Due to the recent down time on Sunday and today, we’ve giving a bit extra this month.
Until Monday noon (server time, that’s EDT) you’ll get be getting +100% XP, +100% Team XP, double mod chances, Bindomite Crystal AI and 20% faster workers!
Time to have some fun before going back to school! Boo!
This week’s update will get everyone up to speed on exactly what I’ve been working on since I’ve returned from vacation. It includes some new tweak types, some bug fixing and a few other changes I’ve been working on as part of the planned base rebalance! Keep reading to find out more!
Firstly, a short announcement — with the new patch I’ve been able to push Mira live! Hopefully players are enjoying the new content!
Second up I’ve worked on three new aura types for Field Generators and Neurotweaks. The first of these is a new aura type for Projectile Speed. Next I worked on a Transference Power aura type and finally, a Transference Efficiency aura type. These three aura types were requested by ycleption as part of his base rebalance. Since we’re continuing our decoupling of combat skills from trade skills (and some unintended bonuses stations get from class skills are going away) his goal is to have a line of station-only, class locked super items to aid in galaxy defense. These new aura types will more than likely be used there. They function pretty much as expected. Projectile Speed increases the maximum speed any projectile based weapon travels. Transference Power increases the transference damage done and Transference Efficiency decreases damage taken from outgoing heals.
On the subject of decoupling — a lot of unintended bonuses stations were getting from class skills is being removed. Seer will no longer benefit station radars, Engineer will no longer get bonuses to station tweaking and neuro tweaking on their stations and Snipers will no longer give bases projectile speed bonuses.
Thirdly, the project that took up most of the time I spent working last week — outpost drones. These are another item planned to go in with the base rebalance and again were proposed by ycleption. These are temporary drones with a 24 hour lifespan that function almost identically to outposts. The main differentiation between their functionality and an outpost is that you must have at least one team owned station in the galaxy in order to own it. You can’t only have the drone. They’ll be decently geared, they also won’t count against the number of outposts your team can own but they will be rather pricey. The goal for these is to give players a way to BvB galaxies that aren’t on team borders — but have unowned territory nearby.
Finally, I did a fair amount of bug fixing! Jey patched while I was away on vacation and some of the new features coming in didn’t work entirely as intended and needed some fixing. Chief among these were a few issues with transwarps and the ship statistics window. First, with the new patch some refactored code for the Transwarp devices went live — unfortunately it also contained a bug with Fleet Commander transwarps. They were ignoring the distance requirements for taking along your friends. This was fixed, but that introduced another bug preventing transwarp usage entirely. This has also been fixed! As for the issue with the ship stats window — the resistance table wasn’t properly updating when players equipped and unequipped diffusers. This made it a bit taxing to see just how effective your diffusers are at blocking incoming damage. This has also been remedied.
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!
This patch introduce 2 new major features alongside the generic fixes / tweaks etc.
– The new ship info window, containing all sorts of useful information about your ships current stats.
– The ship paintjob (skins) which are available in every spacestation at a cost of 10 spacepoints each for the first iteration of the system.
Not all ships have skins available but many of the mid to high end ships do. See at the end of this post for a preliminary list of the skins available.
- Once you buy a skin, it is permanently added to your account, all your characters can use it at any time on any ship that they own. You can also use skins on your slaves, but transfering the slave will cause it to lose the skin on server restart (will probably be changed to a demo paintjob timer)
- Skins can be seen in the preview window when buying them and can be demoed 30 seconds for free.
** Winners of the skin contest will had their skins donated to their account.
bug fixes:
* Made it so a solarbody can’t get two different types of ruins (you could only access one anyway)
* Players can no longer transwarp docked ships.
* Made it so you can’t equip fighter bays or missile launchers on ships with 0 weapon slots
* Stations now dropped in attempt to BvB keep track of that fact
** Altered the enemy-lines abandonment to only abandon bases from failed BvB attempts
* Fix for missions auto-abandoning when the server has been up for around two weeks
* Fixed an issue causing the alt key to become locked when alt-tabbing on some systems. (does not affect the locking of thrust / brake / firing that are on purpose)
* Fixed ‘Destroyed
* Error message changed from ‘&myguy doesn’t belong to any squad’ to ‘You don’t belong to any squad’ when trying to do squad actions without one
* Fixed autopilot to unknown galaxy message from “Traveling to .” to “Traveling to unknown Galaxy”
* Fixed an issue with the rightclick -> activate control bot not working sometimes when the ship had never been opened.
* Fixed an issue where the weapon manager did not reset properly on reconnection.
* Fixed an issue causing inventory to not display (especially with higher /nf value)
* Fixed an issue with scoop speed.
* Hopefully fixed the issue causing docked ships to appear when docking.
* Fixed rts control for drones. They should now properly attack what you tell them to (target itself to reset to default behavior), if they are combat only drone, targeting yourself or a friendly will cause them to revert to normal behavior, and the inverse is also true for pure healing drones. targeting an enemy will cause them to revert to default behavior.
optimizations:
* Optimized client performance when a lot of objects are created or destroyed constantly.
* Network optimization reducing the bandwidth output by the server in busy area by nearly 40% (download rate from the player perspective).
* Optimized the low level network handling code.
content:
* Fixed an issue with mission item rewards and autocomplete.
* Rudimentary Augmenters will no longer drop from AI.
* Beefed the T22 Resistance ship
* Fixed description errors on the Aurora Beam line
* Increased docking speed on Zebucarts, Phunkas, Volcoms, Wingships (I), Recomissioned Cadet, Patrol Cadet, Pods, and Spirits.
* Marked a lot of ships as wild slave capturable
* Made the Bigger Green a little bit bigger
* New T9 Paxian Capital Ship, Pax Vega.
* New T5 Class Overloaders, with level 1 class skill requirement.
* T10 Class Overloaders now only have a level 5 class skill requirement.
* Removed civilization from Mzungu Tag Test exterminator
+ Lowered the respawn time on the Giant Asteroid in Mzungu Angani from 2 hours to 15 minutes
+ Removed Crack Whore Haven from the planet name list
* Added a ton of new contextual tutorial events for when the player gets stuck on the first few cadet missions
* Added auto-targeting for when you use a super item that contains a weapon and don’t have anything targeted
* Made the Target Dummy MK II highly resistant to everything but physical
+ Fixed generation issue which caused dungeons to sometimes have multiple boss galaxies with the same name
* Moved the default position of the tutorial bot dialog to not overlap the mission tracker/other dialogs
* Added glow map for Warden
* Fixed visison typo in the Station Mastery descrption
* Converted the Vampyre Black Heart to consume Distilled Life Force, obtained by breaking the Vampyre Life Force crate
* Improved the text of the player progression missions
* Roaming charges fix for copper
+ Added a new drop to Dark Curse to train Cloaking 20
* Bunch of new stuff for UrQa AI.
* Fixed a bug where you could capture ships which you didn’t have skills for
* Fixed ‘Radation’ -> ‘Radiation’ in various Color Empire missions
* Missile now self-destruct when the ship that launched them docks.
* Fixed ‘Poisonious’ -> ‘Poisonous’ typoes
* ‘crack whores’ -> ‘Entertainers’ in T21 solo missions
+ Made L Star solar systems a bit bigger
* Fixed Attached Drones which were flagged as non-scoopable being scoopable
* Added the first iteration for the skins system
* Added tooltip lightly explaining the benefit of DDS textures
* Replaced the Poseidon Trident kills in Drones of Olympus with other drones to kill
* Fixed a missing space in neurotweak descriptions
* Fixed ‘seconds seconds’ in item not charged error message
* Augmenters in the trade bay should now be properly colored.
* Changed the initial velocity of credits from a ship killed by a player so that the farther away the player is, the less initial velocity the credits gain. This is to help snipers killing guys from very far away so that they money doesn’t go flying out too far.
* Added a glowmap for shrimp
* Increased cash rewards on Platinum priority target missions in Strontium-90
+ Added Mira
* AI will now no longer use Oilheart’s Afterburner Device on low shields.
* Added the new ship stats window.
* The default credits and xp values for ai is now be lowered for fast spawning ai.
* Fixed the band at the top of the screen not being clickable
* Extra information on transwarp stat string
* Fixed Resilient skill, tweaked description
* Lowered autopilot text by 27 pixels.
* Added a close button to the radar window
* Added /HideHuiMethod, this change the hideUI key “h” behavior from a deadman switch to a toggle for the session (usefull for taking videos and stuff)
* Changed solar panel stat string from every 1.2sec to energy / sec.
* Made it so fighters are no longer displayed in the small target lists.
* When a squadmate is shot, every member of the squad in the galaxy will gain a minimal level of hate toward the aggressor (the kind that fade within 30 seconds if left alone).
Skins list in the first iteration. (most of the skins are available on many variants of a ship)
Delquad -> Chilled Metal
Hermes -> Kleptomaniac Prometheus
Pax Ships -> Assasination
Chromatichrome, Santa’s Special Sleigh -> Infected Chrome
Santa’s Special Sleigh -> Infected Sleigh
Apprentice Ward, Mini Mad Scientist -> Tron’s Ward
Apprentice’s Ward+ -> Tron’s Ward+
Hybridized Ward -> Hybridized Tron’s Ward
Deathstriker -> Ice Striker
Deathstriker+ -> Ice Striker+
Faranji Wingship, Unt Faranji Wingship -> Faranji Bloodstriker
Wattage, Divine Mini Wattage, Demonic Wattage -> Tesla’s Wattage
Lion -> Mane of Flames
Hybridized Lion -> Hybridized Mane of Flames
Space Blue Beta -> Hotrod Space Red Beta
Warden -> 5-0
Earthforce Capital Ship -> Earthforce Teal Edition
Prawn, Shrimp, Shrimp+, Kidd’s Prawn, Reconditioned Shrimp, Hybridized Shrimp -> Golden Shrimp
Zeus Throne, Jovian Lackey -> Igneous Throne
Zeus Throne, Jovian Lackey -> Molten Throne
Ancient Scoutship -> Eternal Sunset
Leviathan, Leviathan+ -> Dark Leviathan
Space Blue Gamma -> Space Green Gamma
Nightfury/Scrupling -> Firespitter
Poseidon Wave -> Citrus Wave
Red Photon Warship, Red Photon Heavy Cruiser, Red Photon Carrier, Red Photon Warship Prototype, Red Photon Support Cruiser, Red Photon Logistics Cruiser -> Blue Photon
Ares War Chariot/+, Wingship II Pro -> Ornamented Chariot
Lion -> Liger
Hybridized Lion -> Hybridized Liger
Zebra, Hybridized Zebra -> Classic Zebra
Vulture, Hornet -> Lightning Vulture
Apprentice Ward, Mini Mad Scientist, Apprentice’s Ward+, Hybridized Ward -> Blue Hybrid Ward
Panther, Panther Kitten, Hybridized Panther -> Black Panther
Panther, Panther Kitten, Hybridized Panther -> Neon Panther
Vaziayu -> Crystal Vaz
Hephaestus Machine -> Deep Blue
Prawn, Shrimp, Shrimp+, Kidd’s Prawn, Reconditioned Shrimp, Hybridized Shrimp -> Tiger Prawn
Wattage, Divine Mini Wattage, Demonic Wattage -> Kilo Wattage
Shrimp, Shrimp+, Prawn -> Dark Shrimp
Earthforce Frigate, Earthforce Battlecruiser, Hybridized Battlecruiser, Earthforce Battleship, Hybridized Battleship, Earthforce Dreadnought -> Dark Capital Ship
Scrupling -> Black Stone Scrupling
Scrupling -> Cream Stone Scrupling
Scrupling -> Grey Stone Scrupling
Skins that we haven’t quite finished, but should be in the next patch:
eMassive, The Pop Tart, Crispy Lobster, Fireball, Herbal Essence, Honey Badger, Cursed Ares, Fallen Hephaestus Machine, Zeus Thunder, Red Wingship, Yellow Frigate
Submitters of accepted skins will be getting one copy of the skin that they made for free.
As some of you know, there was a patch initialy scheduled for last week (July 30) but never happened because I delayed it.
There were many reasons for the delays, but the main one was due to some bugs that were found during testing that still escaped me up till earlier this morning, especially a very random one causing visages to be created from a cache but not all the time, which in turn caused skins to not always display seemingly randomly.
Alongside that bug hunting, I still kept doing my normal stuff, client crash tracking and fixing and optimisations.
This blog post is to announce that the next full patch including the first iteration of the skins system and many other things will be live this Sunday (August 10)
As for the things I been working on when i was not tracking that damn bug, my recent attention was turned to the deathblossom induced lags, both server and client side.
deathblossom allowed for a lot more enemies to be killed quickly and in sync, on top of the fact a lot of projectiles / lasers were created/destroyed compared to before.
I made a simple extreme testing ground using 300 phobos for optimisations purposes, and configured my ship to fire hephaestus burning maul at maximum rof with the highest deathblossom available.
This is what it looked like on my test machine on the current beta client.
As you can see in that small gif, it lagged hardcore. There were 2 major sources of lag, the lasers creations and the objects destructions (including lasers)
The first one was due to the laser using a brightpass and how the operation of adding to the brightpass was not optimised. Everytime we added an object to the brightpass, it first checked its container to be sure the object was not already in the bright pass. Which is safe and was fine when the call was not frequent, but with 140 lasers per seconds being added and destroyed (14 at max rof), it quickly added up. This was pretty easy to improve since we can safely assume any newly created object is not already in the bright pass, we can skip that check the first time any object is added, which is most of the cases. This resulted in a noticeable improvement in performance all around.
The other problem was the amount of objects being destroyed every 0.1 seconds + the number of ships blowing up in the process. There is very little I could do directly to that, since well, the objects do need to be created and destroyed (pooling them wouldn’t had helped much since its not their memory allocation/destruction, but the whole process of placing them adding the effects etc that is causing the lag). Which is why instead I went with a distributed approach, instead of trying to delete 140lasers (which end up being about 1200nodes with all the effects and stuff) every 0.1 sec, I remove them from view and queue them for a deletion over the next few frames. As a result, the total workload is the same, but its evenly distributed so there is much less noticeable lag, especially on system where your fps is capped or your logic fps is much higher than fps in which case the only reduction is on the logic fps and not the fps.
This was the result of those optimisations in the same scenario.
Its important to note, there were no graphic alterations whatsoever in those optimisations. The visible result is exactly the same, just done slightly differently.
We’re excited to announce that in an upcoming update, we’re adding the ability to trade space points in-game as items! After purchased on the website, they will show up in your TSL and be tradeable to other players. Any player can then redeem them and after a short delay spend them on anything that space points can be spent on (such as subscriptions, aug resets, and name changes).
For the initial release, we’re adding a very unique protection to the items to make sure that it is impossible for them to leave your possession except through a sale. To start, we’re only allowing transactions through userbases, and only the base owner can add or remove any of the item from the base. If the base is destroyed then the item will be transported back to the base owner’s TSL. We might open up these restrictions in the future, but for now we’re leaning on the safe side.
Now, you may be noticing that I haven’t said what these items are called. Thats because we don’t know yet! While we’re just about ready to patch these in we haven’t actually came up with a name. We figure that our players are the ones that will be seeing this name ever day, so we’d like to give you guy some input on the naming process. Any and all name suggestions are welcome in the discussion topic. We’re aiming for something a little more interesting than “20 Space Point Voucher” but a little less out there than “Spacepointium”.
This week’s update is going to be a little shorter, but will encompass the latest round of changes to the forthcoming ship dialog updates as well as some information on my next project!
This past week didn’t see too many more major changes to the dialog as most of the hard work on the project was already done. However, I did make a few pretty important and noticeable fixes and additions! They are as follows.
The dialog with all the current updates currently looks like this –
Apart from that, I’ve started with all the necessary code changes to support the upcoming base rebalance! There is a fair amount that needs done to make sure that we get everything right so I’ve been working down a list of requests from ycleption. I’ll talk more about them when he’s ready to reveal a bit more of what he’s planned!
That’s it for this week’s update. I won’t be making an update next week due to me taking vacation this week, but still feel free to post questions, comments and suggestions in the forums and I’ll do my best to respond! I’ll be back again with another update in two weeks!
As a followup for the sucessfull quickfixing session 2 weeks ago, im starting a new one for tommorow.
For those who do not know, the quickfixing session is in essence, a day i take off my normal work and focus on fixing/adding as many small things as I can from a list I compile from player requests.
Its at my own discretion as to which bugs or features I’ll do on that day, based mostly on if its possible to do it in the day and how many people are affected/want it fixed ASAP.
For bug request, if the bug can be described precisely including a way to reproduce it in a few lines, then just posting about it in the topic is fine. Otherwise a short description and a link to a bug topic is preferred.
Similarly for feature request, if it can be described precisely in a few lines, then just write it in the topic, otherwise a short description and a link to a suggestion is preferred
This week’s update is going to mainly be a continuation of last week’s announcement of the Ship Stats window!
