Patch and Updates Notes

[INovaeFlavien]

0.6.0.0 ( Thursday, 26 September 2019 )

This version is the Early access candidate. It contains a lot of improvements related to the Steam build (non public yet), more settings, bug fixes and leftovers from the previous patch.

It also contains some asset updates (more upgraded station modules) as well as the new audio sound effects to replace most of the old placeholders.

There’s still a day left before we launch in Early access. That’s very little time left, so tomorrow we’ll be mostly focusing on server performance, backend improvements and what we can do in terms of client polish / fixes. As usual, please report
any emergency issue on the forums.

Thanks to the community for all your support and patience over these past years. We still have a lot to do, but the game is shaping up and we look forward to seeing a lot of new faces in game in a day or two !

-The I-Novae Studios Team

UI / Menus

• Fixed issues related to target indicators incorrectly displayed in non-standard camera field-of-view: that very annoying bug that made indicators stretch on the sides of the screen
• Added HUD field-of-view slider in graphics options. It can be set independently from the camera field-of-view, but it is recommended to keep the two values close
• Added language selection to general options menu. Currently supported: english, german and chinese
• Ships are now properly sorted in the star map under their parent station or planet
• Added player name to options menu. Warning: it should be changed on the main menu; changing it in game will not be replicated to other players unless the player re-joins a server
• Implemented graphical options menu. Warning: resolution, screen modes or quality changes currently require a restart of the game
• The old windows launcher dialog containing basic settings has been removed by default. It can still be used for emergency reasons (like messed up full-screen resolution) by running the executable with -launcher on the command line
• More options menu work: HUD / radars selection, controls sensitivity, bug fixes…
• Added menu sensitivity slider. This can be used to make the mouse cursor move at a different speed in menus compared to the normal game
• Added direct mode flight sensitivity. Note that if the sensitivity is too high, direct mode does not allow to exceed the maximum turn rate, which can make the controls feel random as it takes many frames to “absorb” the input
• Info popup (like match startup or battle notifications) now appears on top of the UI / menus
• Added a button per event in keybindings menu to clear its keys
• Also added a checkbox per axis event to flip the value
• Increased scrollbar focus loss default distance

Bug fixes

• Fixed capital ship control scheme movements while opening menus
• Fixed small bug in key detection threshold in the keybindings menu
• Tab ( entering the game menu ) switches back to spawn menu when in spectator mode
• It is no longer possible to fire missiles, torpedoes or mines in match warmup / ending
• Fixed list of active players on client menu and server
• Fixed player join / leave messages spamming with a high number of player
• Fixed a small bug related to sending the respawn base list before indicators were created, the first time the client connects

Assets

• Audio sound effects revamp; most of the old placeholder sounds were replaced. Non-exclusive list: all thruster/engine sounds/boosting, most weapons sounds, all ambient sounds and many ship systems sounds
• Upgraded multiple station modules to their new look (new materials, textures and colors)
• New detailing pass for the corvette hangar
• Corvette spawn holographic marker is now the same than for fighter hangars (more visible from a distance)

[INovaeFlavien]

Patch 0.6.1.2 ( server-only ) ( Sunday 29th 2019 )

This is a server-side only patch. You do not need to reboot or patch your client to get access to it. Just join one of the servers labelled version “0.6.1.2”.

As there are people on the other servers right now, and we don’t want to forcefully shut down these servers, we’ll be doing the patching in staggered stages. The first stage is already done, with a bit more than half the servers being already patched. I have scheduled a soft reboot at the end of the match on the other remaining unpatched servers. Tomorrow we’ll finish patching them.

Changes:

• Fixed multiple server crashes related to firing chaffs / missiles / mines when the player count was above 100

• Disabled ramming bonus for the Destroyer

• Collision damage now takes into account ship health ratio ( a colliding ship will cause less damage if it’s on low hull health ) and is better tuned. Note that there is a minimum amount of damage percentage ( 25% ) no matter the health of the ship.

• Tweaked collision damage formula. We increased a bit the amount of damage at lower speeds ( so you’ll take more damage in an interceptor if you bump into a station at 100-200 m/s for example, be careful ). Damage is now fully symmetrical.

• In terms of design, the goal was that a destroyer ramming a cruiser at 2 km/s would end up in the death of the destroyer, leaving the cruiser heavily damaged ( but not dead ). This scenario is assuming that both ships are at 100% health.

• Missiles / torpedoes should no longer stay alive forever after they have a target locked

• Missiles / torpedoes should no longer stay alive when their target is too far away or in warp

• Fixed multiple issues related to persistency of credits and team selection / switching. Note that we highly suspect that there are remaining bugs related to credits persistency. This will need more investigations, but if this happens to you, please let us know in which condition it happened ( match just started ? middle of the match ? end ? how long since the last time you re-joined the match ? are you sure the match hadn’t rebooted ? are you sure you joined the same server ? etc…

• Fixed a bug which caused turrets to not repair on ships that are at full health, despite being in the correct hangar / docking bay

• Disabled spawning at neutral installations. Players were confused and deathmatching / getting killed in their first minutes of starting. It didn’t help that the first station in the list for all players was probably the neutral one.

• Refreshing indicator names and players list upon team switching ( note: also needs a future client patch to properly refresh the players list in the UI )

• Implemented anti-griefing / auto-kick system for servers

• Reduced player name length requirement from 3 to 2 min characters

• As servers performance seems to run quite well, we increased player max limits to 300. This will also increase the potential amount of bots / battles on servers, as bots fill in for players.

[INovaeFlavien]

Patch 0.6.2.0 ( Friday October 4th 2019 )

Game balance

• Turbo boost cooldown parameter is now set per ship. Interceptor boost cooldown was reduced to 0.5s (from 1.0s) and bomber to 0.75s (from 1.0s)
• Increased initial boost intensity for interceptor ( +20% ) and forward / backward boost ( +12% )
• Reduced boost intensity on lateral thrusters for interceptor ( -25% ) (note: since initial boost was increased by +20% the end result is similar for lateral thrusters and higher for main/back engine )

Some people have been complaining that the Interceptor felt “slow”. We tried increasing accelerations in the past but it proved troublesome due to the engagement distances, making hitting enemies even more difficult. Instead, we’re looking at rebalancing the game in small steps to see how we can improve the ships “feeling”. Our first step here is a buff of turbo boosting.

• Increased proximity mine launch speed to 100 m/s (from 50 m/s)

AI destroyers and some players got caught into their proximity mine exploding (due to accidental contact or splash damage from another mine) right after they launched a mine. Increasing the launch speed should help with that.

• Improved bounty rewards to be less agressive and generate less credits ( the reward starts lower, but scales by +50% for each bounty rank )
• Limited bounty max rank to 3, to avoid insane bounties
• Player will now receive a notification when the enemy commander placed a bounty on him

It’s still very easy to generate credits in the game right now, but keep in mind we don’t have the credits sinks yet (besides dying). Instead of adjusting the ship prices we’ll try to adjust the rewards prices iteratively each patch.
In this patch we’re starting with bounties, which were probably the more imbalanced. A bomber killing a capital ship with a bounty could easily earn double or triple the price of that capital ship in a single kill. Bounty rewards now start lower, but can still generate a decent reward if the bounty reaches rank 3. In addition, players will now get informed when a bounty has been placed by the enemy commander on their head

• Tweaked warp ramming damage formula

Ramming damage seems to be in a decent spot… when not in warp. The problem is that damage increases far too quickly at higher velocities such as in warp. Aiming at an enemy ship in warp is also easy, so the risk vs reward ratio is too good at the moment. Instead of completely removing warp ramming damage we reduced the amount of damage caused by warp ramming at velocities higher than 1 km/s. The reduction factor isn’t linear but based on a logarithmic scale, so doubling the impact speed does less than doubling collision damage.

