BETA 4 is now ready to download. This update is mainly a clean up and house keeping patch containing a large amount of bug fixes and quality of life changes to get us ready for content focused updates coming with the following BETAs. One of the more significant changes is the addition of a new quick scanning ability (pictured below), this enables you to peek at components without requiring inventory to be open.
You can discuss BETA 4 and let us know your thoughts on Discord or as usual on the Steam Discussion Topic

Patch Notes

Tactical Scanning

We have added a new tactical scan feature which allows you to quickly scan a target and reveal its mount locations. We hope the new scan ability will address a few issues with combat pacing, and improve combat overall. To use the new scanning feature, simply left click any point on a target vessel, this will for a brief time reveal all mounts near the scan point. This scanning ability was added specifically to address issues during combat when wishing to target specific components. Previously the game required you to have a targets inventory open to view component locations which is not ideal and caused issues with interaction, including the inability to target those components. To accommodate the scanning ability, inventory of a target is now accessed by pressing and holding left click for a brief time, or alternatively by pressing "U" on the keyboard whilst hovering over the target vessel.

Bug Squashing

For the second major component of this update we have squashed a significant amount of bugs, ranging from the smallest typos to some significant, long lasting issues, in addition to many minor quality of life improvements. Among some of the larger bugs we have fixed in this update are bugs with construction (mainly incorrectly splitting tiles off of objects, as well as constructions actions that are performed very quickly and losing sync with the server). The full extensive list of bugs fixed is listed below

Details

Additions

• ADDED: Ability to scan vessels and other objects for components
• ADDED: A max range for opening cargo (/sv_maxinspectrange server variable)
• ADDED: Explicit option to the /remove and /removeall commands to keep hangared vessels. This is default is false and will remove any hangared vessels.
• ADDED: Quitting game warning screen
• ADDED: Death location to respawn screen
• ADDED: Tooltip hint for inspection.
• ADDED: Universe check and dialogue box to warn players if a universe had previously not fully saved
• ADDED: Improved redundancy for universe upgrading to make it a bit less fragile in certain situations
• ADDED: A Painting cursor and a color swatch next to the mouse when applying colors during building

