I'm posting the weekly update a bit earlier than usual (see below).
The main thing I've been working on since launch is an update, currently available on the opt-in unstable branch, that addresses a number of minor QoL issues, plus two bigger areas:
The first is improved controller/deck support, particularly menu navigation. It's getting there, and players have generally said it's much better, but still a few areas that need work.
The second is addressing areas where players have gotten "stuck" with no obvious way to progress. While this is a game of exploration and discovery, in general players should not find themselves with no obvious way to progress the main story for very long. Because of the open-world nature of the game and many different play styles, sometimes players do or don't do things that I didn't anticipate. Sometimes these create situations where the player has no obvious course of action.
Based on the several dozen "stuck" saves I've received, I've identified and addressed about a dozen points where players needed a bit more guidance/direction. The root causes of these mostly fall into 3 categories:
[h2]Informational Goals[/h2]
During Early Access, when players got stuck, I'd add hint nodes to the mission system which would suggest, but not necessarily explicitly spell out, a course of action. And these seemed to overall fix the problem as those missions no longer were reported. Later, I added categories including "high priority actionables" to draw attention to main story critical goals. And this feature partly "unfixed" the previous hints as players learned that core story missions would be highlighted in bright yellow. So I'm going back and either upgrading these goals or adding additional goals to supplement them.
To a lesser extent, it's possible the addition of goal locations has made players assume that the lack of a goal location means there's nothing to do, even when they have only one mission with a yellow objective.
[h2]Uninvestigated Objects[/h2]
I suspect that sometimes players fail to investigate an object that they see, and then later forget that or where they saw it. Early in EA, players would leave planets uninvestigated and not notice the "!" unless they happened to be nearby. So I added the "highlight investigate" toggle to the map, which seems to have addressed this issue. But I've seen a few reports where players have either found flingers but never traversed them, or seen stars, but never flew over to see their planets.
Stars with undiscovered planets "glow" brighter on the map than stars whose systems have been explored. I'm pretty sure this has reduced cases of the latter, but as the map has gotten more crowded, there's possibly more of a chance of players missing them, so I've dimmed explored star systems a bit more.
I'm changing Flinger map behavior so "highlight investigate" will prominently mark any unexplored flingers with a "?" icon.
[h2]Newer Content[/h2]
This mainly applies to one particular late game mission
Strange Matter that was one of the last pieces of content added and no player happened to have reported this issue by launch:
if the player discovers the Collapsar region, but never gets close enough to the nearby Nebula to have the crew prompt a course of action.
[h2]Opt-in Beta[/h2]
There is now
a new build on the opt-in branch with these and other fixes. Hopefully some brave commanders will venture into this build so that future explorers will have a smoother path forward. See the note on save compatibility.
[h3]Kepler 17334 Notes:[/h3]
- Anomaly, character and item sprites are loaded as thumbnails at start, full images as needed. This speeds up application start up and first game load. It also substantially reduces the baseline memory footprint.
- Refactored Controller/Deck input system
- Improved controller inputs for many menus, UI screens
- Allow for rebinding Controller buttons
- Fixed Map HUD text scaling
- Show binding conflicts
- Controller glyphs in menus
- Controller close dev console with B
- Fixed Windowed-mode resolution being reset in options
- Fixed Fog of Exploration preference not being saved
- Fixed issue with ship max health not being recalculated after design revert (low health percent or even destruction on leaving Celaeno)
- Finally fixed "negative resource" trade bug
- Plasma autofire more strongly favors target lock
- Screenshot composer now uses current color swatch
- Fix for "screenshot composer" ship data being used in last save
- Changed artifact analysis sound in response to player complaints on pitch too high
- Default branch incorrectly logging extra analytics data
- Incorrect keybindings shown in some tutorial comments
- Unexplored Flingers display "?" if highlight investigate is enabled
- Boost brightness difference between explored and unexplored systems
- Early anomaly infinite Aluminum exploit
- If player doesn't research anything during the prologue, they will be prompted to return to Celaeno
- Fix for an anomaly Foreboding Planet in Kyrnan space could not be successfully completed if failed the first time.
- If the Aletheia travels too far from Celaeno, it will automatically be returned to the gateway
- Missing Diplomat more explicit derelict hint if player missed it
- More explicit hint if player doesn't purchase the Remnant Spike from the Kyrnan
- Clarified Nimion Ally mission wording to make it clear there are Kyrnan in other nearby systems
- If the player misses the Collapsar while exploring the Stalker region, Pirx will say something
- If the player doesn't enter the Heretic Portal activated by the Pyramid, a crew member will eventually set it as an objective.
- If the player unlocks, but does not research the Starlance Equation, Dr. Rama will politely remind them
- Added base Italian, Russian and Ukrainian machine learning translations
- Missing anomaly name localization in logs
- Missing Brazilian Portuguese icon
- Numerous typos
Finally, and sadly, a good friend passed away unexpectedly this week. I will be traveling Friday and Saturday for the funeral and will not be able to respond to players during that time. Thanks for your understanding and thanks for playing.
Until next week,
Kevin
