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Author Topic: Starfarer 0.35a (Preview Released) - Patch Notes  (Read 81314 times)

Alex

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Starfarer 0.35a (Preview Released) - Patch Notes
« on: June 27, 2011, 11:58:29 AM »

Update - the preview version of the 0.35a release is out, and you can get it here.

The preview version, in a nutshell:
  • New fleet control scheme
  • Codex with info on ships/fighters/weapons
  • Fleet command tutorial
  • Mods need to be updated with "gameVersion":"0.35a" in the descriptor to show up in the list.
  • Right-click and drag now pans the map around, instead of left. Left-clicking is wholly reserved for interaction with objects. This will trip you up. I apologize :)

The full patch notes are below.


Latest Changes (updated on 8/19/2011)
  • Wrapped up fleet command changes, discussed in detail here
  • Content:
    • New ships: Medusa, Aurora, Dominator
    • New fighters: Warthog, Gladius, Thunder, Longbow, Trident
    • Cult of Lud captains in missions now have suicidal personalities
    • Revamped missions to showcase new ships and gameplay. The names are the same, but the missions are all quite different.
  • New hand-painted backgrounds, stars
  • Codex interface - accessible from main menum, "more info" on context menus, mission briefing, and mission results
  • Improved font rendering, added new font for improved readability of larger blocks of text.
  • Improved fog of war rendering, increased fog of war resolution
  • Changed the way the exe is generated for windows, hopefully avoiding some AV false positives
  • Mods need to be updated with "gameVersion":"0.35a" in the descriptor to show up in the list.
  • New csv loader - supports multiple lines within strings in a row, and double quotes in strings (escape as ""). Mostly useful for descriptions.csv
  • Balance changes:
    • Improved Onslaught - converted some small turrets into medium, improved all-around coverage
    • Improved Conquest - side-facing hardpoints converted to turrets, changed slot types & sizes, made faster. Overall, more powerful and easier to use
    • Lots and lots of weapon balance changes - mostly bringing weaker weapons up to par
  • Added captain personalities
  • Fighters more likely to return to carrier when hitpoints are low
  • Added two new fighter classes. Assault - stays close to target like interceptors, but doesn't have a preference for engaging fighters like interceptors do. Support - tries to strafe around the target without making direct attack runs.
  • Added friend-vs-foe indicators around ships and missiles (red diamond for enemy, blue circle for neutral, green square for friendly in map view only)
  • To prevent any incompatibility problems due to extensive control changes, controls are now reset to defaults when running the new version of the game for the first time.
  • Fixed AI bug that caused bombers to be too cautious with bombs, and too cautious in general. They're a lot more deadly now.
  • All dialogs can now be dismissed by right-clicking outside the dialog. Pressing Escape still works, too.
  • Ships use full color icons - should be placed in ships/icons/color/icon2_<hull id>.png


Full list of changes, broken out by category, below:

Content
  • Codex interface - accessible from main menum, "more info" on context menus, mission briefing, and mission results
  • New fighters: Warthog, Gladius, Thunder, Longbow, Trident
  • Cult of Lud captains in missions now have suicidal personalities
  • Revamped missions to showcase new ships and gameplay. The names are the same, but the missions are all quite different.
  • New hand-painted backgrounds, stars
  • Codex interface - accessible from main menum, "more info" on context menus, mission briefing, and mission results
  • New High Intensity Laser and Annihilator Rocket Launcher graphics (screenshot, featuring the Aurora, which is also sporting the new PD burst lasers for good measure)
  • Added new ships - Medusa, Aurora, Dominator - screenshot
  • Added Heavy Burst Laser, medium energy point defense weapon
  • Added PD Burst Laser weapon

