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!

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!

This week’s update is going to focus entirely on some new content that I’ve been working on as well as some long term goals for the early to mid-game!

For a while we have heard complaints that the game is lacking in the low to mid-game. Last year, after our all team meeting, we went ahead and did an analysis on low to mid game missions and ultimately ended up restructured the existing missions in game to ensure there is a clear leveling path up to 500 (if you do pretty much everything). That however didn’t do very much to introduce new content; new content is something that is definitely needed and ultimately what I think players really wanted. With T22 and the class rebalance out of the way, I have some time to actually start working on some new content for the lower levels! So, for the past two weeks I’ve spent nearly all of my time between bugfixing working on a new content zone known as Arctia. Arctia is a custom dungeon for players levels 20 to 50. It’s comprised of seven new galaxies, a bunch of new AI and items and contains two new bosses with unique loot tables.

I’m very excited about Arctia, and that’s because Arctia is a kind of prototype for new low level content zones going forward. Instead of being heavily mission based like most of the low level content (like Nexus), this zone is more about running the custom dungeon and getting loot and XP, in the vein of Blue Outpost or Protoplasmica. I think ultimately, for the new player, the concept of dungeon, boss, loot, is a very easy one to digest. There are still some missions, but the missions don’t overwhelm the experience. It also has pretty wide level range so you can stay there for a while if you want to level up off AI instead of doing missions elsewhere.

Arctia is also just the beginning. Going forward I’m going to be spending a fair amount of time working on more low to mid-level zones to fill content gaps. I’ll also be revamping some existing ones so they are more manageable for the single player by reducing teamed AI swarm (I’m looking at you Infernal Tempest and Bonnet). The end goal is to have a full series of custom zones that newer players can do for XP and useful loot if they don’t feel like running around for the Paxians or trawling Earthforce Space for AI.  The end goal is to also have enough of these that there is overlap between the level ranges on each one so players have multiple options on where they choose to level. For example, Arctia overlaps with Blue Outpost for the levels 20 to 50 range. Players can bounce between the two if they get bored. Ultimately, what I’d love to see is a lot of choice in the lower levels. Players need to be able to progress however they see fit. If they want to do exploration or missions or just hunt AI, there will be places they can do any of that.

So you can get a better idea of just what this zone offers, I’ve gone ahead and made a short preview video!

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

This week’s post is going to primarily focus on some post-reset bug fixes — of which there were some, but nearly as many as there could have been thanks to the class rebalance testing phase! Keep reading to find out more.

Primarily this past week I dealt with some of the issues that weren’t found and fixed during the class rebalance testing phase. I figured I would go into a few of them in a bit more detail.But first, map issues!

There were definitely a few map issues this reset. First, Iq’ Bana this universe ended up spawning in Emphatic Biology! Which meant to get there you needed to go through an engineless galaxy. Hardly ideal. So a new wormhole to the area was added in Anomu. Secondly, there was an issue with Lyceum. Splitting up the galaxies left the Earthforce Space layer map a little cluttered. So I took a bit of time and rearranged the galaxies on the map and move them all to the Serengeti layer. Instead of a jumble of crossing links, you now have what you see below.

I think everyone will agree it’s much neater! I’ve also updated the galaxy files so the map should stay that way for future universes as well.

There were a few bugs missed during the testing phase, mainly there have been a few issues with drones and missiles. First, drones and bases were healing friendly destroyed drones, this is obviously a problem since healing a destroyed drone over an active drone makes the healing pointless (and the destroyed drone can’t even get hit by the heal). When I added the destroyed drone feature, I accidentally overlooked adding a check to ignore destroyed drones in the drone and base attack code. It was a simple fix to add a check in to make sure destroyed and inactive drones were ignored. Secondly, destroyed and inactive drones weren’t properly evaporating when players logged off. This was leaving a mess in some galaxies. This issues is due to the fact that destroyed and inactive drones skipped their idle (so they didn’t attack enemies, heal friends, follow, etc). I’ve added some additional code to make sure they’ll evaporate even if they are destroyed or inactive! Both these drone fixes should go live sometime soon.

And then there were the missile issues. It was discovered that missiles were inheriting some damage bonuses they weren’t supposed to and that is detailed here. There was also an issue with missile bays. They would sometimes think they had a full queue even when the queue was empty. This was a tricky bug that ended up being a bit beyond my reach to do in a reasonable amount of time, so I passed it off to the code wizard, Jey. It’s since been fixed and we have a new queuing system for missiles!

