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Beta Branch Patch 0.16.0 Patchnotes - Combat Update I


koonschi
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  • Boxelware Team

Patch 0.16.0

 

Date: February 15th, 2018

 

PLEASE NOTE: THESE CHANGES ARE EXPERIMENTAL, WILL HAVE TO BE TESTED AND WILL UNDERGO CHANGES.

Please report concerns and issues so we can address them.

 

Now that this is out of the way, here are the patchnotes for the combat update:

 

Beta Branch Note: These changes are currently available on the beta branch. The beta branch is for testing experimental changes and for finding and fixing errors.

 

This is how you get access to the beta branch (USE AT YOUR OWN RISK):

Right-Click on Avorion in your Steam list, Properties -> Betas -> Select branch 'beta'.

 

Gameplay

 

"You can now switch to a sector with a ship/station of yours in it! Your current ship will stay where it is. Use this feature to easily command remote stations and ships without having to go all the way back. Apart from that, we added more content, more polish."

  • Added a "Switch to Sector" command that lets a player switch to a ship of his on the map
  • Increased refresh rate (and thus accuracy) of turrets
  • Added a "Defensive" mode for independent targeting turrets
    • Turrets in "Defensive" mode prefer torpedoes and fighters over other ships
    • The current ship stays where it is, only the player moves

    [*]Added a Search and Rescue mission event

    [*]Added a bulletin board mission to explore a sector

    [*]Added an upgrade that increases pickup range of loot

    [*]Stations now have upgrade slots

    [*]Ships of disbanded alliances can now be claimed by everybody

    [*]Turret and system upgrade loot now only despawn when there is no player in the sector

    [*]Fighters whose mothership got destroyed can now be commanded by all ships of the same faction

    [*]Implemented passing of time for resource depots when they are loaded from disk

    [*]Implemented passing of time for shipyards when they are loaded from disk

    [*]Improved combat AI of ships so they can use PDCs and Anti-Fighter turrets correctly

Point Defense Chaingun (PDC)

 

"Good defense against fighters, very good defense against torpedoes. You're going to want some of these when getting closer to the core!"

  • Added Point Defense Chainguns as a new weapon
  • Extremely fast turning speed
  • Very high fire rate
  • Non-scaling damage with tech level
  • Medium range
  • Always independent targeting

Anti-Fighter Cannon (AFC)

 

"Specialized to fighters, especially in close-range combat."

  • Added Anti-Fighter Cannons as a new weapon
  • Very fast turning speed
  • Shoots projectiles that explode near the target and deal AOE damage
  • Lower reach than normal weapons
  • Deals fragment damage that's more effective vs. fighters and torpedoes
  • Always independent targeting

Torpedoes

 

"This is just the general gist of torpedoes, there's tons of changes to internals, mechanics, lots and lots of new UI etc., but we'll do you a favor and only list the most important things here."

  • Added Torpedoes
  • Torpedoes are always-seeking one-shot weapons that deal massive damage
  • Torpedoes must be bought at an Equipment Dock (looting them is planned)
  • Torpedoes are made up of a body and warhead
    • Torpedo body determines flight properties
    • Torpedo warhead determines damage, shield penetration and the like

    [*]Added a torpedo launcher block that launches torpedoes

    [*]Added a torpedo storage block for storing torpedoes

    [*]Each torpedo launcher block adds a new torpedo shaft to your ship

    [*]Torpedo shafts can be filled with torpedoes and assigned to hotkeys similar to turrets

    • Material of torpedo shafts determines how many torpedoes it can hold
    • Torpedo shafts have to be assigned to a weapon group in order to work!

    [*]If a torpedo barely misses its target, it will still explode and deal half damage

Turret Scaling

 

"Turrets now scale in size and slots, gaining more power and reach with every slot they use up. We've got a few special plans for more high-tier weaponry that will take up 5 slots and more. Stay tuned!"

