Lord of Rigel News

Greetings Lords of Rigel,

This patch continues with our bug fixes and quality of life adjustments, including some from recent feedback.

This Patch:
• Hotkey for cycling between systems and colonies (default: Q, E)
• Hotkey for clearing event ticker. (default: X)
• Adjustments to the tax calculation system, changes only take effect now on turn.
• Reduced message spam for hostile fleet detection
• Adjustments to the autoexplore system to allow for multiple autoexploring player fleets at once.
• Volumetric clouds

We’ve made more progress on the auto ship design generator, but still in the works for EA 1 are two larger features:
• Loading and saving build queues: You can build a custom pre-made queue with known buildings. These queues are in their own save file and should be able to be shared between games and players! If you load a queue and there’s unresearched buildings those get filtered out.
• Auto ship design generator: With the optimizations done on ship designer we’ll be adding in an “auto” button to have the AI generate a design of your selected size class.
We are still hoping to hear back from you all on the default species color schemes, so suggestions and feedback are appreciated on what works and doesn’t work with the current species and their colors.

As for this week’s deep dive:

Planet skyboxes and volumetric clouds!

As we’ve been working through LoR’s EA1, we’ve been adding in graphical tweaks and adjustments such as the sharpness setting and tweaks to planet cloud shadows. The latest addition is a rework of some planet clouds to use volumetric effects. Volumetric effects use three dimensional and use materials that can be adjusted. Some planet types in LoR already heavily used volumetric effects, such as the Toxic and Swamp planets. Others, like Dead worlds, use a combination of volumetric particles for dust blowing effects along with the update volume cloud system. Finally, the background sky dome in each scene has its own material with a color scheme set to match with the system view and tactical appearances of each planet climate type.

Image 1. Terran Planet Cloud System

Image 2. Ringworld Cloud System

Image 3. Dead Planet Cloud System
Image 4. Dead Planet Dust Volume

Image 5. Ocean Skybox Material

Let us know what further changes you would like to see or if you have encountered any technical issues. Please post on the forums, reach out to us via Discord or send an email: [email protected] Saved games and clear steps to reproduce the bug are critical. It helps us more quickly track down the bug and get it fixed. Additional information on bug reporting tips can be found here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/437440/discussions/.


As always, we appreciate the feedback, conversations, and support from all of you!

Greetings Lords of Rigel,

We have two quality of life improvements this patch, along with more bug fixes and optimizations based on what you’ve reported.

This Patch:

• Range indicator in tactical: Weapons out of range of your target are marked in yellow. Destroyed weapon banks are marked in red.
• Filtering planetary shields in build queue.
• Adjustments to tutorial goals to make some of them more open ended.
Still in the works for EA1:
• Loading and saving build queues: You can build a custom pre-made queue with known buildings. These queues are in their own save file and should be able to be shared between games and players! If you load a queue and there’s unresearched buildings those get filtered out.
• Auto ship design generator: With the optimizations done on ship designer we’ll be adding in an “auto” button to have the AI generate a design of your selected size class.
Some other things we’ll be looking at will be default species color schemes, so suggestions and feedback are appreciated on what works and doesn’t work with the current species and their colors.

Additionally, this week we had some great feedback on suggested additional hotkeys. We’ll be working on implementing those over the coming patches. Again, more suggestions for actions for more hotkeys are appreciated!

As for this week’s deep dive:

Missiles!

Missiles in LoR are one of the main weapon types. You start the game with nuclear missiles and kinetic weapons which are direct fire or “beam” weapons. Missiles pack a punch, seek, but can be shot down by point defense and spoofed by ECM systems on a ship. Missiles also have limited ammo in combat, which is replenished at the end of a turn. There are a few linear upgrade warhead types: Nuclear, Fusion, Antimatter, and Singularity. Each type doing considerably more damage.

Missiles also have a number of special techs and modifications. Resolute guidance allows for missiles to track new targets after their primary target has been destroyed or has spoofed using ECM. Missiles can also have special modifications like MIRV (more damage from small warheads on impact), shields, heavy armor, and cloaking! Cloaked missiles are very hard to hit with point defense. There’s also combinations that can be done with techs and mods, such as tholon thrusters and FST missiles which make them much faster and able to penetrate PD quicker. ECCM and Adaptive Scanners on a ship can also be combined to break through the ECM of most ships. Emissions guidance (ENG) missiles will damage the engines of a ship once through armor, and can easily cause core breaches on ships making it one of the most powerful mods available. Better armor technologies and shield technologies increase the amount of damage missiles can take and how much damage is absorbed on a shielded missile, respectively. However, piling on too many mods can slow down refire rates, so think about using different sets of specialized missiles such as a volley of weaker FST nuclear missiles to take up point defense while specialized ENG missiles follow up.

