Release Candidate 0.29.0 - Ship Painting Improvements & More

Cosmoteer release candidate 0.29.0 is now available for testing! (To play this release candidate, you must opt in to test it. Please see this post for info on how to test release candidates.)

This release candidate adds new features and decals for painting ships, plus a bunch of other balance tweaks, quality-of-life enhancements, and bug fixes.

We're still working hard at a bunch of upcoming improvements as part of Career 2.0, plus a big new weapon and related ship-design mechanic that will arrive sooner, but we wanted to get these improvements out to everyone sooner rather than later.

Thanks for testing!

RC1:

• Ships:
  • Added 3 new Monolith combat ships: Geironul, Praetor, and Praetorian.
  • Added 1 new Imperium combat ship: Knysna
  • Miscellaneous updates to existing built-in ships.

• Balance:
  • Standard Cannon, Large Cannon, Deck Cannon, and Flak Cannon shots will no longer spawn or "phase" inside enemy ships when their cannon barrels are poking inside the enemy.
  • HE, EMP, and Nuke missiles now have the same lifetime when dumbfired as when fired with a target.
  • Reduced the Power Capacitor's cost from 4000 to 3000 and increased its power capacity from 18 to 24 batteries.
  • Reduced the cost of the Heavy Laser Blaster from 6000 to 5000.
  • Disruptors now only have penetration resistance when getting hit on the turret.
  • Coil and Hypercoil factories now allow doors next to all of their storage tiles.
  • Small Thrusters will no longer generate power when their ship is classified as junk.

• Ship Painting:
  • Most built-in ship paint decals can now be resized and/or stretched up to 4x4 tiles in height and/or width. (Modded decals will likely need to be updated with larger sprites to support resizing.)
  • All decals (regardless of built-in or modded) can now be "inverted", meaning that their transparent areas become opaque and their opaque areas become transparent.
  • The new resizing, stretching, and inverting features have made many existing decals redundant. Those redundant decals have been removed. Any ships that use those removed decals will be automatically converted to use the new decals. Likewise, "favorite" decals lists will also be converted, though you may notice fewer decals in your favorites if multiple have been combined into a single decal.
  • The naming scheme for decals has been revamped, producing a more intuitive ordering of decals and making it easier for additional decals to be added in the future.
  • Many new decals have been added, including basic straights/curves/fades, complex shapes, icons, and text symbols.

• User Interface:
  • Favorite parts and decals can now be reordered by dragging and dropping them into the desired order.
  • Railgun and Ion Beam range/direction lines should now be more visible when zoomed out.

• Career:
  • Tweaked the dialogue text demanding that the player surrender in the case that the player isn't actually outmatched by the A.I.

• Multiplayer:
  • Updated the built-in rulesets for Domination mode to more closely match the rules commonly-used by the community.
  • Roof Headlights are now allowed in Build & Battle.

• Performance:
  • On computers (typically laptops) with both low-performance (integrated) and high-performance (dedicated) GPUs, Cosmoteer will now automatically configure itself to run on the high-performance GPU. If this is not desired, you can change it in your Windows graphics settings.

• Bug Fixes:
  • Crash in some circumstances if a modded resource type no longer exists.
  • Ships would sometimes unintentionally try to avoid collisions with other ships that they were flying away from. This was especially problematic with ships flying in formation.
  • Ships would sometimes stop pathfinding around ion storms and electron clouds.
  • Hailing a ship that was already hailing you wouldn't act as accepting their hail.
  • Crew would sometimes walk over tiles in certain factories that were supposed to be impassable.
  • RAM and VRAM used by ships that no longer exist wasn't being freed as soon as intended.
  • In multiplayer Career mode, it was impossible to switch the sector view back to a sector that didn't have any ships belonging to the first player. (This fix is not retroactive for existing saved games. For existing saves, you must first physically jump back to that sector before the fix will take effect.)
  • Synchronizing mods with a host or saved game would enable any locally-installed mod with a matching ID instead of downloading it from the Steam Workshop even if the locally-installed mod had the wrong version number.
  • The selection boxes for the object selection tool in Creative mode could have odd scaling when zoomed out.
  • In blueprint mode, if the only ship modification was to add crew, it was impossible to click the "make it so" button.

• Modding:
  • The new decal resizing/stretching feature can only *shrink* the size of the decal. Thus, mods that want to support resizing/stretching their decals will likely need to increase the resolution of those decals.
  • The naming scheme of built-in decals has been changed to be much more intuitive. This should make it easier to add new decals that sort logically with the built-in decals.
  • The roof_decals.rules file now contains 'Upgrades' and 'DefaultSizes' that mods can add to if they want to upgrade their own decals to the new sizes and/or naming scheme.
  • Added a new 'JunkToggle' component that is "on" whenever the ship is junk.
  • BulletEmitter now supports an optional 'AntiPhasingRaycastDistance' parameter that, if set, can be used to prevent projectiles from spawning or "phasing" inside enemy ships when fired.

RC2:

• Decals now default to the smallest possible size while maintaining their original aspect ratio.
• Processor factories now also allow doors next to all of their storage tiles.
• Tweaked the shape_corner_square_1 and shape_corner_square_arrow decals to seamlessly blend with solids at their corners.
• RC Bugfix: The new 'symbol_caret' text decal was unintionally rendered as '*' instead of '^'.
• RC Bugfix: The old 'fade01' decal was converting to the new 'fade_corner' decal (inverted) with the incorrect rotation.
• RC Bugfix: Using the "grab" tool to pick up a decal didn't grab the decal's inverted state.

RC3:

• Changed the version number to 0.29.0 to more appropriately convey the scope of this update.
• RC Bugfix: Deck Cannon bullets would sometimes get blocked by their own ship.
• RC Bugfix: Mirror mode wasn't working properly with stretched decals in some circumstances.
• RC Bugfix: Stretched decals could look abnormally pixelated.
• It is now possible to favorite specific combinations of decal, size, and inversion.
• Changed the invert hotkey to just 'I' (without Ctrl).
• Right-clicking a decal with the grab tool now copies the decal's size and invert state.
• Selected decals can now be inverted without having to cut and paste.
• The Z key can now be used to open and close the decal resizer.
• Added a handful of additional new decals.
• Added another skull decal that is very similar to the original small skull decal.
• Added a handful of new base paint textures.
• Removed a couple more redundant decals.

RC4:

• RC Bugfix: Dragging favorite decals to reorder them broke in RC3.
• Shortcuts to rotate, flip, and invert decals now work while the decal resizer popout is open. (Including right-click to rotate.)
• Pressing the Z key to open the decal resizer will now popup the resizer underneath the mouse cursor, wherever that is.
• Right-clicking or middle-clicking to favorite a decal will now favorite the specific size and inversion combination as well. (The star button added in RC3 was thus made redundant and has been removed.)
• The visuals on decal buttons will now update as their size and inversion are changed to reflect the exact combination of size and inversion that will be favorited.
• Favorites groups are now lettered A/B/C instead of 1/2/3.
• Added a couple more fade decals, removed a few low-usefulness fade decals, and tweaked another couple of fade decals to be more useful.
• Added 15 ships from the August 2024 ship design contest. These ships will not spawn in Career but are playable in Creative mode.
• Modding: Changed the format for automatic decal upgrades so that decals with special characters in their names can be upgraded.