Six Degrees of Freedom

As we’ve continued iterating and improving on the physics based flight model, we’ve now implemented 6DOF controls and flight mechanics for all of our ships. This will allow players to move along every axis and shows off the flexibility of our flight model as well as what makes space flight so cool!

New control schemes

You can now select between multiple popular preset control schemes. This represents the first pass at personal customization the full version of which will be coming shortly, planned for patch 13.1 which will allow you to completely customize your control scheme.

HUD Improvements

v0.9 introduces some significant usability improvements to the Combat Visor Interface. Navigation within each context window has become much more streamlined, in addition to becoming navigable with a mouse cursor. We’ve also introduced new hotkeys for managing your ship’s power and shield allocation quickly in the heat of battle.

Lead Target Indicator

Your HUD now features a lead target indicator which will extend from your active target. This is your targeting computer’s (ITTS) attempt at telling you where to shoot in order for your weapon groups to hit the target. It accounts for relative velocity, acceleration, and the average projectile speed of your weapon groups. This change to targeting means that you no longer aim at the ship itself and rely on ITTS to auto-fire on the predicted hit location. Instead, pilots need a little more skill: you’ll have to fire at the ITTS lead indicator! We’d originally wanted to have this system in place for V0.8 so we are very excited to introduce it with 0.9. This is a big change to how Dogfighting works in Arena Commander but is more realistic, and fun.

Fixed Weapons and Convergence

With the introduction of the Lead Target Indicator we’ve also introduced fixed weapons and fixed weapon convergence. Now class one weapon mounts are properly fixed forward and no longer gimbal. They do however now automatically converge based on your range to the target lead indicator to ensure that if you line up your gun cross properly, you won’t miss.

Improved Ship Performance

We’ve increased the top speed of every ship. With this we’ve also reworked the afterburner mechanic to increase acceleration instead of top speed. We’ve also added the ability to temporarily boost the output of your maneuvering thrusters to more quickly arrest undesirable angular velocity, such as in a tight turn.

Improved Sound

We’ve added a number of sound effects that help make the ‘Verse feel more immersive. Everything from the ships, weapons, and environment have completely new sound effects. We have also fixed numerous sound bugs and given our legacy sound effects another pass to make sure they meet the quality of our new sound effects.