Deep Space Battle Simulator News

This update adds new laser impact effects for capital ships, you will now see if you hit a shield, or if you dealt damage to the hull. The droid patrolling system also got reworked, the droids now move around more naturally and don't get stuck in some corners or in hangars anymore.

There are also new keybinding options and improvements to the keybinding menu, as well as lots of minor improvements and bugfixes you can take a look at in the full changelog below.

Full changelog:

-ADDED: shield impact effect when shooting at a capital ship section that has its shields up
-ADDED: explosion impact effect when shooting at a capital ship section that has its shields down
-ADDED: keybinding options for smaller fighter left/right roll

-REWORKED: droid patrolling system, to prevent them from sometimes just standing in hangars doing nothing and instead cover the whole ship all the time

-IMPROVED: asteroid field collision detection
-IMPROVED: asteroid field GPU performance
-IMPROVED: keybinding menu layout

-FIXED: droids firing at friendly turrets
-FIXED: fighter sometimes instantly landing again when flying out of a hangar and hitting a hangar door
-FIXED: fixed players sometimes respawning in a box outside the map
-FIXED: B2 Attack droids sometimes spawning in the wrong ship
-FIXED: Pitch Up/Down keybindings not resetting correctly
-FIXED: no AI Tactical Droid spawning inside the frigates
-FIXED: potential issue that resulted in shuttles from the frigates spawning inside the capital ship interiors
-FIXED: capital ship flying through the planet
-FIXED: hangar doors hitbox being wrong
-FIXED: hangar doors shield not being visible from the outside
-FIXED: hangar doors not showing flames on the outside when falling below 50% health

This update adds active abilities to all classes, they have 30 to 60 seconds cooldown and can be used by pressing the key you assigned to "Active Abilities" (default: "R").

The Crew class can place a small sentry turret, that will shoot enemy players that get close to it.



The Engineer can place a teleporter, if he has two teleporters active, all players can travel between those two points. You can see teleporters on the map, and if they connect two points in the same ship, you can see where you are going to get teleported to if you look at the arrow on the teleporter.



The Marine (previously Ranger) can fire a small missile from his backpack, dealing great damage to whatever it hits, and decent damage to the surrounding area. Can be used to quickly blow up doors that are in lockdown mode.

The Pilot can spawn a drone that can be used for reconnaissance and comes with an energy beam that deals decent damage over close distances. It can self-destruct to deal decent damage to its surroundings.

The Officer class can now give their team orders like repairing generators or engines, killing enemy droids, destroying teleporters, manning turrets, or jumping in smaller fighters. If you use the ability, the map will open and you can click on the thing that you want to be taken care of. Once the order is followed, the Officer and the player that completed the order receive a resource point reward.

There are also some minor improvements and bugfixes like hangar doors not taking damage correctly, that you can take a look at in the full changelog below!

Full changelog:

-ADDED: new active ability system for each class
-ADDED: small sentry, placeable by Crew class
-ADDED: teleporter, placeable by Engineer class
-ADDED: small personal missile, useable by the Marine class
-ADDED: recon drone, useable by the Pilot class
-ADDED: new orders system that allows the Officer class to give orders to their teammates, both players receive a resource point reward if the order is completed
-ADDED: droids now can shoot teleporters and sentries
-ADDED: teleporters get shown on the map
-ADDED: sentries and teleporters now show their teams color

-NERFED: reduced sentry upgrade HP from 800 to 400
-NERFED: reduced sentry fire rate from 120 RPM to 90 RPM
-CHANGED: renamed "Ranger" class to "Marine"

-FIXED: sentry bugs that allowed the sentry to keep firing even when the generator of their ship was disabled
-FIXED: asteroid field always taking up server resources
-FIXED: bug that resulted in players appearing to sit inside turret control seats while they were not
-FIXED: rounds restarting when a player left and only 1 player remained
-FIXED: hangar doors not taking damage correctly
-FIXED: "Heavy Fighter" midround purchase not being greyed out when you did not have enough resource points

This update brings a big rework to hangars and smaller fighters, you will now have to fly out of the hangar instead of just spawning outside. The hangar gates will open automatically when you jump in a fighter, allowing you to see the battle outside. The gates will also close behind you, but enemy fighters might try to fly in while it's closing, so look out for that!



There is also a new upper floor from which you can access the new hangar control stations, which allow you to have an overview over the hangars, and toggle the hangar gates manually. The fighters now also have a reworked interior UI, replacing the texts for HP, shields, speed, and laser heat with progress bars.



There are also new asteroid fields with destroyable asteroids of different sizes, you can shoot them or destroy them by flying through them with your capital ship, which will result in heavy damage on the hulls that get hit.



Additional changes that were widely requested and made it into this update include a class selection menu in the pre-game selection UI, and the ability to force open lockdowned doors which will take 20 seconds per door, and only half of that if you are playing as Engineer.

There are also more minor additions, changes, and bug fixes that you can take a look at in the full changelog below.

