New Major Update - Covenant

last announcement I teased that work was being done on a new feature - now it's here: Online Coop is coming to Catharage with the Covenant update!

This has been a long-requested feature that I had initially considered out of scope, owing to the massive amount of knowledge, time and money required to bring it to life. After doing some research a few months back I found a third party middleware capable of bridging the gap, one specifically designed for this case: bringing online multiplayer to singleplayer games that weren't designed for it. Using this solution enabled me to offload a significant portion of the backend programming and took this conversion from unthinkable to (relatively) easy. As such, I have to go into some legal and technical detail about the exact nature of the coop coming to the game.

Catharage uses Coherence Networking SDK to facilitate its online component. Sessions are peer-to-peer, meaning one player acts as "host" and all the other players are "clients" connecting to their machine. Catharage uses neither central cloud hosting nor dedicated servers - this is both a financial and future-proofing measure that ensures it will remain possible to play Catharage online for at least as long as Steam exists, independent of Coherence itself. In order for this peer-to-peer self-hosting to work, the new build contains a built-in replication server that is automatically launched on the host computer when opening a lobby. This replication server is software licensed from Coherence and because of this, participation in Catharage online multiplayer requires agreement to the Coherence Replication Server EULA.

Online Coop Details

Because the fundamental structure and risk/reward nature of Catharage is fully intact in Covenant, online features are subject to some restrictions. To play with others, the host needs to open a Lobby - this is only possible after selecting and embarking a ship but before warping for the first time. A new "online multiplayer" option will appear in the top level of the pause menu when embarked to Catharage station. In this menu, players will see an automatically populated list of available lobbies, named after their owner. Players can also host their own lobbies from here: Either publicly or for friends only. Once clicked, Lobbies or Host buttons will close the MP menu after a small delay and the multiplayer status indicator at the bottom of the pause menu will indicate whether a successful connection has been achieved. Note that lobbies do not currently feature passwording or other protection mechanisms, and once warped, will be locked until the session disbands.

Death, suspension and extraction

All player-side exit mechanisms function in coop just like they do in singleplayer: Players can extract, suspend or quit the game at any point (unless interdicted). All exit mechanisms will also disconnect players from their current Lobby. Should the Host player die, extract, suspend or quit, players within the Lobby will have the opportunity to exit on their own terms, but they cannot continue the session.

Note that since suspension is fully functional in multiplayer, suspending together and re-embarking are perfectly valid and intended ways of pausing and resuming multiplayer sessions as well as re-joining dead players. Since warp difficulty is determined by the host, the difficulty penalty from resuming a suspended save is applied as usual.

Progression, resources, missions and objectives

As Lobby hosting and joining is only possible after embarking, all players enter multiplayer with their own upgrades, engineering and unlocked ships. Cargo resources collected in-run are player-specific and are not shared. Mission rewards and bounty credits on the other hand are automatically shared to all Lobby members, and objectives are likewise completed for all players, including their associated scrap payout. Coop features an exclusive leaderboard that all lobby players will be listed on simultaneously. Area difficulty is determined by the host and their difficulty increase upgrades, so make sure to check these before embarking! In the same vein, hosts can choose to perform chaotic warp by activating them just like they do in singleplayer.

Items, abilities, upgrades and the fleet

In principle, all items function the same between single- and multiplayer. All weapons, modules and upgrades work the same and some may even have increased utility on account of having more navigators around, such as field emitters. An exception to this is the fleet, which is not available while in multiplayer - hired fleet ships will remain upon hosting or joining a Lobby but cannot be commanded, and hiring new ships at Outposts does not work. In-run upgrade structures like Forges, Extractors and Reliquaries can be used by each player individually and will not deplete after one use.

To ease coordination, multiplayer repurposes the fleet command overlay to show other players' ships while in a Lobby. Fleet attack buttons are similarly reused, these will apply a large "tag" to enemies that can be seen globally, to allow focused attacks and notification for special threats.

Performance and considerations

Catharage is a demanding game driven by complex maths and a physics-based simulation, and can be performance-hungry even in singleplayer mode. Since playing in multiplayer adds a networking component on top of this, hosts in particular need to have powerful hardware to successfully host large lobbies in endgame areas. The player limit is five, and multiplayer areas are less dense than singleplayer sectors, but it is still possible to hit limits in specific circumstances (such as flying five Queens in Verdant-dense parts of space). Please also keep in mind that while the coop mode is quite robust and has undergone a lot of internal testing, I'm still just one dev, so bugs and minor issues may still occur.