That’s it for this week’s update. This is a short update, and that’s because besides bugs, I spent a large amount of time this week working on a special project that I am continuing to work on this week. Expect an announcement next week on exactly what this is! Until then, feel free to post questions, comments and suggestions in the forums!

We’ve been getting reports that missile damage is a bit too high. On further inspection, it’s been discovered that missiles are getting unintended bonuses from both the Gunner Class Skill and the Big Guns subskill.

What we designed missiles around :
damage = damage * missile mastery (1.5) =  damage * 1.5

What is actually happening :
damage = damage * missile mastery (1.5) * gunner (1.2) * big guns (1.2) = damage * 2.16

This is a very significant increase in damage that was not taken into account when we redesigned missiles and destruction further amplifies this issue. As such, we will be shortly inhibiting missiles from inheriting half of their owner’s Gunner Class skill and Big Guns subskill to bring missile damage back down to where it was originally intended to be.

This week’s update is going to detail a pair of new skills that will offer some much requested bonuses to Transwarp devices, some updates to the Weapon Effect system as well as a new Fleet Commander class super item! Keep reading to find out more.

Transwarp devices were added with our last universe reset and they offer players a very convenient way to traverse the vast distances between galaxies. Based on the feedback so far, I think it is safe to say they are very appreciated means of travel. The only complaint I’ve really heard is that some people feel the cooldown is too long! To those of you who feel that way, I am introducing some new Transwarp specialty skills! Very soon I will be adding two new skills to Beta Antares; Transwarp Turbocharging and Advanced Transwarp Nagivation.

Transwarp Turbocharging will increase the charge rate for transwarp devices by 20% per level. This skill has a maximum of five. That means maxed out, this skill will reduce your transwarp cooldown to five minutes! Advanced Transwarp Navigation will increase the jump distance of your transwarp devices by 5 per level, up to a maximum of 25 extra jumps. Both these skills will require a new commodity called a “Transwarp Coil” that can be built from a blueprint in Beta Antares. Like the Bar Skills, these specialty skills are rather pricey, but for the added convenience, I am sure some players will find them worth it.

This past week I also made a few changes to some of the effects in the weapons effect system, notably the Ricochet and Chain Bullet effects.

Currently the Ricochet effect works by ‘bouncing’ a projectile off your target at a random angle in a 180 degree arc towards your ship. This means that unless you are threading the needle between two ships to hit one behind it, the device is largely useless. Using a little trigonometry and some physics, I’ve changed the way they work to be a little more natural and predictable. Now the bullet will ricochet at an angle based on where you shoot the target (it reflects the bullet’s velocity across a vector drawn from the center of the object hit to the impact point). This means if you shoot the target dead on, the ricochet will come back towards your ship; but if you hit the target at an angle, it will bounce at an angle. This will allow ‘trick shooting’ with these devices which I think is extremely cool.

The Chain Bullet effect has been updated as well. There were a few bugs in the implementation. Firstly, it wasn’t properly inheriting the auto-aim (or tracking) from it’s weapon. Secondly, a slow moving projectile with the effect did some interesting and unintended things if you fired it and warped into another galaxy. This has also been fixed. Finally, there has been a slight mechanic change. Currently when you fire a chain bullet weapon at a target, if it can’t locate other available targets, it won’t bounce at all. It’s been updated to bounce at a random angle away from the target hit regardless of if it finds a target or not. This is a pretty useful change since it means the effect isn’t dead, it can still hit something that might wander into it’s path and get another bounce.

Finally, the new Fleet Commander class super item! The original design for class super items called for the Fleet Commander Squad Transwarps to be one of the special items obtained by doing the Crucible. However, they were way too cool an item to hold until the class rebalance was finished. Instead of that item, the Fleet Commander’s third super item is the Dirty Bomb.

The Dirty Bomb item is a low cooldown radiation damage explosion that will hit all targets within its range. It can be used to finish off larger enemies or completely destroy a group of smaller enemies. The idea behind this item is that with the newest changes to irradiation (irradiated AI will now activate their space break) a medium damage, AoE radiation device could make it a lot easier to get a large group of wild slaves quickly!

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

This week’s update is going to focus primarily on a restructure of Lyceum and some UI changes for holobook (storybox, echo, etc) items! Keep reading to find out more.

