Patch and Updates Notes

[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

[INovaeFlavien]

Patch 0.7.6.0 ( Saturday September 12th 2020 )

This is the final patch primary focusing on the star map and mission screens. It contains a lot of improvements to these screens, including an improved representation of conflict zones or bases under attack. This patch also replaces and introduces a bunch of new sound effects, with more to come later (we’ll be revamping the sounds over the coming months, and are also in the process of doubling the amount of musical tracks in game). There is still a lot of work to do related to the UI and menus, however we’ll be refocusing our efforts on gameplay starting this next patch, and work on the UI will take the back seat from now on.

Gameplay

• Active mission’s objective’s location is now automatically pre-selected on HUD upon entering the game
• Fixed ship movement being on hold while menus/UI are opened (this caused players to overshoot or collide with planets in warp)

Audio

• New interceptor thrusters sounds
• New small machine gun and blaster sounds
• New gun and blaster projectiles impact sounds
• New small ship and missiles explosion sounds
• New mk4 (corvette) turret machine guns and blasters sounds
• New shotgun (bomber) sound
• Added sound effects for AMS lasers and rotating turrets sound loop
• Rebalanced volume of various sound effects
• Thruster sounds now have a dynamic pitch based on the ship’s angular speed, which should feel more immersive
• Sound effects range and performance optimizations, which should reduce clutter that deteriorated sound quality during large battles

UI / HUD

• Added mission symbols (letters: A, B, C etc…) in starmap/mission screen’s viewports. Each mission is given its own unique color ( with a different hue and saturation ) to help differenciate missions
• Added quick-deploy buttons floating over the starmap/mission screen’s viewports
• Added a panel for filtering and rendering options to the starmap and mission screens. It is now possible to filter the map by entity type (ex.: bases, players, teams, logistics like haulers) etc…
• Added a “heat map” (colored halos around team assets) to map’s viewport, which should emphasize areas of conflict (blue for allies, red for enemies, so it turns purple in areas of conflict)
• Added threat/under-attack indicator dots (orange = threat, red = under attack) to map’s viewport and entities panel
• Added back “Select on HUD” buttons in mission menu and star map for the selected item in the info panel at the bottom-right
• Added arrows on starmap and mission screens showing the direction between your ship and the closest allied base (blue arrow), or to the selected mission (green or orange arrow)
• Added the selected mission’s symbol and objective type to the ship’s HUD floating below its target location’s icon (this should make it extra obvious to new players to see where their objective is)
• Current mission can now be deselected on mission screen (default: backspace)
• Minor UI tweak: tighter tooltip positionning when opening a tooltip around the screen borders
• Minor UI tweak: checkboxes can be toggle by clicking on the text too (not just the check icon only)
• Minor UI optimization: added screen culling to icons rendering
• UI is now properly refreshed when changing the color theme or the language
• Tweaks to UI style in the mission and starmap screens (ex.: new icons for mission categories, improving coloring coherency, etc…)
• Fixed icons located in the back of the camera appearing on screen as mirrored ghost icons
• Fixed HUD and menu icons to be fully resolution independent
• Selected mission’s objective’s indicator is now always enabled on the HUD even if not actively selected (before: it was hidden if it was far away)
• Distances in starmap and mission’s targets list is now calculated as the distance between the player’s ship and the target’s (if in game)
• Fixed coherency of mission names + locations in UI
• Top 3 missions in deployment panel now selects the mission in the mission screen and focuses the camera on it instead of starting deployment
• Improved representation of the selected/active mission in the missions panel
• Fixed trade routes not showing up in mission screen
• Fixed trade routes randomly appearing in team screen
• Deployment panel is now also fully available from the ship screen

Assets

• Updated 3 station modules with improved geometry and materials
• Updated map icons to differenciate between planets, moons and asteroids (they now use different icons)

Bugs fixes / Misc

• Fix for the shield visual effect not being played when a projectile bounced off a shield
• Optimization fix for internal cockpits being loaded/attached and updated for all ships and not just the player’s ship, which wasted cpu resources for no good reason

Misc

• Increased game’s default camera’s vertical FOV from 70° to 80° to see more of the cockpit in small ships
• Server admin commands now dump information to the chat box instead of the HUD’s info MFD (which was too limited in size)

[INovaeFlavien]

Hotfix 0.7.6.1 ( Sunday September 13th 2020 )

• Fixed missiles lifespawn accidentely increased to 200s (they’re now back to their default of 20s)
• Floating starmap’s deploy buttons can no longer be accidentely clicked on while panning / rotating the view
• Flight assist now tries to maintain the current speed while radial menus are opened
• Fixed crash due to large numbers in network interpolator
• Added a sensor screen transition speed setting in the general options menu (default: 1 second)
• Small sound volumes tweaks
• German strings localization update

[INovaeFlavien]

Patch 0.7.7.0 ( Saturday October 17th 2020 )

This patch implements a new match progression system to act as tug-of-war, in order to focus players on a specific battle/location instead of spreading out over multiple battlefields. The changes are pretty experimental so might need urgent balance tweaks in a future hotfix or patch.

The way it works is the following: instead of having multiple battles run at the same time, we only allow one single battle ( AI-commanded directed ) at any one time. One team is attacking, the other one defending. If the attacking team wins, the objective gets destroyed and it can attack another objective again. However, if the team loses, then the initiative goes to the defending team, which then gets its turn to go on the offensive.

Our goal with this change is to focus the action on a specific battlefield instead of spreading the playerbase over multiple battles ( so sometimes players didn’t even encounter each other due to participating to different battles ). The other goal is to make the battles feel more important - which is why we got ride of the critical vs non-critical battles system: now all battles are critical. Losing a battle as a defender means losing the base, period. As a side consequence, the rules should also be easier to understand, especially for new players. Destroy all enemy bases to win the match, that’s it !

Feedback on whether the new system works or not is very much appreciated. This patch also contains a lot of AI tweaks, a new neutral color-theme for the menus/UI, a new panel to compare ships statistics, and as usual plenty of HUD improvements and bug fixes.

Gameplay & AI

• Removed the concept of critical vs non-critical battles. All battles are now critical (the base will get destroyed if the enemy wins the battle) even if it’s no longer explicitely said. This should help to reduce the duration of matches, but also feel like each battle has a stronger impact on the match flow

• Removed condition threshold (<20% of enemy’s) for match victory versus opposite team’s score. It was an obscure rule to speed up the end of a match. Now a match will only end when very single enemy base has been destroyed

• Increased countdown to battle ending from 10s to 2 minutes (battles were ending too quickly with no time to clean leftover ships, and sometimes the same battle restarted at the same location)

• Changed match progression to act as a tug-of-war for battles. Only one battle is active at a time. When a team loses a battle, its opponent gets the initiative for attacking. As a result, the match ping-pongs between teams. However when a team wins an attack battle, it has the opportunity to attack again instantly

• Static defenses on structures are now taken into account when showing a battle’s victory odds to the player

• Attacker teams now have a slight advantage in fleet’s credits budget compared to the defender team’s, to take into account that the defender team’s slightly advantaged due to the static defenses/turrets/platforms

• Shields no longer break down when they’re depleted. Depleted shields now start recharging instantly. A critical hit has been added for shields being damaged instead (like other ship sub systems). It’ll take 30s for shields being repaired

