Hey all it’s that time again – time for your weekly update! As we’ve previously mentioned our primary focus at the moment is weapons. Support for machine guns has been added along with ammunition limitations. A quick balancing pass was performed on both machine guns and blasters however a lot more time will have to be invested in this over the coming months. We’ve also added different damage values for shields vs armor. Work has started on missiles/torpedoes however since they require a reasonable amount of intelligence there’s still a lot left to be done. We have yet to start on anti-missile countermeasures and of course we need to create bigger versions of these weapons for capital ships.
Land bases and factories can be quite large, spanning multiple square kilometers
An emerging priority of ours in the coming weeks is improving our download experience. Currently we are only using a single datacenter in the US to distribute files. Unfortunately, it frequently has disappointing download speeds for users outside the US and we’re working on integrating CDN support. We haven’t decided which regions we’ll use for our CDN locations but most likely we’ll have 1 in the US, 1 in Europe, and 1 somewhere in east Asia. On the art side work is being wrapped up on the destroyer with only the cruiser and the carrier remaining. Kristian also spent some time improving our HUD icons. Once the capital ships are finished there’ll be the bobbleheads, UI, special effects, backer rewards, and a final polish pass left to do.
The final geometry pass for the destroyer is nearly complete
As for the next patch we’re still waiting to make a bit more progress on weapons before we give an estimate on the release date. We touched on this briefly last week but the plan is to release a patch as soon as all of the weapons have been mocked up in the game. This will be an extremely quick and dirty implementation so expect lots of balance problems. Once we release the weapons patch, if initial testing with Developer Access backers doesn’t uncover any showstoppers, we’ll announce the next Alpha backer play weekend. That’s all for this week, until next time!
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Thanks for the update!
Reading the updates is something I look forward to every week, even if there is not much to be reported on at times.
Here are some suggestions/wishes I would like to see:
A function in the installer to manually select a patchfile from a drive would be nice. This way you could easily seed patches via bittorrent as an alternative for those that experience slow downloads or can’t download at all without vpns.
As far as I could see the patchfiles are stored in multiple folders anyway, so they are already accessible to the public. You could save on bandwith cost by doing that and solve some download issues. I think there a some users that would seed the files. Just a suggestion.
If its not too much work, a fov slider on the laucher would be very much appreciated too.
And of course the ability to move the cockpit camera while simultaneously steering the ship beeing reimplemented.
The last two wishes would make the game work nicely with vorpX and Vive/Rift.
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One important precision: when Keith says that the next patch will have “all weapons mocked up in game”, he means one per weapon category: kinetic ( machine guns ), energetic ( blasters ) and missiles / torpedoes. We’ll be adding more weapons within a same category later on. Ex.: flak canons are kinetic but might not be in the next patch.
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I miss these parts already 
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Well its pretty good parts from sci fi and ship.
I personally am a huge fan of the new destroyer. 
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I did like the R2-D2 part of it. It was more of a distinguishing factor for the ship. But I like the new model and it still looks like the badass destroyer we all know and love. 
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That section of the ship is still being “re-designed” and is one of the remaining sections that require detailing. The scale of the bubble (which was intended as a radar placeholder) caused the destroyer to feel smaller than it actually is. The re-designed section will no longer serve as a visible bridge, but rather, an array of less critical systems.
We’re moving away from a large visible bridge on the top of a ship, and moving more in the direction of “Internal” bridges for capital ships.
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