After a whole month of beta testing and furious bug fixing, following the tradition, we are once again doing our yearly release. This release includes many engine improvements, such as 3D ships, an in-game wiki, reworked weapon sets, notable performance increases, etc., but also a significant amount of new content including a whole new area, more and reworked missions, and ship variants among others things. We also have not forgotten significant quality of life improvements; folding messages, more visual indications for things such as important characters at the spaceport bar, filtering for the mission computer, and more! We would like to thank all the contributors who participated and helped in the making of this release that we hope will both surprise new players and veterans alike!

Most notable changes:

• Nearly all the ships are now modeled in 3D with fancy lighting and tilting effects!
• You can now capture ships!
• New ships and ship variants!
• Faction reputation is no longer a single global value, but more nuanced and local.
• Simplified and more powerful weapon sets
• New challenging area to access many secrets.
• In-game Wiki full of mechanics and lore explanations!

[previewyoutube=voeB--pGsoY;full][/previewyoutube] The new version should be compatible with older save games, and will update things as necessary. Full Changelog

• Gameplay
  • Ability to capture disabled ships
  • Faction reputation is no longer universal, but varies on systems
    • Direct faction hit changes are shown as messages
    • Your actions will more directly affect ships in the system
  • Significantly increase maximum potential fleet capacity
  • Excess energy to battery recharge efficiency is now flat instead of varying based on charge level
  • Gave the Zalek Sting a slight detection buff
  • Can only have a single patrol mission active at a given time
  • Pirates are less numerous during Chapter 0
  • Dvaered Arsenal has no fighter bays and fewer slots
  • Lowered CPU cost of some fighter bays
  • Decreased CPU and energy provided by large core slots
  • Pillaging ships affects reputation
  • Significantly increased the amount of fuel provided by outfits
  • Camouflage burster gives a speed bonus while active and disables when out of stealth
  • Can scan ships with u key
  • Gave the Quicksilver another medium structural slot
  • Beam weapons have minimum delays instead of minimum durations
  • Can stealth when missiles are locked on
  • Deployed fighters take stress and damage over time when their mother ship is destroyed
  • Electron Burst Cannons and Zalek Heavy Drones have had their damage per second lowered
  • Improved point defense
    • Spittle Tubuloid Cluster is now a utility and does more damage
    • Guardian Interception System does double damage
    • Missiles explode when intercepted
  • Bounties have explicit time limits
  • Derelicts should appear in remote systems
• Quality of Life
  • Added colourblind correction mode
  • Exposed more colourblind options to the user
  • Can modify game speed directly instead of using a slow mode difficulty for accessibility
  • Messages get folded instead of repeating
  • Asteroids no longer fade out if close to or targeted by the player
  • Display fuel consumption for ships in the equipment overlay
  • Added option to match speed with the slowest ship in the fleet (on by default)
  • Made it so ships in the equipment screen do not change order based on value
  • Mark spaceport bar tab when there is an important NPC
  • Weapon set keybindings change window tabs
  • Use short outfit names when displaying groups of outfits
  • Shown more useful things you have when buying outfits with things other than credits
  • Can sort and filter the mission computer
  • Added small optional bounce to NPCs when they start talking
  • Inform the player when they dont meet mission requirements for some important missions
  • Can add new plugins directly from the options menu
  • Can toggle whether autonav stops when missile lock-ons are detected
  • Added colour coded factional backgrounds in the shipyard
  • Can rotate shipyard image for ships with 3D graphics
  • Prompt when deleting notes
  • Added accessibility option that allows skipping story minigames
  • Can view and change all your ships in the equipment tab when there is refuelling
  • Reduced space dust size by 50%
  • Changed mouse click selection priority, it prefers spobs/jumps and will ignore clicks reselecting the same object
• Content
  • New in-game wiki with explanation on gameplay mechanics and lots of lore
  • 8 new missions
    • The Onions call
  • 4 new ships
  • 13 new ship variants
    • Give a new twist to existing ships
  • 6 new outfits
  • New area with unique challenges
  • New events
    • Get more Sirius abilities
    • Find the dark side of the Nebula
  • New NPC portraits
  • New generic NPC and News messages
  • Reworked trails to make ships feel more speedy
• Engine
  • Support for 3D models
    • Lighting is based on system stars
    • Fancy effects for special systems
    • Ships tilt slightly when rotating
    • Simple animations are supported and used when applicable
  • Support for an in-game wiki
    • Can process YAML, Lua, and markdown
    • Cross-link support
    • Support for custom widgets
  • Stats (except inverted stats) are now additive instead of multiplicative
  • Try to merge saves if multiple directories correspond to the same player
  • More robust weapon set support that can handle multiple overlapping weapon sets
  • Faster handling of asteroids with large exclusion areas
  • Added fuel_usage_mod ship stat
  • Fixed player losing navigation targets when unidiff is applied
  • Fixed ai.idir giving wrong answer by M_PI_2 in some cases
  • Threaded more loading components
  • Lua require now caches chunks
  • Dropped SDL_image fallback
  • Use higher internal timer for all platforms
  • Support for Tracy
  • Spobs that are not landable yet generate presence will be shown on the map
  • Warn the player if they try to use a name with all space characters
  • Decoupled the collision system from the rendering system
  • Added a low memory mode to use fewer and smaller textures with 3D
  • Lazy load ship and outfit graphics to reduce memory usage and decrease load time
  • Use clang-format to format all the C code
  • Use enums internally to represent keybindings instead of strings
  • Always use replaygain information when available when loading vorbis files
  • Stop repeating the same warning after a fixed amount of times
  • Support for outfits that dont break stealth
  • Editor has partial support for universe diffs
  • Editor has separate configuration and file dialogues
  • New ship stats
    • Global weapon range, damage, fire-rate and energy usage
    • Range ship stat for all specific weapon types
    • Turn, speed, and accel for launchers
    • Shield downtime modifier
  • Deprecated old faction API in favour of the new one for local / global standings
  • Added support for temporarily overriding faction standings
• Fixes
  • PSO and Mizar nebulas have trails again
  • Removed fancy background mode
  • Can remove fighter bays with deployed fighters
  • Sol is less friendly
  • Fixed rare cases where fighters would not be able to dock
  • Fixed hypergate and wormhole effects getting stuck
  • Obelisks tell if you have completed them already
  • Fixed space dust disappearing with certain jump abilities
  • Boarded pilots become permanently disabled if they lose space-worthiness
  • Double tap will activate feather drive like blink engines
  • Fixed camouflage burster not activating stealth
  • Fixed bug where beams were counted as giving energy in the equipment optimizer
  • shadowvigil: claim entire route
  • sh01_corvette: should be completable on easy difficulties now
  • patrol: fixed escorts and fighters becoming hostile if hostile to the mission giving faction
  • Fixed debugging paranoid builds under Windows
  • Fixed autonav not respecting shield thresholds
  • zbh10: Godheart and friends get at most 1 fighter bay per ship now
  • Fixed ESS Trinity being bribeable
  • Cargo on fleets with be displayed to make room for mission cargo when necessary
  • Made it so Shadow Vigil doesnt try to go through Surano system for reasons
  • blackhole/zbh09: fixed softlock during a cutscene under certain conditions
  • Dont play wormhole sound on main menu
  • Dont allow the player to sell unique ships
  • Fixed corner cases where destroyed player ships would not properly be updated
  • Fixed Sirius Providence flow absorption bonus
  • Fixed positioning of a certain blockade
  • Fixed some visual aberrations when forcing the player to land or jump
  • Prioritize pilots and other objects over uninhabited planets when clicking
  • Can always bribe your way to pirates clansworlds
  • Consistently colour the ShipAI messages in the tutorial
  • Made max_fps actually get respected
  • Fixed map decorators not shown in editor
  • Update the overlay scaling given the players position
  • Fixed population not being updated by universe diffs
  • Fixed date acquired being wrong on some platforms
  • Improved pilot facing corrections when jumping
  • Pirate ambush derelict events break stealth
  • Mining minigame result affects yield more
  • Absorption is no longer limited to the 0% to 100% range
  • derelict_rescue: only allow generic target space objects
  • Restored portable installs with the Windows installer
  • Show intrinsic outfits in the Other tab
  • Fixed plural form of 0 items in many cases
  • Ships significantly past the mass limit are no longer space worthy
  • Dont allow ship shield/energy to go negative
  • Jumping through a one-way normal / hidden jump reveals the hidden side
  • Increased nebula visibility by 400 km
  • Fixed map thresholds for interference
  • Editor now shows dialogues on errors and allows user to choose directory to save data to
  • Escorts will try to respect players autonav rules by default
  • Dont show stealth circles during cinematics
  • Made pilots in formation less prone to spinning
  • Workaround MESA driver bug that causes dark or invisible ships on AMD hardware
  • Can no longer abort missions during landing animation

