Infinity: Battlescape News

Hey everybody, here's a new intermediary patch focusing on balance changes and quality-of-life improvements. The next big item on our TODO list is revamping the navigation system (the "tunnel helper" showing up during warp) and generating waypoints for players and bots to navigate through the solar system. This is an important milestone that will eventually allow the AI to fly between points of interests, instead of warping in/out "magically" as it currently does. We will also introduce new tools available to players to set up a "flight plan", to better coordinate attacks and follow objectives. This will tie into the next big feature we'll be working on during summer: the squad/fleet system and VOIP.

-Flavien Brebion



[h2]Balance / gameplay changes[/h2]

• Railguns now consume energy in addition to normal ammo (Note: it was originally intended to be a hybrid kinetic/energy weapon, but due to lack of time the energy consumption couldn't make it into the previous patch)
  
• Added repair/resupply field to the carrier (Note: does not work on other capital ships, only light ships. The range and rate are slightly more efficient than the corvette's repair/resupply fields)
  
• Reduced base cost and mass of carrier to take into account repair/resupply fields (Note: the goal here was to get the same mass/cost than in the previous versions, repair/resupply fields included)
  
• Removed tech level requirement to mount a weapon or component on a ship (Note: this constraint was frustrating to some players. Tech levels are still in game but currently do not affect anything. If we keep this change, we're planning on introducing team abilities in the future that will be unlocked by the tech level)
  
• Multiplied by x5 the repair rate of weapons/turrets from repair fields (Note: a corvette repairing a capital ship's turrets was extremely slow. We're testing this multiplier to see if it works better)
  
• Significantly increased shield regen rate on all capital ships (Note: shields were regenerating at an extremely slow rate. With this change, regeneration is still relatively slow and will take many minutes to reach 100%, but it'll give a chance of getting back a bit of shields while the ship is in transit)
  
• Missile launchers on capital ships now have 12 missiles (from: 6)
  
• Torpedo launchers on capital ships now have 12 torpedoes (from: 3); torpedo damage is now set to 5000 (from: 3500) to be coherent with bomber's torpedoes (Note: the mismatching torpedo damage was likely a typo in the config file)
  
• Slight increase of AMS laser damage to 2 (from: 1) (Note: as cruisers now have more missiles and torpedoes, this will likely increase the spam on the battlefield, so AMS laser damage needs to be more powerful to counter them in time)
  
• Increased EMP missile damage to 350 (from: 100) (Note: EMP missiles were not dealing enough damage, giving no reason to favor them over kinetic missiles. This might also give a chance to deal some damage to capital ship's shields)
  
• Repair robot and repair crew now self-repair their ship up to a max HP % (50% for repair robot, 25% for repair crew) (Note: most players were confused by this ability. It will now behave as expected, but the amount of damage repaired is capped)
  
• Extra missiles upgrade now add +50% missiles (from: +33%)
  
• Extra missiles and torpedoes now only cost +5% mass (from +10% and +20%) (Note: +20% mass for some extra torpedoes was a bit extreme, especially on capital ships..)
  
• Light repair field repair rate increased to +6 HP/s (from +4 HP/s)
  
• Added repair robot parts upgrade, which increases the max repair HP to 100% (from 50%). This requires the repair robot upgrade
  

[h2]Battle reports / ratings[/h2]

We revamped the scoring and rating system for battle reports and statistics. The previous system emphasized team performance, which caused frustration if you were joining a lost battle (in which case you'd lose rating points even if you did well in battle). The new scoring system should be more fair, giving a chance for players performing well to earn points even if they lost the battle. Another major change is the normalization of the scoring calculations. In the previous versions, the score was calculated by weighting in the kill count, assists, deaths, damage and repair/resupply dealt. Kills in particular were all identical: a destroyer killing a dozen interceptors counted as 12 points, while a cruiser killing a cruiser only counted as 1 point. The new system better takes into account ship classes into account, and a capital ship destroying another capital ship will bring more points than, say, an interceptor killing another interceptor. Another problem was that the old formula was too weighted towards damage, which naturally favored capital ships play. The new formula still takes damage into account, but the weighting is lower, giving a chance for light crafts to earn as many points as capital ship players.

