1.4 Dev 5 Now Available

The past few months of development have been spent almost exclusively on the game's UI. We've been pushing out builds along the way, so most of what's listed here has already been available for a while. If you're not in our Discord server, this will bring you up to date with all of the changes since Dev 4.

Playing on development builds

• Right click BallisticNG in your steam library and go to Properties

• Go to the betas tab on the window that opens

• From the dropdown select development. If the update doesn't automatically queue for download, restart Steam

• Once you have opened the game, the version at the bottom right of the menu will read 1.4-d51

Notices

Dedicated Server Changes

There have been a lot of backend changes for multiplayer in this release which changes variable names used in dedicated server CFG files and changes how the LUA API is used for for changing lobby data.

See the updated example CFG, random lobby lua example script and LUA documentation txt for more details.

Menu Background Animation Options

Two options have been added to customize the background animations on the menu. Some people don't like the new flying ship animation or find the particles in particular are too distracting, so we've added options to customise this. You can turn the particles off, or swap back to always using the old turntable animation.

• Options -> Game Options -> Interface -> Always Use Turntable

• Options -> Game Options -> Interface -> Flying Ship Particles

BNGL Bundled

To coincide with the gallery update in this build, we've worked with Radracer to officially distribute a portion of their BallisticNG legacy project with the game!

We've taken the mods which are relevant to the game's development history and packed them in a ZIP which you can find in the Additional Content folder where the game's installed. A readme is included with installation instructions.

If you're a GOG user, we're currently working with them to have the ZIP added as a goodie.

When uncompressed, the ZIP provides just over 700mb worth of old ships and tracks from the game's past for you to play around with!

The UI Overhaul

Dev 5 finishes up the majority of work on interfaces that we had started on with Dev 4. The changes here span across the entire game and a detailed breakdown about all of them would take a long time, so we'll touch upon the most significant changes since Dev 4.

Scaling & Padding

UI scaling and list padding can now be customized! The game starts at 100% scaling (the maximum) and 72% padding to make sure everybody can see the UI regardless of the screen they're playing on.

Here's the custom race settings list at 60% scaling:

Multiplayer Lobby

The multiplayer lobby screen has seen a major layout change to accommodate for vertical navigation and to maintain more consistent scaling with other UIs.

Information is now split into three tabs: players, config and chat.

The player tab shows the player list with chosen ships and liveries. Name tags are now also shown above each ship in 3D so you can more easily identify who's who visually.

The config tab shows the full lobby configuration, listed in the same order that the host sees in the configuration screen. If the host changes the settings while you're in this tab, a soft flash animation will play to let you know.

The chat tab shows you the full chat