Patch Notes v0.2.1 - v0.2.4

I apologize for the day one demo issues with controller and camera movement. They should be in a much better place after these updates.

Thank you for leaving crash reports on. That was very helpful in my ability to find them and fix them promptly.

https://discord.gg/Cx9RQ8vKR

I'm available there and will respond as fast as I can to fix bugs and issues, and I am happy to hear any ideas or features you would like added.

Thank you for playing!!!

New

• Full controller support. Every screen is now reachable with a gamepad: main menu, fleet, equip, orders, inventory, territory, empire overview, and the galaxy map top bar. A and B are bound, held directions repeat, and the right stick scrolls.

• Move your ships with the right stick. Deflect to aim, release to go. The stick works like a reticle: a light push moves a short distance, a full push spends the whole move allowance.

• A focus ring is drawn on screen so you can always see what the controller has selected.

Changed

• Ships turn before they burn. A hull points its nose where it is going instead of sliding sideways with its engines aimed backwards.

• Ship movement is smoother end to end: constant cruise instead of stop and start pulsing, and corners no longer dip in speed.

• Every battle board opens at 6400m, so sector 1 fights are no longer cramped into a 5000m box.

• Every battle opens at the same zoom, pulled back a notch, and the opening frame follows your fleet.

• The camera pans to whichever ship is acting, enemies included.

• Debris girders and containers are larger and no longer travel in packs, so it is clearer what you can fly around.

• The Destroyer and Carrier button drops its Passive strip; the details moved to the hover tip.

Fixed

• A pierce shot no longer kills the ship standing next to the one you aimed at.

• Wrecks no longer block line of fire, so a hull behind one is targetable.

• Ships and drones stop diving into gaps they cannot fit through.

• A ship redirected mid move continues from where it actually is instead of snapping back.

• Structures and mission objectives no longer hide in the fog.

• A ship moving into fog flies into the dark and dissolves instead of teleporting back to where it started.

• Your carrier warps in where you placed it, and crowded hulls say so first.

• Music no longer sounds like silence: one track was nearly a third dead air.

• Scout Paint only fires when you fire it, and moving ships can be heard again.

• The Hostile Contact prompt has a sound, and the hover tick is loud enough to hear.

• The story log stops cutting off its own entries.

• The warp-in objective prompt no longer says itself twice.

v0.2.3

Changed

• The radar contact ping is a little louder.

• Weapon impacts spark outward evenly again instead of leaning one way.

Fixed

• Warping into your first battle no longer stutters while the shaders load.

• Enemy ships no longer end their turn holding a ready weapon with one of your ships in front of them.

• Enemy frigates now close to a range they can actually shoot from instead of stopping just outside it.

• Drones show their own icon in the turn queue and the inspect panel rather than borrowing their carrier's.

• The reward screen no longer swallows the Escape key.

• Two panels no longer spill their text outside the frame.

• Several stability fixes, including a crash reporting bug that filed reports against the wrong part of the game.

v0.2.2

Fixed

• Controller bindings now load correctly. The demo shipped with its Steam Input action manifest rejected at startup, so no in-game action set ever resolved and controller configuration silently fell back to defaults. If you play on a gamepad, this affected every screen.

• Leaving a battle no longer interrupts the enemy AI mid-move. A turn still resolving as you left could abort partway through and leave the AI marked busy.

• Swept a batch of internal errors that fired during victory screens and battle teardown. No effect on play, but they were filling up error reports.

v0.2.1

Changed

• Ship speed re-dialled. v0.2.0 cut top speed by about three times, which went too far. Scouts now cruise at 550 and Titans at 350, with every hull in between falling on the same curve. A 150 m hop is back to feeling brisk, and the worst long move with a full turn drops from 5.5 seconds to 4.6.

• Scout and Frigate deaths are louder. A small hull was blowing up quieter than the gun that killed it. Their explosion comes up 2 dB, still sitting under the medium and large hull blasts so the size ladder still reads.

Fixed

• Center-screen prompts stop stacking on top of each other. Only one holds the center at a time now. A more important message takes the slot, a less important one waits its turn and shows when the slot frees, and anything that waited too long is dropped instead of appearing late. Turn banners step aside so a response to something you just did is never stuck behind one, and warp-in alerts outrank everything else. Prompts anywhere other than center screen are unchanged.