  • Turrets increase in size, firepower, reach and slots, while firepower and reach scale with amount of slots
    • 2 slot turret: 2x damage, 115% reach
    • 3 slot turret: 3x damage, 130% reach
    • 4 slot turret: 4x damage, 145% reach
    • etc.

    [*]Maximum scaling depends on the kind of turret (example: PDCs never scale)

    [*]Turret rotation speed decreases with size

    [*]Turrets can now use up more than one slot

Enemy Specialization

 

"In order to spice up combat, we've added specialized enemies that will be very strong in their specific area, for example destroying your shields or fighting from long range."

  • Enemies are now more specialized and some will carry torpedoes
    • Defender (untouched): Stronger ship that spawns in normal sectors, to defend it
    • Carrier: Carries fighter squads, anti-fighter weaponry
    • Military Ship (untouched): Default ship with armed turrets
    • Torpedo Boat: Attack ship that carries normal torpedoes
    • Disruptor: Shield breaking or penetrating ship, can carry torpedoes
    • CIWS: Anti-Fighter, Anti-Torpedo weaponry
    • Persecutor: Strong attack ship with advanced torpedoes
    • Flagship: High HP, carries fighters, anti-fighter weaponry and strong weapons and torpedoes
    • Artillery Ship: Long range weapons and torpedoes

    [*]Added icons for specialization of enemies

    [*]Added icons for military ships and civil ships

    [*]Pirates have ship classes as well now

Weapon Specialization

 

"We've revamped the strengths and weaknesses of many weapons so they're more specialized. We won't go into super-deep details, but here's the general overview of how we rebalanced them. Some remain mostly untouched, while others have undergone bigger changes."

  • Kinetic Weapons' main purpose is to do damage to hull
    • Ranges from low to high: Chaingun, Bolter, Railgun
    • General behavior of these remains unchanged

    [*]Disruptor Weapons' main purpose is to deal massive damage to shields

    • Ranges from low to high: Tesla, Plasma, Lightning
    • Range of Tesla Weapons has been increased
    • Range of Lightning guns has been massively increased and their accurancy improved

    [*]Artillery Weapons do mixed damage from very high range

    • Ranges from low to high: Cannon, Rocket Launcher
    • General behavior of these remains unchanged

    [*]Defensive Weapons are meant for defense against torpedoes and fighters

    • Anti-Fighter Cannon (see above)
    • Point Defense Chaingun (see above)

    [*]Special Weapons:

    • Laser: Mid Range, 100% accuracy
    • Pulse Cannon: Mid Range, shield penetration
    • The general behavior of these remains unchanged

    [*]Short ranged weapons have rather low damage and accuracy, but a high turning speed can fire for a long time

    [*]Mid ranged weapons have average damage, medium turning speed and can fire for some time

    [*]Long ranged weapons have high damage, slow turning speed and rate of fire and overheat more quickly

    [*]Civil weapons, such as mining lasers, salvaging lasers and force guns remain unchanged

Further Balancing

 

"We've added some more changes to make it more difficult (not impossible!) to fly to the center without proper equipment or ships."

  • Turrets can no longer be built on holo blocks
  • Headhunters now spawn as persecutors with torpedoes
  • More pirates and more different pirates are being spawned now
  • Added persecutors that hunt players down when they go too deep into the galaxy without proper ships or weapons
    • Persecutors are disabled for Beginner difficulty

    [*]Reduced price of reconstruction site setting by 50%

Server

  • Stopped AvorionServer from creating ~/.avorion and querying pwuid when --datapath is specified
  • Added a --hostgalaxy cmd line option similar to --startgalaxy, but that hosts a LAN game
  • Chat messages that are sent with the /say command (and others) have their own message type and stand out more
  • Added a config option to enable invincibility for player ships when players log out
    • This is only enabled for a ship when the player has been logged out for at least 30 seconds and the ship wasn't damaged in the last 30 seconds

