Shadowrun: Hong Kong - Extended Edition - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Alec Meer)

At this year’s Develop conference in Brighton, I grabbed an hour with keynote speaker Luke Crane, Head of Games at Kickstarter, to talk about the state of play of videogames on the crowdfunding platform in 2016. Discussed: what makes a good project now, the odds of making it, ‘Kickstarter fatigue’ and the question of glory days, Kickstarter’s reaction to funded projects that are not then released, the importance of community, how the press can be unhelpful and whether or not famous names are dominating the ecosystem at the expense of smaller developers. … [visit site to read more]

Elite Dangerous - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Alice O'Connor)

Elite Dangerous: Arena [official site], the spin-off standalone of Elite’s combat arena mode, is free to try this weekend. More than that, if you get it now it’s yours forever.

… [visit site to read more]

Elite Dangerous - BrettC Frontier
Greetings Commanders, we have a small update coming for PC as well as the Xbox One players. Specifically to address a number of stability issues including some additional fixes.

Patch notes

Stability Fixes
  • Fixes for crashes when Hyperspace jumping
  • Fix for crash when entering Supercruise from a Conflict Zone
  • (Xbox) Fix for title entering unresponsive state after disconnecting the WAN Network cable
  • (Xbox) Fix for title crash from launch

General Fixes
  • (Xbox) Fix for loss of Horizons access after launching from Engineer Base
  • Fix for Docking Computer and NPC’s drifting off target landing pad
  • Various text updates
Elite Dangerous - BrettC_Frontier
Greetings Commanders, we have a small update coming for PC as well as the Xbox One players. Specifically to address a number of stability issues including some additional fixes.

Patch notes

Stability Fixes
  • Fixes for crashes when Hyperspace jumping
  • Fix for crash when entering Supercruise from a Conflict Zone
  • (Xbox) Fix for title entering unresponsive state after disconnecting the WAN Network cable
  • (Xbox) Fix for title crash from launch

General Fixes
  • (Xbox) Fix for loss of Horizons access after launching from Engineer Base
  • Fix for Docking Computer and NPC’s drifting off target landing pad
  • Various text updates
Elite Dangerous - BrettC Frontier
As seen from our official forums.


Greetings Commanders,

You may well have seen our recent posts after The Engineers (2.1) which highlight some of the feedback that we’ve taken on board and changes we’ve made based on that feedback. You’ll have noticed that we’ve made a number of server and point updates including a host of immediate bug fixes and balances to NPC behaviour as well as allowing you to select the experimental modification type from Engineers, reducing the rare allocations to make the unlocking of Engineers easier and local news article at Engineers bases to give more information on where to find specific materials.

However, that’s not all, as ever we are working hard to ensure that player feedback is at the heart of Elite Dangerous and we just wanted to share with you a few more changes that we are planning for our next major point update. We are aiming for the end of July/Early August (there may be a few minor point updates and stability fixes before then).

In order to continue to address the feedback raised regarding both the grind and RNG nature of The Engineers we’re going to making the following changes;

  • We will be adjusting the way the surface scanner works to allow you to see what materials are available from any given planet. This should make locating materials far easier.
  • In addition we are making a number of changes to the lowest level blueprints. This includes improving the positive effects of low level upgrade results as well as reducing the cost and simplifying the materials needed.
  • We’re also increasing the number of units you get for each instance of a material you find. This means instead of getting one unit of a material, you will get multiple units of that material. This will allow you to increase the number of attempts at each Engineer.
  • We’ll be increasing the number of materials spawned when surface mining. Again, to make the process easier and the materials easier to gather.
  • The likelihood of finding rare materials in these instances will also be increased, meaning it will be easier to use higher level blueprints.
  • And we will be reviewing the balance and locations of non-planet salvage and reviewing the possible USS locations for each material

Not to mention the changes that we’ve made in the recent point update. To be able to select your weapon upgrade and give you control over what module you leave with, reducing the requirements to unlock certain Engineers and increasing the visibility of where materials can be sourced, should help to make the Engineers more accessible and more rewarding for players venturing down to the planet surface in search of a new upgrade.

As always the development team will continue to read and review your feedback to allow us to make the best possible experience for the community.

Thank you for your continued patience and support.
Elite Dangerous - BrettC_Frontier
As seen from our official forums.