• Energy no longer recharges at the same time as firing weapons in weapons overcharge mode. Weapons overcharge mode felt overpowered compared to the other modes, as if you fired in bursts, your energy was naturally recharging at full rate; so if you alternated between firing bursts, there was little downside to using this overhcharge mode

• Rogue AI/bots will no longer accidentely reinforce/participate in active battles (they were interfering with the score calculations)

• Reduced a little bit the probability of spawning AI capital ships in battles (this should make capital ships more valuable)

• AI can now fire kinetic weapons when their target’s shields are low (previously, shields had to fully depleted or damaged for a bot to start using kinetics)

• Fixed too many AI ganging up on a single enemy. The ratio was previously 5:1, but is now limited to 2:1 (in ship’s score worth)

• Fixed AI ships getting forcibly killed by the server due to remaining in warp in for more than 2 minutes, which could happen for AI destroyers entering a planetary battle. The limit is now 5 minutes

Asteroid and planetary collisions Fixes

• Fixed a bug which ignored projectile collisions on planetary surfaces (projectiles were passing through)

• Fixed multiple collision issues/bugs with asteroids

• Adjusted asteroid rotation speed (massive asteroids now rotate slower, almost unnoticeable)

• Fixed a major resource leak issue in asteroid fields/rings, which could potentially cause slowdowns over time (collision bodies were not properly destroyed when the ring was unloaded)

• Fixed planetary/atmospheric battles ships that were warping in too fast and colliding/dying on the ground before they could even get into battle

User Interface / Menus

• Implemented new user interface / menus color theme (previously: the UI was using the HUD’s color theme, so the colors were messy/all over the place. The new color theme is more neutral to the eye and coherent)

• Added team assets to mission screen’s info panel when selecting a battle. The victory odds are still shown as previously, but the panel now also shows the absolute credit’s worth of assets owned by each team in the battlefield

• Added new ship description and statistics panel in ship menu screen. This will allow to compare the different ships’s statistics together

• Fixed a bug related to textured brushes, which made some images flicker or appear incorrect in the UI (ex.: team selection menu background images were sometimes incorrect for a frame)

• Fixed missing trailings length slider bar in sensors tactical screen

HUD Tweaks and Improvements

• Added new HUD notifications for being repaired/resupplied (or, as a corvette, doing repairs/resupplies), either by an allied ship or in hangars

• Updated spawn marker colors: they’re now only blue for hangars that can fit your ship class (otherwise they’re now red). This will make it more obvious to new players where they can repair/resupply

• Added new floating text indicators on HUD to notify player of closest hangar or resupply ship (corvette).

• Added a new floating text indicator on HUD to notify player of the the closest heavily damaged ally (so as a corvette player, you know who’s in need of repairs)

• Tweaks to HUD warnings/alerts: they’re now colored as a function of importance/priority (info alerts are in cyan, normal alerts in orange, critical alerts in red)

• HUD indicator tweaks (they’re now more opaque)

• Tweaked selected target’s color so that it is more easily visible on the HUD

• Added horizontal alignment to MFDs (ex.: mission MFD is now right-aligned if it’s in the top-right corner of the HUD)

• Changed bounty indicator icon

• Added more explicit target-out-of-range alert if manually firing weapons at a far-away target

• Locking targeting circle color is now shows up as green only if the ship’s direction is aligned to its velocity. This will help firing missiles/torpedoes at targets within the circle

General bug fixes and Improvements

• Fixed friendly fire warning not showing up when hitting modular structures
• Fixed credits being reset to 0 instead of 50 when the match restarts

Assets and Visuals

• Updated a dozen station modular assets with their upgraded visuals (better geometry, improved materials/colors, added ambient occlusion etc…)

• Added ground (planetary surfaces or asteroids) impact projectile effect

• Updated bobblehead models with new look and textures

• Dust-particles effect now uses a non-uniform, more realistic density model (rings and close to thick atmospheres = higher dust density)

• The dust-particles effect is now affected by the ‘effects quality’ setting

• Modular structures destruction/explosion effects now fade off over time (previously, the small explosions never stopped and could become annoying)

• Updated spawn/hangar modular markers (also, fixed the ones for ground bases)

• Updates to spawns: dimensions tweaks, added new markers, added some new spawns in ground modules

• Updated destruction materials and added some missing materials ( some modules, like HUBs, did not have destruction materials and did not appear destroyed to the players)

Audio

• Fixed a major bug when initializing the audio device. It defaulted to 5.1 output, even for stereo users. As a result, if you were using a stereo device, sound quality was negatively affected. The game should now properly use your default audio device’s setup and most users should notice a sound quality increase (especially if you were playing in stereo or 2.1)
• Added menu option to change the output audio device on the fly (without having to restart the game)
• Audio volume adjustments for rotating turrets, weapons firing sound range, explosions sound range…
• Updated some audio effects after last patch’s feedback (new AMSl laser sound effect, improved machine gun sounds, improved some projectile impact sounds)

Misc

• Updated some default game settings (ex.: MFD layouts per ship, increased navigation targets from 30 to 50, … )
• Updated game’s initial settings to better take into account quality level based of CPU speed and GPU video-ram
• Moved default viewpoint in corvette slightly to the left (to be seated)

[INovaeFlavien]

Patch 0.7.8.0 ( Saturday October 24th 2020 )

This small patch focuses on some important bug fixes related to planets, and introduces a new moon: Rygol, an arid Arizona-inspired moon full of canyons and terraced cliffs with a radius of 4250 Km and a green-ish atmosphere.

• Introduced a new planet: Rygol. Note that the current Battlescape still only has 4 moons max, so not all matches will necessarily feature the new moon
• Updates to new base locations on Sarake and Aresthia
• Fixed incorrect (floating) hardpoints when mapping a defense (tower) module on a planetary surface (turrets were sometimes floating in the air far above their tower)
• Fixed warp-in incorrect target location that lead an AI ship crashing into the ground after a ground battle started
• Fixed planetary collision issues due to the difference of precision in some noise functions between cpu and gpu. It mostly affect Aresthia, the Mars-like planet, where some craters had invalid collisions (sometimes you’d hit a ghost hill far above from the ground)
• Fixed haulers that sometimes had trouble engaging warp and leaving a dense atmosphere
• AI ships now know when to overcharge their engines on planets where gravity is too strong for their mass
• Corvette turrets will now keep auto-aiming at their target even when they’re not the active weapon (this will minimize the re-targetting time when switching between turret guns / turret blasters)
• Light weapons and MK4 turrets slight increase in max hit points (corvette weapons were very weak and easily destroyed by opponents)
• Respawning will no longer open the starmap menu. It will now retain the previous menu that the player had selected in game
• Fixed spawn marker colors for capital ships in docking bays (the markers remained red, as invalid, but should now properly be displayed as green, meaning busy)
• Minor bobblehead/textures tweaks

[INovaeFlavien]

Patch 0.8.0.0 ( Saturday December 19th 2020 )

Hey everbody. As you can see, we’ve increased the major version number for this patch. That’s because this patch is probably the biggest/most complex of the year, and brings the long-awaited ship upgrades system and custom loadouts into play.

The implementation required some huge code refactoring so it is likely to have stability and balance issues, especially as we haven’t been able to test all the combinations of ships and upgrades yet. Remember that this is only the initial implementation.

