Hi All,

Just a quick note, Traditional and Simplified Chinese are now active language options as of v1.001.

There are no other changes in this new version aside from the addition of the two new languages.

We are not able to read either of these new languages, so there may be a few translation issues at first, but please let us know if you find any, and we will collect them and have them fixed promptly.

We are currently taking some personal time until January. We have finished up with the launch PR campaign and now have a bit of time to relax over the holidays and get our heads back on straight.

Happy Holidays everyone!

Andrew (Blorf) and Richard (Narlak)

Hi All,

Just a quick note, Traditional and Simplified Chinese are now active language options as of v1.001.

There are no other changes in this new version aside from the addition of the two new languages.

We are not able to read either of these new languages, so there may be a few translation issues at first, but please let us know if you find any, and we will collect them and have them fixed promptly.

We are currently taking some personal time until January. We have finished up with the launch PR campaign and now have a bit of time to relax over the holidays and get our heads back on straight.

Happy Holidays everyone!

Andrew (Blorf) and Richard (Narlak)

Hi All,

Release day has finally arrived!

Early Access has been a great learning experience for us and we are so thankful for all of you who came along with us for the ride, sharing your ideas and support.

SPAZ 2 has been a long haul. 18 months in Early Access, and 18 months as Coming Soon prior to that. So 3 years now we have been on the Steam forums daily taking input on the game, sharing progress, and leaning on you all for support. We feel like we received a massive education in that time. All together SPAZ 2 was in development for 62 months. 62 crazy months.

Going forward, we plan to continue to support SPAZ 2. In the short term, we have a Chinese translation almost ready as well as tools to allow players to localize SPAZ 2 themselves into their language of choice. We also want to create a system to make the sandbox tuning files conveniently sharable on workshop.

Beyond that, we are hoping the community continues to grow and shares their ideas so we can continue to tune and tweak.

So for the Early Access crew, thank you for letting us get to know you and for sharing your ideas. You helped keep us going. It was hard sometimes, but we always had you counting on us and believing in us. We couldn't have done this alone.

For new players, thank you for joining us! We gave it our all with SPAZ 2. We worked harder than we ever thought we could and in the end we think we did it, by some miracle :)

For those on the fence. We have added a robust demo that works on flat screen and VR. Give it a try. Your saves will carry over to the full game, and there are the first couple of hours of gameplay in there.

Thank you all!

Andrew (Blorf) and Richard (Narlak)

Hi All,

Release day has finally arrived!

Early Access has been a great learning experience for us and we are so thankful for all of you who came along with us for the ride, sharing your ideas and support.

SPAZ 2 has been a long haul. 18 months in Early Access, and 18 months as Coming Soon prior to that. So 3 years now we have been on the Steam forums daily taking input on the game, sharing progress, and leaning on you all for support. We feel like we received a massive education in that time. All together SPAZ 2 was in development for 62 months. 62 crazy months.

Going forward, we plan to continue to support SPAZ 2. In the short term, we have a Chinese translation almost ready as well as tools to allow players to localize SPAZ 2 themselves into their language of choice. We also want to create a system to make the sandbox tuning files conveniently sharable on workshop.

Beyond that, we are hoping the community continues to grow and shares their ideas so we can continue to tune and tweak.

So for the Early Access crew, thank you for letting us get to know you and for sharing your ideas. You helped keep us going. It was hard sometimes, but we always had you counting on us and believing in us. We couldn't have done this alone.

For new players, thank you for joining us! We gave it our all with SPAZ 2. We worked harder than we ever thought we could and in the end we think we did it, by some miracle :)

For those on the fence. We have added a robust demo that works on flat screen and VR. Give it a try. Your saves will carry over to the full game, and there are the first couple of hours of gameplay in there.

Thank you all!

Andrew (Blorf) and Richard (Narlak)

Hi Everyone,

We just wanted to give you all a heads up that we will be leaving Early Access on November 7, 2017.

Code lockdown has gone really well and the buglists for 1.0 are clear, so it is time to give SPAZ 2 its final 2 weeks in the oven before release.

