Hello everyone! As promised on the forums I have been doing some QA work on high end missile launcher and fighter bay balance. The tech levels that might see some small changes are tech 18-22

This blogpost is a suggestion proposal, which means that everything in this blogpost is proposed suggested stats, and I would like to hear your opinion Any suggestions and ideas are welcomed!

A player pointed out that tech 22 launchers weren’t properly balanced, so the more rare alien launchers had worse stats than the entry tech 22 launchers. The same player also earlier pointed out that there were no freighter fighter bays between tech 16 and 22, so I am also adressing that issue! Thank you for the reports Johnston, I hope my suggestions can close this gap Keep reading to see the exact suggestions.

There will be four overall restructures, which are as following:

• All tech 20-22 capital fighter bays and missile launchers will gain some increased weight, at a maximum of 100,000 (previously weight was a decreasing trend instead of a stable condition)
• There will be 2 new tech 21 fighter bays, as there previously were none apart from the Zeus Throne built-in
• New tech 18, 20 and 21 freighter fighter bays
• Small revamp to fighter/missile launch amount

Let’s start with the list of tweaks to current in game launchers and missile bays :)

Old stats:

New suggested stats:

New fighter bays:

So as you can see, only one fighter bay had a decrease in launch amount, and that was the tech 22 freighter fighter bay. Ideally we want to keep these at a maximum of 2 fighters We also want to keep heavy fighter and freighter launchers at lower weight and size to encourage the use of missiles and fighters across other hull classes as well.

All fighter bays and missile bays are balanced around the tech level, launch amount, launch speed (fighter bays only), size and weight. If you want to suggest any other changes than what I have proposed, then head over to the forum and I will gladly discuss it with you!

This was all for now, my next combined development/QA work might take a look at fighter and drone size across all levels, so keep an eye out for that in the near future

This week’s update is going to further discuss changes to the Nexus. It’s also going to detail a few new features for auto-started missions and a new type of AI!

One of the big things I’ve done this past week is adding a new AI type known as ‘Ally’. An Ally has a few unique features that make it extremely different to any other AI types we currently have. First, Allies will never attack a player or player owned property. This means even if you shoot them, they’ll not fire back. Secondly, Allies will prioritize attacking other AI that have been attacking players. Finally, Allies can be set as non-attackable by players. All three of these features make this new AI type extremely friendly for low level players and it’s seeing a fair bit of use in the new Nexus changes.

For examples, consider Whiskey Outpost. I’ve changed the spawners there so the AI that help the player fight the opposing faction are now Allies. This means you no longer have an accidental shooting of the players ‘team’ leading to all the AI turning on them. It also means the the AI that help the player better prioritize attacking the enemy instead of docking or being otherwise useless. For a second example, I’ve added an ally spawner to Ur Ziq Bana. I know many players have complained about the difficulty of the missions in that galaxy. Now, when you enter, if you have the mission Zobitan himself spawns to assist you! Not only does it greatly reduce the difficulty but it feels appropriately epic! This new AI type is extremely useful and  will definitely be seen in other mission content or boss fights.

Since I am talking about Ur Ziq Bana, it might be obvious that I have completed streamlining the Cadet side of the Nexus. Less than half the mission require docking to complete them now, and the ones that do are mainly focused on training skills or receiving and equipping items. Overall, the entire Cadet side of the Nexus flows a lot more smoothly and guides players galaxy to galaxy instead of always forcing them to go back to base between missions. I think when we have it available for play testing everyone will agree it’s a much quicker and overall more friendly experience.

Other than that, I’ve put a bit of work on making the pop-up dialogs for missions a bit more exciting. Missions that automatically start now have a customized dialog with a few new features! The mission agent portrait will ‘flick on’ similar to an old television. The text for the mission will ‘type out’ as if you are receiving a text transmission and we now display the mission agent’s name! These new additions might not seem like that big a deal, but the help with the immersion quite a bit.

In addition to this change, I’ve pared down a lot of the mission text in the Nexus so it’s more succinct and readable. As much as I love the story aspect of doing missions, having to read a daunting wall of text every few minutes is kind of annoying and definitely detracts from the new-player experience. Instead we’ve placed an increased emphasis on the summary text to make sure new players know what they need to be doing and how to do it!

So that’s it for this week’s update. Expect to see me again next week with another update detailing some more Nexus changes as I’m ready to start work on the Pirate side! As always, questions, comments and suggestions can be directed to the forums!

The winter blues have passed us by, and now is a warmer time coming, with plants flowering, eggs to decorate and find. Astro-Bunny will be visiting us soon with lots of chocolaty goodies and Easter joy.

But before that can happen, we need some eggs, every size, shape(?) and colour. That’s why the Easter Bunny wants you to decorate, or make an egg and send it to him. Your egg can be a drawing, a hard boiled one or any other egg-tastic idea for eggyness you can come up with. Five winners will be picked from the submissions based on creativity and design, with bonuses for Star Sonata themed entries. They will receive a collection of Easter items and a special permanent holoprojector.