Greetings Commanders,

You may well have seen our recent posts after The Engineers (2.1) which highlight some of the feedback that we’ve taken on board and changes we’ve made based on that feedback. You’ll have noticed that we’ve made a number of server and point updates including a host of immediate bug fixes and balances to NPC behaviour as well as allowing you to select the experimental modification type from Engineers, reducing the rare allocations to make the unlocking of Engineers easier and local news article at Engineers bases to give more information on where to find specific materials.

However, that’s not all, as ever we are working hard to ensure that player feedback is at the heart of Elite Dangerous and we just wanted to share with you a few more changes that we are planning for our next major point update. We are aiming for the end of July/Early August (there may be a few minor point updates and stability fixes before then).

In order to continue to address the feedback raised regarding both the grind and RNG nature of The Engineers we’re going to making the following changes;

  • We will be adjusting the way the surface scanner works to allow you to see what materials are available from any given planet. This should make locating materials far easier.
  • In addition we are making a number of changes to the lowest level blueprints. This includes improving the positive effects of low level upgrade results as well as reducing the cost and simplifying the materials needed.
  • We’re also increasing the number of units you get for each instance of a material you find. This means instead of getting one unit of a material, you will get multiple units of that material. This will allow you to increase the number of attempts at each Engineer.
  • We’ll be increasing the number of materials spawned when surface mining. Again, to make the process easier and the materials easier to gather.
  • The likelihood of finding rare materials in these instances will also be increased, meaning it will be easier to use higher level blueprints.
  • And we will be reviewing the balance and locations of non-planet salvage and reviewing the possible USS locations for each material

Not to mention the changes that we’ve made in the recent point update. To be able to select your weapon upgrade and give you control over what module you leave with, reducing the requirements to unlock certain Engineers and increasing the visibility of where materials can be sourced, should help to make the Engineers more accessible and more rewarding for players venturing down to the planet surface in search of a new upgrade.

As always the development team will continue to read and review your feedback to allow us to make the best possible experience for the community.

Thank you for your continued patience and support.
Elite Dangerous - BrettC Frontier
Hi everyone,

update 2.1.03 will be released this morning for all platforms. Servers will be turned off at 10 am BST, and should be live again within 2 hours. The update contains the following changes listed below.

------------------

Stability Fixes

- Fixes a crash in the case of a ship being killed or fleeing while waiting for a response to a docking request
- Fix proxy kinematic rig crash
- Don't crash on capital ship 'death'
- Fix for server crash from uncertain CQC state
- Fix a server crash when checking commodity lists
- Fix a server crash when checking a players death
- Fix a crash if we receive damage from a disconnected player in CQC
- Fix a crash if you disconnect while shooting someone while in CQC
- Fix crash when disconnecting while taking damage in CQC
- Applied fix made sure that user has their input focus on a proper component when entering inventory shop
- Fix a crash when handing in missions when trying to find superpower info
- Don't assume locking of vertex buffers will succeed - prevents crash in terrain generation
- Tackle some soft locks caused by specific POIs
- Fixed softlock when quickly selecting refuel/repair/restock after opening station services
- Fix softlock when signing out as we enter Hyperspace
- Fix for softlock when loading at settlements
- Fix a softlock when approaching or loading in an Engineer's base
- Fix server disconnect on "Pomeche 2 C"
- Xbox One: Game enters a semi unresponsive state when changing the Yaw Axis Preset from within the Controls Options fixed
- Xbox One: Don't refresh Inventory when unconstraining. We don't want the client and server state to get out of sync so we now only check for Inventory once, at sign-in

General Fixes/Tweaks

- Xbox One: Support for localised languages (French, German, Spanish, and Russian)
- Added Saitek x56 control preset
- Fix missing Hawking Depot - now called Hawking Station
- Use loose rather than strict checks when testing if a ship is valid for recovering from storage, this means that people who've stored ships with mass over their engine limit will be able to recover those ships again. But will still be prompted to fix the problem when in outfitting
- Pirated cargo not appearing in hold when stealing from players fixed
- Re-fix making Independent powers being hostile to each other when deciding which actions to allow when being opposed
- Added guards against receiving duplicate inbox messages, which could cause the inbox gui to become unresponsive
- Fix not being able to dock at some stations in the Arbuda system
- Fixed viewing the list of CG's, and the progress preview bar being wrong
- If an interdiction takes you into orbital cruise, then cancel the interdiction as otherwise you will end up inside the planet
- When dropping out after an interdiction make sure we don't drop out too close to a planet. If we do drop out too close then move the drop point away
- Extra logging for some machine disconnection issues
- Stop sending Federation and Empire rankup inbox messages when eligible for the mission for the next rank
- No longer able to bind 'Reset Mouse' to the same buttons as UI controls
- Audio: For Wwise prior to 2015.1.7 and Windows 10+ only use XAudio2 if the 2.7 DLL is there
- Audio: Make sure we are relatively close to a hostile before triggering combat music
- Audio: Don't load chatter soundbanks or planet port voice soundbanks when they aren't needed
- Audio: Fix for orbital cruise sounds happening after hyperspace jumps
- Xbox One: Fixed excessive XMA compression on title ident
- Xbox One: The tabs under Friends and Private Groups do not update when the user tries to view member in a group fixed
- Xbox One: Fixing Nasty sounding XMA compression artifacts on some music cues
- Mouse cursor stuck on side of screen when in main menu fixed
- Store relationship values on mission avatars so they don't change into their cool pirate jackets anymore :(
- Fixed missing Cyrillic font glyphs on special effect panel
- Latest batch of translated text
- Various text fixes