Fixes/Updates

• CHANGE: Left click and hold is now required to view inventory/cargo and change components. Alternatively hovering object and press U can be used.
• CHANGE: Universes now store a copy of the universesetup data in their universe.json file. The universe can be considered entirely self contained now (outside of mod data). This will allow making and playing multiple universes easier when they have different settings.
• CHANGE: Dynamic region min/max settings is now located in universesetup.json instead of gendata.json, and will be saved to the universe data
• CHANGE: Added dead zone to mouse control to prevent rotation when clicking inside your own ship
• CHANGE: Tractors have had their max mass increased 10x and their max lengths increased as well
• CHANGE: During building only the range indicators for the current mount or component type will show to reduce clutter. This behavior can be toggled (auto/all/off).
• CHANGE: During building Energy overlay will no longer appear when placing components or mounts when in "auto" mode.
• CHANGE: Object template upgrading and remapping now better supports multiple versions of upgrading. This should make upgrading older templates (more than 1 version out of date) much easier and reliable.
• CHANGE: Player clients now received more faction data on joining, this allowed us to expose a few more things via tooltips
• CHANGE: Minor visual improvements to the Main Menu screen's social buttons
• CHANGE: Early Access notification popup is now partially transparent for improved presentation on game start
• CHANGE: Added keybind for opening pending hails, default: B
• CHANGE: If there is only one hail in the pending hails, pressing the notifier button or key will automatically open it, instead of previously requiring hail selection as well.
• CHANGE: Wrecks will no longer create zero objects. They will now always produce something, this should be most noticeable in lower level regions with smaller ships.
• CHANGE: Improved the "main piece" picking process during wreck generation. This selected piece will now be the chunk with the most bridges, previously it was the first chunk with a bridge.
• CHANGE: Improved wreck generation component picking. This means less overall components being left intact, but should also mean more interesting loot to find. It also means smaller vessels are more likely to keep at least one component around where as previously they would be almost guaranteed to be bare.
• CHANGE: Improved wreck generation piece destruction. Previously if the "main piece" was chosen for destruction this could result in no pieces. This will also increase the amount of varied wreck patterns experienced.
• CHANGE: Objects spawned with bridges and faction but no AI associated will now have public access. This should improve access to certain wrecks
• FIX: Tile changes will now immediately affect components instead of requiring de- then re-activating. e.g. a broken weapon will turn off immediately as soon as enough tiles are removed
• FIX: Completely overhauled split piece detection during construction, it should tolerate lag better and have a minor performance boost
• FIX: Problems encountered with returning split pieces when leaving construction would prevent further pieces being returned. There should be no floating tiles possible now.
• FIX: Dragging quickly when building should no longer result in strange tile boxes
• FIX: Multiple tile building overlay problems leaving ghost overlays
• FIX: Improved item count accuracy during building, especially during rapid input
• FIX: Improved tile edit batching especially when actions are performed quickly
• FIX: Repeated "Run out of items" and similar building error popups should be much less frequent
• FIX: Some issues where hologram tiles in construction would stick around when they shouldn't
• FIX: An issue that was affecting adding tiles during building
• FIX: Object templates created in BETA1 onwards being 'upgraded' when they didn't need to be, resulting in incorrect results when loading
• FIX: Popup message when loading a template failed had broken/incorrect text
• FIX: "Force clear" button not working correctly on template loads during construction
• FIX: Building inventory panel always opening half scrolled on first open
• FIX: Improved legibility of the "infinity" icon most noticeable when building in creative mode
• FIX: Updated item display on the cursor and building inventory items to match the rest of the game
• FIX: An issue with the cursor not being set correctly during construction, which was occasionally breaking the whole UI
• FIX: Removing tiles under multi tile mounts during building would occasionally cause the mount to bug out
• FIX: An issue with multi tile mounts not always associating correctly tiles added during building
• FIX: The energy overlay missing was its texture if inventory was opened with the EnergyOverlay parameter set to "ForcedOn"
• FIX: Tile energy labels occasionally displaying being behind the overlay itself
• FIX: Tile energy labels should now display correctly even when zooming in and out quickly
• FIX: Energy overlay incorrectly appearing when switching out other components if you have any reactor affecting enhancements
• FIX: The component/mount overlay graphics looking out of place for a brief moment when opening inventory
• FIX: Improved currency label count up/down animation
• FIX: Dragging the trade slider widget when buying and selling wouldn't let you pick full range
• FIX: An error when viewing a trader's inventory whilst it refreshed could cause broken UI or incorrect prices
• FIX: Trade dialogue not being closed correctly when another dialogue is opened
• FIX: Issue with Trader UI being considered "visible" when it wasn't, which was causing other UI issues afterwards.
• FIX: SHIFT+AlphaNum keys to pick dialogue responses not working correctly
• FIX: Using SHIFT+AlphNum for dialogue responses also changing action bar slots
• FIX: Missing portrait when being hailed by a dead entity
• FIX: The strange flashing animation on the hail notifier
• FIX: Issues with Faction panel scrolling
• FIX: Improved performance of the faction panel UI and also slightly restyled it
• FIX: Lab queue UI not resizing correctly when switching between labs
• FIX: An issue where labs were still processing their old queues when lab was replaced. Queue is now cleared when the lab is replaced.
• FIX: Spaced out tutorial text to improve legibility
• FIX: State of Energy Overlay/Range Indicators etc. should now correctly those of the buttons in inventory on subsequent openings
• FIX: Home icon on name plates should now show immediately when a new home station is set
• FIX: Pressing ESC whilst in a text input boxes should now consistently clear text input then deselect the input element and then finally close the element/panel
• FIX: Input issues that were incorrectly being performed when the map was open (clicking on things behind the map, firing weapons, etc.)
• FIX: An issue with the UI breaking when transitioning between two star systems when the inventory is open
• FIX: Ability to spam click "Join Game", which was causing some problems
• FIX: Wrong text on respawn screen when dying in a ship
• FIX: Misspellings of the "Zeblalt", spelling should now be unified across the game
• FIX: Click-to-move mouse control causing the ship to continuously spin when not intended
• FIX: Fixed an issue where objects weren't being correctly removed from the region server when tractored objects were taken into warp when other players were present in the region
• FIX: All players in a region should now have correct discovery info for that region, especially important when being tractored by another player.
• FIX: Tractor constraint length is better calculated, resulting in less "shoving" when tractors are used on large objects
• FIX: Mount removal and components changes not always being synced correctly on the region server. This should fix issues where AI thought they had weapons (or other components) when infact they didn't. This should significantly reduce incorrect AI behavior where it is dependent on component counts.
• FIX: An issue with AI target searching when they had no weapons available
• FIX: Improved performance when generating missions
• FIX: Updated several naming patterns in mission generation
• FIX: An issue with tile death and updating the associated region server
• FIX: Added some verification for item pickup to prevent incorrect pickup when someone has just warped or died.
• FIX: Added pickup range verification to the server to ensure consistency
• FIX: An issue when receiving shield health if the shield component had been removed on the client
• FIX: An issue where client input was not being validated correctly against server data
• FIX: A few issues with AI data not being saved correctly, which was causing "dead ai" to appear, especially after a game crash.
• FIX: An issue where the max player limit was being reset to 4 in single player
• FIX: Improved memory cleanup when quitting to menu
• FIX: Improved several networking issues, especially when programs other than the game attempt to connect on the same ports. Previously these connections could sit in the connection processing queue and were not always being cleaned up properly. They were already being ignored once the initial handshake failed however.

COMING IN BETA 5

BETA 5 will see the introduction of a new limited faction, Madd's Marauders, a group of bounty hunters that will show up in other faction's star systems. Additionally we will be looking at adding a few more weapon types to improve combat variety.