Visually each missile technology type is color coded and matches the progression of bombs. Nuclear missiles are red, fusion are yellow-orange, antimatter are violet, and singularity light blue. Missiles have slight ambient lighting to improve visibility, and their engine glows are large for visibility so you can see their color and have a sense of how much damage is incoming.

Image 1. Fusion Missile Model

Image 2. Katraxi Point Defense

Image 3. Antimatter Warhead

Let us know what further changes you would like to see or if you have encountered any technical issues. Please post on the forums, reach out to us via Discord or send an email: [email protected] Saved games and clear steps to reproduce the bug are critical. It helps us more quickly track down the bug and get it fixed. Additional information on bug reporting tips can be found here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/437440/discussions/.


As always, we appreciate the feedback, conversations, and support from all of you!

• Ticket #1268 QOL – Fleet tracking events tuned for Yalkai
  
• Ticket #1344 Closing event ticker can cause camera panning fix
  
• Ticket #1459 Mind Control failure prompt fix
  
• Ticket #1458 Research complete and first contact on same turn results fix
  
• Ticket #1466 Explore button in tutorial fix
  
• Ticket #1467 Ship designer in build queue tutorial overlay update
  
• Ticket #1175 Added additional exit points in tutorial
  
• Ticket #1304 KEW tactical data fix
  
• Ticket #1468 QOL – Weapon out of range indicator in tactical
  
• Ticket #1469 System view Tutorial goals UI anchoring fix
  
• Ticket #1255 Outpost and colony objectives appear early fix
  
• Ticket #1470 Tutorial tooltips remain after existing tutorial fix
  
• Ticket #1462 Auto combat support ship retreat behavior fix
  
• Ticket #1473 Tutorial - cannot send outpost ship to Tianth fix
  
• Ticket #1460 Auto button not refreshing in build queue is empty fix
  
• Ticket #1481 Building scrapping behavior fix
  
• Ticket #1474 Tutorial - Camera movement behavior when fleet module opens after system view fix
  
• Ticket #1483 Housing buildings doubling on build slots fix
  
• Ticket #1176 Event ticker fix for detected ships
  
• Ticket #1477 Low fighter FPS in tactical fix
  
• Ticket #1476 Tactical unit selection optimization
  
• Ticket #1486 Build queue UI anchoring fix
  
• Ticket #1485 Pleasure dome not buildable fix
  

Notes:
Saved games from prior versions will not work.

Greetings Lords of Rigel,

This week has been more under the hood bug fixes and quality of life changes and optimizations but some of the major ones are:

This Patch:

• Empire, Fleets, Diplomacy, Planets, and Ship Designer menu optimizations and visual enhancements on the sort menus. Menus and filters should be faster for slower systems. There is also smart filtering added on categories. (ex. Filtering out asteroids when sorting by gravity or minerals in Planets menu)
• Tutorial menu anchor and render order fixes and adjustments to match with new menu features in New Game, Ship Designer, and Build Queue.
• Autoturn stop trigger adjustments- Turns off when hostile fleets are approaching your systems instead of detecting fleets in general

Still coming down the pipeline for EA1 are:

• Auto ship design generator: With the optimizations done on ship designer we’ll be adding in an “auto” button to have the AI generate a design of your selected size class.
• Loading and saving build queues: You’ll be able to select various buildings and items to set up a build queue order. Unavailable items will be filtered out. These queues will be tied to your user settings and should be able to be shared between games. Along with the existing auto construction tool this should provide a lot of control for automation for players

As for another deep dive this week:

Selach Ships!

The aquatic traders, the Selach, have been a fan favorite. Selach ships are meant to be sleek and aquatic, with flowing forms similar to marine mammals and fish. Their ships are large due to the size of the Selach but have smaller crews. The ships are also massive as they have open spaces containing seawater and have large engines to counter the mass. Selach starbases have radial symmetry and a central “fishbowl” with docking ports and utility arms that have the weaponry. The large docking areas also fit with their role as traders. The reactor cores are also typically at the base. Texture wise Selach ships have a slight water caustics styling, and this is also seen on their ground units like the hovertanks.

Selach ships also have a separate animated material for the fluid inside. There is a slight emissive glow and fluid flow animation. Finally, the smooth lines on their ships are visible in the normal maps and parallax occlusion maps that help details pop out more on their ships.

Image 1. Selach Cruiser

Image 2. Selach Starbase

Image 3. Selach Heavy Assault Vehicle (Hovertank)

Image 4. Selach Window Material

Image 5. Selach Frigate Normal and Parallax Occlusion Maps

Let us know what further changes you would like to see or if you have encountered any technical issues. Please post on the forums, reach out to us via Discord or send an email: [email protected] Saved games and clear steps to reproduce the bug are critical. It helps us more quickly track down the bug and get it fixed. Additional information on bug reporting tips can be found here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/437440/discussions/.


As always, we appreciate the feedback, conversations, and support from all of you!