We’ll add new upgrades and weapons on a regular basis in the coming months. We’d love to get community feedback on the new system: is it working well, is it confusing, is the loadout customization interface too complex or intuitive to use ? Are there upgrades which you find useless, or overpowered ? What other upgrades or weapons would you like to see ?

Let us know on the forums or on Discord and see you in game !

Upgrades, loadouts and ship menu

• Introduced the new ship upgrades(/components) system and its UI. The main idea here was to extend the hardpoints system not just to weapons, but also to internal hardpoints. All hardpoints are now restricted to a category of components that you can mount on them. For example, a “structural” hardpoint can only mount structural components, and not weapons or sensors. Some upgrades have size/class restrictions as well and might not be avaialble on all ships
• The list of components available to your ship and their categories is displayed on the right-side panel
• A “show mounted only” checkbox is also available next to the categories. The upgrades panel will only show components currently mounted on your ship’s loadout
• Hardpoints are now displayed on top of the 3D viewport. They can be hollow (hardpoint is free) or filled (a component is mounted on it). The icon can be a small circle for internal hardpoints, or an hexagon for external/weapons hardpoints. The color is green (hardpoint is free), red (hardpoint mounted) or yellow (selected)
• Components can have dependencies on other components (requirements or incompatibilities). Components that are currently mounted are displayed in green. Available components (but not yet mounted) are in blue. Finally, components which you cannot mount (due to a dependency issue for instance) are displayed in orange
• When hovering over a hardpoint in the 3D viewport, or a component in the upgrades list, the details/information about the component or weapon statistics gets displaying in the information panel at the bottom-right corner of the screen
• Components have tech levels. These are currently only for information purposes only, however we’re currently evaluating the possibility of introducing technological research done at military bases that would unlock new upgrades for your whole team
• A loadout management bar is available at the top-right corner of the screen
• The icons in order are: save loadout to disk (this will make the loadout available in future play sessions); duplicate the current loadout into a new one; rename the loadout; undo/revert changes to the loadout; reset/empty the loadout to a fresh start (all hardpoints become empty); and finally: delete the loadout (including from disk)
• Note that default loadouts cannot be deleted. They can be temporarily modified, but if you do any change to a default loadout, make sure you undo/revert the changes if you’re not satisfied with them. If you’re happy with your changes and want to save the loadout, you’ll have to duplicate and rename it first before the “save” option becomes available
• In terms of content we introduced about 25 upgrades and components. These range from familar components (flight assist, targetting assist, warp jammer, repair and resupply fields etc… ) to new upgrades that modify your ship’s statistics (ex.: feather weight reduces its mass, giving more mobility at the expense of a hit points reduction). Storage upgrades provides extra ammo/chaffs/missiles. Weaponry provides upgrades to the ship systems in general, or a sub-category of weapons
  in particular (ex.: faster turrets rotation or increased AMS laser damage). Some categories are currently empty as we haven’t implemented upgrades in them just yet (ex.: no propulsion upgrades are available yet)
• We also introduced 2 new weapons: the Halcyon and the Plasma cutter. Both are converging weapons, which means that the weapon will no longer auto-aim at the target like the standard guns/blasters. As a converging weapon however, it will automatically adjust its firing angle towards the “depth” at which the target currently is. Those weapons require more skills/precision, and as a result have a higher DPS than the standard gimbaled weapons
• Ship’s 3D model now correctly displays the team’s skin
• Ship’s 3D model now renders the loadout’s selected weapons on the hull
• Chat box is no longer visible on the ship or team menus anymore (for layout/lack of space reasons)
• Updated ship statistic bars and values to show how the current loadout positively or negatively affects each attribute (ex.: +10% mass, -15% hitpoints etc…)
• Added more statistics (ex.: recharge rates) to the ship statistics panel

Music and assets

• Introduced new musical tracks in game as they were too repetitive, especially in battles. The amount of music in game was doubled (6 new battle tracks, 3 new ambient tracks, 2 new danger tracks). Credits and thanks go to our compositer, Markus Zierhofer (http://markus-zierhofer.com)
• The music system now randomizes the order in which the tracks are being played (previously: it was sequential)
• New station asset (a new docking bay module) for haulers
• Loads of new icons for the new upgrades system

HUD and general UI

• Updated layout of deployment panel: the design is now more compact and top 3 missions list was removed
• Revamped locking system when a missile/torpedo launcher is selected: the ‘aim’ circle now dynamically changes it size based on the alignment angle towards the target. The new system takes into account your velocity and the target’s velocity and distance, to show
  you a spinning ‘lead’ indicator/reticle. Orientating your ship on this reticle will maximize your chances of the missile/torpedo hitting your target. An arrow is also displayed on the aim circle to show you in which direction you should fire your lateral thrusters to compensate the target’s relative velocity/direction
• Revamped team scores in tab menu: removed the progress bar, now the scores appear on the left/right sides of the menu tabs. Icon is bigger, and the name of the team is displayed
• Fixed “make target” bug in mission panel that sometimes didn’t change the HUD’s primary target
• Closest spawn point button on starmap screen (while having opened the menu in game, not at spawn) now selects the corresponding base in the map or missions list panel. This button also becomes automatically disabled if the closest spawn base is being selected in the list
• Fixed a clipping bug that stopped rendering the HUD radar ring or missile aiming helper when it’s partially out of the screen (but should still be partially visible)
• More HUD icons shoould have a black outline for readability over bright backgrounds
• Fixed a refresh bug that still showed the base having deployable spawns in the star map after it got destroyed
• Fixed a bug that caused ships standing in their spawn to display the hangar’s spawn marker as valid (green) despite belonging to the enemy team
• Nearest hangar’s text marker helper on HUD now stops showing as soon as its base gets destroyed (previously: the marker only disappeared after the hangar module gets destroyed, which could be a dozen seconds later)
• Scrollbars now appear thinner
• Fixed last death position incorrectly appearing at (0, 0, 0) with a red icon the first time the player joins a server (hence never had a ‘last death position’)
• Fixed Windows focus event that could result in accidental UI clicks (now, if the window does not have focus, the first mouse click that gives the focus to the game will no longer result in an in-game click)
• Fixed truncated right & bottom borders around some UI panels/windows in resolutions <= 1080p
• Fixed various UI layout bugs related to list boxes

Bug fixes

• Fixed instant action deploy system which listed an AI ship that the player couldn’t afford to take over due to not having enough credits (it was possible to click on the button, then the action got silentely denied by the server…)
• Fixed carrier that couldn’t spawn at large stations anymore
• Carrier now spawn at station docking bays instead of thin air/far away in space
• Fixed a bug that auto-repaired some modules (defense turrets, hangars…) right after they reached 0 hitpoints, forcing them to stay alive despite the base being destroyed
• Fixed a bug that caused some far-away modules (like defense platforms) to stay alive despite the base being destroyed
• Fixed random client crash bug related to HUD indicators getting deleted at the wrong time
• Fixed an issue that prevented the closest resupply ship to appear outside the (close) visual range
• Fixed FMOD crash due to listing and try to get driver information from disconnected/unplugged audio devices
• Fixed a crash bug when mouse clicking right as the application is starting

Known issues

• Ships have gravity issues on planets ( even the interceptor ). We added a ramp-up factor so that ship’s don’t instantly accelerate, but this results in a loss of sufficient anti-gravity acceleration to compensate for gravity on planets. We’ll revamp the ramp-up factor to take gravity into account
• UI and HUD icons are messed up in low quality texture mode. As a workaround, you can increase the texture quality to medium or high. We’ll work on a hotfix asap
• The prices of ships and their loadouts has inflated. We adjusted the economy in consequence, but this hasn’t been throughly tested. It might be more difficult to earn enough credits to afford the better loadouts or capital ships than in previous versions. Feedback on the economy ( are you having difficulities with it, or do you find it more challenging in a good way ? ) is welcome
• station/base defenses no longer fire at enemies. This is also a high priority for a hotfix
• on custom loadouts, the weapon groups are automatically assigned and might not be in the ideal order (for example, you could have multiple groups for the same weapon… )

[INovaeFlavien]

Patch 0.8.1.0 ( Tuesday December 22th 2020 )

After we released the ship upgrades and custom loadouts patch a few days ago, we fixed a number of issues (some of which are pretty important) and added a polish pass over the loadouts interface. We also addressed some of the most urgent balance issues related to the two new weapons, the Halcyon and the Plasma Cutter.

