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!

* Made it so that you must be docked to equip or unequip a super item
* new feature: Made untanglers that can break gremlins remove all your current ones as well as stop new ones from being added
* Moved all the lyceum galaxies to the new map layer.
* Updated lyceum galaxies with new coordinates.
* Updated spawner times on all color empire galaxies.
* AoE weapon effect can now do percent damage.
* Fixed stat string for elect temp tweaks
* rebalanced Color Empire cloaks.
* Replaced “Satanic” energy tweaks with “Sacrificial” energy tweaks in the drop lists
* Fixed a bug with drones/bases not launching missiles/fighters
* Fix so Sniper Analysis properly works with beam weapons.
* Sniper Analysis critical bonus no longer scaled by level of Sniper (always get full 100% regardless of sniper level)
* Scruples in Hyper now have enough energy to fire their missiles.
* fixed mission sob floaty issue for spawners that don’t give credit
* fixes on the team score display.
* Fixed a typo on the GOUQE
* Added Plague Device and Hidden Plague Device super items
* Added AI tags for most class super items so that your slaves can use them
* Added the ability for missiles/fighters to have 360 degree launch aiming with some missile launchers/fighter bays, or when launched from bases or drones
* Made salvos of multiple missiles launch in a spread pattern, instead of randomly
* Made bases/drone only launch 1 salvo of missiles at a time, and only attempt to launch a missile when the missile bay is fully ready, so they don’t queue up wasted missiles
* Marked the Locution as non-captureable
* Shield Redistribution device laser no longer is affected by NT

and most importantly
* CRUCIBLE is added to arena lobby

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!

Since micropatches arent worth a single post everytime, and i been doing quite a few lately. Ill keep this blog post updated with micropatch notes.

February 26
* Server crash fixes
* removed event code generation from instances
* Seer mines are no longer scoopable.
* Fixed a bug that caused repair attempt to error with impossibly long time.
* Fixed a bug causing drones to not fire at ai drones.

February 28
* Fixed High Priest Chamber not giving a lockout
* Fixed a server crash

March 03
* High Priest’s Blessing is now Neurobound.
* Fixed lockout issues on High Prophet boss fight.
* Reduced spawn time for the High Priest’s Blessing in the Key Chamber.
* Fixed spawn time on Weapons 22 Boss adds.

March 04
* Slave Ph.D. is now properly accounted for when transferring a slave.
* Skill Resetting now checks slave slots used, etc, and will deny the reset if you would exceed limits after the reset.
* RP Warship uses weaker missiles.
* Using a demo kit on a destroyed base will kill you if you couldn’t normally undock in that ship.

March 07
* Fixed a bug causing drones repairs to eat away money if you did not have enough credits to repair it all at once.
* Made it so client specify if an item can be partial repaired or not in the repair widget tooltip (in the top bar) (drones are the only item that can’t).
* Fixed repair cost display for drones.
* Fixed a bug with drones/bases not launching missiles/fighters
* New sounds and textures in the client for future content (not in use on live yet)
* Increased delay before tooltips show up (from 0.7 to 2 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.

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 is mostly a bug fixes patch, Crucible is coming very soon.

* Rajanicar’ayu got a new super item and adjusted resistances.
* Vacohar’ayu got a new super item and adjusted resistances.
* Stede’s Basil is no longer capturable.
* Fixed a bug with missions costing money over 32 bit limit
* Fix for squad transwarp bringing along targets out of range.
* Fix for squad transwarp graphic being the wrong size.
* Fix for Higher Remote Control mission.
* Attempted fix for the missile bug preventing some people from launching any. (unable to reproduce but this should fix it in theory).
* Bases and Drones will no longer heal destroyed or inactive drones.
* Fix for Eye for an Eye skill mission taking Sniper instead of Berserker.
* Deathblossoms already equipped to bases will now force unequip
* Deathblossom can no longer be used on bases.
* Evasive Manuvers Neurotweak depreciated.
* Fixed a bug where hull locked items could be equipped on the wrong ship type.
* Fixed mobile drones synchronisation bug.
* Fixed a bug where drones would not launch fighters (still broken)
* Increased range on the Alien Nest Drone tagging laser.
* Fix for 2 bug with the wildman subskill (Slots are now properly calculated, and resist is now applied)

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!

We’re approximating one hour downtime for some minor fixes and tweaks. We estimate the server will be up at 2PM EST.

Some people are experiencing disconnection issues. If you are getting dc’d from liberty.starsonata.com please use  23.23.172.169 instead!

Want to get live updates? Head to my stream at twitch.tv/bageese!