Known issues specific to multiplayer:

• Background planets may not be fully synchronized

• Player-side visual effects like cruise trails and status effect VFX are not synchronized

• Ship engine trails behave in visually weird ways upon warping

• End-screen kill counts may be wrong

• In rare cases it is possible to have Scene desync, where world generation does not match up on host and client machines. This is not game-breaking and usually fixes itself on the next warp, but may lead to odd situations where collision-relevant geometry is not shared between players

Beyond coop, other changes are coming as well:

Prestige

For those who've seen and unlocked it all, are sitting on huge piles of materials and credits, utterly dominating anything below five-figure threat levels, I'm introducing Prestige: A way to reset progress for reward. While the credit reserve was an attempt to bring a credit sink into the game, Prestige is a total wipe that puts players back to where they started at the very beginning. In exchange for this sacrifice, they will gain new power and abilities:

• A global scrap multiplier is added for each prestige, making the (typically) slowest resource acquisition quicker

• One of three stat packages can be selected to be carried over into the future

• Ship visual customization is unlocked, allowing Prestige players to show off their progress when flying online

Whether you're resetting to be on par with newly flying coop partners or just want more to chew, I hope Prestige entices at least some of you to give it all away (again?). Note that with the introduction of Prestige, the Global Credit Reserve is deprecated. Its supply drop buffing functionality has been rolled into the standard supply drop behaviour, so the bonus quality the community achieved is still there - it just cannot increase anymore (for now).

New items

With Covenant, a small number of new items are being added to the game:

• Auto Support Beams are a laser type that functions similarly to point defense, but in a support role. These turrets will automatically target allied ships within a certain radius and have negative damage and armor strip, healing whatever they hit. While they are especially useful in coop, they also target drones and fleet members so solo captains can make use of them as well

• Tabula Rasa is a new mythic engine that fully removes all regular status ticks on a long cooldown - a perfect tool for players stuck in large environmental hazards or reeling after a tough fight with Blackguard enemies

Tractor changes

Item collection is changing slightly with Covenant. Instead of being able to pick up items by default, players will now need to enable tractor mode to interact with loot in space. With this change, combat will no longer be interrupted by (sometimes unpredictable) item windows, preventing misclicks and more rigorously delineating looting and combat as separate gameplay phases. Since time stopping and slow motion are not available in multiplayer, it is also convenient for that mode.

Miscellaneous

• Fixed an issue where mythic legion armor would spawn too many turrets

• Fixed an issue where beacon missions would sometimes auto-complete before starting properly

• Pause menu has been reorganized to house some buttons that were previously top-level in more appropriate categories

• Made target icon pinning also display the health box for pinned targets

• Changed Rapacity relic bonus to no longer stack but properly carry over when suspending

• Added a shield break VFX and SFX, and increased the visibility of damage overlays

• Changed Armor, Shield and Hull bars to no longer stretch infinitely

• Missions have had different marker colors added to make it easier to visually distinguish them

• Added larger death explosions to some large ships

• Made player ships, fleet ships and drones no longer collide with each other. This change should make flying large carrier groups much less annoying

• Tutorial messages have been fixed to no longer have incorrect text spacing

• A new secret POI has been added, with a secret function...

• Other small fixes and tweaks

Community Shoutout

Over the past couple of months, some great community contributions have been made for Catharage. I want to shout out the Beginner and Sector Guide made by Shaggy Moose - this is an excellent resource for those new or rusty and I highly recommend giving it a read! There are also guides by Zflocco and Dimble, each going into more granular detail on itemization and POIs respectively.

To celebrate the release of this update (and perhaps entice some coop partners), the game will be discounted for a week following this announcement!

That's it from me for this update. I hope you all give multiplayer a try, fly far with your friends and fight cool battles together. Huge thanks to the internal testing team on the Discord, all of whom have been indispensable for bringing this mode to life! If you have any feedback, further questions or encounter bugs with the new update, make sure to let me know, either on here or on the official Discord.