Welcome to my first weekly post of the new year! In this week’s post I’ll be primarily discussing some upcoming additions to the client UI that I think most players will be extremely excited about.

What I’ve been working on is a UI addition; specifically, a right click context menu for the Possessions tab of the Character dialog. This new menu contains remote slave commands that can be used on slaves in other galaxies. It currently has five options, but it was coded in a way that it’s easily expandable, so if the feature is popular and people want more, we can do that. The current options on this menu are as follows.

• Release Slave – this was the button option that is currently in the Possessions tab. Selecting the option will allow you to permanently get rid of a slave — don’t worry, it still has the confirmation dialog so we can avoid accidents.
• Leave Stasis – this is exactly like the X-Key menu option with the added benefit that you can issue the command from another galaxy.
• Follow Me – this is also exactly like the X-Key menu option and again, it can be issued from another galaxy.
• Open Inventory – this was adapted from a little known feature of the Possessions tab — if you double click on one of your possessions it will open the inventory. I put it in the menu as well so people know it’s there (the double click command isn’t very intuitive).
• Repair Ship – this will allow you to repair your slaves on the fly, provided you can pay the credit cost needed. That’s right, no more docking to repair. Slaves being repaired must be out of stasis before the command is valid.

These new options are meant to make it possible to manage slaves when you get them stuck in hairy situations while keeping the master safe; for example getting slaves out of a galaxy like Iq’ Bana while safely sitting outside or getting your slaves to return if they get lost. They won’t in any way replace the X menu that everyone is so used to using on for slaves in the same galaxy. Also, the Repair Ship command I created for the Possessions context menu has been added to the X menu as well — as a quicker way to repair slaves on the fly without tracing through menus.

So that’s it for this week’s update. As always, questions, comments and suggestions can be posted in the forums!

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.

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!

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!

So this week it’s my turn and I have a nice little collection of questions to answer!

From starwyrm:
Hours of SS played weekly?
What recent content have you had a hand in?
I think your position has something to do with the forums, but remind us all of the specifics?
Any plans on an in-game ship based on your forum avatar?

And from DragonGod:
What was the answer to the Dungeon Danger Factor competition?

So firstly, in all honestly I don’t play a lot of Star Sonata any more. I occasionally log in and do some DGs or bosses with Jeff. I don’t play a lot of games in general though, well three or four, including Star Sonata and excluding little flash web games.

Changing direction a little bit, I’m going to answer the third question before the second one (it makes more sense this way, trust me). I think your position has something to do with the forums, but remind us all of the specifics?
My position doesn’t really involve the forum and I could work without using it all. When it boils down to it, when I joined the dev team I was a rather active forum poster (had over 5,000 posts) and that trend just continued on. I now have about 7,500 post if you include that 5,000. Although I would say I don’t post as much as I used to, I occasionally follow threads and never post in them if they intrigue me. My actual role is much the same as Calypso’s; content and programming. Although I only do server sided programming. I also often to lookups on things like missing slaves or blown up stations.

Still in odd directions, question two! What recent content have you had a hand in?
Recent content… I haven’t really done a lot lately that’s hit live and players known about it. Calypso pumps out a lot of content-y things like missions and zones etc and also posts about them in blog posts every Monday, while I generally do odd fixes and miscellaneous things. I do quite a few things you never see or hear of either like documenting stuff on the wiki for other content developers or extra little things for the admin panel. To answer the actual question of what I’ve done recently, in terms of big content, not a lot. I created the DD22 boss originally and scripted it to act like an Engineer-ish as well as working on The Crucible, the mining content I mentioned a few weeks back and making various class superitems. Mostly I do little odds and sods around the place, these are the things I committed to the last patch:

• Changed the radar blip to be uniformly transparent.
• Removed the ‘experimental’ and ‘alpha’ notices from Orthographic camera, HDR and SSAO checkboxes.
• ‘Buttonified’ the undock button.
• Added support for untanglers (graviton disruptors) to optionally also disrupt tweaks (including auras etc), gremlins and critical hit effects (you’ll still do the extra damage).
• Made missions take into account required items to complete it when calculating if you have enough space to finish it.
• Made missions able to have multiple galaxy reveals on the map
• Missions now tell you how many credits you are short when you try to complete a mission that requires credits
• Beefed hullspace on Academy Freighter and Academy Thatch.
• Fixed the blue photon transwarper missions not taking the credits they should
• Fixed the mission ‘Urzod’ to kill Urzod (the giant volcom) not telling you where Honey Moon is.
• Fixed incorrect manhours on the Adonis Protector Z blueprint
• Added Zebucart variants (CS, HF and FR) to the Basic (normal Zebus) spawners in Earthforce and Celestial Gardens

I also created the sound projector items that came in with this years Halloween event, and of late have been doing a few things to spice up this Christmas.