The release should simply be us changing the version number to 1.0 on Novermber 7th, assuming no more critical issues arise. Thanks for your patience with the lockdown. We feel it is the best practice for a clean release.

We want to thank everyone who has been there with us over the last 17 months of Early Access. It has been great sharing ideas each day and SPAZ 2 is so much better for it. We really appreciate you all!

Andrew (Blorf) and Richard (Narlak)

Hi Everyone,

We just wanted to give you all a heads up that we will be leaving Early Access on November 7, 2017.

Code lockdown has gone really well and the buglists for 1.0 are clear, so it is time to give SPAZ 2 its final 2 weeks in the oven before release.

The release should simply be us changing the version number to 1.0 on Novermber 7th, assuming no more critical issues arise. Thanks for your patience with the lockdown. We feel it is the best practice for a clean release.

We want to thank everyone who has been there with us over the last 17 months of Early Access. It has been great sharing ideas each day and SPAZ 2 is so much better for it. We really appreciate you all!

Andrew (Blorf) and Richard (Narlak)

Hi All,

We have spent the last month continuing our preparations for the 1.0 release. The month was all about removing those last few hard to find bugs and doing a bit of deeper optimization that was not possible while the codebase was in flux.

We have also begun to work on the Mac and Linux builds in the hopes that they will be ready before for the Windows 1.0 release.

So lets delve into what's been going on....



Some of these last bugs have been on our list for over a year, but we finally got the time to fix them. It feels great to clear them off the list.

• Fixed hang when retreating from battle after destroying a starbase.
  
• Fixed case where is was possible for loading an autosave to force you into a battle instead of being on the starmap.
  
• Fixed rare case where bandit's demand surrender menu would appear at the start of battles.
  
• Removed Scrap and Loose Scrap text from the bandit hive attack menu since it was just confusing. Look at the values of the Rez,Goons,Scrap to see what the raid potential is. Bigger is better.
  
• Fixed scavenge node coloring updating when the owner is changed.
  
• Fixed scavenge nodes losing player ownership when a new node lands on top of it.
  
• Added code to detect and skip loading of corrupted settings/save files.
  
• Fixed case where XP rewards often returned 50 when late game when the player was much much higher threat than other enemies. Now XP rewards will continue to scale down appropriately even once the player is uber strong.
  
• Added Custom Order Parts Max Stars to the Sandbox options. Allows setting how good the custom order parts can be. Can also turn off custom order parts entirely with the slider.
  
• Motherships higher prioritize fighting other motherships in battle, about twice as much as before.
  
• Starbases much higher prioritize targeting other motherships in battle, about 3x as much as before. This is to prevent them wasting missiles and bombs on strike craft. Their local beam defenses will still target any strike craft that stray too close.
  
• Starbases are now priority targets in combat as well for motherships. Targeting weighting 2x higher than before.
  
• Added nice fade out to loading savegames, instead of a frozen screen.
  
• Fixed Kill Captain side objective to only count captains, not bandits or transports.
  
• Fixed special hot swap case when switching medium sized parts left to right sometimes the swap would fail.
  
• B button can now back out of the Tactics Panel in controller mode.
  
• If in escape pod on the starmap, territories are now discovered as you travel.
  
• Spelling fixed across all languages
  
• Bloom now has 4 intensity settings

These optimizations may not seem like much, 8% here 4% there, but for lower end machines these will be pretty substantial. Whenever the game starts running too slowly, the physics needs to update multiple times per frame, making performance worse and worse. This train wreck feeds on itself when it happens. So what we have essentially done is made the train wreck a LOT less likely for people both in battle and on the starmap.

• Major starmap optimization, prevents rolling movement lag in large galaxy. Smooths out the map a lot. This will be a huge improvement on slower machines in big galaxies.
  
• Weapon mounts now cache their battle wagon targeting for 100ms instead of constantly re-thinking. This bought back about 8% cpu in battles.
  
