Welcome to another Pixel blog where I, Pixel, will be going over what has been done over this past week.

Hober Mallow

Tentative Tractor Beam Changes

Additionally their’s been a topic made about suggesting changes to current tractor beam mechanics. Click here to find out more…

Pixel

Battle Sphere – Super Laser

Finally witness the fully operational Battle Sphere! Yes, the Battle Sphere is currently being worked on to add a super laser that will be able to cut through almost everything.
Here’s a mock demostration of the current progress on the superitem visual, this is probably going to change at the final result, as discovered some issues occur with this current animation after multiple uses.

User Interface Improvements

In other news higher resolution background textures for all dialogs in the games user interface, this will reduce artifacting that the previous version used to produce.

Ring Station

As you’ve probably noticed via this blog’s background image, ring stations! This is currently in concept stage but most of the visual work is done. Here’s some image content produced so far:

• Ring Frame (deployed)
• Ring Facilities (building/resource focus)
• Ring Habitat Supports (colo resource focus)
• Bio-ring (colo focus)
• Ring Enhancers (galaxy effects focus)

Hello everyone. We’d like to announce some changes to permanent drones that will take effect tomorrow on Universe Reset.  The upshot is that healer permanent drones have had their HPS output nerfed by about 50%, down to around 23,000 for endgame variants.  For exact numbers, please consult the spreadsheet linked below (which also gives some helpful augmentation suggestions).  We have undertaken this nerf as part of a larger repositioning of permanent drones as anti-player emplacements, as opposed to general-purpose defense assets that often rival bases in defense utility.  For this reason, we are trying to balance drone healing power to around the level that a player ship can achieve.  Since endgame drones were healing in the 40-60k range, a nerf of roughly 50% was required.

Spreadsheet of Changes

There’s one other change to permanent drone mechanics that was decided on ages ago but never got coded until now. When we revamped Augmenter Tweaking, we buffed all non-base augmenters by a factor of two to compensate. Accordingly, we decided to stop allowing non-base augmenters to be inserted into permanent drones via Astral Injection, but the code for this has only just been prepared for patch.  We do regret giving you all such late notice on this change. If you were planning to use non-base augmenters on your drones and have been thrown off by this, we would be happy to do an exchange at no cost to you. Just submit a ticket within the first two weeks of the universe and specify which non-base augmenters you would like to have exchanged for base augmenters (tech 10 and lower).

Greetings!  We are excited to announce a new role on the Star Sonata development team.  This role is being introduced to address two separate goals:

1. We would like to make the dev team’s work more transparent to the community.
2. We would like to attract skilled and dedicated community members to the dev team.

As a member of the Star Sonata Press Corps, you will receive read/listen-only access to weekly dev meetings.  At these meetings, you will have the opportunity to ask questions, much like the public comment period at a local governmental meeting.  In exchange for this access, we would like Press Corps members to report to the rest of the community on what the dev team has been discussing and working on.  You’ll receive a forum designation to reflect your status as a Press Corps member, but you are also welcome to use other avenues to report to the community. Joining the Press Corps is also a great way to get acquainted with the team in case you’re interested in becoming a developer in the future.  Everyone is welcome to apply, even if you have previously applied to join the dev team.  Just send an email to jeff@starsonata.com indicating your interest and he’ll take it from there.

Universe Reset July 22nd 2017

In recent events, Hober Mallow has learned how to buff stuff. With this revelation he has buffed the strength of the Aveksaka exponentially to increase the difficulty of Subspace. The Aveksaka are now destroying the Terran universe quicker than ever before – Lyceum scientists predict our universe will end on the 22nd of July, 13:00 EDT (18:00 BST, 03:00 AET). This is only days away now, remember to pack your bases and permanent drones before they are deleted! All characters, ships, bots, and skills will be unaffected by the reset. Fortunately, the newfound power of the Aveksaka will be lost in the collapse of our universe.

