Happy Saint Patrick’s Day! This week’s update will focus on some more bug fixes, changes and new features that will soon be coming to Star Sonata. Keep reading to find out more!
Let’s start with new features, they’re probably the most exciting. As I am sure everyone is aware, with the class rebalance we added in drone destruction. Since the reset when that change went in I’ve seen a lot of destroyed drone husks littering the universe. It seems a lot of players forget about something like an Acme Combat out in Perilous space and just leave it! It’s no wonder I’ve seen so many requests for the ability to abandon drones — which is a new feature you will see in an upcoming patch.
I’ve added options to both the target options menu (x-key) and the context menu in your possessions tab of your character window that allow you to abandon drones. This option will be available for any drones owned by your character. Using it will bring up a confirmation (for the possessions menu variant), and if you really are sure, will do one of two things depending on the type of drone you are trying to abandon. If it is a permanent drone, it will disappear and be gone forever. If it is a temporary drone, it will go inactive (regardless of timer or other states) and gain an Abandoned prefix. This will sever all ties the drone has to you. Abandoned drones will still exist in the game however and can be scooped by any player. This could no doubt lead to some pretty lucky finds time and again!
As for changes, there is one coming up for the chain laser effect that directly deals with chain shield transferences. I’ve updated the chain laser code so it properly subtracts shields from the healer for all targets hit, not just the primary target. This change comes on the heels of another that hit with the class rebalance; splashing healing lasers also take shields from the healer for each target hit. Both these changes are pretty important to making a wider variety of healing lasers available for players which we definitely intended to do at some point in the near future.
And for some fixes! One thing that was completely overlooked with the addition of the Blue Photon Test Ranges was modded gear. Modded gear can drastically alter the maximum shield banks of the drones and lead to some extremely skewed results. To fix this I’ve added a new option to our ‘shipyard’ or the part of the code that loads up all the AI ship configurations to disallow a ship from starting with modded gear. When this change hits everyone’s drones in the testing range will always be identical. This will make your damage testing mean a bit more. Another fix that is coming also deals with the testing range and that’s that Testing Dummies will no longer be rad-exable. I am sure people think that is is funny they managed to get them out, but they were never intended to leave the galaxy.
Now for a final small bug fix update; I’ve finally found and corrected the issue causing desync for mobile drones. This was the result of the new inactive flag not being properly serialized to the client. So pretty much, the server knew the drone wasn’t mobile anymore, but the client didn’t and chose to render it as if it was still mobile. Now that that flag is properly sent to the client we should be free of any more weird drone sync issues!
So that’s it for this week’s update! As always, questions, comments and suggestions can be directed to the automatically generated forum post! I’ll be back against next week with another update!
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