Happy New Years, Star Sonatans!  2013 was a pretty good year for us, and I hope 2014 will be even better.

Within the game, 2013 saw the new Subspace Assault Expansion, with a large new area, alien invasions, and tech 22.  We added prospecting, Bindomite, TSL, and transwarping.  We restructured Olympus, and improved the galaxy map.  We continued to improve the Nexus, and rearranged and improved a lot of the low to mid level content and missions.  We’ve continued to optimize and improve both the client and server and increased both the speed and reliability of both.

We did a huge revamp on the website, which now looks and functions way better than the old one, and is much more tightly integrated.  We did massive upgrades on the billing system, and improved the whole Space Point system.  We added the suggestion list, where we can propose new features that either we come up with or the players propose on the suggestion forum, and players can vote on them to let us know where out priorities should be.

We’ve recently updated the suggestion list so that it will better track what is currently under development and what has been completed.  As you can see, the solo wave-based challenges are underway, as are the class based super items that will be the rewards for those instances.  Both are coming along really well, especially the super-item rewards that we’ve been working very hard on to help make Star Sonata a little bit more action oriented and increase the cool abilities available to players.  These will be major improvements to the game that you guys should see in the early part of 2014.

Completed, and waiting for client and server patches are new extensive high score tables and improved in-game news that will bring all the lasted developer blog posts to the in-game log in screen.

The other major project we are making great progress on is a big class rebalance spearheaded by yclepticon and s_m_w.  There have been lots and lots of discussions, maths, and testing going on, and these class balance changes are already in large part on the test server.  This is going to give more active and interesting roles to every class and improve the game for everyone across the board.

After the class balance and class super items go in, we plan another big round of suggestions and suggestion voting to help determine the major improvements to bring you during the rest of 2014.

We love working on Star Sonata and constantly improving it.  Thank you to everyone who plays Star Sonata who make all of this possible.

It’s that time of the month for a monthly event! Since the new year is right around the corner, we’re gonna extend the event to the 31st! This month we have +75% experience and +25% augmenter drop chance!

It started on December 27th at 12:01am EST and it will end on December 31st (Tuesday) at around 12:30pm EST!

Enjoy!

EDIT: Surprise! We’re extending it through the 2nd at 12:30pm EST! Happy New Year!

This is a very brief look at two more new superitems that are arriving with the class rebalance, both for Snipers.

The first is the Flak Device and is available at tech 5 and 17. This device fires a volley of exploding projectiles and fills the surrounding space with flying shrapnel hitting all nearby enemies.

The second, the Sniper Ricochet Device is available at tech 9 and 20. This devices fires a fast moving physical projectile that can bounce between targets up to five times; quickly dealing with smaller enemies or ricocheting between larger ones to deal significant damage.

Both of these devices will give Snipers a bit more AoE utility which is something they’re currently lacking. As always, questions, comments and feedback can be directed to the forums!

This week’s update is going to focus on some bug fixes and changes made to various weapons, as well as a new addition to the weapon effects system! Keep reading to find out more.

A while ago I worked on a fairly big addition to the weapons system called the ‘Weapon Effects’ system. Since I’ve never written a blog on this before, I’ll explain it a little. The weapon effects system allows us to attach various effects to any of our weapons that are triggered on various conditions. A few examples of weapon effects are Laser Splash, Warhead Splash or Projectile Ricochet and we can specify if the effect should fire on hit, miss, near miss, etc. When I added the system Chain Lasers were also moved into the new system.

Unfortunately, Chain Laser has never worked exactly the same as it did before the migration to the new system. It’s either bounced the wrong direction, bounced off into nothing, only bounced once or not even bounced at all. I’ve spent a large chunk of time this past week debugging the chain weapon effect and have gotten it into a much better state. I think it’s safe to say that when I get this fix patched live Chain Lasers will be a lot more usable and should once again work the way everyone expect them to!

The big reason for taking this time to look at the Chain Laser code was preparation for a new weapon effect that shares some of the functionality of a Chain Laser. This new effect is called the Chain Projectile (or Mutalisk Bullet, but we can’t actually call it that). It will be similar to a Chain Laser in that it bounces between targets but it will also have the advantages of a projectile such as tracking and knockback. Expect to see it used in one of the new Class Superitems that we’ve been working hard on for the rebalance!