Lyceum is one of the most important galaxies in the game and because of this, over the years it’s gotten increasingly cluttered. It now houses infinite knowledge training, class skill training, module factories, Guardian of the Lyceum and the Serengeti. There is a lot of stuff all tossed in a really small space. It might make sense to older players who are used to it, but honestly, I can’t imagine how confusing it would be for a new player when they first arrive there.

A few weeks ago I hit on the idea of splitting it up; going from a custom galaxy to a custom zone. Each aspect of Lyceum would be broken off into its own, separate galaxy, essentially uncluttering the mess Lyceum has currently become. Also, it would allow us to move The Acropolis, a Lyceum affiliated zone, closer to Lyceum. This would make Augmenter Tweaking easier for new players to find, as well as making Aug Tweaking more convenient for older players to train. Overall, it would make Lyceum a lot less confusing.

With the new design the new Lyceum would be a four galaxy zone. There would be Lyecum, reserved for Class Skill training, Reboot Modules and the Lyceum Library. We’d also have the Platonic Academy, where all module factories, blueprints, mention and diploma turn-in missions and Infinite Knowledge training would go. The Acropolis would be moved in and could be made a bigger hub for Augmenters and tweaking training in general. Finally, there would be the Serengeti Blockade, a PvP enabled zone housing all the missions for and the entrance to the Serengeti UZ. The Guardian of the Lyceum would roam this entire area looking for trouble makers!

Other than splitting the galaxy up into this new zone, there are some additional notable changes being made, mainly the addition of the Lyceum Library. The main base in Lyceum will sell guide books to help players with various aspects of the game from inside the game. To better facilitate this idea. I’ve also revamped the way echos (or holocubes, whatever) look and function.

I changed the dialog they use from a small box with a scroll bar to a taller, more readable box. I’ve also added the ability to make multi-page echos. Now content developers, when making echo items, can create versions that collect a series of echos together or create books. The first use will be a set of three echo items containing explanations for what core skills do, and where you can train them, to supplement the progression missions Blue Dwarf recently added. In the future the Lyceum Library will contain quite a few of these books, ranging from topics like mining and prospecting, to building their first station and even to the rules regarding claiming the universe as Emperor. This will transform Lyceum into an ideal place for newer players to go if they need in game help and give us a way to get some of the excellent guides players have posted on the forums into the game.

As a bonus, I’ve added a fly through of the work in progress Lyceum Restructure. Each of the galaxies is getting it’s own unique theme and I think it’s turning out extremely well.

That’s it for this week’s update. As always, feel free to post questions, comments or suggestions in the forums! I’ll be back again next Monday with another update!

Hello players! For my first blog post on the new site, I’m going to share some exciting new changes we have coming up soon.

I’m very excited to announce that we will be splitting Freighters into 2 new ship types! Currently, classes outside of support focus have a very difficult time being involved in base building and other non-combat activities that require large amounts of hull space.  We would like to fix that so that all players can participate in base building, without the need to level up a new Engineer or Shield Monkey alt. Both ship types will be able to equip all of the current “Freighter only” gear.

Industrial Freighters are ships designed to store and transport large amounts of items most often for the purpose of creating user bases. They have extremely high hull space, but relatively low defensive abilities. The Thatch, Dark Freighter, and Singularity Sphere are great examples of this new class.  They will no longer be affected by any class  hull bonus, and will have their hull increased to balance that out. They will also have an inbuilt effect to lower weight to match the support focus bonus that they will lose out on.  They will still get bonuses from classes that affect all ship types though, so we hope that will provide some interesting diversity.

Support Freighters are the ships that are currently flown in combat roles by the support focus. They have tend to have decent defensive abilities as well as much higher hull space than other combat oriented ships.  Ships such as the Pax Astronomica and Apprentice Ward are classic examples of this new ship type. All skills currently effecting freighters will be changed to effect support freighters, so the transition should be seamless for everyone currently flying one.

The following freighters have been changed to Industrial Freighters. If you feel there are any other ships that should be moved to the new hull type, we’ll be watching the discussion topic so please let us know. Additionally, MFM will provide 5% to Industrial Freighters rather than the standard 10%.

In other news, we’re also making some changes to how team slots work. After some recent discussion resulting from us fixing a bug with perma drones and owning galaxies, we’ve decided to make team slots based off of accounts instead of characters!  This should alleviate the issues caused by our previous changes by allowing all those off team Merchant Fleet Master alts to join their main teams. Based off of the number of accounts on teams out there in the universe, we’ve decided to set the base number of account slots on a team to 50 and the Roster team skill will give 5 slots per level. This means that teams grandfathered into the team skill system with 10 in Roster will have 100 account slots, which is just above what the largest teams current have. We’ve checked all the teams out there, and everyone will have plenty of account slots to fit all their current characters.

