Hello captains,
Important: Don't overwrite your old savegame when saving after this patch, so you have a fallback in case something breaks.
In this update we heavily focussed on some performance and savefile size reduction. The big changes are that shipstats, including temporary effects that influence the stats, are now kep track of in a much leaner way. So this should improve performance in bigger battles and is of course important for what is yet to come :)
Also, the savefile size reduction is a big change, this mainly hits shopinventories and the way we store data for NPC's, asteroids and salvageables in the world. The change will be noticable for the first load after saving a game in 0.8.1.14. If you care a lot about your current savefile its a good idea to create a newly named one when saving after this patch. Just in case :) We tested a lot already, but there might still be some issues we missed. Please let us know if you run into anything strange.
This update is still under active development. As such, it is only available if you switch to the beta branch of Vanguard Galaxy to test out these new changes. Instruction on how to install the beta updates can be found at the bottom of this post.
Added/Changed
- Improved prediction of installation and boarding difficulty, ECHO also uses this for which activities to persue
- Bulkheads, hull beams en computing units no longer show up in the refinery
- Added reason why an operation failed/ended to the operation log
- Reworked Support miner mission a little bit, player will now always get any ore that was mined but not fitting the mission. Ore owner of any remaining ore is the original miner when the mission is completed
- Changed data drop chance in certain comparments (boarding mini-game)
- Added timeline/lore entries to some of the found data items (Historical Records)
- Big refactor of how stats, buffs and debuffs are tracked and calculated. This should improve performance in POI's with more units
- Big refactor for reducing the size of savegames. Biggest changes: shops, spacestation parts, NPC's, asteroids and salvage are all seed based and more lazily loaded. Statics in each system (sun variables, planets) are now also seed based and regenerated rather then stored. This should dramatically improve loading speed (noticable on second load). What was not touched: player and ship inventories, player ships, trade info, story missions.
- Corropult uses new ammo type: NUC-3 Round
- In preparation for the carrier/battlecruisers the Pilot crew member has been added (no functionality as of yet)
- Spaceship pathfinding added, they will try to avoid collisions now
Balance
- Increased potential enemy count on higher level missions
- Morale in installations and boarding will decline if player losses get too high relative to the chance to win. ECHO should use this to bug out a bit earlier too rather then throwing all crewmembers into the meatgrinder
Fixes
- Fixed weird smoke offsets that sometimes happen on debris
- Fixed recipes for Small Plasma Lance and Medium Laser Repeater
- Aspect Shield X can be slotted to small and medium shields as well
- Fixed Warpath triggered ability icon
- Fixed incorrect drag and drop behaviour (Vanguard Marks/Blueprints)
- Fixed support miner doing a weird lap around the POI
- Fixed player ship staying stationary
- Locator beacon cannot be dropped in Industry Ops mission location
- Ships will properly chase lootitems if they have no other active target
- Fixed blueprints/fragments dropping in cargo when doing dungeons, will go in data now
- Fixed salvage/mining drones also dropping hull upgrade materials
- Fixed the milestone for Mining 10 not producing 3x the ore for core ores
- Fix for reentering the same installation again after a failed run or manual extraction
- Fixed some translations
- A few fixes for ECHO getting stuck in dungeons
- Improved behaviour for salvagegrinder turrets
- Fixed rep loss in dead drop missions
- Some improvements to the very first prologue missions to make sure the player cannot get stuck there by being too agressive on lootcontainers early on :)
Cheers,
Bat Roost Games
Make sure to keep an old save game when switching to the beta, just in case. We always make sure that your save games will keep working, but as long as the beta is ahead of the release, the beta save game won't work on the release version until it catches up.
To take part go to Manage and select Properties for Vanguard Galaxy in Steam:
And select the open-beta under Game Versions & Betas as shown below.