The 1.0 release update is here! After pretty much exactly one year of Early Access, eXoSpace Combat Engineer now officially launches into full release. I worked on this game as a solo developer from home for two years full-time now, and quite a bit longer before that, so this is an exciting (and slightly terrifying) moment for me.
A big thank you to the community, all the wonderful people who helped my out by testing the game, coming up with great ideas and even greater designs, and generally being awesome. I really could not have done this without you!
The future will bring more updates. 1.0 means I think the game is ready to warrant this label, but I have lots and lots of ideas to bring it even further. That brings us naturally to the release update and everything that is in it:
The Wild Waste is a new mission where you can take down multiple bosses. It's highly customizable: you can select the map size, factions on the map, what bosses to take down. In the Wild Waste, you can even encounter your own designs and factions!
The sector map is now dynamic as well: factions have starbases and launch fleets attacking each other or pursuing you.
Several brand new hangar parts have been added. These allow you to launch and command your own fleet of custom-designed drones. A hangar can contain multiple cheap drones, a single advanced one, or even launch a custom torpedo or space mine. The new command wheel lets you quickly give orders to your drones, and has some handy other options as well.
Most traders now have mercenaries parked nearby for hire. For a one-time payment of X-Coins, these will follow you to the death (theirs, most likely). You can boss them around as well, ordering them to escort you, or attack nearby targets.
Engaging the hyperdrive was never easier. Making a jump now only requires one visit to the star map, and the jump itself is right inside the flight screen. Each hyperjump ends at the edge of a new sector. You can also backtrack quickly and cheaply along your route, facilitating exploration.
You can now fly outside the sector borders as well, making the world feel more open, and most of that sector will not yet be visible to you, leaving more to be discovered.
There is a lot more! Go find out for yourself, or read the full update notes below.
Bounty Hunt:
Added the Wild Waste mission, a customizable multi-boss mission. You can select the bosses and factions that will appear and the size of the map.
You can jump home early during a Wild Waste mission, giving partial XP depending on the number of targets eliminated. For the other missions, jumping home early now also gives XP. Depending in how far you traveled, up to 50% of the mission XP is granted, for exploring the target area.
The sector map for all missions is now dynamic: factions have bases that spawn fleets, fleets patrol and attack other factions, and areas change ownership after a conflict. Your actions can influence the state of the map!
Working wormholes letting you jump to a random far location and back. There are other types of wormholes as well, that let you (or any ship) teleport locally or black-hole ones that make you explode specularly.
Friendly and allied traders may now sell tech!
Traders now have mercenaries parked next to them. These can be hired for a sum and will follow you into battle.
Veiled Consortium now has a crew role for reducing mercenary hiring cost.
Shadow Consortium has a crew role for increasing mercenary slot count.
Difficulty is now replaced by a danger level slider. You get an indication whether the selected danger level is expected to be easy or hard for your rank.
All missions now have a difficulty that scales up to danger level 250.
It is now possible to grow in rank above rank 16 (Intergalactic Hero). This grants increased ship cost caps, up to a whopping 1 million metal!
Added a "Wait" button, if the player selects the current cell on the star map. This advances the star map simulation one turn and may spawn arriving fleets.
The highest completed danger level per mission is shown in mission setup.
Rebalanced difficulty and resource gain over missions and ranks.
Hyperjumps now require only one visit to the star map screen: choose your destination, make a jump and arrive immediately at your destination.
Hyperjumps now normally end at the edge of a gravity well.
Added hyperspace nodes: some encounters now make you jump into the middle of the area, if there is a hyperspace node present.
Rank now only caps metal cost. This is a soft cap: if you go over it a "tax" is added to the ship's cost.
You can now cheaply and quickly backtrack to an earlier visited area.
Added and updated lots of new designs, thanks to NotABot87746, Dalrethliant! (if I forgot to mention you, please let me know)
Increased faction reputation gain from helping in many situations.
Made faction reputation effects a bit more local: the first attack in an area results in a larger reputation loss than subsequent ones.
Corespace Pact reputation is now fixed to avoid situations where starting missions is impossible.
Added new encounters.
