Minor Update 0.3.1.17 - Tumbleweed
It was hard to decide on a name for this update, since it's mostly general improvements across the board with no headline feature, but there's still plenty here for everyone to enjoy!
[h2]New Map: Tumbleweed[/h2]
We've added a new map to the game, our first in a while, called Tumbleweed. This is a complex twisting asteroid maze which leads to some really interesting dynamics. Close-range ships and waypointed missiles thrive on this map but there are still plenty of long sight-lines...just watch out for someone sneaking up behind you. We've been playtesting this one for almost two months with our tester group and it's proven to be a lot of fun, so we hope you enjoy!
[h2]Pre-Game Coordination[/h2]
A very highly-requested feature is the ability to show your teammates your fleet composition in the skirmish lobby. I held off on this for a while due to the risks of a player swapping over to the enemy team, seeing their fleet comp, and then returning. In this update, I've added a fleet display next to the chat pane in the lobby which you can use to manually reveal your fleet to your teammates when you're ready. If anyone new joins your team all fleets will be automatically hidden and you will have to choose to reveal them again. Clicking on each ship in the list will show its weapon fitting.
[h2]Tactical View Stenciling & Radar Display[/h2]
The range circles seen in the tactical view, which show sensor and weapon coverage, have been improved to no longer create a giant mess. The circles are now merged together and overlapping lines are stenciled out,
I've also added a small but helpful set of lines around your currently selected ship showing radar panel coverage, with red lines showing panels that have been knocked out.
[h2]Balance and Drag[/h2]
It wouldn't be an N:FC patch without balance changes. First off, for OSP we've fixed C81 being extremely tough (which was not intended) by reducing its integrity values to match the C65. The Ocello also had one of its CR75 comms antennas swapped for a CR10, and the small Yard Drive has had its linear thrust bonus decreased to prevent the Ocello from taking too much advantage of it. On the Alliance side, the Axford and Solomon have had their thrusters beefed up by increasing their damage threshold (the amount of damage necessary in one hit to destroy them), making their maneuverability more resilient to long range mass-driver fire. The OSP also got a buff to grapeshot, increasing its velocity, range, and armor damage, to make it more useful against groups of frigates.
One of the longest running jokes in Nebulous is space drag. Drag exists for a few reasons, mostly to prevent disabled ships from careening into rocks or off into the ether. It also had the secondary effect of making it more difficult for ships with damaged thrusters to reach their top speed with reduced thrust. Unfortunately, after the last thruster/flank changes, this made Alliance capitals unable to reach their top speed laterally and made them complete sitting ducks after losing a thruster or two. To remedy this, the global drag value has been cut in half. While capitals will now find it easier to reach higher speeds later in the battle, it also means changing direction is harder because you can't count on drag to supplement your braking thrusters.
[h2]Optimization[/h2]
In my endless quest to make the game run better, I've also optimized the CPU-based armor system which is used on the dedicated servers. Servers should no longer stutter or freeze for several seconds when large amounts of armor damage, such as a reactor bloom hitting multiple ships, occurs. I've also significantly cut down on the game's memory usage by purging the decompressed asset bundle data after loading. The stock game should occupy almost 1.5GB less space in memory when running, and my tests with a ton of mods took memory usage from 8GB to 5.5GB.
As always, full patch notes follow:
Patch Notes - 0.3.1.17:230630-0454
Changes/Features:
- Added new map Tumbleweed.
- Added fleet display to help teammate coordination in the skirmish lobby.
- Added "Hide Empty" multiplayer game filter.
- Lobby point values now have comma delimited numbers.
- Parallelized and optimized CPU armor damage application, dedicated servers should no longer freeze for several seconds when multiple ships are caught in a reactor bloom.
- Overlapping range circles in the tactical view are now stenciled out.
- Added tactical view lines to show radar coverage for the selected ship.
- Changed C81 Plasma Casemate health and DT values to match the C65.
- Increased 100mm Grapeshot flight speed to 1,100m/s (was 900) and range to 8km (was 5.5km).
- Increased 100mm Grapeshot armor damage to 16 (was 10).