• It is now possible to recharge shields at hangar / docking bays

The rate at which shields recharge might still need some tweaks, and we’re aware of some issues with the repair/resupply rate of people “camping” at the spawns and firing non-stop missiles/torpdoes. We’ll revisit these mechanics in a future patch

• Weapons tweaks: slightly faster turn rates for auto-turrets
• Increased max range for mk4 / mk5 auto-turrets and defense platforms
• Increased hit points for mk5, mk6 and mk7 guns
• Increased damage from static defenses

MK4 auto-turrets range was increased to make the Destroyer fit his protection role again small crafts better. The range was almost doubled. The static defense towards / guns also needed a serious buf to detract surprise attacks and earn time for defenders to spawn or come back. In a future patch we’ll add base attack notifications to the starmap.

Hitpoints were increased, starting on the MK5 (just a little), MK6 (quite a bit) and MK7 (a lot more). It will be harder to destroy the large guns on capital ships now. It was frustrating for capital ship players to have their main guns destroyed so quickly.

Bug fixes

• Fixed a rare issue where game executable does not launch due to symbols such as $ appearing in the user Documents path
• Fixes for “invalid login length” message upon connecting to a game server
• Fixed destroyed weapons still absorbing damage despite being down and preventing the ship from being damaged

UI / HUD

• Options menu will now enumerate controllers from Direct Input asynchronously

Some users had massive slowdowns / 10-to-30 seconds freezes when entering / exiting the options menu. After our investigations our conclusion is that some input drivers are not improperly detected and cause Direct Input to not answer until a time-out is reached. We can’t do much about that, however the controllers enumeration will not proceed in the background instead of blocking / exiting the options menu. Note that if you modify keybindings, applying the changes might still take a long time. However if you modify other game settings without changing keybindings, there should be no slowdown anymore.

• Added more information messages when using various ship systems / weapons fail

A generic failure sound has been added. Locking sound volume has been increased. More warnings show up when for some reason you cannot fire or launch missiles / torpedoes / mines

• Fixed “warp engage” alert which was lingering too long compared to other alerts
• Fixed an issue with carrier spawning around Glimmerfall and instantly dying

Improvements

• Added ships engine / thruster sound fade ins/outs (it’ll now take half a second for most sounds to smoothly start and stop)

• Improved loading times of background images in the GUI

• Added voice volume slider in options menu

Voice command spam was real. One bug was fixed with global volume not affecting voice commands. The range of voice commands has been decreased to 10 Km (full volume) and 100 Km (65% volume). Voice commands over 100 Km aren’t audible anymore

• Added a priority icon to battle missions screen, to make it more clear what battles are recommended to join

We found that far too many people were joining battles that were lost, and by the time they arrived, the battle had ended. The coloring rules have also been simplifies: green for battles being won and red for battles that are either critical or high priority. High priority battles are battles with contested odds (40-60% range) and that are about to start, or have started recently.

• Increased warmup / countdown until battle missions start, to give players more time to prepare / transition out of other battles

The countdown to battle start was often too short, 2-3 minutes. If the player was busy with another battle or doing something else, by the time he took off, travelled in warp and reached the battle, that battle was already in the middle phase. Increasing the countdown duration to battle start should give players more time to coordinate and prepare.

Assets

• New engine sound on Interceptor

Many people have been complaining about the high pitch engine sound on the Interceptor so while we’re working on an improved version we’ve replaced it by a new placeholder

• New Odyssey station lights pass
• Added ambient occlusion and colors to station Hub B module
• Carrier final texturing, improved materials and updated skins (green stripes were out of place). Added ambient occlusion

Misc

• Added more debug info for DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_REMOVED into the logs when presenting the back buffer

This error is typically caused by a video card that doesn’t have enough video memory, or has an obsolete driver. We recommend upgrading your video card drivers if this happens. There has been a few cases of users that have modern / powerful video cards AND updated drivers and still have these issues. For these people this video might help (caution: follow advice at your own risks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FWAVe1km_g)

• Improved server disconnection messages
• First-time run of the game will now bring up a window to select the starting quality / screen mode / resolution
• First-time run of the game will attempt to auto-detect the quality level based on the computer’s cpu performance ( note: we need to take into account the gpu too, but ran out of time to implement it yet )

Server

• Fixed performance issues related to refreshing the players list UI, causing too many events. This in turn generated random stutters for all players on the server, every second

We’re still monitoring server performance. It is possible that there are other sources of stutter / slowdowns, but keep in mind a number of issues could also be coming from your connection to the server

[INovaeFlavien]

Patch 0.6.3.0 ( Thursday October 11th 2019 )

Game balance

General

• Reduced min boost ratio energy requirement from 25% to 10% for all ships

Boost had a requirement that energy was at least at 25% of its max. There is no feedback when failing to engage boost, which could result frustration from players not understanding why their ship didn’t boost when they pressed the key. We need to work on better feedback, but by reducing the requirement to only 10%, ships have “a bit more juice” and can still engage boost for a last thrust.

• Reduced credits rewards for destroying turrets / weapons
• Reduced credits rewards for destroying ships

Last patch nerfed credits rewards related to bounties. This time we nerfed credits rewards for destroying ships or turrets. The rewards are largely unchanged for destroying small ships, but mid/cap ships kills will no longer generate as many credits as before.

Interceptor

• Increased energy points from 150 to 175
• Increased energy recharge rate from 7.5 to 12 points per second
• Increased max heat points from 125 to 150
• Increased turbo boost thrust rate from x2.0 to x2.5
• Increased max chaffs from 10 to 16

Another interation towards better maneuverability for the Interceptor. It received a small boost update combined with more energy, to allow for boosting more often/efficiently and using blasters at the same time.

Bomber

• Increased energy recharge rate from 6 to 10 points per second
• Increased max chaffs from 16 to 20

Corvette

• Increased max chaffs from 20 to 24

Destroyer

• Increased hitpoints from 15000 to 20000

Cruiser

• Increased hitpoints from 30000 to 40000

Carrier

• Increased hitpoints from 40000 to 60000

Weapons

• Tweaks to locking times for missile / torpedo launchers: slightly lowered on small ships, slightly increased on capships

Chaffs

• Doubled duration (6s to 10s)
• Increased launch speed (40 m/s to 100 m/s)
• Increased range (1 km to 1.5 km)
• Tweaked launch angle (behind and up)

Missiles required too much attention from the player on the receiving end. Chaffs will be more efficient and launch further away from the ship, resulting in less splash damage. The doubled duration and increased amounts of chaffs on all small ships ensure that chaffs will not run out as quickly as before.

Collision Damage

• Reduced collision damage by half and reduced warp ramming damage by another 50%

The ship doing the ramming should cause less damage, but will still receive full damage. Collision damage in general was halved due to many players hitting docks when starting with their capital ships

New features

New chat box and team chat

• Added a new UI for the chat box with 4 default channels: All, Global, Team and Local
• All agglomerates all messages received from other channels
• Global channel messages are sent to all players on the server
• Team channel messages are sent to all team members on the server
• Local channel messages are sent to all allies in the local zone of the player (roughly 1000 Km)
• You can enter/exit chat mode via Enter/Return/Escape like before
• You can press Tab to cycle through the channels; the current one is where the messages will be sent to
• Each channel has its own color to identify the channel more easily (especially useful for messages in the All channel)
• Messages are now scrollable when you enter chat mode. Default is 30 messages
• A Channel’s tab background color flashes when a new unread message is received in that channel
• Added chat auto-close mode mode in Options -> Gameplay (this will close chat mode after every single message typed). Default is off
• Voice commands will go in the Local channel
• Text content is verified for errors before being validated and sent to the server (to avoid errors like empty strings, accidental key presses, too long messages etc… )

Training

• Added youtube links with 8 video tutorials in the main menu (note: only a placeholder in Early access until the gameplay is finalized and we can produce in-game tutorials)

Assets

• Updated some station modules materials and textures
• Fixed holes in station Hub B

Bug fixes and misc

• Final fix for “name is invalid” error on the server when players have a name shorter than 3 characters

• Improvements to key detection, especially related to throttles (throttles where often blocking input detection due to always sending non-zero values)

• Added input profile for Logitech Extreme 3D Pro

[INovaeFlavien]

Patch 0.6.4.0 ( Thursday October 17th 2019 )

This patch focuses on bug fixing and improvements to the existing functionalities, with a number of significant changes to the chat box. Note that control scheme unification and input improvements could not make it in time,
so we’ll most likely be including them in next week’s patch instead.