Client & UI

  • Added a builk assign/unassign/dismiss UI for crews
  • Improved layout of trade invite window
  • Increased amount of time radar blips are visible on the map
  • Gate and wormhole lines to undiscovered sectors are faded out
  • Reduced maximum intensity of bloom
  • New inventory items are set to non-recent on mouseover, not click
  • Improved hit feedback (damage numbers)
  • Hit feedback displays dodges of fighters as well
  • Added dps, shots until overheating weapons for overheating weapons to tooltips
  • Added block penetration of railguns to tooltips
  • Added description for no shield damage to tooltips
  • Improved overview of crew salary in ship tabs
    • Salary is displayed by default
    • Salary is yellow when due

    [*]Added a "Press T to Enter" text when approaching a ship that can be flown

    [*]Added scrolling for ComboBox

    [*]Added numbers to different corner blocks to tell them apart by name

    [*]Increased visibility of turret overheating displayer

    [*]Added icons for home sector and reconstruction site

    [*]Added multi-key (Ctrl-F, etc.) key assignments

    [*]Improved layout of controll settings window

    [*]Added hotkeys for fighter commands

Misc

  • Improved logging when a crash happens
  • Improved description clarity of "All Turrets" turret upgrade
  • Added community localization for Turkish
    • Thanks Corviuse for your hard work on the translation!

Scripting API

 

"We're taking the first steps towards a more modular modding API and dynamic mod loading."

  • Improved and added missing documentation of several callbacks
  • Added getCurrentLanguage() function to client API
  • Added a new ServerInformation chat message type
  • Added torpedoes to API
  • Implemented init.lua scripts for player, entity and sector
  • Removed sector.lua script and moved its contents to init.lua scripts
  • Fixed addScriptOnce() function so it works when scripts aren't initialized yet
  • Implemented a script callback "onEntityJump" for when entities jump
  • Added a "transferEntity" function to Galaxy to easily move entities between sectors

Bugfixes

 

"As usual, user bug reports are marked with [uBR]. Thank you everybody for reporting and keep it up!"

  • [uBR] Fixed an issue in whisp command for names with spaces
  • [uBR] Fixed several issues with hangar visuals
  • [uBR] Fixed an issue where the player didn't stay seated when transforming a ship to a station
  • [uBR] Fixed an issue where entities that don't belong to the player could be selected by dragging a rect in strategy mode
  • Fixed an issue where entities with faction index 0 were checked in the targeter for strategy mode selection
  • Fixed swapped line in screenshots
  • [uBR] Fixed several issues with spelling and typos
  • [uBR] Fixed an issue where wormholes to non-passable sectors could be created
  • [uBR] Fixed an issue where energy system would load battery with too high speeds
  • [uBR] Fixed an issue where the sun could shine through planets
  • [uBR] Fixed an issue where keybindings for mirroring were not taken from the config
  • [uBR] Fixed an issue where clicking a fighter in a squad would change the order of the squad
  • [uBR] Fixed an issue where buttons of hint windows could be placed outside the game window
  • [uBR] Fixed an issue where energy weapons fired even when disabled in energy tab
  • [uBR] Fixed an issue where UI of station docks wasn't rendered when in huge ships
  • [uBR] Fixed an exploit that allowed players to build negative-space ships leading to all kinds of glitches
  • [uBR] Fixed an exploit that allowed players to fly holo-only ships that were impossible to hit
  • [uBR] Fixed an issue where the hyperdrive was recharging while waiting in loading screen
  • [uBR] Fixed an issue that lead to one-way gates from start sector
  • [uBR] Fixed an issue where the turret factory ui showed stolen goods
  • Fixed an issue where the building stats UI started off at the wrong position
  • [uBR] Fixed an issue that lead fighters without motherships to attack gates
  • [uBR] Fixed an issue where beams of rotation locked turrets weren't rendered correctly
  • [uBR] Fixed an issue where launched fighters weren't transferred to the alliance with their mothership
  • [uBR] Fixed an issue where action music wasn't triggered for players in alliance ships
  • [uBR] Fixed an issue where turrets could be placed on hangar openings
  • [uBR] Fixed an issue that could lead to a crash when deleting official servers in "Join via IP"
  • [uBR] Fixed an issue when building two ships with the same name in a shipyard
  • [uBR] Fixed an issue where players in alliance ships didn't get some achievements
  • [uBR] Fixed an issue where player-owned stations could be exploited
  • [uBR] Fixed an issue where players and alliances could exploit stations
  • Fixed an issue where pulse conservation wasn't considered correctly when building
  • [uBR] Fixed an issue where salvaging and mining orders wouldn't remain over a server restart
  • [uBR] Fixed an issue where ingredients would get reset in turret factory after building a turret

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This is more than I expected this update. I'm really looking forward to testing these changes out!