Engineers

- Ensure we have up-to-date data when opening the workshop so that we correctly show 'alternative' progress
- Players can now spend favours (reputation levels) to control experimental effects on blueprints
- Filter option is not always reset when navigating to the recipe selection panel fixed
- Back button working on pinned and help popups

Missions

- Permit Missions should now give a permit
- Supply to demand overrides should take into account permit access
- Fixed mission board reputation bars being wrong
- All missions now give a positive state effect with the mission giver for completion, that is relative to the cargo/mission target
- Fix reputation values and spawning levels in planetary rescue
- Make delivery missions fail upon death
- Fix for Settlement not spawning mission required skimmers
- Some mission generation optimisations
- Nav Beacon Wrinkle message will be sent every time you supercruise away from the contact's system fixed
- If we don't have space for all the reward materials, only add what we can
- Use a more reliable way of finding commander ids so that mission update requests aren't handed invalid commander ids
- Added a contract element into the initial mission progression that checks the player's cargo hold - This prevents the player from taking missions if they don't have enough cargo in their hold when the reward has cargo in it
- Added Contract Element to all 'hand-in' panels to indicate when the player does not have enough cargo space for the cargo rewards and therefore cannot hand in the mission
- Allow people who do not have a matching mission to drop cargo for said missions through in/voluntary means
- Removed the destination station element from the transaction panels that don't need them, so you should no longer see random destination logos on the left hand panel
- Changed the Massacre legal variants to set a timer when an enemy is killed - ensures that the race wrinkle can spawn
- Read relationship from avatar contact string. Prevents the issue where you're standing may change as you complete a mission to be greeted by a slightly different avatar from the original mission giver
- Planetary Disable BLOPS missions are now marked as Horizons only
- Mark a mission as planetary if any of its contract element results are Available Planetary, not just if the end result is Available Planetary (means that unavailable missions can have the planetary icon)
- Micro resource space deficiency should be called out in the rewards section not additional
- Added Can Land AtS tation Checks to all Alternative offer inbox messages, preventing the player from talking Alternatives that require Horizons content
- Exclude minor factions from selection as mission targets if they are engineers and/or hidden
- Reduced the number of community goal web requests sent from the client by caching data and only fetching new data when viewing the goals on the mission board
- Changed the ship being used in the rescue mission maints from a hauler to a type 6 - they now have the correct amount of cargo for the mission
- Changed the effects of the states for the piracy, planetary and mining missions to be a "positive" effect when the player successfully completes the mission - on these templates it was backwards
- Allow missions & Community Goals to be completed at stations that have mission generation temporarily disabled

NPCs

- When determining the rank of NPC ships, use the player's combat rank, rather than their highest PF rank, although add 1 rank if their trade or exploration rank is higher than their combat rank
- Updated the Archetypes of the NPCs in the USS cargo drop missions - they are now Ambush Pirate and should attack the player on entry
- Fixed AI rotation damping to work properly across the AI skill range
- alter the changes in allowed interdiction ranks based on security, so that the biggest rank disparities are reserved for very low security and anarchy systems
- Reduced the number of engineer mods on AI ships substantially, now only Deadly & Elite rank ships are guaranteed to have mods and any below Master are guaranteed to have none
- Fix for Large AI ships ramming large player ships
- Slightly reduced the ranks below an AI that they can interdict players, this will tighten up the difficulty a bit
- Add state to Powers Assassin and Powers Security ships to allow them to threaten the player before attacking
- Reduced the percentage interdiction chance of power play ships by 10%, and altered the ship type chances and combat ranks to be more mid range, dropping a lot of the top range down
- Balance mission generated NPCs to be lower ranked (for the most part)