Finally, I’ve made a few more additions to warheads and the warhead effect for the upcoming class rebalance. The most notable of these is the addition of support for parasite injection to warheads and warhead effects. Going forward we will be able to do some extremely interesting missiles utilizing this support. For example, this past week I made a powerful fire parasite for warheads and added it to the new Incendiary Missiles as well as Lancer Missiles. We are also planning on changing missiles like Entanglement missiles to inject a heavy sludge instead of doing agility reducing tweaks.

That’s it for this week’s update and this one will be the last of the year. I’ll be taking some time off for the Christmas holiday so I won’t have anything to report next week. As always feel free to post comments, questions and suggestions in the forum post. I hope everyone enjoys the holiday season and I will be back in 2014!

So here we are boys and girls, robots and exotic genderless lifeforms, computers and mechs. Christmas, a time to be joyful and eat lots of food. Candy Canes to find and Spiked Egg Nog to drink and more goodies than the eye can see to stuff into your Gigantic Stocking. As usual we’ve run our annual Astro-Santa Letter competition of which we have picked five winners; Epicnija, Tom Daedalus, Reaper Pride, Platinum and AfriendlyCanadian. These five will get some pretty rewards, as well as their letters in game for you to collect during the event and deliver to Alabaster Snowball in Lapland, off Bipolar and Sol.

Additionally this year there a few new treats, a small collection of sound projectors have been added and a new collection of missions. As well as all this, this year we have a very special guy visiting, I don’t want to say much but it should be very amusing (for me at least).

The Christmas Holiday event will run from the Saturday 21st December at 00:00 until Sunday 5th January at 00:00.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year Star Sonatarians!

This is a small patch, mostly to get the stuff needed by this year christmas event in and a few bug fixes / improvements and will be live at 23h00 SS time (see homepage for current server time).

Client changes:

• particles system change, higher fluidity and shorter trails all around (smoother animation as well), on very high especially (lower graphic also gain smoothness but not as much)
• particles system massive performance increase. This patch improved the performance of the particles rendering system by nearly 300% (which allowed us to make most existing case much smoother without impacting performances)
• greatly improved memory bandwidth and rendering efficiency (speed if it was your bottleneck) on all dynamically generated meshes, (like the suns and the spheres used in some projectiles), also fixed a memory leak on that side which was one of the last remaining known client crash
• added /lkc distortion for those who dont like the distortion effect on laser / trans applied at veryhigh, /lkc 1.1 would disable them completly.
• more debug data to help me pinpoint the last known crash still existing (the one where you alt tab during an autopilot jump and it sometime crash). I am sure there are other crashes left, but the 2 mentioned here are the last 2 i was able to prove existed.
• fixed a bug that caused engine particles to not update after an engine change until you undocked a second time.
• Added new assets for the holidays.

Server changes:

• Fix for the crash that has been happening every 26-30hours for the past week.
• Event galaxies now have their own layer on the map.
• Added support to missions to be open for set periods of time automatically (event missions automaticly becoming unavailable after a set time).
• new christmas missions and content.
• Made untanglers which stop tweaks stop imparted weapon affects
• Fix Seer Virus Transmission Laser intro mission (Leo Branton chain)
• Changes to the Bhisajayu and Samgrahak’ayu Healing Burst and Regenerative Burst super items.

Jan 16 EDIT:

There was a micro patch between Dec 20 patch and Jan 16 that fixed a bug related to healing experience not degrading properly.

How fast can my Shield Monkey do 1 million damage?  In this video, I test against one of the new test targets.

We have been testing every class against these test targets to measure total dps output more accurately.  It’s nice, because it lets us measure classes like Shield Monkey, Engineer, and Gunner, for which straight up math estimates from their skills and augs aren’t sufficient due to slave, drone, and missile damage.

The test target instance is live on the test server with a wormhole in Sol.  How long does it take your character to do 1 million damage?  Upload a video to prove your might!

Looks like it’s my turn to answer the weekly dev questions!

My questions this week are from Arias:

1. hours of SS played weekly?
2. what content have you influenced recently?
3. you work on weapons and zones, so what are your current projects?

These days I play about 10 hours of SS per week. I mainly log on to fiddle with my bases and do an occasional run with my team, but I’m planning to get more active when the new class skills go live!

