This week’s update is going to cover a few small feature additions as well as a whole load of bug fixing! Keep reading to find out more!

With the Alien Invasions changes and additions completed, I had a week were I was able to focus on a lot of smaller issues and make fixes and additions to resolve them. The first up was the issue with the lockout for the High Prophet in Temple Grounds. Since this is a unique encounter (in that you don’t actually kill the boss) we were having issues getting a lockout that would apply to the whole squad. To remedy this, I’ve added in a new bit of boss script that allows a boss AI to give a lockout to everyone in the galaxy automatically. This is being applied to the High Prophet to properly fix his lockout issues and going forward will make life easier if we want to do another boss that doesn’t actually die.

Another rather big change that I made concerns “special” galaxies. Special galaxies are point-of-interest locations in the universe that contain skill training, missions, etc. You may recall a while back I added in custom map coloring for the name of special galaxies. In order to help newer players even more, I’ve added to the functionality of being a “special” galaxy by ensuring they’ll always be revealed on the map for players. This is good for two reasons, firstly, new players will have less trouble finding galaxies for Paxian missions (so less WHERE IS XXXX in help chat) and secondly, it’s very convenient for existing players to find key locations after a universe reset.

Finally, what I spent most of my time on this week, fixing a lot of little bugs. All of our content (items, galaxies, enemy spawners, etc) is stored in XML files. Recently Jeff added in some error checking code to our XML loading functions to check for out-of-order XML tags for our content files. An out of order tag for spawner and galaxy files will lead to a skipped tag and a skipped tag means information about an object that is missing. The new error checking code revealed hundreds of small issues that needed tracked down. For the most part, these issues were little things that won’t noticeably affect a galaxy or spawner — but there are two noticeable fixes that took place.

Firstly, there were quite a few lower level spawners that were getting their treasure lists skipped by the parser. These mainly include Monochome Tints and Hues. With the tags in the proper order, they’ll once again drop all the loot they are meant to, not just Augmenters and Kromaticos. This also affected NCC-Bulk spawners in Beta Antares, BP Processing and East Vindia, who were getting their treasure lists replaced by their missile launcher drops. Secondly, the roaming Olympus AI that players need to kill for missions were getting their team definitions skipped. Ares Warriors, Stingrays, Cyclops, Rams and Zeus Pretenders were all meant to have individual teams and will properly have them next universe.

So that’s it for this week’s update, I’ll be back again next week with another update! Until then feel free to post questions, comments and suggestions in the forums!

Hi everyone, here’s an update on the base rebalance.  As hoped, it is on track to go in for next universe (which should be announced soon).  The purpose of this post is to elaborate on some of the details of the rebalance, especially those that I left vague in my first post.

• Station Mastery skill will only provide 2% combat bonuses per level, but this change will be completely balanced out by increasing the corresponding base gear stats.
• Base gear will also be improved by a factor of 2 in addition to the Station Mastery change.  This will change the balance in PvB but BvB will be unaffected by it.  The changes will only affect things like DPS and Shield Recharge, not Range.
• Class skills will no longer affect bases.  There will be new base-only super items that the bases can use during combat to give themselves extra range or other bonuses.  The super items will have a 10 minute charging time to prevent you from rapidly swapping between bonuses.

I mentioned disposable base gear in my previous post.  Here’s how it’s going to work.  When you deploy a base kit, it will come with three new blueprints pre-installed.  If it’s a tech 20 kit, the blueprints will be Annihilator Upgrade X, Y, and Z.  Lower tech kits will come with the corresponding lower tech blueprints.  Each upgrade project builds a whole set of gear that can’t be removed, tossed, or sold from the base.  That includes a shield, energy, shield charger, laser, and omni-dampener (all seven damage types).  These projects cost little or no credits, but require a substantial supply of raw materials (Metals, Silicon, Nuclear Waste) over an extended period of time.  For example, the Upgrade Z version will take 6 weeks to complete.

The objective here is to give players the chance to build a strong galaxy defense even if they don’t have any base gear stored up.  Of course, having some Adamantiumized or Armada gear in storage will still be quite handy to make sure your bases are strong from Day 1.  Not only that, that kind of gear will be necessary for competitive BvB since the XYZ Upgrades take far too long for that.

