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

For some curious reason, the live client isn’t patching correctly, however you can use the beta instead which you can obtain from http://www.starsonata.com/dl/StarSonata_2_beta.exe

This weeks update includes some more class rebalance content and some work on the Tech 22 Alien Ships! Like last week, this will be a shorter update because again, I took a shorter week.

For the class rebalance, I have still been working on Seer content. This week I finished up a new ability for Seer that will be tied to Psionic Shrouding called Phase Shift. This is a passive ability that allows Seers to possibly avoid untargeted damage when cloaked. It scales with your level of Psionic Shrouding up to a 50% chance of avoiding untargeted damage. Hopefully this ability helps to get Seers into instances where they so often get completely destroyed by boss area-of-effect. Since it only affects untargeted damage, don’t expect it to upset the balance of PvP too much.

Other than the new Seer ability, I’ve made a small change for the rebalance that will mainly affect Gunners and Fleet Commanders. I’ve changed the functionality of Fighter and Missile Launchers slightly to facilitate salvo launching. Launchers will now ‘charge up’ and only launch fighters and missiles when they are charged. This won’t change the current functionality too much, you’ll still be able to queue normally, but it allows us to have a more strictly regulated cooldown on launchers when we implement Salvo Missiles. It will also allow instant launching since you can ‘charge up’ beforehand instead of having to wait for the launch delay. Charge up time will be reduced if you stack launchers, much like how multiple launchers decrease the launch timer now.

I am sure everyone has seen the proposed change to the T22 Alien Ships that I posted in the forums. I have started implementation of most of those changes and I have a few more details for you here. First, the Rajanicar’ayu, which wasn’t going to be getting any changes, is getting its superitem slightly beefed, they have more shields, do a little more damage and most importantly, now have a cloak. The fighters launched by the cloning pods weren’t powerful enough compared to the other T22 superitems. Also, I have added a special option for fighters to allow them to copy the name of the ship that launched them. This should make the Cloning Pods a little more useful in PvP.

Other than that previously unannounced changed (which I will update the forum post to reflect), I’ve been working on the Capital Ship changes; in particularly the new item for Vazi, the Nest Drone. It’s a special drone that will be able to launch and control a maximum of three special fighters that are unique to the drone. These fighters will be similar to Jovian Fighters and will offer buffs.

That’s this week’s update, as always, questions and comments can be posted in the related forum topic!

Universe Reset is tonight! Obviously, and we’ve decided to have a bit of a hang out. As in a Google Hangout!

From about noon EST (5PM BST) I’ll be on Google Hangout, with other amounts of unknown developers and of course, you, the players!

We’ll be talking about cool stuff, and I’ll give updates on new uni progress as they come.

I’ll post link to our Google Hangout later, when I create it.

See you there!

Server
* Made it so that no PVP tag applies to teammates too.
* New Auratweak item class.
* New Charge Overloader item class.
* Neurobinding and Modding an already modded item will no longer result in duplicate, wasted mods.
* Empty prospecting nodes no longer show up in scans.
* Tweaked down the minimum dock range a bit to a value that should feel more comfortable.

Content
* Fixed Surging Poseidon Hippios Energy and Heavy Bloodstained Ares Radar blueprints using the wrong items.
* Lyceum Signet from Herophilus 3000 is now neurobound.
* Removed the Cadets from Earthforce Outpost to curb confusion of players attacking them when they shouldn’t.
* Fixed Solarian Drone Blueprint being the wrong tech level.
* Fixed objects in Strontium-90 being at the wrong angle.
* Added a Nooby Planetscanner and added it with the Nooby Shipscanner to AI stations.
* Prabhava Remains for the Subspace Daily “Hatchery Mayhem” are no longer neurobound.

New uni stuff:
+ Subspace Hub galaxies are now no PvP zones.
+ Tidepool should properly have a lockout.
+ Head Master in the Building Academy now uses an Emperor’s Behemoth.
+ Fixed a bug with the Pyrite node in Capella.
+ Added warp beacons to Free Market, The Mausoleum and The End of the Universe.
+ New Fleet Commander Transwarps and Missions.
+ New Seer Transwarps and Missions.