Traders now may sell a blueprint for a weapon, thruster or shield module.
Friendly fire tuning: now only triggers if the friendly fire dealt is > 25% of damage dealt by player to hostiles.
Improved the tutorial and added more help items and pages to flight screen, star map and editor.
FluxCreds are renamed to X-Coins, and icon is updated. You now keep your X-Coins over missions.
Improved tech tree layout for extra modules.
Combat:
Area boundaries no longer push ships back. The minimap is now centered on the player instead of the active area. Hyperjumping out of an area is possible from anywhere, but the drive charges faster the closer you are to the edge.
You can now store 2 of each type of powerup. Select a different powerup by short-pressing the powerup key, and activate the selected by long-pressing the powerup key (T by default).
You can now use your excess credits to buy a random powerup at any trader, to use in subsequent encounters.
Improvements to spawn variety (actually more of a bugfix), now correctly using the faction fleet doctrine.
Added an autofire override function to the command wheel. When enabled, all autofiring weapons will be controlled using the primary weapon control instead.
Added missile guidance override to the command wheel. When enabled, all guided weapons will move towards the cursor instead of their target.
Toggling parts now keep their status in sync even when destroyed and repaired.
Repair speed recovery after taking damage is smoother now. The repair speed is now shown as a bar instead of a spinning repair icon.
Added "Rewind to arrival" option on death.
Added reputation changes to notification ticker.
Resource-rich asteroids are now marked on the minimap.
A physics engine update gives huge performance improvements for ships overlapping each other.
Minimap coloring now based on side/faction in sandbox. This is also an option for in-mission. The minimap highlights resource-rich asteroids.
Hangars and custom drones:
Different types of hangars have been added for you to place on your design.
For each hangar you can select or design a drone to be launched from it. A hangar can support more drones if they are cheaper.
You can take control of your drones.
Drones are controlled using a new command wheel (toggled using middle-mouse button by default): return, defend, attack, self-destruct.
When the launching hangar is destroyed, drones will become disabled.
The flight screen shows stored and launched drones.
The ship editor shows info about drone size and cost limit.
Ship Editor:
Ship & part info UI is now a lot more readable.
Updated the selected modules config panel layout, improving its usability.
Paint UI is improved, and faction palettes have been added. For player-made factions the palette can be edited as well!
Part details are now shown on hover in editor instead of in bottom-left. Much improved clarity of part info.
Added staggered fire option to weapons.
Warnings are now integrated in the ship info sidebar.
Selecting "Unknown" classification override is now possible.
Joint rotation range is shown when hovering over or selecting a single joint part.
Bosses:
New and updated bosses and more dangerous versions of existing bosses
Bosses can now spawn other ships whenever a phase activates.
Bosses can now be marked as "Usable for Wild Waste". If their faction is also suitable as a Wild Waste faction, you can encounter this boss during your mission.
Boss phases can now define set part groups to be disabled during that phase.
Added option in ship editor to hide boss bar for a boss ship.
Boss phase editing UI has been improved.
Added hangar control to boss phases AI.
Added "move to top" button to boss phase editing UI.
Parts:
Added staggered fire option to weapons. You can enable it on any weapon, and the weapons in a weapon group (e.g. primary / secondary) that have stagger fire enabled will try to fire in a staggered manner.
Added EMP weapons. The EMP mechanic works similarly to the explosion one: an EMP missile has an "EMP pool", and active parts have "EMP resistance". For an EMP pulse, the EMP effect is applied to parts from closest to furthest, depleting both the pool and the EMP resistance. If a part's EMP resistance reaches 0, the part is disabled. EMP resistance goes back up over time, and is back to full after the disabled period ends.
Added EMP missile launcher.
Added different types of hangars.
Added solar panel. Cheap, costs no antimatter, but low power output and flimsy.
Added tiny exploder.
Added tiny core (for missiles).
Added penrose / rhombus light missile launcher, defense laser, power unit, heavy shield, heavy minigun turret, heavy thruster, and pentagon 270 degree shield.
Added several rounded corner armors.
Added huge rectangular armor (boss only).
Pentagon battery capacity increased to 150.