• Weapons now don't rethink targeting while they are reloading, saves about 4% cpu in battles.
  
• Major fighter optimization at lower frame rates. When train wrecks happened, fighters were particularly impacted... Not anymore.

VR is really stable now and pretty much final. Reviews indicate that the vast majority of people are really enjoying SPAZ 2 in 3D, and they are surprised that a VR game can work so well in 3rd person. So were we :)

Now the challenge will be to get VR players to know we exist.

• In VR mode, the physics update was automatically being set super high by the SteamVR Vive plugin. This caused major slowdown in physics intensive battles. Now the VR updates at the same rate as the flat screen/Rift so big battles are nice and smooth. This will be a HUGE performance improvement on the Vive.
  
• Added display menu for VR to size the output window.

The Mac version is in a 95% working state, including the Xbox controller functionality. We are using six year old Mac Books to test it (the same ones we used to test SPAZ 1), and the game still runs quite well. Expect to see an experimental version available soon.

The Linux build has been a bit of a challenge so far, mostly because of our inexperience working with the platform. This doesn't mean the Linux build is going poorly, but it's a slow process while we learn something new to us. Expect to hear an update on this front soon.



So as of September 1, our two year project has hit year number five. We still cringe at being on the most anticipated titles of 2014 list... In the end though, what we ended up with was well worth the extra time, and we love how the game evolved during Early Access.

Our bugs lists are now pretty much empty for the windows build. We still have a set of smaller tasks that are not new feature related that we would like to complete such as adding more achievements, and adding new arena ships to showcase the new weapons added months ago in the super strike craft update. This all all icing on the cake stuff though. For all intents and purposes the windows build is ready.

Code is in hard lockdown now in prep for 1.0 and also to help with the Mac and Linux porting, the Early Access goals are complete, and the bug lists are empty. It feels good... really good!

We are also starting to look at ways of getting exposure for the 1.0 release. This will involve talking to PR agencies, contacting Let's Players, somehow advertising etc. This will take a bit of time, but really is the last step before we release. We need to build a bit of buzz for release and any help with that would be appreciated! As with SPAZ 1, please tell your friends.

Thanks very much for your continued support!

Andrew (Blorf) and Richard (Narlak)

Hi All,

We have spent the last month continuing our preparations for the 1.0 release. The month was all about removing those last few hard to find bugs and doing a bit of deeper optimization that was not possible while the codebase was in flux.

We have also begun to work on the Mac and Linux builds in the hopes that they will be ready before for the Windows 1.0 release.

So lets delve into what's been going on....



Some of these last bugs have been on our list for over a year, but we finally got the time to fix them. It feels great to clear them off the list.

• Fixed hang when retreating from battle after destroying a starbase.
  
• Fixed case where is was possible for loading an autosave to force you into a battle instead of being on the starmap.
  
• Fixed rare case where bandit's demand surrender menu would appear at the start of battles.
  
• Removed Scrap and Loose Scrap text from the bandit hive attack menu since it was just confusing. Look at the values of the Rez,Goons,Scrap to see what the raid potential is. Bigger is better.
  
• Fixed scavenge node coloring updating when the owner is changed.
  
• Fixed scavenge nodes losing player ownership when a new node lands on top of it.
  
• Added code to detect and skip loading of corrupted settings/save files.
  
• Fixed case where XP rewards often returned 50 when late game when the player was much much higher threat than other enemies. Now XP rewards will continue to scale down appropriately even once the player is uber strong.
  
• Added Custom Order Parts Max Stars to the Sandbox options. Allows setting how good the custom order parts can be. Can also turn off custom order parts entirely with the slider.
  
• Motherships higher prioritize fighting other motherships in battle, about twice as much as before.
  
• Starbases much higher prioritize targeting other motherships in battle, about 3x as much as before. This is to prevent them wasting missiles and bombs on strike craft. Their local beam defenses will still target any strike craft that stray too close.
  
• Starbases are now priority targets in combat as well for motherships. Targeting weighting 2x higher than before.
  