 

I have to say, this looks AMAZING! I love that some turrets can now be bigger and take up more slots. I love that we can have proper PDCs now! I love that we can teleport to our ships in different sectors!

 

And thank you for listing weapon DPS in the tooltips!

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Feature Requests/Bug reports:

Organizing turrets by size in inventory, can't seem to search for point defenses in the menu. (bought some and couldn't find them with the search by typing point or defense).

 

Desyncs seem a bit more common on beta branch atm. (ghost ships that take no damage when shooting them until you bump them and they jump to actual position)

 

Rocket launchers are not always showing explosion effects on impact.

 

Damage from size three cannons occasionally seems to be delayed by up to a half second (possibly the explosion damage calculation over such a large area? Can we get tooltips for burst radius on explosive/aoe weapons?)

 

Can we get ship sensor blocks/arrays that give the ship the ability to zoom/show predictive aim points for the target you are aiming at/your currently selected weapons and have a way to increase scan range via blocks (rather than upgrades)? Would be very useful considering some size 3 weapons can hit out to 30k+ now and have considerable projectile travel time.

 

Can we use a turret factory to modify an existing turrets size for some raw mats (upgrading an avorion turret a size costs X avorion)? (just for the sake of size consistency when using non-manufactured turrets)

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Added persecutors that hunt players down when they go too deep into the galaxy without proper ships or weapons

 

These are nasty. I'm playing on Insane difficulty and they make it much riskier to rush to the Naonite stage before getting a proper ship. I really like this change actually. I've died twice now, but it was my own fault for not equipping enough PDCs. I've never died in this game before. Giving them torpedoes is a nice way to spice up the gameplay. It's nice having enemies that you can't just boost away from and be out of their range in 3 seconds.

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Many awesome big and little things were added with 0.16. Thank you very much  :)

I have another request though:

Could you guys make it possible to properly add an Energy-consumer, which also shows up in the ship's power menu?- Like so (photomontage):

1eSxUel.jpg

Something along this:

EnergySystem:addEnergyConsumer(double  amount, string  IconPath)

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ohmigod YEESSS

 

My body is ready for this update. Let's address things point-wise.

 

"You can now switch to a sector with a ship/station of yours in it! Your current ship will stay where it is. Use this feature to easily command remote stations and ships without having to go all the way back. Apart from that, we added more content, more polish."
Ohhh, yes. I can't wait to see what this is like. Galactic ship-to-ship teleportation? How great. Now I feel like an actual commander rather than a Captain who runs a tugboat.

 

  • Added a Search and Rescue mission event

Interesting! I've had ideas of my own for Events that had this theme going for them. I'm excited to see in-game what that's all about.

 

  • Added an upgrade that increases pickup range of loot

YES! I've been meaning to explore the possibility of modding in a Loot Magnet... and now I don't have to. ;D

 

  • Stations now have upgrade slots

More great news! I've always found it slightly cumbersome that Stations don't benefit from the same accessibility to Shield Booster and Energy Production SMUs as Ships did.

 

  • Implemented passing of time for shipyards when they are loaded from disk

Ah, I wonder, does this address the bug report I made earlier?

 

Point Defense Chaingun (PDC)

Anti-Fighter Cannon (AFC)

Sweet, sweet. I hope now that the Invulnerable Fighters have somewhat of a decent counter. Eager to test in-game.