General and gameplay

• Introduced carrier spawns (compatible with other capital ships too) and updated station layouts to allow carriers to spawn at docking bays that have enough room for a carrier. Carriers will no longer spawn in space far away from stations. Note: we introduced a new icon to represent the carrier spawn. It currently uses the 'L’arge character, like other capital ships. In a future patch we’ll replace it with a dedicated 'C’arrier icon
• Starmap list now takes compatible spawns into account when displaying “deployable” vs “non-deployable” hints and icons. This means that if you’re an interceptor trying to deploy at a base where all fighter hangars are destroyed but corvette bays are still intact, the list will now show “deployable” instead of preventing you from being able to deploy there
• Reduced amount of chaffs on Interceptor to 10. This should make the chaff upgrade more interesting
• Added a new upgrade: Efficient Booster. This upgrade reduces the booster’s energy consumption by -30% at the expense of a small piece of the shield’s recharge rate (-15%)
• Doubled the amount of hitpoints on MK5 Flak canons, as they were too easily damaged in combat
• Reduced Halcyon shot speed, range and damage. It still has slightly more DPS than gimbaled machine guns, but you’ll need good accuracy to fully exploit it
• Reduced range and damage on the Plasma Cutter (although less than the Halcyon nerf). Shot speed is unchanged
• Reduced spread on Halcyon and Plasma Cutter, making them more accurate at larger distances
• Reduces heat (Halcyon) and heat+energy consumption (Plasma Cutter) to allow firing them for a longer time
• Fixed some Halcon and Plasma cutter settings which made their converging mode useless. The new settings should make it more easy to hit a target

Bug fixes

• Fixed HUD icons being messed up at “low-quality” texture level
• Fixed a bug with the deploy panel that didn’t refresh the ship screen’s upgrades/components panel after changing the selected deployment loadout
• Fixed a propulsion issue caused by introducing a ramp-up factor at very low speeds. This made ships unable to take-off from planets when they were at zero/very low speeds
• Fixed custom loadout’s automatic weapon groups being messed / mixed up together sometimes (or even having missing weapons…). Weapons are still assigned to groups automatically, but we’ll provide a weapons configuration screen in a future patch

Improvements and UI tweaks

• “Not enough credits” flashing text on the ship screen was moved at the top of the screen instead of occluding the center; loadout credits text is now smaller to fit on a single line for large credits values…
• Selecting a specific component’s category in the ship’s loadout panel will now filter hardpoints that match this category in the 3D viewport
• Changed weapons hardpoints to a diamond shape (the hexagon was too close to a circle and be confusing)
• Weapon’s details info panel text is now colored the same as the weapon card in the upgrades panel
• Fixed some incorrect weapon details that appeared in the info panel, like for missile/torpedo launchers
• Added locking range information for missile/torpedo launchers in the info panel
• Duplicating a loadout will now automatically pop up the rename window
• Deleting a loadout will now pop up a confirmation window to avoid doing it accidentally
• Icon tweaks (ex.: info panel’s dots are now smaller; added an up/down icon to match whether an attribute improves or hurts a ship’s attribute)

Misc

• added final version of the new musical tracks with smoother transitions
• added a new audio effect for the Plasma Cutter weapon

[INovaeFlavien]

Patch 0.8.2.0 ( Friday 01 January 2021 )

Hey everybody, first of all: Happy New Year! We’re starting the year with a new patch which aims at fixing a lot of the bugs recently introduced in patches 0.8.X as well as some quality-of-life improvements. Now that the new ship upgrades/loadout system is in place, we’ll be moving towards the player/team statistics screen revamp, the battle reports and introducing the new skill rating/scoring/leaderboard system as well as tuning the economy and match progression. There’s no precise ETA for the next patch, although we’re aiming at releasing it some time around the end of the month.

After these new features have been implemented, the next big major tasks will be to develop the squad/fleet management systems and some overdue AI improvements (making AI fly in formation, assisting the player, improving the missions system…). As you can see, 2021 is going to be a busy year…

General and gameplay changes

• Added mass to weapons and rebalanced ship’s empty hull’s mass to be lighter so that default loadouts do not weight more with the new weapons mass (resulting in the same ship’s speeds and accelerations)
• Mass changes from loadout now affects rotation (turn) speed
• Added new upgrade: Spinner. Increases by +25% the rotation (turn) speed, at the cost of aiming precision and taking more time to compensate angular momentum when turning back
• Created a new default loadout for the Interceptor called “Hawk” which focuses on mobility (it has feather full, improved turbo boost and the spinner upgrade)
• AI now has a 25% chance to spawn an interceptor bot with the Hawk loadout

Ship upgrades/loadout screen fixes and improvements

• Fixed incorrect loadouts when taking over an A.I. ship or sometimes for random custom loadouts
• Fixed warp entry’s speed that wasn’t affected by mass changes from custom loadouts
• Added a digit of precision to various ship’s statistics in the loadout screen
• Changing a component category in the ship loadout screen now resets the component selection/filter in the 3D view (it was confusing that all hardpoints disappeared because the component selected was from the older category)
• Fixed repair rate statistic being incorrectly treated as a negative instead of a positive change in the ship screen
• The ship loadout’s screen and deployment panel now remember the last selected loadout for a given ship class when switching the ship class (instead of resetting it to the main default loadout)

UI / HUD

• Switching between internal and external camera mode with capital ships no longer changes the view orientation
• The camera view is now properly reset to being behind the ship when deploying a capital ship (previously it used the previous camera’s orientation at the time of death)
• Reduced the size of the missile aiming lock circle (it was too large and was distracting)
• Fixed target info’s hitpoints not being displayed on the HUD when it was below 1%
• Hit marker sound effects will now play even on low damage hits for consistency (sometimes it felt like you were not hitting the target at all, while in reality you did, but you were doing no damage to it…)
• “Low damage output” alert will now be displayed as a warning notification when the damage output of your current weapon isn’t sufficient to deal significant damage to the target (ex.: interceptor machine gun trying to hit a capital ship’s hull)
• Updated keybindings help screen (F9)
• Reduced brightness of keybindings help screen so that it doesn’t glow
• Added a warning message when trying to activate the warp jam while it’s still under cooldown
• Fixed HUD’s weapons aiming dots smoothing, which wasn’t working outside the screen boundaries and sometimes caused the dots to suddenly jump back into it at an incorrect position
• Added a gravity alert that triggers when propulsion’s anti-gravity cannot compensate gravity anymore
• Fixed carrier deployment icon (now uses a “C” icon instead of an “L”)

