BETA 7 is here, and it brings a big overhaul to the Distress Calls and by extension dialogues. Distress Calls can now come in a variety of flavors: wrecks, derelicts, and ships actually in a distress situation. You can discuss BETA 7 and let us know your thoughts on Discord or as usual on the Steam Discussion Topic

Patch Notes

Calls of Distress

Ships in distress are a kind of "mini mission", which are typically brief ways to help (or harm) the vessel. They may request item parts, a tow to a friendly station, defense against attackers, extraction from undesired tiles, or transportation for passengers.
Additionally, most factions will accept Sixiser pirates or their ships for bounties, and the Sixiser will accept other factions ships and personnel for profit. Rewards typically consist of some faction and money. You are also free to go off the rails, and do whatever you want with the ships, and it follows the usual rules on hull destruction and strong arming vulnerable targets.

Improved Towing

Towing via tractoring (controlled ships cannot be hangared) between regions is easier now, with tractors persisting through warp, jumpgates and wormholes. To turn vessels in, you'll want to find an appropriately factioned space station, hail it, and pick the corresponding dialogue choice. Similarly turning in personnel is done at space stations too.

Wrecks

Wrecks can now spawn with debris clouds of items in space around the vessel, and it may or may not contain a data log, a small bit of story filling in how that ship ended up the way it did.
Derelicts, mostly intact ships, can also be found, but will be pretty rare. Overall there is approximately 30 new distress call scenarios and wreck logs, and a number of fixes and improvements along with tons of new text.

Details

NOTE: Changes marked with were inspired by feedback or bugs found by the community!

Additions

• Added ability to spawn items via region template, can now see items floating in space
• Dialogue can now have requirements to appear, ex: requiring a tractor component before showing a tractor dialogue response
• Added "foreign tile" concept to a vessel's tiles. This can be seen most obvious in the new distress calls where ice must be removed from a vessel before it can be saved. These foreign tiles will not trigger a hostile response from the vessel.
• Shipwrecks can now spawn belonging to factions that is not the current region faction
• Added a 'boss' discovery icon for Madd's Fleet when in System View
• Added data logs, these can be found among the items of a wreck. When picked up they will produce some dialogue, and can then be sold.
• People are now items. Certain distress calls can spawn evacuees that require inventory space. These people can be handed in at friendly (or certain not friendly) stations for rewards.
• Entering the range of certain vessels can now prompt dialogue, this is in addition to the existing on-enter-region prompts.
• Added ESC Menu button to top right button tray.
• Added ability to have tooltips for items and codex entries within dialogue to be more informative.
• Players can often utilize a "hey, wait" type of hail to encourage temporary peace from potentially hostile vessels. Hostiles actions during this period will cancel any temporary peace.
• Tractored objects will now remain tractored on exiting warp.
• Tractored objects will now remain tractored on passing through wormholes and jumpgates.
• Can now close tutorial window with ESC
• Added a distinction between item pickup and manufacturing completion notice. Completion now shows the recipe instead of the output count.
• Vessel hand in area lasts for 2 minutes, can be re-displayed if needed with another hail.
• For distress calls where the vessel asks to be freed, AI can now tolerate minor damage before becoming hostile when you tell them you'll help.
• CTRL + clicking a region icon while at warp will now add the region UID to chat (mostly for development and administrative uses).

