Another week, another update! This update will focus on a few new things I’m working on as well as a few of the things that went in with the patch.
First, last weeks patch and what was supposed to go in. I had quite a few features that I’d been working on pushed live in this last patch– the biggest being prospecting changes, a new Olympus daily, neurobind and mod, and scooping changes. To quickly recap; the prospecting change give nodes a lifespan, when it’s up they die and are reseeded elsewhere in the universe, the new Olympus daily, the Tidepool, neurobind and mod is a new right click feature where you can neurobind an item in exchange for random mods and the scooping changes allow you to hold down your scoop key to continually scoop items.
There was a change I was working on that wasn’t entirely ready that made its way in, those were the new character creation options — and it did created a bit of confusion with the Nexus. Rest assured, those changes have been disabled and we will be pushing a new client shortly to enable the fix.
The past week I have mainly been working on a new spawner type, the Wave Spawner. The Wave Spawner is similar to an Ambush Spawner (spawners that only spawn when a player gets ‘caught’ in their trigger area), with the main difference being it spawns multiple, predefined waves of AI. Previously, we ‘faked’ this functionality with multiple Ambush Spawners (think the UrQa vs. Mzungu battle in the Enigmatic Sector, Whiskey Outpost in the Nexus), but with this new spawner we will be able to do similar content much more easily and with much greater control.
This control is enabled with some key new features. First, there are the spawn features. We can set a wave to automatically spawn after a set duration, when the previous wave is cleared, or a combination of both. Secondly, there are enhanced mission control features. Each wave can be assigned a different mission requirement and the spawner will skip to the highest wave based on player missions. So for example, we can have missions to skip the first 10 of 20 waves for a spawner if you have the required mission. Thirdly, unlike traditional spawners, we can set individual teams and extra skills for each configuration. This affords us greater variety in the kind of AI we can spawn, ie, we can do a wave with Gunner and Sniper AI, etc, as well as letting us make AI that are hostile to one another with the same spawner. You can expect to see this new kind of spawner used quite a bit going forward to hopefully make some epic space battles.
Perhaps more exciting since it directly affects player, well, I’ll let the screenshot explain.
I have been working on some mod changes, including adding two all new mods. The first, Reinforced, will make your items take less durability damage when you die. The second Angelic, reduces hostility and visibility. Along with these two new mods, we are also expanding the number of items that can have mods to include Tractors, Shield Chargers and Hull Expansions. Finally, we’ll also be adding new functionality to some of the old mods so we can add them to items they couldn’t be on before — for instance, Amplified on cloaking devices to increase their cloaking power, or Rewired for engines where some turning is traded for thrust.
So, that’s an update on what I’ve been doing the past week. As always, feel free to give me feedback! Until next week!