• Added nice fade out to loading savegames, instead of a frozen screen.
  
• Fixed Kill Captain side objective to only count captains, not bandits or transports.
  
• Fixed special hot swap case when switching medium sized parts left to right sometimes the swap would fail.
  
• B button can now back out of the Tactics Panel in controller mode.
  
• If in escape pod on the starmap, territories are now discovered as you travel.
  
• Spelling fixed across all languages
  
• Bloom now has 4 intensity settings

These optimizations may not seem like much, 8% here 4% there, but for lower end machines these will be pretty substantial. Whenever the game starts running too slowly, the physics needs to update multiple times per frame, making performance worse and worse. This train wreck feeds on itself when it happens. So what we have essentially done is made the train wreck a LOT less likely for people both in battle and on the starmap.

• Major starmap optimization, prevents rolling movement lag in large galaxy. Smooths out the map a lot. This will be a huge improvement on slower machines in big galaxies.
  
• Weapon mounts now cache their battle wagon targeting for 100ms instead of constantly re-thinking. This bought back about 8% cpu in battles.
  
• Weapons now don't rethink targeting while they are reloading, saves about 4% cpu in battles.
  
• Major fighter optimization at lower frame rates. When train wrecks happened, fighters were particularly impacted... Not anymore.

VR is really stable now and pretty much final. Reviews indicate that the vast majority of people are really enjoying SPAZ 2 in 3D, and they are surprised that a VR game can work so well in 3rd person. So were we :)

Now the challenge will be to get VR players to know we exist.

• In VR mode, the physics update was automatically being set super high by the SteamVR Vive plugin. This caused major slowdown in physics intensive battles. Now the VR updates at the same rate as the flat screen/Rift so big battles are nice and smooth. This will be a HUGE performance improvement on the Vive.
  
• Added display menu for VR to size the output window.

The Mac version is in a 95% working state, including the Xbox controller functionality. We are using six year old Mac Books to test it (the same ones we used to test SPAZ 1), and the game still runs quite well. Expect to see an experimental version available soon.

The Linux build has been a bit of a challenge so far, mostly because of our inexperience working with the platform. This doesn't mean the Linux build is going poorly, but it's a slow process while we learn something new to us. Expect to hear an update on this front soon.



So as of September 1, our two year project has hit year number five. We still cringe at being on the most anticipated titles of 2014 list... In the end though, what we ended up with was well worth the extra time, and we love how the game evolved during Early Access.

Our bugs lists are now pretty much empty for the windows build. We still have a set of smaller tasks that are not new feature related that we would like to complete such as adding more achievements, and adding new arena ships to showcase the new weapons added months ago in the super strike craft update. This all all icing on the cake stuff though. For all intents and purposes the windows build is ready.

Code is in hard lockdown now in prep for 1.0 and also to help with the Mac and Linux porting, the Early Access goals are complete, and the bug lists are empty. It feels good... really good!

We are also starting to look at ways of getting exposure for the 1.0 release. This will involve talking to PR agencies, contacting Let's Players, somehow advertising etc. This will take a bit of time, but really is the last step before we release. We need to build a bit of buzz for release and any help with that would be appreciated! As with SPAZ 1, please tell your friends.

Thanks very much for your continued support!

Andrew (Blorf) and Richard (Narlak)

Hi All,

This version was all about completing the final deliverables for the 1.0 release. We are so close now. We have had a ton of great input over the last 14 months in Early Access, and we really appreciate you taking this journey with us!

• Professional Voice Acting.
  
• Localization to French, German, and Russian.
  
• VR motion controller support for VIVE and OCULUS

Here we go.



Hiring professional voice talent was new to us, but in the end we think that we found the perfect voices for each character. In fact, originally we were not going to professionally voice Mac, Skid or the Computer but in the end the quality of the main cast's voice acting was so high that we decided to voice everything because the difference between the professional voice acting and the text to speech was just too glaring.