 

Torpedoes
I can't express enough how much this excites me. Torpedoes sound awesome. And, finally, some sort of ammunition system to balance in-game combat with. This is gonna be good.

 

One question: in the future, will we be able to design Torpedoes like we can Turrets in Torpedo Factories? I'd love to custom-design the destruction to enact upon my enemies, and outfit specialised ships with specialised torpedoes. Some ideas that come to mind:

  • EMP Torpedoes aimed at disabling ship systems like Engines and Hyperdrive;
  • ionised Torpedoes that are meant for taking down shields;
  • fast Torpedoes with very little damage but high travel speed and rate of fire;
  • nuclear warhead Torpedoes that are slow, deliberate, slightly inaccurate but deal a massive amount of AoE damage upon exploding;
  • laser-guided Torpedoes that are excellent at tracking fast-moving targets and adjusting their course mid-flight;
  • Subspace Rift Torpedoes that simply teleport to their target and 'splode. So, basically, bombs.

 

 

Turret Scaling

 

"Turrets now scale in size and slots, gaining more power and reach with every slot they use up. We've got a few special plans for more high-tier weaponry that will take up 5 slots and more. Stay tuned!"

Aw-hoho YYYESSS that sounds good. I love the idea of bulkier Turrets, and it only makes sense that they would take up more Turret Slots. Excellent!

 

 

Enemy Specialization
Oh, wowie! All of this sounds intense! I believe a lot of my installed mods are instantly broken, too, though. Hahaha I'm gonna need some time to play in the ballpark and recentre myself with all these changes.

 

 

  • Reduced price of reconstruction site setting by 50%

A strange change for me to highlight out of all the other cool-sounding changes, but thank you for this. Setting the reconstruction site previously seemed like such a high paywall for something that just improves the QoL of your game experience when death comes knocking.

 

Server

  • Added a config option to enable invincibility for player ships when players log out
    • This is only enabled for a ship when the player has been logged out for at least 30 seconds and the ship wasn't damaged in the last 30 seconds

Ah cool. This addresses some of the griefing concerns players have mentioned on PvP servers. Though I think more balancing and changes will be necessary on that front, in time.

 

Client & UI

  • Added dps, shots until overheating weapons for overheating weapons to tooltips

Heeeyyyy, now stop reading my posts and shamefully adding their content to the game without my prior consent! :P

 

  • Added multi-key (Ctrl-F, etc.) key assignments
  • Added hotkeys for fighter commands

It's like you're reading our prayers! Praise Boxelware!

 

Scripting API
Oh, wow. That's some changes that seem insignificant but may have some rampant implications. All mods that relied on sector.lua before will need to be looked at.(EDIT: derp thought sector.lua was server.lua - my bad.) That's the price of modding an Early Access game, I guess!

 

More callbacks and more documentation about callbacks is much, much appreciated. Thanks folks!

 

Bugfixes
JEEBUS THAT'S A LOT OF BUGS FIXED. Good going, you guys!!

 

Specifically,

  • [uBR] Fixed an issue where action music wasn't triggered for players in alliance ships

impresses me (of all things); my friend and I haven't heard combat music on our multiplayer server... basically ever. And we were starting to get a little sad about it. ;)

 

Maybe some of you will enjoy this video clip of my demise. :)

 

I did, thank you for this. ;D
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Love all of these changes. I do, however, have two pieces of feedback one major, one minor.

 

The minor piece of feedback, you said:

 

Ships of disbanded alliances can now be claimed by everybody

 

Which implies that the owner of such a ship can be everyone in the entire universe. What I believe you meant to say was anybody, which means that any singular person in that universe can be the owner, rather than the whole thing. Yes I know, it's very minor.

 

As for the bigger piece of feedback:

I feel like this update fails to address one of the fundamental issues with combat at the moment which is how scale is handled. As of current, a bigger ship is without fail always better for combat. I made a whole thread about it here:http://www.avorion.net/forum/index.php/topic,4528.0.html.