Game balance

• Rebalanced resupply rates / costs, in particular it will now take many seconds for corvettes to resupply missiles / torpdedoes on another ship
• Reduced shields recharge and resupply rates on spawning points
• Spawning points will no longer recharge / repair / resupply if they received damage in the last 10 seconds (note: this already applied to corvettes)

Resupplying was imbalanced, and possibly still is. It should now take more time for the corvette to resupply ammo to nearby ships, especially missiles/torpedoes

• Small reduction of chaff’s duration, launch speed and activation distance (chaffs were buffed a bit too much last patch)

• Adjustments to credits rewards for ships deaths and battle participation bonus

The battle participation bonus was very unbalanced and giving too many credits for kills during battles. The credits rewards have been rebalanced. Overall it’ll be more difficult to accumulate a lot of credits now if you aren’t careful

• Increased torpedo damage from 3500 to 5000

After last patch’s buff to the capital ship’s hitpoints, bombers in particular needed to be more threatening to capital ships

Chat box

• Chat box welcome messages show up when entering the game instead of when the client initializes
• Team channel now also displays local zone channel (including voice commands)
• Auto-close setting for chatbox is now the default
• Initial implementation for private message chat. Type /msg playername text to open a private channel to another player
• Added commands /team /global /local commands to chat in a different channel than the one currently being selected
• Added support for custom chat channels. Use /join channelname to create or join a custom channel. Warning: channels are public, and not password or team restricted
• Implemented a /mute command to mute a player in all chat channels
• Fixed chat box being visible despite HUD being hidden

Improvements and features

• Installation modules can now self-repair too (this also includes turrets on modules). However once the module is destroyed, it no longer repairs / come back up

• Spawn button can now display “can’t afford” or “not available” states if the selected ship is too costly, or if there are no spawns available left at the selected base

• Selected spawn now defaults to closest upon dying, unless a manual spawn was set

• Added buttons to filter spawns, players and other entities on the starmap

The “select closest spawn” button has been removed: it is now the default upon dying, unless you had manually set a respawn base before dying. Three new buttons have been introduced,
to filter out spawns, players and other entities (that last one includes enemy bases). All three filters are enabled by default. If you want to more easily see which spawn bases are
available, you can just disable the “players” and “other” filters to only keep “spawns”/

• Added randomness in probability curve for selecting ship classes in battles generation

This was almost a bug: the algorithm deciding which NPC ship classes to spawn when a battle starts was using the same seed for all battles. Different battles and waves will now use
different seeds, bringing more “variety” to the battles in terms of ships composition. It is also possible to see battles with a higher proportion of small ships / interceptors
or other battles with a higher proportion of capital ships. Overall, this change should add variety to way the battles “feel”.

Bug fixes

• Revamped spawn system to better take into account selected ship class
• Fixed stuck situations when it wasn’t possible to respawn in an interceptor when the capship spawns had been destroyed

Destroyed capital ships spawns were especially problematic when the matching was ending, sometimes getting players in a stuck loop where they tried to downgrade their ship, but the available spawns list wasn’t correctly refreshed.
This shouldn’t happen anymore.

• Fixed hauler pathing and death at arrival that happened at some stations

Investigating and fixing this bug took an entire day of work. Haulers were often colliding with station modules upon arriving at their destination, exploding and losing their cargo. This disrupted the flow of resources and team credits income.
Haulers should now behave much better. I’ve still witnessed a rare occurence of haulers coincidentally reaching the destination docking platform at exactly the same time (despite spawning from different factories!) and pushing into each others.
But this should be extremely rare and not disturb the resources flow.

• Fixed incorrect sound location for special effects attached to an actor (ex.: impact sound)

Impact sounds were always played at the actor origin. Usually not a problem on small ships, but on a station, a hit could have happened kilometers away from the origin, so it was a deaf impact…

• Fixed positionning of chat box and main menu in non-standard / wide screen aspect ratios / resolutions

• Fixed crash bug at startup due to corrupted quality settings

• Fixed bouncing projectiles flipped orientation

• Projectiles can bounce on static actors too now

Weapon projectiles were flipped after bouncing. They were never bouncing on non-ships such as bases…

Misc

• Improved algorithm for selecting default starting spawn base

Upon joining a game for the first time, the server tried to select the first spawning base available. The new algorithm is smarter and tries to place the player at an allied base where there are other players, and possibly a battle

• Server browser population now displays player count as a number and not as a percentage
• Added support for FMOD live update for modding. Disabled by default, but can be manually enabled in ClientConfig.xml

[INovaeFlavien]

Patch 0.6.5.0 ( Monday November 4 2019 )

This patch contains major architectural changes related to input events and key bindings. Control schemes can now be specified per ship, the Virtual Cursor navigation mode and Direct control schemes were unified, and new bindings were introduced for capital ships, allowing full rebinding of strafing keys. As a result, some of the bindings might be empty or no longer work properly. We implemented an automatic configuration upgrader so that players do not have to remake their input profiles, however due to the complexity of the changes it is possible that some events might have to be fixed or updated manually. If you do not use a custom configuration and run into trouble, we simply recommend pressing the “reset to defaults” button.

Note that we got ride of some obsolete profiles that were not working properly anyways: X52, X56 and T-Flight Hotas X. If you have a working, fully functional profile for one of these HOTAS, or some other not-officially-supported-yet HOTAS, do not hesitate to send us your config file so that we can include it in a future build, thank you !

Balance changes

• Increased torpedo count on bomber from 6 to 8
• Small reduction of death credits rewards to make it more challenging to keep a capital ship
• Haulers vertical thrust increase by 50% so that they can fly upwards on planets without engine overcharge

Some minor balance changes. Bombers should now be more threatening to capital ships as they won’t have to resupply their torpedoes as often as before. Killing other ships will also be rewarded with a few less credits.

Flight Model

• Updated manual thrust flight model when overriding flight assist. The new model should be more responsive, especially when using analog inputs or controller arrows
• Fixed corner directions not having enough thrust when using using an 8-way arrow/hat for strafing
• Fixed the long-standing bug of overriding throttle manually in warp, which somehow slowed down the throttle

We discovered that the amount of manual thrust in the corner directions wasn’t reaching 100% due to a bug, so we reworked the manual thrust physics so that it’s more coherent and works as expected

• Introduced a hard-brake option in controls settings to specify if the brake key also overrides manual thrust/strafe. Default is on
• Fixed braking continuously starting / stopping at zero throttle / speed

This technically wasn’t a bug, but a question of priority. When you’re holding the brake key, but are still holding a manual thrust/strafe key, would you expect your ship to brake and ignore the manual thrust inputs ? We saw divided opinions on this subject, so we decided to add a setting for this behavior

• Revamped warp exit speed: it will now set the throttle to match the warp entry speed (instead of resetting the throttle to zero)

Before the change, the warp exit speed was always set to the minimum warp entry speed (ex.: 240 m/s on the interceptor) no matter what the real entry speed was. After the change, your ship will exit warp at the same speed it had when entering warp. Throttle will also be set to that value instead of zero

• Added more vertical thrust to haulers so that they can hover / take off more easily on planets without overcharging engines

Input / Controls

• Fixed a major bug with key + axis combinations that made key combinations sometimes not work as expected

This was a major bug that caused key combinations conflicts. This should now be resolved

• Added support for tooltips and localization to input events. All events should now have a proper name and tooltip
• Added support for display order (sorting) for events and event groups. Categories should now make more sense and be more intuitive
• Improved key conflicts: they’re now displayed as a warning underneath the corresponding input event entry in the keybindings menu
• A value bar appears for each event entry in the keybindings menu
• A value bar appears for each axis entry in the device calibration menu
• Cleaned up the key bindings menu (made the keys button larger, with a smaller font, and removed the event type as it is now usually mentionned in the event name)