General bug fixes

• Carrier hardpoint layout fixes (their orientation was messed up, causing some turrets or missile launchers to fire through the hull)
• Fixed static defenses on bases that weren’t firing at incoming enemy targets
• Fixed ramp-up factor slowing down the ship when reverting momentum during flight/combat
• Fixed AMS lasers hitting a target through walls/assets
• Fixed AMS lasers hit consistency as the laser beam switches between hits & misses (sometimes after a miss it did not resume hitting properly despite the target being in the line of sight)
• Fixed a potential mutithreading crash bug on the server related to metal crates

Misc

• German localization update (thanks to Playbenni)

[INovaeFlavien]

Patch 0.8.3.0 (Saturday 27 February 2021)

Greetings everybody ! This is a major new patch introducing the new player progression mechanics, a new team screen including stats with a new leaderboard, and battle reports. A lot of the changes are experimental and will need further refining/tuning, so as usual feedback is welcome.

We’ve also shifted the economy to work passively (credits get distributed regularly by the AI commander, instead of having to grind them actively in game) which should improve the strategical depth to the game and give more importance to attacking or protecting haulers.

We’re introducing the concept of research & development, under the form of science points that get researched at military facilities, finally giving them a strategical purpose. As your team accumulates research points, it unlocks new tech levels which unlock weapons and ship upgrades.

For the individual player progression, we introduced the concept experience points (XP) which are used to get promoted to a higher your military rank, also unlocking certain weapons and upgrades. XP and rank only ever goes up and can never be lost, and unlike credits, is persistent accross matches. Finally, we’ve introduced the concept of team rating (TR) which measures your individual performance and how much you’re contributing to your faction’s war efforts. You can earn or lose rating points after succeeding or failing a battle/mission, and the calculation is similar to a chess ELO-like system, taking into account the team ratings and participation of your opponents. At the moment, we’ve decided against locking ships, weapons or upgrades to your rating, as it’d prevent players with a lower skill level to access some of the content. We’re currently thinking of tying the rating to special cosmetics and maybe some special social roles, like the team commander, but if you have more ideas do not hesitate to let us know. Team rating is also persistent accross matches.

Next patch we’ll continue on iterating/adjusting the new progression mechanics, while doing a new pass over the weapons systems, rebalancing them, and finally introducing sub-systems targetting.

Progression system

• Implemented match progression: military rank, xp and team rating
• You now get XP instead of credits for killing enemy ships, and for participating to battles/missions
• Once XP reaches a threshold it will level-up your military rank. There are 10 ranks total at the moment, with increasing XP thresholds
• XP only ever goes up, you cannot lose XP even if you fail at missions or get killed
• Some weapons or upgrades are locked in by military rank. It is still possible to edit the loadouts, but you won’t be able to spawn them without meeting their requirements
• Team rating (TR) starts at 1500 and utilizes a chess ELO-like system, which measures your skill level and how you win or lose with your faction
• You earn or lose TR points based on your achievements and statistics in a battle/mission, once a battle report pops up
• Your TR is compared against the enemy team’s, in a complex formula that includes the average opponent’s rating points and the initial victory odds
• So if you were favored to win and actually won, you’ll gain less points than winning when you were favored to lose, and vice-versa in case of defeat
• TR gains or losses are weighted by your participation points, which measure the amounts of activity (no matter if you performance well or bad) during the mission
• Implemented team tech level and R&D which generate ‘science points’ at military facilities, which level up the team’s tech level automatically
• There is no individual player tech level, the tech level is shared by all members of the team
• Some weapons or upgrades are locked in by team’s tech level like the military rank
• Tech level starts at 1 at the match’s start and goes up to 5 after a few hours, assuming military facilities haven’t been destroyed
• XP, military rank and team rating are persistent accross matches (but not servers)
• The tech level is not persistent and will reset after the match ends

Team statistics screen

• Revamped the team menu tab, now called ‘Stats’, to show the player leaderboard and the current team’s / match statistics
• There is now a leaderboard panel at the center which shows players either online or offline, irrespective of their current team (all mixed up)
• Each entry in the leaderboard shows the player’s rating rank (sorted by descending rating score), military rank/player name, kills/assists/death match stats, and time online (if the player is currently offline, it’ll show the last time this player connected on this server)
• There are filter options to show all players (from the past 30 days), players that participated in the current match, or players currently online only
• The leaderboard should now properly show players logging in/out (previously: some caching bugs sometimes caused some players to be invisible to new players)
• Each team now has a dedicated panel showing various stats, such as match score, number of players per team, average team rating, credits income/amounts, science research points/tech level and ships losses/amounts. There’s also an asset panel showing the amount of ships and bases for that team currently owned (or detected, if belonging to the enemy) in game
• Implemented match statistics, which are sent to the client when he joins a server, then gets updated every minute. They are displayed as a graph at the bottom of the team panel. Different statistics/graphs can be toggled on or off (note: this still needs a polish pass, changing colors if there are many graphs, showing the axis names/range etc…)

Battle reports

• Implemented battle/mission reports that pop up a statistic screen at the end of a battle
• The battle report automatically opens up only when you enter the in-game menus (default key: TAB)
• The report shows rating changes (gain or loss), participation ratio, mission score and XP gained
• Your mission score is calculated from your statistics during the mission: how many ships you killed, how you died, how much damage you made to enemy ships or structures, or how much you assisted your team like via repairs/resupplies
• The center of the panel cycles every 10 seconds between 2 tabs: the first one shows the podium for the top 3 players and their mission scores. The second one shows the top 8 players, you included, with the score ranking and various statistics
• The bottom of the panel also shows a bunch of toggle-able graphs showing your statistics over the battle/mission duration. If you did not participate during some time, some gaps in the graphs might appear
• When you close (‘Dismiss’) the report, the leaderboard will temporarily open to show your change of rating before/after the mission or battle
• Note that closed reports currently are not stored and cannot be re-opened later on, so if you’re interested in your stats, do not close the panel too quickly

Economy

• Rebalanced the economy towards a more passive credits income system
• Credits still get redistributed to players over time, every minute. Target is 25 credits/minute per player
• Credits still get generated at space stations after a hauler travelled there from a factory
• Credits cannot be earned from killing normal ships or destroying base structures anymore
• Credits can still be earned ‘actively’ by targetting ships with bounties placed on by your team commander
• Tweaked haulers income: each hauler now has a much higer resource load (x2 to x3 compared to before)

Weapons

• Fixed an issue that caused slight irregular fire frequencies when firing a weapon
• Burst firing will no longer resume at previous burst count after being interrupted. A new burst will properly start after some short cooldown
• Fixed the torpedo launcher that had a mass of zero. It now has a mass of 2 tons

Mouse cursor sensitivity

Note: it is possible that the sensitivity settings have changed since the previous versions if you’ve customized them. If so, you might need to re-check and adapt your settings again

• Fixed sensitivity settings: mouse cursor now takes into account windows settings (mouse speed, window DPI)
• Made coherent the range of sensitivity sliders in the options men
• Changing a sensitivity slider is now applied instantly instead of having to apply & close the options menu

