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)
