0.3.5.0 ( Friday, 07 December 2018 )

Welcome to the second limited Infinity: Battlescape beta week-end.

We would like to remind you that the game is still in alpha (beta backers only have access this week-end) with full beta scheduled for early 2019.

Many assets are placeholder or work-in-progress. Ships are untextured, gameplay features are missing and UI is basic (no star map, no missions menu, no ship selection or upgrades menu). We will be

iterating both on the visual effects and gameplay in the coming months.

Although the current version is rough around the edges, we sincerely hope that you will like what we are trying to achieve and have fun.

A community event is planned on Saturday 8th December at 20:00 UTC on the server. Players will gather and try to play objectives to complete a full match (or two) in order to stress the server and test

the gameplay. We hope to see you in game !

Patch 0.3.5.0 changes:

Gameplay:

Armor points implementation (reduction on hull damage model)

All ships now have armor points, which reduce incoming damage on the hull. The interceptor has no armor. Capital ships have a high armor which will cancel most of the damage from smaller ships.

Note that energy weapons (blasters) are not affected by armor, and obviously generate full damage on the shields

Introduced heat mechanics to engine component

All kinetic weapons produce heat points. Each ship can sustain a maximum amount of heat points. The heat bar is shown on the bottom-right part of the HUD ring, next to the energy bar.

When it reaches out 100%, kinetic weapons will be unusable for a few seconds. Energy weapons consume energy points and aren’t affected by heat mechanics.

This is an initial implementation. The idea is to add more external factors (environment, overcharge etc… ) that will eventually affect your ship’s heat dissipation rate.

Revamped (again) voice commands playback volume rules

Allies using a voice command should now be heard now matter the distance.

Physics:

Large ships now use dynamic mesh physics bodies. This should allow players to fly very close to the hull of capital ships. There are two important notes:

As ships are constantly moving, you’ll probably be sent flying like a pinball if you hit a moving ship. Networked collisions can also cause interesting behaviors… Projectile hits are still performed using the ship’s bounding box. In the future we will replace it with more accurate collision meshes, too

Added quick dampening of angular velocity when it’s over maximum angular speed threshold

Revamped ships masses. They were not coherent before (a destroyer was only 3 times more massive than a corvette). This should result in more realistic behavior in ramming scenarios

Controls

Initial implementation for the new capital ships control scheme is underways. This is a massive work-in-progress. The current state is not satisfactory, however we’ve decided to release it publically to gather feedback on it in the early stages. So before testing it, please take into consideration that it’s only half playable and will still need major improvements to be considered a decent state.

By default, capital ships still use the old navigation-cursor based control scheme. To enable the new control scheme, use F4 to cycle through control schemes ( it’s after Direct mode ). Note that it’s possible to play in small ships with the capital ships control scheme too - it might even be a fun ride.

The way the new control scheme works is by decoupling camera orientation and ship orientation. You don’t need to hold any key to turn the camera around the ship. By pressing forward, you align your ship to the camera’s orientation, instead of accelerating. You can still strafe with the other keys, however to accelerate and start moving you have to use the target speed controls ( 1-9 or mouse wheel by default ).

At the moment, there are 2 main issues with this control scheme:

If you want to orient your ship, you need to point the camera at the direction where you want to turn. The ship is in the way of the camera and often blocks the aiming marker, used for the large guns. More work on the camera behavior is planned in a future patch.

Other changes:

It is now possible to cycle through control schemes in spawn or spectator modes

Radial menus are now usable in direct Mode control scheme

Formation resets to free when the target is lost

HUD / Camera:

Added radar type preference to launcher settings dialog (ring, front/back, or both). Spherical radar is always turned on. The default is ring (no front/back radar)

Team scores bar now shows up temporarily on HUD for 30 seconds when scores change

Lead reticles are now displayed on top of other HUD 3D indicators (previously, they were below all other indicators!)

