0.5.1.0 ( Saturday, 17 August 2019 )
A major balance patch. Half the changes are experimental ( especially movement tweaks to the interceptor, and gimbaled weapons ). This patch also includes major NPC/AI updates, hopefully making dogfights with AI more dynamic. NPC carriers will try to stay away from threats
while NPC corvettes will try to resupply nearby allies.
Balance
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Interceptor got a +50% linear thrust increase. Originally I wanted to double the values, but it was a bit extreme. +50% is very significant ( in fact iirc that’s the highest it’s even been since the start of the project ) but it’s not so fast that it feels too fast ( at least that’s my personal opinion from my internal tests ).
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Bomber got a +30% forward thrust increase but a slight nerf on the side propulsion. So it can reach higher speeds faster, but its strafing abilities are nerfed.
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Other ships ( corvette + capships ) have no mobility changes. The turn rates / angular accelerations are also unchanged for all ships.
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Speed cap has been slightly increased for interceptor and bomber but remains the same for other ships ( Interceptor was 360 m/s before, now it is 400 m/s ).
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Fixed weapons are now gimbaled ( aka. convergence on the target ). Gimbal angle is set to 2 degs. Shooting targets is now much easier ( in terms of having to be super accurate to keep your navigation cursor on the lead reticle, which was quite hard ).
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Since it’s so much easier to land shots, I had to rebalance long-range accuracy by making the interceptor guns less precise ( aka. increased the random spread ). It’s not super big ( 0.3 degs ) but significant enough to want to attack at close ranges ( although hitting at 1-2 km is still easier than before ).
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Interceptor gun shots are also now less deadlier ( reduced their damage ) and the interceptor has +50% more hitpoints to allow it to survive more easily. Keep in mind that even with all these changes, an inty can die within a dozen seconds if you don’t pay attention and dodge / boost vs concentrated incoming fire.
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Nerfed a bit the regen rate of shields. It was pretty high, so sometimes it felt frustrating that you landed a couple shots and the shields regenerated in a few seconds, like nothing happened. Shields regen rate is still significant but not as high as before.
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Increased weapons hitpoints for MK5 / MK6 / MK7. Doubled the hit box size for all weapons ( including small ship’s ). Damaging weapons is now much easier. Another change is that weapons can be damaged even when shields are up. This now gives a good purpose for interceptors to make a difference in battles by disabling capital ships weapons.
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Revamped missiles / torpedoes sockets on the Destroyer and Cruiser. All torpedo launchers are now frontal / forward facing. It was awkward on the destroyer how torpedoes launched vertically. Also, there are now more missile launchers. On the cruiser they have an X profile, similar to the carrier.
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Tweaked projectiles velocities for all weapons. In general: interceptor weapon guns have slightly slower projectiles, while large capital ship guns have faster projectiles ( up to 2.2 Km/s for an MK7 ).
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Blaster damage increased. As many players noted, the blasters were considered next to useless. Kinetic guns are easier to use and guaranteed damage, whether on shields or hull. Blasters however can only damage shields, so if they made as much damage as guns there was no incentive to use them other than ammo vs energy usage.
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Implemented weapons convergence. Since we want to test gimbals on the interceptor, I assigned the bomber’s shotgun to be converging. Distance calculation is automatic and based on distance to lead reticle of target.
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Revamped collisions damage. We’re also going to experiment with ramming damage for the bow of the destroyer ( aka. it’ll inflict damage bonus when hitting at the right location ).
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Nerfed and reduced curve agressivity for explosions splash damage. Manually killing proximity mines in an interceptor should now be far easier.
Gameplay
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Added a braking mode ( default: hold space ) to input controller
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Weapon groups are now toggleable via keys ctrl-1 to ctrl-0
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Fix for disabled the speed cap not allowing to set a target speed higher than the speed cap
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Removed global damaged state for weapons ( weapons can be individually broken now, so the global state was redundant and annoying )
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Switched to server-side collisions for large ships colliding with small ships. That means that capital ships, in particular, will no longer go crazy when getting rammed by small ships. Capships vs capships collisions will also feel much better. This comes at a cost though: by ignoring client-side collisions in these scenarios there can be some inter-penetration of ships for the duration of the latency between the client and the server; so at high latencies, you can potentially see ships get into other ships for a small amount of time. It’s still a much better solution than the crazyness coming from client-side collisions.
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Aim-at cursor on capital ships now performs a ray intersection to determine the cursor’s depth along the ray, making it easier to hit nearby geometry.
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Speed cap is now increased when overcharging propulsion
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Weapons damage model now bypass shields (weapons can be damaged even with full shields)
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Corvettes can now repair damaged weapons on all capital ships
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Corvette aura no longer repairs or resupplies the destroyer
HUD
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Target indicator icons were revamped. They’re now thicker and more opaque. The currently selected target icon should now keep clearance over the target. An arrow with the target’s name, distance and speed will appear next to the selected target
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Moved energy emissions to top-left corner of the screen, next to weapon stats
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Improvements to HUD weapon groups, now color encoding the weapons state ( active, firing, disabled, out of ammo, broken… )
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Players are now notified when they destroy target weapons. They also get a small credits reward.
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Tweaks to external camera view range
AI
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Revamped AI routines related to flight, dogfight mechanics and introduced new tactics (barrel roll, staying in a blind spot, strafing, etc… )
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NPC corvettes will now try to repair/resupply nearby allies
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Added threat avoidance. Carriers in particular, will try to stay away from enemy capital ships
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Added static scenery avoidance. All ships should now try to avoid infrastructure modules
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Added a way for allies to temporarily form-up / regroup on nearby allies, when the target is far away
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NPC capital ships now have a team indicator (HVK = Havok, SCR = Scoria, CPL = CPL Tech)
Bug fixes
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Fix for tabbed buttons in game menu, incorrectly positionned in wide screen ratio
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Game now pops up an error message upon failing to initialize engine
Misc
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Tweaked starfield density so that bright stars are less uniform
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Tweaked battle smog effect ( colors, distribution )
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Added support for overriding font charset in engine
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Localized string arguments now use $(ArgN) syntax instead of %s / %d ( which could cause crashes if badly used )
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Tweaks to camera vibrations and some particle effects;
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All ships now default to cockpit or internal view upon spawning