Class rebalance stuff:
= class rebalance stuff (line starting with = will not be enabled until they are all completed as a whole, merely on those notes to keep track of progress (and they are enabled on test port 3032)).
= New Gunner “Starfighter” devices.
= Gunner Big Guns skill is now +2% damage, +1% mining damage.
= Missiles Launchers can now give augmenter mods to the missiles they fire.
= Missiles automatically get 100% bonus speed and 400% bonus thrust.
= Missiles can now be fired in salvos.
= Changed bonus damage to Seer Backstab skill from +3% / level on backstab to +1.5% / level general damage bonus and +1.5% / level on backstab.

10.23.13 Micropatch Notes:
* Non-Premium players can no longer warp to beacons in Premium areas.
* Missing visage fix for Fleet Warp Devices.
* Removed weapon from AI Warp Beacons.
* Fix to add Team and Temporary Warp Beacon Blueprints.

Here’s a quick update from the website front. One of the things I’ve been working on recently is a better team ranking page. Until recently teams were only ranked by total score. Now we have a new page that breaks that total down into its constituent parts, so you can see in more detail how well (or badly!) your team is doing.

The page was updated today with popup descriptions of each of the scores, in addition to some aesthetic improvements. You can see the result here. Hit CTRL+F5 in your browser if it looks broken or the button doesn’t work, you probably have an old version of the stylesheet or script cached.

I’d love to hear your feedback on this new design and, more broadly, any ideas you have for team and player listings, profiles and related functionality. What would you like to see?

This weeks update is going to be a little shorter (I took a short week) — but still filled with important information! For this week I’ll be covering a new type of overloader, a new kind of neurotweak as well as some massive bug fixing that went on post patch.

First, the bug fixing. This patch had it’s share of troubles and most of them were fixed extremely fast. Some issues with subspace instances were quickly squashed. The issue with deploying drones in instances? Found and fixed! Also, all the excess prospecting nodes created by the duplication bug have been removed (which was a time consuming and tedious process, but it needed done). As I have said in the past, I’ll be committing a fair bit of time to taking care of issues like these and I’ll keep doing it. It only makes the game better!

Some other miscellaneous updates? Prospecting Scanners will no longer show empty nodes and the Alien Ship Rebalance is well underway. Before it’s finalized I will post a list of suggested changes and let you guys give me plentiful feedback on it.

Now for the new item announcements! This week there are two. They might not be as epic as the Gunner Deathblossom, but they should prove useful to quite a few players.

The first is an Aura Tweak. It is a hybrid of an aura and a neurotweak. This means we can now make tweaks that can buff your party for a limited time without the need of having an aura equipped. Some examples where this might be useful are things like an XP tweak that you could pop to make your squad level faster, or an area-of-effect heal-over-time tweak that a Shield Monkey could pop to keep the squad up in a sticky situation. We can also use them to debuff an entire group of enemies. There are a lot of possibilities to a tweak that works like this so expect to see a slew of them in the near future.

The second item, which personally I find more interesting, is a new type of Overloader called an Charge Overloader. This special variant of overloader charges up, and on your next weapon fire after it’s charged, it’ll do tweak effect on your target. This is useful because it unties tweak effects from specific weapons; that is, you can get the tweak effect from any weapon if you are using a charge overloader. Charge Overloaders, like normal overloaders, can only have one equipped at a time.

The first uses will be for new Seer items called ambush modules. These items also have the added restriction that the effect will only take place if you backstab the target. If they are used successfully though, they will apply a powerful debuff on the target. There are other potential uses for these items though; consider special Shield Monkey variants that add a heal-over-time tweak to their healing target regardless of which shield transfer they are using. Or we could add special Berserker variants that debuff the target if they’re taking it head on. Like the Aura Tweak, there is a lot of potential for this new item class.