New control scheme

• Added a new control scheme: ‘auto-recentering’
• It works like in other space games: you still have a cursor whose relative position on screen controls where and how fast you turn, but this cursor is hidden by default (there is an option to make it visible)
• This cursor automatically moves back towards the screen center after a delay where you don’t move it. This delay can be changed with a slider in the options menu
• The speed at which the cursor moves back can also be changed through a slider in the options menu
• This control scehem should feel more natural than the ‘direct mode’ for the mouse, like you’re in better control of the orientation of your ship, so mouse users that do not like the default virtual cursor control scheme and do not find the direct mode to work well, could give this one a try

General bug fixes and improvements

• Fixed HDR/IBL generation bug that made the whole screen turn white for a long time in certain conditions
• Fixed server browser ping in the 100-200 ms range being displayed in red/bad instead of yellow/average
• Fixed a rare bug with credits initially showing as zero on the client upon joining a match, despite the player having more than zero credits on the server
• Players can now change their call sign/name in game (previously, the change was only applied on joining a server)
• Fixed drop shadows not appearing correctly below some icons (ex.: team icons at the top of the menu tab had a black square background instead of a drop shadow)
• Fixed a UI bug that could cause a crash if a panel was being refreshed/rebuilt while scrolling its content

[INovaeFlavien]

Patch 0.8.4.0 (Saturday 26th June 2021)

Greetings everybody. We apologize for the delay in releasing this new patch. Production has been going slower than anticipated due to a combination of technical factors (we had to change our certification company, we cleaned up project organization and assets for the first time in years, etc…) and new game features (the new sub-targetting system is now in, and allows you to target structural modules on bases or hardpoints). We also reworked the engine’s texture compression, which should lead to an increase of textures quality (no more blocky compression artifacts up close) and saving up VRAM usage.

On the content side, this patch introduces new military ranks, 6 new space stations and 3 new weapons. The flaks were also reworked to be more effective and a new pass has been made on the starmap (yep, again…) to make it interactive (you can now click on icons to select a target instead of having to scroll in the targets panel) and make the camera behavior more intuitive. As this patch has a lot of new content and features, expect new bugs and issues to get addressed in a future patch (this time sooner!) and let us know in the comments section or forums your feedback. Also note that a community event is planned in a few hours this Saturday. See you in game,

-Flavien Brebion

General / Gameplay

• Added 6 new space stations: 2 large ones (including a remake of the Kickstarter’s Skycrane 35-Km-sized station), 1 medium one (an asteroid processing space factory) and 3 small ones (outposts with no capital ships docks)
• New light weapon: the railgun. Available on small crafts (MK1/M2 hardpoints), the railgun is a fixed non-converging weapon with a blind zone at short range. It deals a lot of damage but has a low firing rate. The electromagnetic launcher allows very high projectile speeds (3 Km/s, double the typical gun) with no spread and little heat generation at the cost of extra mass, making your ship less maneuverable. The lack of gimbals makes and the low firing rate makes the railgun a powerful but specialized weapon
• New turret weapon: the railgun turret. This heavy MK4 variant can be mounted on capital ships for point defense. It retains most of the advantages of the light variant, but has a low turret tracking rotation speed and a higher spread
• New missile launcher: EMP missiles. When these missiles detonate they generate an energetic blast (causing splash damage in a radius of 500m) causing 100 damage to shields and energy reserves
• Added 2 new default loadouts, one for an interceptor with railguns and an EMP missile launcher; the other one for a railgun-mounted destroyer
• Implemented docking mechanics to refund/change ship when standing inside a hangar/bay. This can be done through the system menu (escape key) or via the deploy panel in the starmap. This features requires your ship to be fully repaired and not be under fire. Full credits will be refunded
• Introduced 10+ new military ranks (new low-level officer ranks and new high-level admiral ranks)

Targetting System

• Added the new sub-targetting system, allowing to target an individual structural module or a hardpoint on a ship or a base
• A structural module (on a base, for example) can be targetted via the select-target under cursor key (default: T)
• New input events and keybindings are now available to target a sub-system or a hardpoint on the current target (if there are no targets, these keys do nothing). The defaults are alt-T to select the sub-target under the cursor, alt-Y and alt-U to cycle through the previous/next sub-target respectively
• A new input event was also added to select the nearest ally (default: alt-G)
• When a sub-system or hardpoint is targetted, a red square will appear on the current target. The lead reticle and distance indicators will use it as the point of reference
• Modified the behavior of the unselect-target key (default: backspace) to go back to the parent actor if a module or hardpoint had been targetted
• Note that the AI currently does not make use of this feature, but this will be a point of focus of an upcoming patch

Balance

• Revamped explosions splash damage/radius curve: the old curve was so abrupt that it almost never generated splash damage from missiles. The new curve should generate more splash damage from detonating missiles and be a bit more dangerous to being close to a dying capital ship
• Doubled repair rate of capital ships when docked at spawns. Also slightly increased shields regen rate
• Repair/resupplying (from a corvette aura or inside a hangar/bay) now gets interrupted for 10 seconds after firing weapons (so you need to wait 10s without firing your weapons before you start getting repaired/resupplied)
• Rebalanced Flak canons: they now fire in burst with a cooldown (DPS is similar to what it was before) and have a higher projectile velocity, at the cost of splash radius. This should make them more effective against light crafts
• Tweaked warp speed limit to take into account custom loadout mass changes (this should make it easier for a heavy cruiser to navigate in warp)

HUD

• Added an alert message on the HUD when your ship is standing in the wrong hangar/bay type and repair/resupply/docking isn’t available
• Target/throttle speed is now represented as a filled arrow on the HUD’s speed’o’meter
• Speed’o’meter background color is now darker for speeds above the speed cap, making it easier to see what the cap is
• Fixed some layout issues with match score and ranks in the main menu or the ship menu (sometimes the font size was too large and text was clipped)
• Hit feedback icon will now blink and play the ding sound even upon dealing low damage (this was sometimes confusing, as you thought you didn’t hit the target)
• Fixed interceptor scanner not matching the HUD’s transparency during power fluctuations
• Added a “reset MFD” button in the general options to reset the MFD layout of a given ship

Deployment Panel

• Revamped deployment buttons to be more coherent. In the mission map, the deploy button will now properly match the selected mission’s objective (if it’s an allied based) or the starmap’s selected base
• Deployment buttons from the deployment panel now have better titles to reflect the behavior of the button (you’ll now know if you’re taking over an A.I., or spawning at a carrier…)
• Added a warning when you’re about to take over an A.I., with a confirmation dialog

Leaderboard Screen

• Fixed incorrect centering of report screen in ultra-wide resolutions
• Fixed player’s stats going over a billion on report screen
• Fixed player’s ships damage stats in report screen not taking armor points reduction into account
• Fixed leaderboard caching issues when switching to a different server
• Leaderboard panel now remembers previously selected options after changing to another menu tab

Tab Menus (Starmap, Mission, Loadouts…)

