ΔV: Rings of Saturn News

This is a polishing release, expanding tooltips and explanations in the game.

Changelog:

• Additional tooltips explaining damage, crew skills and mineral market.
  
• Additional tips for mouse autopilot controls.
  
• Ship system can now be disabled using keyboard or gamepad.
  
• Systems will not power up after astrogation flight.
  
• Fine-tuned AI behaviour near edge of the Rings.
  
• Audio feedback of being hit by plume of other ship now louder.
  

[h3]New Downloadable Content![/h3]
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1211880/V_Rings_of_Saturn__Tales_from_the_Rings/
We released a completely free DLC - ΔV: Tales from the Rings.

It contains supplementary material you might want to opt-in to - story written in universe of ΔV and high-resolution wallpapers. We will be sending any extra material we have - be it artbooks, more wallpapers, lorebooks and other stuff we think you might be interested in.

Downloading Tales does not affect your game in any way - it's just extra material to look at.

[h3]Features:[/h3]

• Ships have reaction wheels now - devices that can slightly alter the rotation velocity of the ship without using up propellant. They make autopilots better at controlling ships with oversized thrusters.
  
• Pilots are now much better at anticipating collisions. Adrenaline boost won't trigger so often in relatively safe maneuvers.
  
• Added more dialog options for ships you can encounter in the rings.
  
• Game display has some extra special effects to make you feel actually piloting the ship.
  
• Ships have boot screens now. You can see them both during the launch sequence on Enceladus, and when you deplete your ultracapacitor.
  
• Game ported to latest version of Godot Engine (3.2.1) to ensure latest compatibility, performance and stability fixes.
  
• Improved display of plumes when sweeping through large asteroids and moonlets.
  

[h3]Bugfixes:[/h3]

• Dialog options will always be visible now.
  
• Fixed display of autopilot during out-of-ring-plane jump.
  
• Computer will now re-boot again if you deplete your ultracapacitor.
  
• Fracturing rocks will no-longer clip through the ship causing instant damage.
  
• Performance fixes.
  

Fixing bugs is important, but adding features is where the fun is. This release adds a bunch of new visuals and hardware you can fit on your ships.

The Eagle Prospector radiators got a visual update. Eagle uses moving belt radiators - a track of high-specific-heat material that physically moves in and out of the reactor chamber to physically remove the heat. This design can remove much more heat than normal radiator, and the graphics of the Prospector now reflects that.

But why does it need to remove more heat? Eagle Prospector boasts a Yama SSR-16 40GW molten-uranium-core reactor to power it's twin main thrusters - and now you will be able to mount such molten-core reactors to all ships. They utilize rapidly spinning drums to keep the molten uranium at bay and a direct exchange of heat from fuel to reactive mass - a feat that keeps them both compact and powerful.

But what use is all this extra heat? You can now mount a plasma-thrower on your ship. It will take up to 18GW of super-heated plasma directly form your reactor and blast if forward to melt any asteroids directly in front of your ship. EINAT "Kzinti Lesson" Mk2 plasma thrower is definitely Not A (hastily retro-fitted) Thruster.

Not feeling like using plasma torches? Check out our new railgun. Compact and simple design is capable of both rapid fire and high muzzle velocities - but wears out faster than coilguns, and needs much more energy to deliver same hit. Good choice for a miner on the budget.

We are also thrilled to announce yet another community-supplied translation: Radek Poláček was kind enough to translate entire game to Czech!

Detailed changelog:

• Eagle Prospector now uses a visible moving-belt-radiators to match the game lore.
  
• New liquid-core reactor upgrades for your ship.
  
• New Kzinti Lesson Mk2 plasma thrower.
  
• Game now translated to Czech.
  
• Burning someone with thrusters or plasma throwers is now seen as hostile act.
  
• You can now buy railguns for your ships.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused ship details to reset during astrogation flight.
  
• Fine-tuned pilot's course anticipation. Advanced pilots will not be so edgy around massive objects now.
  

One of the paradigms we have for ΔV's development is "fix bugs first". We try to fix every bug we know of before adding new features. This should ensure that you get a polished and bug-free game at all times, even in Early Access stage. There are, of course, bugs that slip past us - either we don't find them soon enough, or the fixes we apply are not so effective as we thought. This why you get frequent bug-fixing releases, like this one.

This release addresses the issues we found over the weekend, but still manages to sneak in one autopilot improvement. We had reports that some players find the autopilot behaviour imperfect. When coasting through the rings and using the mouse to lock on rocks and ore, autopilot would attempt to put you to relative stop after each click. Many players found that disruptive, so we changed this behaviour. Clicking on an item will now preserve the relative velocity that you had.

Full changelog for this release:

• New autopilot controls for mouse. Clicking on an object will no-longer put you at relative stop by default, making it easier to mine with autopilot.
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause reactor overload and explosion after out-of-the-plane ring-hop.
  
• Player-controlled ships can no-longer be damaged during cutscenes.
  
• Fixed AI of the tug-ships, so they will pick up derelicts again,.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused impacts to be inaudible on player ships.
  

In the beginning, space was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of quantum fluctuations. And then came the inflation, and the inflation was superluminal.

In last few days we worked to improve the performance of ΔV: Rings of Saturn. Some of you reported that the game worked too slow for you and we heard your concerns. We ported the game to recently version of the game engine - Godot 3.2 - which yields significant performance and stability boost. We have reports of game running more than 400% faster on some machines.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

There were a lot of changes required in order to make the game working with new version of the engine, but most of them were hidden from general public. Our testers seen myriad of quirks we had to iron out before release. Even so, we managed to sneak in some improvements.

Changelog:

• Updated the game engine to Godot 3.2.
  
• Fixed memory leak that affected upgrade screen if you played with gamepad or keyboard only.
  
• Found and fixed multiple race conditions that could lead to game crash in rare circumstances.
  
• Fixed multiple typos.