The new rating formula is no longer based on the difference between team ratings, but on the individual score performance during the battle, to which a bonus/malus of +15/-15 is added based on the battle result. This means that the best players on the winning team should earn the most, while bad players can potentially lose some rating points, even if they were on the winning team. In the same way, the best players on the losing team can still get a positive rating if they performed well. Let us know in the comments if you think the rating system is going in the right direction or if you feel there are still some major issues to address.

[h2]Quality-of-life improvements[/h2]

• Fixed no chaff left message on capital ship, now explicitely tells that chaffs aren't available
  
• Added half-cruiser ship wreckage upon explosion (note: this is a cruiser-specific debris, instead of the generic debris introduced in the previous patch)
  
• Ships that dock & refund do not generate a kill or griefing notification/increase kill stats upon ships that had fired at them anymore
  
• Tweaks to ship loadout screen: rank requirements and costs are now displayed even if already in game (not just on spawn)
  
• Revamped coloring rules for weapon/component cards to be more consistent: blue=available, green=already mounted, orange=max reached but mountable, red=unavailable (rank requirement, not enough credits etc..)
  
• Weapon/component cards and info panel now show the rank requirement level and icon
  
• The take-over-AI confirmation dialog will now popup from the mission screen upon clicking on the deploy button for a given mission
  
• Repair robot/crew now displays the "repair in progress" alert on the HUD
  
• Added lights to the new station's modules
  

[h2]Bug fixes[/h2]

• Fixed dock & refund option not available to carriers
  
• Fixed eject button not being properly grayed-out while dying/ejecting
  
• Fixed a bug that caused the asteroid-processing facility (Perseus Stn) to mess up the background halo size on the starmap, making the whole starmap covered by a single color
  
• Fixed corvette missile hardpoints firing upwards instead of frontwards
  

Greetings everybody. We apologize for the delay in releasing this new patch. Production has been going slower than anticipated due to a combination of technical factors (we had to change our certification company, we cleaned up project organization and assets for the first time in years, etc..) and new game features (the new sub-targetting system is now in, and allows you to target structural modules on bases or hardpoints). We also reworked the engine's texture compression, which should lead to an increase of textures quality (no more blocky compression artifacts up close) and saving up VRAM usage.

On the content side, this patch introduces new military ranks, 6 new space stations and 3 new weapons. The flaks were also reworked to be more effective and a new pass has been made on the starmap (yep, again..) to make it interactive (you can now click on icons to select a target instead of having to scroll in the targets panel) and make the camera behavior more intuitive. As this patch has a lot of new content and features, expect new bugs and issues to get addressed in a future patch (this time sooner!) and let us know in the comments section or forums your feedback. Also note that a community event is planned in a few hours this Saturday. See you in game,

-Flavien Brebion



[h2]General / Gameplay[/h2]

• Added 6 new space stations: 2 large ones (including a remake of the Kickstarter's Skycrane 35-Km-sized station), 1 medium one (an asteroid processing space factory) and 3 small ones (outposts with no capital ships docks)
  
• New light weapon: the railgun. Available on small crafts (MK1/M2 hardpoints), the railgun is a fixed non-converging weapon with a blind zone at short range. It deals a lot of damage but has a low firing rate. The electromagnetic launcher allows very high projectile speeds (3 Km/s, double the typical gun) with no spread and little heat generation at the cost of extra mass, making your ship less maneuverable. The lack of gimbals makes and the low firing rate makes the railgun a powerful but specialized weapon
  
• New turret weapon: the railgun turret. This heavy MK4 variant can be mounted on capital ships for point defense. It retains most of the advantages of the light variant, but has a low turret tracking rotation speed and a higher spread
  
• New missile launcher: EMP missiles. When these missiles detonate they generate an energetic blast (causing splash damage in a radius of 500m) causing 100 damage to shields and energy reserves
  
• Added 2 new default loadouts, one for an interceptor with railguns and an EMP missile launcher; the other one for a railgun-mounted destroyer
  
• Implemented docking mechanics to refund/change ship when standing inside a hangar/bay. This can be done through the system menu (escape key) or via the deploy panel in the starmap. This features requires your ship to be fully repaired and not be under fire. Full credits will be refunded
  