- Halved drag force for non-disabled ships to 0.015 (was 0.03).
- Reduced CHI-777 Yard Drive linear motor bonus to 10% (was 30%).
- Increased damage threshold for Solomon and Axford strafe thrusters to 20 (was 15).
- Increased damage threshold for Solomon and Axford main and braking thrusters to 25 (was 15).
- Changed Ocello aft antenna from a second CR75 to a CR10.
- When switching PDTRT mode to DEDI, any dual-purpose weapons, fire-control radars, and illuminators currently targeting missiles will be set to idle.
Bug Fixes:
- Freed unnecessary memory usage left after loading an asset bundle.
- Fixed reactor blooms doing armor damage to the same hull segment multiple times.
- Fixed Bulker LN Stern A engines 5 and 6 not playing particle effects.
- Fixed PD prioritization and MAN setting being exploitable to ignore missile decoys.
- Fixed mod faction equipment sharing via "Shared Faction All" unlocking hulls as well, which was not intended. Hulls can still be added to the shared equipment list directly.
- Fixed Solomon thruster 7 missing from DC board.
- Fixed several zero-length vectors causing look rotation failures and log spamming.
- Ships owned by a disconnected player can no longer be transferred to former teammates who have previously disconnected or retired.
- Fixed Cargo Feeder structure hitbox being scaled incorrectly.
- Fixed exception when collecting after-action report on dedicated servers.
- Fixed a case where server would stall at "IN PROGRESS" even if all players had disconnected.
- Fixed firing cooldown UI visuals not being timed correctly for buffed ewar modules.
- Fixed subscribed workshop ship templates not appearing in the ship template list.
- Fixed disconnect caused by having a teammate's ship selected when they disconnect and the selected ship is transferred to you.
- Fixed disabled (red) modules not removing their stat modifiers if receiving power.
- Fixed plasma focusing component damage into one component instead of spreading.
- Fixed Self-Screening Jammer spawning as a cone instead of a sphere.
- Fixed missile with cruise guidance not doing terminal maneuvers when using a direction-only seeker.
- Fixed rocket turrets being stuck in bearing to target state when extremely close to their target.
- Fixed missile engine sounds not being affected by volume controls.
[h2]New Map: Tumbleweed[/h2]
We've added a new map to the game, our first in a while, called Tumbleweed. This is a complex twisting asteroid maze which leads to some really interesting dynamics. Close-range ships and waypointed missiles thrive on this map but there are still plenty of long sight-lines...just watch out for someone sneaking up behind you. We've been playtesting this one for almost two months with our tester group and it's proven to be a lot of fun, so we hope you enjoy!
[h2]Pre-Game Coordination[/h2]
A very highly-requested feature is the ability to show your teammates your fleet composition in the skirmish lobby. I held off on this for a while due to the risks of a player swapping over to the enemy team, seeing their fleet comp, and then returning. In this update, I've added a fleet display next to the chat pane in the lobby which you can use to manually reveal your fleet to your teammates when you're ready. If anyone new joins your team all fleets will be automatically hidden and you will have to choose to reveal them again. Clicking on each ship in the list will show its weapon fitting.
[h2]Tactical View Stenciling & Radar Display[/h2]
The range circles seen in the tactical view, which show sensor and weapon coverage, have been improved to no longer create a giant mess. The circles are now merged together and overlapping lines are stenciled out,
I've also added a small but helpful set of lines around your currently selected ship showing radar panel coverage, with red lines showing panels that have been knocked out.
[h2]Balance and Drag[/h2]
It wouldn't be an N:FC patch without balance changes. First off, for OSP we've fixed C81 being extremely tough (which was not intended) by reducing its integrity values to match the C65. The Ocello also had one of its CR75 comms antennas swapped for a CR10, and the small Yard Drive has had its linear thrust bonus decreased to prevent the Ocello from taking too much advantage of it. On the Alliance side, the Axford and Solomon have had their thrusters beefed up by increasing their damage threshold (the amount of damage necessary in one hit to destroy them), making their maneuverability more resilient to long range mass-driver fire. The OSP also got a buff to grapeshot, increasing its velocity, range, and armor damage, to make it more useful against groups of frigates.
