SPL: Skilled Pilots Live News

Hey,
this is the last patch in the series of minor improvements and gameplay polish.

I will go silent for a bit now preparing the new content updates.

[h3]Balance changes[/h3]

• No heat generation using normal acceleration, only dash increases heat.
  
• Player ship rotation rotate increased - this will allow players to tail and out-maneuver the enemy ships more easily.
  
• Enemies will be easier to lock on and hit in high speed scenarios especially fly-byes
  

Hey there,

here's another batch of improvements. Thanks to the super useful feedback I'm getting from you lately the game is getting more and more polished, or rather less and less clunky and buggy :)

[h3]Visuals[/h3]

• The fog is no longer uniform, this finally gives the player the feeling of movement, when passing or dense patches of the nebula.
  
• Improved fog rendering.
  
• Added red light shafts coming out from the singularity, this adds a bit of color to the scenery.
  
• Added multi-colored skybox.
  
• Melter (green gun) glow has been greatly reduced .
  

[h3]Balance[/h3]

• Sentinel weapons (triangle potato guns) no longer drop, this weapon variant will be replaced later by a new one. Everyone found this weapon variant pretty useless.
  
• Hailgun heat cost has been reduced, projectile speed increased, rate of fire slightly increased.
  

[h3]Gameplay[/h3]

• More improvements to lock-on and auto-aim.
  
• Fuse has been reworked: It can combine exclusively either weapons or ship upgrades. The fused item level is averaged as before but also increased by ship's tech level. The fused item type will be random, one of the types provided in the fabricator. So if you fuse plasma weapon and death ray weapon, you will get either a random plasma or random death ray.
  

[h3]Bugfixes[/h3]

• Fixed a save corrupting bug where the game would crash if the player exited the game and entered it again more than 32 times. The corrupt saves will get auto-fixed once the game runs again.
  
• Fixed a game breaking bug where sometimes the enemies would escape to infinity (NaN km distance) and broke the players ability to use jump drive, effectively making them stuck.
  

Also made the Discord button more visible, it's been relocated to the main menu buttons.

Pew

[h3]Changes[/h3]

• The ship slightly rotates to help auto-aim make a lock-on - this should deal with most of situations where the player felt they should be in a position to shoot but it often never happened
  
• Improved AI behaviour when engaged with wingman - their movement should be much less erratic making them easier to lock-on
  
• Wingman lock on priority has been greatly reduced
  
• It's no longer possible to lock camera on a wingman
  

[h3]Changes[/h3]

• Pressing right analog stick now locks the camera at the target, pressing it again removes the lock
  
• Same functionality on keyboard by pressing left shift key
  
• Added a game setting where auto camera lock during shooting when using gamepad can be turned on/off
  
• Camera locks strongly guide the camera, however right analog input isn't completely locked out, so you can aim ahead of the enemy ship while the camera follows the target.
  

[h3]Bugfixes[/h3]

• Fixed a critical bug where the game would get stuck in a loop creating and destroying encounters which caused a massive FPS drop and soon after it - a crash (and a handful of refunds
• sob*)
  

A new feature was added to make dying less punishing and I would dare say more interesting:

[h3]New Feature[/h3]

• Whenever you die and loose all your non stashed items you gain Skull Tokens.
  
• The skull token gain is equivalent to the worth of the loot you lost.
  
• Skull tokens are an auto-use resource. They are consumed when enemy drops an item on death and upgrade this item's rarity. So if a Rare weapon was dropped it will be upgraded to Epic.
  
• The tokens amount consumed is related to the rarity upgraded, higher tier upgrades cost more.