Both changes are currently on test.starsonata.com:3032, and will be in for the reset.  I hope everyone enjoys these changes, and has a great reset!

This week’s update will mainly focus on class rebalance changes and bugfixes, but will also contain a new ship announcement! Keep reading to find out more!

With the Class Rebalance testing phase in full swing, you guys have been doing a really good job of bringing issues to my attention. I’ve been trying to do just as good a job at getting fixes rolled out for every bug you guys find! There have been some pretty big bugs that have been squashed and I figured I’d go over a few of them here.

• Slaves not getting class skills.
• Slave Ph.D. not properly giving extra slave slots.
• Issues with Psionic Shrouding ability proccing too often.
• Lots of implementation changes for Deathblossom.
• Fleet Admiral not being applied at all.

These are only a few of the issues that have been fixed in the last week and I applaud you guys for finding all these bugs. Because of your testing the eventual roll out to live is going to be considerably smoother!

Along with bug fixing, I also worked on a lot more missile changes. One of the biggest projects this past week was reworking missile production. Right now missiles that no one even uses, some missiles that don’t even work and almost all the specialty missiles are a pain to make. That doesn’t even cover the confusion of factories. This has all been simplified and given a minor rework.

Firstly, we are eliminating a few missiles and factories. Disruption, Gatling Platform, Decoy, Interference and Burst are all being depreciated and having their factory blueprint removed from Hyperion. Most of these missiles have seen very little use and a few of them don’t even work properly (I am looking at you Decoy). We are also eliminating Mark I and Mark II factories for Kinetic and Armor Piercing Missiles. Having three different crates per missile just is item bloat. The crates will still exist, and the factories will still work (if you have them), but you won’t be able to get blueprint for them from Hyperion anymore. All missile factories that used MKI and MKII crates have been changed to use MKIII crates. MKIII factory blueprints are also now sold directly in Hyperion and you don’t have to do the annoying mission to kill UrQa to obtain them anymore.

Secondly, we are making some missiles more easily available. Cheetah Missile factories are having their cost significantly reduced and the missiles crates will no longer require Vis or Copper. Red Photon missile crates will no longer require Plasma Crystals, but Promethium instead. Vortex Missile factories are having their Vortex Pellet requirements drastically reduced, Medium Lancer Factories will only take 2 Reach of Prometheus, down from 5, and finally Large Disinegrator Missile factories will no longer require Amoetroidizodal’s Acid Blood, just Acidic Remains like the previous two tiers. Missile factories have also had their production time cut in half, down to five minutes. All of these changes should increase the availability of missiles to all players.

Finally,  a new ship announcement. Next universe we will be introducing a tech 5 capital ship, the Pax Lyrae, as part of the class rebalance. This is a hole in content that sorely needed filled, as players who selected a Fleet Focus class couldn’t use a ship that would give them full bonuses until tech 10. Players will be able to find this new, 2 augmenter capital ship in Paxius or the Fleet Focus base in Lyceum.

That’s it for this week’s update. As always, feel free to post questions, comments or suggestions in the automatically generated forum post! I’ll be back next week with another update!

So i’m being told i need to make a blog post to answer those questions, here we are.

My questions this week are from starwyrm:
1. hours of SS played weekly?
2. what recently released content have you worked with?
and just for you:
3. so you’re Canadian, Eh? east or west? either way, shoutout from New Brunswick!

The number of hours I spend playing SS vary greatly from week to week. Depending mostly on how many major problems I have to fix. But on average i would say I spend about 20hours playing ss (Not counting afk time)
I do spend quite a good share of this time on secret unteamed alts that i just enjoy leveling and meeting random people.

I very rarely work directly on content or content code, my role is more of a code management thing. Bug and crash fixing, performance improvements, security implementation, backup systems, server configuration and such.
I am especially the one stuck with being awake for days when the server experience major problems… extreme lags, hardware failure / replacement, external attacks, patch going wrong, memory corruption errors and the likes. Mostly because well… if i dont do it, who will ?
It takes a special kind of mental illness to have the instinct needed to figure those weird issues that make very little sense up to the point where you do track it down, and apparently, I am affected !

As for the last question, I am east Canadian, more specifically from Quebec. I live in Saguenay but thats about as precise as you’ll get .