ΔV: Rings of Saturn News

This is a re-balancing release. It changes the way kinetic damage is dealt to the ship, making the mass-drivers a valid option for ship-to-ship combat. Breached reactor core will now have lower critical temperature, and this in turn makes it a lot easier to cause ship explosion with kinetic damage.

The upgrade and tuning screens got an face-lift. They are more readable, and the charts you see as part of simulation will now display exact values. You also get a warning now if your ship is not able to handle an upgrade.

This release also contains multiple stability bugfixes, physics performance improvements and many miscellaneous features. Full changelog:

• Re-balanced kinetic damage. Now it's lot easier to destroy a ship - or get destroyed - by breaching reactor with mass-driver bullets.
  
• New mass-driver fire effect.
  
• Added chart labels and level dangerous level warnings to upgrades and tuning menu.
  
• New blueprint-view special effect in upgrades and tuning menu makes descriptions easily readable.
  
• Added some command-line options to allow access to debug menus and unusual workarounds for players directly.
  
• Enceladus screen is now affected more by the graphics quality slider, improving performance on lower-end machines.
  
• Fixed some dialogs.
  
• Stability improvements.
  
• Fine-tuned physics engine performance.
  
• Optimized shaders.
  
• Cargo manifest is not all uppercase now.
  
• Updated translation files.
  

A new year dawns, and with it a new release. Our fist responsibility when making the game - even in early access - is to fix all the bugs and polish up everything first, before implementing new features, so you players get a complete, polished experience. This release attempts to do just that, patching up all the bugs we know about and polishing existing aspects of the game.

The pirate AI got a fine-tune, making them bit less hostile and much easier to scare away. There are now additional accessibility features, and I tried to fix all the bugs I was aware of. There are also new performance improvements and optimizations.

Changelog:

• Changed the AI of pirates, so they can now be scared off easier.
  
• Added visual cues for both hearing-impaired players and players that prefer to play without our soundtrack.
  
• Your astrogator panel will now display how long your astrogator can track an anomaly.
  
• Targeting ship equipment with autopilot will now correctly target the ship itself.
  
• Camera will not zoom in and out automatically if you have smart camera disabled.
  
• Performance improvements.
  
• Side-mounted lasers on K37 are no-longer obstructed by open excavator.
  
• Fine-tuned pilots adrenaline limits.
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause story events to duplicate under some circumstances.
  
• Fixes memory leak that caused performance degradation and possible crashes when playing for extended time.
  
• Fixes a bug that could cause your LIDAR to crash.
  

This is an AI enhancement release, introducing new ways the engine of the game handles things. You'll see the AI and pilots being smarter, multiple bugs fixed and some new features added.

Changelog:

• New AI collision detection. AI is now aware of relative velocities, exhausts and weapon ranges and should maneuver accordingly.
  
• Added Russian translation.
  
• Added separate HUD to Eagle Prospector.
  
• Disabled the automatic zoom when smart camera is turned off.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused the buttons to stick on some systems.
  
• Updated the graphics of Enceladus station.
  
• Weapons now can be tuned again.
  
• Fixed a leak in the thrusters.
  
• Fixed a graphical glitch of the moonlets on extra-wide displays.
  
• Mineral price charts now update when you skip time forward.
  

December marks the beginning of a new month with a new focus; but it also marks the last phases of development before we reach version 1.0, closing up all loose threads, completing all the game mechanics and getting something that can be called ‘complete’. We still have a way to go, and I doubt we will be able to wrap it up in 2019, but I’m confident we are just a few months away.

We leave November with new events, such as the Phage-class in-ring refueling station, with new crew system and crew capabilities. Our instruments were refined, Enceladus itself got an overhaul… In total we added 85 new features and polished up 77 details.

And bugs, so many bugs. Over 109 bugs have been reported and fixed. Our diligent community has helped out, submitting logs and savegames that exhibit unusual behavior as a starting point for tracking them down.






December is story month. This is where I begin taking the universe I’ve created into something that lives, breathes, and changes. You’ve already seen many discreet story events in the game, but this is where we begin building real story arcs, events that proceed from events. At the time I’m writing this we have roughly 4 hours of the storyline in, and I want to expand it over to at least 10.


I intend for stories to have a beginning and an end, yet hopefully still be unique to each play-through, without a single beginning or a single ending, or a single path from any single beginning or ending. Hopefully, the rings will be a place that you can not only experience, but a place that you can make your mark upon.


No doubt you’ve noticed that our favorite K37 is not the only ship maneuvering the rings. You’ve seen the Search-and-Rescue CERF and the sleek Eagle Prospector plying the rings, but there’s more in the rings, and you’ll begin to see some of these. Some of these will be other professionals, working the rings just like you.

Others will be more mysterious, both dangerous and secretive. Along with new stories being implemented, you’ll see new players in the rings, some of whom may not appreciate the interest you take in their activities.




Of course, there’s no cosmic law that you can’t command an Eagle Prospector, or one of the other working vessels plying the rings. We’ll be opening a ship dealership, allowing the player to get behind the helm of various and varied craft.

Each ship is not simply a better K37, though. Each ship will have its own unique mass balance, its own unique technologies and interfaces, its own unique handling and thrust configurations. The unique designs, under-the-hood instrumentation, and the physics that influence each ship’s handling will change the personality of each ship on a more fundamental level than changing a value for hit points or increasing a mass value by ten percent.


As usual, a hundred little details will shift. Improvement and bug fixes will continue, and with the help of a vibrant community, we’ll do all the polishing needed to proudly call the game complete. We will continue to keep the rapid release cycle, so you can still expect to see multiple releases each week in the experimental branch - and few well-tested stable ones as well.

This is a polishing release, focused on quality-of-life improvements. Changes:

• Fine-tuned lighting in Enceladus Prime station. Image will not be so dark anymore.
  
• When hiring crewmembers, you can now preview what skills they bring and how these skills compare to your current crew.
  
• Improved graphics for certain ships.