• Introduced 10+ new military ranks (new low-level officer ranks and new high-level admiral ranks)
  

[h2]Targetting System[/h2]

• Added the new sub-targetting system, allowing to target an individual structural module or a hardpoint on a ship or a base
  
• A structural module (on a base, for example) can be targetted via the select-target under cursor key (default: T)
  
• New input events and keybindings are now available to target a sub-system or a hardpoint on the current target (if there are no targets, these keys do nothing). The defaults are alt-T to select the sub-target under the cursor, alt-Y and alt-U to cycle through the previous/next sub-target respectively
  
• A new input event was also added to select the nearest ally (default: alt-G)
  
• When a sub-system or hardpoint is targetted, a red square will appear on the current target. The lead reticle and distance indicators will use it as the point of reference
  
• Modified the behavior of the unselect-target key (default: backspace) to go back to the parent actor if a module or hardpoint had been targetted
  
• Note that the AI currently does not make use of this feature, but this will be a point of focus of an upcoming patch
  

[h2]Balance[/h2]

• Revamped explosions splash damage/radius curve: the old curve was so abrupt that it almost never generated splash damage from missiles. The new curve should generate more splash damage from detonating missiles and be a bit more dangerous to being close to a dying capital ship
  
• Doubled repair rate of capital ships when docked at spawns. Also slightly increased shields regen rate
  
• Repair/resupplying (from a corvette aura or inside a hangar/bay) now gets interrupted for 10 seconds after firing weapons (so you need to wait 10s without firing your weapons before you start getting repaired/resupplied)
  
• Rebalanced Flak canons: they now fire in burst with a cooldown (DPS is similar to what it was before) and have a higher projectile velocity, at the cost of splash radius. This should make them more effective against light crafts
  
• Tweaked warp speed limit to take into account custom loadout mass changes (this should make it easier for a heavy cruiser to navigate in warp)
  

[h2]HUD[/h2]

• Added an alert message on the HUD when your ship is standing in the wrong hangar/bay type and repair/resupply/docking isn't available
  
• Target/throttle speed is now represented as a filled arrow on the HUD's speed'o'meter
  
• Speed'o'meter background color is now darker for speeds above the speed cap, making it easier to see what the cap is
  
• Fixed some layout issues with match score and ranks in the main menu or the ship menu (sometimes the font size was too large and text was clipped)
  
• Hit feedback icon will now blink and play the ding sound even upon dealing low damage (this was sometimes confusing, as you thought you didn't hit the target)
  
• Fixed interceptor scanner not matching the HUD's transparency during power fluctuations
  
• Added a "reset MFD" button in the general options to reset the MFD layout of a given ship
  

[h2]Deployment Panel[/h2]

• Revamped deployment buttons to be more coherent. In the mission map, the deploy button will now properly match the selected mission's objective (if it's an allied based) or the starmap's selected base
  
• Deployment buttons from the deployment panel now have better titles to reflect the behavior of the button (you'll now know if you're taking over an A.I., or spawning at a carrier..)
  
• Added a warning when you're about to take over an A.I., with a confirmation dialog
  

[h2]Leaderboard Screen[/h2]

• Fixed incorrect centering of report screen in ultra-wide resolutions
  
• Fixed player's stats going over a billion on report screen
  
• Fixed player's ships damage stats in report screen not taking armor points reduction into account
  
• Fixed leaderboard caching issues when switching to a different server
  
• Leaderboard panel now remembers previously selected options after changing to another menu tab
  

[h2]Tab Menus (Starmap, Mission, Loadouts..)[/h2]

• Merged star map and mission map view/camera. This should be less confusing, as previously each screen had its own independent camera position/orientation
  
• Default star map view will now center on the current Battlescape (=Rethe Prime at the moment)
  
• Arrow leading to mission area will no longer be displayed before you haven't spawned yet (a 'ghost' arrow was displayed from the center of the map)
  
• Changing the selected mission will no longer change the selected target to be the mission objective's in the star map list
  
• Improvements to starmap's camera: it will now stay at the same elevation above the grid plane, making it easier to move around when the view is rotated
  
• Starmap (/and mission map, as they've been merged) is now interactive. It is possible to click on an icon (either a target or a mission) to select it and center the camera on it
  
