requires to set a target speed. At zero, its behavior is similar to “Chase”. The target speed basically defines the orbital distance. Tangential movements get cancelled out unless you manually thrust
• Added rotation assist toggle event (look for the event called “RotationAssist” in the profile editor). It is not bound to any key by default
• Slight buf to small ship’s linear thrust (around +10%)
• Slightly increased angular thrust on bomber to make it a bit less wobbly when aiming

Weapons

• Added activation timer to chaffs ( currently set to 1 second ) and a detonation delay for missiles ( 2 seconds ) ( this solves the problem of missiles instantly exploding near you the moment a chaff is fired )
• Collisions ghosting after a missile / torpedo / mine launch is now temporary. Collisions are re-enabled with the parent actor after a few seconds
• Auto-turrets can now defensively fire at incoming mines
• Auto-turrets no longer target or stop firing at dying actors
• Slightly reduced precision of corvette guns and MK4 auto-turrets

HUD

• Match time only shows up in leaderboard ( it could show up on the main HUD when the scores changed, before )
• Added target indicator for mines
• Fixed a bug related to losing selected actor / stats (like hitpoints/shields) on client when a target becomes an indicator
• HUD “incoming threat” alert now shows the type of threat ( missile, torpedo or mine )
• Incoming threat is always showing as high priority on radars
• Mines, crates and misc. indicators are no longer displayed at far ranges ( > 1000 Km )
• Added an option to disable the lead reticles from the launcher dialog

Audio

• Added support for doppler in sound effects
• Added muffle effect. It is maximal in space, however it takes into account atmospheric density, so the muffle will fade out on planets
• Added a flight sound effect loop on missiles and torpedoes
• Added sound pooling / streaming to reduce the number of active FMOD sounds and reduce stress on the sound systems which glitched the audio in battles
• Fixed a small problem with FMOD in debug mode which caused conflicts with concurrent client instances due to profiling enabled
• Fix for sounds attached to objects that stopped playing too soon when the parent object was deleted (this was cutting the sound in the middle of playing)
• Emphasized engine sounds on non-player ships

Visual effects, assets, graphics, performance

• The Interceptor is now textured. It has two base skins, one for Scoria and one for Havoc
• New capital ship shockwave / explosion effect
• Tweaked camera vibrations / shaking attenuation formula and parameters from effects, will fade out more naturally now
• Tweaks to dying explosions effect when a ship is about to explode
• Fixed starfield / galaxy pipes redundantly attached twice to render pipeline (this caused a very minor performance hit for no good reason)
• Added a dim gray/blue galaxy background color. This was done so that ships and structures silhouettes in the dark could be better seen over the background
• Ship death effects can now appear at a long range, even if the ship is out of visible range on the client

Server and Misc

• Server crash fix related to a 0.4.2.0 bug (hotfixed)
• Added additional check to server for desyncs between the client’s selected actor target and server’s ( if the actor got destroyed on the server but the client selected it right before, it crashed the server )
• Added admin network commands to mount / unmount a ship equipment
• Fixed a minor memory leak in server networking code
• Added Hull HP ratio persistency to actors database
• Added actors destruction persistency to actors databaes (previously, deleted actors would re-live upon rebooting the server)

[INovaeFlavien]

0.4.4.0 ( Friday, 22 March 2019 )

The last patch ( 0.4.3.0 ) introduced a lot of new content which generated new issues. Patch 0.4.4.0 aims at adressing all these issues, starting with stability: it contains an important client crash related to proximity mines, as well as stability fixes to the server.

In terms of gameplay, patch 0.4.4.0 wraps up the implementation of the new battle system, by introducing consequences to lost battles. Battles that are deemed “critical” will be important for the defender’s team to win, otherwise the objective will get destroyed. We added more info popups to inform the player the state of the battles, and completely revamped the battle “missions” notification system with the countdown to the next battle, but also its odds of victory once the battle has started. The battle system also received a balancing pass, with the AI commander being able to transfer credits between objectives as needed. For non-critical battles (aka. balanced between the teams), the winner will receive a nice credits reward. AI should now be able to complete an entire match on its own and even start multiple battles at once on multiple fronts.

This patch also introduces a bunch of tweaks to explosions / capship deaths, a red shockwave for torpedoes and proximity mines, and a new heavy weapons kinetic impact effect (currently the intersections are still done with the bounding box of the ship, however in the future we’ll implement accurate intersections).

Gameplay / Balance

• Improvements to battle system:
• Added consequences to losing a battle
• Added critical battles when a battle is balanced, which will destroy the objective installation
• Various improvements to dynamically balancing credits between allied or enemy objectives
• Revamped AI commander scouting of objectives
• Added player battle mission notification system
• Added a bit more separation distance to the formation chase mode (sometimes it made the ship fly very close to the target)
• Halved activation time on chaffs to make them more reactive
• Fixed a bug which didn’t show the incoming missile alert until the missile got activated
• Fix for carriers being undestructible
• Tweaks to explosions splash and knockback force, to be less invasive/annoying
• Reduced range of defense auto-turrets
• Slight reducion in missiles damage. At the same time, slight increase of interceptor’s hitpoints and shields (respectively: 75 to 80, and 120 to 125). This change allows the interceptor to not instantly die to a single missile hit
• Nerfed damage for heavy capital ships weapons. They were too strong, especially since proximity mines were introduced, and capital ships died too quickly overall
• Slightly increased activation time for missiles and torpedoes, to give targets more time to react at close ranges