These changes should make the keybindings menu cleaner and easier to work with. A small bar representing the current detected value should appear below every single keybinding, make it easy at a glance to see if keys/axes are properly detected. Conflicts will now appear below each input binding too, make it easier to see where the issues are located

• Unified events between Virtual Cursor navigation mode and Direct mode
• Introduced a Capital Ship mode with separate events / key bindings (it is now possible to use separate strafe keys)
• Removed many hardcoded keys / combinations in events. The automatic profile upgrader tries to keep the same configuration, but might need some tweaks, especially for capital ships bindings

All those changes should make it easier for players to figure out how control scheme works and how to rebind keys. In the previous version, the Virtual Cursor control scheme (which was the default) used “CursorX” and “CursorY” events, whereas most players tried to bind “ShipYaw” and “ShipPitch” which only works for Direct mode. This generated a lot of confusion and frustration and lead many people to thinking rebinding keys wasn’t working properly. With better event names and events unification, this problem should now be solved

• Fixed major issues related to event values being polled in the physics step versus the UI thread, which caused mouse samples to get lost/ignored
• Fixed major issues related to mouse wheel. It is now properly treated as a relative axis with framerate independence
• Fixed a bug with changing mouse movement or wheel sensitivity in the controls settings which didn’t apply the changes until restarting

Mouse wheel wasn’t framerate independent, so it behaved differently if you had 30 fps versus if you had 300 fps. In general, mouse inputs weren’t polled at the correct frequency so samples could be lost, resulting in erratic behaviors at high (100+ fps) framerates. Mouse sensivity settings changes weren’t correctly applied

• Added new input event bindings: scan mode and mine launch
• Removed F4 key to cycle through control schemes. Control schemes can now be set per-ship in the controls settings menu
• Fixed view switching from cockpit to internal when changing control schemes
• Camera / head look now automatically resets after a delay, which can now be set via a slider in the control settings menu (default: 2 seconds)
• Introduced a camera absolute mode, in controls settings to specify if camera movement uses incremental values or resets the values for every event input
• Revamped colors in radial menus, to make the selection more obvious / stronger
• Fixed some ship movement inputs still being active in radial menus (ex.: you could move forward / backward while a radial menu was open)
• Removed obsolete profiles: X52, X56 and HotasX - we need replacements !

Other Bug fixes

• It is no longer possible to spawn at a carrier in warp (if it had a very low warp speed)
• Fixed a carrier respawn bug which didn’t check the proper respawn conditions (it was possible spawn at a carrier in movement)
• Fixed client crash when loading the game with an input profile that does not exist anymore (now defaults to Qwerty as expected)
• Fixed crash when finishing to send some text after getting disconnected from a server
• Fixed incorrect matching of spawn type when calculating team scores statistics
• Fixed static base credits generated by installations resulting in stale match endings

An annoying bug that resulted in credits being no longer resulted when there was a low amount of bases alive at the end of a match, resulting in a status-quo and no battles being spawned. It was then the responsability of the players to finish the match by destroying the remaining bases, but since there is no challenge it was just a chore. In this patch, battles should now be generated (although at a lower frequency) and result in an automatic match ending

• Fixed other ships’s thruster effects still firing when their ship is powered down

Misc

• Reduced thickness of armor/speed curved bars on HUD and removed the text/status information
• Added random reactivity to AI ship powering back up after being powered down

AI ships that got powered down, powered back up almost instantly no matter the NPC’s rank. Now it can take a few seconds for the NPC to react

[INovaeFlavien]

Patch 0.6.5.1 ( Thursday November 8 2019 )

A small patch with a bunch of HUD and star map fixes.

HUD

• Updated font for monospaced numbers ( curtesy of Pendrokar )
• Redesigned HUD central elements: removed text and icons; made the curved bars thinner and shorter
• Removed set throttle notifications
• If the selected target is behind a planet, an “Obstructed” notification will now appear on top of the target’s indicator name

Starmap

• Trade routes now show up on the star map rather than in the 3D viewport
• Fixed a bug with blinking icons on the star map when they were obstructed on the main HUD
• Trade routes are now team colored

[INovaeFlavien]

Patch 0.6.6.0 ( Friday January 10th 2020 )

Hey all, sorry for the time it took to release this patch. We encountered a lot of internal issues related to the AMS (aka. Anti-missiles/torpedoes/mines system) lasers implementation. Please keep in mind this is only a first implementation, and as such, until we get more player feedback, is likely to cause some balance issues. The patch also contains multiple bug fixes as usual.

AMS (Anti-missiles/torpedoes/mines system)

• Initial implementation for AMS lasers for capital ships

• AMS are currently available on destroyers (4 hardpoints) and carrier (2 hardpoints). To promote the escort role of the destroyer, the cruiser currently does not have any AMS system

• AMS produce green-colored lasers that hit their target instantly and cause a very low amount of damage over time

• AMS lasers automatically target heavy missiles, torpedopes and mines within a 10 Km range. Since light missiles are no serious threat to a capital ship, they currently do not target light missiles

• Remember to enable the AMS systems in your ship’s weapons radial menu (they’re disabled by default)

• Introduced heavy missiles and renamed the old missiles to light missiles

• Light missiles are available on small ships (interceptor, bomber, corvette) and do the same amount of damage as before (150)

• Heavy missiles are available on capital ships and do more damage (500) but are less maneuverable than light missiles. They’re still faster than torpedoes.

• Rebalanced missiles, torpedoes and mines hitpoints so that they’re harder to kill

• Slight reduction in activation time for missiles, torpedoes and mines

• Reduced chaff activation range from 1.25 Km to 1.0 Km

• Removed chaffs from destroyers, as they now have AMS

General / gameplay

• Target speed now resets to zero automatically after exiting warp
• Increased ramp-up / warmp-up propulsion factor
• Tweaks to missile detonation and distance calculation algorithm (sometimes missiles were exploding too far away from the target)

HUD / Interface

• Changed default font
• Fixed friendly fire warning while being on the spawn menu / star map
• Added a checkbox in the controls menu for automatic view reset
• Added effects quality setting to options menu

Bug fixes

• Fixed options menu staying opened after clicking “apply” with settings asking for a restart
• Fixed invalid initial position of navigation cursor when entering the game due to accumulating mouse input on the splash screen
• Fixed /SetSkin server crash when player is on spawn menu
• Other minor coherency fixes / checks for player commands
• Fixed a bug that caused some input event groups to randomly stop working
• Fixed a bug with error correction that gets ignored when client receives server’s tick before client validated its own
• Fixes and checks related to custom quality levels which were causing crashes, or weren’t being take into account properly for smoke / damage effects
• Fixed lack of camera control in spectator and kill-cam mode
• Fixed rare server crash during corvette ammo resupply
• Fixed a bug that caused weapon muzzle sounds to sometimes originate from the actor center instead of the actual gun position

Eye tracking

• Added eye tracker interface + experimental Tobii eye tracking support
• Added eye trackers selection list to the controls menu

Misc

• Updated many stations / modules layouts (some modules had gaps and holes)
• Added input profile for Logitech X-55
• Particle system culling now better takes into account per-particle size to calculate its bounds
• Slight Increase of brightness of space debris

[INovaeFlavien]

Patch 0.6.7.0 ( Saturday February 8th 2020 )

This patch mainly aims at laying down the foundation to revamping the weapons groups / management system and introduces a number of important changes. On small ships (up to Corvette, included) weapons are now exclusive (you can only select one weapon group active at a time). On capital ships, it is possible to toggle automatic vs manual firing and aiming. The locking system for missiles / torpedoes has been updated to be less constraining (locks are acquired instantly so that you can fire as soon as you select a target). Finally, we updated the radial menus and assigned a new weapons selection contextual menu to the right mouse button (for keyboard profiles). The goal of all these changes is to prepare for the upcoming HUD update.