[ 2024-12-23 17:18:47 CET ] [ Original post ]

With the bug frenzy calming down, we are proud to announce version 0.12.0-beta.3. This release contains a myriad of bug fixes and should be quite close to the final 0.12.0 version that is planned before the end of the year. As always, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join our Discord or Matrix chatrooms. Find out more about them here! You can obtain the new version by opting into the beta branch with the steam client.
As a new ship variant of the Llama, the Llama Voyager shares many features but has fundamental differences such as fuel regeneration.

Changes since 0.12.0-beta.2:

• Fixed collisions for some ships at certain angles
• Changed mouse click selection priority, it prefers spobs/jumps and will ignore clicks reselecting the same object
• Fixed map decorators not shown in editor
• Centered buttons at the top of the holo-archives
• Show if a system has a bar in the map
• Fixed conf.mouse_doubleclick not disabling when set to 0
• Fixed crashes when a faction is assigned a non-existent colour
• Update the overlay scaling given the players position
• Fixed population not being updated by universe diffs
• Fixed date acquired being wrong on some platforms
• Round reputation values when displaying standing text for consistency
• Display local standing in the information window
• Fixed certain combination of opening menus locking up
• Fixed fmt.number displaying wrong values when negative
• Fixed spoiling of system names on the map
• Improved pilot facing corrections when jumping
• Can no longer abort missions during landing animation
• Fixed editor crash with empty descriptions
• Fixed editor crash when making links to systems with no presence
• Fixed rehabilitation missions
• Fixed escorts not using special outfits and abilities
• Fixed escort fighters existing after undeploying escort
• Fixed Certitude trails
• Pirate ambush derelict events break stealth
• Mining minigame result affects yield more
• Absorption is no longer limited to the 0% to 100% range
• derelict_rescue: only allow generic target space objects
• onion04: dont fail if something happens to the gawain after taking the cargo
• traffic_01: dont use hardcoded systems
• bounty: fixed error with deadlines in certain cases
• neburesearch04: dont let the drones see through stealth and disable the player from relanding to skip stage
• minerva/judugement: fixed error in VN flow
• Minor typo fixes and translation updates
• Increased maxmimum reputation for a certain hidden faction to 70
• Restored portable installs with the Windows installer
• Documentation fixes
• Minor typo fixes and translation updates

[ 2024-12-11 11:30:03 CET ] [ Original post ]

A lot of major and minor issues, in addition to some minor new features, have been resolved calling for a 0.12.0-beta.2. In particular, support for lowering the saturation of the nebula, and having escorts respect your autonav preferences (you can disable it in the settings from the info menu) have been added as new features. We dont have any intention of adding any new features before the final 0.12.0 version, and will keep on resolving bugs as they are found. As always, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join our Discord or Matrix chatrooms. Find out more about them here! You can obtain the new version by opting into the beta branch with the steam client.
As a new ship variant of the Llama, the Llama Voyager shares many features but has fundamental differences such as fuel regeneration.

