Update v1.0.20160319.13 This is the first patch for Heathen Engineering’s Terran and is strongly driven by community feedback. The typical process would see this patch on the ‘Beta’ release for a longer period of time before being applied to main or default however we feel these changes are reasonably stable and yet substantial enough to warrant an accelerated push to main. Among the major update we have also passed the initial tests of the Mac build however the Linux build is still being worked on by the development team. In-game guidance, improved tooltips, tutorials and other usability concerns are an on-going area of attention for the development team. As always we encourage gamers and spectators alike to be as vocal as possible about what works and doesn’t work for you as a gamer.

Tips:

• Most fields have tooltips, hover your mouse over a field 1.25 seconds. Configurable values for tooltip delay are on the list ;)
• You can scroll panels by clicking and dragging them e.g. similar to touch controls.
• Your ship will face the direction of the camera by default … tap V or the middle mouse button to disable this. You can also use WASD for turning and pitch as well as Q and E for left right and R and F for up and down. The best pilots make use of all of the above. Try counter turning (turn in the opposite direction) when making a hard turn for faster breaking as your ship lines up.
• Full speed is not the only speed. Turrets must track their targets and at closer ranges high speed movement can make this difficult, slow down when attacking near targets for more accurate shots.
• You can set your launch option to “-show-screen-selector” (without the quotes) to force the launcher to display. The launcher lets you set the resolution and window mode and if applicable which monitor it will render to.

Fixes:

• Mac build should be available and running now. Testing is not quite complete however the initial tests (load and basic play) have passed.
• Corrected an issue where in cannon shot sounds would not play
• Corrected an issue where combat sounds would not respond to Combat SFX audio group e.g. turning down the SFX volume wasn’t correctly affecting all SFX sounds.
• Corrected scroll window response. Multiple causes at play we believe we have them pinned down and corrected however will be monitoring.
• Language select has been re-enabled. NOTE: English functions as the fall back language for fields still pending translation.
  • Danish: Human completed, new fields pending
  • English: Base language
  • Japanese: Human completed, new fields pending
  • Portuguese: Human completed, new fields pending
  • Spanish: Human completed, new fields pending
  • Swedish: Mechanical, pending human translation
• Pause during space flight will now correctly release the mouse, a new pause screen has also been added; see the changes section for more information.
• Corrected an issue with UI colour updates causing excessive stress on the UI and thus much slower load most noticeable when loading a ship template with a large number of parts.
• Handled several conditions that could cause UI behaviours to fail to initialize in the correct sequence yielding various odd results such as the ship in the Ship Editor moving with the camera, parts to appear to remain in the Ship Editor even after being removed, etc.
• Corrected Item Detail Panels (right side list of items in Ship Editor) mouse over test which could cause the panels to respond as if moused over even when they were not in view.

Changes:

• ITS UI layout such that the side panels are fixed to the edges of the screen allowing the removal of the Camera-Mouse tracking when in the ITS view.
  • Changes to available workspace area required additional changes to the side panel layouts and widget layouts … see below for more details.
• Media player widget has now been completely merged with the Co-pilot as a result it is available in its full form in all programs.
• Ship Widget has been merged with the detail panel (right side panel) and forced to its open state. As a result, the active ship is always visible (in ITS) and access to the ship management panel is always available.
• Archives program has been merged with Dashboard as a Tab with workspace window. Access this under the Co-pilot when on the Dashboard.
• Profiles and Settings has been merged with Dashboard as a Tab with workspace view. Profiles may only be accessed when not currently on mission (e.g. it won’t respond while paused)
  • Input mapping button has been changed to a normal button and renders on the Settings tab of the Dashboard under Profiles.
• Ship Editor Control Group and Capacity glyphs have been moved to the side panel, functionality of these controls is available on the Templates Tab. Additional text has been placed above the control group controls to help with confusion. Additional attention will be paid to this area over coming updates.
• Materials section has been hidden as these are not fully implemented and were only adding to UI confusion for the gamer. These will be re-enabled in an upcoming build.
• Saved templates have been moved to render below the Ship Widget when in the Ship Editor program.
• ‘Test Flight’ button has been moved to a dedicated panel labelled ‘Simulation Settings’ to help indicate its use. This button starts a ‘simulated’ mission e.g. a place to test your design.
• Update several controllers to better manage asynchronous tasks in particular regarding the initialization of ships and loading of ship templates.

Additions:

• Pause now renders the ITS Dashboard which slightly adjusted behaviour. Note the full array of settings are available in the pause view however some settings may not take effect until the start of the next mission.
  • The available programs will be replaced with pause specific functions such as ‘Return’ which forces a return to the ITS and exit from mission space.
  • Profiles will not respond when selected from the Settings Tab
• New Archive entry for the ITS Dashboard and Pilot Settings This is the first of many entries to come which provide details on the UI layout, specifics on individual fields and more.
• Tutorials! The tutorial button has been re-enabled with new tutorial steps for the UI changes. No audio is available for this build however the Dashboard and Ship Editor should have the high level tutorials complete for the English language with other languages forthcoming.
  • Additional Tutorials will be added for specific areas of the game and its UI over time.
• New Ship Editor tools The Symmetry and Centre buttons have been implemented!
  • Symmetry: Only applicable when adding new parts, you can now automatically apply parts symmetrically on X, Y and or Z … yes symmetry on all 3 axes is supported.
  • Centre: the parts … or the ship on any or all axes. Parts can be centred as a group or individually making it much easier to bring multiple parts in line with each other. TIP: Tap the Centre tool button after opening its panel and the Ship will snap to the centre view area.

Key Known Issues:

• Linux build is experiencing issues with initialization. The development team is working hard on these issues and will resolve ASAP.
• Thrust and Torque values are calculating higher than expected resulting in ships with overpowered steering … e.g. handles like a bathtub. The calculations responsible for this are being looked into.
• Rendering performance is unusually poor inside the mining complex of the Solo Combat simulation. The development team is aware and reviewing solutions.
• Control Group settings are not being saved to the Ship Templates, this is a bug and the development team is looking into it.
• Not all fields are translated & some translation values cause text to overlap. Translations are an on-going work in progress and will be improved with each build. Expect new or recently added or changed fields to have incorrect or missing translations.