This weeks’ update focuses mainly on a major set of class rebalance changes concerning everyone’s favorite form of combat, Drones. Keep reading to find out more!

A fair amount of time this week was spent on two major changes to drones that I think are very needed. As everyone is aware, players who fight primarily with drones (Engineers), face much higher risk than players who fight with conventional weapons. If an Engineer wipes, they potentially lose all their drones permanently. The two major changes I’ve done address the two ways you can lose your drones.

First, drones can expire. If you are sitting in a pod waiting for light stasis and your drones time out, they’re gone. With the class rebalance, this is changing. Instead of disappearing when they expire, scoopable drones will simply go inactive. Inactive drones will get a small name change to ‘Inactive + Drone Name” so you can identify them. The will also no longer attack AI, give auras, follow you if they’re mobile, etc. However they still take up drone slots and can be attacked; which means they can still be destroyed; the next way players can lose their drones.

Drones can be destroyed. Unlike slaves or weapons, (which can stasis or lose durability), drones can actually die. This is also being addressed with the class rebalance. Instead of blowing up and being lost forever, scoopable drones will now enter a destroyed state when they run out of shields. The destroyed state is identical to the inactive state with a few notable changes. Destroyed drones get a particle effect so you can see they are destroyed. They also get a name change to “Destroyed ” + “Drone Name”. When you scoop a destroyed drone it has zero durability and displays as a “Destroyed Drone Name” in your inventory. Destroyed Drones can’t be equipped or deployed until they are repaired. Repairing a destroyed drone functions the same as any normal repair. Currently you are able to simply right click on the item and pay a credit cost to fix it.

Right now we are mainly considering credit repairs for scoopable, non-permanent drones and a binary durability system where they’re either full durability or null durability. The binary system will cut down on stacks; you’ll only have two stacks; one for destroyed drones and one for normal drones. It also means loosing a drone will still hurt. It won’t hurt as badly (as it’s not gone forever), but you’ll still have to pay a full repair cost each time you lose one. What exactly that full repair is going to cost is still under discussion internally and we will be giving you more details when we come to a consensus.

So, that’s this weeks’ update! As always feel free to post comments, questions and suggestions in the forums. I’ll be back again next Monday with another update!

Hey Star Sonatians!

We’ve been recently made aware of something going on with Paypal that is making Paypal subscriptions process significantly longer than usual. Previously, you could sub with Paypal and it would be instantaneous, but now we’re getting a significant delay in processing time. At the time of this post we believe it is something to do with Paypal itself, and not actually on our end, but we’re exploring all options to try and get that processing time down. Players are experiencing processing time of anywhere between 10 minutes to 12 hours.

So if you would like to subscribe immediately and get into the game NOW I would suggest using a credit card to subscribe instead. People in the past have had concerns about the security of the credit card processing system, but we’ve changed over to the popular Stripe billing system, and you can find out more about their security over at their website. www.stripe.com

If you subscribe with Paypal and are still not seeing your subscription apply within 12 hours, please submit a support ticket to support.starsonata.com and I will help you as soon as possible!

This past week I took a bit of a break from class rebalance content, so this week’s update will focus on some pretty big bug fixes, new transwarp content and an introduction to a new bit of content I am working on. Keep reading to find out more!

Firstly, bug fixing! Two major issues with transwarp devices has been located and fixed. People were reporting they couldn’t see some destinations on their list for Temporary and Team beacons. After a lot of painful debugging I finally tracked it down to an issue where the beacon is in an unexplored galaxy. I’ve made a client update so if your client doesn’t have the galaxy record for the galaxy the beacon resides in, it’ll still display the beacon in the list, but under “Beacon Inaccessible / Unexplored.” Since the client only keeps a list of the galaxies you’ve been too, we can’t give the name of the galaxy the beacon is in, but at least this way you know the beacon exists. You can then ask your squad, team, etc, where it is so you can get it fully added to your list properly.Secondly, the bug where Team and Temporary beacons were going missing from the destinations list on server crashes has been located and fixed. There was an issue where the beacons weren’t being properly flagged as temporary or team beacons when they were being saved, so when the server would reload, it would skip all the code to re-add the beacons to the list. Both these fixes will be in the next patch.