Since we are repurposing XYZ gear as disposable, we need to do something about currently-existing XYZ gear.  When universe reset is taking place, we will go through and replace existing XYZ gear by the plain versions.  But before you cry “nerf!” let me share with you some new stats.

• Achilles Protector Z (old): 550,000 bank, 530/sec regen
• Achilles Protector (new): 1,822,875 bank, 2,462/sec regen

As you can see, the new plain versions of base gear will be miles better than the current Z versions.  The only XYZ gear that won’t be replaced by the plain versions are Andaman and Achilles Laser Z.  We are aware that these are popular endgame base weapons and so those two items will be left as they are (except of course they will receive the same stat buffs as the rest of the gear, as well).

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to hearing your impressions on this.

I am egrosphere, a new developer for Star Sonata. In this post, I will show some of the skins that I have been making that will use features from the new version of the skin system (which most likely will be on the live server soon), and will tell you what sort of ships need skins, so that you, the players, can help make them.

Here are 6 of the skins that I have been making that are either finished or almost finished:

Rainbow-imizer, the four irregular shaped parts on the top cycle through all RGB colours over 24 seconds.

Earthforce Police Zebra, with four animated roating red and blue lights.

Zebucart Mark 2, a skin for the various types of Zebucart (such as the normal Zebucart and Oversized Zebucart) that makes them look like the client 1 Zebucart.

Hephaestus Machine Frame

Prawn Frame

Earthforce Police Dreadnought, a skin in which the red and blue cylinders flash, alternating their colours. Similar skins have been made for all of the Earthforce capital ships except the Earthforce Frigate (which has no cylinders).

All of these skins are not final, and may change due to some problems that I found with them (for example, the Rainbow-imizer glow seems to have problems near bright suns, and the Prawn Frame skin might have to have its polygon amount reduced so that it runs easier on many computers). I also have been making some “phasing” subspace ship skins, that add a phasing bubble similar to many of the planets in subspace to the player-obtainable subspace ships, however a problem with how visages are displayed in the client caused the ships to be scaled down to very small sizes inside their phasing bubble, so I will have to wait until this problem is fixed before I can continue making them.

We still need more skins from you however, as many of the ships have no skins currently. I believe that skins are mostly needed for many lower-tech ships (ones that people whose level is under 900 would use as their main ship), and many of the Industrial Freighters, such as the Dark Transport. More specific ships that I believe should have skins aswell are the tech 21 Paxian ships, the Red Photon ships and the ships that players commonly use as slaves. Any kind of skin is welcome to be submitted to the forum post accompanying this blog post, from 3D models (it would be good to keep the model under 3500 triangles, or at least have a model that can be recduced to something around that number), texture replacements, glowmap replacements or a combination of them.

The new version of the skin system due be released soon, allows skins to use the entire visage system, allowing the whole ship to be replaced (for example, a Zebucart could in theory, have a skin that makes it look like a Juxtaposition wormhole, or a sun). This means that in your skin submissions any special effects on your skin that you would like, such as particles or flashing glows can be included, and if your skin is chosen to be in the game, I will try to incoroprate it into the skin. Also, a question that you players may be able to answer regarding skins, is that do you think that there is a need for skins for ships that a player of less than level 50 would use? Or are people upgrading ships too fast at that point for skins to matter to the player?

Also, I have confirmed that people who have their skins chosen to be in the game will also get a free copy of the skin.

In this video, I demonstrate a new item type called a Maneuvering Thruster that was created for the Target Dummies in the Nexus to make them more interesting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mu1OEhdU8bU&list=UUI8NgyQmuJfPyadcld8JSsA

Maneuvering Thrusters come in 3 types, absolute, relative, and home. Absolute thrusters will always thrust in a certain direction regardless of the ships facing. There are currently 4 of these that I made (AI only for now) which are “North”, “South”, “East”, and “West”.

Relative thrusters are relative to the ships facing. The two of these that I made are “Port” and “Starboard”.

Home-type thrusters only will ever work for AI, and they remember where the AI spawned, and will always thrust towards that point. This helps to keep the AI in one place.