With these two new items that use the tweak system, we are also looking at expanding the maximum number of tweak effects to include some buffs that have been added since the tweak system first debuted. Some possibilities are tractor power tweaks and electric tempering tweaks. This is actually not a trivial change, so it might come a little later.

So, that’s it for this week. As always, sound off in the forum post associated with this post!

Client:
Additions:
* Added 2 new lkc command for the hardcore mcer / low performance pc
** /lkc renderres 0.5 (where 0.5 can be anything from 0 (fullqlty) to 0.9 (very very lowres)) This setting basically lower the resolution at which your gameview is rendered, but does not affect the gui
** /lkc renderfull 0.1 is more extreme than renderres, as it will affect the whole client (text will become very hard to read) but this produce much better gain when the gpu is the bottleneck
** those new settings are used automatically to reduce the load of clients that are not focused or completely covered by other window (multiclienting) this should fix the issue of clients having a delay when alt-tabbing (need background client rendering enabled)
* Lagkiller will also lower the resolution of the gameview slightly (this can give a great performance boost in some case, with very little ingame impact)
* (feature) Added a new button to the bottom bar “?” Which open to the player guide section of the website.
* Added back the space brake sound from C1

Tweaks:
* (tweak) shipforming now display the ship hull name in the last confirmation window before using the spacepoints.
* (tweak) tooltip from the ship inventory, now only display for item you have selected (should reduce greatly the amount of “annoying” tooltip
* Improvements to the Autopilot Code
** Don’t thrust in the wrong direction when starting out
** Don’t wiggle back and forth
** Don’t thrust all the time and lost speed bonus from afterburners or tractors and thrust as little as possible while stealthy
** Brake at the correct time, rather than braking early and pulsing the brake
** Use the break any time the ship is moving in the wrong direction, but not facing the right direction to thrust (as opposed to only braking at the very end)
** Don’t stop on the last wormhole of the AP journey and then jump through. Instead, jump through and then stop — it’s faster.
** Don’t try to end up exactly in the middle of the destination, rather suffer tolerance based on the ships jumping and docking radius
** Do reverse thrusting if the AP wants to stop somewhere and the ship is going to overshoot it
** Make the angle that the AP is “cutting in” in order to get on track be proportional to how far off it current is, rather than just either pointing 45 degrees in or straight at the target
* (lagkiller optimisation) added renderbg to the lagkiller which essentially lower the rendered resolution of backgrounds and large clouds (which are the main cause of gpu related lag on lower end hardware). There are a few camera related artefact going on when you are zoomed in too much, but they are minimal (lighting dim a bit on the cloud and what it cover).
** this optimisation took the spot between laglevel 1 and 4 pushing the full renderres effect from 5 to 12, since its pretty rare that rendering the ships them self at lower resolution help anything.

Fixes:
* fixed a long-standing bug in autopilot path that would refuse to traverse some specific galaxies.
* Improved client and server millisecond timer to be much more reliable over long duration, fixing the desync issue on asteroid and planets (i hope)
* Reduced the amount of “failsafe” network update now that sync should be fixed (planets / asteroid and the likes, currently caused quite a bit of network stress for lower quality isp / routers, especially while multiclienting).
* (bugfix) shipforming should now make the ship disappear from the docked list
* (bugfix/feature) fix for the random crash when using death tow (and possibility other galaxy change related crash, although much less likely).
* (bugfix) fixed tooltip issue when the galmap was close to the left side of screen
* Fixed a bug with engine thrust sound where it would sometimes stay on after you end AP or dock at a base
* Fixed a sound bug with fast firing projectiles where some of the ones that were getting inserted by the server to make the average RoF come out correct were having the wrong firing sound (e.g. Radish Torch)
* Fixed a bug where the Activate Controlbot option would only work if the ship was previously entered.