• Double-clicking on an icon will now focus the camera on it and also automatically zoom around it
  
• View-reset key (default: double tap left-ctrl) now resets the camera to focus on a target
  
• Select-target key (default: T) can now be used on the starmap to select a target
  
• R/F keys can now be used on the starmap to zoom in/out on the selected target
  
• Mouse wheel will now zoom in/out at the cursor location (so not necessarily on the screen center) which allows to zoom on a location of the starmap and panning the camera at the same time
  
• The grid plane is now automatically set on the selected target (previously, it stays on the reference actor, which had to be manually set, and was usually forgotten)
  
• Revamped the floating/3D texture size around actors in the starmap's viewport to be more coherent with the target size
  
• The selected target's name in the viewport is now highlighted in yellow, like in the actors list panel UI
  
• The selection sound is now played when changing the selected target or mission on the starmap
  
• The ship menu will now show the available system/weapons upgrades even while in-game and not just during spawn. By default, the game only displays the systems currently mounted on your ship
  
• Added failure sound when trying to fit a component/weapon on a ship layout while in game (loadouts can only be edited on spawn);
  

[h2]Technical[/h2]

• Revamped texture compression to support grayscale, BC5, BC6 and BC7 formats. Without being too technical, these newer compression formats allow the game to reduce VRAM usage while increasing textures quality at the same time (you'll see less blocky compression artifacts when being close to a texture).
  Internal tests show a reduction of about 1 to 1.5 GB of VRAM in high/extreme quality settings, or about 10-15%. There might be some light performance increases on VRAM or bandwidth-starved video cards.
  
• Updated FMOD API to latest version
  
• "Default" loadout name text can now be localized in the strings table
  
• Fixed "GenericAction" missing sound from log files
  

[h2]Bug fixes[/h2]

• Fixed a major client crash/memory corruption issues due to incorrectly calculating a compressed texture's storage requirements for non-power-of-2 textures
  
• Fixed capital ships control scheme not working after being changed on-the-fly in the options menu
  
• Fixed camera view instantly jumping around when changing control scheme to capital ship on-the-fly in the options menu
  
• Fix for particle child emitters that stopped to work after a few seconds (child emitter's data was not properly reset after a particle gets recycled from the pool). This caused some hierarhical particle effects to look wrong
  

[h2]GFX[/h2]

• Fixed various assets related to cleanup of project
  
• Tweaks to 'space dust' effect, to make it more noticeable and better take into account the environmental density (aka. no space dust in deep space but more dust in rings!)
  
• Fixed shrapnel effect quality when dying: the shrapnel debris will no longer get ejected at crazy speeds near your ship when dying
  
• Added a new slider to control the space/skybox background's brightness in the graphical options
  
• Added major ship debris/junk for exploding capital ships. More specialized, larger pieces are also in the workds for a future patch; These debris last 5 minutes on the battlefield before fading off. They can even be collided against or destroyed by firing at them
  
• Weapons on light crafts will now better synchronize their firing timing (previously, the left/right guns for ex. on an interceptor could be staggered)
  
• Revamped visual effect for: ship explosions, counter-measures/chaffs (they should now be more visible), warp-jam, impacts/sparks, smoke, shrapnel (red glow is less noticeable)
  
• Updated glowing material for surface destruction, to make the UV tiling/repetition patterns less noticeable
  
• Fixed flak canons mesh size
  
• Doubled projectiles brightness, to make them more easily noticeable against busy backgrounds
  

Another DevStream and Gameplay event.
We'll start by streaming the latest build of the game, and then join the community discord for some casual PvE or PvP gameplay.

Check our official Discord channel for in game communication.
We'll be playing on the USEast#1 Server for this event.

[h2]Event Details[/h2]
Saturday, June 26th 2021 : DevStream & Community Event
19:00 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)

[h2]Event Schedule[/h2]

• Cover the latest Patch Notes & check in on the state of development with Flavien Brebion
  
• Gameplay, PvP, PvE, & Co-operative play
  

See you in game!

Greetings everybody ! This is a major new patch introducing the new player progression mechanics, a new team screen including stats with a new leaderboard, and battle reports. A lot of the changes are experimental and will need further refining/tuning, so as usual feedback is welcome.