You have until 00:00 Server Time, Sunday 13th April to submit your entries, all submissions are to go to the forum topic. This gives you about a week and a half to get them done. Winners will be announced later that day and prizes handed to them.

* fix for the newly introduced beta client bugs (invisible particles) and small target icon not showing for squadmate
* Relabeled the “TSL” tab as “Storage”
* Moved ship upgrade items to the ships tab of the trade bay.

If you do not have the beta client and wish to install it. It can be downloaded from http://www.starsonata.com/dl/StarSonata_2_beta.exe. The installation is separated from the live client, and it is recommended you keep the live client at hand reach, in case beta client update break it for you.

This week’s update is going to focus on some changes coming to the early game experience, new mission features as well as some UI modifications.

Over the past few weeks I’ve talked about putting an emphasis on the early to mid game experience. This started with my post on Arctia, continued with last week’s post on Vulcan and continues again this week with a look at the starting experience in the Nexus.

Over the last week I’ve done a lot of work on the Nexus. I think everyone can agree the current iteration is clunky, confusing and a bit unforgiving for the newer players. Many players get lost or otherwise stuck in the Nexus and that definitely doesn’t leave a good impression. So I’ve been working on making it a much more accessible and streamlined experience.

Some of the biggest changes so far are changes to the mission flow. A few months back we added in the ability to start and finishing missions on the fly, without the need to dock at a base. Paired with the mission tracker, this offers a very accessible way to get new players oriented with the game. A lot of the Nexus missions are going to use this. This is because docking after EVERY mission really is kind of boring and a little bit frustrating. Why should you have to go back to the previous galaxy to get a mission to kill guys in the next galaxy? You shouldn’t. With the changes, players are really only ever going to dock when they get a new skill or want to buy an upgrade. This will definitely help us establish a flow through the Nexus that we didn’t have before, and make the entire experience more enjoyable for the player.

Along with streamlining the starting experience, I’ve been looking at making the inventory more accessible for new players. To do this, I’ve added some new mission options. First, I’ve added the ability for a mission to equip your item rewards. This is especially useful for the starting side of the Earthforce chain where players were given a surgical laser that was essential to progression, but no help on how to equip it and switch between weapons. Now, we can automatically equip the weapon for them and just let them know via the mission which key they need to use to switch between equipped weapons. Much easier, right? Secondly, I’ve added a new mission goal that requires the player to equip a specific item. By adding new missions with this goal, we can ensure that players open their inventory and explore it a little bit. We can gradually introduce the concept of the inventory in Star Sonata with some helpful hints via mission. We can also use this tool to help explain upgrading your items which absolutely vital at the lower levels of the game.

Speaking of upgrading, one of the most confusing things for a new player is no doubt upgrading their ship. It’s a messy process that involves buying a new ship, finding the right tab on the station, moving all their gear over and reequipping everything. It also means losing any augmenters they may have gotten. To alleviate some of this confusion, at least for the very early game (techs 1 through 3) we are adding a lot more ship upgrade items. Along with this, we are removing the equipment requirement from ship upgrades, and having them only require piloting skill. Finally, we are moving where ship upgrades are listed in the trade bay from the ‘items’ tab to the ‘ships’ tab. These three changes should make getting out of that Zebucart into something useful — like a Wingship — a lot easier for new players, and getting into that new ship will in turn make the Nexus easier for them.

So that’s it for this week’s update. As always, questions, comments and suggestions can be directed to the forum post! I’ll be back again next week with another look at what I’ve been working on!

Greetings Sonatians!

Many of you were around for our 2013 player survey! We received a lot of feedback and were able to apply much of what was said into development of Star Sonata, but we discovered that there were still some questions left unanswered.

With that we created a much shorter survey to specifically ask questions about the Quality of Life while playing Star Sonata. What we mean by this is things that are annoying to use, and could be much simpler in it’s implementation. For example: the tooltips on items are frustrating to use and disappear when I’m reading them.

This survey will close at the end of April! Thank you for your feedback!

Take the Survey Now! 

This week’s update, like the update about Arctia two weeks ago, is going to focus on a new content addition that will soon be coming to Star Sonata.

This new zone is named Vulcan. Vulcan is a fiery area of space surrounding a super-hot sun that regularly flares, subjecting the surrounding area to intense heat. Vulcanites, an offshoot of the Copper Creatures that have evolved defenses allowing them to survive in this harsh environment, have begun to leave the areas closer to the sun and now threaten a Terran mining outpost nearby. It is up to pilots levels 30 to 100 to explore the depths of Vulcan and put an end to Infernus, the Vulcanite Alpha who is pushing them into Terran space!

Vulcan consists of nine new galaxies, many of which have environmental hazards. Between the flares from Vulcan itself, players have to watch for the magma pools of the Burning Basin and the steam pillars in the Magma Vents. Both of these hazards will deal damage to the player and cause fires on their ships! Vulcan will also feature four new bosses, each with their own unique loot! From the magma trailing Lavrite and the splitting Vulcanox, each of these bosses utilizes some new and exciting features that should prove both challenging and rewarding to players. Loot from the bosses will be between techs 3 and 7 and will provide some very nice new items that were previously unavailable at those tech levels like Fighter Bays and Missile Launchers. It will also contain a bevy of new weapons, energy banks and other unique gear!