These Target Dummies each have a different super item which uses a combination of maneuvering thrusters to move them around in an interesting, arcade-y, way. The first one does a series “east, west, home”, causing the dummies to move side to side relative to the main Nexus base. The second one goes “north, south, home”, causing it to go vertically up and down. The last guy goes “starboard, home”, causing him to go in a circle around you if he has aggro and you are sitting relatively near his spawn point.

So far, these maneuvering thrusters are AI-only, and only in these target dummies, but expect them to appear in some other AI in the future, and possibly be available to players. I’m thinking something like a tech 9 base kit with built in thrusters so you can move your base around without a tractor beam, or some kind of thatch with no engine, but built in thrusters… Who knows?

This week’s update is going to further cover the changes and additions coming to the alien invasion announced last week. Keep reading to find out more!

Firstly, I’ve made some changes to the way overall alien ownership is calculated. Currently, it’s extremely easy to keep the overall ownership down (and negate any of the effects that alien ownership has) by clearing out the Ekam, Dve and Tra arms of the layer. So I’ve added an ownership weight to each arm and instead of taking a true average of the ownerships of each arm, I’m taking a weighted average. This means that ownership in the lower level arms is valued less while ownership in the higher level arms is valued more. With the current weights, 25% of the overall ownership is contributed by the Ekam, Dve and Tra arms and the remaining 75% is contributed by the Katur, Pajca and Sas arms. This was especially important to do considering ownership is going to control a lot more than it currently does. Not only will it affect colony income, but it will control a lot of spawners in both Subspace and P-Space.

This past week I did a lot more work on the back end of things as the major features discussed last week were mostly implemented. This mainly meant updates to the alien invasion page of our admin control interface. There were some things we couldn’t set without changing the configuration files for the invasions (which means a server restart!) and all of them are now accessible via the control panel, including the new ownership weights. These additions are good for two reasons. First, it makes testing out anything invasion related a lot faster and easier — being able to manually set the alien ownership levels made testing out the ‘growth’ factor of the world boss a lot simpler! Secondly, it will allow us to make tweaks on the live server to some aspects of the invasion we couldn’t before as well as some extra manual control for events if we want.

Finally, I’ve done a small pass at the alien loot. I’ve added a few new items, but more importantly, I’ve added some rolls from the instance loot tables onto some of the harder aliens spawned by the subspace invasion! Paired with an experience increase, this will hopefully address some of the risk vs. reward issues we have with killing the harder outposts in subspace.

That’s it for this week’s update, I’ll be back again next week with another update! Until then feel free to post questions, comments and suggestions in the forums!

As some of you probably noticed. There was an issue with the webserver (and the game server due to dependency) being down.

There has been an hardware failure and it took a bit over 12hours before we could get it replaced. It is now fully functional again.

As compensation for the 14hours downtime that entailed from it, there will be a 100% experience bonus, 100% teamxp bonus and 60% faster worker until 11h59pm 2014-09-15 server time (EDT).

This week’s update is going to cover a bevy of changes and additions that are being made to Subspace and Alien Invasions! Keep reading to find out more!

Over the last few weeks the dev team has been internally discussing subspace, alien invasions and what we can do to motivate players to participate in the layer a bit more. Most importantly though, we wanted to recapture the feel and fun factor of the first universe after we added the layer. I am sure everyone remembers how hectic and overrun the layer was and more importantly, how epic the battles there felt. So this past week I’ve been working on quite a few changes based on our discussions to shake up the layer and really bring back the invasion feel.

Firstly, I’ve made some small changes to the default parameters for invasions in order to increase the number of aliens that spawn dramatically during invasions. The new parameters will increase the number of eggs in a clutch, the overall number of clutches that spawn during an invasion and increase the duration of the invasion. The new parameters also allow for a much faster and more dramatic ramp up. This will make the actual invasions a lot more hectic. As an added bonus for fighting during invasions, the aliens spawned by invasion spawners will have a significant XP bonus. Finally, I’ll be taking an in-depth look at the loot you can get from invasions to make sure that it’s worth facing the alien hordes. Invasion alien loot will definitely see a boost in quality.