Full changelog:
-ADDED: new hangar system that allows the hangar doors to open from both sides
-ADDED: hangar lever that manually controls the hangar doors
-ADDED: hangar doors automatically open/close when fighter starts flying/flies out
-ADDED: new upper-level corridors and hangar control stations (for testing purposes only on the "Epic" battlesize)
-ADDED: ability to force open enemy lockdowned doors (20s duration, 10s for engineers)
-ADDED: class selection to pre-game selection screen
-ADDED: asteroid fields, asteroids can be destroyed by lasers or by capital ships driving through (capital ships take a lot of damage if they do this)
-ADDED: option to disable the battle zone limitations
-ADDED: new upper floors to the capital ship vs capital ship battle size

-IMPROVED: overall performance slightly
-IMPROVED: made bridge/hangar screens smoother
-CHANGED: increased hangar door hack open cooldown from 120s to 180s
-CHANGED: collision system changes to increase CPU performance
-CHANGED: small fighter cockpit instruments
-CHANGED: increased battle limit size by 25%

-FIXED: blue small fighters looking like the old blue-yellow design instead of the newer blue-white design
-FIXED: repairing broken doors as engineer sometimes not working
-FIXED: capital ship lockdown affecting frigate doors
-FIXED: players and droids being able to walk through the hangar shields
-FIXED: being able to fly through closed hangar doors
-FIXED: players sometimes getting stuck when spawning on the frigate
-FIXED: some minor turret UI selection issues
-FIXED: multiple bugs regarding turrets
-FIXED: multiple hangar bugs
-FIXED: UI scaling issue introduced in the last beta update
-FIXED: lights being very bright on "Normal" battle size
-FIXED: multiple frigate respawn issues
-FIXED: multiple hangar bugs
-FIXED: UI scaling issue introduced in the last beta update
-FIXED: lights being very bright on "Normal" battle size
-FIXED: planets sometimes not being rendered if far away
-FIXED: red team fighters spawning issues
-FIXED: stuttering when flying capital ships through the asteroid field

This smaller update fixes a few bugs regarding turrets, especially the gauss cannon, adds a vsync option, and brings the first iteration of a work-in-progress ultrawide monitor support system, that focuses on the most important UI screens like the main menu for now and will be improved upon in future updates.

Full changelog:
-ADDED: V-Sync option
-ADDED: first WIP version of ultrawide support (for the most important menus)
-CHANGED: reduced gauss cannon explosion sound
-FIXED: gauss cannon shooting 2 projectiles when manually shooting
-FIXED: some smaller gauss cannon bugs
-FIXED: log spam when opening the energy control screen
-FIXED: frigate turrets not firing while friendly capital ships super laser was charging

This update adds the first version of the ping system, allowing players that are not using the voice chat to still communicate with their teammates quickly. You can do basic pings anywhere, and there are context-based pings for things like generators, keycards, and droids.



The newly introduced frigates are now also harder to invade for enemy players, which are now forced to go through the new vent systems of the frigate, triggering an intruder alert and killing intruders that are not careful enough.



There is also a new voting system, which you can use to change the AI difficulty, restart the round, or toggle between PVE/PVP without having to host a new server, which should make playing on dedicated servers a lot easier.

There are also bug fixes, most notably for missing and not properly resetting keybinds, as well as the usual adjustments and improvements, all noted in the full changelog below.

Full changelog:
-ADDED: the ability to start a vote to change AI difficulty on a server
-ADDED: current AI difficulty to the scoreboard
-ADDED: players that died on a frigate will now respawn on that frigate (to be able to fight vs intruders)
-ADDED: players that dock on an enemy frigate will now have to try to sneak in through the vent systems
-ADDED: vents that kill players and stop from time to time
-ADDED: vent intruder alarm system for frigates, giving the frigate crew enough time to prepare to fight an invader
-ADDED: basic ping system (help, moving here, attack, protect)
-ADDED: context-based ping system for things like generators, engines, droids, ... that also sends team chat text message
-ADDED: keybinding support for number keys, right control/alt/shift, arrow keys and more
-ADDED: votes to change the game mode to PVP or PVE and vote to restart the round
-ADDED: frigate AI now will fly back to their capital ship to get repairs done
-ADDED: some lights now fail if the generator is down

-IMPROVED: increased keycard respawn rates
-IMPROVED: removed red minimap icon color for teammates to avoid confusion
-IMPROVED: AI movement when trying to dodge the players super laser
-IMPROVED: keycard respawns, to make sure there is always one keycard of each color available in each ship at any time
-IMPROVED: AI frigate flying
-BUFFED: increased smaller fighter shield regeneration by 50%
-BUFFED: super laser now deals damage to everything in range, instead of only the first thing it hits
-BUFFED: increased frigate repairs while docked from 10% per minute to 20% per minute
-NERFED: Heavy Fighters and Bombers now get their rockets/bombs replenished over time in a hangar, instead of instantly
-NERFED: reduced Heavy Fighter rocket damage from 70 to 50
-NERFED: reduced Bomber mines amount from 8 to 6

-FIXED: minimap sometimes showing enemy ship interior while on your own ship
-FIXED: destroyed frigate explosions not disappearing correctly
-FIXED: Interceptor Drones not focusing enemy smaller fighters correctly
-FIXED: some fighter keybinding issues
-FIXED: player steam avatars sometimes not appearing on the scoreboard
-FIXED: gap in the wall in the cantina
-FIXED: sometimes being unable to dock frigate even though it was close enough to the capital ship
-FIXED: planets sometimes being invisible through the bridge window
-FIXED: potential fix for turret selection UI sometimes not appearing
-FIXED: parts of the fighter UI not being removed after exiting a fighter
-FIXED: multiple minimap bugs
-FIXED: "Reset Keybinds" not removing some of the existing binds
-FIXED: typo in the server browser
-FIXED: B1 droids not spawning correctly on epic battle size