0.3.2002.19 Big Guns

This larger update brings a new class of weapons, changes to shields, an easier way to fly-test your ship designs, and lots of small fixes.

New large modules

These new 2x2 modules are beam turret, plasma turret, and shield generator. They function similarly to the existing smaller versions, but with about 10 times the raw damage output and resource usage they form a new significantly higher tier. The large plasma and large beam are intended as main weapons of large ships that can provide enough energy and cooling to reach their potential. Normal shields are not adequate to defend against these weapons, which is where the large shield comes to play.

Large beam turret has slow rotation speed but can fire a perfectly accurate 4-second burst with medium range. If the firing ship and target stay still enough, the beam can drill its way through multiple modules. The large beam can be very effective against heavily armored ships, because the core modules can usually be sniped with a flanking attack.

Large plasma turret fires relatively slow plasma projectiles with medium to long range. It is effective against slower and larger ships that it can hit reliably. The large plasma shots destroy armor plating on impact and do additional explosive damage if they penetrate, which can damage multiple modules. Like the medium plasma module, the projectile size can be tuned from module options.

Large shield generator has double the max shield radius of the normal shield generator, and the shield is also tougher. The large shields are very effective against medium plasma, kinetic and beam weapons, being able to nullify even large amounts of incoming fire if the ship can provide enough electricity. Missiles, super gauss and large weapons may still get through. Note the difference between energy and kinetic shield variants also added in this update.

The new modules currently use existing audio effects, but the plan is to eventually have specially made individual effects that convey their greater power.

Energy and kinetic shields

Until now the shields have provided protection against all weapons, while being better against plasma and beams. This is now changed by having separate "energy" and "kinetic" shield variants with different properties. The choice can made using module options in ship editor.

The energy shields are effective against plasma projectiles and beam weapons, but have almost no effect on kinetic projectiles. They have same max diameter and visuals as the generic shields previously.

The kinetic shields are effective at stopping and deflecting kinetic projectiles, but do little against plasma and beam weapons. In addition, the kinetic shields stop relative motion of other ships and asteroids, guarding against collisions. Motion away from the center of the shield is not affected, so its hard to get further into a kinetic shield but easy to get out along the radius. Kinetic shields can be identified visually by their lighter color and larger max diameter compared to the energy shields.

Test flight mode

The fleet editor now has a second option beside "Test battle" for easier testing of your ship designs. The "Test flight" button takes you directly to manual control mode with selected ship in a special test level that has some passive targets to shoot and asteroids to fly around. This mode is based on the regular battle sandbox and the test level is a battle scenario you can edit using the battle editor.

Graphical changes

• New beam rendering for sharper and more accurate visuals. The beams now fade away correctly along their length when their energy is drained by shields and segment ends are aligned to hit module surface normals to avoid gaps. When zoomed out far enough, simplified rendering is used to keep all beams in view similar to how projectile graphics are scaled.

• Fixed weapon muzzle flash and projectile hit light effects. These seem to have been broken for a while and actually look pretty nice.

• New particle effects for the large weapons and super gauss include firing, large plasma projectile trails, and projectile impacts.

• Reimplemented main ship sprite sets to be a single sheet created with TexturePacker and loaded from user-editable image file instead of xnb resource.

Minor fixes and changes

• Extended toggle ship / camera follow logic to allow following enemy ships and other objects if no ships are selected. Just point at an object and press F. Heavily prefers following ships over everything else.

• Weapon turret targeting and firing logic improvements. Improved turret firing logic to require a valid intercept solution found in setTarget call, which prevents wasting energy on shots that will surely miss.

• Globally disallow button elements to get and retain focus when clicked.

• Added better handling of ship blueprint id conflicts when loading them from disk. New logic assigns new id to one of the blueprints and re-saves it. Stock and workshop designs have precedence in keeping their preferred ids.

• Added mouse position change tolerance check to double and triple click check. This fixes issue in ship editor where fast placing of modules using single clicks would trigger the end ship editing action.

• Fixed issues in rebuilding and duplication of ships have been edited in the ship editor and then brought into a test battle.

• Fixed shield generator modules wasting / using too much electricity when shield is at max size.

• Implemented adaptive shield rendering vertex count (LOD) based on visual size for small performance gain.

• Fix for beam penetration intersection calculation in a situation where beam first enters a module with custom shape such as medium armor, passes through it and to adjacent module such that the exit and enter points are the same.

• Added some tooltips in fleet editor and improved action button descriptions.

• Improved some module descriptions.

• Fixed projectile light position being at world origin on first frame of its existence.

• Fixed wrong particle emitter's parameters getting updated in UI if an effect had multiple copies of same emitter type. Also fixed emitter parameter change event handler removal logic after exiting and re-entering the particle editor screen.

• Fixed particle emitters continuing emission after emission time had elapsed if the whole effect wasn't done.

• Increased shield pattern texture size and also increased its opacity when zoomed out. Enabled mipmapping for the shield hex pattern to avoid aliasing.

• Made the game speed slider in battle screen actually reach 10 as max value.

• Fixed beam energy calculation when module structural HP is negative.

• Fixed initialization of shield generator module to not reset to full strength when deserializing.

• Fixed mirroring of 2x2 modules in ship editor.

• Added separate color gradients for kinetic shields.

• Fixed and much improved sustained firepower ship statistic calculation. Now takes into account both available power generation and heatsinking within ship for a better estimate, but still not really accurate since resource distribution order, weapon range, active module usage etc. many other variables matter too.

• Fixed manual ship control action groups UI moving vertically in battle sandbox when game was paused or unpaused.

• Fixed ship control commands being triggered from shortcuts when in battle sandbox edit mode.

• Fixed issue related to having disabled ships (debris) selected in battle sandbox screen.

• Made radiator module self-illumination pass animate based on the stored heat similar to the diffuse channel.

• Added smooth blending between shaded and raw diffuse color based on self-illumination value in DeferredCombine shader. The hard cutoff was very visible with radiator modules when the self-illu is animated based on the amount of stored heat.

• Fixed bindings for ship control commands causing crash in the campaign prototype screen.

Stock ship library updates

• Added Beam destroyer ship blueprint.

• Added Beam stiletto ship design.

• Added Plasma battleship mk. 2 ship blueprint.

• Added Capital cruiser mk. 2 ship blueprint.

• Updated gauss battery ship design with kinetic shields, added resource groups.

• Updated shield wall ship design with large shields.

• Updated arrow fighter ship design with kinetic shields.

• Updated super gauss fighter design with kinetic shield.

• Updated heavy punch ship design with kinetic shields.

• Updated thin sniper ship design with kinetic shields.

• Updated gauss barrage ship design with kinetic shields.

• Updated light frigate ship design with kinetic shield and few more generators.

• Updated big box ship design with large shields and guns, increased power generation.

• Updated medium sniper ship design with kinetic shields, resource grouping.