Patch 0.8.2.0 Notes

Hey everybody, first of all: Happy New Year! We're starting the year with a new patch which aims at fixing a lot of the bugs recently introduced in patches 0.8.X as well as some quality-of-life improvements. Now that the new ship upgrades/loadout system is in place, we'll be moving towards the player/team statistics screen revamp, the battle reports and introducing the new skill rating/scoring/leaderboard system as well as tuning the economy and match progression. There's no precise ETA for the next patch, although we're aiming at releasing it some time around the end of the month.

After these new features have been implemented, the next big major tasks will be to develop the squad/fleet management systems and some overdue AI improvements (making AI fly in formation, assisting the player, improving the missions system..). As you can see, 2021 is going to be a busy year..



[h2]General and gameplay changes[/h2]

• Added mass to weapons and rebalanced ship's empty hull's mass to be lighter so that default loadouts do not weight more with the new weapons mass (resulting in the same ship's speeds and accelerations)
  
• Mass changes from loadout now affects rotation (turn) speed
  
• Added new upgrade: Spinner. Increases by +25% the rotation (turn) speed, at the cost of aiming precision and taking more time to compensate angular momentum when turning back
  
• Created a new default loadout for the Interceptor called "Hawk" which focuses on mobility (it has feather full, improved turbo boost and the spinner upgrade)
  
• AI now has a 25% chance to spawn an interceptor bot with the Hawk loadout
  

[h2]Ship upgrades / loadout screen fixes and improvements[/h2]

• Fixed incorrect loadouts when taking over an A.I. ship or sometimes for random custom loadouts
  
• Fixed warp entry's speed that wasn't affected by mass changes from custom loadouts
  
• Added a digit of precision to various ship's statistics in the loadout screen
  
• Changing a component category in the ship loadout screen now resets the component selection/filter in the 3D view (it was confusing that all hardpoints disappeared because the component selected was from the older category)
  
• Fixed repair rate statistic being incorrectly treated as a negative instead of a positive change in the ship screen
  
• The ship loadout's screen and deployment panel now remember the last selected loadout for a given ship class when switching the ship class (instead of resetting it to the main default loadout)
  

[h2]UI / HUD[/h2]

• Switching between internal and external camera mode with capital ships no longer changes the view orientation
  
• The camera view is now properly reset to being behind the ship when deploying a capital ship (previously it used the previous camera's orientation at the time of death)
  
• Reduced the size of the missile aiming lock circle (it was too large and was distracting)
  
• Fixed target info's hitpoints not being displayed on the HUD when it was below 1%
  
• Hit marker sound effects will now play even on low damage hits for consistency (sometimes it felt like you were not hitting the target at all, while in reality you did, but you were doing no damage to it..)
  
• "Low damage output" alert will now be displayed as a warning notification when the damage output of your current weapon isn't sufficient to deal significant damage to the target (ex.: interceptor machine gun trying to hit a capital ship's hull)
  
• Updated keybindings help screen (F9)
  
• Reduced brightness of keybindings help screen so that it doesn't glow
  
• Added a warning message when trying to activate the warp jam while it's still under cooldown
  
• Fixed HUD's weapons aiming dots smoothing, which wasn't working outside the screen boundaries and sometimes caused the dots to suddenly jump back into it at an incorrect position
  
• Added a gravity alert that triggers when propulsion's anti-gravity cannot compensate gravity anymore
  
• Fixed carrier deployment icon (now uses a "C" icon instead of an "L")
  

[h2]General bug fixes[/h2]

• Carrier hardpoint layout fixes (their orientation was messed up, causing some turrets or missile launchers to fire through the hull)
  
• Fixed static defenses on bases that weren't firing at incoming enemy targets
  
• Fixed ramp-up factor slowing down the ship when reverting momentum during flight/combat
  
• Fixed AMS lasers hitting a target through walls/assets
  
• Fixed AMS lasers hit consistency as the laser beam switches between hits & misses (sometimes after a miss it did not resume hitting properly despite the target being in the line of sight)
  
• Fixed a potential mutithreading crash bug on the server related to metal crates
  

[h2]Misc[/h2]

• German localization update (thanks to Playbenni)