Weapons groups

• Weapon groups are now exclusive on small ships: for ex. selecting blasters will unselect guns
• Weapon groups on capital ships can now cycle between disabled, automatic and manual firing
• Revamped missile locking system and alerts. To fire a missile, just select the missile’s weapon group and press fire. Locking is instant as long as the conditions are met (enough ammo, in range, not on cooldown etc…). The angle restriction has been rempoved
• Revamped HUD weapons list (now showing group ids, name and ammo as a bar)
• Reduced amount of heat generated by laser AMS by half
• Most weapons groups are now active by default on capital ships (default configuration: automatic)
• Cleaned up corvette groups: there’s now only one group for kinetic guns and one for blasters
• Changed ordering of some groups on destroyer to go in increasing power

Input/Controls

• Revamped keyboard input profile for weapon groups hotkeys (1-9 activates the matching weapon group, instead of ctrl 1-9). Note: ctrl 1-9 is now used to set the throttle.
• Chaffs have been moved to the middle mouse button instead of left-alt (for keyboard profiles)
• Removed “Secondary fire” and “Missile fire” input event
• Revamped radial menus: introduced the Flight mode menu (default: hold X on keyboard, which is the ex key for weapons)
• Cleaned up other radial menus and reduced their content so that they fit into 10 slots
• Moved the weapons radial menu to the right mouse button (for keyboard profiles)
• Radial menus now resize dynamically according to the amount of slots they contain (ex.: a 4 slots radial menu will look smaller than a 12-slots)
• Added an optional event to cycle through active weapon groups ( “CycleWeapons” ). Currently left unassigned by default

Bug fixes

• Fixed music volume slider in audio options that required a game restart to take effect (it can now be changed on the fly)
• Fixed camera free-look not working when spectating / in kill-cam of a capital ship
• Fixed missiles/torpedoes still locking and tracking a target even when satefy lock is off

Misc

• Increased a bit AI probability to fire missiles/torpedoes
• Revamped AI to actively manage weapon groups in a smarter way. The AI now takes into account more parameters, such as heat (for ex. interceptors switch to blasters when kinetics are overheating), ammo depleted, damaged weapons, etc…
  They try to switch to the weapons with the best DPS according to their target.

---

In this image you can see the weapons group HUD update. For each weapon group, from left to right:

• Weapon group ID ( matching the number hotkey )
• Number of usable weapons ( not damaged, having ammo, not under cooldown ) over the total number of weapons in that group
• Name of the weapons in that group
• [*] if the weapons are automatic
• A bar showing the average amount of ammo for weapons in that group. Note that energy weapons ( blasters ) share their ammo together ( so the bars will be synced ). Kinetics use per-hardpoint ammo, so it’s technically possible that some hardpoints have exhausted their ammo while others still have some ammo. The bar represents the average. The orange portion represents the ammo already exhausted. When the whole bar is orange, none of the weapons in the group have any ammo left.

[INovaeFlavien]

Patch 0.6.8.0 ( Saturday February 29th 2020 )

This patch is the first iteration for the new HUD. It mostly focuses on small ships; while it also works for capital ships, it still needs multiple tweaks and improvements that will come in future iterations.

Also note that the targetting system (and the target indicators) and the planetary indicators will be revamped in the next iteration. The patch also introduces HUD color themes (you can change them in the general options menu) and adds support for Russial localization.

HUD Changes

HUD changes are too numerous to list, but here are the main changes:

• The default color theme is now green (but you can also set it to blue or orange in the general options menu)
• The speed and energy bars have been redesigned and moved to the left side of the screen
• The right side of the screen is now reserved for the selected target’s information. The information panel on the top-right corner of the screen has been removed. It’ll be re-introduced later as a special target MFD
• The bottom-left center part of the screen now displays counter-measures (CM) and the overcharge mode (None, Engine, Weapons, Shields)
• The bottom center part of the screen is now showing your ship’s armor and shield points are a percentage
• The bottom-right center part of the screen is displaying the heat percentage and the currently selected weapon and its ammo count
• A circle and locking status information is now displayed at the center of the screen when selected a missile / torpedo launcher (note: disabled for capital ships)

General

• Improved per-turret targetting selection: now takes into account distance, tries to minimize rotation angle, prioritizes the selected target and/or the incoming missile threat (for AMS)
• Increased hitpoints for most turrets (MK4 to MK7) as they got destroyed too quickly in big battles
• It is now possible to fire missiles even in heat overflow mode

Bug fixes

• Fixed client crash bug when selecting a target far away with a missile launcher
• AMS / lasers no longer fire after engaging warp

Misc

• Increased width of system menu (to better fit longer localized strings)

[INovaeFlavien]

Patch 0.6.9.0 ( Saturday March 21th 2020 )

This patch is the second iteration and overhaul for the HUD. It introduces most of the missing features, including tweaks for the capital ships HUD, a new planetary HUD, a revamp of the targetting indicators, a revamp of the ring radar, a warp tunnel helper to show the path to an objective and a bunch of other HUD tweaks.

Note that some features are experimental. Due to the high amount of HUD changes and tweaks, it is likely that this patch has introduced new bugs and will require further tweaking. Feedback is more than welcome so please let us know on the forums what you like or dislike with the new HUD features. Thank you !

-The I-Novae team

Capital Ships HUD

• Initial implementation for capital ship HUD and tweaks compared to small ships
• Armor / shield points are moved above speed bar and central information has been offset, to avoid covering the ship
• Removed hemispherical radar from capital ship HUD: since capital ships have a free rotating camera, the hemispherical radar wasn’t as useful and was covering the ship. With this radar removed, the view is now clear

Planetary HUD

• A planetary HUD now pops up when approaching a planetary surface
• This planetary HUD displays a heading bar (plus the heading angle in degrees, compared to the north pole of the planet) and the pitch angle, compared to the horizon
• Moved altitude meter on the bottom left side of the heading bar

HUD targetting / indicators

• Added an arrow at the HUD center to show the direction / angle of the currently selected target
• Added max target indicators limitation in combat vs navigation modes (+ slider in options menu). This is a major step towards decluttering in large battles
• Removed HUD cycling: the F3 key is now simply toggling on/off the entire HUD. The automatic vs manual HUD modes have been removed
• There is still a concept of combat versus navigation HUD. The simple difference between the two is whether you have a target selected or not. Without a target, you are in navigation mode and the HUD shows more target indicators
• The HUD switches to combat mode when you select a target. It then highlights only the highest priority targets
• Target selection (default key: G) is now taking into account priorities/threats as well as your ship type (ex.: a bomber will prioritize selecting capital ships, while an interceptor will prioritize enemy interceptors and bombers).

Note that the priority/threat formula is experimental and might need future tweaks.

Ring Radar

• Updated ring radar to use the new arrow design. The ring radar shows all the combat mode targets (by default: the 5 highest priority targets)
• Added a slider in options menu to control radius / size of ring radar

Navigation tunnel helper

• Added a navigation tunnel helper towards long-range objective in warp mode

Note that the tunnel display is experimental. In particular, at the moment it is straight. We are still working on generating a tunnel along an orbital curve to avoid planets / massive obstacles

Other HUD Improvements

• Added max weapon range info to HUD
• Increased font size for armor / shield hitpoints display
• Added cursor hovering to highlight targets and display their names (experimental)

Misc:

• Strings localization update for German and Russian languages
• More tweaks to HUD color themes

[INovaeFlavien]

Patch 0.7.0.0 ( Saturday April 25th 2020 )

This is the final patch focusing on the HUD overhaul. It introduces virtual MFDs (multi-functional display) that aim at providing HUD customizations to players. The default MFD layouts have already been changed on all ships.

This patch also includes other UI tweaks, related to the HUD or some star map improvements.
In the next patch we’ll be focusing on the star map and a new sensors overlay system, then it will finally be time to move over to more gameplay !

-The I-Novae team

HUD and virtual MFDs

To open the MFD layout setup screen, hit F4 while in-game. The layout provides 14 MFDs, and each one has a button to select the current data page to be displayed in it. Some pages require dual MFDs and aren’t available at the left/right sides.