Secondly, I have a Transwarp content update! I’ve changed the mission for Tech 20 Transwarp devices to be Premium only, as Free-to-Play players can’t use the device. This will only affect the Tech 20 version of the device, the rest will still be accessible for Free-to-Play. I’ve also gone ahead and made a repeatable variant of the mission for each device from Blue Photon. In the next patch I’ll enable these missions and you’ll be able to get duplicate devices for each of your ships. This should be good news, no more waiting for the cooldown when you swap ships!

Finally, as you may have noticed, the past few weeks (including this week) I’ve been posting some ‘golden’ images. This was a not-so-subtle way of saying I’ve restarted work on a long dormant content project I started a few years ago call the ‘Trials of adum.’ This will be a new instance containing a new Tech 22 boss for players to fight and ultimately rewarding a new Tech 22 Hauler, the Divine Behemoth, among other Tech 22 items.

The instance is a new multi-part one utilizing some new features we’ve added over the last few months. It contains a single player section and a squad section. In the single-player section of the instance, one player, and one player alone, will have to complete the ‘Trials of the Golden Path.’ Passing these three tests will reward the player a key they can use to give their squad access a new boss, the ‘High Prophet.’ Expect to see this in game at the latest, the next universe, earlier if I can add it without a reset.

So, that’s it for this week’s update. As always, feel free to post questions and comments in the automagically generated forum post!

Now that we’ve hammered out most of the issues with the new website upgrade we’ve launched a new way of viewing all the patch notes, development notes, news articles, etc. Anything that comes as an official announcement from the development team will now go to this new page!

You might be wondering, “well how do I access this awesomeness?” To see the latest news, it’s just as simple as visiting http://www.starsonata.com! All of the latest articles will post to the front page. You can also click on the Community tab, and then click on News, to get to a nice page for all news updates. That page also has categories to the right, so you can sort by just patch notes, or just News articles.

Some of you are probably thinking, “Why’d you guys change this? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” The truth of the matter, is having our development posts separated from the forums improves something called “SEO” or Search Engine Optimization. Basically it will help our rankings on search engines like Google, Bing, etc. It also gives people a one stop place to check our news without being logged in. We still wanted the comments integrated into the forum. You’ve probably already noticed that every post that gets posted here will auto create a development notes thread for you to comment on. The existing News Forum and Updates Forum are now archived, and are sub forums of Dev Notes so you can refer to them if you need to.

We’ve also added RSS functionality to our new blog system, and we post all new articles straight to social media as well, so you’ll never be out of the loop on the latest happenings in the Star Sonata universe.

If you have any questions on how to access your Star Sonata news, send me an email to bageese@starsonata.com and I’ll help you out!

As part of our ongoing efforts to facilitate player feedback and better understand our players we are launching a biannual player survey! This survey asks all sorts of questions from demographic related questions to Star Sonata content questions! All responses are completely anonymous and will help out the development team tremendously. If you have any questions about the survey please email me at bageese@starsonata.com and I will address any questions you have.

Without further ado here is the link to the survey!

www.starsonata.com/survey

This week’s update has a lot of interesting information mainly related to the forthcoming Class Rebalance. Keep reading to find out more.

First, I made a lot of skill changes that will go live with the rebalance. Both Berserker and Gunner will now get a 100% bonus to multifire at level 1 of their respective skills. This should have profound impact on newer players when they are first choosing a skill and should help with the fledgling Gunner or Berserker’s damage output. Both Berserker and Gunner class skills will no longer grant an incremental multifire bonus either. This means a fully leveled Berserker will now have 3x MF instead of 5x. To compensate for this, Berserker will also get a rate-of-fire bonus on their core class skill. I also made some changes to the Speed Demon skill, Speedy Firing. The bonus will no longer be scaled with speed. Again, this should help with Speed Demon damage output in PvE situations quite a bit.

Second, and perhaps the biggest thing I tackled this week, was expanding the current ‘buff’ system used by Field Generators and Neurotweaks. Currently, the buff system is locked to a maximum of 32 buffs, all of which had been already used. This hard cap was due to a bitmap that needs to be sent to the client to tell it to display buff icons. Going forward I’ve doubled that number and we’ll be able to have a maximum cap of 64 different buffs. This gives us a lot more stats we can play with when creating Field Generators and Neurotweaks.

