Greetings Commanders!
Another busy week here at the Studio. This week we bring you more improvements to the save system, more memory management, several new bounty missions and a slight re-balance to the two easier difficulty levels. With that said, on to the changes:
Backup Saves
The save system continues to be a sore point for some of you and hopefully this patch will help. Two changes have been made to the save system.
The first change is that each save now also supports up to 4 backup saves. To help differentiate saves the hh:mm:ss time stamp has also been added to all saves. When you choose to load a game you are now given the option to load the most recent save at the top of the list, as well as 4 backup saves, including one backup of the current save and the 3 next oldest backups. Backup saves will only populate when you start a new game or if you manually save when Autosave is off. If you have Autosave on the new save system will not impact you.
The second change is that we have implemented a save recovery option. When you try and load a save that is corrupted (or doesn't exist) the game will prompt you to attempt to force load and recover the save. If you do this it is possible the game can crash or the save will be destroyed. However there is also a chance it will recover the save, depending on how it was corrupted. For people that lost save games during past patch processes hopefully this will allow some of you to recover.
Going forward these changes mean that it should be much harder to lose your saved progress. Even if one save becomes corrupted with multiple backups hopefully players should lose less of their progress... or nothing at all. We hope this helps.
Memory Management
Today's patch brings a third and probably final round of memory optimization. We have reduced texture sizes for some models and done some additional buffering with sound and music. At this point I'm not sure there is much low hanging fruit left on the optimization front. We hope as many people as possible can now run the game.
New Missions
A new type of Bounty mission has been added to the random mission tables in Arx, Epsilon, Crosius and Cygnus. The new missions will have you defending a mining outpost from pirate raiders while gaining Hydrium and Energy resources.
The new missions are available immediately to games already in progress as well as new games that start going forward.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed a bug where the Orion mercenary mission was not launching. Players should once again be able to recruit the Nemesis.
- Fixed a bug where the wrong resources were being dropped in a bounty mission in Cygnus.
Balance Tweaks
- Increased the chances that the missions to unlock the Queen's Bounty, Executioner, Nemesis, Hammerhead, Chickadee and Gha'Khar will show up. The rest of the Mercenary ships are being found at the expected rate and were left unchanged.
- Lowered the overall difficulty of both Beginner and Veteran difficulties. This should continue to make the game more accessible for more people. Epic is unchanged.
- Decreased the difficulty of Alliance Story Missions 22, 27 and 28 and Federation Story Missions 25,27 and 28 on all difficulties.
- Increased item rewards for several missions.
That's all for this week. We are hoping to be able to spend some time finally getting those Steam Achievements up and working in the next couple of weeks. Once the achievements are done we will look at our roadmap going forward.
Thank you to everyone for playing our game!