We now have over 2 HOURS of spoken dialogue in the game between Elsa, Carl, Jamison, Mac, Skid and Janeframe (the Computer) It was surprising how much voice work is actually in the game, over 18000 words.

We originally tried to have the voice work done locally, but it was too short notice for the local studios, so we decided to try to to do it ourselves. We put together detailed character packages and posted on a couple big voice acting sites (Voice123 and CastingCallClub) and what do you know, we got over 300 auditions over the course of a week. We narrowed and narrowed and finally both Richard and I independently came to the exact same picks for the voices (so no arguing there, phew)

After that we interviewed each actor over Skype and answered questions, we finally had a group table read using a 5 way Skype call. It was really incredible to hear the voices of our characters come alive after 8 years of developing them.

Once the table read was done, recording started individually by each voice actor, and they delivered audio files weekly for about a month. And now we have it all compiled together and balanced and in game, ready for you to hear. We hope you love the voices as much as we do.

Note: The old text to speech voices are still in there and are individually selectable via the sound menu for nostalgia sake.



This version was also about getting the localization system ready for public consumption. We were contacted by some fans of SPAZ 2 and decided to Localize French, German, and Russian. French and German because they are fairly large sections of our European player base, and Russian was picked because of its large player base and for having an entirely different alphabet from Germanic languages.

Having fans translate the game was a great choice we think. They really understood the feel of the SPAZ universe and sometimes even suggested inside jokes from their own languages to replace our own. All in all it was a great experience and the translators were super dedicated. They translated over 30,000 words type dedicated.

There may be some translation issues or missed spots so please report any mistakes or omissions. Its a lot of words, and things will have been missed/mislabeled. The translators will want to fix them and we want them fixed! :)

Once the localization has settled, we will be releasing custom localization XML files. This will allow player localization to any language. The process we went through with the translators should have knocked off most of the translation rough edges. Long term, we would like to hook up player translations to Steam Workshop, though that probably wouldn't be before 1.0.

For official translations we are going to see how the current translations do sales wise before branching out further. Managing an official translation takes considerable time and a non trivial amount of funds. So for example if the translated versions suddenly explode in sales, it makes doing other languages more attractive. This is all new to us, so we need to see. In any case we will support custom translation by players, so if there is an interest in a particular language, a translation will always be possible.



As a final step to our VR support, we have added motion controls to SPAZ 2 VR. Richard has prepared a video linked here to explain it a bit. Even if you don't have VR, you may be able to get a bit of a sense of how SPAZ 2 feels in VR.

https://youtu.be/r8b5cgoaL9M

One motion controller is for aiming and ship functions like boosting shields, reloading, and camera controls. The other controller is for movement, switching weapons, and switching ships. It was quite a challenge to get all the SPAZ 2 functions on the few controller buttons, but we managed it by using the grip button as a sort of “shift key.”

Gameplay wise, shooting is definitely my favorite on the motion controls. Lazing targets is just cool. Flight wise there are three modes. Controller relative (point where you want the ship to go), Helmet relative (forward means go toward where you are looking), or Ship relative (pressing left turns you left) Find a mode that is most comfortable to you. Note: VR also allows you to use a regular XInput style controller instead of the motion controls. This behaves the same as on the flat screen.

This version will bring our VR support to completion aside from bugs. Please please give it a try if you can and let us know if you have problems (especially with the motion controls)

• Fixed issue where sometimes the camera could get caught flickering when toggle camera was selected right before pause.
  
• Made AI captains attack Bandit Hives longer so they try to destroy them more vs just raiding them for supplies.
  
• Fixed case where captains would raid bandit hives with bounties instead of trying to destroy them.
  
• Made local governors more likely to clear bandit hives from their territory.
  
• AI captains more likely to complete Starbase building tasks where they have to pay a portion of the cost themselves.
  
• Made the blocked port checker a little more forgiving to allow fitting parts in spots that look like they should allow parts to fit.
  
• Fixed bug where sniper cannons and mass drivers would cause a hitch in the enemy ship's movement when they hit.
  