POIs/USSs/Settlements

- Address some long initialisation times for certain POIs
- Fix for seed spikes not spawning meta-alloys
- Changed trigger volumes of trespass zones to be much smaller to prevent issues
- SRV gets stuck on Baker's Prospect ramp fixed
- Doubled the height of the foundation wall of the large biome, so that it can be bedded into more undulating landscapes without the terrain intersecting through the centre
- No audio acknowledgement that something has been received after scanning a nav beacon fixed
- For capital ships in fixed scenarios (e.g. the one at Sol, but not capital ships that turn up for combat zones) make their name choice pseudo-random based on UniversalAddress so that it will always be the same
- Materials from nodes floating high into the air when in wing fixed
- Attenuation changes for POIs
- Fix for silent security door on settlements
- Fix a server error when scanning certain large industrial settlements

Weapons

- Huge burst lasers added
- Adjust tracking rates for turreted weapons. Large+ are unchanged, medium are slightly faster, small are a lot faster
- Improvements to turret tracking: When evaluating confusion the turret will now take into account the apparently linear acceleration of the target actually caused by angular acceleration of the firing vehicle. Overall this should make turrets confused less of the time, and emphasises the skill element a bit more - the better you match your targets acceleration to keep them stationary in view, the better your turrets will track
- Correct the Target Entity checks when weapons hit their target to correctly account for subtargeting being used with Target-Only mode turrets, these will now cause hostility correctly when hitting the ship whose module you've targeted, but will correctly disregard hostility when stray shots clip other ships as before
- Advanced Plasma Accelerater now has ammo when installed
- Changes to impulse attacks (force shell an impulse mine), aiming to prevent stacking from being extremely unpleasant (and sickness inducing in VR) while not making single guns ineffective:
-- Reduce impulse generated by force shell on larger cannons, smaller ones are increased slightly
-- Torque generated by impulse attacks is clamped to a multiple of the ships mass, so large weapons cannot induce unrecoverable spins in small ships
-- Diminishing returns now applies to impulse attacks within a short space of time. This resistance will drain to zero after at most 5 seconds, but within that window the more a ship is pushed around the more it becomes resistant to it

- Balance pass for Incendiary ammo multicannons, they're a bit too good ;). They now also come with the downsides of a 10% reduction in fire rate, and generate significantly more heat than a normal multicannon (though still less than an equivalent pulse). This change will retroactively affect existing items
- Dispersal field should no longer affect (some) fixed weapons, or turrets set to forward fire
- Balancing for heat attack weapons (Retributor, Thermal Shock and a few others), overall intention is to keep single weapons having a purpose, while reducing the power of heavy stacking:
-- Having an active shield now statically prevents 25% of the heat from getting through
-- Adjusted the diminishing returns curve, getting someone to 100% is easier, getting them past 100% is harder, getting them into hull damage is MUCH harder, and the final cap is now 220% rather than 300%

- Remove override that was giving C4 pulse/burst lasers the incorrect audio event name
- Ensure that beam highlight textures are kept alive as long as they are needed
- Main game power distributors were too good on eng/sys across the board and have been brought back to 2.0 levels
- Prevent ammo from going over the normal maximum when modifications have reduced the clip size, which also caused absurd costs to show in restock menu
- Audio: adjusted the number of audio objects in the audio impact system. A Partial fix for messy impact audio when player is hitting target with multiple beam weapons at once
- Updated the missile sound

Outfitting

- Power distributor recharge rate cropped in outfitting fixed
- Outfitting shop GUI data can persist between core modules fixed
- Sidewinder spoilers have the wrong icons fixed

Ships

- All shields now regenerate at double rate when in supercruise
- Fixed landing collision issues with Diamondback Scout
- Missing engine VFX on the Anaconda
- Both Asp Explorer and Scout Paint job cameras are no longer position behind the roof lights
- Some flight controller volume inconsistencies fixed
- Clashing "Incoming Message" and "Incoming Mission Critical Message" fixed
- Imperial Courier drive flares now working as intended again
- Added bullet fly by sounds
- Fixed some weird panning behaviour on flight assist on/off mechanical sounds by whacking up the spread on it
- Xbox One: Added landing gear deployed/stowed rumble for ships that had it missing

