Jun 21, 2023

Space Impossible - rexspaceman

Space Impossible BETA 12 has landed. It now has Solar System Problems, a sort of grouped shared missions, that players can engage in.

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You can discuss BETA 12 and let us know your thoughts on Discord or as usual on the Steam Discussion Topic

Patch Notes

Star System Problems

Star systems can now be found with problems to solve, typically these consist of multiple steps, and work just as well in single player as they do in multiplayer. Rewards are given at the completion of each step. The steps can require any number of different activities and interactions, ranging from tracking and hailing, towing, crew pick up and delivery and plain old blowing things up. Some problems are faction specific, while others are available to most/all factions, but may be more difficult depending on the player's faction standing. Completion of the Problem often brings a period of peace, with better pricing and the possibility of unique traders.

With the addition of Problems, the old Missions are going away. We felt they shared too similar a space, and Missions were just overall more boring.

Thousands More Colors

Additionally, we have overhauled tile colors. You can now pick from approximately 65,000 colors. Very dark, near black, colors are excluded because we think it's kind of lame to make an all black spaceship in a very black game. Blinking or light emitting choices still exist, and now can be placed with a specific tile.

Improvements a Plenty

AI got some significant work done. Better behavior depending on their role, better movement handling and more.

Finally there is a whole bunch of new optimizations. We are always striving for good or great performance in the game and have taken a look at a number of optimizations ranging from object creation to additional networking. We have reduced or totally removed garbage creation in some key areas.

Details

NOTE: Changes marked with 📡 were inspired by feedback or bugs found by the community!

Additions

Added System Problems
Added temporary enhancements. These are enhancements that have a duration and when the duration expires, the effect will be lost. These are tied to the specific vessel, not a player or component.
Added a number of new components and tile types to support the new System Problems, many of these can be captured by a careful player should they choose
Added outdated tractor as the most baseline "free" tractor component for some problems
Added new technical feature, "glob on" that allows the merging of two distinct objects into one, like a pile of space puke tiles attached to a starship's hull
Added item spawn effect for items spawning in space, passenger spawning will have a distinct effect
Added the ability for the game to alter regions on the fly (instead of replacing them). This technical capability opens up a large number of gameplay possibilities and is heavily utilized in System Problems
Added new fleet ai type that will prioritize flying towards the regions edge before warping
Added ability for specific tile types to have physics properties. For example the icy tiles being more slippery and will behave differently when colliding with other objects.
Added custom druminence trader text
Added a background to some UI elements to improve readability
📡Added click to move while at warp in star system
Added new system information display, this includes System Problem information
Added faction standing color to many places where faction is displayed, like tooltips and star system name labels
Added AI targeting score to differentiate whether the AI is trader or not. Traders will only attack those who have attacked them directly as opposed to attacking anyone based on faction standing.
Added warp spoolup and spooldown parameters to engines and their tooltips. A vessel's spoolup and spooldown times are an average of all engines instead of a fixed time.
Added tile loot multiplier as an enhancement property
Added price modifier as an enhancement property
Added hangar mass modifier as an enhancement property. This alters the mass of an object in any hangar
Added component recovery chance as an enhancement property.
Scrappers can now give some benefits when salvaging. Talk to them and find out more.
Added ability for components to have ambient sounds. Reactors and select bridges have them so far.
Added camera zoom audio fading. Some sounds will fade out (or in) depending on how zoomed your camera is.
Added more randomization for sounds that have variance
Added vectoring thrust information to engine tooltips. Vectoring thrust is all the thrust the engine can do beyond the normal orientation thrust. This includes engine's ability to strafe and rotate.
Added detailed mass breakdown to mass tooltip in inventory and construction screens
Added several new sorting options during construction
Added "/addenhancement" and "/removeenhancement" commands
Added the /addtag and /removetag commands for object tags
Added ability for command selectors to have a count limitor (e.g. /remove @a[ai=true,limit=2] would always remove first two oldest objects vs /remove @r[ai=true,limit=2] two random objects)
Added "visited" selector for region commands (e.g. /removeregion @a[visited=true])
Added "tilecount" selector for commands (e.g. /remove @a[tilecount=>10], includes =>, =< =, =min:max)
Added "componentcount" (enginecount, bridgecount etc) selector for commands