• Fixed exploit where you could disband a starbase you own to get salavge access to the store inventory which you do not actually own.
  
• Fixed Starbases not dropping their Stockpile contents when disbanded.
  
• Fixed mouse over resource values disagreeing with Starmap values (Ceil/Round Conflict)
  
• Fixed Join faction button round off error, reporting relations too low when it is possible to join.
  
• Fixed issue where bombs on strike craft would impact the player ship when starting combat.
  
• Added Starmap Explored button to the Sandbox level setup options. This makes the starmap fully explored on start.
  
• Accessing Cheat menu easier for a variety of keyboards: (Left Alt or Right Alt or AltGr) + (F7 or 0)
  
• Starbase bounties are now checked vs the bounty taker's relation with the owner. So friends will no longer attack your bases.
  
• Bounty takers will now take into consideration their relations with the faction leader before taking on a bounty to destroy a starbase (So player friends won't attack the bases in the Player faction, even if the player does not own that base)
  
• Fixed issue where you could contextual target parts in the inventory level, causing Battle Wagon to attack them.
  
• Fixed issue where you could lock onto an ally outside of battlewagon mode, then switch to battlewagon mode and your ship would automatically fire at your ally.
  
• Fixed fighter docking issues on high speed motherships where they couldn't catch up.
  
• Increased Rez drop from zombie Starbases from a flat 200 to 400-1000 based on the size of the base.
  
• Fixed case where you could mark a part for hot swapping in the inventory level then attach it to your ship using the tractor instead, leaving the part in a weird state.
  
• Starbase threat level now properly updates when you level up.
  
• Starbase threat updates when transferred to a new owner to reflect their tech level
  
• Fixed knocked off enemy parts attached to player ship not consuming any capacitor power. In fact, it was stealing the power from the old ship.
  
• When the player rams a ship, the ship being rammed now takes it as a hostile act. Especially so if they are an ally and there are not hostile ships left in the region. Allies now react to being rammed to death for free parts after battles conclude.
  
• Fixed case where after player lost a battle and player continued instead of loading that the winning ships did not recover their strike craft and their health was not updated to the proper post battle health.
  
• Taught Motherships not to avoid Strike Craft and since they will rarely collide due to being at different Y heights. (Also taught strike craft not to avoid motherships)
  
• New AI flight system that attempts to de-clump the ships and keep ships at optimal range with each other. Also smooths out their decision making so they stick with ideas longer and don't criss cross each other so much while re evaluating.
  
• New weapon analyzer that weights damage potential of all equipped weapons and decides the best combat range based on that.
  
• AI ships better at deciding when to boost engines.
  
• When clicking “Fight” on a station, you need to click the button a second time within 3 seconds to prevent accidental fights.
  
• On Easy and Normal difficulties the max stars for AI strike craft are 4 for larges, and 5 for mediums and smalls. Hard and Insane unchanged.
  
• Fix for case where ship parts could not reattach sometimes when they were knocked by enemy captains.
  
• Fixed issue where zombie strike craft spawned from eggs were much higher in Y than regular strike craft.

With the addition of voice acting, localization, and the completion of VR, our Early Access goals are now complete. We still have a bit of tuning and bug fixing to do, but the codebase is mostly on lockdown now in preparation for 1.0. Even seemingly simple changes sometimes cause nasty bugs, so we have to let the build settle before release.

Once 1.0 releases, we will be spending time on a Mac and Linux port right away. Then we plan to re-open the code base in response to the new player input that “hopefully” floods in.

It has been a really long road for SPAZ 2 (5 years as of September 1) but we are thrilled with the results and the support you all have given us!

Andrew (Blorf) and Richard (Narlak)

Hi All,

This version was all about completing the final deliverables for the 1.0 release. We are so close now. We have had a ton of great input over the last 14 months in Early Access, and we really appreciate you taking this journey with us!

• Professional Voice Acting.
  
• Localization to French, German, and Russian.
  
• VR motion controller support for VIVE and OCULUS

Here we go.