SRV

- Fixed offset hitcheck on SRV

CQC

- CQC power distributors now have their 2.0 values back, and weapon distributor is no longer strictly the best
- Fix a lost flag on a few PG weapons that turned all the beam lasers into pulses, and would have un-intentionally increased DPS by 50% because the damage per second value would be interpretted as damage per shot and fired every 0.66 seconds
- Wing manager should now remove player that leave the game from their teams wing, they should also no longer assert about having a wing member in a weird state
- The message the team gets about players leaving teams should now work as intended

Stations/Ports

- Small volume boost on flight controllers and radio chatter
- Xbox One: Fix for rumble happening on "other" landing pads
- Xbox One: Fixed out of sync rumble on small pads animations

Galaxy Map

- Galaxy map now properly opens from transaction tab while in headlook
- Bookmarked systems show the bookmark marker even if it has other active markers
- Bookmarks: Pressing left (pad/joystick) will close the bookmark dropdown menu fixed
- Gal map / powerplay : Displaying "radius profit" instead of "profit" in the popup to avoid confusion about values displayed
- Bookmarks: Make sure the send modification button (delete/save) can't spam request the server


Render

- Make the render feature system more robust against GraphicsConfig.xml being broken
- Increased distance for tiling rates on rocky and metal worlds to improve the distance you can see surface details from the materials. Also brightened the surfaces slightly
- Sort the stars based on the new lighting curve - addresses some lighting issues in systems with black holes
- Fix for cases where stellar background textures could fail to render correctly
- Fix ring detail texture resolution so that it isn't synced to main ring texture size
- Smaller authored ring textures as we don't need 4096 x 128 for the coarse colour/spacing information
- Fix for NaNs showing up in PlanetRingFog shader


VR

- Only control input focus through HMDs if they are rendering (don't affect regular mono modes)
- Fix for the VR camera flicker in supercruise transitions
Elite Dangerous - BrettC_Frontier
Hi everyone,

update 2.1.03 will be released this morning for all platforms. Servers will be turned off at 10 am BST, and should be live again within 2 hours. The update contains the following changes listed below.

------------------

Stability Fixes

- Fixes a crash in the case of a ship being killed or fleeing while waiting for a response to a docking request
- Fix proxy kinematic rig crash
- Don't crash on capital ship 'death'
- Fix for server crash from uncertain CQC state
- Fix a server crash when checking commodity lists
- Fix a server crash when checking a players death
- Fix a crash if we receive damage from a disconnected player in CQC
- Fix a crash if you disconnect while shooting someone while in CQC
- Fix crash when disconnecting while taking damage in CQC
- Applied fix made sure that user has their input focus on a proper component when entering inventory shop
- Fix a crash when handing in missions when trying to find superpower info
- Don't assume locking of vertex buffers will succeed - prevents crash in terrain generation
- Tackle some soft locks caused by specific POIs
- Fixed softlock when quickly selecting refuel/repair/restock after opening station services
- Fix softlock when signing out as we enter Hyperspace
- Fix for softlock when loading at settlements
- Fix a softlock when approaching or loading in an Engineer's base
- Fix server disconnect on "Pomeche 2 C"
- Xbox One: Game enters a semi unresponsive state when changing the Yaw Axis Preset from within the Controls Options fixed
- Xbox One: Don't refresh Inventory when unconstraining. We don't want the client and server state to get out of sync so we now only check for Inventory once, at sign-in

General Fixes/Tweaks

- Xbox One: Support for localised languages (French, German, Spanish, and Russian)
- Added Saitek x56 control preset
- Fix missing Hawking Depot - now called Hawking Station
- Use loose rather than strict checks when testing if a ship is valid for recovering from storage, this means that people who've stored ships with mass over their engine limit will be able to recover those ships again. But will still be prompted to fix the problem when in outfitting
- Pirated cargo not appearing in hold when stealing from players fixed
- Re-fix making Independent powers being hostile to each other when deciding which actions to allow when being opposed
- Added guards against receiving duplicate inbox messages, which could cause the inbox gui to become unresponsive
- Fix not being able to dock at some stations in the Arbuda system
- Fixed viewing the list of CG's, and the progress preview bar being wrong
- If an interdiction takes you into orbital cruise, then cancel the interdiction as otherwise you will end up inside the planet
- When dropping out after an interdiction make sure we don't drop out too close to a planet. If we do drop out too close then move the drop point away
- Extra logging for some machine disconnection issues
- Stop sending Federation and Empire rankup inbox messages when eligible for the mission for the next rank
- No longer able to bind 'Reset Mouse' to the same buttons as UI controls
- Audio: For Wwise prior to 2015.1.7 and Windows 10+ only use XAudio2 if the 2.7 DLL is there
- Audio: Make sure we are relatively close to a hostile before triggering combat music
- Audio: Don't load chatter soundbanks or planet port voice soundbanks when they aren't needed
- Audio: Fix for orbital cruise sounds happening after hyperspace jumps
- Xbox One: Fixed excessive XMA compression on title ident
- Xbox One: The tabs under Friends and Private Groups do not update when the user tries to view member in a group fixed
- Xbox One: Fixing Nasty sounding XMA compression artifacts on some music cues
- Mouse cursor stuck on side of screen when in main menu fixed
- Store relationship values on mission avatars so they don't change into their cool pirate jackets anymore :(
- Fixed missing Cyrillic font glyphs on special effect panel
- Latest batch of translated text
- Various text fixes