• Merged star map and mission map view/camera. This should be less confusing, as previously each screen had its own independent camera position/orientation
• Default star map view will now center on the current Battlescape (=Rethe Prime at the moment)
• Arrow leading to mission area will no longer be displayed before you haven’t spawned yet (a ‘ghost’ arrow was displayed from the center of the map)
• Changing the selected mission will no longer change the selected target to be the mission objective’s in the star map list
• Improvements to starmap’s camera: it will now stay at the same elevation above the grid plane, making it easier to move around when the view is rotated
• Starmap (/and mission map, as they’ve been merged) is now interactive. It is possible to click on an icon (either a target or a mission) to select it and center the camera on it
• Double-clicking on an icon will now focus the camera on it and also automatically zoom around it
• View-reset key (default: double tap left-ctrl) now resets the camera to focus on a target
• Select-target key (default: T) can now be used on the starmap to select a target
• R/F keys can now be used on the starmap to zoom in/out on the selected target
• Mouse wheel will now zoom in/out at the cursor location (so not necessarily on the screen center) which allows to zoom on a location of the starmap and panning the camera at the same time
• The grid plane is now automatically set on the selected target (previously, it stays on the reference actor, which had to be manually set, and was usually forgotten)
• Revamped the floating/3D texture size around actors in the starmap’s viewport to be more coherent with the target size
• The selected target’s name in the viewport is now highlighted in yellow, like in the actors list panel UI
• The selection sound is now played when changing the selected target or mission on the starmap
• The ship menu will now show the available system/weapons upgrades even while in-game and not just during spawn. By default, the game only displays the systems currently mounted on your ship
• Added failure sound when trying to fit a component/weapon on a ship layout while in game (loadouts can only be edited on spawn);

Technical

• Revamped texture compression to support grayscale, BC5, BC6 and BC7 formats. Without being too technical, these newer compression formats allow the game to reduce VRAM usage while increasing textures quality at the same time (you’ll see less blocky compression artifacts when being close to a texture).
  Internal tests show a reduction of about 1 to 1.5 GB of VRAM in high/extreme quality settings, or about 10-15%. There might be some light performance increases on VRAM or bandwidth-starved video cards.
• Updated FMOD API to latest version
• “Default” loadout name text can now be localized in the strings table
• Fixed “GenericAction” missing sound from log files

Bug fixes

• Fixed a major client crash/memory corruption issues due to incorrectly calculating a compressed texture’s storage requirements for non-power-of-2 textures
• Fixed capital ships control scheme not working after being changed on-the-fly in the options menu
• Fixed camera view instantly jumping around when changing control scheme to capital ship on-the-fly in the options menu
• Fix for particle child emitters that stopped to work after a few seconds (child emitter’s data was not properly reset after a particle gets recycled from the pool). This caused some hierarhical particle effects to look wrong

GFX

• Fixed various assets related to cleanup of project
• Tweaks to ‘space dust’ effect, to make it more noticeable and better take into account the environmental density (aka. no space dust in deep space but more dust in rings!)
• Fixed shrapnel effect quality when dying: the shrapnel debris will no longer get ejected at crazy speeds near your ship when dying
• Added a new slider to control the space/skybox background’s brightness in the graphical options
• Added major ship debris/junk for exploding capital ships. More specialized, larger pieces are also in the workds for a future patch; These debris last 5 minutes on the battlefield before fading off. They can even be collided against or destroyed by firing at them
• Weapons on light crafts will now better synchronize their firing timing (previously, the left/right guns for ex. on an interceptor could be staggered)
• Revamped visual effect for: ship explosions, counter-measures/chaffs (they should now be more visible), warp-jam, impacts/sparks, smoke, shrapnel (red glow is less noticeable)
• Updated glowing material for surface destruction, to make the UV tiling/repetition patterns less noticeable
• Fixed flak canons mesh size
• Doubled projectiles brightness, to make them more easily noticeable against busy backgrounds

[INovaeFlavien]

Patch 0.8.5.0 (Thursday 15th July 2021)

Hey everybody, here’s a new intermediary patch focusing on balance changes and quality-of-life improvements. The next big item on our TODO list is revamping the navigation system (the “tunnel helper” showing up during warp) and generating waypoints for players and bots to navigate through the
solar system. This is an important milestone that will eventually allow the AI to fly between points of interests, instead of warping in/out “magically” as it currently does. We will also introduce new tools available to players to set up a “flight plan”, to better coordinate attacks and follow objectives. This will tie into the next big feature we’ll be working on during summer: the squad/fleet system and VOIP.

-Flavien Brebion

Balance / gameplay changes

• Railguns now consume energy in addition to normal ammo (Note: it was originally intended to be a hybrid kinetic/energy weapon, but due to lack of time the energy consumption couldn’t make it into the previous patch)
• Added repair/resupply field to the carrier (Note: does not work on other capital ships, only light ships. The range and rate are slightly more efficient than the corvette’s repair/resupply fields)
• Reduced base cost and mass of carrier to take into account repair/resupply fields (Note: the goal here was to get the same mass/cost than in the previous versions, repair/resupply fields included)
• Removed tech level requirement to mount a weapon or component on a ship (Note: this constraint was frustrating to some players. Tech levels are still in game but currently do not affect anything. If we keep this change, we’re planning on introducing team abilities in the future that will be unlocked by the
  tech level)
• Multiplied by x5 the repair rate of weapons/turrets from repair fields (Note: a corvette repairing a capital ship’s turrets was extremely slow. We’re testing this multiplier to see if it works better)
• Significantly increased shield regen rate on all capital ships (Note: shields were regenerating at an extremely slow rate. With this change, regeneration is still relatively slow and will take many minutes to reach 100%, but it’ll give a chance of getting back a bit of shields while the ship is in transit)
• Missile launchers on capital ships now have 12 missiles (from: 6)
• Torpedo launchers on capital ships now have 12 torpedoes (from: 3); torpedo damage is now set to 5000 (from: 3500) to be coherent with bomber’s torpedoes (Note: the mismatching torpedo damage was likely a typo in the config file)
• Slight increase of AMS laser damage to 2 (from: 1) (Note: as cruisers now have more missiles and torpedoes, this will likely increase the spam on the battlefield, so AMS laser damage needs to be more powerful to counter them in time)
• Increased EMP missile damage to 350 (from: 100) (Note: EMP missiles were not dealing enough damage, giving no reason to favor them over kinetic missiles. This might also give a chance to deal some damage to capital ship’s shields)
• Repair robot and repair crew now self-repair their ship up to a max HP % (50% for repair robot, 25% for repair crew) (Note: most players were confused by this ability. It will now behave as expected, but the amount of damage repaired is capped)
• Extra missiles upgrade now add +50% missiles (from: +33%)
• Extra missiles and torpedoes now only cost +5% mass (from +10% and +20%) (Note: +20% mass for some extra torpedoes was a bit extreme, especially on capital ships…)
• Light repair field repair rate increased to +6 HP/s (from +4 HP/s)
• Added repair robot parts upgrade, which increases the max repair HP to 100% (from 50%). This requires the repair robot upgrade

Battle reports / ratings

We revamped the scoring and rating system for battle reports and statistics. The previous system emphasized team performance, which caused frustration if you were joining a lost battle (in which case you’d lose rating points even if you did well in battle). The new scoring system should be more fair, giving a chance for players performing well to earn points even if they lost the battle. Another major change is the normalization of the scoring calculations. In the previous versions, the score was calculated by weighting in the kill count, assists, deaths, damage and repair/resupply dealt. Kills in particular were all identical: a destroyer killing a dozen interceptors counted as 12 points, while a cruiser killing a cruiser only counted as 1 point. The new system better takes into account ship classes into account, and a capital ship destroying another capital ship will bring more points than, say, an interceptor killing another interceptor. Another problem was that the old formula was too weighted towards damage, which naturally favored capital ships play. The new formula still takes damage into account, but the weighting is lower, giving a chance for light crafts to earn as many points as capital ship players.