Like I explained in my post on Arctia, you will be seeing a fair number of zones like this making their way into game in the future. Arctia was the first, Vulcan the second, and between myself and another of the content developers, we have no shortage of ideas. The plan is to ensure we have enough zones of this nature and that they are visible enough, that players have a clear leveling progression without having to do missions if they don’t want to. Vulcan covers a very wide range and players could end up spending a lot of time there leveling from the Vulcanites,

Also like Arctia, the missions in this zone will be fairly minimal. There will be an introductory missions to help players get to know the zone and explain the usage of heat diffusers and fire extinguishers, followed by a set of boss kill missions with some fairly interesting rewards. In general though, the zone itself is the main attraction. Players will want to do it for the loot and experience so they can get stronger and move on.

So that’s it for this week’s update. I hope you’ve enjoyed a first look at Vulcan as I’ve enjoyed working on it immensely. I’ll be back again next week with another update, but until then, feel free to post questions, comments and suggestions in the forums! Until then!

This is a beta client patch needed to connect on test, without it youll experience glitches when seeing drones.

* Code needed to fix the inactive drones wandering off (need server update and is the reason why the new client is needed on new server)
* Multiple crash fixes (7 new crashes were tracked and fixed, at least 2 remain)
* Massive performance optimisations (about 30% fps and 1000% logic fps depending on the scenario).
* Higher precision fps and logic fps display / calculation (previous system was losing precision the higher the value was, so an fps of above 66 could be anything from 80 fps to 50 fps due to timer precision, which in turn caused slowdown in the fps smoothing system), new system support fps up to 1,000,000 with 2 decimal precision).

If you do not have the beta client and wish to install it. It can be downloaded from http://www.starsonata.com/dl/StarSonata_2_beta.exe. The installation is separated from the live client, and it is recommended you keep the live client at hand reach, in case beta client update break it for you.

Hey guys! Sorry for the radio silence since the contest’s conclusion. We’re having to do much in the way of manual work in order to track everyone’s points. The contest was way more popular than we anticipated! We are expecting winners to be announced late March-Early April, with a new contest announced shortly after (with much less manual work involved).

I can’t say much about the new contest yet, only that it involves a new system Jey’s been designing for the past month and that new system involves skins for player ships.

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day! This week’s update will focus on some more bug fixes, changes and new features that will soon be coming to Star Sonata. Keep reading to find out more!

Let’s start with new features, they’re probably the most exciting. As I am sure everyone is aware, with the class rebalance we added in drone destruction. Since the reset when that change went in I’ve seen a lot of destroyed drone husks littering the universe. It seems a lot of players forget about something like an Acme Combat out in Perilous space and just leave it! It’s no wonder I’ve seen so many requests for the ability to abandon drones — which is a new feature you will see in an upcoming patch.

I’ve added options to both the target options menu (x-key) and the context menu in your possessions tab of your character window that allow you to abandon drones. This option will be available for any drones owned by your character. Using it will bring up a confirmation (for the possessions menu variant), and if you really are sure, will do one of two things depending on the type of drone you are trying to abandon. If it is a permanent drone, it will disappear and be gone forever. If it is a temporary drone, it will go inactive (regardless of timer or other states) and gain an Abandoned prefix. This will sever all ties the drone has to you. Abandoned drones will still exist in the game however and can be scooped by any player. This could no doubt lead to some pretty lucky finds time and again!

As for changes, there is one coming up for the chain laser effect that directly deals with chain shield transferences. I’ve updated the chain laser code so it properly subtracts shields from the healer for all targets hit, not just the primary target. This change comes on the heels of another that hit with the class rebalance; splashing healing lasers also take shields from the healer for each target hit. Both these changes are pretty important to making a wider variety of healing lasers available for players which we definitely intended to do at some point in the near future.

And for some fixes! One thing that was completely overlooked with the addition of the Blue Photon Test Ranges was modded gear. Modded gear can drastically alter the maximum shield banks of the drones and lead to some extremely skewed results. To fix this I’ve added a new option to our ‘shipyard’ or the part of the code that loads up all the AI ship configurations to disallow a ship from starting with modded gear. When this change hits everyone’s drones in the testing range will always be identical. This will make your damage testing mean a bit more. Another fix that is coming also deals with the testing range and that’s that Testing Dummies will no longer be rad-exable. I am sure people think that is is funny they managed to get them out, but they were never intended to leave the galaxy.

Now for a final small bug fix update; I’ve finally found and corrected the issue causing desync for mobile drones. This was the result of the new inactive flag not being properly serialized to the client. So pretty much, the server knew the drone wasn’t mobile anymore, but the client didn’t and chose to render it as if it was still mobile. Now that that flag is properly sent to the client we should be free of any more weird drone sync issues!

So that’s it for this week’s update! As always, questions, comments and suggestions can be directed to the automatically generated forum post! I’ll be back against next week with another update!