Some pages can be centered on two MFDs in “dual display” mode. When available, an arrow button will be displayed on top or below the MFD screen.

The currently available MFD pages are:

• Loadout (weapons list)
• Target (only displays basic stats at the moment, but this MFD will show a holographic 3D view of the ship in a future patch)
• Communications (chat box)
• Electronic Warfare (EW) (at the moment, only displays energy emissions and detection status)
• Front radar
• Back radar
• 3D radar (spherical radar)
• Mission / objectives
• Squad (not implemented yet)
• System notifications / messages

More pages might be available in the future - if you have feedback on pages you’d like to see, please let us know !

Also of interest: cockpits currently have MFDs that aren’t functional, but in the next patch those should be available as working MFDs too.

Note that MFD layouts are persistent (changes are saved automatically) and per ship class. You can transfer MFD layouts from your current ship to another ship in the gameplay settings menu.

UI / HUD changes

• Added a separate slider setting to control the max amount of displayed ring targets ( as opposed to combat targets )
• Fixed cursor hovering which was highlighting all targets within a certain range: now it only highlights the closest target
• HUD text now has a dark outline (instead of a drop shadow)
• Removed helmet deformation effect from root, main and tab menus;
• Fixed “not enough credits” text clipping issue in ship selection screen
• Improvements to star map targets panel: now properly uses team colors; distance text is smaller; added spawnable/unspawnable icons to be more clear on where a player can respawn at
• Added back status icons on top / bottom of the HUD MFD panels
• Improved readability of warning alerts

Bug fixes

• Fixed delta speed (mouse wheel up / down) being inconsistent in warp (it had a different sensitivity when scrolling down and instantly went back to zero)
• Fixed a small bug with HUD speed being sometimes displayed in menus
• Fixed an issue in menu flow that opened an empty spectator menu when you hit escape in the options menu while in spawn

Misc:

• Updated in-game Discord link to open the welcome-and-rules channel

[INovaeFlavien]

Patch 0.7.1.0 ( Friday May 8th 2020 )

This is a transitional patch that contains a lot of improvements and fixes related to the MFDs (multi-functional displays) and HUD. In particular, it contains new settings options, a fix for the new HUD in wide-screens, the introduction of physical MFDs in cockpits (as well as a revamp of the virtual MFDs and seat positions).

A couple of various improvements are also included, like temporal anti-aliasing (note that the game still defaults to SMAA until we get feedback about TAA and if it’s good enough to be made the new default) or the ability to use the numpad keys to set the cockpit view.

The next big item on the upcoming tasks list is sensors overlay - which will be replaced the ‘quote’ key which was previously bound to 3D radar zoom in. It still needs a few days of work, and will probably become the focus of the next patch.

Note that as per community request we’ll be resuming our development updates in a new format (what we previously called “weekly updates”, but won’t be weekly anymore) and that might be merged with patch notes in the future. We’ll also post a quaterly update, with focus on priorities and refreshing the roadmap. We’ll post one of those next week.

-The I-Novae team

Cockpit physical MFDs

The interceptor, bomber and corvette now all have functional physical MFD screens. As previously, you can edit the layout and which MFD pages go on where by bringing up the MFD layout setup (default: F4). There are 4 screens in the interceptor and bomber (note: some screens are redundant on the bomber’s top frame). The corvette has 3 screens. Capital ships do not have cockpits, so they cannot use the physical MFDs systems.

IMPORTANT: the seat positions were tweaked in all cockpits, as well as the camera’s vertical field-of-view, that went from 60° to 70°. This allows every ship to display the physical MFDs at the bottom of the screen in the “default” view. Since there could be some overlaps with the HUD’s virtual MFDs that some people might have customized in the last patch, we decided to reset the virtual MFDs layout to restart from a “clean” state. This means that if you had customized your vMFDs, you might now have to do it again.

If you do not like the physical MFDs and wish to just use the HUD’s virtual ones instead, we introduced seat adjustment offsets in the General -> HUD options menu. You’ll find 3 new sliders that control the vertical, front/back offsets as well as the head pitch. Changing the head pitch is currently not recommanded, as the crosshair will no longer be centered and gameplay might feel awkward.

Numpad keys can now be used to turn your head in the cockpit (4= left, 5=center, 6=right, 8=up and 2=down). The corners (ex.: up-right) aren’t implemented yet

Temporal anti-aliasing

We’ve introduced a new anti-aliasing method, temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) to the game / engine. The game still defaults to SMAA, however you can enable temporal anti-aliasing in the graphics settings options menu. You’ll find a setting to change the “AA method” (it’s also now possible to disable anti-aliasing, for those of you that have a low-specs computer and need max performance). There’s also a setting for “AA quality”, which is dependent on the type of AA method applied. It doesn’t do anything for SMAA, but for TAA it changes the number of samples and the application or not of a sharpening filter.

In general, you should find that SMAA gives you minimum anti-aliasing and suffers from a lot of flickering. TAA is much better, but can suffer from ghosting effects (especially when you quickly zoom in or out) and slightly blurs the image (which is why we apply a sharpen filter in post-processing as a counter). TAA is slightly more expensive than SMAA in terms of performance.

Once we gather enough feedback about the quality / performance tradeoffs of TAA, we might make it the default AA method (at least on high-end computers)

HUD fixes and improvements

• Fixed new HUD / MFDs wide-screen layout

• Wide-screen fixes for starmap and ship selection 3D viewport (they didn’t use the correct camera’s aspect ratio)

• Fixed a potential crash if you died while editing the MFD layouts

• Fixed a bug that still rendered MFDs despite switching the HUD off (F3 key)

• Fixed carrier “player spawn notification” layout for the new HUD. It will now show up as another line in the systems notification MFD

• MFDs now also flickers like the rest of the HUD when the engine / power is partially damaged

• Fixed warp engage warning after exceeding the soft cap speed, which was disappearing too quickly (most players didn’t notice it)

• Removed dark, very transparent (it was barely visible ) background over some text MFDs (ex.: objectives MFD)

• Swapped left / right arrows on collapse MFD buttons, which feel more natural

• More shadow outlines around some text in the system notifications or mission MFD

• HUD bottom-screen’s decoration lines now only show up when virtual MFDs are present, to avoid cluttering the physical MFDs at the bottom of the screen

• Tweaked (increased a bit) font size, opacity and layout of system notications MFD (the text was too small to be readable sometimes)

New customizable options or settings

• Tweaked graphics settings menu: it is now possible to change quality parameters individually, which will set the global quality level to “custom” automatically, which feels a lot more natural to the user
• Added target hit mark sound effect toggle in the audio options menu
• Added a slider into the HUD settings in the options menu, in order to control the separation between the ship/target info and the center of the screen
• Cockpit seat settings (offets and head pitch) can be customized per ship (see general settings)
• Added a screen shaking slider setting in the graphics options menu

General and bug fixes

• Respawning in a capital ship now defaults to third-person camera
• Increased max camera vertical-FOV from 80 to 100 degrees
• Changed default camera vertical-FOV from 60 to 70 degrees
• Tooltips now have a darker background, bigger font and padding
• Inactive/disabled sliders now appear darker in the menus
• Fixed joystick options window contour that was always displayed in blue, ignoring the current color theme
• You now get a critical hit notification when you destroy an allied ship’s weapons by accident
• Fixed a bug that required a restart despite not changing any graphic settings, the first time the user opens the options menu

Misc

• Added new muzzle flash effect for MK6 / MK7 kinetic guns on capital ships

[INovaeFlavien]

Patch 0.7.2.0 ( Saturady May 30th 2020 )

This is a fairly big patch which contains the initial implementation for the new sensor overlay (tactical screen) replacing the old 3D radar zoom.

There are also a number of HUD improvements to make it easier for new players to understand who are enemies and who is currently shooting at you, as the indicators will now flash when an enemy is firing at you.

An important AMS lasers bug was fixed (which caused their DPS to under-perform) and 8 AMS turrets were given to the carrier for defensive purposes.

Finally, we also spent a bit of time to do a new round of improvements for the keybindings and improve the joysticks key detection.

