Patch and Updates Notes

[INovaeFlavien]

0.4.1.0 ( Saturday, 16 February 2019 )

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

Gameplay

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

Controls

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

Weapons

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

HUD

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

Bug fixes

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

Visual effects, graphics, performance

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

Server

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

[INovaeFlavien]

0.4.2.0 ( Saturday, 02 March 2019 )

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

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

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

New default Havoc cruiser skin

Gameplay / Balance

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

Controls / Input

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

Weapons

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

HUD

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

Bug fixes

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

Visual effects, audio, graphics, performance

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

Misc

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

[INovaeFlavien]

0.4.3.0 ( Saturday, 16 March 2019 )

Hey everybody, welcome to Infinity: Battlescape patch 0.4.3.0

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gameplay / Balance

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

Controls / Input

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

Weapons

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

HUD

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

Audio

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

Visual effects, assets, graphics, performance

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

Server and Misc

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

[INovaeFlavien]

0.4.4.0 ( Friday, 22 March 2019 )

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

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

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

Gameplay / Balance

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

Bugs

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

HUD

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

Visual effects, assets, graphics, performance, audio

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

Planets

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

Server and AI

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

Misc

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

[INovaeFlavien]

0.4.4.1 ( Friday, 29 March 2019 )

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

Performance improvements

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

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

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

Fixes

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

[INovaeFlavien]

0.4.5.0 ( Saturday, 27 April 2019 )

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

General

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

Fixes

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

HUD / Input

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

Graphics / Optimizations

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

Assets

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

Misc

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

[INovaeFlavien]

0.4.6.0 ( Saturday, 25 May 2019 )

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

Gameplay

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

Flight Model

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

Fixes and Improvements

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

HUD / Input

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

Graphics / Optimizations

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

Misc

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