Hiring professional voice talent was new to us, but in the end we think that we found the perfect voices for each character. In fact, originally we were not going to professionally voice Mac, Skid or the Computer but in the end the quality of the main cast's voice acting was so high that we decided to voice everything because the difference between the professional voice acting and the text to speech was just too glaring.

We now have over 2 HOURS of spoken dialogue in the game between Elsa, Carl, Jamison, Mac, Skid and Janeframe (the Computer) It was surprising how much voice work is actually in the game, over 18000 words.

We originally tried to have the voice work done locally, but it was too short notice for the local studios, so we decided to try to to do it ourselves. We put together detailed character packages and posted on a couple big voice acting sites (Voice123 and CastingCallClub) and what do you know, we got over 300 auditions over the course of a week. We narrowed and narrowed and finally both Richard and I independently came to the exact same picks for the voices (so no arguing there, phew)

After that we interviewed each actor over Skype and answered questions, we finally had a group table read using a 5 way Skype call. It was really incredible to hear the voices of our characters come alive after 8 years of developing them.

Once the table read was done, recording started individually by each voice actor, and they delivered audio files weekly for about a month. And now we have it all compiled together and balanced and in game, ready for you to hear. We hope you love the voices as much as we do.

Note: The old text to speech voices are still in there and are individually selectable via the sound menu for nostalgia sake.



This version was also about getting the localization system ready for public consumption. We were contacted by some fans of SPAZ 2 and decided to Localize French, German, and Russian. French and German because they are fairly large sections of our European player base, and Russian was picked because of its large player base and for having an entirely different alphabet from Germanic languages.

Having fans translate the game was a great choice we think. They really understood the feel of the SPAZ universe and sometimes even suggested inside jokes from their own languages to replace our own. All in all it was a great experience and the translators were super dedicated. They translated over 30,000 words type dedicated.

There may be some translation issues or missed spots so please report any mistakes or omissions. Its a lot of words, and things will have been missed/mislabeled. The translators will want to fix them and we want them fixed! :)

Once the localization has settled, we will be releasing custom localization XML files. This will allow player localization to any language. The process we went through with the translators should have knocked off most of the translation rough edges. Long term, we would like to hook up player translations to Steam Workshop, though that probably wouldn't be before 1.0.

For official translations we are going to see how the current translations do sales wise before branching out further. Managing an official translation takes considerable time and a non trivial amount of funds. So for example if the translated versions suddenly explode in sales, it makes doing other languages more attractive. This is all new to us, so we need to see. In any case we will support custom translation by players, so if there is an interest in a particular language, a translation will always be possible.



As a final step to our VR support, we have added motion controls to SPAZ 2 VR. Richard has prepared a video linked here to explain it a bit. Even if you don't have VR, you may be able to get a bit of a sense of how SPAZ 2 feels in VR.

https://youtu.be/r8b5cgoaL9M

One motion controller is for aiming and ship functions like boosting shields, reloading, and camera controls. The other controller is for movement, switching weapons, and switching ships. It was quite a challenge to get all the SPAZ 2 functions on the few controller buttons, but we managed it by using the grip button as a sort of “shift key.”

Gameplay wise, shooting is definitely my favorite on the motion controls. Lazing targets is just cool. Flight wise there are three modes. Controller relative (point where you want the ship to go), Helmet relative (forward means go toward where you are looking), or Ship relative (pressing left turns you left) Find a mode that is most comfortable to you. Note: VR also allows you to use a regular XInput style controller instead of the motion controls. This behaves the same as on the flat screen.

This version will bring our VR support to completion aside from bugs. Please please give it a try if you can and let us know if you have problems (especially with the motion controls)

• Fixed issue where sometimes the camera could get caught flickering when toggle camera was selected right before pause.
  
• Made AI captains attack Bandit Hives longer so they try to destroy them more vs just raiding them for supplies.
  
• Fixed case where captains would raid bandit hives with bounties instead of trying to destroy them.
  
• Made local governors more likely to clear bandit hives from their territory.
  