My first project was to make a new balance sheet for Sebastopols (Lion Incinerator type weapons).  Blue Dwarf and I worked together on that, which is what made the popular Vervaardiger weapons possible.  Since then, I spearheaded the rebalance of manhours on many blueprints, with a focus on making most projects build in a few days at most, if not instantly.  I also do little things behind the scenes, like helping Calypso balance the shields and resistances of bosses in the Aveksaka zone.

My current main project is, of course, the class rebalance. My role in the project is to work out stats for all the skills and super items so that every class gets a useful role that they can excel at in squad-based play, while also being able to enjoy the game in solo PvE and in PvP. I am very happy with how everything is turning out, and look forward to sharing our work with you all!

After the class rebalance begins to wrap up, I am planning to put some serious thought into userbases (and Player versus Base combat, in particular).  I am also interested in working with a few other developers to revamp the low- to mid-level experience in Star Sonata.  If you have any thoughts on these projects, don’t hesitate to send them along to me!

As was mentioned on the forum, the class rebalance has moved into a testing stage.  The test server now has a new instanced galaxy off of Sol that contains passive test dummies with various shield banks.  If you start shooting one, it will keep track of how long it takes you to kill it and notify you of the time in galaxy chat.  To reset the test dummies, just exit the galaxy and make a new squad.

Test server is also updated with the newest draft of class skills. We have already posted class-specific details on the forum, so I will just point a few things out here that may not be immediately obvious.

• Speed Demon no longer needs to be moving to get Speedy Firing DPS bonus.
• Berserker now only multifires 3 weapons, but has actually received a modest increase in DPS as well as boost to DPE.
• Most classes now have access to various super items. Drop by your class’s base in Lyceum on test server to see if there are any available for your class (they’re not all done yet).
• If you use missiles, try dragging your launcher up to the hotbar. It will use the charging animation to show when it’s ready to launch a volley of missiles.

If you try out the new classes on test server, I would like to invite you to also post your results on the forum (or send them to yclepticon in a forum PM).  I am especially interested to get feedback on the class-locked super items.  Thanks for your time!

This week’s update is going to focus almost primarily on some more class rebalance updates. These updates mainly pertain to missiles.

Missiles in their current state are kind of a pain to use — this is why we’re changing quite a few things about them with the rebalance. As I’ve detailed in another post; when I made the initial changes to missiles I added a few new features. I’m going to mention these a lot without explaining them again, so If you get confused, reread that post!

First, missiles will be separated into two categories; damage and debuff. Debuff missiles will be any missile that does a detrimental effect to the target; for example, a Disintegrator Missile or a Vortex Torpedo. These will be single fire.  Damage missiles will be a Gunner’s go to if they need extra firepower to take a target down; for example, Large Armor Piercing or Kinetic. These missiles will fire in salvos. We will also be adding two new types of damage missile that are the same difficulty to obtain as AP and Kinetic; these will be a new heat-damage Incendiary Missile and a surgical-damage Surgical Strike Missile. This should round out the arsenal of a Gunner very nicely.

The distinction is rather necessary since you won’t be able to spam missiles anymore. Missile Bays will have a 5 second delay between launch; that means Gunners will have to make a choice when they queue up. Do they debuff the target or do they load the launch tube with a devastating salvo? This leads into some big changes to missile launchers and fighter bays that took place this week.

Since we want a 5 second delay between missile launches due to salvos, we ran into a dilemma; Combination Launchers (or launchers that can launch both missiles and fighters). If we were to set a 5 second delay between launches on a combo launcher, it would be absolutely horrible for Fleet Commanders (imagine getting 12 fighters out at 5 seconds each). However, if we left the delay at around 1 second, Gunner missile damage output would be through the roof. To solve this issue we decided that we had to kill combination launchers entirely.

Combination Launchers can exist because Missile Launchers and Fighter Bays are the same item. They just have flags set to determine what they can launch. That meant to get rid of combination launchers we needed to separate Missile Launchers from Fighter Bays entirely. This is exactly what I’ve done. Missile Launchers and Fighter Bays can now be equipped independently (you can have one type of each equipped), and they each have their own fighter and missile slot pools.

Since we won’t have combination launchers anymore, any ship that had a combination launcher is being retrofitted to have two launchers, a missile launcher and a fighter bay. The size, weight, etc, on both launchers will add up to the size, weight, etc, of the previous combo launcher.

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