SunDog60

I’ve been working on Arctia the past few days, fixing any issues with it mainly. The Arctia AI will now spawn around each room, not on top of every wormhole as they do currently. They will also spawn in a flurry of snowflakes, this should help alleviate the strangeness of seeing a random shard of ice appearing next to you. Lady Aurora will now drop a rare holoprojector similar to Lord Borean (these changes aren’t in yet at the time of posting this blog!).

Next patch, there will be a temporary mission in The Junkyard to delete those pesky Prefab Fighters from your ship until we can get an improved solution to them.

Bobbo

Bobbo has been working on fixing problems and in general improving the Seer Nanite Infusion Devices. If you have had issues with this and would like to help speed up the fixing process, the current fixes are available on test for you to experiment with!

NCCIntrepid

NCC has converted the built-in Lion Maul tweak generator on the Lion and the built-in Sniper Re-Router tweak generator into tweak devices. This will allow bots to use them as well as modernizing the ship inbuilts to be closer to what is now found on ships today, such as the Paxian Grand Reinforcement on the high tech Paxian ships. We are aware of the lack of information on the super item tooltips and we will be looking into fixing that soon.

Pixel

Pixel has been very busy yet again adding wounderful background changes to galaxys and other things.

End of the Universe

Temple Grounds

Shadow

Reaver Skins

Base Radiation Field Generators

Changes to base radiation field items, that will affect enemy ships resistances as they get closer to your bases.

Jey

Recent client patch reduced the crashes by a lot but there is still more than can be considered acceptable. I am still working on tracking and fixing as many of the crashes as possible but the remaining ones are pretty complicated. We are up to date on patches so expect new ones every week or so.

Pixel

Has been busy with another developer make the faction selection dialog!

Dark Steel

We’re introducing a new tag that allows items to drop on death. It’s first implementation will be on every kind of Industrial Commod. If a bot or player gets killed all their/its Industrial Commods will be dropped.

We’re also going to be making bots drop 20% of their credits upon death which will be modifiable by Piracy and Surgical damage. This should put a lot more risk on off-team trading routes.

Bobbo

Fixed a bug with Deathblossom where it wouldn’t take the range tweak bonus into account when choosing targets.

Ryan

Ryan has been working on our ingame store. Here is a preview of it while it is still in progress. Keep in mind that there are still a couple images missing and that the fonts in several spots are going to be upgraded.

Welcome to another Pixel blog where I, Pixel, will be going over what has been done over this past week.

Background Improvements

Yes! That wonderful default background of nebulae that has been around Star Sonata for quite a while now has been expanded upon! With eight more variants of backgrounds, expect next universe and possibly some current instances of this universe to have a more dyamic background than before!

Here’s one of many changes the new background visuals have produced.

Shipyards

Shipyards are now visually constructing dreadnaughts and battleships in Beta Antares once again, this will come next universe.

Here’s the shipyard animation in action.

Added a new ship to the game called the “The Commissioner”. This has been co-opted with Hober Mallow to add the final touches to the ship for in-game release.

Special thanks to James5 for producing the ship. The topic related can be found here.

Been expanding Kalthi Depths loot table, making additions to the following areas (in-progress):

• Corrupted Conversion Ray
• Fuel Compressors
• Transwarps
• Envelopes
• Prospecting
• Engines
• Tractors

• Drone Controllers
• Electron Clouds
• Scanners
• Sludges
• Torpedos
• Shields

In the shadows of the development, something is making a scratching noise.

Industrial Commodities

DarkSteel and enkelin have been keeping an eye on the Industrial Commodities market and have some proposed tweaks for next universe.

SunDog

Some players have been experiencing issues with the Psychic Mastery mission for seers. Specifically, the repeatable version of the mission after you first complete it. Last night’s hotfix was to address this mission, the Psionic Flares will now appear in Bipolar. If this is the case, send in a support ticket (or contact me on the Star Sonata Discord) to have it removed from your character so you can repeat it.

Kraken, Poseidon’s miniboss, takes a while to spawn in. I’m looking into reducing the time it requires as dragging out the spawn time for so long doesn’t accomplish anything besides increasing the time to complete a Poseidon run.