 

But, long story short, meaningful fleet combat and player-defined ship classes can't happen until there is a real benefit to having a host of smaller ships in your fleet. As long as larger ships are the basically-indestructable-though-hard-to-turn behemoths they currently are it will simply take far too many smaller ships to make any meaningful dent. This problem is far worse in PvP because larger ships also have the highest top speeds and as such can simply choose to disengage whenever. Whilst I understand that this update isn't the final definitive update for combat I do believe this is an issue that has to be fixed as quickly as possible. In a creative shipbuilding game there's nothing worse than creativity being useless in the face of bigger numbers.

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New pirate types to hunt the player down is all fine and dandy, but and this a big BUT...  Why In the universe would they even consider you a threat in the first place and where are they getting all the resources with zero infrastructure.. 

 

Please give a valid game reason for pirates to want to hunt the player down as I already feel like a convict on the run as it is with the present enemy spawning mechanics.

 

Frankly until enemies learn how to use the spacebar they are never going to catch me in the first place even In my starter drone.

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Guys, i love it! With the turret factory working well again making ships instead of carriers is fun again! I love the fact that you did all of this and you did it great for what i know! It took really long, but it was worth waiting for!

 

Keep up the good work and i really hope the second one is going to be as big as this one!

 

Can you however make us being able to choose how the turrets are going to look like? A size 3 turret is nice but if its really tall... its going to look hideous

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Frankly until enemies learn how to use the spacebar they are never going to catch me in the first place even In my starter drone.

 

Your drone can't outrun torpedoes!

 

 

 

I believe next update is supposed to let you design custom turrets!

 

I think he meant that you jump out of the sector, not boosting

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Frankly until enemies learn how to use the spacebar they are never going to catch me in the first place even In my starter drone.

 

Your drone can't outrun torpedoes!

 

 

 

I believe next update is supposed to let you design custom turrets!

 

I think he meant that you jump out of the sector, not boosting

 

In my experience so far, the hunter pirates will have a torpedo on your tail before you even get a chance to calculate a jump, even in your drone. :D

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Also, the Persecutors actually jump after you relentlessly and try to kill you every time you return to the Sector you died in. I've just experienced this yesterday. The Galaxy feels dangerous once more.

 

This update is fantastic. My friend and I have played it to death yesterday on our multiplayer server until the wee hours. The combat is so much more interesting now, Torpedoes are glorious, and enemies actually feel like they possess a sort of cunning and tactics. Great work, guys!

 

It's not completely bug-free, though. For one: damage numbers seem to have disappeared altogether, and some of the new enemies behave in silly ways sometimes. I found a shield-buster enemy (shield-breaking icon) just sitting there staring at me like I was some sort of effigy to their god or whatever. He was just sat there doing nothing, even as my friend and I tore his hull to shreds. I also seem to recall it had what looked to be Salvaging Lasers on it?? It may have been Repair Turrets, in which case, I understand that it wasn't attacking us with those. But then the question becomes: why did it chase after us an isolate itself from its peers who could have desperately used its repairing beams? :P

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New pirate types to hunt the player down is all fine and dandy, but and this a big BUT...  Why In the universe would they even consider you a threat in the first place and where are they getting all the resources with zero infrastructure.. 

 

Please give a valid game reason for pirates to want to hunt the player down as I already feel like a convict on the run as it is with the present enemy spawning mechanics.

 

Frankly until enemies learn how to use the spacebar they are never going to catch me in the first place even In my starter drone.

 

Welll, i'l try my best:

 

You're a lone spaceship (most of the time)

They are pirates, they want loot.

If they attack and kill you, there will be no faction to take revenge for your death (lore-wise, factions sadly dont take or try to take revenge). You are one (although most of the time overpowered) ship, they are with multiple.

 

Xsotan just hate everyone and sent groups to kill, although they dont know the map so will end out in random empty sectors with you...

 

about point defense: nice and well, but if i can kill the ship within 3 (or more if pilots are higherlevelled) seconds, i still dont loose a single fighter. Pls tell me true (so not random weapons with defend modus) AA guns dont trigger the dodge of a fighter.

 

 

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