Patch and Updates Notes

[INovaeFlavien]

0.2.8.0 ( Tuesday, 1st of May 2018 )

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

Game states

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

Gameplay

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

HUD / input

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

Bug fixes

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

Assets, visual effects, performance

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

[INovaeFlavien]

0.2.8.1 ( Monday, 14 May 2018 )

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

Gameplay

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

HUD / input

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

Bug fixes

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

Assets, visual effects, performance, sounds…

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

Networking

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

[INovaeFlavien]

0.2.8.2 ( Saturday, 19 May 2018 )

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

Gameplay

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

HUD / input

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

Bug fixes

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

Assets, visual effects, performance, sounds…

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

Networking

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

[INovaeFlavien]

0.3.0.0 ( Friday, 15 June 2018 )

Welcome to Infinity: Battlescape - Alpha 0.3

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

Join the Infinity Battlescape Discord Server!

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

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

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

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

Gameplay

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

HUD / input

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

Bug fixes

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

Assets, visual effects, performance, sounds…

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

Networking, AI, server

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

Misc

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

[INovaeFlavien]

0.3.0.1 ( Sunday, 24 June 2018 )

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

Gameplay

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

HUD / UI / input

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

Bug fixes

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

Assets, visual effects, performance, sounds…

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

Networking, AI, server

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

Misc

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

[INovaeFlavien]

0.3.1.0 ( Sunday, 16 September 2018 )

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

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

Gameplay

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

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

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

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

Hauler taking off a planet from a factory hangar at sunset

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

HUD / UI / input

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

Assets, visual effects, performance, sounds…

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

Networking, AI, server

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

Misc

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

[INovaeFlavien]

0.3.2.0 ( Saturday, 6 October 2018 )

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

Gameplay

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

Bug fixes

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

Assets, visual effects, performance, sounds…

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

Networking, AI, server

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

Misc

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

[INovaeFlavien]

0.3.3.0 ( Friday, 12 October 2018 )

Welcome to the Infinity: Battlescape beta week-end.

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

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

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

Patch 0.3.3.0 changes:

Gameplay and balance tweaks

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

Bug fixes

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

HUD / UI

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

Assets, visual effects, performance, sounds…

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

Networking, AI, server

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

Misc

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

[INovaeFlavien]

0.3.4.0 ( Friday, 17 November 2018 )

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

Gameplay:

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

HUD:

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

Game balance:

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

Bug fixes:

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

Assets:

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

Audio:

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

Misc:

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

[INovaeFlavien]

0.3.5.0 ( Friday, 07 December 2018 )

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

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

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

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

Patch 0.3.5.0 changes:

Gameplay:

Armor points implementation (reduction on hull damage model)

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

Introduced heat mechanics to engine component

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

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

Revamped (again) voice commands playback volume rules

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

Physics:

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

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

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

Controls

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

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

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

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

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

Other changes:

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

HUD / Camera:

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

Game balance:

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

Bug fixes:

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

Assets, graphics, performance:

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

Networking

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

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

Misc:

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

[INovaeFlavien]

0.3.5.1 HOTFIX ( Saturday, 08 December 2018 )

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

Download hotfix 0.3.5.1 here

Installation instructions:

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

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

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

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

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

[INovaeFlavien]

0.4.0.0 ( Saturday, 09 February 2019 )

Welcome to the Infinity: Battlescape BETA.

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

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

Gameplay

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

Flight model changes

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

Capital ships control scheme

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

Weaponry

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

HUD / Camera

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

Bug fixes

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

Assets, graphics, performance

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

AI changes

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

Misc

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

[INovaeFlavien]

0.4.1.0 ( Saturday, 16 February 2019 )

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

Gameplay

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

Controls

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

Weapons

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

HUD

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

Bug fixes

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

Visual effects, graphics, performance

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

Server

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

[INovaeFlavien]

0.4.2.0 ( Saturday, 02 March 2019 )

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

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

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

New default Havoc cruiser skin

Gameplay / Balance

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

Controls / Input

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

Weapons

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

HUD

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

Bug fixes

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

Visual effects, audio, graphics, performance

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

Misc

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

[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