For anyone interested in lore, I’ve written up the lore of the Blue Pirates. You can read it all on the wiki, on this page: http://wiki2.starsonata.com/index.php/Blue_Pirates

Pixel

There has been some adjustments to the Voulge, Flamberge, and Flamlite where they were too similar so now they’ve received different arm amounts.

• Flamlite has 3 arms.
• Flamberge has 5 arms.
• Voulge has 6 arms.

Pixel’s been adding even more skins, enjoy!

Additionally, changes to Lunarium Dusts and Selenite Dusts will become Shards, this will skip the process into just one step from shard to final commod. The existing dust commodities and blueprints related to dusts will automatically convert over to the shard versions. Existing dust blueprints installed on stations won’t be converted.

s_m_w

Has been hard at work adding new visual effects with the following new lightning bolt effect as shown below, enjoy!

Each shot is dyamically generated giving that shocking experience each time. Additionally while still in the works lasers has received a slight adjustment with a rounded tip. To be warned this is all subject to change due to future developments.

Jeff

Jeff has fixed the bug with class skills giving skill debt. Additionally he’s made a new tutorial event that triggers if you try to warp through a blocked wormhole.

Pixel

Pixel added a new skin for the Behemoth, Divine Behemoth, and Leviathan.

Bobbo

Bobbo is working on a simple new T20 DG uber, piloting a Vulture. It is not meant to be a huge new addition, but simply meant to make access to the Vulture/Aug Blueprint and Commodity a bit easier.

Jey

Jey is still trying to figure out Client crashes, but they are elusive, to say the least. (Or in jey’s words: “They make little to no sense which is **** annoying”)

He can however explain, and has fixed, the ocasional lag affecting the website. It seems to have been caused by the code that handles updating the test server.

Keep on sending crash dumps when you crash (simply click “yes”), the data has been extremely helpful! The client crash is a very weird one and jey is still not fully sure what is causing it, but he is making steady process. All my focus is on that (when the server isn’t crashing / lagging to death) and I am hoping to pinpoint it really soon. Quite a few things are being delayed while the crash hunt continues.

Hober Mallow

Demolishing and Neutralizing weapons are getting their splash damage removed, they are not the right weapons for a splash effect (High DPS, High DPE pulse guns). I’ll be saving the effect for a more appropriate weapon, preferably one that doesn’t have the highest Mining/Radiation DPS in the game. The other stats on the weapons will not change.

In working on invasions, I’ve found that the lower tier invasions don’t seem to serve the purpose they were originally intended for. Originally, they would provide something interesting for low level players to do. However, the fact that they are in a Premium zone meant that those players were not interacting with them very much. Going forward, there will be no invasions in the lower arms. The invasions and outposts will be locked to the Sas Arm, and the rewards from the other arms will be moved into other places.

Pixel

Scruples, Nightfuries and all their kin used textures that were, quite frankly, absolutely terrible. Pixel has been busy making them glorious once again!

He has also been working on a new boss, the Queen Hive, which is still in the early development stages but will enter the universe eventually.

s_m_w

I’ve spent a lot of time in the past few weeks getting myself acquainted with the client code, which is starting to bear fruit! Here’s a short video of my results from fiddling with lasers.

Recent Patches

Recently we’ve been pushing out a lot of patches and we appreciate you all for your help with constant feedback, reporting bugs, and fixes. Expect a couple more patches.

Bobbo

Bobbo been fixing some Easter bugs with some missions not giving rewards correctly, next patch. This includes a number of other bugs related around the Sniper but is still within the primalary stages of being fixed.

s_m_w

Some more background fixes related to gear balance issues.

Pixel

Has remade the Unt Faranji Wingship visual. He has also been poking about with HTML5/Javascript related scripts to apply to the player guide improvements.

Termites have also been looked at with the current result of the huge termite losing ¾ths its damage potential and lowered resistance from 98% to 90%.