Bugs

• Fixed client crash with mines spawned in marker spawns
• Fixed damage smoke trail being generated on a resupplied undamaged ship

HUD

• Fixed safe warp speed alert in spectator mode
• Fixed some bugs related to selecting the closest hostile target ( G key ): if you already had a target selected, the G key did nothing. There was also a wrong behavior related to missiles/torpedoes
• Fixed accidental griefing messages for indirectly killing allied missiles/torpedoes/mines
• HUD popups now support multiple lines (used by the battle notification system)
• Indicators in the far distance are no longer displayed or selectable. This should help to unclutter objectives that are very far away
• Closest supply ship / corvette is now displayed with a special icon on the HUD and on radars
• Moved scanner downwards on the HUD

Visual effects, assets, graphics, performance, audio

• Added rejection distance for particle systems LOD, to improve performance of far-away particle effects
• Tweaked capital ships death effect: a single, massive shockwave is generated instead of multiple, smaller ones. We also added some explosions and debris at the core of the effect
• Added a kinetic impact effect for capital ships heavy weapons, generating a lot of sparks.

Planets

• Reduced diffuse intensity of gas giant
• Changed color of gas giant, to be more blue/purple
• Tweaks to planets atmospheres: slight color changes, and made the atmosphere a bit thicker on many planets
• Tweaks to Aresthia texturing rules: to make the planet a bit less boring/bland seen from space. Some materials are also more shiny

Server and AI

• Fixed launcher crash due to invalid patch notes
• Added credits generation multiplicator to server for AI battle credits
• Fix for deadlock on corvette auras repairing each others
• AI carriers now slow down and stop when a player tries to respawn at them;
• AI destroyers can now launch proximity mines
• Added server command to see battlecredits
• Fixed spam in server logs when an actor fails to enter warp and gets killed after some time;
• Fixed server crash due to typo in missile parent actor

Misc

• Fixed team names ( instead of team colors ) in the launcher dialog
• Added two more locations for ground installations on Sarake

[INovaeFlavien]

0.4.4.1 ( Friday, 29 March 2019 )

This patch focuses on performance improvements in large battles. It should bring about a 50 to 100% fps boost in large battles at Glimmerfall and Hebellos, and a lower but still significant fps boost
in smaller battles. In addition to performance improvements, the patch includes a couple of fixes related to battle reinforcements (server-side), localization and a new custom graphical setting mode
for debugging.

Performance improvements

For more details please see Weekly Update #136.5: from 15 to 45

• Emissive values on the hull of a ship are no longer changed every frame when the emissive hasn’t changed
• Lights are only collected on the hull when the lights layout has changed, and not every frame anymore
• Statistics are no longer gathered every frame even if the graph stats page isn’t currently opened
• Thrusters are dynamically attached/dettached based on view cone visibility and distance
• Lights are dynamically attached/dettached based on view cone visibility and distance
• Weapons/turrets are dynamically attached/dettached based on view cone visibility and distance

This last batch of changes lightens the load on the scene-graph, which previously caused a lot of cpu calculations to update transformation matrices or perform frustum culling on hundreds of objects per ship.
In this patch, thrusters, lights of weapons that aren’t in view ( or that are too far away to be rendered ) are simply dettached from the scene-graph. From the player’s point of view, there should be no
visual difference, even if turning the camera around very quickly. If you notice any bug introduced by this new behavior, please let us know.

Fixes

• experimental change for loading fonts from localization files
• added a custom/debug graphical setting mode, which loads graphics settings from ClientConfig.xml
• fixed popup dialog arguments not supporting localization (utf-8)
• fixed battle reinforcement system which under-reinforced due to a ship-budget recalculation issue

[INovaeFlavien]

0.4.5.0 ( Saturday, 27 April 2019 )

This patch (re)-introduces Asteroid rings around Sarake, the gaian planet. It also includes asset updates, like the new textured Destroyer and an update to the small ship’s hangars.

General

• Reimplemented asteroid ring around Sarake. Known issues: missiles/torpedoes currently do not collide with asteroids ; slight desync between client/server timings can sometimes cause funky ship-asteroid collisions ; the server hasn’t been stress-tested with a lot of actors in rings yet…
• Space stations now prioritize spawning in an asteroid ring when a ring exists for a given planet

Fixes

• experimental change for loading fonts from localization files
• added a custom/debug graphical setting mode, which loads graphics settings from ClientConfig.xml
• fixed popup dialog arguments not supporting localization (utf-8)
• fixed battle reinforcement system which under-reinforced due to a ship-budget recalculation issue

HUD / Input

• Changed HUD proximity mine icon type
• Experimental fix for GUI font charset ( was forced to ANSI, now using DEFAULT, hoping to fix Chinese font issues)
• Fixed key conflicts detection in key map / input profiles: joystick IDs were messed up
• Fix for head pitch/yaw conflicting with ship’s pitch/yaw in direct mode

Graphics / Optimizations

• Fixed sky irradiance being redundant with IBL (this effectively applied double ambient-lighting, which is wrong)
• Experimental fixes for blue-glitch with IBL in extreme mode
• Added a quality level setting to precomputed atmospheric scattering
• In high and extreme quality, atmospheric scattering will now use a higher precision and have less visual artifacts
• Mesh rendering optimizations when rendering a large amount of instanced objects
• Fixed trade route geometry indicator not being added to the octree, so it wasn’t frustum culled
• Fixed small bug in conditions check for refreshing IB
• Increased loading times due to some material generation optimizations
• Fixed a client crash related to occlusion objects

Assets

• Added textures/materials to Destroyer, as well as the two basic Havoc and Scoria skins
• Revamped small ships hangar: improved textures, materials, geometric details, lights and added ambient occlusion
• Replaced post-processing screen dirt texture
• Added lava sounds near ground surface on Cinder

Misc

• Added support for planet ambience sound layers
• Removed wind ambience from wind grid ( now uses planet ambience sound layers )
• Fixed server network issue related to WSAEWOULDBLOCK ( UDP’s send buffers full ) and which spammed / froze the server
• Fixed server crash related to trave-to-target debug functionality

[INovaeFlavien]

0.4.6.0 ( Saturday, 25 May 2019 )

This patch mostly focuses on two things: some new flight model experimental refinements and the first iteration of the textured bomber. As usual it also includes a number of bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements.