Engineers

- Ensure we have up-to-date data when opening the workshop so that we correctly show 'alternative' progress
- Players can now spend favours (reputation levels) to control experimental effects on blueprints
- Filter option is not always reset when navigating to the recipe selection panel fixed
- Back button working on pinned and help popups

Missions

- Permit Missions should now give a permit
- Supply to demand overrides should take into account permit access
- Fixed mission board reputation bars being wrong
- All missions now give a positive state effect with the mission giver for completion, that is relative to the cargo/mission target
- Fix reputation values and spawning levels in planetary rescue
- Make delivery missions fail upon death
- Fix for Settlement not spawning mission required skimmers
- Some mission generation optimisations
- Nav Beacon Wrinkle message will be sent every time you supercruise away from the contact's system fixed
- If we don't have space for all the reward materials, only add what we can
- Use a more reliable way of finding commander ids so that mission update requests aren't handed invalid commander ids
- Added a contract element into the initial mission progression that checks the player's cargo hold - This prevents the player from taking missions if they don't have enough cargo in their hold when the reward has cargo in it
- Added Contract Element to all 'hand-in' panels to indicate when the player does not have enough cargo space for the cargo rewards and therefore cannot hand in the mission
- Allow people who do not have a matching mission to drop cargo for said missions through in/voluntary means
- Removed the destination station element from the transaction panels that don't need them, so you should no longer see random destination logos on the left hand panel
- Changed the Massacre legal variants to set a timer when an enemy is killed - ensures that the race wrinkle can spawn
- Read relationship from avatar contact string. Prevents the issue where you're standing may change as you complete a mission to be greeted by a slightly different avatar from the original mission giver
- Planetary Disable BLOPS missions are now marked as Horizons only
- Mark a mission as planetary if any of its contract element results are Available Planetary, not just if the end result is Available Planetary (means that unavailable missions can have the planetary icon)
- Micro resource space deficiency should be called out in the rewards section not additional
- Added Can Land AtS tation Checks to all Alternative offer inbox messages, preventing the player from talking Alternatives that require Horizons content
- Exclude minor factions from selection as mission targets if they are engineers and/or hidden
- Reduced the number of community goal web requests sent from the client by caching data and only fetching new data when viewing the goals on the mission board
- Changed the ship being used in the rescue mission maints from a hauler to a type 6 - they now have the correct amount of cargo for the mission
- Changed the effects of the states for the piracy, planetary and mining missions to be a "positive" effect when the player successfully completes the mission - on these templates it was backwards
- Allow missions & Community Goals to be completed at stations that have mission generation temporarily disabled

NPCs

- When determining the rank of NPC ships, use the player's combat rank, rather than their highest PF rank, although add 1 rank if their trade or exploration rank is higher than their combat rank
- Updated the Archetypes of the NPCs in the USS cargo drop missions - they are now Ambush Pirate and should attack the player on entry
- Fixed AI rotation damping to work properly across the AI skill range
- alter the changes in allowed interdiction ranks based on security, so that the biggest rank disparities are reserved for very low security and anarchy systems
- Reduced the number of engineer mods on AI ships substantially, now only Deadly & Elite rank ships are guaranteed to have mods and any below Master are guaranteed to have none
- Fix for Large AI ships ramming large player ships
- Slightly reduced the ranks below an AI that they can interdict players, this will tighten up the difficulty a bit
- Add state to Powers Assassin and Powers Security ships to allow them to threaten the player before attacking
- Reduced the percentage interdiction chance of power play ships by 10%, and altered the ship type chances and combat ranks to be more mid range, dropping a lot of the top range down
- Balance mission generated NPCs to be lower ranked (for the most part)