Sensor Overlay

The old “3D radar zoom” (which was previously bound to the ‘quote’ key, aka. the key left to 1 and above tab on the main keyboard) has been re-implemented as a new screen: the sensor overlay / tactical screen.

When entering that mode, the camera will zoom out from your ship to about 15 Km (up to 30 Km max), seeing the entire battlefield. A grid is overlayed on top of the screen, showing ships and their indicators, as well as a “heat map” (basically ships are glowing depending on their allied or enemy status) and trailings heind each ship showing their movement. There are options on the bottom-left to toggle these features.

It’s also possible to change the frame of reference (by default it’s on your ship) to the nearest base or planet (or even the solar system’s plane). Your ship’s framerate of reference stays centered on your ship even if it’s moving, but its orientation is determined by your ship orientation when you enable the sensor overlay and will stay fixed. If you want to synchronize attacks and see the same battlefield view angle than other allied players, it might be better to change it to ‘base’ or ‘planet’ (since these will have the same frame of reference, no matter how your own ship is oriented).

While enabled it is possible to left-click drag to translate the camera or right-click to rotate around the origin. You can also hover the mouse over targets, or even select them as usual with T, G or Y/U.

In the future, we’ll add more information to that screen, like current velocities, arrows representing who-is-attacking-what, and possibly show in a corner the current target’s information (including its name and health/shield status).

If you have more ideas on what you’d like to see on this tactical screen, please let us know as usual, thank you.

New HUD or menus improvements

• Fixed a bug that made the max combat targets slider setting useless, as it still used the max nav’ targets instead of the right number. Note: this is a huge bug, which kind of made the decluttering from a few months ago useless as it still displayed a high number of targets in combat. As a reminder, you can change the number of displayed targets (both in navigation or in combat mode) in the general options settings.
• Implemented new glow/highlight effect for high nearby threats (firing at or targetting you) on the radars and ring target arrows. This should make it more obvious when suddenly a nearby ship out of your view starts firing at you
• HUD target ring and radar indicators now blink when firing at the player. Note: the HUD performs fire cone checks to see if you’re in the light-of-fire of an enemy firing in your direction
• Updated HUD indicators colors coherency (there were differences in the choice of colors between the 3D viewport, the ring target arrows and the various radars). All the different screens should now show the same icons indicators with the same colors
• Revamped HUD bloom/glow shaders and tweaked color theme: the bloom effect was too agressive and affecting the font’s readability. The new bloom is softer and wider and should keep text more readable. The current selected tab in the options menu is now highlighted
• Fixed battle notifications popups showing up in the in-game / tab menus. The popups will now be invisible in menus and update in the background at a slower rate. Popup notification sound can still be heard on menus, so you’re aware that something happened
• Moved battle notification popup so that it doesn’t cover the top of the HUD
• Weapons MFD now shows a dual arrow icon for auto-aiming/firing weapons instead of the cryptic [*]
• Help tips are now displayed in yellow to be more visible on HUD
• Fixed speed formatting on HUD which caused numbers to be too wide at high/warp speeds (now uses the SI units like distance)
• Fixed HUD power flickering (when engines are damaged) which didn’t seem to fade correctly
• Fixed HUD text areas that didn’t use the user-selected color theme
• Fixed HUD text areas that didn’t fade off when power is down
• Removed top helmet decoration bar when HUD is disabled (F3)
• Removed HUD help screen ( in system menu ) as it is obsolete
• HUD improvements to broken targetting systems and broken sensors (they will now correctly behave, flicker or stop showing up when broken)
• Weapons aiming indicators on HUD are now properly rendered as dots instead of small squares. Note: that’s a very small change… but the weapon aiming dots were rendered as small squares previously. They should now properly show as small dots
• Fixed selection indicator being empty for missiles, torpedoes or mines;
• HUD’s missile locking circle now shows as alert color ( instead of normal color ) when it’s under cooldown
• Low damage alert is now more reliable and should show up for interceptor shots landing on capital ships
• Added a new chat / comms channel: System, that keeps meta-game information notifications ( like player X killed Y );
• Added a /clear command to clear a chat channel
• Fixed a bug with the chat box text which didn’t extend to the full width of the window
• Tweaks to planetary HUD: lowered minimum altitude, no longer displays in external capital ship view, pitch are now based on camera instead of ship orientation
• Fixed a bug preventing previous / next target selection cycling ( Y and U keys ) from working as expected
• Mouse wheel will no longer change target speed while on starmap

Keybindings / Input

• Keybindings options menu now makes it more obvious when devices are unassigned for a given input profile (“no device assigned” message is displayed in orange next to a virtual device). That way new players will instantly see that they need to assign their hardware to the correct entry
• Added a warning dialog if you’re starting key detection without having assigned all the virtual devices for the current input profile. That way it’ll be more obvious to new players that they need to assign their hardware to the correct entry
• Improved key detection for keybindings and added options to allow key or axis combos. Key combos are allowed by default but axis combos are not. When starting key detection, if multiple axes are touched, the one with the largest movement/value is the one that will get detected
• Small fixes related to XInput and the joystick devices in options menu
• Tweaks to XBox XInput and PS4 input profiles (some buttons were swapped to be more natural and some new buttons were added)

Gameplay

• Fixed a bug with 2+ missiles launched at once, that end up kissing (colliding) each others while tracking the same target, hence exploding in the middle of nowhere before reaching the target. Note: I had a suspicion for this bug for years but it wasn’t easy to replicate. I was only able to figure out what was going on recently. The explanation makes sense and is 100% logical so in a way it’s not really a bug… more like an undesired feature…
• Fixed a bug that made the AMS lose their power every second, pulsating for no good reason (which reduces the intended DPS on them). This is a huge one, as it kind of made AMS under-performing, which indirectly made bombers over-performing
• Fixed turrets that could still rotate despite the ship having lost its power
• Carrier now has 8 AMS for defense against torpedoes/mines
• Adjusted capital ships default camera distance in third person mode
• Increased amount of heat generated by bomber’s shotgun
• AMS buffs; increased turret turn rates, +50% damage and doubled the visual thickness of the laser beam effect so that it’s more visible at a distance

Other bug Fixes

• Fixed tooltips from mission screen staying on screen after closing the game menu
• Fixed a bug with the starmap contextual (right-mouse button) menu that didn’t close when tabbing out
• Fixed a bug that reset the throttle speed ( also warp speed ) to zero after apply & saving from the options menu
• Fixed rare random crash bug when playing some visual effects

Misc

• Added debug information to log files to figure out the issue with frozen/duplicated pings in the server browser screen for some users
• The client and servers now support new admin commands to spawn entities for the purpose of enriching community events

[INovaeFlavien]

Hotfix 0.7.2.1 ( Saturady May 30th 2020 )

• Fixed a client crash that was introduced in 0.7.2.0 after saving / reloading user settings from the main menu ( while not in game )

[INovaeFlavien]

Hotfix 0.7.2.2 ( Monday June 1st 2020 )

This hotfix is only applied to the Steam version. It’ll be included in the next non-Steam patch.

• Fixed a bug that prevented input key detection to detect > 32 buttons. The game should now support up to 150+ buttons.

[INovaeFlavien]

Patch 0.7.3.0 ( Tuesday June 23th 2020 )

This patch focuses on the first iteration over the star map revamp. A new deployment (aka. spawning) system has been implemented to make it more clear to the players where the deployable bases are and which kind of ships they can spawn.

A “quick deploy” button has been added to get back into the action quickly. This will help to cut down the amount of travelling necessary for attack battles, making it more fair to the attackers versus the defenders that could always respawn instantly at their own base.

The way quick deploy is implemented, if a base or a carrier are available in defense, you’ll be spawning there as usual. If however those aren’t available, you take over an A.I. ship of the same selected class. The algorithm gives priority to A.Is that are not engaged in combat and undamaged. If the ship you take over is somehow damaged, you’ll get a refund proportional to the amount of damage. Note that since the bot had already been paid by the AI commander, the cost you pay for taking over is going back to the team’s funds instead of being paid twice.