Gameplay

• Turbo boost minimum energy requirements increased from 5% to 25%: a slight nerf to players abusing micro boosts with their energy depleted. It is still possible to chain micro boosts, but only with enough energy
• Shield damage model is now probabilistic instead of splitting damage between shield and armor points. In the previous versions, upon getting hit by a physical projectile, a part of the damage was absorbed by the shield and the remainer was passing through and damaging the armor points.
  In the new model, the shield acts as a probability to determine whether all the damage gets absorbed by the shields, or if the projectile passes through the shield and hits the hull. This will be improtant in terms of visual effects later on when shields will no longer match the hull’s shape
• Added the ability to spawn at neutral stations. Neutral stations are invulnerable. Added one neutral station around Rethe Prime (the gas giant). Players in different teams that want to train / dogfight can do it here. The AI will not generate a battle around this area
• The bomber’s missile launchers are now slightly sloped upwards

Flight Model

• Fix for rotation assist mode off which wasn’t providing 100% of thrust capabilities
• Target speed / throttle can no longer exceed speed cap
• Increased forward/backward linear thrust on most ships. Interceptor went from 3.6g to 4.0g. The main difference is on capital ships, that can now fly a lot faster. For example the carrier went from 1.2g to 2.0g.
• Added a launcher dialog option (default: on) to enforce the soft speed cap with flight assist mode. It is no longer possible to exceed the speed cap via manual thrusting, unless turbo boosting (in which case the speed cap can be exceeded as long as energy remains)
• Added a side boost anti-drifting system. It increases side propulsion temporarily in order to let the ship change its course faster. The boost is stronger as speed increases and approaches the speed cap. This change should make the dofights more dynamic and make capital ships
  far more maneuverable. It also helps with dodging or manually orbiting targets.

Fixes and Improvements

• Asteroid ring fixes / tweaks: rings can now be tilted compared to the sun angle, so it won’t shadow-flicker with itself
• Fixed an issue which caused dust particles to not appear in certain ring locations (the asteroids were correctly appearing but the dusty particles were missing)
• Fixed a client crash when switching control schemes in spawn mode
• Trade routes no longer show up when the source or destination have been destroyed
• Main propulsion sound is no longer played on other ships when they’re powered off
• Weapons will no longer lock when safety lock is toggle off but the target stays within lock range

HUD / Input

• Improved highlighting of shield / armor / energy bars when their values are depleting. The bars should be flashing and become brighter to warn the user that their values are decreasing
• Added an internal “no-cockpit” camera mode to small ships. You can toggle it by pressing F1 (will switch from cockpit to internal view and vice-versa)
• Trade routes are no longer showing when HUD is disabled
• Fix for saving an incorrect input profile version when editing the input profile. This bug was introduced in the last patch and could have caused some key conflicts and/or some keys being set back to their default values. The input profile config files should now upgrade correctly
• Added griefing message when destroying minor infrastructure
• Added a locking icon (circles with a dot in the middle) to represent the launch direction of missile / torpedoes. It’ll switch to red when the weapon is locked

Graphics / Optimizations

• Added the textured bomber
• Recording screenshots (F11) is now written to disk asynchronously and will no longer freeze the game for a few seconds
• It is now possible to record screenshots at a higher resolution than the screen’s (see the Screenshot section in ClientConfig.xml). Note: HUD might not render correctly if using a different resolution than the screen’s
• Made space background darker and increased stars brightness. The amount of visible stars in sunlight should’ve increased tenfolds. The idea here is to get away from mostly-black backgrounds, while keeping a realistic look
• Reduced intensity of small ship’s floodlights

Misc

• Tweaked min/max distance to sun of Battlescape generator. The sun in particular should no longer be too close to the Battlescape
• Battlescapes are now titled compared to sun angle
• Added minimum client requirement check to game server: there was a check on the network version, but not on the client itself. This means some players could’ve logged on a server with an upgraded version and get no warning. The game could go on but feel desynced, or using different gameplay parameters…
• Enabled minidumps (crash reports) on the client. If you get a crash, the game should now generate a .dmp file along the log files. Make sure you send both the .dmp and the usual log file if you get a crash, thank you

[INovaeFlavien]

0.4.7.0 ( Saturday, 15 June 2019 )

This patch focuses on two things: first of all, reverting the flight model anti-drifting change introduced experimentally last patch. Secondly, the new menu interface system. The menu system might have introduced a lot of new issues and bugs, please report them as usual on the forums or on Discord, thank you. Please note that the menu system isn’t working with gamepads / joysticks just yet, so if you’re using of of those you might encounted a lot of issues and might have to revert back to keyboard & mouse until proper joystick support is added in a future patch.