Server:
Additions:
+ New Mod Angelic (reduced hostility and visibility)
+ New Mod Reinforced (reduced durability damage on death, and adds inertial dampening)
+ Shield Chargers can now be modded.
+ Hull Expanders can now be modded.
+ Tractors can now be modded.
* Shielded mod now also reduces hostility.
* Super Intelligent mod now also grants critical hit chance.
* Amorphous mod has been added to engines.
* Rewired mod has been added to engines (adds thrust, removes turning).
* Rewired mod also grants electric tempering.
* Composite mod now reduces weight by 50% up to a maximum of 500k reduction.
* Miniaturized mod now reduces item size based on tech level of the item.
* Buffered mod now applies to shields. (adds resist all)
+ Transdimensional Warp Devices
+ Added AI controlled Warp Beacons to Sol, Lyceum, The Nexus, Kumari and Iq’ Bana
+ Missions to get Transdimensional Warp Devices added to Deep Space and Beta Antares
+ Added new commodity, Warpwnium, used in building Warp Beacons

Tweaks:
* Changed the base price of Psion Icicles to 50k
* Moved some of the words in the swear filter from the “partial” to “whole” list
* (Feature change) Spaceshipping no longer completely destroy the ship, Instead all items onboard the ship have their durability lowered to 0 and the ship is towed to the nearest tow station.
** (Tweak) a ship or a slave can no longer spaceship if the player is in the same galaxy (including offline) this should drastically reduce the number of accidental spaceshipping.
** (note) an item will be created soon that will allow safe stasis ship destruction (to allow getting rid of ships that cant be sold). This item will essentially work like a timed bomb, once equipped on a ship, the ship will go in stasis, and will be destroyed x days later unless recovered. (this should prevent catastrophic destruction in case of someone evil taking over an account and willing to destroy every ships since the ship will not be destroyed right away)

Fixes:
* Fixed the warhead/mass impact bug (being sent to infinity (south east)).
* (crashfix) changed the network code to support a dynamic buffer size (from 128bytes to 128mb) instead of a static buffer (32kb), this should completely fix any buffer overrun possible with the network code (server crash when opening a sing sphere with too many items to only name one)
* Fixed a bug where you couldn’t sell unequipped Augmenters to a station that vended them
* fix to prospecting node reseeding
* Fixed “Recharge Like Zeus” mission
* Fix for Zeus’ Recharging Beam, now affects both ships and drones properly
* Fixed damaged items being able to be sold to bases via ‘sell’ button.
* Fixed Miniaturized mod to give the proper amount of space reduction

Content:
Additions:
* New level names up to 10,000.
+ added some shiny new DG AI
+ added piracy drone missions (Strontium)
* added blueprints and droprates for new drones
+ added Looter drone to ai base for sale (Strontium)
+ added lance drone mk I to ai base (vervaardiger)
* Added three shiny new drones (T19-21) to dungeon drops

Tweaks:
* Aliens levelling coefficients have been changed so aliens level at the proper speed.
* Alien roaming ranges have been fixed so they won’t invade lower level leaves of subspace.
+ Subspace Tunnels have been added to reduce travel time in Subspace.
* Tweaked the ratios of dungeon drop categories
* Made the fighter bay on Mulligan’s Zebu Titan be non-sticky, but of the same sub type as the ship so people can equip better fighter/missile bays on that ship if they wish.
* Ohm and Resistance have been slightly beefed (Resistance is a ship)
+ Removed Stasis Generators from galaxies that sold them and shouldn’t
* Beefed most scoops so they have a faster scoops per second stat.
* Olympus Tractors are no longer Neurobound.
* Alien Invasion attacks are no longer contained to a single galaxy.
* Alien Invasion ‘Outposts’ are more dangerous.
* Changes to the Tractor 22 boss to ensure loot drops and mission completions.
* added fighter slots usage to their item description if its higher than 1 slot

Fixes:
* Fixed Subspace Daily “Sweep the Asteroid Field”
* Fixed Subspace Daily missions not requiring the commod given by the root mission.
* Subspace Daily mission fixes
* Rahnti DNA extraction fix