Public Test Now Live, Includes Auto-combat and U5!

Greetings, Privateers! Today we’re bringing you a very long awaited piece of news: The ability to preview and test the widely-requested solution to automating combat a bit more than the manual-only approach at launch. What we are rolling out here allows the user to control whether or not to activate the “Stand Your Ground” feature. How does this work? Read on to find out! When in Stand Your Ground mode, you can command specific privateers to automatically attack anything within the immediate area of that squad member. Selecting another crew member lets you set a different area, allowing you to cover more than one area with automated defense. This feature brings in a way for you to direct your attention elsewhere while combat is ongoing - all while interacting with other crew members - without sacrificing player interaction and control of combat. In situations where you need tighter control, you can toggle Stand Your Ground off, and take full manual control of your crew. When active, the field you defend will be placed again each time you click to move your crew or attack. Using this method, we are able to prevent crew members from pulling aggro on chains of enemy groups before the player wishes to engage with them. We are initially introducing this feature onto the public test branch. This will allow us to gather feedback and ensure that it is working smoothly for everyone and address the issues the community has stressed/raised to us. We hope to see plenty of players opt in and engage with this beta in order to improve the game and take it in the direction you want to see. Along with the auto-attack feature, we have made significant performance increases with the change to Unity 5 and resultant changes throughout the game, and are excited to see how those changes function outside of our testing environment. This should make a very noticeable difference to those who were seeing crashes due to being out of memory, as well as slow-downs, lag, or stuttering due to low frame rate. The team is anxious to hear from those who were seeing these issues, and hope you will let us know if this resolves those problems for you. Once these features are tested with the community, we will be making any necessary changes and then rolling them out to the main branch. We will be reading feedback as it comes in, so please be sure to let us know your thoughts. We couldn’t have made Privateers the game it is today without our community, thanks for being part of our journey!

To opt into the public beta

-Go to Pixel Privateers in your Steam library, and right click on the title. -Click on Properties -Select Betas -Select the Gamma Testing/Public Test branch -The game will update to the public test build -Start game and enjoy!

Please note

Saves that are used while in the test build may not be compatible with the main branch any longer. Be sure to back up any saves you use for public test, or use new ones! You can access your saves from the options menu, by clicking “Open Save Folder.” Additionally we would like to note that there is a known issue/glitch with the character screen after confirming your stat points. This will be resolved as soon as possible through a patch to the test branch. Here are the patch notes for the public test branch update today: New features: - New Defend Area feature which will toggle crew member to auto attack enemies inside a specific area. You can resize the area by holding left-mouse button on the shield icon on the area and dragging mouse right and left. You can have multiple areas active at the same time. Move commands are prioritized over auto attack. - New consumable Cosmetic CRISPR allows you to permanently change the appearance of a crew member. These can be bought from market stations.

Optimizations

- Engine upgrade to Unity 5.6 from Unity 4.6. - Rebuilt UI for Unity 5. - Better texture handling decreasing overall memory consumption. - Numerous miscellaneous optimizations to code decreasing memory consumption and improving performance. - Space backgrounds rebuilt (improved performance on non-combat scenes). - Multiplayer code optimization: better handling of packets. - Creation and destruction of synced objects batched in network code. - Pathfinding moved to a separate thread decreasing its impact on performance. - Better handling of extreme packet loss in multiplayer.

Bug Fixes

- Fixed various buggy status effects (bad serialization). - Fixed threat system failing sometimes when leaving combat. - Fixed health sync in multiplayer. - Fixed quick use icons being offset in relative UI scaling. - Vanity wings now also animate for jetpack engineers. - Fixed cases where the game tried to sync parentless status effects. - Imperium bomb dismantler no longer tries to dismantle other kinds of traps than mines (for example toxic glue). - Fixed multiplayer sync issues with dismantle ability. - Fixed issue with multiplayer color picker not working when UI scaling is set to relative. - Fixed bugs which allowed you to exploit vanity inventory for infinite inventory space. - Fixed multiplayer desync issue related to rescue prisoners mission. - Fixed request mission failing when using it at the edge of the galaxy map. - Fixed bugs with using distress signals in multiplayer. - Fixed a bug with events which close doors of the room getting stuck in closed mode in multiplayer when only one player's characters all died in the trap room. - Fixed player "ready to teleport" states being out of sync in multiplayer sometimes. - Healing chains no longer target pets (for example Trajectory Adjusting Prisms tech). - Fixed elevator shadow bugging out on short distance movements. - Fixed tractor beam effect sometimes getting stuck for clients in multiplayer games. - Fixed bug which prevented vanguards charging through doors if they were too close to the door. - Fixed selection box being the wrong size if UI wasn’t set to pixel perfect mode. - Fixed characters using grenades not being able to shoot sometimes. - Fixed a bug where you could access black market even though the market station didn't have one. - Fixed a bug where you could aggro president earlier than intended. - Friendly tumors will now teleport to owner if left behind.

Known Issues

- After assigning stat points to a character multiple windows will appear simultaneously on the same screen. - Cosmetic CRISPR UI color picker is offset in some cases and the UI shows crew gear which isn’t intended. - Door buttons near stairs are sometimes out of sync.