Menu system

• A main menu was added to exit the game to windows or open the help screen. Later on it’ll allow to change graphical/audio/gameplay options or rebind controls. This menu can be opened via escape.
• Added placeholder for star map. It is currently empty
• Added ship selection menu. It replaces most of the functionality that was previously available in the escape menu. It allows you to cycle through ships, see their credits cost, and has buttons to select the ship type for the next respawn. Once the menu system is more advanced, this menu will be split in two. The ship selection/upgrades will be available when you’re spawning only. In-game, this menu will get replaced by a similar screen, showing the status of the ships systems, weapons, and allow on-the-fly weapons management/reconfiguration
• Added team stats menu. At the moment it only shows the list of player names on both teams. Global team stats as well as more player data (ranks, death/kills etc… ) will be added later on
• Finally, the mission menu is currently empty
• All these menus can be selected through a tab system, which can be opened with the tab key (default, previously assigned to leaderboard)
• The new menu system uses a brand new, vectorial rendering system which should allow for a higher quality, especially for text and icons (which are now vectorial too). It supports multisampled anti-aliasing (x1, x2, x4 and x8 based on the graphics quality setting)

Flight Model

• Rotational speed limitation based on speed has been removed for all ships (except in warp)
• The anti-drifting system was removed for small ships (interceptor, bomber and corvette). It remains active on capital ships as an equipment
• Small ships were given back their original side propulsion. Capital ships still retain some of their improved cap speed thanks to the anti-drifting system, allowing them to change course more easily

Bug fixes and improvements

• Fixed a deadlock (freeze) related to the mouse cursor

Misc

• splash screen rendering (when the game is loading) has been decoupled from the main/loading thread

[INovaeFlavien]

0.5.0.0 ( Friday, 26 July 2019 )

Hey everybody, welcome to Infinity: Battlescape patch 0.5.0.0 and to our very first Asteroid backer week-end !

If this is your first time playing, make sure to report any problem you encounted, bug, technical issues or general feedback on our forums.

We will record footage for our upcoming Steam trailer during this week-end. Two “community events” ( players assembling together to play ) will be hosted on Saturday the 27th at 19:00 UTC, and Sunday the 28th at 19:00 UTC. Make sure you join if you’re available and if the game runs well for you !
For more information please read this thread: I-Novae Community Events

The game is currently scheduled for Early Acess release on Steam around the end of September 2019 ( two months left ).

We’ve iterated on visual polish; all ships are now textured; we revamped most visual effects. The new OST composed by Markus Zierhofer is also in. We’ve also iterated on the UI menus, added capital ships missiles/torpdoes and new flak canons.
For the full patch notes, please see: Patch and Updates Notes

Keep in mind the game is still in development and is still lacking, especially in terms of content ( we’ll add more environments, ship upgrades and missions at a later stage ).

Enjoy !

-The I-Novae Studios team

Visual and Audio Polish

• Added corvette and carrier textures and skins. Note that the carrier one was rushed (uv-mapping is basic in many places) and the hangar entrance was close visually (you can still fly into it like a ghost) for the purpose of recording the Steam trailer video
• Added a sun glow effect around the sun. The effect is volumetric: the closer you are to the sun, the larger and brighter it will become, to the point of making your entire view go white. Inversely, the further away you go, the small the sun and glow will appear
• Various improvements to the sun’s shadow maps. In general, the maximum range at which shadows can appear has been increased. In extreme settings mode, shadows can appear at up to 120 Km
• Added Original Soundtrack from Markus Zierhofer and removed all the old placeholder music
• Added doppler limit to avoid high-pitched sounds due to relative high velocity difference (ex.: warp)
• Implemented Soft-Z transparency for various particle effects, avoiding sharp Z-intersections with surfaces
• Weapon projectile impacts now use accurate hull intersections instead of hitting on the bounding box of the ship (Note: as a side effect, it’s become slightly harder to hit a far-away ship since the actual mesh is like half the volume of its bounding box)
• Revamped projectile impact effects, using directional sparkles
• Projectiles can now bounce based on the angle of incidence on the target hull surface. Armored hulls also cause a lot of bouncing (ex.: interceptor shots on a destroyer)
• Projectiles can now pierce through a ship when the amounts of damage is significant compared to the total ship’s hitpoints (ex.: interceptor getting hit by a capital ship MK6/MK7)
• New torpedoes and proximity mines explosion / impact effects
• Revamped or added smoke contrails for missiles / torpedoes
• Revamped damage trail smoke when a ship is getting low on hitpoints, or has major systems damage
• Added “battle smog” particles, that get dynamically generated in a battle based on impacts / explosions. Smog disappears are 30 seconds. Smog effects use lit particles, meaning they’ll reflect light from explosions or other events happening
• Massive explosions / shockwaves (capital ships exploding, mines exploding) now cast shadows around the area
• Added shrapnel and debris to exploding ships. Individual debris can be bumped on by the player’s ship
• Added an animated warp tunnel effect when flying in warp. Removed the old entry/exit effect placeholders
• Added sparkles effect in cockpit when ship is damaged or on heavy impacts
• Added new thruster effects, which dynamically change based on thrust intensity or turbo-boosting
• In cockpit views the external hull of the ship is now rendered at a lower LOD quality level (slight performance improvement)
• Uprades to various station modules. It’s still in a bit of an incoherent state: most stations will have a mix of old / new modules. A new “Odyssey” station was added, which only features the new modules
• Added new splash loading screen

