Frontiers Reach News

This weekends update is the first of a series of updates that are being made to touch up the WARMAP. As such various tweaks and fixes have been made to it.



First and foremost is that the WARMAP refresh rate has been slowed down. It will now refresh every 6 seconds instead of every 3 seconds. To balance this out the Sol Confederacy AI has been modified to be a bit more aggressive on the WARMAP.

In addition each node now has a Strategic Value. These values will be changed in the future but what this means is that you will receive a small amount of salvage relative to total number of nodes held and the value that each node is worth. Right now Strategic value is only applicable to the player. This will eventually be propagated to the AI bots rolling dice over each node that if one side takes a node of strategic importance it will get a significant bump in its resource pool for fighting across the entire map.



Also, the WARMAP has been updated to refresh the mission selection menu when the defcon level changes.

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There are now 2 new scenarios available on the WARMAP.

TRAIN ASSAULT - Both independent and Confederacy held planetary nodes have a train track that supports a scenario where a train will enter the sector enroute to a location to delivery supplies or sensitive equipment. Your objective is intercept and destroy the train.

PROPAGANDA SATS - Both Independent and Republic held space nodes have propaganda satellites that are heavily armed and armored that play an audible message on loop. You're objective to search for and destroy them.

Last but not least this update brings a couple of small fixes.
- fixed a bug where some particle effects were blown out.
- fixed a bug that could stop the player from respawning.

If you haven't heard the news, Unity Software has recently announced that they will be implementing a per-installation fee to either developers or distributors after January 1st, 2024. This change in licensing prices was also executed with a changed to their Terms of Service which aims to enforce their pricing changes on Unity games launched in the past, and those that are currently in-dev.

While I have no issue with Unity Software wanting to generate more revenue in their streams, I do have an issue with the manner in which they have aimed to achieve this.

With a per-installation fee of the Unity Runtime, this means that I, or possibly Steam, will be charged every time a Unity game is installed on a new machine. And there has been some discussion that it will be every re-installation as well.

Unity has not exactly walked this back, and any attempt to get them to elaborate on this has yielded more questions.

Additionally, in order for Unity Software to determine the number of installations on a per-user/per-device instance, they will have to make tracking software of some kind an embedded part of the Unity Engine. They have also stated that developers will have no visibility into exactly how many installs Unity is tracking on their end. Meaning no website where developers can login to monitor the number of installs that are currently live.

In order to offset the coming changes and to encourage users to genuinely consider if they went to spend the money on the game I have gone ahead and raised the prices on all Blind Alien Productions end products to around 60 USD.

While it was my hope for BAP to keep it's titles in the 10 - 20 USD range, the coming changes to Unity's pricing plans have forced me to anticipate 2 possible scenarios :

1 ) Users installing one of our games on multiple devices means we will charged for each install on each device.

2 ) Unity miscalculating the number of tracked installs and sending a bill that is too high and not refunding the studio till a month or two later.

While I and other developers have enjoyed years of working with Unity, this move specifically and the manner in which it was executed has burned up a lot of trust. And if Unity Software actually moves forward with this pricing model these changes will be required to ensure that enough revenue is generated to cover the cost of multiple installs per user and miscalculations of fees.

It should be noted that future BAP games will be launched on a different engine in order to return to lower priced titles for our players.

- Added sound effects to the main menu UI.
- Added the ability to compare starfighters in the hangar.
- Added "Role" as descriptor in the starfighter information.
- Tweaks to numerous VFX.
- Reset the scroll boxes to their appropriate positions...again.
- Added an angle check and vocal warning to the the landing system.

- Modified UI elements for better visibility.
- Tweaks to cannon firing rates and overheat values.
- Added the option to switch between gun trailing and target leading aiming methods.
- Tweaks to Target trailing algorithms for better accuracy.
- Added boosters animation for take-off.
- Smoothed out landing sequence.
- Fixed some lighting issues on the hangar bay for missions 1-4.
- Fixed texture issues on some asteroid installations.
- Stability fixes for the main menu.
- Changed how throttle control works when using gamepad. This will affect how flying on planets with different gravity affects your craft.

Fixed some minor shader issues.