Bit of a packed incremental update this time round as we continue to fine tune and some additional major work going on under the hood to further refine ship movements.
We tested Update 4.8 at a friends house to gather some feedback and it ended up as quite an exciting session for a number of reasons. As he played we described the pending mechanics soon to be injected; shield rebalancing, subsystem targeting - his eyes lit up.
But perhaps the most thought provoking reaction was when he turned to us and blurted out 'imagine this in multiplayer!'
Now this isn't news to us, we've been imagining it all year, but when looking at his face to gauge his actual excitement we realised that he'd literally been drooling all over his nice shiny new keyboard and that sparked a bit of a rethink about priorities.
Coding multiplayer is a big deal - but we are prepared for it this time round.
The biggest problem in our tests was the use of physics in versions 4.8 and earlier so we replaced it with a home-brew pseudo-physics implementation - the difference is immediately noticable with the inclusion of inertia in the ship movements, huuuugely immersive - take a look!
Keep the bug reports and feedback flowing - incredibly useful!
- Update all ship speeds increased
- Update all weapons ranges increased
- Update all turret turn rates increased
- Update formation spacings increased
- Added inertia to ship movements
- Added custom physics simulation (multiplayer preparation)
- Added modified object pool and prefabs (multiplayer preparation)
- Fixed issue with collision avoidance
- Fixes to ship thrusters
- Fixes to ability attribute modifiers
- Fixed siege laser effect
- Fixes include more defensive code to prevent rare particle crash
- Fixes further to log spam
- Fixes to enemy reveal in fleet panel
- Fixed intermittent bug introduced in 4.8 with soft groups disbanding