Gameplay and AI

• Kinetic damage model is now deterministic (but still probabilistic). This means that if your shields are at 75%, then every 1 out of 4 projectiles will reliably pass through the shields and hit the hull
• Fixed bug with near-depleted shields absorbing all kinetic damage but not leaking the remainer damage to the hull ( ex.: missile hit on a 1 point shield )
• Added environmental radiation damage (from sun and gas giants, when you get too close to them)
• Implemented hardpoints / weapons damage model. Weapons now have hitpoints and a hit box, and can be destroyed, especially on capital ships. Note that shields are still protecting them. Destroyed weapons emit smoke
• Increased repair rates on capital ship docking spawns by a factor of x3
• Implemented missiles and torpdoes for capital ships. Note that locking is done by keeping the camera on the target
• Implemented flak canons (available on Destroyer and Carrier). Flaks deal a moderate amount of splash damage. A single nearby exploding shot is usually not much of a threat, but a large barrage of 4-5 shots can be deadly. They’re more accurate at 1-2 Km range, and less
  effective at 4-5 km unless the target is very big. Max range is around 5 km. They can be deadly against interceptors that wander too close, but they’re bad a deadling serious damage against bigger targets
• AI bombers can now use torpedoes against capital ships
• AI commander now takes into account ship status (hitpoints remaining) when recalculating battle odds/chances of victory (previously: was all-or-nothing, even if a ship had 1 HP left, it was still considered “alive” and add a full weight in the odds calculation)
• AI capital ships can now fire missiles and torpedoes too !
• Weapons balance tweaks: slowed down turning speed of corvette’s turrets;

Menus and general UI

• Added battle missions list to the mission menu tab. The missions are colored based on the importance and chances of winning. Critical missions are usually displayed in deeper red
• Starmap menu now shows unsorted list of targets. Note that the starmap isn’t functional yet - we’ve had to drop that feature for this patch, but hopefully it’ll get refined in the next one!)
• Reduced default tooltip delay in UI (from 0.5s to 0.25s)
• Added 2 more slots for weapons radial menu
• Added HUD help screen (available in ESC system menu)

HUD, Controls, Input

• Fix for auto-warp speed limit alert, now based on speed cap and checks for engage conditions (basically, the alert was too intrusive before)
• Unified “SetCursor” and “AddCursor” events into “Cursor”. This new event automatically detect relative versus absolute mode now (based on the type of input attached to the event. Ex: a mouse will be relative, a joystick absolute)
• Added check for mouse and joystick input event conflict (you can’t use both mouse and joystick for the same input event)
• Fixed warp failure message, now displays correct target entry speed instead of always “500 m/s”
• Fixed damage localization (“blood reddening effect around the screen edges upon taking a hit”) to work in relative camera orientation (previously: was related to your ship’s nose. If the camera looked in another direction, like in capital ships mode, the damage localization was incoherent
• Ship systems / states do not show up at the top of the HUD anymore in their “normal” state, to avoid cluttering the HUD. They only appear when there’s a warning (orange) or when broken (flashing red)
• Removed old HUD 3D “trailings” effects for threats. This was kindda made obsolete by smoke damage and other HUD helpers
• Experimental feature: reverted auto-turn controls on capital ships: turning is now automatic unless you press space to disable auto-turning ( aka. brake ). Note that manual turning still overrides automatic turning (or brake )

General Bug fixes and Improvements

• Fixed leaderboard in team stats menu, which was showing a mess instead of a proper list of player names
• Fixes for automatic upgrade of input profiles, many things were broken
• Physics fix for ghost collisions spawning at world origin during the initial frame, right after an object has been created
• Fixed random crash bug when opening debug graph stats
• Fixed client crash at startup if user config xml was corrupted / messed up

Misc

• Added name randomization for NPC ships. Names are drawn from a pool and then some characters are randomly “mutated” according to a set of rules
• Added FPS limiter setting as an alternative to V-Sync. The problem with V-Sync is that it’s all-or-nothing. For example if your monitor refresh rate is 60 Hz, then you’ll get a butter-smooth 60 Hz if the game can render at above 60 fps,
  but if it dips below 60 fps it’ll immediately cut the framerate in half (to 30 fps). This can happen multiple times within a second (due to the quick change in amounts of stuff to render), resulting in worse visual stuttering.
  This FPS limiter aims at limiting the framerate to a certain threshold (ex.: 60 fps), but not cut the framerate in half if it dips below (ex.: it can still render at 50 fps), which should lessen the stuttering in quick-changing loads.
  If you are streaming on the same machine than you’re playing, you might want to give this setting a try:

1. Disable V-Sync in the launcher dialog.
2. Edit UserClientConfig.xml in C:\Users\XXX\Documents\I-Novae Studios\Infinity Battlescape
3. Add or change “FPSLimit” to 60 under the “Graphics” node

• Added ability to override individual quality settings from global quality level. Also requires a manul editing of UserClientConfig.xml. Under the “Graphics” node, add or set the following values from -1 (automatic), 0 (low), 1 (medium), 2 (high) and 3 (extreme): “TexQuality”, “LightingQuality”, “ShadowQuality”, “GeomQuality”, “TerrainQuality”, “PlanetsQuality”
• Added a /Stats command in chat to display global ships statistics on the server

[INovaeFlavien]

Hotfix patch 0.5.0.2

A small hotfix to address some of the most pressing issues from last patch:

• Fixed flickering of warp tunnel effect
• Warp tunnel opacity is now a function of speed. At “low” speeds ( < 1000 Km/s ) the view shouldn’t be as obstructed as before
• Tweaks to camera vibrations for flak canons
• Slight balance update on flak canons ( increased splash radius but decreased precision of flak canons )
• Added back ship contrails in atmospheres
• Increased albedo of contrails for missiles / torpedoes
• Fixed HUD’s corvette “nearest resupply” indicator ( nearest was itself, so the indicator didn’t show up )
• Capital ships auto-turn is now a toggle ( default: space bar ). It’s disabled every time you respawn to avoid collisions with the docks
• Reduced by half the “dying” time for Interceptor and Bomber ( and slight reduction on Corvette ). Death will feel more instant
• Increased probability of “CRITICAL” battles in game so that the match doesn’t last forever. Note that probabilities are adjusted in favor of the losing team as a way to “balance” the game and allow turn backs. That means that if you’re on the losing team, you’ll have a higher chance of seeing critical attack missions, while your own defending missions will have a lower chance of being critical.