Of course, I didn’t just raise the buff cap on a lark, I’ve also gone ahead and added a few new buffs; Tractor Power, Electric Tempering, Inertial Dampening and Anti-Transference. The first three of these are extremely familiar so I don’t think they need explaining, but the last, Anti-Transference is a brand new buff. Anti-Transference is similar to Lifesteal in other games. It converts a percentage of your damage to your target into healing for your ship’s shields. Expect to see this buff used for some special new Berserker items.

The third big thing I worked on this week is also Class Rebalance related. It is a brand new item for Fleet Commanders called a Fighter Recall. When used, this item will do three different things. Firstly, it will destroy any fighters that can’t return to your ship. Secondly, it will teleport any fighters that can return back into your ship. This will be extremely useful for saving valuable fighters and also for destroying fighters to free up slots for new fighters. Thirdly, if you have any fighters queued, it will remove them from your launch tube and return them to your ship. This should allow Fleet Commander a lot of additional freedom in using fighters as they can save valuable injured fighters or escape from a bad situation quickly without sacrificing fighters. Below is a short video demonstrating the new item.

This weeks update is going to be focused primarily on post-reset woes and the Tech 22 Alien Ship revamp and a new UI feature! Keep reading to find out more!

The universe reset wasn’t without its share of difficulties; I ended up spending the first few days of last week just sorting out bugs, missing content, etc. But, that is to be expected. With the launch of a few major new features there is always going to be something missed during our testing. I am pleased to say that all of the immediate issues found have been fixed — and patched in via a micropatch last Wednesday. There is still one transwarp issue waiting on patch, but it shouldn’t be long ’till that’s live as well. As always, I’ll keep my eye on tickets and the bug forums and make sure to continue fixing any issues that might come up.

I started working on this last week, but I got the bulk of the work for the Tech 22 Alien Ship revamp done this week. All the ships got upgraded in some way and should be a little more desirable now. I am sure you are interested; so here is a rundown of exactly what I did. Note that these changes do not include any stat changes, I am still considering some but at this time I haven’t made any.

• Rajanicar’ayu’s fighters now have cloaks, more shielding and damage as well as copy the owners name.
• Subhatt’ayu has a new inbuilt that increases hostility, resistances and rate of fire with a forced thrust ‘charge’ effect.
• Isvas’ayu had the range on the microwarp inbuilt increased and the microwarp stops the player. It also has a new inbuilt similar to the Subspace Submerger.
• Bhisajayu had the max shield bonus removed from it’s Overcharger. It also has a new superitem that injects a very powerful healing parasite into it’s target and reduces its transference resistances.
• Samgrahak’ayu had the max energy bonus removed from it’s Overcharger. It also has a new superitem that injects a powerful energy recharge parasite into it’s target and increases the targets resistances slightly.
• Antuayu has a new ‘Siege Mode’ superitem that significantly reduces speed, thrust and turning but greatly increases rate of fire.
• Vaziayu has a new superitem, the ‘Nest Drone’, which deploys a drone to buff and heal nearby fighters as well as launch additional fighters.

Now for the new UI feature. As I always seem to do, I’ll announce it with a screenshot!

Tooltips for item-form ships will now display a preview of the ship’s model! I think this will be especially useful for newer players in identifying what is what when it comes to ships and stats. Perhaps more importantly though, is how useful this preview will be if (or when…) we add a ship skin system. For those you concerned about performance, I might add a graphic option to turn this off. Regardless, expect to see this feature live in an upcoming patch.

That’s it for this week’s update, feel free to post questions, comments or just discuss this post in the discussion post!