POIs/USSs/Settlements

- Address some long initialisation times for certain POIs
- Fix for seed spikes not spawning meta-alloys
- Changed trigger volumes of trespass zones to be much smaller to prevent issues
- SRV gets stuck on Baker's Prospect ramp fixed
- Doubled the height of the foundation wall of the large biome, so that it can be bedded into more undulating landscapes without the terrain intersecting through the centre
- No audio acknowledgement that something has been received after scanning a nav beacon fixed
- For capital ships in fixed scenarios (e.g. the one at Sol, but not capital ships that turn up for combat zones) make their name choice pseudo-random based on UniversalAddress so that it will always be the same
- Materials from nodes floating high into the air when in wing fixed
- Attenuation changes for POIs
- Fix for silent security door on settlements
- Fix a server error when scanning certain large industrial settlements

Weapons

- Huge burst lasers added
- Adjust tracking rates for turreted weapons. Large+ are unchanged, medium are slightly faster, small are a lot faster
- Improvements to turret tracking: When evaluating confusion the turret will now take into account the apparently linear acceleration of the target actually caused by angular acceleration of the firing vehicle. Overall this should make turrets confused less of the time, and emphasises the skill element a bit more - the better you match your targets acceleration to keep them stationary in view, the better your turrets will track
- Correct the Target Entity checks when weapons hit their target to correctly account for subtargeting being used with Target-Only mode turrets, these will now cause hostility correctly when hitting the ship whose module you've targeted, but will correctly disregard hostility when stray shots clip other ships as before
- Advanced Plasma Accelerater now has ammo when installed
- Changes to impulse attacks (force shell an impulse mine), aiming to prevent stacking from being extremely unpleasant (and sickness inducing in VR) while not making single guns ineffective:
-- Reduce impulse generated by force shell on larger cannons, smaller ones are increased slightly
-- Torque generated by impulse attacks is clamped to a multiple of the ships mass, so large weapons cannot induce unrecoverable spins in small ships
-- Diminishing returns now applies to impulse attacks within a short space of time. This resistance will drain to zero after at most 5 seconds, but within that window the more a ship is pushed around the more it becomes resistant to it

- Balance pass for Incendiary ammo multicannons, they're a bit too good ;). They now also come with the downsides of a 10% reduction in fire rate, and generate significantly more heat than a normal multicannon (though still less than an equivalent pulse). This change will retroactively affect existing items
- Dispersal field should no longer affect (some) fixed weapons, or turrets set to forward fire
- Balancing for heat attack weapons (Retributor, Thermal Shock and a few others), overall intention is to keep single weapons having a purpose, while reducing the power of heavy stacking:
-- Having an active shield now statically prevents 25% of the heat from getting through
-- Adjusted the diminishing returns curve, getting someone to 100% is easier, getting them past 100% is harder, getting them into hull damage is MUCH harder, and the final cap is now 220% rather than 300%

- Remove override that was giving C4 pulse/burst lasers the incorrect audio event name
- Ensure that beam highlight textures are kept alive as long as they are needed
- Main game power distributors were too good on eng/sys across the board and have been brought back to 2.0 levels
- Prevent ammo from going over the normal maximum when modifications have reduced the clip size, which also caused absurd costs to show in restock menu
- Audio: adjusted the number of audio objects in the audio impact system. A Partial fix for messy impact audio when player is hitting target with multiple beam weapons at once
- Updated the missile sound

Outfitting

- Power distributor recharge rate cropped in outfitting fixed
- Outfitting shop GUI data can persist between core modules fixed
- Sidewinder spoilers have the wrong icons fixed

Ships

- All shields now regenerate at double rate when in supercruise
- Fixed landing collision issues with Diamondback Scout
- Missing engine VFX on the Anaconda
- Both Asp Explorer and Scout Paint job cameras are no longer position behind the roof lights
- Some flight controller volume inconsistencies fixed
- Clashing "Incoming Message" and "Incoming Mission Critical Message" fixed
- Imperial Courier drive flares now working as intended again
- Added bullet fly by sounds
- Fixed some weird panning behaviour on flight assist on/off mechanical sounds by whacking up the spread on it
- Xbox One: Added landing gear deployed/stowed rumble for ships that had it missing