[INovaeFlavien]

0.5.1.0 ( Saturday, 17 August 2019 )

A major balance patch. Half the changes are experimental ( especially movement tweaks to the interceptor, and gimbaled weapons ). This patch also includes major NPC/AI updates, hopefully making dogfights with AI more dynamic. NPC carriers will try to stay away from threats
while NPC corvettes will try to resupply nearby allies.

Balance

• Interceptor got a +50% linear thrust increase. Originally I wanted to double the values, but it was a bit extreme. +50% is very significant ( in fact iirc that’s the highest it’s even been since the start of the project ) but it’s not so fast that it feels too fast ( at least that’s my personal opinion from my internal tests ).

• Bomber got a +30% forward thrust increase but a slight nerf on the side propulsion. So it can reach higher speeds faster, but its strafing abilities are nerfed.

• Other ships ( corvette + capships ) have no mobility changes. The turn rates / angular accelerations are also unchanged for all ships.

• Speed cap has been slightly increased for interceptor and bomber but remains the same for other ships ( Interceptor was 360 m/s before, now it is 400 m/s ).

• Fixed weapons are now gimbaled ( aka. convergence on the target ). Gimbal angle is set to 2 degs. Shooting targets is now much easier ( in terms of having to be super accurate to keep your navigation cursor on the lead reticle, which was quite hard ).

• Since it’s so much easier to land shots, I had to rebalance long-range accuracy by making the interceptor guns less precise ( aka. increased the random spread ). It’s not super big ( 0.3 degs ) but significant enough to want to attack at close ranges ( although hitting at 1-2 km is still easier than before ).

• Interceptor gun shots are also now less deadlier ( reduced their damage ) and the interceptor has +50% more hitpoints to allow it to survive more easily. Keep in mind that even with all these changes, an inty can die within a dozen seconds if you don’t pay attention and dodge / boost vs concentrated incoming fire.

• Nerfed a bit the regen rate of shields. It was pretty high, so sometimes it felt frustrating that you landed a couple shots and the shields regenerated in a few seconds, like nothing happened. Shields regen rate is still significant but not as high as before.

• Increased weapons hitpoints for MK5 / MK6 / MK7. Doubled the hit box size for all weapons ( including small ship’s ). Damaging weapons is now much easier. Another change is that weapons can be damaged even when shields are up. This now gives a good purpose for interceptors to make a difference in battles by disabling capital ships weapons.

• Revamped missiles / torpedoes sockets on the Destroyer and Cruiser. All torpedo launchers are now frontal / forward facing. It was awkward on the destroyer how torpedoes launched vertically. Also, there are now more missile launchers. On the cruiser they have an X profile, similar to the carrier.

• Tweaked projectiles velocities for all weapons. In general: interceptor weapon guns have slightly slower projectiles, while large capital ship guns have faster projectiles ( up to 2.2 Km/s for an MK7 ).

• Blaster damage increased. As many players noted, the blasters were considered next to useless. Kinetic guns are easier to use and guaranteed damage, whether on shields or hull. Blasters however can only damage shields, so if they made as much damage as guns there was no incentive to use them other than ammo vs energy usage.

• Implemented weapons convergence. Since we want to test gimbals on the interceptor, I assigned the bomber’s shotgun to be converging. Distance calculation is automatic and based on distance to lead reticle of target.

• Revamped collisions damage. We’re also going to experiment with ramming damage for the bow of the destroyer ( aka. it’ll inflict damage bonus when hitting at the right location ).

• Nerfed and reduced curve agressivity for explosions splash damage. Manually killing proximity mines in an interceptor should now be far easier.

Gameplay

• Added a braking mode ( default: hold space ) to input controller

• Weapon groups are now toggleable via keys ctrl-1 to ctrl-0

• Fix for disabled the speed cap not allowing to set a target speed higher than the speed cap

• Removed global damaged state for weapons ( weapons can be individually broken now, so the global state was redundant and annoying )

• Switched to server-side collisions for large ships colliding with small ships. That means that capital ships, in particular, will no longer go crazy when getting rammed by small ships. Capships vs capships collisions will also feel much better. This comes at a cost though: by ignoring client-side collisions in these scenarios there can be some inter-penetration of ships for the duration of the latency between the client and the server; so at high latencies, you can potentially see ships get into other ships for a small amount of time. It’s still a much better solution than the crazyness coming from client-side collisions.

• Aim-at cursor on capital ships now performs a ray intersection to determine the cursor’s depth along the ray, making it easier to hit nearby geometry.