Gameplay & Balance Changes
  • Wrapped up fleet command changes, discussed in detail here
  • Finished functional changes to the war room/fleet control interface. You can now create assignments for your fleet to carry out, instead of micromanaging the details. Blog post with details forthcoming.
  • Improved Onslaught - converted some small turrets into medium, improved all-around coverage
  • Improved Conquest - side-facing hardpoints converted to turrets, changed slot types & sizes, made faster. Overall, more powerful and easier to use
  • Lots and lots of weapon balance changes - mostly bringing weaker weapons up to par
  • AI improvements:
    • Revamped collision avoidance AI - much better at avoiding collisions and also aware of the ship's tactical goals (i.e., won't avoid a collision to wind up in front of an enemy Onslaught's main battery)
    • Missile avoidance similarily improved. Use of shields vs missiles also improved, especially for omni-directional shields.
    • Maneuvers to avoid being surrounded and to cause enemies to get in each other's way
    • Maneuvers to avoid crowding friendly ships that are between it and the target
    • Large ships will attempt to vent flux and get movement/turn bonus to better face threats trying to stay behind them
    • Interceptors are more wary of PD weapons
    • Improved friendly fire avoidance - AI is more aware when friendly ships might move into the path of a shot, but currently isn't
    • Won't vent flux when it's in a good position to do damage- i.e., when the enemy is venting or overloaded
    • Perceives ships that are almost done venting flux as a threat
    • Won't turn off autofire on PD groups when flux is high but enemy missiles are nearby
    • More judicious about using too many missiles on a low-hull target - won't waste all of them on overkill
    • Large ships aren't so easily distracted by smaller ones
    • Less paranoid about the threat posed by enemy missile launchers
    • Closes in to effective non-missile weapon range instead of relying on missile weapons entirely
    • If a ship outranges the enemy, it will close in to just beyond effective enemy range to take advantage of as many weapons as possible.
    • Improved strafing to stay away from enemy ship's firepower
    • Increased propensity to fire strike weapons against appropriate targets (notably, the Apogee will use its AM blasters now)
    • Alternating weapon groups now properly distinguish whether the ideal weapon to use requires aiming or not. (notably, the Apogee will use its MIRV launcher much better)
    • More intelligent about using kinetic-damage weapons vs shields
    • Added captain personalities
    • Fighters more likely to return to carrier when hitpoints are low
    • Fixed AI bug that caused bombers to be too cautious with bombs, and too cautious in general. They're a lot more deadly now.
    • Added two new fighter classes. Assault - stays close to target like interceptors, but doesn't have a preference for engaging fighters like interceptors do. Support - tries to strafe around the target without making direct attack runs.
  • Added "burst" beam weapons. A burst beam fires for a set duration - usually about a second - and then has to cool down before firing again. No weapons using it (yet), most likely candidates are PD weapons - the burst damage is front-loaded, so among other things, this allows for weapons that can easily shoot down some incoming missiles but have low overall DPS.
  • Improved the effectiveness of armor vs beam weapons overall. This includes non-energy-damage beam weapons such as the Graviton Beam, and does not include energy damage non-beam weapons such as the Pulse Lasers.

Modding-related
  • Mods need to be updated with "gameVersion":"0.35a" in the descriptor to show up in the list.
  • New csv loader - supports multiple lines within strings in a row, and double quotes in strings (escape as ""). Mostly useful for descriptions.csv
  • Ships use full color icons - should be placed in ships/icons/color/icon2_<hull id>.png
  • Sound effects are now moddable - the contents of sounds.json will be combined the same way spreadsheet contents already were
  • In weapon_data.csv, "burst size" is the burst duration, and "burst delay" is the burst cooldown.

Misc Features & Improvements
  • Added friend-vs-foe indicators around ships and missiles (red diamond for enemy, blue circle for neutral, nothing for friendly - both in map and combat view)
  • To prevent any incompatibility problems due to extensive control changes, controls are now reset to defaults when running the new version of the game for the firs
  • All dialogs can now be dismissed by right-clicking outside the dialog. Pressing Escape still works, too.
  • Improved font rendering, added new font for improved readability of larger blocks of text.
  • Improved fog of war rendering, increased fog of war resolution
  • Changed the way the exe is generated for windows, hopefully avoiding some AV false positives
  • Changed ship variant names to differentiate between "Close Support" or "Fire Support" roles, in preparation for upcoming war room changes.
  • Doubled default amount of panning. Instead of expanding the pan range, the 'Z' key now centers view on target - regardless of how far it is.
  • Changes to controls - pressing 'R' will now set/clear target as appropriate, instead of using a separate key for clearing the target.
  • The new default mapping for pause is spacebar.
  • Entering the war room always pauses the game and leaving it always unpauses.
  • Exiting the war room no longer turns off autopilot. It now stays on until it's explicitly toggled off or manual control of the ship is performed.
  • Performance tweak - planets render about 100 times faster. No, really.
  • Improved look of armor grid display