We've also shifted the economy to work passively (credits get distributed regularly by the AI commander, instead of having to grind them actively in game) which should improve the strategical depth to the game and give more importance to attacking or protecting haulers.

We're introducing the concept of research & development, under the form of science points that get researched at military facilities, finally giving them a strategical purpose. As your team accumulates research points, it unlocks new tech levels which unlock weapons and ship upgrades.

For the individual player progression, we introduced the concept experience points (XP) which are used to get promoted to a higher your military rank, also unlocking certain weapons and upgrades. XP and rank only ever goes up and can never be lost, and unlike credits, is persistent accross matches. Finally, we've introduced the concept of team rating (TR) which measures your individual performance and how much you're contributing to your faction's war efforts. You can earn or lose rating points after succeeding or failing a battle/mission, and the calculation is similar to a chess ELO-like system, taking into account the team ratings and participation of your opponents. At the moment, we've decided against locking ships, weapons or upgrades to your rating, as it'd prevent players with a lower skill level to access some of the content. We're currently thinking of tying the rating to special cosmetics and maybe some special social roles, like the team commander, but if you have more ideas do not hesitate to let us know. Team rating is also persistent accross matches.

Next patch we'll continue on iterating/adjusting the new progression mechanics, while doing a new pass over the weapons systems, rebalancing them, and finally introducing sub-systems targetting.



[h2]Progression system[/h2]

• Implemented match progression: military rank, xp and team rating
  
• You now get XP instead of credits for killing enemy ships, and for participating to battles/missions
  
• Once XP reaches a threshold it will level-up your military rank. There are 10 ranks total at the moment, with increasing XP thresholds
  
• XP only ever goes up, you cannot lose XP even if you fail at missions or get killed
  
• Some weapons or upgrades are locked in by military rank. It is still possible to edit the loadouts, but you won't be able to spawn them without meeting their requirements
  
• Team rating (TR) starts at 1500 and utilizes a chess ELO-like system, which measures your skill level and how you win or lose with your faction
  
• You earn or lose TR points based on your achievements and statistics in a battle/mission, once a battle report pops up
  
• Your TR is compared against the enemy team's, in a complex formula that includes the average opponent's rating points and the initial victory odds
  
• So if you were favored to win and actually won, you'll gain less points than winning when you were favored to lose, and vice-versa in case of defeat
  
• TR gains or losses are weighted by your participation points, which measure the amounts of activity (no matter if you performance well or bad) during the mission
  
• Implemented team tech level and R&D which generate 'science points' at military facilities, which level up the team's tech level automatically
  
• There is no individual player tech level, the tech level is shared by all members of the team
  
• Some weapons or upgrades are locked in by team's tech level like the military rank
  
• Tech level starts at 1 at the match's start and goes up to 5 after a few hours, assuming military facilities haven't been destroyed
  
• XP, military rank and team rating are persistent accross matches (but not servers)
  
• The tech level is not persistent and will reset after the match ends
  

[h2]Team statistics screen[/h2]

• Revamped the team menu tab, now called 'Stats', to show the player leaderboard and the current team's / match statistics
  
• There is now a leaderboard panel at the center which shows players either online or offline, irrespective of their current team (all mixed up)
  
• Each entry in the leaderboard shows the player's rating rank (sorted by descending rating score), military rank/player name, kills/assists/death match stats, and time online (if the player is currently offline, it'll show the last time this player connected on this server)
  
• There are filter options to show all players (from the past 30 days), players that participated in the current match, or players currently online only
  
• The leaderboard should now properly show players logging in/out (previously: some caching bugs sometimes caused some players to be invisible to new players)
  
• Each team now has a dedicated panel showing various stats, such as match score, number of players per team, average team rating, credits income/amounts, science research points/tech level and ships losses/amounts. There's also an asset panel showing the amount of ships and bases for that team currently owned (or detected, if belonging to the enemy) in game
  
• Implemented match statistics, which are sent to the client when he joins a server, then gets updated every minute. They are displayed as a graph at the bottom of the team panel. Different statistics/graphs can be toggled on or off (note: this still needs a polish pass, changing colors if there are many graphs, showing the axis names/range etc..)
  