Secondly, I’ve made some substantial changes to the way alien garrisons work. When the aliens ‘win’ an invasion, they set up an outpost and a limited number of  roaming guards. For starters, I’ve tracked down an fixed the bug causing multiple outposts to spawn — this will make recapturing an alien galaxy a lot less tedious. Additionally I’ve increased the numbers of guard aliens quite a bit. This was done to address the issue of the layer being barren between invasions. The biggest change I made however was a change to how the number of guards scale. Previously, they scaled over time (much like the invasion spawners do), with the changes they scale based on the proximity of their galaxy to other alien owned galaxies. This means a galaxy in the middle of a clump of alien owned territory is going to create more alien guards than one on the outskirts.

To further facilitate this, I’ve changed the way aliens pick which galaxies they plan on invading. Currently they just pick a random galaxy in their slice of the layer from the pool of remaining galaxies. With the changes aliens will prioritize picking galaxies adjacent to currently owned territory. The effect is they will create pockets of alien owned space in the layer in order to better take advantage of the new way garrison spawning works.

Finally, I’ve added a new spawner feature that will allow us to do a lot of really, really cool things. It’s a prerequisite to spawn based on the ownership percentage of the alien layer. We have two planned uses for it. The first is a set of alien spawners that will be added to Perilous Space. These will kick in when the aliens have ownership of a chunk of the layer an the aliens spawned by them will be aggressive towards both players an AI. It should definitely add an interesting twist to P-Space if players let the aliens build up in Subspace. Secondly, this feature will control the spawn of a brand new roaming boss in Subspace.

This boss is called the Gurujana Ekam and will make Astro-Santa look like a chump. This alien will only spawn when the layer is at least 25% occupied and his strength will go up and down based on alien ownership. At his weakest he will take multiple squads to down, at his strongest he will be next to impossible. In return for killing him players will receive a token that can be traded in for a substantial amount of credits and a special mystery reward. The rewards haven’t been entirely decided upon but they will not be limited to items from subspace and will definitely include some rare and hard to get items.

That’s all I have for this week’s update. I’ll be back again next week with another update! Until then keep posting your questions, comments and suggestions to the forums!

This week’s update will cover a multitude of bug fixes that took place last week and a new feature that will soon be in the game.

This is going to be a bit shorter for a weekly update since most of my week was spent handing support tickets and bug reports from the forums — that is to say, I spent a lot of time tracking down bugs! The following is a brief list of what was fixed up!

• Augmenter Bonus stat strings are being removed from drones to avoid stat string confusion.
• Updated a few zones in Perilious Space so they’re properly flagged as premium space so non-premium players can’t access them with transwarp devices.
• Fixed an issue where irradiated Permanent Drones were being destroyed preventing capture.
• Fixed an issue with the Ship Statistics window not displaying hostility in the permanent bonuses table.
• Fixed the tooltip text for the docking button on the lower bar of the client.
• Fixed the issue causing destroyed drones to lose their visage and go invisible.
• Fixed an issue causing subspace outposts to get additional limited spawns.

These are just a few of the more noticeable issues I took care of and with those fixes finished, I closed the week out with a new feature.

For those of you not familiar with it, we have a system in game to automatically level out the number of skill points a player has to the proper amount should they get into a situation where they have too many or too few. This situation is called a Skill Point Debt (or Credit). If a player has too many skill points, they’ll only gain 4 per level up instead of 5. If they don’t have enough, they’ll gain 6 per level up. This has been around for quite some time, but it’s feasible that very few people really know about it since there wasn’t any way in game for players to actually know they had an incorrect amount of points.

If you are in debt, or need to be credited, there is now a line in the Avatar dialog that will denote this. If you have the proper amount of points, this line won’t appear for you at all. In addition, when you level up you will now be told how many skill points you are receiving in the even chat tab. This is extremely useful for new players since they’ll more clearly be able to link leveling up with skill points (if they skip all the mission dialogs). In addition, if you have a debt or credit, it will also display how many points you are in debt or need to be credited.

That’s it for this week’s update, I’ll be back again next week with another update about the next project I am starting on! Until then feel free to post questions, comments and suggestions in the forums!

Hey guys, Bageese here. It’s been a pretty kick ass few years at Star Sonata for me. I joined the game in 2009, was part of the very first Hephaestus kill, and became the Community Manager in January 2012. It has been a privilege to get to know so many of you and interact with you in game, on our forums, and in PM.

