Patch 0.6.2.0 ( Friday October 4th 2019 )

Game balance

Turbo boost cooldown parameter is now set per ship. Interceptor boost cooldown was reduced to 0.5s (from 1.0s) and bomber to 0.75s (from 1.0s)

Increased initial boost intensity for interceptor ( +20% ) and forward / backward boost ( +12% )

Reduced boost intensity on lateral thrusters for interceptor ( -25% ) (note: since initial boost was increased by +20% the end result is similar for lateral thrusters and higher for main/back engine )

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

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

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

Improved bounty rewards to be less agressive and generate less credits ( the reward starts lower, but scales by +50% for each bounty rank )

Limited bounty max rank to 3, to avoid insane bounties

Player will now receive a notification when the enemy commander placed a bounty on him

It’s still very easy to generate credits in the game right now, but keep in mind we don’t have the credits sinks yet (besides dying). Instead of adjusting the ship prices we’ll try to adjust the rewards prices iteratively each patch.

In this patch we’re starting with bounties, which were probably the more imbalanced. A bomber killing a capital ship with a bounty could easily earn double or triple the price of that capital ship in a single kill. Bounty rewards now start lower, but can still generate a decent reward if the bounty reaches rank 3. In addition, players will now get informed when a bounty has been placed by the enemy commander on their head

Tweaked warp ramming damage formula

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

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

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

Weapons tweaks: slightly faster turn rates for auto-turrets

Increased max range for mk4 / mk5 auto-turrets and defense platforms

Increased hit points for mk5, mk6 and mk7 guns

Increased damage from static defenses

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

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

Bug fixes

Fixed a rare issue where game executable does not launch due to symbols such as $ appearing in the user Documents path

Fixes for “invalid login length” message upon connecting to a game server

Fixed destroyed weapons still absorbing damage despite being down and preventing the ship from being damaged

UI / HUD

Options menu will now enumerate controllers from Direct Input asynchronously

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

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

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

Fixed “warp engage” alert which was lingering too long compared to other alerts

Fixed an issue with carrier spawning around Glimmerfall and instantly dying

Improvements

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

Improved loading times of background images in the GUI

Added voice volume slider in options menu

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

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

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

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

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

Assets

New engine sound on Interceptor

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

New Odyssey station lights pass

Added ambient occlusion and colors to station Hub B module

Carrier final texturing, improved materials and updated skins (green stripes were out of place). Added ambient occlusion

Misc

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

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

Improved server disconnection messages

First-time run of the game will now bring up a window to select the starting quality / screen mode / resolution

First-time run of the game will attempt to auto-detect the quality level based on the computer’s cpu performance ( note: we need to take into account the gpu too, but ran out of time to implement it yet )

Server

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

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