Changes since 0.12.0-beta.1:

• Fallback for missing holo archives ship entries
• Reset proteron reputation more aggressively
• Fixed overlap in VN logs
• Show intrinsic outfits in the Other tab
• Shooting weapons no longer resets autonav speed up
• Fixed plural form of 0 items in many cases
• Made pilots in formation less prone to spinning
• Ships significantly past the mass limit are no longer space worthy
• Lowered the price of a certain map
• Lowered presence of a certain faction
• Prevent changing autonav target via Lua when jumping
• Disable jettisoning cargo when landing
• Removed overlap in the options menu
• Dont allow ship shield/energy to go negative
• Dont show stealth circles during cinematics
• Jumping through a one-way normal / hidden jump reveals the hidden side
• Escorts will try to respect players autonav rules by default
• Increased nebula visibility by 400 km
• Fixed text overlap in the holo-archives for certain languages
• Fixed reputation changes not working on dynamic factions
• Fixed text overlap if ship name is too long
• Fixed automatic weapon sets behaving oddly with multiple ships
• Fixed rare crash when setting hook on non-existent pilot
• Fixed map thresholds for interference
• Fixed some reputation values not being correctly rounded
• Fixed OSD not advancing in a certain mission
• Fixed Sirius Divinity collisions
• Fixed beam weapons in in range mode not respecting range bonus
• Fixed hiding mission OSDs and changing priority being reset on take off or jump
• Fixed asking your ship AI for advice
• Fixed point defense requiring toggling thrice to turn off in some cases
• sensor anomaly: Nelly will no longer appear in too dangerous or risky systems
• mephisto type v: lowered heat generation
• seek_n_destroy: fixed hints breaking in certain cases
• pir_hit_intro: fixed OSD being displayed wrong
• taiomi04: update OSD after boarding ship
• bounty: fixed OSD getting reset after killing/capturing target
• ant_supplies: fixed hostility after jumping into system again
• Editor now shows dialogues on errors and allows user to choose directory to save data to
• Minor typo fixes and translation updates

[ 2024-11-28 11:51:07 CET ] [ Original post ]

This year, were starting the betas a bit early given the large amount of content modified and added. As always, this release contains a large amount of changes done during the past year which likely have introduced a lot of bugs and issues that we want to iron out before the final release of 0.12.0. Now, this release changes a lot of how the game currently plays, and, while it is highly recommended to start a new game, it should be possible to just load up your old saves without too much stuff being changed. In particular, some of the major changes are: [olist]

Nearly all the ships are now modeled in 3D with fancy lighting and tilting effects!

You can now capture ships!

New ships and ship variants!

Faction reputation is no longer a single global value, but more nuanced and local.

New challenging area to access many secrets.

In-game Wiki full of mechanics and lore explanations!

[/olist] If you try it and find any issues, please report them at the issue tracker. Discussion about the game can be had on one of the various discussion forums and chatrooms we have. Check them out here! You can obtain the new version by opting into the beta branch with the steam client.
As a new ship variant of the Llama, the Llama Voyager shares many features but has fundamental differences such as fuel regeneration.