As some of you have probably noticed, I haven’t been the most active one recently, and there’s a reason for it. Today is my last day as Star Sonata’s Community Manager and my last day at Star Sonata. SI will be replacing me as support lead, and moderation lead. Blue Dwarf will be the head of community shenanigans, such as events and all that goodness. I’m also glad to report that Voomy has returned and is spearheading getting the bug tickets resolved and back to manageable levels (never ever let Jey be the default on a ticket category! His hometown will flood!). If you’re waiting on your prizes for some of the contests from this year expect a PM about that in the next 24 hours.

I’m not leaving for another game, no game could capture my heart quite like Star Sonata and it’s community. I’m actually leaving to follow my lifelong dream of becoming a school teacher and helping kids. I am beyond excited and I am so ready to begin the next chapter of my life.

As is customary in SS leaving posts here’s my list of personal messages to as many people as I can remember.

The Old Strawberry Pancakes – Thanks for carrying me along in a little zebra and indulging my Pos Wave fantasies. If it wasn’t for your passion for Star Sonata I wouldn’t be posting this blog post today.
To Zero Gravity – My first team filled with so many kickass people. ^_^ Thanks for showing me the ropes and giving me so many laughs and good times.
To all teams that started wars and poked people. You made my job so interesting… In a good way!
The Mod Team – Keep rocking it. Seriously. You are the unsung heroes of SS and have helped in more ways than you know.
Jey – Thanks for keeping me straight and sane, and for answering all my stupid questions.
BlueDwarf- For keeping me not straight and very insane, and for helping me do really stupid things.
SI – I’m staring at you right now as I’m typing this. Hi. Thanks for your help, for listening, and for your patience.
Vert, Yclepticon, Suit – For being so active and helping me out in so many ways. SS wouldn’t be functioning without you three keeping us straight.
All dev team members past and present – Many people came to us from the game, and it was your drive and determination that makes the game so awesome today. I’d name you all, but there are so many of you. <3
And Jeff, for giving me the flexibility to carve my own path and giving me an opportunity I will remember fondly for a lifetime.

And finally to you reading this, yes you. Thank you for being awesome and being a part of the most unique online community in the world and making the last few years so amazingly kickass for me. I was the admin, manager, but thanks to so many of you I was also a friend which is better than anything else. You guys are amazing.

So long and thanks for all the fish,

Marty (Bageese)

This week’s update will discuss a few new features and updates that will be coming to the game in the near future! Keep reading to find out more!

Since I didn’t have a large project to work on this week (the base rebalance change have been mostly completed), I instead worked on a few smaller projects that have been recently requested as well as some bug fixing.

The first of my small projects for the week was to add in a way for people who have used a Rovert on their base to know they’ve done that. Currently the only way to check if you’d upgraded your construction bay was to try to upgrade it again — something that could waste a lot of commodities since you’d be building extra Rovert Upgrades. My solution was to add a line of text to the construction bay dialog to tell players exactly how much of a bonus they are getting to the bay. I’ve also reduced the alpha a bit on the background image of the construction dialog to increase readability of the text on that tab.

Secondly, I made another small change to the Ship Statistic window. I’ve added a checkbox to toggle showing critical hit information on the weapon stats table. Clicking this checkbox will do three things. First, it will update the damage column to reflect how much your weapon would critical hit for. Secondly, it will update the DPE column to show the damage-per-energy your critical hits do. Finally, it will update the DPS column to show the expected change in your average damage-per-second based on critical hit percentage and strength. This DPS change isn’t going to be 100% accurate considering critical hits are randomly determined, but it should give you a fairly good approximation. I know there are currently suggestions to add hostility, sniper analysis and other unique damage modifiers to the window and I have been thinking about a ways to integrate them but I don’t have any good solutions yet.

Finally I’ve worked on a fairly useful change to debris visages! I’ve modified the attached effect system used for Holoprojectors slightly — so we can attach effects to other types of objects, not just space ships. This in turn allows us to attache additional effects to things like debris, something we will be doing for debris containing neurobound items. This will give players a visual indication that the item they are about to scoop is bound so they can better decide who is going to be the one scooping it!

That’s it for this week’s update, I’ll be back again next week with another update on what I’ve been up to! Until then, feel free to post questions, comments and suggestions in the forums.