One of the longest running jokes in Nebulous is space drag. Drag exists for a few reasons, mostly to prevent disabled ships from careening into rocks or off into the ether. It also had the secondary effect of making it more difficult for ships with damaged thrusters to reach their top speed with reduced thrust. Unfortunately, after the last thruster/flank changes, this made Alliance capitals unable to reach their top speed laterally and made them complete sitting ducks after losing a thruster or two. To remedy this, the global drag value has been cut in half. While capitals will now find it easier to reach higher speeds later in the battle, it also means changing direction is harder because you can't count on drag to supplement your braking thrusters.
[h2]Optimization[/h2]
In my endless quest to make the game run better, I've also optimized the CPU-based armor system which is used on the dedicated servers. Servers should no longer stutter or freeze for several seconds when large amounts of armor damage, such as a reactor bloom hitting multiple ships, occurs. I've also significantly cut down on the game's memory usage by purging the decompressed asset bundle data after loading. The stock game should occupy almost 1.5GB less space in memory when running, and my tests with a ton of mods took memory usage from 8GB to 5.5GB.
As always, full patch notes follow:
Patch Notes - 0.3.1.17:230630-0454
Changes/Features:
- Added new map Tumbleweed.
- Added fleet display to help teammate coordination in the skirmish lobby.
- Added "Hide Empty" multiplayer game filter.
- Lobby point values now have comma delimited numbers.
- Parallelized and optimized CPU armor damage application, dedicated servers should no longer freeze for several seconds when multiple ships are caught in a reactor bloom.
- Overlapping range circles in the tactical view are now stenciled out.
- Added tactical view lines to show radar coverage for the selected ship.
- Changed C81 Plasma Casemate health and DT values to match the C65.
- Increased 100mm Grapeshot flight speed to 1,100m/s (was 900) and range to 8km (was 5.5km).
- Increased 100mm Grapeshot armor damage to 16 (was 10).
- Halved drag force for non-disabled ships to 0.015 (was 0.03).
- Reduced CHI-777 Yard Drive linear motor bonus to 10% (was 30%).
- Increased damage threshold for Solomon and Axford strafe thrusters to 20 (was 15).
- Increased damage threshold for Solomon and Axford main and braking thrusters to 25 (was 15).
- Changed Ocello aft antenna from a second CR75 to a CR10.
- When switching PDTRT mode to DEDI, any dual-purpose weapons, fire-control radars, and illuminators currently targeting missiles will be set to idle.
Bug Fixes:
- Freed unnecessary memory usage left after loading an asset bundle.
- Fixed reactor blooms doing armor damage to the same hull segment multiple times.
- Fixed Bulker LN Stern A engines 5 and 6 not playing particle effects.
- Fixed PD prioritization and MAN setting being exploitable to ignore missile decoys.
- Fixed mod faction equipment sharing via "Shared Faction All" unlocking hulls as well, which was not intended. Hulls can still be added to the shared equipment list directly.
- Fixed Solomon thruster 7 missing from DC board.
- Fixed several zero-length vectors causing look rotation failures and log spamming.
- Ships owned by a disconnected player can no longer be transferred to former teammates who have previously disconnected or retired.
- Fixed Cargo Feeder structure hitbox being scaled incorrectly.
- Fixed exception when collecting after-action report on dedicated servers.
- Fixed a case where server would stall at "IN PROGRESS" even if all players had disconnected.
- Fixed firing cooldown UI visuals not being timed correctly for buffed ewar modules.
- Fixed subscribed workshop ship templates not appearing in the ship template list.
- Fixed disconnect caused by having a teammate's ship selected when they disconnect and the selected ship is transferred to you.
- Fixed disabled (red) modules not removing their stat modifiers if receiving power.
- Fixed plasma focusing component damage into one component instead of spreading.
- Fixed Self-Screening Jammer spawning as a cone instead of a sphere.
- Fixed missile with cruise guidance not doing terminal maneuvers when using a direction-only seeker.
- Fixed rocket turrets being stuck in bearing to target state when extremely close to their target.
- Fixed missile engine sounds not being affected by volume controls.