Full Changelog

• Gameplay
  • Ability to capture disabled ships
  • Faction reputation is no longer universal, but varies on systems
    • Direct faction hit changes are shown as messages
    • Your actions will more directly affect ships in the system
  • Significantly increase maximum potential fleet capacity
  • Excess energy to battery recharge efficiency is now a flat 50% instead of varying based on charge level
  • Gave the Zalek sting a slight detection buff
  • Can only have a single patrol mission active at a given time
  • Pirates are less numerous during Chapter 0
  • Dvaered Arsenal has no fighter bays and fewer slots
  • Lowered CPU cost of some fighter bays
  • Decreased CPU and energy provided by large core slots
  • Pillaging ships affects reputation
  • Significantly increased the amount of fuel provided by outfits
  • Camouflage burster gives a speed bonus while active and disables when out of stealth
  • Can scan ships with u key
  • Gave the Quicksilver another medium structural slot
  • Beam weapons have minimum delays instead of minimum durations
  • Can stealth when missiles are locked on
  • Deployed fighters take stress and damage over time when their mother ship is destroyed
  • Electron Burst Cannons and Zalek Heavy Drones have had their damage per second lowered
  • Improved point defense
    • Spittle Tubuloid Cluster is now a utility and does more damage
    • Guardian Interception System does double damage
    • Missiles explode when intercepted
  • Bounties have explicit time limits
  • Derelicts should appear in remote systems
• Quality of Life
  • Added colourblind correction mode
  • Exposed more colourblind options to the user
  • Can modify game speed directly instead of using a slow mode difficulty for accessibility
  • Messages get folded instead of repeating
  • Asteroids no longer fade out if close to or targeted by the player
  • Display fuel consumption for ships in the equipment overlay
  • Added option to match speed with the slowest ship in the fleet (on by default)
  • Made it so ships in the equipment screen do not change order based on value
  • Mark spaceport bar tab when there is an important NPC
  • Weapon set keybindings change window tabs
  • Use short outfit names when displaying groups of outfits
  • Shown more useful things you have when buying outfits with things other than credits
  • Can sort and filter the mission computer
  • Added small optional bounce to NPCs when they start talking
  • Inform the player when they dont meet mission requirements for some important missions
  • Can add new plugins directly from the options menu
  • Can toggle whether autonav stops when missile lock-ons are detected
  • Added colour coded factional backgrounds in the shipyard
  • Can rotate shipyard image for ships with 3D graphics
  • Prompt when deleting notes
  • Added accessibility option that allows skipping story minigames
  • Can view and change all your ships in the equipment tab when there is refuelling
  • Reduced space dust size by 50%
• Content
  • New in-game wiki with explanation on gameplay mechanics and lots of lore
  • 8 new missions
    • The Onions call
  • 4 new ships
  • 13 new ship variants
    • Give a new twist to existing ships
  • 6 new outfits
  • New area with unique challenges
  • New events
    • Get more Sirius abilities
    • Find the dark side of the Nebula
  • New NPC portraits
  • New generic NPC and News messages
  • Reworked trails to make ships feel more speedy
• Engine
  • Support for 3D models
    • Lighting is based on system stars
    • Fancy effects for special systems
    • Ships tilt slightly when rotating
    • Simple animations are supported and used when applicable
  • Support for an in-game wiki
    • Can process YAML, Lua, and markdown
    • Cross-link support
    • Support for custom widgets
  • Stats (except inverted stats) are now additive instead of multiplicative
  • Try to merge saves if multiple directories correspond to the same player
  • More robust weapon set support that can handle multiple overlapping weapon sets
  • Faster handling of asteroids with large exclusion areas
  • Added fuel_usage_mod ship stat
  • Fixed player losing navigation targets when unidiff is applied
  • Fixed ai.idir giving wrong answer by M_PI_2 in some cases
  • Threaded more loading components
  • Lua require now caches chunks
  • Dropped SDL_image fallback
  • Use higher internal timer for all platforms
  • Support for Tracy
  • Spobs that are not landable yet generate presence will be shown on the map
  • Warn the player if they try to use a name with all space characters
  • Decoupled the collision system from the rendering system
  • Added a low memory mode to use fewer and smaller textures with 3D
  • Lazy load ship and outfit graphics to reduce memory usage and decrease load time
  • Use clang-format to format all the C code
  • Use enums internally to represent keybindings instead of strings
  • Always use replaygain information when available when loading vorbis files
  • Stop repeating the same warning after a fixed amount of times
  • Support for outfits that dont break stealth
  • Editor has partial support for universe diffs
  • Editor has separate configuration and file dialogues
  • New ship stats
    • Global weapon range, damage, fire-rate and energy usage
    • Range ship stat for all specific weapon types
    • Turn, speed, and accel for launchers
    • Shield downtime modifier
  • Deprecated old faction API in favour of the new one for local / global standings
  • Added support for temporarily overriding faction standings
• Fixes
  • PSO and Mizar nebulas have trails again
  • Removed fancy background mode
  • Can remove fighter bays with deployed fighters
  • Sol is less friendly
  • Fixed rare cases where fighters would not be able to dock
  • Fixed hypergate and wormhole effects getting stuck
  • Obelisks tell if you have completed them already
  • Fixed space dust disappearing with certain jump abilities
  • Boarded pilots become permanently disabled if they lose space-worthiness
  • Double tap will activate feather drive like blink engines
  • Fixed camouflage burster not activating stealth
  • Fixed bug where beams were counted as giving energy in the equipment optimizer
  • shadowvigil: claim entire route
  • sh01_corvette: should be completable on easy difficulties now
  • patrol: fixed escorts and fighters becoming hostile if hostile to the mission giving faction
  • Fixed debugging paranoid builds under Windows
  • Fixed autonav not respecting shield thresholds
  • zbh10: Godheart and friends get at most 1 fighter bay per ship now
  • Fixed ESS Trinity being bribeable
  • Cargo on fleets with be displayed to make room for mission cargo when necessary
  • Made it so Shadow Vigil doesnt try to go through Surano system for reasons
  • blackhole/zbh09: fixed softlock during a cutscene under certain conditions

[ 2024-11-16 15:32:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

This year were having another edition of our Sporadic Naev Newsletter. Well be covering some of the improvements that will appear in the 0.12.0 release, and more importantly, discuss a feature almost 15 years in the making: Naev going 3D! Now, this doesnt mean gameplay is going 3D - gameplay is fundamentally unchanged - however, the ship models are now in 3D, allowing us to do new fancy effects and lower memory consumption while at it!

Less Pirates in the Early Game

One of the major complaints that Naev always gets is how ruthless pirates are, especially in the early game, when the player has no proper defenses. Although the past several releases have tried to mitigate the issue by establishing a safe starting area with no pirates, and adding more introductory missions to help the player get started, for those players that strayed too far from the starting area, it was often fatal. Now, Chapter 0 will feature significantly less pirates, that will ramp up to normal when the player reaches Chapter 1. This should give the player time to get better ships and survive the pirate menace.
In order to implement this feature, the in-game universe editor was significantly reworked (yet again!) to support universe diffs, that is, instead of saving the entire universe, only changes with the default are saved. While this has been used only for reducing pirates, for now, this is going to come very in hand when implementing the next stages of the major campaigns, where the universe will undergo many significant changes. It will definitely be a good investment for things to come.

Naev, now in 3D!

