Cosmoteer: Starship Architect & Commander News

[h2]STARDATE 2023.10.23[/h2]

Exactly one Earth-year ago (that's 365 Earth-days ago for you non-Earthlings), Cosmoteer launched in Early Access on Steam!

Cosmoteer has been a huge success, and I want to take this moment to thank all of you for supporting Cosmoteer over this past year. So here's a brief video message from me to you:
https://youtu.be/AXJA8Vasrgs

A year ago feels like yesterday, and yet so much has happened in the Cosmoverse! Like you, I wish that development of big new features had been able to start sooner and progress faster, and yet I'm still proud of the many accomplishments our little team has pulled off so far! Let's take a brief look back at some of the many improvements made to Cosmoteer this past year:

• Hundreds of bugs fixed (too many to count!), including crashes, multiplayer desyncs, and various gameplay bugs. (Please keep reporting all the bugs you run into! The #1 way to get a bug fixed is to report it, ideally with a saved game that demonstrates the bug.)
  
  
• Hundreds of quality-of-life improvements, like ship-wide resource limits and building new ships from scratch in Career mode.
  
  
• A couple hundred new built-in ships (219 if my count is correct) across all four factions.
  
  
• Major improvements to performance and multiplayer connection reliability. Although there's still plenty of room for improvement, the performance of late-game Career mode has been greatly improved over the past year. And multiplayer connections are also much more reliable and less likely to disconnect than they were at launch.
  
  
• Over a dozen new ship parts, including the Chaingun, the Resource Collector, the Hyper-Jump Beacon, and a handful of aesthetic-focused parts such as roof lights and armor/structure hybrids.
  
  
• Improvements to the non-English language translations, including a complete re-translation of Simplified Chinese.
  
  
• "Crew Construction", a major new game mechanic where crew perform all ship construction and repairs by manually delivering resources and zapping ship parts into existence. This creates a more immersive experience and allows for more creative and emergent strategies.
  

And the best is yet to come! I'm excited to announce that work on "Career 2.0" is now fully underway, which we are actually planning to split into *two* big updates:

• "Career 2.0": This first update will focus on creating a much greater variety of content, including many new types of misions and new types of environments such as black holes and nebulas that will affect how you design and play. We're hoping to release this update early-ish next year (2024).
  
  
• "Career 2.5": This update will focus on faction-vs-faction conflicts, allowing you to enlist with a faction and help them conquer the galaxy. (We're also of course thinking about letting you create your own faction, though we can't promise support for that in 2.5 at this time.) We're hoping this update will launch a few months after Career 2.0.
  

I'm *also* excited to announce that we're simultaneously working on a new PvP multiplayer mode, tentatively called "Build & Battle". Played over several rounds, competitors build or upgrade their ship using a randomly limited selection of parts and then battle against the other players. We're expecting to launch this mode *before* Career 2.0, hopefully before the end of the year!

Peering further into the future beyond Career 2.0/2.5, you can look forward to awesome new features like drone/fighter carriers, crew boarding, transforming ships, and a variety of additional new weapons and other ship parts. You can read about much of that on the roadmap.

Thank you again for supporting Cosmoteer. Without your support, Cosmoteer's future wouldn't be nearly so bright.

Over and out,
Walt

Cosmoteer release candidate 0.24.1 is now available for testing! (To play this release candidate, you must opt in to test it. Please see this post for info on how to test release candidates.)

This release candidate has a variety of bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements.

Thanks for testing!

RC1:

• Added 3 new Monolith ships: Broadsword, Conciliator, and Intercessor.
  
• Added 3 new Fringe ships: Can Opener, Graverobber, and Unclassified Misdemeanor.
  
• Added 1 new Cabal ship: Luminary.
  
• A handful of other miscellaneous ship updates.
  
• Increased Mining Laser range from 100 to 150.
  
• Ships will now "lock in" their final rotation when they get close enough to their intended destination to automatically switch to strafe mode. This should reduce issues that some ships have when trying to stop at their final destination.
  
• Updated the Hyper-Coil graphics to better stand out from regular Coils.
  
• Fires can now spread to all tiles on the Chaingun.
  
• Fires will now be rendered above the bullets in the Chaingun Magazine.
  
• The Battle Helper in Creative Mode now shows the total cost and crew for each team with more than one ship.
  
• Holding the Shift key when clicking Load Game will now bypass the confirmation popup.
  
• Double-clicking an Airlock now selects all Airlocks on the ship regardless of their rotation.
  
• Changed the default hotkey for "Launch Mines" from N to Ctrl+N to prevent it from conflicting with the hailing hotkey.
  
• Changed the "Restrict Shape Mode" hotkey from Ctrl to Slash to prevent it from conflicting with other hotkeys.
  
• The "Cancel Hyper-Jump" hotkey has been removed by default to prevent it from conflicting with other hotkeys. (It can still be manually added.)
  
• The Fire Extinguisher tooltip and tutorial now mention that they have limited capacity.
  
• Bugfix: Possible fix for multiplayer desyncs caused by making in-system hyper-jumps.
  
• Bugfix: Possible fix for some other random-seeming multiplayer desyncs in Career mode.
  
• Bugfix: If station (or trade ship) crew ran low on oxygen while carrying resources as part of a trade, this could cause the crew to "steal" those resources and prevent the player from getting paid or given mission credit for those resources.
  
• Bugfix: Trade ships whose resources had been purchased by the player but not yet delivered or in transit (usually because construction isn't ready to begin yet) were able to fly off before delivering those resources. This could cause construction to fail to complete.
  
• Bugfix: Extreme lag spikes in Career mode caused by loading nearby NPC ships.
  
• Bugfix: Penetration damage wasn't being correctly calculated versus certain types of ship parts, resulting in less damage than was intended.
  
• Bugfix: Mines targeted on junk or asteroids were not detonating in proximity to enemies.
  
• Bugfix: Exploding ship parts such as reactors wouldn't damage nearby ships if the destruction of that part caused its own ship to become junk.
  
• Bugfix: When crew construction was disabled, sometimes an insufficient number of resources would get consumed if some of those resources were being held in storages that were being deconstructed.
  
• Bugfix: Crew and resource assignments could break when copy/pasting parts while rotating or flipping them and the destination part wasn't rotatable or flippable.
  
• Bugfix: It was possible to enable "I Hate Salvaging" without having "I Hate Crew Construction" enabled by disabling "I Hate Crew Construction" after enabling "I Hate Salvaging".
  
• Bugfix: In the multiplayer pre-game setup screen, switching game modes could cause observers to appear to become non-observers on non-host computers.
  
• Bugfix: Hotkey conflicts weren't being properly detected in all cases for part abilities that were shown even when the part is not selected.
  
• Bugfix: The crew priorities for Storage Bays were being listed under "Storage Bay (4)" even though they applied to all Storage Bays.
  
• Bugfix: The "Mass" stat for all megaroid parts was being displayed as 1/16 their actual mass.
  
• Bugfix: The "Mass" stat for the Missile Launcher was incorrectly showing 6.0 tonnes instead of its actual mass of 8.0 tonnes.
  
• Modding: FlexResourceGrid now supports a 'OverridePriorityKey' parameter.
  
• Modding: ResourceConsumer, FlexResourceGrid, and PartCrew components now all support a 'OverridePriorityName' parameter. (This was supposed to already be supported for ResourceConsumer and PartCrew but would crash when used.)
  
• Modding: The PenetrationRectType parameter is now unused and can be safely removed.