• Speed cap is now increased when overcharging propulsion

• Weapons damage model now bypass shields (weapons can be damaged even with full shields)

• Corvettes can now repair damaged weapons on all capital ships

• Corvette aura no longer repairs or resupplies the destroyer

HUD

• Target indicator icons were revamped. They’re now thicker and more opaque. The currently selected target icon should now keep clearance over the target. An arrow with the target’s name, distance and speed will appear next to the selected target

• Moved energy emissions to top-left corner of the screen, next to weapon stats

• Improvements to HUD weapon groups, now color encoding the weapons state ( active, firing, disabled, out of ammo, broken… )

• Players are now notified when they destroy target weapons. They also get a small credits reward.

• Tweaks to external camera view range

AI

• Revamped AI routines related to flight, dogfight mechanics and introduced new tactics (barrel roll, staying in a blind spot, strafing, etc… )

• NPC corvettes will now try to repair/resupply nearby allies

• Added threat avoidance. Carriers in particular, will try to stay away from enemy capital ships

• Added static scenery avoidance. All ships should now try to avoid infrastructure modules

• Added a way for allies to temporarily form-up / regroup on nearby allies, when the target is far away

• NPC capital ships now have a team indicator (HVK = Havok, SCR = Scoria, CPL = CPL Tech)

Bug fixes

• Fix for tabbed buttons in game menu, incorrectly positionned in wide screen ratio

• Game now pops up an error message upon failing to initialize engine

Misc

• Tweaked starfield density so that bright stars are less uniform

• Tweaked battle smog effect ( colors, distribution )

• Added support for overriding font charset in engine

• Localized string arguments now use $(ArgN) syntax instead of %s / %d ( which could cause crashes if badly used )

• Tweaks to camera vibrations and some particle effects;

• All ships now default to cockpit or internal view upon spawning

[INovaeFlavien]

HotFix 0.5.1.1 ( server only ) ( Sunday 18 August 2019 )

A server-only hotfix to address some of the most pressing issues from yesterday’s patch.

• Fixed haulers failing to enter warp and follow their path - this effectively killed the economy and spammed the server with hundreds of haulers over time ( to the point no battles could take place due to the server reaching its bots capacity, all haulers )

• Fixed haulers dying right after spawning at factories ( long-time bug ). This was caused by planets having too much gravity compared to the hauler’s vertical thrust capabilities. The temporary solution was to give haulers overcharge engines to counter-act gravity. In a future patch, we’ll have to increase the haulers’ vertical thrust.

• Fix for AI carriers not slowing down when a player is trying to respawn - slowing down will now take priority over other AI tactics

• Fixed “weight” of various tactics, and particularly avoiding threats vs coming back to the battlefield - hopefully this should address carriers being chased by cruisers and fleeing away at 100+ Km from the battles

• Nerfed ramming damage and reduced collision damage a bit; collisions in warp are also reduced

[INovaeFlavien]

0.5.2.0 ( Friday, 30 August 2019 )

Welcome to the second Infinity: Battlescape backer week-end.

This is our last playtest week-end before we launch the game on Steam in Early access, in a month. We still have a lot of work ahead of us, but the game is starting to come together.

This patch introduces the first functional version of the star map on which you can visualize the solar system and its main Battlescape, Rethe Prime. It’s possible to center the camera on an actor, move / rotate the camera around a focal point and see the planetary orbits. The next stage is to introduce more information on the star map, including icons for smaller ships or installations from a distance.

This patch also contains a first version of the system menus. The number of options / parameters in each tab ( Gameplay, graphics, audio, controls and account ) are currnently limited, but we’ll add more as time goes on. The most important part ( key and input rebindings ) should be more or less functional. As it’s an early version, please backup your profile config files often (especially if you’ve made custom ones) and report any bugs, thank you !

If you’re an old time supporter you’ll also be happy to hear that full-screen mode has been fixed and it should now be possible to switch between windowed and full-screen mode via alt-enter. The monitor refresh rate has been unlocked too.

As usual a disclaimer: keep in mind the game is still in development and is still lacking, especially in terms of content ( we’ll add more environments, ship upgrades and missions at a later stage ).

Enjoy !

-The I-Novae Studios team

UI, Menus, HUD…

• Gimbal weapons no longer reset to center when target is out of the gimbal cone ( unless they’re far off screen )
• Reduced font scaling minimum size
• FMOD global audio volume implementation
• Added starmap holographic rendering, camera controls, target selection, map icons and colors
• Added station module spawn markers
• Added system / options menu, ability to change some gameplay settings and audio settings
• Added input profile editor and key rebindings to system menu
• Reworked max view pitch / yaw angles for absolute input modes

Bug fixes

• Fixed full-screen mode not sticking
• Engine now utilizes default monitor refresh rate instead of fixed 60 Hz
• Fixed load-time crash due to a rare multithreading bug in rendering the splash screen
• Fixed flight assist not going over the speed cap… when the speed cap was disabled
• Fixed turrets not appearing anymore on static actors like stations
• Fix for last LOD level not having the correct skin ( always scoria, even being in havok )
• Fixed various bugs related to input mapper

Misc

• Smog particles should no longer look gimbaled ( roll when approaching ) due to using a new billboarding technique
• Tweak for AI corvettes scoring actor to resupply ( preferring players )
• Tweaked LOD power / formula to be more agressive at lower quality settings, while being slightly optimized at higher quality settings;

[INovaeFlavien]

0.5.3.0 ( Saturday, 07 September 2019 )