So, while this is something that was proposed around 15 years ago, this is something that has been quite active in the works for almost 5 years now. During that time, it has been rewritten twice: first using object files and more traditional rendering, and now using gltf files with physically-based rendering. As were not using any sort of game engine, it was all written from the ground up, and includes some fancy things like variance shadow maps, FidelityFX filtering, high dynamic tone mapping, and super sampling. Theres still many things to do, but this finally lets us start to do fancier things that were infeasible using spritesheets. That said, spritesheets are still supported, however, 3D models are the recommended way of adding new ships.
It has taken a lot of work, but all the ancient models have been updated to work with the newest blender, and many models have seen upgrades in different aspects like texturing, engine glows, broken geometry, and animations. Some ships have had to be nearly completely remade to work with current standards. Theres still a lot to do, but they look much better, and the same model can be used in the shipyard, communication window, and in-game.
With 3D, we finally can also have ships tilt slightly when turning. This makes flying feel much more natural, and the tilt shows off more highlights and details of the ships. While we were hoping to add blinking lights and more details, those have not yet been implemented, but there is a real possibility that they will come sooner and later, once some logistics are figured out.
For now, only ships have been reworked into 3D, but we hope to have planets, stations, and asteroids to join them in the near future. Some effects such as the backgrounds, wormholes, and the likes will still be kept in 2D, however, it will all work much better together. Oh, and last but not least, weve taken this opportunity to add 4 new ships to flesh out a bit more the Naev universe!

Linear Energy Regeneration

Although many players had not noticed, energy regeneration in Naev used an RC (Resistance-Capacitor) charge curve, which meant that energy would regenerate faster the less you had, and slowly taper out. This was not properly conveyed to the player and has now made linear. Now 100 GW of energy regeneration will always be 100 GJ of energy generated per second. While it is not possible to keep exactly the same behaviour as before, outfits and ships have been adjusted to try to be as similar as before the change.

Quality of Life for all!

A lot of Quality of Life has also made it into the nightly. Spaceport bar is marked with red exclamation points when there is an interesting NPC, there is support for sorting and filtering mission computer missions, repeated messages get folded in the GUI, asteroids wont disappear when the player is nearby or actively targeting them, and much more! This should ensure a smoother experience for the players and get rid of lots of small friction.
Additionally, the game uses lazy loading and threading to load much faster than before, starting up much faster and using less memory in general.

Concluding Remarks

All the aforementioned fixes can be already tasted in the nightly branch which can be obtained through the steam beta, github, or itch.io. They will be included in the next 0.12.0 release which is scheduled for December if youd rather wait for a more stable release instead of risking the bleeding edge. If youre interested in seeing the full changelog, including things that have not been discussed here, its available on github. With that, this concludes the Sporadic Naev Newsletter Vol. 4, and see you again in the next one!

[ 2024-07-21 05:05:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

This is a minor release, that mainly provides build support for BSD systems. However, an important issue where the combat hologram projector could make escorts hostile and some missing jumps in the FLF-Pirate map have also been fixed. If you are interested on helping the Naev project, you can get in contact with other players and developers from the contact page. You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:



[previewyoutube=QnHRItBIRCM;full][/previewyoutube]

Changes since 0.11.4

• Fixed FLF-Pirate map not providing jump information
• Fixed the combat hologram projector making escorts hostile
• Build system no longer libdl on platforms such as BSD

[ 2024-06-13 04:52:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

This new version contains a diversity of fixes, including a crash when selling deployed ships, and some issues that still appeared on some platforms when using autonav. We are also glad to announce that this version includes two complete translations: Japanese and Spanish. Most of the outstanding issues have been resolved and we hope that this is the last release in the 0.11.x series. If you are interested on helping the Naev project, you can get in contact with other players and developers from the contact page. You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

• Naev on github
• Naev on steam
• Naev on itch.io
• Naev on flathub

[previewyoutube=QnHRItBIRCM;full][/previewyoutube]

Changes since 0.11.3

• More guards against divides by zero in autonav
• Fixed warnings on certain OpenGL drivers
• Fixed toolkit not rerendering when right-clicking on tabbed windows
• Fixed Marius enclave description
• Tweaked Zalek Diablo and Mephisto stats so that they are better suited to their respective roles
• Updated flicker drive, blink drive, and hyperbolic blink engine descriptions to be more complete and correct
• Initialize outfit Lua scripts when added in the equipment view so that flicker drive signature gets properly computed
• Flicker drive no longer displays -10% signature range bonus twice when equipped
• Fixed crash when selling deployed ship
• Gave the Dvaered warlord event better criteria so they dont attack the hypergate
• shark/sh01_corvette: have the pilot jump in from the same system as the player
• minerva/kex03: have mission claim the crimson gauntlet to prevent unwanted spawns
• dvaered/gauntlet: have mission claim the system if it can, but not fail if it cant
• trader/trader_escort: player can only escort one group of traders at a time
• neburesearch/neburesearch_01: use the correct faction when complaining
• Fixed some typos and revised writing
• Translation updates

[ 2024-04-18 14:09:17 CET ] [ Original post ]

The Naev DevTeam is proud to announce the release of Naev version 0.11.3. This new version hopefully fixes the bug that causes autonav to crash the game in specific conditions, fixes autonav breaking when loading old saves, and increases the yields of mining five-fold. Other minor bug fixes and translation updates are included in the update. Thanks to all those reported and involved in the fixing! You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

• Naev on github
• Naev on steam
• Naev on itch.io
• Naev on flathub

[previewyoutube=QnHRItBIRCM;full][/previewyoutube]

Changes since 0.11.2

• Dont run discovery event when in cinematic mode
• Do a better job of updating old save autonav settings
• Added more checks so tutorial messages dont appear in claimed systems
• Fixed blinking not breaking stealth
• Fixed auto-hail message colouring
• Only do updates with positive delta ticks
• Fixed cargo disappearing when buying a ship when over the cargo limit
• Dont let the player trade ships when they have mission cargo
• Fixed not being able to turn off point defense weapons
• Fixed Zalek drone bay being cheaper than the mini-bay
• Flicker drives can not be stacked and are mutually exclusive with other blink drives
• Decreased Nexus Drill Lance mining malus from -80% to -15%
• Increased all mining yields by roughly 5 times
• sciencegonewrong/02_sciwrong: make the drones not hostile to other factions
• neutral/baron_comm: fixed trivial warning when trying to clean up baron comm event
• neutral/wastedump: fixed getting rid of cargo while landed
• Translation updates

[ 2024-01-25 09:40:01 CET ] [ Original post ]

Naev is now available as a Native Apple Silicon app! Starting with 0.11.2, any versions of Naev released in the future will include native support for Apple Silicon. Nightly releases are included. This should benefit users that have an Apple device with Apple Silicon (M1, M2, etc.), with significant speedups compared to running Naev with Rosetta. For running Apple Silicon builds of Naev make sure you are running macOS 11.0 or higher. Users with Intel Macs can still run Naev on macOS 10.13 or higher. Enjoy!