Ding ding!   As I said in my spontaneous update last Friday, I’ve been working on a multitude of things as well the Crucible. Now a shiny refurbished Crucible is on the test server for more testing! This time round, there are versions for Engineer, Shield Monkey, Gunner and Fleet Commander. For those of you that missed the post last week, I’ll reiterate on the changes. Calypso wrote up a new type of spawner, similar to the Ambush Spawner but for waves and thus aptly named a Wave Spawner. Wave Spawners can spawn a series of waves of AI, each wave can have lots of different AI and the AI can get different drops. Waves also have various options for when they spawn based on the previous wave, like as soon as the last wave is completely eliminated or after a certain amount of time, regardless of the AI left alive. In addition to this we can also set two trigger areas, one which lets the Wave Spawner function normally and another to force spawn a wave if valid to do so. The Crucible now uses this so that if you beat a wave, you can spawn the next one immediately instead of waiting around, which is one of the main requests I got from feedback from the last time we done testing. Additionally I’ve changed a few AI around, which’ll hopefully make things a bit nicer. The bosses don’t have any fancy scripts, but I can easily add some superitems to make some quirky behaviour if desired. I’ve also written a new mission requirement for completing waves of a specific wave spawner. Missions for Engineer, Shield Monkey, Gunner and Fleet Commander are located at Arena Central in Arena Lobby on the test server (test.starsonata.com:3032). You can pick the missions up and play through. Jump into the instance, AI will spawn. The drone ring just north west of the sun is the force trigger area I mentioned earlier, sitting in there will spawn the next wave when possible.

A couple of months ago, I made a blog post about some content I was working on; The Crucible.

Since then I’ve been working on various things, but not much else has been heard, except for my normal forum posting but that greatly fluctuates on what topics there currently are.

So here’s a relatively sporadic update, of what I’ve been up to since, and including The Crucible.

The Crucible

From the feedback I got it was clear there were two main issues; the stage bosses were just normal AI and rather boring to kill and that a lot of players wasted time waiting for the next wave.

The first of these issues is pretty easy to fix, our super item system is diverse and we can do very interesting things using it.

The latter however is a bit in-depth. We all know waiting around for things to happen is a bit boring. The easy option would of been for me to just make the next wave instantly spawn when the previous wave had passed, but I didn’t want to do that as I figured it’d make the later stages much, much harder. At the time, The Crucible consisted of two boss AI. A hidden controller featuring an extensive and long boss script featuring a few things I had written specifically for this, which controlled all the AI that spawned and stage selection, and a dummy AI which just roamed around (the Crucible Commentator).

The controller AI’s script is was about 1500 lines which is pretty long already given that Pretender Hermes is about 500, Easter Bunny/Zombie Easter Bunny are about 200 each and Copper Blob is a measly 140 lines.

As such it was decided it’d be too complex to modify the current script to allow for some mechanic where you can manually trigger the next wave either ahead of time. So it was decided that Calypso would write us a new type of spawner, a Wave Spawner. Similar to an Ambush Spawner but allowing us to spawn waves in succession with mission requirements and a force spawn trigger area. Removing the need for messy boss script and giving us much nicer way of doing wave-based combat in the future. While Calypso worked on that, I took a detour and started playing with other things.

After Calypso finished up the Wave Spawner code, or the large part of it. I got dirty with it, there was some quirky behaviour or things which I wanted and were lacking, mostly hindsight when actually trying to use it. So I then polished it off, including mission goals for clearing waves of a wave spawner. Compared to how it was going to be, doing the Crucible will feel very smooth and sleek. Now the spawners are done for Engineer, Shield Monkey, Fleet Commander and Gunner and will be on test later today. Now, onto the other things!

The Other Things

Some of these things are in game already, some are yet to come and some are real life things, of which I’ll save the coolest for last.

Starting with things that have already hit live, the most noticeable is probably the new level names. Previously the level names that accompany your level stopped increasing at 5350. Years ago when these level ranges were made, 5350 was such an unbelievable level to hold and it shows when you see that ‘Average’ and ‘Above Average’ covered the tiny range from 182 to 316. Our list of level names now extend to our absolute level cap, which is currently 10,000. Removing some of the old less inspirational names such as ‘Super-Duper Elite’ and adding some new much more epic ones such as ‘Marauder’, ‘Supreme’, ‘Demigod’ and replacing ‘Average’ and ‘Above Average’ with ‘Reasonable’.

Halloween is around the corner, literally, I’m typing this like 30 minutes before I’m activating the event. Unfortunately this Halloween doesn’t have a great deal of new, last year I added Vampires and Holoprojectors, this year features a new item class which you may of already heard of, the Sound projectors. There aren’t a great deal of these, but there are some! You will need your sound on to hear them, though. This years Halloween event also featured a contest in a similar vein to the Astro-Santa letter competition. The competition has ended now though and winners have been picked; their prizes will be various collection of Halloween items + something extra special.