Most pulse cannons have slightly increased damage and cost efficiency.
Shadow sword beam weapon energy demand halved.
Exploders now have different cost and explosion strength.
Several parts had their graphics improved.
Ship AI:
Added ship AI targeting preference: Balanced (default), Closest, Ahead, Highest DPS, Highest Cost. Balanced targeting prefers targets of its own size.
Added AI boost setting: Auto, Never, Always.
Added experimental "Spinner" AI, fun but not entirely reliable.
Added straight ahead movement AI (e.g. for torpedoes).
Added AI self-destruct timer option.
Ship AI behavior is shown on mouse over.
Improved ramming AI to better hit its target, as well as use strafing to stay on course.
Sandbox:
Added new tools: spawn wormhole, create explosion.
Faction fleets can be spawned in the sandbox, for example to see if you can defeat it or whether it matches up against your own fleet.
Fast-forward now lets you speed up time in the sandbox.
Added Shift+F8 keyboard combination to hide the UI while in flight screen.
Arenas:
An awesome new Boss Rush arena by Skipydog (you should really try!)
Added design sort by cost descending (arena default).
Added "My designs" toggle to arena ship selection (on by default).
Arena combat screen now has all status bars.
Added push-back-from-edge option to arenas.
Modding:
Localization via mods: add your own localization in mods, with custom font support.
Modding for encounters and missions via a new "Modding Tools" screen where you can create a new mod in-game.
Modding support has been streamlined a bit as well, with a dedicated Modding Tools screen accessible from the main menu. Here you can even create a new mod from inside the game.
Ship drops can now be edited in the editor details panel when modding tools are enabled.
When modding tools are active, ships can now be added to or removed from the edited mod from the sandbox popup.
When modding tools are active, factions can now be added to or removed from the edited mod from the faction view.
Added targets images directory to mod loading.
Lots of workshop uploader fixes and improvements.
Visuals:
Parts animate into place when a ship is spawned or repaired (small change, big visual improvement).
Hyperjumping is now accompanied by some nice effects.
The explosion effects are a bit more dramatic and give a clearer idea of the damage radius.
The particle system now adapts to rendering speed to avoid slowdown in extreme situations.
Other:
Large update to the physics engine, significantly improving performance and stability.
Added cinematic and overview camera modes in sandbox.
Many improvements to stability and rendering were made, along with an advanced crash reporter that lets me fix more kinds of bugs quickly.
Added exclusive fullscreen option.
Restart is no longer needed when changing graphics quality.
Added a frame watchdog that logs main thread hangs from a separate thread.
The Turbo Trouble mutator now requires the Malfunction achievement (destroy the Contraptionist) instead of Explorer, to make it less annoying to unlock.
Controller pointer movement speed fixes: ramps up from slow to faster.
Ship preview image directory is now cleared on loading.
Bugfixes:
All next/previous part references in the editor have been fixed (used when changing the active part using hotkeys).
Unused crew levels would not save correctly. This fix also restores missing crew levels.
Crew retraining did not take effect until reloading.
Opening and closing tech tree after being destroyed in boss fight broke the boss encounter.
Sneaky Snipers modifier did not unlock correctly.
In-combat repairs with repair powerup active did not work.
Arena statistics (victories) were not loaded correctly in some situations.
Exiting game immediately after defeating boss would make collecting XP impossible.
Closing the game when in the starting area right after starting a new mission made the ships disappear.
Exotics cost was mixed up with metal cost when editing ship for arena.
Bosses with parts with joints initially destroyed bugged out when these parts were repaired.
Faction fleet doctrine was not used correctly by mission spawners.
Editing non-active save game could change active slot color and name.
Antimatter engineer would give free antimatter.
Increased battery capacity crew effect would not work as intended.
Arena achievements would be granted even if the player did not win.
Arena crashed when pressing "Continue" on completed arena.
Ship with joints sometimes jumped around after hyperjump.
Crash when suspending computer out of sleep.
Faction reputation changed while killing ships in test mode.
Removing parts in undo broke when test mode was activated.
Many (potential) crashes and smaller bugs have been fixed as well.