Bug Fixes
  • Fixed bug where sometimes an incorrect resolution would be used in windowed mode
  • Fixed bug where the keyboard would get into a state where it thought the Alt key was
  • Fixed bug that caused the AI to occasionally turn off shields and keep them off even while under fire
  • Fixed bug where AI would sometimes point omni shields away from the desired direction when first raising them
  • Fixed bug where game would hang if it tried to load a non-existent image.
  • Fixed bug with unknown key bindings showing up as "<unset>". Now show up as "unknown_123" etc.
« Last Edit: August 23, 2011, 07:47:27 AM by Alex »
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theShadow

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Re: Starfarer 0.35a Preview - Live Patch Notes
« Reply #1 on: June 27, 2011, 12:41:25 PM »

whoooo

I am so psyched for this!
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mendonca

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Re: Starfarer 0.35a Preview - Live Patch Notes
« Reply #2 on: June 27, 2011, 01:14:47 PM »

Wicked cool, man.

I only speak for myself, but I don't think you should be overly concerned with breaking mods (unless of course its trivial to *not* break mods). I'm happy to update mine as and when necessary, and I'm firmly aware anything I have done is definitely going to need to be updated several times if I want it to work with the final thingy.
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Avan

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Re: Starfarer 0.35a Preview - Live Patch Notes
« Reply #3 on: June 27, 2011, 01:45:52 PM »

Nice! Can't wait to start trying out some of these things.

Alex

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Re: Starfarer 0.35a Preview - Live Patch Notes
« Reply #4 on: June 27, 2011, 02:10:45 PM »

I only speak for myself, but I don't think you should be overly concerned with breaking mods (unless of course its trivial to *not* break mods). I'm happy to update mine as and when necessary, and I'm firmly aware anything I have done is definitely going to need to be updated several times if I want it to work with the final thingy.

Thanks for that - yeah, I just don't want to break things if it'd take me five minutes not to ;)

The "surge" just magically changed to "burst". Err, rather, it's been that way allll along, nothing to see here.
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Ivaylo

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Re: Starfarer 0.35a Preview - Live Patch Notes
« Reply #5 on: June 27, 2011, 02:22:07 PM »

These aren't the surge weapons we are looking for. Move along.
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frostphoenyx

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Re: Starfarer 0.35a Preview - Live Patch Notes
« Reply #6 on: June 28, 2011, 01:44:41 AM »

These aren't the surge weapons we are looking for. Move along.

Haha nice :p
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Dibuk

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Re: Starfarer 0.35a Preview - Live Patch Notes
« Reply #7 on: June 28, 2011, 04:28:35 AM »

Nice work! Lovely list, it gives me a warm an fuzzy feeling thinking about all the goodness next patch will bring, but that could be my fever.
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Alex

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Re: Starfarer 0.35a Preview - Live Patch Notes
« Reply #8 on: June 28, 2011, 07:39:07 AM »

Nice work! Lovely list, it gives me a warm an fuzzy feeling thinking about all the goodness next patch will bring, but that could be my fever.

Could be both :)
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Avan

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Re: Starfarer 0.35a Preview - Live Patch Notes
« Reply #9 on: June 28, 2011, 02:49:22 PM »

Its really cool to see david's ships from the blog post come to life!

Avan

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Re: Starfarer 0.35a Preview - Live Patch Notes
« Reply #10 on: June 28, 2011, 07:41:20 PM »

Quick question for alex: will ordinance points be balanced in .35?

Alex

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Re: Starfarer 0.35a Preview - Live Patch Notes
« Reply #11 on: June 28, 2011, 07:44:27 PM »

Quick question for alex: will ordinance points be balanced in .35?

That's the plan.
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Avan

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Re: Starfarer 0.35a Preview - Live Patch Notes
« Reply #12 on: June 28, 2011, 09:42:23 PM »

Nice!

so... ummm... do we get a balance preview? >.> (ie, so modders can begin adjusting things, and people can comment?)

Dibuk

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Re: Starfarer 0.35a Preview - Live Patch Notes
« Reply #13 on: June 29, 2011, 02:50:11 AM »

Nice!

so... ummm... do we get a balance preview? >.> (ie, so modders can begin adjusting things, and people can comment?)

Oh oh! I want preview! gimmegimmegimme! ... But naw, only of Alex have time for it. We'll figure it out otherwise.
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Trylobot

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Re: Starfarer 0.35a Preview - Live Patch Notes
« Reply #14 on: June 29, 2011, 08:06:16 AM »

PD burst laser weapons will be perfect for the Earthling Cruiser and Autonomous Fighters. Thanks for this Alex!
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