The new rating formula is no longer based on the difference between team ratings, but on the individual score performance during the battle, to which a bonus/malus of +15/-15 is added based on the battle result. This means that the best players on the winning team should earn the most, while bad players can potentially lose some rating points, even if they were on the winning team. In the same way, the best players on the losing team can still get a positive rating if they performed well. Let us know in the comments if you think the rating system is going in the right direction or if you feel there are still some major issues to address.

Quality-of-life improvements

• Fixed no chaff left message on capital ship, now explicitely tells that chaffs aren’t available
• Added half-cruiser ship wreckage upon explosion (note: this is a cruiser-specific debris, instead of the generic debris introduced in the previous patch)
• Ships that dock & refund do not generate a kill or griefing notification/increase kill stats upon ships that had fired at them anymore
• Tweaks to ship loadout screen: rank requirements and costs are now displayed even if already in game (not just on spawn)
• Revamped coloring rules for weapon/component cards to be more consistent: blue=available, green=already mounted, orange=max reached but mountable, red=unavailable (rank requirement, not enough credits etc…)
• Weapon/component cards and info panel now show the rank requirement level and icon
• The take-over-AI confirmation dialog will now popup from the mission screen upon clicking on the deploy button for a given mission
• Repair robot/crew now displays the “repair in progress” alert on the HUD
• Added lights to the new station’s modules

Bug fixes

• Fixed dock & refund option not available to carriers
• Fixed eject button not being properly grayed-out while dying/ejecting
• Fixed a bug that caused the asteroid-processing facility (Perseus Stn) to mess up the background halo size on the starmap, making the whole starmap covered by a single color
• Fixed corvette missile hardpoints firing upwards instead of frontwards

[INovaeFlavien]

Hotfix 0.8.5.1 (Saturday 17th July 2021)

Fixed top 3 podium in battle reports screen showing large numbers (billions) when a player’s score is negative

[INovaeFlavien]

Patch 0.8.6.0 (Wednesday 27th October 2021)

Hey everyone. Today’s patch is transitory, as we’re still heavily working on the squad/fleet system and VOIP. It introduces a brand new way waypoints/flight plan system. At the moment, its usage is quite limited but it will eventually become the foundation for other important systems such as the squad system (you’ll be able to share your waypoints or targets with your teammates), AI improvements (fleet coordination), tutorials/mission editor (following a path…).

But as those features are not available yet, the waypoints system has currently limited purposes. You are able to use it from the starmap (or tactical view) by right-clicking and using the context menu to clear/add or set a waypoint as active. The current active waypoint also shows up on the HUD and on radars.

Speaking of radars, we revamped them to be more coherent between each other, added new information (the velocity now shows up in the radars) and we introduced a new radar type (available in game through the MFD-edit key: F4): the dual parabaloid radar. It merges the front and back radars into one view, where the iner circle represents what’s in front, and the outer edge what’s behind. We are experimenting with some tweaks to make the gimbal weapons more skill based (reducing their angular range and spread), added a lag pip (some players have been asking for it for years!) and introduced a HUD minimalistic mode for experienced players that know how the HUD already works and want to declutter it a bit. Let us know in the comments if you find these useful or not.

Finally, this patch includes a rework for the smog (battle smoke) effect, to make it look more impressive, at the cost of more performance. If you find your performance has degraded too much inside big battles, we recommend switching the smog quality setting back to “medium”, which should more or less correspond to the old setting. We’ve also added an option to display short smoke trails behind small ships in space, which could be useful to see small ships in the distance in a big battle, especially if they don’t show up on your HUD as targets. Last but not least, we’ve completely revamped the death sequence for all ships with new visual effects, explosions and debris, and shortened the small ship’s explosions to be instant.

We are planning on releasing the patch focusing on the squad system and VOIP in about a month, after which we will resume work on new core gameplay systems.

-Flavien Brebion

General features

• Added support for mission/flight plan with waypoints. At the moment you can only add waypoints, but later on in the mission editor you will be able to add targets or objectives between waypoints

Balance / gameplay changes

• Reduced gimbal weapon’s angle by more than half, and increased their spread. We are experimenting this change to make the game more skill-aiming based, keeping in mind that new players still need to have a chance at killing a target without pixel-perfect accuracy…
• Missiles/Torps no longer detonate when too close (< 1 km) of their source upon expiring (lifetime exceeded or target lost)
• Reduced pushback force caused by massive explosions shockwaves

Radars

• Polish pass over HUD radars: increased size of front/back radars by +30% (to fit the MFD page), targets are now bigger when closer, more readable… added waypoints to radars
• Introduced new radar MFD page: Dual radar, which merges the front+back radars together into one single view (the iner circle is what’s in front, the outer circle is what’s behind the ship, aka. dual paraboloid projection)
• Fixed radars not rendering on cockpit MFDs with HUD mode disabled
• Fixed broken sensors and HUD targetting not behaving properly on radars

HUD / UI / menu fixes or improvements

• Fixed negative rating change going to a large number after a battle
• Fixed top 3 scores in battle reports showing up as large numbers when they’re negative
• Improved layout of HUD/MFD target information around the right HUD center (name, distance, speed etc…) to be cleaner and more compact (horizontal alignment was messy)
• HUD is now displayed in third-person capital ship control scheme, even if applied to a smaller ship like the corvette (this allows the corvette to be playable with the cap ships control scheme)
• Introduced ‘navigation’ color into HUD color theme (currently used to show navigation points). In the default green color-scheme, navigation-related targets show up in orange/yellow
• Added lag pip to HUD
• Added a setting to switch between lag and lead pip/reticle (default is still lead pip)
• Added a keybinding to switch between lag and lead pip in game (default: unbound)
• Introduced HUD Smart (Minimalistic) experimental mode that automatically hides some HUD elements based on the context
• Reduced minimum combat, ring and navigation targets setting to zero (sliders in HUD settings) (previously, the minimum number of displayable targets was 3 for all of these)
• Updated default MFDs for small ships in anticipation of the new Dual radar and the future Squads system
• Loadout MFDs at the bottom of the screen now packs the weapons list downwards to save space
• New experimental set of aim reticle icons for lead/lag pips (the previous one was too opaque and cluttered the target)
• Modal dialogs (or context menus) can now be closed by clicking outside the window area

Visual effects

• Improvements and new effects for capital ship’s death sequence + tuned death sequence parameters
• Small ships death sequence was shortened: the explosion is now instant, to have more immediate feedback
• Dying ships now play their engine/power damaged sound ambiance loop
• Added small ship’s trails in space + an option for it (default: off). This allows to see small ships in the distance, especially if you’re playing on a limited amount of navigation/combat displayable targets over the HUD
• Improved smog and added a quality setting dedicated to smog: denser/more opaque, darker, wider particles, to give a better sense of “terrain in space”

Disclaimer: the new smog settings can be more performance-hungry than the old one. A rough equivalent of the old smog would correspond to “medium” quality. High and Extreme quality will consume more performance than before