Balance tweaks

• Reduced linear thrust on interceptor and bomber to be half-way through the previous level
• Increased rotation dampener for joysticks to stop angular momentum more quickly
• Re-tweaked speed caps on interceptor / bomber
• Slight increase of bomber hitpoints ( 300, up from 250 )
• Very slight decrease in turbo boost initial strength
• Increased angular thrust on bomber by ~50% for pitch / yaw
• Decreased max turn rates on Interceptor by ~20%
• Tweaks to spotlight cone angle on hangars
• Doubled hitpoints on interceptor / bomber weapons
• Increased gimbal guns angle from 2° to 3°
• Decreased gimbal guns turn rate from 10°/s to 3°/s
• Increased gimbal guns projectile speeds by ~15 to 30%
• Slight increase to blaster’s damage
• Slight decreased of gimbal gun’s spread ( more accuracy at distance )
• Decreased max range to ~2.5 km for capital ship’s MK4 auto guns/blasters

Star map

• Fixed loss of target when physical actor transitions to virtual indicator
• Fixed grid positionning / rendering
• Root planet will now act as default grid reference actor if none exists
• Added simple LOD system for rendering planets and orbits with higher tesselation quality
• Added names of planets and bases

UI and Controls

• Revamped capital ship auto-turn mode: now uses left-shift by default to set a target orientation. Hold left-shit to turn towards the camera orientation. Space now toggles auto-turn mode (press left-shift to set the desired target orientation once).
• Added per-joystick device settings in input bindings menu
• Added force-feedback / vibrations checkbox in device settings
• Added mouse / wheel sensitivity slider
• Re-organized settings and parameters in their tabs
• Fixed tooltips for UI text blocks
• Improved / unified direct and target rotation controllers, which should make it easier to aim for joystick players
• Gimbaled hardpoint direction no longer resets to center when target is out of screen
• Cleaned and removed old menu code / launcher settings now obsolete with new UI
• Fixed weapon lock alert stuck beeping when missile launcher gets damaged
• HUD now uses target abbreviation codes instead of full class name (ex.: INT instead of INTERCEPTOR)

Bug fixes

• Fix for destroyed bases still showing up in respawn actors list
• Fixed IgnoreConflicts events list not being saved properly in input profiles

Misc

• Error correction performance optimizations
• Revamped AI to randomize brain / behavior and assigned a rank to it ( plus naming NPCs by rank ). That means bots have variable difficulties; ranks are as follows: Ensign, Lieutenant, Commander and Captain. Higher ranked AIs can do more evasive maneuvers, barrel rolls, better timing chaffs, flee or aim more precisely.
• Added tricount budget of 10% for updating low priority shadow maps
• Increased volume for shield and weapon hit feedback sound effect

[INovaeFlavien]

0.5.4.0 ( Tuesday, 17 September 2019 )

This patch focuses on UI and menu flow. It introduces the main menu, the server browser, Steam authentication (currently non public), a new team switching dialog and a major revamp of the spawn system, which is now happening from the starmap.

As this patch introduces major architectural code changes, it is possible that new bugs were introduced in relation to game flow and menu navigations. Please test it thoroughly and let us know if you encounter any issue.

Work on the star map is still a big work-in-progress.

UI / Menus

• Introduced main menu with three functional entries: multiplayer, options and exit
• Introduced Steam authentication (currently only available through non-public Steam builds)
• Introduced server browser. In addition to listing available servers, it also performs the client version check, reports the server players activity and the ping to the server
• Revamped the spawning system. It is now map based. Browse through the list of available bases, then click on the “Spawn” button on the center bottom of the screen
• Note that you’ll be spawning with whatever ship you have selected in the Ship tab. If the ship is too expensive, the spawn button will be disabled
• Revamped spectator mode. The F8 key no longer works. It is no longer possible to spectate an enemy. To spectate a player, select him on the star map in the targets list. The “Spawn” button will be replaced by a “Spectate” button
• Note that as a consequence of the same button being contextual, it is currently not possible to spectate a carrier (which acts as a mobile spawn) as the “Spawn” button will be prioritized. We’ll probably introduce an alternative mode of spectation through the contextual target menu later on
• Revamped team selection and switching. The first time you join a match you’ll be automatically placed in a team selected by the server for balancing purposes. You’ll then be asked whether you want to keep this team or switch to the other team
• You can switch to another team during respawn by going in the Team tab and clicking on the “Team” button at the bottom center
• Switching to another team is free the first time in a match, and after that costs 25% of the total credits
• It is now possible to return the game’s main menu from the system menu (escape)
• It is now possible to eject (request a respawn) from the system menu (escape, when in game)
• It is now possible to switch teams from the system menu (escape, when spawning
• Server connection and disconnection errors no longer cause a return-to-desktop; the game will just return to the main menu and pop up an error dialog
• Added a field-of-view slider in the graphics options menu tab
• Added a way to clear an event key in the keybindings menu (right-click will clear the event’s keys)
• Added tooltips to options menu

Star map

• Star map view now defaults to top-down and resets to top-down after each spawn
• Star map now displays the list of targets in a hierarchical way
• It is now possible to move the camera by dragging the left mouse button
• Star map now shows icons for targets
• Focused actor is now being highlighted in the targets panel on the left
• More work on recoloring targets on the star map
• The distance value is now calculated between the target and the focused actor
• When spawning the last player position is shown as a big red icon
• When in game the current player position is shown as a big yellow icon
• Added a previous / next button to cycle through possible spawns

Bug fixes

• Fix for input mapper not detecting negative axis 2 and 5
• Escape now works to access main menu even if no event is bound
• Fixed tooltips not disappearing when parent object gets deleted
• Fixed missile lock acquisition sound that still played on main menu