Changes

• CHANGE: Overhauled wreck generation, it is now modular, allowing for more control over what the destroyed vessel looks like.
• CHANGE: Altered how player->ai dialogue is selected and processed
• CHANGE: Changed order of tile killing in the algorithm that calculates AOE damage from reactor explosions
• CHANGE: Did a number of behind-the-scene data loading and processing improvements for the new dialogue capabilities
• CHANGE: Improved faction calculations related to tile destruction. Bridge tiles are now fully accounted for.
• CHANGE: Dialogue will now evaluate their opinion of you when responding, so if they're currently shooting you, they're going to respond a bit differently than if they weren't.
• CHANGE: Items removed by dialogue will now use "Lost X" instead of "Received -X" phrasing
• CHANGE: Changed how dynamic regions (like distress calls and fleets) were calculating their time-to-live. This should eliminate any future regions from being "stuck around" even well after they should be removed. Also existing "stuck" dynamic regions should now decay properly once the universe is upgraded. NOTE: Regions with uncontrolled player vessels in them at game load will be immediately removed due to the changes, this should be a one-off event.
• CHANGE: Minor modification AI path patroling radius, affects mostly situations with large and fast vessels that weren't patrolling very well.
• CHANGE: Adjusted navmesh calculation for AI vessels. This should result in better patrolling and fleeing behavior.
• CHANGE: Adjusted AI rotation calculations. Hopefully this discourages the AI from over rotating in some specific scenarios.
• CHANGE: Adjusted AI local collision detection. Vessels should be more capable of squeezing into areas that are tight, but still passable.
• CHANGE: Overhauled warp transitions and inset window. Vessels should now be better centered and the camera position should better reflect who is present. Slight performance improvement due to removing any physics simulating objects that were present.
• CHANGE: Keybind displays in text and dialogue should now correctly fade with along the rest of the window.
• CHANGE: Min craft speed clamped to 0.1, this mainly affects the use of certain enhancements and the resulting "23 days" craft times.
• CHANGE: /runcmd Command now supports variables. Variables can be inserted by putting '%' in the script. e.g. "/spawn %1" will become "/spawn venture" if the file is run with "/runcmd file venture". The line "wait 1;" added to a script will make the client wait 1 second before executing the next line.
• CHANGE: /spawnai and /spawn now have an optional "check position placement" argument.

Fixes

• FIX: Fixed languages using older single file method not showing up correctly in options
• FIX: Fixed an issue with Traders possibly losing ability to trade, this should also improve trade template picking
• FIX: Fixed a bug in warp spoolup checks where the wrong system coordinates were being checked, causing other players to possibly not see the spoolup correctly.
• FIX: Fixed F1-F12 keys, and several others, not working when chat is in focus
• FIX: Optimized a number of dialogue related networking elements.
• FIX: Fixed several ship and station templates missing correct metadata, this may have been causing certain unintended mission or trader behaviour in the past.
• FIX: Fixed a major cause of menu related issues that were requiring multiple ESC presses to open/close menus.
• FIX: Fixed an issue with the CRC32 checking for multiplayer, this should be a tiny bit faster than before.
• FIX: Fixed an error that occurred when viewing a hail from a vessel that no longer existed.
• FIX: Fixed tractor beams not always displaying if they were forced on.
• FIX: Fixed a significant issue where on pressing the "X" for any Error popup window was preventing any further building/construction from taking place.
• FIX: Fixed an issue where players would possibly respawn in the default Venture instead of their correct saved ship when being forced out of a region (such as after a crash, tractor drop, or multiplayer shutdown).
• FIX: Fixed an issue with tractoring where tractoring data wasn't always being cleared correctly, mainly in multiplayer. If player 1 is tractoring player 2 and disconnects, player 2 should now be correctly untractored and free to move again.
• FIX: Fixed an issue with dynamic region spawning that prevented the region from despawning under certain conditions (if the game crashed when the region spawned, on reload the region wasn't fully saved and would have been broken).
• FIX: Fixed map screen when linking jumpgates requiring "X" being pressed twice to close.
• FIX: Fixed mouse item showing behind inset warp view.
• FIX: Fixed an issue with region discovery that in specific situations wasn't behaving correctly.
• FIX: Fixed an issue with manufacturing recipes incorrectly consuming input items and never producing output when a lab was removed.
• FIX: Fixed an error when receiving tractor data but in an EVA suit
• FIX: Fixed an issue with vessel orientation during tractor in warp if the tractoring player leaves game.
• FIX: Fixed engine trail display on/off state when in warp while tractored
• FIX: Fixed a graphics issue, this was occasionally seen in hanger enter/exit effects but also with the new vessel hand-in effect.
• FIX: Fixed linear splash direction, was incorrectly using world space instead of local tile space.
• FIX: Fixed item mass not be recalculated when sorting/transferring/component swap shortcut(via shift + click)
• FIX: Fixed placement of a fresh build area. It should be better at finding a nearby suitable area.
• FIX: Fixed enter key opening chat instead of accepting trade when trade slider window is open.
• FIX: Fixed cooldown display after the UI is hidden and later re-enabled.

COMING IN BETA 8

We have been talking about this internally for a while now and listening to player feedback, one of the big issues still facing the game is general progression. This ranges from manufacturing progress to combating appropriately challenging opponents. We will be looking at a number of possible ways to improve this starting with universe organization and layout as well as universe size.