[ 2024-01-15 22:34:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

The Naev DevTeam is ashamed to announce the release of Naev version 0.11.2. Inside the improvements of 0.11.1, a critical bug that seems to affect release-version windows only sneaked in. This bug causes autonav to basically crash the game when activated in certain conditions. Given that this makes the game pretty much unplayable on affected systems, we created a new version that should solve the issue. Thanks to all those reported and involved in the fixing! [previewyoutube=QnHRItBIRCM;full][/previewyoutube]

Changes since 0.11.1

• Stopped autonav from preventing wobble and overshooting by crashing the entire game

[ 2024-01-15 04:36:28 CET ] [ Original post ]

The Naev DevTeam is proud to announce the release of Naev version 0.11.1. This update fixes some issues on certain platforms with video memory corruption and crashes, and a myriad of smaller issues here and there. It is highly recommended to update to the newest version. We would like to thank all the contributors who have participated and helped in the making of this release. [previewyoutube=QnHRItBIRCM;full][/previewyoutube]

Changes since 0.11.0

• Give all ammo back to player after doing obelisk
• Fixed player being invincible after completing an obelisk
• Fixed a crash when loading games while a landing hook was running
• Fixed race condition in threadpool
• Fixed asteroids spawning in not proper shapes
• Fixed autonav wobble and overshooting
• Point defense wont shoot at disabled pilots anymore
• Fixed battery descriptions
• Discovering a hidden jump will make both directions known
• Fixed AI trying to scan hostile targets they lost track of
• Properly save and load reward_value to and from saves
• Fixed events and missions being able to trigger in obelisk tests
• Fixed beam weapons not hitting asteroids
• Properly compute weapon range with launch_range modifiers
• Fixed some range checks with inrange weapon sets
• Fixed Empire Pacifier mass being too low
• Fixed warning when looking at internal flow amplifier descriptions
• Removed Soromid Ira turret and forward weapon stats
• Fixed reality rip and avatar of sirichana abilities giving errors when the AI tries to use them
• Fixed issue on some systems with indexed images
• Fixed pirates and pilots that dont care being able to disable the fake transponder
• Can now see and target allies that are stealthed
• Pheromone emitter wont do anything in exclusively claimed systems
• Fixed some weapons such as beams not hitting targets other than selected one
• Fixed rendering order making it so most effects were below the player
• Fixed fallback switch weapon sets not being found properly
• Fixed bioship Wanderer perk giving absolute accel bonus instead of relative
• Increased Neural Accelerator Interface energy regen malus to -100%
• zalek/blackhole/zbh09: dont error out when a bioship ceases to exist
• kidnapped/traffic_00: fixed formatting string telling the player what system to go to
• kidnapped/traffic_01: ship should spawn if taking off in the same system, not just jumping in
• tutorial/nelly01: fixed derelict message not appearing
• minerva/pirate4: fixed save me spam only being print once
• neutral/seek_n_destroy: fixed warnings when taking off in the same system
• sirius/achack/achack01: fixed not being able to accept mission
• dvaered/dv_diversion: fixed not being able to accept mission
• dvaered/dv_bikers: dont allow the player to use escorts and properly update mission TODO
• sirius/achack03: fixed not being able to complete the mission
• neutral/kidnapped: fixed inconsistency in the name of the system to go to
• shadow/shadowrun: fixed VN issues not allowing mission completion
• shadow/shadowrun: changed locations to make it possible to do in the allotted time-frame
• shadow/shadowvigil: fixed Seiryuu not appearing
• shiplover: dont ask the player about ships they cant obtain
• Fixed many typos
• Translation updates

[ 2024-01-14 10:50:20 CET ] [ Original post ]

Following the winter tradition, the Naev DevTeam is proud to announce the release of version 0.11.0. This is again quite a large release that has rewritten and reworked large parts of the engine and long-established mechanics to be more flexible, faster, and efficient. Many long-term players will notice that many things they had gotten used to have been changed, starting from the Naev universe itself. We would like to thank all the contributors who have participated and helped in the making of this release. Most notable changes:

• Reworked universe map to fit existing lore
• House Sirius completely reworked
• Improved autonav that uses lanes and is configurable
• Reworked structural outfits and number of ship slots
• Weapon sets are more simple with no distinction between weapons and non-weapons
• Possible to legally obtain all standard factional ships and outfits
• Point defense weapons that automatically fire at fighters and missiles
• A lot more content
• Significant engine speed-ups

You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

• Naev on github
• Naev on steam
• Naev on itch.io
• Naev on flathub

The new version should be compatible with older save games, and will update things as necessary. However, in this release, given the big changes done to the universe, old saves will potentially have the their universe map in a bit of a mess. [previewyoutube=QnHRItBIRCM;full][/previewyoutube]