The patch also contains a second iteration over the new sensor screen tactical overlay (default: tilde key), which now shows arrows to highlight ships attacking each others. Finally, amongst other fixes, we improved Tobii Eye tracker and integrated TrackIR to the game. Feedback on how good/bad the implementation is, is appreciated.

The next patch, due later this week, will most likely be a hotfix with a number of left-over quality-of-life improvements.

Starmap and new deployment/spawn system

• Implemented new deployment (spawn) system with quick deploy and deploy at buttons in the star map
• Cleaned up star map, added ship selector, automatic refresh of targets list, etc…
• Quick deploy allows to take over an AI ship in a battle
• Added high priority missions list quick spawn in the star map;
• Added deployable states and icons to targets list in star map
• Deploying over an AI bot will refund credits proportionally to how the bot is damaged
• Added selected target’s info panel to starmap and sensor screen
• Added search filter to starmap’s targets list

Sensors overlay tactical screen

• New holographic visual style for the sensors overlay / tactical screen for planetary surfaces, stations or ships
• Arrows are now displayed to show who is attacking who. You can see who’s attacking you / who you are attacking, same for your selected target or the ship you’re hovering on with the mouse
• It is now possible to click on the sensor screen to select a target, or double-click to recenter the view around it
• Added more options to sensor overlay screen: show MTBs, show vertical lines, trailings length
• Sensor overlay tactical screen will no longer show arrows or vertical lines for far away / invisible targets

General UI / Menus improvements

• Revamping UI visual style with custom buttons
• Added various new icons to the UI
• Mission screen’s missions list now automatically refreshes every second
• Fixes for various UI elements not correctly displayed as grayed-out when inactive
• Fixed indicators being displayed behind the camera on the starmap
• Fixed layout issues in missions list
• Fixed “deleted” objective names appearing in missions list
• Selecting a mission in the mission menu will now also highlight it on the star map
• Mission menu’s missions list is automatically refreshed as soon as a mission or battle gets created or destroyed

Head tracking (Tobii and TrackIR)

• Improvements to Tobii Eye tracking integration
• Added head / gaze tracking settings in controls options menu
• Added option for clear UI (gaze-based highlighting of MFD)
• Tobii eye tracking now supports head position offset/strafing
• TrackIR integration
• Added better error handling for Tobii and TrackIR (if the libraries can’t be loaded, an error message will pop up)

Misc

• Temptative fix for server browser pings all being the same on some machines
• Fixed a rare server crash bug when an actor gets deleted at the exact same time a player disconnects
• Updated match victory conditions: carriers are no longer taken into account in team score calculation, preventing a match from ending

[INovaeFlavien]

Patch 0.7.4.0 ( Monday June 29th 2020 )

This patch contains quality-of-life improvements over the last patch and the new development system. In particular, we have introduced a waiting queue upon deployment if you were trying to spawn at a moving carrier, or if the hangars were busy.

We also have a new countdown mechanism so that players can’t abuse the quick-deploy at the same base/battle instantly after dying. A minimum “buffer” of about 30 seconds has been introduced, but the trick here is that this countdown is shared/synchronized by all players trying to deploy at the same location (so they’ll spawn in game at the same time).

The help tips system has been revamped, is more contextual and new help tips for beginners have been added.

UI / Menus improvements

• Introduced deployment waiting queue for carriers or busy hangar spawns
• Introduced countdown deployment timer if you try to respawn too quickly at the same location
• Deployment countdown timer is currently set to about 30s and is synchronized for all players waiting to respawn at the same time intervals
• Deploy buttons have been added to the ship selection menu (that way you have to go back to the star map to spawn, which will be important in the future when the ship upgrades/loadouts are added to the ship selection menu)
• More improvements to deploy buttons (they now become disabled if you can’t afford the ship cost) + more feedback messages that will tell you exactly why you can’t deploy at a given location
• Star map menu now properly sorts listed missions/battles by top-down priority
• Star map’s containers in targets list are now collapsible (there’s a small arrow on the left of each item, which you can click to (un)collapse the item)
• Added back spectator mode (accessed through RMB contextual menu while selecting a target in map menu)
• Added “select closest deployable base” in the star map’s targets list contextual menu (RMB). This will select the deployable base that is the closest to the target you have clicked on
• Updated generic list box and scrollbar arrows buttons icons visual style
• Fixed various issues related to tooltips staying alive after spawning or changing game states
• Fix for sensor screen’s base grid reference, which should now properly orientate the grid on the nearest base
• Revamped random help tips. The new system is contextual (ex.: it’ll show a tip about using chaffs only when a missile is fired at you). New tips have been introduced, which should help with the basics for new players. The tips now properly display the active keybindings in their text

Bugs fixes / Misc

• Fixed a rare client crash bug happening due some fired projectiles during high network latencies

[INovaeFlavien]

Patch 0.7.4.1 ( Wednesday July 1st 2020 )

A small hotfix patch for 0.7.4.0.

• Fixed weapons radial menu, weapons were not selectable anymore due to a bug
• Fixed holographic shader rendering that was missing from the sensor tactical overlay screen

[INovaeFlavien]

Patch 0.7.5.0 ( Saturday August 5th 2020 )

This new patch introduces the new revamped mission screen, which should make objectives more clear to new players. The mission screen now acts in a similar way to the star map, with a 3D viewport showing the stellar system, the planets and the objectives.

The missions are now listed on the right side of the screen and can be selected to get more information about the current status or objectives in the bottom-right info panel. Note that each mission also has an eye icon (to set the camera on it) and an "i"nformation icon, which opens a panel with mission details.

We still have to clean up the 3D viewport itself (make it interactive, improved the text and icons, make it more clear where the objectives and missions are), which will probably be the focus for the next patch, currently scheduled around mid/end august. After that, we’ll be refocusing back on gameplay (and particularly, match/battles/missions progression).

Gameplay

• Warp charge duration and warp cooldown is now set per ship instead of being the same for all ships. Interceptors and bombers still need 5 seconds to charge the warp drive, but corvettes and above now charge a bit slower. Large capital ships (cruiser, carrier) charge much slower (10 seconds for the cruiser, 12 seconds for the carrier). The warp cooldown after exiting warp also behaves in the same way: higher cooldown for the bigger ships…

HUD

• Aiming direction dot indicators are now displayed on HUD for gimbal weapons (Note: the HUD was already showing these small dot indicators for turrets, but not gimbal guns. Since the gimbal guns kind of behave like turrets, just with a smaller angle, it made sense to also display the dot indicators for them. It’ll also help players to understand why they’re sometimes missing ships quickly traversing their view due to the gimbal gun’s rotation latency)
• Selected target indicator no longer fades out when too close (Note: the selected target indicator was disappearing when you were getting close to a station or a capital ship, making it impossible to know that you had it selected… )

UI / Menus improvements

• Revamped the mission tab menu screen. It now has a visual style / layout similar to the star map
• Mission menu is now the first tab, and is also the new default when launching the game, to emphasize its importance for new players
• Destroyed bases are now dimmer in star map’s targets list
• Implemented under threat/under attack status (orange or red dots in the right column) in starmap’s targets list. Orange dots notify under threat, where a limited number of enemies are gathering around an objective. Red dots notify that the objective is under attack by a large force
• Star map’s search filter now updates targets list dynamically based on what’s being typed
• Star map target’s list now auto-refreshes every 10 seconds while in-game (previously: it only auto-refreshed during respawn, not in game)
• Buttons and various UI text blocks that don’t allow multi lines now auto-rescale their text content down when it’s too long. This should particularly be helpful to fit some localized strings within their UI block
• Buttons border brightness is now reduced compared to content color (small visual tweak)

Bugs fixes / Misc

• Fixed a bug that caused some sounds with a non-standard pitch to get cut short
• Tooltips no longer appears on top of a UI control that has keyboard focus (like an edit text area)

Misc

• Tobii Eye tracking library upgrade to the latest version. Please let us know if you encounter new issues