Changes

CHANGE: Changed the tile color system to allow far more color choices and remove the hardcoded tile color data types
CHANGE: Glow is no longer a tile color choice, but is now a tile type. Upside is you can paint that tile any of the available tile colors for thousands of glowy choices. This also improves performance with the internal workings of how tile colors were working and shifts full responsibility to the shaders and graphics cards.
CHANGE: Separated system price mod between buying and selling
CHANGE: Modified star system map so child clustering is less likely to happen
CHANGE: Star system map is now approximately 5% more zoomed in
CHANGE: AI can now "give up" with several outcomes including surrender, fleeing and suicidal ramming
CHANGE: Turret AI has been improved to better select targets for maximum impact and surprise elements
CHANGE: Cache optimizations to utilize built in Unity processes for better performance
CHANGE: Scrapper Stations should have more scrapping related items for trade and less potatoes.
CHANGE: Damage mask improvement to reduce drawcalls and increase performance
CHANGE: Vessels spawning crew members for pickup are more likely to spawn them toward the player instead of randomly in a radius
CHANGE: Tractors are now attached to vessel center of mass instead of weapon mount center to more stable towing as it proved to be more frustrating than fun
CHANGE: Hails that don't come from objects now use the faction portrait instead of the question mark
CHANGE: When saving distressed ships via tractor and entering a new region, the AI in the region should be less inclined to attack the distress ship
📡CHANGE: Proximity mine launchers now only shoot 1 mine instead of a salvo as it was causing mines not to act correctly
CHANGE: Proximity projectiles spawned by the player should now correctly include all appropriate targets as viable targets instead of ignoring them
CHANGE: Dialogues now respect priorities. Highest priority messages will always display, including up to forcing the current message back into the hailing queue. Dialogues with high priority can now open automatically instead of requiring player input (e.g. the System Problem completion text).
CHANGE: Items given to the player while at warp, if it doesn't fit in inventory will be correctly dumped into a flotsam region.
CHANGE: Clarified networking pings to be more accurate for their connections. The server should now able to see things like per player stats and region connection stats.
CHANGE: Updated Steam SDK version and improved Steam networking performance and reliability
📡CHANGE: Improved performance anywhere the universe image is displayed. This affects both universe creation display and ingame universe map. This will significant reduce GPU useage during those displays.
📡CHANGE: Dragging the wrong object into a handin area will longer despawn the area, and instead it will flash red
CHANGE: AI will now automatically create weapon groups if the template is lacking weapon group data
CHANGE: Improved UI performance when several mounts are simultaneously destroyed
📡CHANGE: Projectiles should no longer have a mass unless explicitly set. This should improve interactions when being hit (no more being flung just from the collision)
CHANGE: Changed several name patterns for region names. This should produce more unique names.
CHANGE: Fleeing ships will attempt to still fire weapons even when fleeing from their target
CHANGE: Improved performance with some UI sounds
CHANGE: Icesteroid template 3 is not correctly capitalized
CHANGE: Improved AI ship handling to better follow pathing, come to a stop at their desire location and prevent unnecessary spinning
CHANGE: Changed it so tiles dissolve from center instead of from a corner
CHANGE: Changed region backgrounds to point at the nearest point of interest (like the closest planet) instead of always the star
CHANGE: Improved vessel tooltips to make it more obvious who is in control and how they feel about you
CHANGE: Adjusted universe generation to decrease the likeliness of repeated same factions across different star clusters
CHANGE: Changed "Create" to "Create Game" for Multiplayer and "Create Universe" for Singleplayer to be more explicit about what is about to happen
CHANGE: Adjusted star system rendering to improve sort ordering and decrease chance of things incorrectly rendering behind each other
📡CHANGE: Corrected several codex entries to reflect recent changes
CHANGE: Implemented a better version of smooth point text filtering. Text should look better at all levels of zoom now.
CHANGE: Changed how sound distance is calculated, which should improve how sounds drop in and out of audio range.
CHANGE: Elements displaying time will better display significant digits (13.00 minutes just becomes 13 minutes)
CHANGE: Changed weapon charge time enhancement property from a fixed time to a percentage modifier
CHANGE: Improved control group icon rendering
CHANGE: Replaced and improved a number of runtime processes to reduce memory allocation and increase performance
CHANGE: Analyzed and re-distributed a number of memory pool allocations to better match game requirements and useage
CHANGE: Optimized a number of processes that were working with low level Unity engine calls
CHANGE: Improved logging performance to reduce performance impact
CHANGE: Streamlined build process to minimize game installation size
CHANGE: Optimized a few network calls to reduce redundancy, especially concerning new object spawning
CHANGE: Console variable commands like sv_cheats can now autocomplete. "/sv_cheats t" will complete to "/sv_cheats true"
CHANGE: Split sv_gamemode up into several new commands (/sv_gamemode 1 will still set all of these according to previous rules). All commands can also be set per player:
- '/sv_assembly_creativeinventory': When set to true, enables access to the creative inventory in building.
- '/sv_assembly_tilerestrictionmod': Modifies building tile restriction limits. Value of -1 removes all restrictions.
- '/sv_assembly_weaponrestrictionmod': Modifies building weapon restriction limits. Value of -1 removes all restrictions.
- '/sv_assembly_otherrestritionmod': Modifies building other component restriction limits. Value of -1 removes all restrictions.
- '/sv_assembly_disabledrones': When set to true, disables building drones from being sent and instead construction is immediate.
- '/sv_assembly_requiresassembler': Whether or not you must use an assembler for construction.
- '/sv_warpanywhere': When set to true, allows warping to any system without validation.
CHANGE: Modified /removeregion command to no longer explicitly require the star system x,y coordinates. Instead they are now optional
CHANGE: Command text files now must be in the "commands" folder inside Appdata