Changes since 0.10.6

• Gameplay Changes
  • Universe significantly overworked to be more consistent with lore
    • More landable uninhabited spobs, unique locations, and things to discover
    • Reviewed and corrected many descriptions and placement of spobs and systems
    • More in-depth and fleshed out tag system for locations
  • Ship slots and mass limits reworked such that smaller ships get more utility/structural slots to work with
  • Point defense systems that can shoot down missiles and torpedoes
  • Space object (planets, stations, etc.) properties affect quantity of missions available
  • Moved many missions and events to the vn system
  • Can sometimes find POI events with a pulse scanner equipped when entering systems
  • Changed the visuals for some of the nebulas (PSO, Mizar)
  • Pirate bribes cost more depending on your fleet and are based on points not mass
  • Missions are introduced less all at once to the player
  • Blink drives are more flexible but use energy and generate heat
  • Razor class weapons have been completely reworked
  • Can steal more than one outfit from a ship with high boarding bonus
  • Differentiated more significantly the energy / kinetic / plasma weapon types
  • diy-nerds: improved reward
• Quality of Life
  • Significantly improved autonav
    • Configurable and can use lanes
    • More efficient at reaching target locations
    • New option like follow pilots through jumps or brake when going to positions
  • Make it explicit when all the escorts have jumped or landed
  • Escorts will keep their same loadout until the game restarts
  • Player ship is no longer translucent when in stealth as it is redundant with the stealth icon
  • Show enemy/ally factions in the faction standing info window
  • Space dust is properly anti-aliased
  • Minor speed ups to patrol lane computations
  • Try to enforce minimum number of articles in the news
  • Independent patrol and bounty missions can be completed on more planets and stations
  • Can hide or prioritize missions from the info menu
  • Manual aiming model aims at the mouse location when the mouse is visible
  • Travelling merchant tells you when new wares are available and should be easier to find
  • Lua Love API should be better at handling input and not apply keys held before started
  • Increase time compression when disabled
  • Inverted how hide, evasion, and stealth value percent bonuses work. Now lower is better
  • Hide locked slots without outfits as the player cant do anything with them
  • Added volley mode to weapon sets that makes weapons fire as fast as possible, instead of staggered
  • Autonav options are now player-specific and accessible via the info menu settings button
  • Travelling merchant gives full details of the intrinsic outfits they provide
  • Selected slots in the equipment window will only show outfits that fit
  • Autonav routes consider distance travelled in-system
  • Made stress more visible in the slim GUI
  • Reworked how stats are displayed to be more visible and intuitive
  • Can show all known outfits or ships in with the map find functionality
  • Weapon sets much more flexible, verbose, and easy to use
  • Weapon sets remember slots, not outfits
  • Route is visible on all map modes now
  • Blink and flicker drives can use double tap arrow keys to move around
  • Toolkit is cached in a framebuffer for much faster rendering
  • Intrinsic outfit details now visible from the equipment menu
  • Visually indicate which pilots are scanning the player on the overlay and radars
  • Can sell all outfits on any spob with an outfitter
  • Enemies in patrol missions should not run away
  • Changed the faction standing caps to allow the player to get all ships when maxed out. Will be decreased in the future as missions are added
  • Slot icons to make it more clear what special slots a ship has
  • System markers and autonav TARGET marker will try to not overlap with jumps and spob names
  • Slim GUI uses primary/secondary colours like the info menu
  • Slim GUI now shows activated outfits and all weapons all the time
  • Added short names to some outfits such that they are easier to distinguish in the GUI
• New Content
  • New mechanic for House Sirius called flow to unlock psychic powers
    • Gives passive bonuses to Sirius ships
    • Outfits allow use on non-Sirius ships
  • 8 new missions
    • Finish the Minerva campaign
    • Nebula refugees
  • 24 new events
    • Abandoned stations with secrets
    • Greedy pirates looking for domination
    • Challenges of the mind
    • Mysterious signals
    • More points of interest
  • 67 new star systems with 123 new space objects
    • More interesting and unusal locations
    • Many new unique graphics
  • 37 new outfits
    • Sirius flow outfits
    • Completely reworked Sirius weapons too
    • Point defense systems
    • New accessories
    • Intrinsic outfits
    • and more!
  • Many new outfit graphics
  • New NPC graphics
  • More NPC and news messages
  • Added the Space Trader Society faction
  • Custom death animations for many ships
  • More ways to increase fleet capacity
  • The pirate clans are now more differentiated in terms of AI behaviour and taunts
  • More factional landing messages
  • Rehabilitation missions have been made more factional and a new rehabilitation mission for the FLF is now available
• Engine
  • Map system viewer is more compact
  • Added hook.hail_spob
  • Events support tags
  • Editor supports tags
  • Library to handle conditionals for mission computer missions
  • Added support for disabling specific patrol lanes from being generated
  • Support for Lua scripting for ships
  • Changed api of evt.claim and misn.claim
  • Missions/events load Lua as chunks instead of compiling each time
  • Significant speed-ups in collision detection with quadtrees
  • Hooks outfit_buy, outfit_sell, ship_sell, and ship_swap pass Lua objects instead of strings
  • Ships can have extra descriptions that show up on mouse over
  • More Lua API added such as pilot.armour, pilot.shield, or naev.missionList
  • Soromid NPCs can have custom descriptions based on genetics
  • Improved VN API with vn.move, vn.musicVolume, etc.
  • Improved VN handling of non-ascii fonts
  • Support for generating munitions from outfits
  • Improved derelict script to handle custom derelicts better
  • Removed some custom environment and string handling functions for standard SDL ones (requires 2.0.18 now)
  • Better handling of user locales
  • Weaker effects shouldnt overwrite stronger ones anymore
  • Spobs can use communication graphics
  • Require OpenGL 3.2 for geometry shaders now
  • Support for advanced collisions such as weapon on weapon, allowing for point defense weapons
  • Renamed thrust to accel for more consistency and simplifications
  • Support for buying intrinsic outfits
  • Ship distress moved to the message framework
  • Outfits have support for double tapping accel/left/right triggers
  • Removed toolkit fading effects
  • Support for rendering images as SDFs
  • Significant loading time speed-up with multithreading
• Fixes
  • Main menu more responsive when changing windows
  • Typo and wording fixes
  • Fixed many corner case crashes in the editor
  • Fixed cargo missions not being generated in some parts of the universe
  • Game no longer crashes when loading save with persisted Lua pointing to nonexistent systems/spobs
  • Minor improvements to many existing missions
  • Fixed crash when events trigger other events on creation
  • Fixed autonav sometimes having trouble landing with reverse thrusters
  • Qex races should be much less laggy now
  • Fixed some outfits using the wrong store images
  • Fixed system viewer not being consistent with map
  • Players escort damage is counted towards players damage
  • Avoid having missions duplicates for cases where they can significantly stack such as patrol missions
  • Fire rate and action speed should affect damage and disable of beam weapons
  • Fixed some outfits not having Activated Outfit in their description
  • Fixed ships offering 100 fuel refuels twice
  • Fixed some ships having trouble equipping because of stacking engine reroutes and such
  • Improved AIs scanning behaviour to be more robust to stealth pulsing
  • Fixed POI generating in extremely volatile systems
  • Fixed tutorial running during cinematics
  • Fixed active outfits not showing activated outfit in their summary sometimes
  • FLF no longer become true allies of the Dreamer Clan to not limit the players actions
  • Made audio system more robust to running out of source errors
  • AI should be less prone to jump before their leader
  • AI will turn off weapons ionizer when going for a kill
  • Hardened physics engine a bit to overflow that happens in 49 days of straight game time
  • Dont allow giving the player names that cant be saved
  • Allied factions wont help out the player against neutral targets
  • Fixed pilot.setSpeedLimit not working
  • Show tracking icons for non-turret bolt weapons too
  • Have ships be a little less spammy distressing
  • Gave unicorp storm launchers a rarity of 2 and made it more available
  • Fixed resizing not working on the background and toolkit in some cases
  • Turn off all weapon sets when entering stealth or changing type
  • Maps discovery mode shows system features
  • Fixed rare hard crash when beams are being fired
  • Fixed crash when change tab triggers a takeoff
  • Buffed Scanning Combat AI to have an additional +15% tracking
  • Buffed weapon ionizer to only -50% damage from -70% damage
  • Soromid Arx now has one non-exclusive heavy non-bio slot
  • Can only start to afterburn with enough energy for 0.5 seconds of afterburning
  • Consider beam width when computing collisions