Added low damage feedback warning on reticles

Limited HUD negative FOV that made helmet go out of screen

Turrets aiming helper dots are no longer displayed in spectator mode

Increased opacity and brightness of information / meters in the HUD ring center

Third-person camera is now reset to default view distance when the view changes

Added parameters to control smoothing of camera movements in third-person mode

Improved smoothing related to accelerations and angular velocity in third-person mode

Removed hard-coded parameters for min/max view range, now set up in actors config files

Updates to camera component for relative vs absolute mode

Select nearest (default: G) will only target hostiles; will expand range and type to stations when there are no more hostile ships around…

Increased navigation cursor’s max screen radius

Reticles used for locking are now displayed even for turrets

Added heat meter to HUD

Added a heat alert when heat reaches its maximum and dissipates

Auto assist and reverse mode now blink the system on the HUD

Added alert when exceeding safe warp speed

Added tip for opening the large zoom

Minor HUD color tweak

The spherical radar’s range dynamically adjusts based on the ship’s speed ( so in warp, the range might be hundreds or thousands of Km ). Default range is still 25 Km

Game balance:

Increased voice command notification duration from 7s to 15s

Tweaks to navigation cursor settings (deadzone, sensitivity), so that interceptor is slightly more precise to beginners

Reset weapons cooldown to zero when ammo type is missile or torpedo

Added a repeater gun. This gun, as its name says, fires shots in quick succession, then cools down for a few seconds. This is now the default light anti-aircraft defense for stations and the destroyer

Added MK5 guns to Cruiser;

Added Armor points to all ships;

Weapons stats tweaks (spread, turn speeds, damage) to rebalance taking into account ships armor reduction

Increased Destroyer roll dampener

Bug fixes:

Cockpit alert light now takes power state into account

Fixed collision damage localization which was calculated in world space instead of object space

Fixed potential crash with deferred light pipe and shaders that don’t use atmospheric settings

Fixed issues related to ghost keyboard help screen on initial spawn menu: escape or ctrl or chat were not working

Debug menu (F12) can now be opened in spawn or spectator modes

Assets, graphics, performance:

Reduced holographic scanlines in HUD composite shader

Added client caching of mesh bodies for body components

Added shadow map resolution power curve setting to better control shadow maps transitions agressivity

Tweaked geometry rejection default settings

Reduced max shadow pipe processing queue budget time from 5 ms to 3 ms per frame (will gain an FPS or two around stations)

Gas giant color tweaks (config can now specify a user-defined color table)

Tweaked clouds transparency function for gas giants (now based on camera distance for smoother transitions)

New weapon meshes to replace the old placeholders

Implemented LOD for weapon meshes / objects

Weapon impact effects now scale depending on weapon parameters

Tweaks to lights for station modules. They are now appear bigger

Added placeholder lights to capital ships (destroyer, cruiser and carrier)

Revamped impact effects and colors, now different for metal / shield vs kinetic / energy

Tweaks to team paint colors

Updates to hauler lights (they were incorrectly offset and appeared out of the ship)

Swapped cap ship spawn dock’s default Z orientation

Improvements and optimizations to lights in fighter and corvette bays

Various stations materials upgrades and improved textures

Networking

This patch introduces a series of massive networking improvement, mostly affecting players with high latencies and/or unstable connections ( high packets drop ). The network stack was modified to increase redunduncy of packets in case of packets loss. Players with high-latency connections ( > 200 ms ) might consequently notice an increase of bandwidth, however the game’s stability and network smoothness should have vastly improved.

Decreased orientation tolerance for error correction, for improved accuracy

Implemented an adaptative server input buffer queue which grows or shrinks dynamically based on the client’s latency and connection stability. This should reduce error corrections and unwanted “loss of control” when the network is unstable

The input buffer queue can still be set manually with /SetInputBufferSize N command, where N=0 to 64 which represents the queue size in server ticks. A value of 0 (the default) means “use adaptative mode”.

Added a /GetInputBufferSize command to query the current input buffer size

Added client network interpolation delay parameter, which can be changed with command /SetUPSDelay. Default value is 2.0. This affects how much in the past the client displays server actors

Increased server lag compensation max history from 32 to 64 ticks

Increased server max input queue size from 10 to 64

Added client error correction smoothing for velocity

More tuning for adaptative input queue on server side ( will now estimate initial connection latency )

Added more information ( input queue size, framerate, tricount averages ) for server players list dialog

Misc: