Much like the past month or so, this update is going to focus on more changes to the Nexus and low level game play. It will also address a few more features that are being added to smooth out the UI for newer players! Keep reading to find out more!

The Nexus is coming along very well. All the content on both sides, Cadet and Volcom, up to Deep Space have been streamlined to remove all the backtracking and pointless docking. They’ve also been rebalanced to make them easier with the new player in mind and all the galaxies have been reworked slightly to make the flow of progression through the Nexus a lot smoother. Most recently, in the past week I looked at the Contracosta and Honey Moon dungeon arms.

The content in both of these dungeons arms was significantly overtuned for the players we wanted to complete them. Contracosta received the bulk of the changes. I’ve moved the ‘stations’ that you have to destroy to ambush spawners so they don’t stick around after the player kills them. I’ve also turned the fight against the Ganglinite Research Gamma station into a mini-event similar to Whiskey Outpost. Instead of going it alone against an army of Micro-Zebus and defense drones, the player is now given backup in the form an allied Volcom army. Not only does it make the mission a lot easier to complete, it makes it a lot more fun and engaging. Honey Moon received a few changes for difficulty as well. Firstly, the AI in both Dagger and Cutlass Caprice were unteamed. Most of the difficulty in those areas were the fact a new player would get swarmed. I’ve also toned down Urzod significantly. Having him call for reinforcements just overwhelmed new players who don’t know how to handle AI swarms yet.

I’ve also made a few other changes to help out new players server side, the biggest of which is that docking in an AI base will now refill 50 energy and 50 shields per second. This isn’t enough to be extremely useful for higher level players, but for the new player this kind of regen will ensure that if they dock because of low shields, they’ll be back in action a lot faster than they would have before.

On the client side I’ve made a few more improvements to the pop-up mission agent dialog as well as another change to station UI. For the pop-ups I shifted the typing animation from a frame based animation to a time based animation. This will make sure that jumping into a galaxy with a lot going on (which can lag your client and slow the framerate) won’t slow down the speed the text types out. I also removed the big close button from the agent dialog and made a few modifications to the accept button so it can handle all the usage conditions. It didn’t make much sense to have two close buttons on that dialog and it allows for the mission vendors name to be visible for all missions (which is a definite win for immersion!).

For the station UI, I am sure some of you have already noticed a button underneath the mission list that reads ‘Contact Agent’. This button when clicked will automatically open the first available mission at that station. It can also be used to avoid double clicking to open missions. Clicking on the mission you want in the list and then hitting that button is a bit easier to understand for a new player. The second change I’ve made that you probably don’t know about is that I’ve added a new button to the bottom of the ships tab in AI stations. This button is the ‘Buy or Upgrade Ship’ button and when clicked will automatically take the player to the hull tab of the trade bay. Again, this was done to help new players. Upgrading your ship is one of the most important power increases in the early game but it isn’t the most intuitive process. Hopefully this button will help alleviate some confusion — they can go to the ships tab to see their ship and click this button to easily see if the base they’re docked at has any alternatives.

So that’s it for this week’s update. I’ll be back again with another post (perhaps the final one!) on the Nexus! Until then, feel free to post questions, comments or suggestions in the forums!

In this video, I demonstrate two new convenience features that we’ve been working on: auto-targeting and auto-credit scooping.

Auto-targeting eliminates the need to select a target before attacking it. If you have no target already selected and shoot at an object that is either a mission goal to kill, something that you have hostility towards, or just an aggressive AI, then as soon as you shoot, that object will be automatically selected and your shot will track towards it.

Auto-credit scooping works in two ways. The first is that if you have a scoop equipped and fly near any credits that you would normally be allowed to scoop, then those credits get automatically scooped. The second is that for 5 seconds after you kill something, those credits will fly towards your ship. In effect, you can clear out a whole DG level or kill most guys at normal range/speed and get all the credits automatically without having to go and scoop them.

This will be on the test server in the next day or so and require a test client to use, so please check it out and give your feedback. In particular, we need to test the credit scooping in various squad type environments to make sure that nothing too crazy happens.

This is a micropatch, mostly bugfixes / minor tweaks and also update the client to include some supports needed for test server.

* Tweakings to the bosskill score system.
* Autopilot no longer requires Astral Travel.
* New Contact Agent button for station mission list.
* Missions now autocomplete when you dock at the ending station.
* Text in the trade bay is now colored based on price and tech levels (dark green for can’t afford, red for insufficient tech level).
* Crash fixes.
* Fixed the bug where we had an extra tab in several different tab control UI elements.

Much like the last few weeks, this week’s update will continue detailing changes to the Nexus as well as a few new mission features that will be coming with the early game changes.

I did a lot of work with the the mission system this week after some initial testing. The end result was two new mission goals that should make life a lot easier for newer players. The first of these is the new Proximity Goal. With this, content developers can specify any object in any galaxy as a location that players need to fly to in order to progress their mission. It will then require the player to be within a specified distance of that object and will put a mission marker above it. This pretty much lets us do ‘hey, fly over there and check out this nebula’ type missions that we couldn’t do properly before. An example of this is in the Fly Dungeon. Instead of vague mission text that says ‘go find the Maggot’, I instead gave a proximity goal to explore the sun he spawns near. When a player gets near, it completes that mission, auto-opens the mission to kill the maggot and spawns him. This hopefully illustrates how useful this goal will be for low level content. It lets us guide new players around galaxies to better help avoid confusion

The second new mission feature is a new mission goal called a Motion Goal. This essentially lets us check for thrust, break or turn actions that the player does and was added so we can further slim down the tutorial bot. Instead of getting the W, A, S, D key information from the tutorial bot when you start a new player, you’ll now get it from a mission. This makes it a lot easier for us to time the actual starting missions (killing a Volcom attacker if you’re a cadet, or proving yourself to the Volcom if you’re a pirate). It also is a little less confusing since you’re getting your information from one source (the mission dialog) instead of three (mission dialog, mission tracker and tutorial bot). Along with this I’ve added a new feature to auto-completing and auto-starting missions that lets us set a delay between the completion of the previous and start of the next mission. This gives the player a little time to breathe between the missions in the movement tutorial missions (and lets us give them mission completion text). Overall, I think the new mission based tutorial will play a lot better and be a lot less confusing for new players.

Finally, a few of the bosses in the Nexus are going to be seeing some changes, specifically, Rattie Moe and Vorian the Rogue. Both of them were extremely difficult for new players. Vorian was extremely confusing, so he will no longer jump around the galaxy and force you to find him. It was a good boss design, but not for a level 15 player. Instead he will do a new super item translocate. This keeps him moving around, but not in a way that can get players lost! Rattie Moe just did way too much damage for a new player to handle. That’s being significantly toned down.  Between these two though, perhaps most importantly, Rattie Moe is finally getting the robotic-space-rat squeak he deserves. Even doing less damage he’s more terrifying than ever!

So that’s it for this week’s update. I’ll be back again with more progress on the Nexus (and a lot closer to completed). As always, feel free to post questions, comments or suggestions in the forums!

After more feedback from you guys, we’ve made several critical changes to how our suggestions system operates! We now allow for player submitted suggestions!

On the first of every month we will review the top three suggestions and give responses. We’ll either approve the suggestion and assign it to a developer, make tweaks and assign it to a developer, or reject the suggestion and give our reasons for the rejection.

To create a suggestion visit the suggestions page and select the new “Create” button. In order to create a suggestion you need to either have one character above level 100, or subscribed. The restriction is in place to prevent spam from cluttering the suggestions board. Creating a suggestion costs three votes.

We will award 30 votes every month to subscribed players or players with characters above level 100. For now we still will restrict the amount of votes you will get on a monthly basis until we settle into the new user submitted system. Likewise we may also tweak restrictions on voting and submitting suggestions based on player feedback.

To kickstart the system we are zeroing out all existing votes and granting 50 votes to all eligible accounts.

The suggestions forum will still be open for you to brainstorm ideas with other players, but we will no longer be curating that forum (we honestly weren’t culling it too too much, but would read it and discuss ideas).

This week’s update is going to again continue discussing changes to the Nexus. It’s also going to discuss a few new features for the new Ally AI type announced last week as well a some more changes to mission pop-up dialogs.

As I announced last week, I’ve been working on a new AI type known as Ally. From the base concept, I’ve expanded Allies quite a bit. One of the biggest changes was the addition of Faction Allies. Faction Allies are like regular allied AI but with a few special exceptions. Firstly, they’re aligned with either the Earthforce Cadets or Volcom Pirates (for those of you who don’t remember, the faction you choose from when you create a new character). Secondly, a faction ally will still attack players of the opposing faction but will never attack players of the same faction. Thirdly, a faction ally will only assist players of the same faction. Finally, a non-attackable faction ally can still be attacked by players with the opposing faction.

This leads to some really interesting stuff we can do in the Nexus now. For example, we are adding a roaming Cadet and a roaming Volcom that are both faction allies to the Nexus. These allies will automatically help players out! They’ll no only help you kill mission AI, but maybe even more useful, take care of those pesky flies outside Janitor’s Outpost. It also let me rework Whiskey Outpost so that you can never shoot ships on the players ‘side’ — but still allows players from either faction to participate in the missions at the same time! This fixes what was perhaps the single biggest issue with trying to do an epic space battle mission — so you can be sure that you will see some more of them in the future.

I’ve also quite a few other changes to improve mission flow through the Nexus; the biggest of which right now is the removal of Cadet Academy. During testing it was noticed that nothing really happens in Cadet Academy at all. There are some drone training missions, which are kind of lame by the time you get to them but really, all it served as was a mission hub and an extra jump to get places. So it’s been removed. We’ve renamed the initial galaxy on the Cadet side to Cadet Academy, and Earthforce Trading Outpost to just Earthforce Outpost now. This enables us to have a very nice mission flow where players get guided from their starting galaxy into the Nexus with no backtracking.

As for the pop-up dialogs that I am sure everyone hates at this point (due to the bug this week)! I’ve made a few more changes to the way they work. Firstly, the annoying space at the top that used to only read ‘MISSION AGENT’ has been revamped. Instead of the static image, that area now contains the title of the mission. This has let me move that title out of the text box on the dialog. I’ve also changed the animator that ‘types out’ text for the pop ups. You can now click on it to instantly finish the mission text. This will be extremely useful for those who don’t feel like waiting. The typing text animator also now autoscrolls if the text is too long for the text box to make it easier to read.

That’s it for this week’s update! Progress on the Nexus has been great so far and I’ll be back again next week with another look at what’s going on with the revamp! As always, questions, comments and other feedback are appreciated!

Well, the time is here. Astro-Bunny has finalized preparing all his Easter goodies and has entered our universe. As usual, Astro-Bunny has set up shop in Easter Warren, located off Earthforce Celestial Garden Outpost and his Egg Boxes and Resurrected Rats roam the universe.

This year includes a new chain of missions like the 12 Days of Christmas missions, which start on the 15th and a few other bits and pieces.

The winners of the competition (link) will be announced later.

Lastly, Happy Easter from the Star Sonata Development Team!

I’ve just received the all clear from Jey regarding the infamous Heartbleed exploit! The live server was somewhat affected by heartbleed, and the website was never affected by Heartbleed. We definitely suggest that you change your password to be on the safe side. Due to the nature of the exploit, It is also recommended that you wait to change ANY passwords until you get a notification that the website or service has updated to fix the exploit. You may now change your Star Sonata password safely,  but please check other websites you use before you change those passwords!

For more information about heartbleed check out these links. (note that Star Sonata is not responsible for content you may find on other websites)

http://heartbleed.com/

https://lastpass.com/heartbleed/

We’re very pleased to announce that we’re removing the level cap restriction on Free to play players! We’ve been doing a lot of research into Free to play games recently and what works, and what doesn’t. We felt the level cap was an unneeded restriction that ultimately served no real purpose. Since Star Sonata is very skill based and many P2P’s never even hit 2000 the idea of a level restriction seemed very silly.

With that we also wanted to congratulate the existing F2P characters that actually made it to 2000: Stereotyp1, MDK, Sk1rm1sh. Thanks guys for playing!

So to all our free to plays out there, have fun without the level cap!

Client
* Increased delay before tooltips show up (from 0.7 to 1 sec) and the deadzone allowed for the mouse to be considered paused (from 15 to 40 pixels).
* Gremlin now interrupt autopilot (was not a problem in c1 because the autopilot was too stupid to adapt to a grem, but since the c2 autopilot is quite a bit more aggressive it tend to completely counter gremlins and as such, gremlins will disable it.
* Made it so that you can unequip permanent holoprojectors from the action bar
* New “Abandon Drone” option for drones in right click possessions context menus.
* Multiple client performance optimizations (up to 1000% on logic fps and 30% on fps depending on the situation)
* New fps and logic fps calculation / display code for higher precision and reliability (especially with high value, the previous code could not display logic fps higher than 1000, and logic fps higher than 70 was extremely unreliable due to the timer resolution on many cpu).
* Multiple client crash fixes.
* Relabeled the “TSL” tab as “Storage”

Server
* Ricochet weapon effect now ricochets using PHYSICS.
* Fixes to Chain Bullet Effect.
* Chain Bullet Effect will now bounce in a random direction if no acceptable target is present.
* Prospecting nodes can no longer spawn in subspace instance entrance galaxies.
* A mission that is the requirement for multiple missions will no longer auto open a ‘next’ mission.

* Critical hit changes:
** Critical hit side effect can now happen only once per 10 seconds (you can still do the extra damage during that time, just not the tweak)
** Physical: Random turn gremlin for 2 seconds
** Energy: -100% thrust for 2 seconds
** Laser: -50% shield recharge for 3 seconds
** Heat: -90% radar for 3 seconds
** Mining: -60% energy regeneration for 3 seconds
** Surgical: +60% recoil for 3 seconds
** Radiation: Warp interdiction for 6 seconds
* Sniper Stalking no longer increases critical hit time

* Fix so slaves / AI with low bank, high regen energies will fire.
* Fix for undoing an AI base sale ending with a neurobound item.

* Fixed a typo in the 1 minute timer repair message
* Holoprojectors now evaporate when you log off.
* Fixed a bug with tractors when multiple strong tractors were on a single target.
* New “Abandon” option for drones in X-Key menu.
* Using the Abandon Drone command on scoopable temporary drones will give them the prefix “Abandoned”. They can scooped by any player.
* Using the Abandon Drone command on non-scoopable or permanent drones will cause them to disappear.
* Fix so Abandoned Drones don’t fire on targets that have already hit them.
* Fixes to disable error messags appearing for automatically assigned missions that the player is ineligable for.
* Chain Transference weapons now take shields from the healer for each target hit.
* Fixed update messages so a drone properly displays an updated name when it gets destroyed, abandoned or goes inactive
* Fix for mobile drones desynching when going inactive.
* Added functionality for asteroid belt spawners to spawn different types based on what they have (fixing belts not spawning wreckages when they should).
* Fix for “INVALID” displaying for characters with no class on the login screen.
* Fixed a server crash relating to auto completing missions.
* Splash effect will impart side effects from the main weapon.
* Fixed a bug with Computer Engineer advance subskill.

Content
* Fix for T21 Drone Ops Aug missions requiring Drone Mastery 21.
* Stede’s Basil is no longer capturable.
* Replaced “Satanic” energy tweaks with “Sacrificial” energy tweaks in the drop lists
* Fixed name on the base in Serengeti Blockade
* Alien Siege Mode rebalanced. Cooldown reduced from 180s to 90s. Duration reduced to 10s. Recoil bonus reduced.
* Subhatta Charge speed increased.
* Using Alien Cocoon will no longer unequip class super items or reset the time on Alien Siege Mode.
* AI in The Crucible no longer give Experience, mission XP rewards increased.
* Crucible and lobby galaxy marked as dungeon galaxies and unmappable
* Fixed a spelling mistake if you try to enter an instance with a squad larger than the max size
* Outposts in Subspace will no longer gain invincibility from fighters or missiles.
* Reduced the bonus damage granted to Engines 22 boss.
* Fixed bogus item requirement for the Apollo Drone build
* Slaves can now use Berserker Shield Redistribution Device.
* Updated the cost on Seer and Fleet Commander Transwarp devices.
* Marked all Serengeti, Anaconda, Iq’Bana, Olympus, Mausoleum, Red Photon, Enigmatic Sector, Lunacy, Mumble & it’s instance, Bonnet, Captain Kidd, Emphatic Mother, Kumari and Blue Photon Processing as premium only.
* Marked xyz and empathy field as semi premium
* You can no longer use ship upgrades while undocked.
* Blue Photon Stock Missile Changes.
* Fixes for Dropship Generator.
* Fixed a bad drop tag in colour empire gal for Asteroid Being
* Paxian Final Frontier mission typo fixes
* Fixed a typo in the stat string of the Bauble holoprojector
+ Readded the Zailaguru Ksatracara to Perilous Space.
+ Changed Iq’Bana to use the automatic gate lock system
+ Changed Anaconda to use the automatic gate lock system
+ Moved DG Ohms to Perilous Space for next universe
* Fixed quantity typo in the mission ‘Capital Punishment’ from Blue Photon Subspace chain
* Rajanicar’ayu got a new super item and adjusted resistances.
* Vacohar’ayu got a new super item and adjusted resistances.
* Shield Redistribution device laser no longer is affected by NT
* Added two new asteroid belt spawners to Forrest Run to mitigate wreckages not spawning
* Added ability for missions to have hidden rewards
* New Transwarp Subskills (Transwarp Turbocharging, Advanced Transwarp Navigation)
* Fix so multiple levels of Automated Reloading subskill won’t grant addition bonuses.
* Made it so King Midas is bound to his layer of space
* Gave Nightfury Focus tweak crit immunity for 3seconds and increased damage to 10% and tracking to 50%.
* Increased charge time and elect on both Nightfury Focus and Nightfury Rage to 180s and 30k
* Fixed the man hours for the Adonis Protector Z
* Fixed name on the base in Serengeti Blockade
* Fix so Kinetic, AP, Incendiary and Surgical Strike missile factories are the same tech as their blueprints.
* Pods no longer start with velocity.
* Rovery Nanorobotics Facility BP now properly has 1 max use.
* Changed drone death message from ‘was blown up’ to ‘was destroyed’
* Destroyed and Inactive drones will properly evaporate when their owner logs off.
* Fix for Funky Monkey Advanced subskill.
* Nila Rakta no longer does damage. It instead adds +10% weight to your ship.