Any plans on an in-game ship based on your forum avatar?
I do not have any content planned around my forum avatar, for a very simple reason. This is just an image of the ship Red Dwarf from the British science fiction sitcom of the same name which has been modified to be blue and flipped horizontally. The actual ship from the show is a five mile long mining ship belonging to the Jupiter Mining Corporation. I haven’t checked, but I’m pretty sure using the model or a similar model would be copyright infringement.

DragonGod’s question: the answer to the Dungeon Danger Factor competition.
For those of you who don’t know, a couple of months ago I hosted a competition about how Danger Factor works which was won by singularity. Basically, in the code danger factor is 100 times smaller, DF100 in game is 1.0 in the code. DG’s start out at the galaxyDF + a random number from 0.025 to 0.1 * 10. The random part becomes pretty small in the end, if you take a DG from a DF400 galaxy, the first stage is going to have a maximum DF of 4100. From here the DF increases between 37.5 and 62.5 per stage, averaging about 50. The clues I gave were pretty cryptic to solving the puzzle but did get there. The first clue related to PvP ranges, the second clue was towing costs.

That’s all of the questions for this week, but I did like answering them so you should definitly ask some more!

This week’s update covers a few fixes to the towing system, some bug fixing and a lot of changes for the coming class rebalance.

First, the towing system. Recently we enabled a ‘tow-on-death’ feature so players can get out of sticky situations. When we did this we also updated Janitor’s Outpost in the Nexus to be a towing base so new players can utilize this feature (without getting sent to Sol which could be very confusing). However, this had a few unforeseen side effects. First, dying in certain places outside the Nexus would lead to a towing offer into the Nexus! This is due to how the server calculates the closest towing base. I’ve updated this bit of code so that Janitor’s Outpost will only be offered as a towing location if you are within the Nexus.

Secondly, towing bases. When we made Janitor’s Outpost a towing base it also removed the skills tab from the station dialog. I’ve updated the client to address this issue. As part of this, I added a new flag for AI bases to let the client know if they offer skill training. If they do, the skills tab will be shown, if they don’t, it won’t. Unfortunately neither of these were ready in time for the patch.

And patch we did. I spent a fair amount of time this weekend doing some post-patch support and bug fixing. We had two major issues that needed fixed, first, a line of code meant for the rebalance was in the wrong place: this lead to fighters being double-subtracted from your current count and allowed infinite launch. Secondly, with Fleet Commander Transwarps fixed, we inadvertently looked over the fact premium players could use them to bring non-premium players along for the ride to places they shouldn’t be. Both these issues were fixed immediately and they are already patched in. There are still a few more minor issues that are being fixed (including drones not equipping), expect another hotfix for them very soon.

This past week I also did a lot of work on the Class Rebalance; which is coming along nicely. We’ve done another round of analysis and I had a lot of skill stat changes to do. This latest round of changes is up on test and was meant to bring the damage and damage-per-energy bonuses of all class a bit more in line. It also contains a very big change to the Gunner subskill, Destruction.

Currently Destruction adds a +0.5% (+1% if Multifiring) per level vulnerability debuff to the target on weapon impact. This debuff is the same damage type as the weapon used to apply it. Going forward, this has been significantly changed. Instead of using normal weapons to apply the debuff, the debuff is applied via missile strikes. With this, the debuff has been increased to +2% per level (for a max for 40%) and now affects all damage types, not just the one used to apply it. I’ve also update the warhead splash effect to apply the debuff to all incidental targets hit as well. This will pair very well with the Gunner Deathblossom item and allow them to launch something like a Bunkerbuster to debuff a group of spawn and AoE them down very quickly.

That’s this week’s update! As always, feel free to sound off in the forum post with comments, questions and suggestions. Also, before I forget, I have been fixing permanent Warp Beacons. So if you or your team has one that’s still non-functional, let me know the owners name and I’ll reset it.