• AI captains more likely to complete Starbase building tasks where they have to pay a portion of the cost themselves.
  
• Made the blocked port checker a little more forgiving to allow fitting parts in spots that look like they should allow parts to fit.
  
• Fixed bug where sniper cannons and mass drivers would cause a hitch in the enemy ship's movement when they hit.
  
• Fixed exploit where you could disband a starbase you own to get salavge access to the store inventory which you do not actually own.
  
• Fixed Starbases not dropping their Stockpile contents when disbanded.
  
• Fixed mouse over resource values disagreeing with Starmap values (Ceil/Round Conflict)
  
• Fixed Join faction button round off error, reporting relations too low when it is possible to join.
  
• Fixed issue where bombs on strike craft would impact the player ship when starting combat.
  
• Added Starmap Explored button to the Sandbox level setup options. This makes the starmap fully explored on start.
  
• Accessing Cheat menu easier for a variety of keyboards: (Left Alt or Right Alt or AltGr) + (F7 or 0)
  
• Starbase bounties are now checked vs the bounty taker's relation with the owner. So friends will no longer attack your bases.
  
• Bounty takers will now take into consideration their relations with the faction leader before taking on a bounty to destroy a starbase (So player friends won't attack the bases in the Player faction, even if the player does not own that base)
  
• Fixed issue where you could contextual target parts in the inventory level, causing Battle Wagon to attack them.
  
• Fixed issue where you could lock onto an ally outside of battlewagon mode, then switch to battlewagon mode and your ship would automatically fire at your ally.
  
• Fixed fighter docking issues on high speed motherships where they couldn't catch up.
  
• Increased Rez drop from zombie Starbases from a flat 200 to 400-1000 based on the size of the base.
  
• Fixed case where you could mark a part for hot swapping in the inventory level then attach it to your ship using the tractor instead, leaving the part in a weird state.
  
• Starbase threat level now properly updates when you level up.
  
• Starbase threat updates when transferred to a new owner to reflect their tech level
  
• Fixed knocked off enemy parts attached to player ship not consuming any capacitor power. In fact, it was stealing the power from the old ship.
  
• When the player rams a ship, the ship being rammed now takes it as a hostile act. Especially so if they are an ally and there are not hostile ships left in the region. Allies now react to being rammed to death for free parts after battles conclude.
  
• Fixed case where after player lost a battle and player continued instead of loading that the winning ships did not recover their strike craft and their health was not updated to the proper post battle health.
  
• Taught Motherships not to avoid Strike Craft and since they will rarely collide due to being at different Y heights. (Also taught strike craft not to avoid motherships)
  
• New AI flight system that attempts to de-clump the ships and keep ships at optimal range with each other. Also smooths out their decision making so they stick with ideas longer and don't criss cross each other so much while re evaluating.
  
• New weapon analyzer that weights damage potential of all equipped weapons and decides the best combat range based on that.
  
• AI ships better at deciding when to boost engines.
  
• When clicking “Fight” on a station, you need to click the button a second time within 3 seconds to prevent accidental fights.
  
• On Easy and Normal difficulties the max stars for AI strike craft are 4 for larges, and 5 for mediums and smalls. Hard and Insane unchanged.
  
• Fix for case where ship parts could not reattach sometimes when they were knocked by enemy captains.
  
• Fixed issue where zombie strike craft spawned from eggs were much higher in Y than regular strike craft.

With the addition of voice acting, localization, and the completion of VR, our Early Access goals are now complete. We still have a bit of tuning and bug fixing to do, but the codebase is mostly on lockdown now in preparation for 1.0. Even seemingly simple changes sometimes cause nasty bugs, so we have to let the build settle before release.

Once 1.0 releases, we will be spending time on a Mac and Linux port right away. Then we plan to re-open the code base in response to the new player input that “hopefully” floods in.

It has been a really long road for SPAZ 2 (5 years as of September 1) but we are thrilled with the results and the support you all have given us!

Andrew (Blorf) and Richard (Narlak)