As a refresher, here is a screenshot of what the window looked like last Monday when I made my announcement post.
Now, here is an updated screenshot of what the window looks like.
As you can see, quite a bit is different! Firstly, I’ve added colored icons to the resistance table. This was done to further reinforce the buff icon colors used for resistance buffs, as well as provide a more consistent look and feel for the tables. I’ve also updated and added a bunch of tooltips to clarify just what everything means! If you hover over the text for things like Augmenter Tweaking and Neuro Tweaking, you’ll get an idea of what they do. I’ve also added in values for Ship Turning Rate and Ship Thrust.
The bigger addition that I made this week was the weapons stat table. This table will figure out how much DPS, DPE your weapons have. How much damage they do, how far they fire and what’s their recoil! It also displays an icon to denote what damage type they are! This table currently takes into account all of your augmented stats, including multifire when it calculates damage and should provide a fairly accurate look at just how effective your weapons are. However, it doesn’t currently include buffs in those stats. This brings us to some finishing touches I am planning on working on in the coming week.
This window is nearing completion, but there are a few things I have slated to do. Firstly, I need to refactor the messages so buff updates will update the weapon stats and resistance tables as well. This would let you see your resistances after popping a blocker or how fast you fire when that Rapid Attack goes off. Secondly, because it’s been requested quite a few times, I’d like to add an item tooltip for the ship’s base stats (like what you would see if you clicked on it in a trade bay) somewhere in the window. I am thinking this could be a button or on hovering over the ship’s name. Once those two features are finished, it’s time for testing, debugging and optimizations and it’ll be ready for deployment!
So that’s it for this week’s update. I hope you’ve enjoyed a further look at the ship stat’s window.
Heyoo! It’s time for our Monthly Event!
This time we’re hitting you up for 25% Bindomite drop chance from Dungeon Bosses and 50% extra Experience!
In addition to this, Midday Sunday (server time) will see some strangely appearing outposts across the universe.
The event will last until the 1st. Happy hunting!
This week’s update is going to mostly detail a new feature that will soon be added to the game! Keep reading to find out more!
Firstly, something I forgot to mention last week when I announced Mira. With Mira I added a new mission feature that is used there and will no doubt see a fair amount of using going forward. This feature allows a mission to randomly assign another mission to a player on completion of the primary mission. In short, it means we can do randomly assigned dailies (like we have for T21 and T22) without the bulky mission item middleman!
As for the new feature. If anyone has been watching the Suggestions system, they will have noticed that the status on the suggestion for Ship Statistics has been changed from Accepted to Underway. That’s because I’ve started working on it! Since this is the first user-submitted suggestion that’s started development, I think it would be interesting to tell everyone just what’s gone into that so far.
Everything started with the suggestion — which asked that we add in a way to view the stats of a players current ship; stuff like mods, augmenters, class skills, etc. From there, I made a mock-up in Google Docs. We tend to use Google Docs for a lot of stuff since it lets us work on designs collaboratively!
From the mock-up, the next stage was modifying the existing dialog so it could support all the new features. Since our GUI is skinnable, dialogs are saved in XML in the client folder. At this stage it’s all about re-sizing the existing window, adding a bunch of UI elements and positioning them properly. Once this is done we can start working on the signals from the client that will feed these elements, like lists and labels, all the useful information about your ship!
Before we can actually display the information though, the client needs to have it — which it doesn’t. That’s because it doesn’t have access to all the information about your ship, only what it needs to render it on the screen and display things like inventory and shield bars. It’s the server that has all the stats, buffs and other information needed to figure out things like damage. This means I had to make a few new client/server messages so the client could request the required information when the new dialog is opened, as well as ones from the server to send all that information back.
Once all this is finished, it’s time to start organizing and formatting the data so it’s a bit easier to read. To do this, I went with tables for stats and buffs and a list for the important stats you want to see at a glance, like resistances. I also added icons to the augmenter stats so you can tell at a glance what a stat modifies. For instance, a shield modifier has a shield icon since it directly modifies the values on that shield! I also colored the values so you can tell which modifiers are good and which are bad at a glance! After some internal feedback though, we decided the window was a bit cramped, so I widened it a bit so you can more easily see everything in it!
This window is still a work under construction and I am extremely open to more suggestions on how to make it even more useful for players. So definitely feel free to post feedback in the forums about this! That’s all I have for this week, I’ll be back next week with another update. Until then!