Fixes

FIX: Fixed an issue with regions moving between star systems that could have been causing phantom regions or fleet regions to incorrectly stop moving
📡FIX: Fixed issue with small objects incorrectly flinging all around when hit with a collision
FIX: Fixed potentially wrong region IDs when mutating systems for problem and system generations
FIX: Fixed an issue where traders were incorrectly ignoring faction id when selecting trade goods for sale
FIX: Fixed an issue with AI ownership change
FIX: Fixed a few technical issues with mounts and their relationship with their parent object
FIX: Fixed a number of memory allocation issues with networking and game logging for increased performance
FIX: Fixed debug performance graphs incorrectly missing "kb" range
FIX: Fixed region discovery sound effect not playing
📡FIX: Fixed an issue where templates for conflict regions were being selected for non conflict regions
📡FIX: Fixed a number of issues that were throwing runtime exceptions
FIX: Fixed an issue with foreign tile removement if foreign tiles were split off via chunking
FIX: Fixed issue with loading templates during building not fully removing the previous object's mounts before placing the new mounts
FIX: Fixed several stations and large ships incorrectly missing hangar components
FIX: Fixed some issues with dialogue when not originating from a region or object
📡FIX: Fixed a number of grammar and typo issues in text
FIX: Fixed an issue with target selection on the region server after an AI vessel no longer needed a vessel
FIX: Fixed an issue wtih AI incorrectly rapidly switching between patrol and idle states
FIX: Fixed an issue with AI fleeing if they had magically spawned right at the coords of 0,0
FIX: Fixed a potential out of bounds exception when Building
FIX: Fixed action bar icons not updating when mounts were destroyed
FIX: Fixed wilderness systems so they spawn stations now at any level
FIX: Fixed tooltip when hovering over items during trade if the item has a faction restriction
FIX: Fixed an issue with projectiles incorrectly being removed or replaced
FIX: Fixed an issue with changing components during active mount destruction
FIX: Fixed an issue with pathfinding for AI when the navgraph hadn't fully been created
📡FIX: Fixed an issue where fleet regions were attempting to follow/engage a recently disconnected player
FIX: Fixed an issue with UI sounds pitch affecting other UI sounds. They should now always play (and pitch) independently
FIX: Fixed an issue with navgrid generation accuracy and speed
FIX: Fixed issue where the level 1 lawless system wasn't always being set to wilderness
FIX: Fixed UI to correctly show weapon cooldown on current vessel when quickly switching vessels
FIX: Fixed small pixel issue when zoomed waaaaaay in on vessel paper doll
FIX: Fixed issue with "Advanced Options" display depth in Create Game menu
FIX: Fixed "no power" and "broken mount" icons incorrectly displaying behind the component when looking at an object
FIX: Fixed slide bar on the manufacturing panel not correctly updating its number
FIX: Fixed split off fleets from becoming hostile fleets when the fleet has no ability to attack
FIX: Fixed not being able to place a component in a mount when the mount was swapped while the drone was in flight

Removals

REMOVAL: Removed missions from star systems

COMING BETA 12

In BETA 13 we will be tackling a few things. Player made factions is finally on the table. We will be taking a good hard look at post-death playing experience and how good or terrible ship destruction is. We will also be looking at ways to incorporate buying and selling of vessels.