Finally I have started on some (other) new content. This is a zone I’ve been interested in doing for about a year now and I love the idea so much, I’ve been collecting ideas for things to do and include on it and I feel like I’m at the stage to just do it, save for the other things I’ve been doing.

The new zone like the minor faction, Vervaardiger, is somewhat inspired by the iOS, Android, Windows and Mac OS game Galaxy on Fire 2. The content will be featuring three new galaxies within the normal universe, occupying Celestial Gardens, Earthforce Space and Perilous Space. It’ll revolve around industrialism, specifically the mining industry. The span of universal layers covered does mean that there will be content for both low level and high level players. There will definitely be some worthwhile items from there for all players.

The Coolest

And now, to finish off, the coolest one I have to say. Friday 11th and Saturday 12th of October was the Norwich Game Expo. Having been tipped off just the Monday before by one of my Explorer Scouts, I managed to get myself an exhibition spot quite last minute. NGE was no PAX Prime or E3, but it was good. I popped down on the Saturday where I demoed Star Sonata on one of my computers on a local server for new people to try. It was quite honestly fun, I just wish I had more time to talk to the other developers who were there. Needless to say I’ll be doing it again, and this time I might seen a current player! I also got some good feedback from people trying the game and noticing things myself which just weren’t quite right. After which I spent about 6 hours playing through the entirety of The Nexus content to find things which aren’t quite right. And that was just the Volcom faction! I plan to do the Cadet side soon as well.

 To finish up, like Calypso I will be doing relatively often blog posts, although they won’t be every week, nor the same day each time.

This blog post I am anticipating to be MASSIVE so I’ll bold all the important goodies so you can skim over my ramblings if you desire.

Recent Shenanigans

We really appreciate your tolerance and patience as we go through some nasty client and server crashes at the beginning of this universe. Unfortunately there are just some things that we just cannot test until it hits a new, live universe. As a dev team, we always try to anticipate bugs and crashes, and mitigate the new uni crashes, but they always happen, and it’s part of what comes with being a Massively Multiplayer Online game. Our server administrator, Jey, has been nothing short of a wizard without sleep looking at each crash with excruciating detail to fix it. He’s been also working with a select group of testers to address client crashing issues to push them live to everyone else.

We understand how you just want to curl up next to your dog on a Saturday and watch the universe explode into a fiery hot mess of chaos, then reestablish itself anew, so you can explore the uncharted territory. We understand how jarring it feels when you are establishing your empire and pumping those colonies full of those silly peasants and everything suddenly goes black. We understand the cold sweat and the fits of rage from that “connecting” message. We understand that you want to rip that keyboard from the computer and chuck it out the window, sending your dog to hide under the nearest table. We understand. And you shouldn’t have to deal with it, but we’re glad you stick with us, even through your dog’s whimpering and the tears of rage. So we’re going to give you stuff so maybe you’ll feel just a little bit better. Two days of extra subscription time has been automagically added to every pay to play account to compensate for the crashes. We’re also tweaking and boosting plans to the monthly event for compensation, but that’s at the end of the post.

Halloween 

Halloween in Star Sonata is just around the corner. We’re kicking off festivities on Friday, October 25th, and ending the sugary fright fest on November 8th. Blue Dwarf has added some frightfully awesome new items, that you’ll want to turn your sound on for. Scare the daylights out of your friends and enemies with our new Sound Projectors!

Monthly Event

It’s also that time of the month for your Monthly Event! We’re going to be doing things a little bit differently this time around and we’re going to be trying out DOUBLE the spawn rate on the Halloween AI for the weekend. We were also going to accompany this with some 50% experience boost, but in the wake of the recent shenanigans on the server, we’ve decided to up this to DOUBLE EXP. BUT THAT’S NOT ALL. This Monthly event will also last a whole extra 24 hours! 

October’s Monthly event will have Double Halloween Spawns, Double EXP, and begin on Friday, October 25th at 1:00pm EST, and end on Tuesday October 29th at 12:59pm EST. 

Thanks for sticking with us through the frights and the chaos. We’ll see you in the universe.

-Marty