Most of this update came from players writing in. Thank you — please keep doing it.
The sky
Two changes you will notice within a minute of launching.
- The Milky Way has been reworked. It is a real all-sky photograph, and it read like one — an even haze laid over everything. The faint wash is gone now, the dust lanes are properly dark, and the core holds its warmth. The band has structure instead of being one smear of light.
- Distant planets grow in from a speck. They used to appear at a fixed distance, already large — Jupiter arrived out of nothing at roughly eight times the width of a full moon. Now they resolve as a point of light from almost an astronomical unit away and grow the whole way in, rings and moons with them.
Flight
- Fixed: the autopilot could sail straight past the ISS and coast for millions of kilometres before turning around, sometimes more than once. It now keeps enough margin to actually arrive.
- Derelict satellites, pirate ships and the rescue vessel are solid. You could previously fly through all three.
- The rescue vessel has floodlights. It used to arrive invisible when you called it on a planet's night side — which is exactly when you tend to need it.
Interface
- New: a TEXT SIZE setting in Options → Settings, from 14 to 24 pixels. The default has moved up slightly, and panels and gauges now scale with it. Added for a player reading the interface in Japanese, where the old size was genuinely hard to make out.
- Fixed: the mission board in the SIGAI console was unreachable past the bottom of the panel. It scrolls now, and follows the cursor as you step through contracts.
- Fixed: the velocity panel resized itself to fit whatever its longest line happened to be, so the left edge of the HUD never sat still. It has a fixed width now and wraps its text.
Controller
- New: force feedback. The pad shakes when your hull takes a hit, scaled to how hard. Toggle in Options → Controls.
- Fixed: the HUD named keyboard keys for things that are on the pad — the console tabs, the map zoom.
- Signature lead, cloak and self-destruct are reachable on a controller for the first time, on BACK+LB, BACK+RB and BACK+L3. Cloak in particular could be bought and then never triggered.
- Every setting in Options → Controls is now reachable with the pad. None of them were.
- The gamepad on/off setting is gone. A controller is used when it is plugged in — the old switch could be thrown with the pad itself, leaving nothing to switch it back on with.
Sound
- Thirteen new tracks, including five classical recordings — Rimsky-Korsakov, Strauss, Grieg and Mozart — bringing the soundtrack to 59.
- Fixed: the shuffle was not really shuffling. It restarted every time you launched or loaded, so some tracks came round constantly while others never played at all. You now hear the whole playlist before anything repeats.
- Fixed: combat music no longer cycles through several tracks in one fight, and the silence between tracks is much shorter.
Missions
- Fixed: a recovered satellite could end up stuck in a cargo bay that nothing could empty, even after the contract was paid. Existing saves carrying a stranded payload will clear themselves on load.
Six of the eleven changes above came from reports on these forums. If something looks wrong, say so — it is the fastest way to get it fixed.