[h2]Battle reports[/h2]

• Implemented battle/mission reports that pop up a statistic screen at the end of a battle
  
• The battle report automatically opens up only when you enter the in-game menus (default key: TAB)
  
• The report shows rating changes (gain or loss), participation ratio, mission score and XP gained
  
• Your mission score is calculated from your statistics during the mission: how many ships you killed, how you died, how much damage you made to enemy ships or structures, or how much you assisted your team like via repairs/resupplies
  
• The center of the panel cycles every 10 seconds between 2 tabs: the first one shows the podium for the top 3 players and their mission scores. The second one shows the top 8 players, you included, with the score ranking and various statistics
  
• The bottom of the panel also shows a bunch of toggle-able graphs showing your statistics over the battle/mission duration. If you did not participate during some time, some gaps in the graphs might appear
  
• When you close ('Dismiss') the report, the leaderboard will temporarily open to show your change of rating before/after the mission or battle
  
• Note that closed reports currently are not stored and cannot be re-opened later on, so if you're interested in your stats, do not close the panel too quickly
  

[h2]Economy[/h2]

• Rebalanced the economy towards a more passive credits income system
  
• Credits still get redistributed to players over time, every minute. Target is 25 credits/minute per player
  
• Credits still get generated at space stations after a hauler travelled there from a factory
  
• Credits cannot be earned from killing normal ships or destroying base structures anymore
  
• Credits can still be earned 'actively' by targetting ships with bounties placed on by your team commander
  
• Tweaked haulers income: each hauler now has a much higer resource load (x2 to x3 compared to before)
  

[h2]Weapons[/h2]

• Fixed an issue that caused slight irregular fire frequencies when firing a weapon
  
• Burst firing will no longer resume at previous burst count after being interrupted. A new burst will properly start after some short cooldown
  
• Fixed the torpedo launcher that had a mass of zero. It now has a mass of 2 tons
  

[h2]Mouse cursor sensitivity[/h2]

Note: it is possible that the sensitivity settings have changed since the previous versions if you've customized them. If so, you might need to re-check and adapt your settings again

• Fixed sensitivity settings: mouse cursor now takes into account windows settings (mouse speed, window DPI)
  
• Made coherent the range of sensitivity sliders in the options men
  
• Changing a sensitivity slider is now applied instantly instead of having to apply & close the options menu
  

[h2]New control scheme[/h2]

• Added a new control scheme: 'auto-recentering'
  
• It works like in other space games: you still have a cursor whose relative position on screen controls where and how fast you turn, but this cursor is hidden by default (there is an option to make it visible)
  
• This cursor automatically moves back towards the screen center after a delay where you don't move it. This delay can be changed with a slider in the options menu
  
• The speed at which the cursor moves back can also be changed through a slider in the options menu
  
• This control scehem should feel more natural than the 'direct mode' for the mouse, like you're in better control of the orientation of your ship, so mouse users that do not like the default virtual cursor control scheme and do not find the direct mode to work well, could give this one a try
  

[h2]General bug fixes and improvements[/h2]

• Fixed HDR/IBL generation bug that made the whole screen turn white for a long time in certain conditions
  
• Fixed server browser ping in the 100-200 ms range being displayed in red/bad instead of yellow/average
  
• Fixed a rare bug with credits initially showing as zero on the client upon joining a match, despite the player having more than zero credits on the server
  
• Players can now change their call sign/name in game (previously, the change was only applied on joining a server)
  
• Fixed drop shadows not appearing correctly below some icons (ex.: team icons at the top of the menu tab had a black square background instead of a drop shadow)
  
• Fixed a UI bug that could cause a crash if a panel was being refreshed/rebuilt while scrolling its content
  

Join us for some PvP action and gameplay.
A patch is planned for later in the week, which will give us new things to talk about on stream prior to some casual / competitive gameplay.

Check our official Discord channel for in game communication.
We'll be playing on the USEast#1 Server for this event.

[h2]Event Details[/h2]
Saturday, Feb 27th 2021 : DevStream & Community Event
20:00 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)

[h2]Event Schedule[/h2]

• Cover the latest Patch Notes & check in on the state of development with Flavien Brebion
  
• Gameplay, PvP, PvE, & Co-operative play
  

See you in game!