SRV

- Fixed offset hitcheck on SRV

CQC

- CQC power distributors now have their 2.0 values back, and weapon distributor is no longer strictly the best
- Fix a lost flag on a few PG weapons that turned all the beam lasers into pulses, and would have un-intentionally increased DPS by 50% because the damage per second value would be interpretted as damage per shot and fired every 0.66 seconds
- Wing manager should now remove player that leave the game from their teams wing, they should also no longer assert about having a wing member in a weird state
- The message the team gets about players leaving teams should now work as intended

Stations/Ports

- Small volume boost on flight controllers and radio chatter
- Xbox One: Fix for rumble happening on "other" landing pads
- Xbox One: Fixed out of sync rumble on small pads animations

Galaxy Map

- Galaxy map now properly opens from transaction tab while in headlook
- Bookmarked systems show the bookmark marker even if it has other active markers
- Bookmarks: Pressing left (pad/joystick) will close the bookmark dropdown menu fixed
- Gal map / powerplay : Displaying "radius profit" instead of "profit" in the popup to avoid confusion about values displayed
- Bookmarks: Make sure the send modification button (delete/save) can't spam request the server


Render

- Make the render feature system more robust against GraphicsConfig.xml being broken
- Increased distance for tiling rates on rocky and metal worlds to improve the distance you can see surface details from the materials. Also brightened the surfaces slightly
- Sort the stars based on the new lighting curve - addresses some lighting issues in systems with black holes
- Fix for cases where stellar background textures could fail to render correctly
- Fix ring detail texture resolution so that it isn't synced to main ring texture size
- Smaller authored ring textures as we don't need 4096 x 128 for the coarse colour/spacing information
- Fix for NaNs showing up in PlanetRingFog shader


VR

- Only control input focus through HMDs if they are rendering (don't affect regular mono modes)
- Fix for the VR camera flicker in supercruise transitions
Elite Dangerous - BrettC Frontier
Hi everyone,

Just wanted to share a quick update with you as we go live with the 2.1.03 update. You can see the full list of changes on the forum post here, but we wanted to point out a few tweaks and updates that we made in order to further improve your experience with the NPC AI. We also wanted to share a few AI changes that we have planned for a future update, too.


For 2.1.03 we fixed a bug where AI were using too tight a turning circle at low levels, we reduced ranks of Powerplay interdictors, lowering the chance of powerplay ships choosing to interdict you by 25%. The interdiction rank range has been reduced by one both above and below the player. It is also now based on your combat rating. We’ve made a change that ensures there will be a pause before AI attacks you after you’ve been interdicted… previously some Commanders would be immediately bombarded as soon as they’re pulled from supercruise.

We have a lot of AI changes planned for upcoming updates too, such as stopping the bottom three levels of AI from boosting (which was an unintended bug), we are looking at stopping AI from targeting sub-modules and we’re considering further reductions on the interdiction rank ranges detailed above.

In a previous update we fixed the AI bug that would create super modules, we stopped the bug that allowed AI aligned powers from attacking you, we reduced the ranks of AI spawning based on accepted missions, and we reduced the ranks of AI in ambient traffic.

The development team are dedicated to making the NPC AI experience as fun as possible, and the right level of challenging, and will continue to work hard on finding the correct balance.
Elite Dangerous - BrettC_Frontier
Hi everyone,

Just wanted to share a quick update with you as we go live with the 2.1.03 update. You can see the full list of changes on the forum post here, but we wanted to point out a few tweaks and updates that we made in order to further improve your experience with the NPC AI. We also wanted to share a few AI changes that we have planned for a future update, too.


For 2.1.03 we fixed a bug where AI were using too tight a turning circle at low levels, we reduced ranks of Powerplay interdictors, lowering the chance of powerplay ships choosing to interdict you by 25%. The interdiction rank range has been reduced by one both above and below the player. It is also now based on your combat rating. We’ve made a change that ensures there will be a pause before AI attacks you after you’ve been interdicted… previously some Commanders would be immediately bombarded as soon as they’re pulled from supercruise.

We have a lot of AI changes planned for upcoming updates too, such as stopping the bottom three levels of AI from boosting (which was an unintended bug), we are looking at stopping AI from targeting sub-modules and we’re considering further reductions on the interdiction rank ranges detailed above.

In a previous update we fixed the AI bug that would create super modules, we stopped the bug that allowed AI aligned powers from attacking you, we reduced the ranks of AI spawning based on accepted missions, and we reduced the ranks of AI in ambient traffic.

The development team are dedicated to making the NPC AI experience as fun as possible, and the right level of challenging, and will continue to work hard on finding the correct balance.
...