[ 2023-12-23 15:18:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

During playtesting 0.11.0-beta.2, weve found even more issues that have been fixed, including some hard crashes and some inconsistencies with weapon set behaviours. Additionally, lots more quality of life usability such as in range weapon sets only shooting when enemies are in arcs have also been added. Were hoping this to be the last beta before the official release which should hit in a week or so. As always, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join our Discord or Matrix chatrooms. Find out more about them here! You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

• Naev on github
• Naev on steam (select beta branch)
• Naev on itch.io
• Naev on flathub

A player in a Sirius Preacher using the Seeking Chakra ability.

Changes since 0.11.0-beta.2

• Differentiated more significantly the energy / kinetic / plasma weapon types
• Fixed hard crash when loading when approaching certain NPCs
• Fixed crash when change tab triggers a takeoff
• Fixed Naev not starting on Mac OS
• Fixed beam collisions (again)
• Fixed rare hard crash when beams are being fired
• in range option for weapon sets now takes into account weapon arcs
• Buffed Targeting Conduit
• Renamed Point of Interest to Sensor Anomaly
• Double-tap activating outfits breaks stealth
• Nerfed Sirius Fidelity so it can no longer get ludicrous levels of action speed
• Maps discovery mode shows system features
• Removed enemies from a certain hidden faction so the player wont have standing issues with them
• Non-weapon outfits no longer show switch groups they are in as hot keys
• Turn off weapon sets when changing type
• Fixed toggle weapon sets not triggering outfits over and over as expected
• Turn off all weapon sets when entering stealth
• Fixed resizing not working on the background and toolkit in some cases
• Added pilot.weapsetAddType and pilot.weapsetSetActive
• Gave unicorp storm launchers a rarity of 2 and made it more available
• Have ships be a little less spammy distressing
• Centered tracking icon in slim GUI
• Show tracking icons for non-turret bolt weapons too
• More short names for weapon outfits
• Fixed pilot.setSpeedLimit not working
• Added tutorial message when player acquires first point defense weapon
• test_of_renewal: fixed weapon set defaults being incorrect and increased enemy damage
• seek_n_destroy: missions should work properly when boarding the target
• flf_diversion, flf_rogue: Missions should no longer be able to have ridiculously low credit rewards
• ec00: changed it so you cant hail the collective drone
• escort: fixed pilots not flying in formation
• Fixed many typos
• Translation updates

[ 2023-12-14 13:42:17 CET ] [ Original post ]

During playtesting 0.11.0-beta.1, weve found a bunch of bugs and issues that weve addressed. In particular, some of the more important ones include having the slim GUI show what outfits are being activated, which is particularly useful for toggle weapon sets, and fixed some issues with collisions making it hard for fast weapons to hit their targets. As always, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join our Discord or Matrix chatrooms. Find out more about them here! You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

• Naev on github
• Naev on steam (select beta branch)
• Naev on itch.io
• Naev on flathub

A player in a Sirius Preacher using the Seeking Chakra ability.

Changes since 0.11.0-beta.1

• Slim GUI now shows activated outfits and all weapons all the time
• Collision system reworked (again) to take into account fast moving particles
• Fixed collision polygons not properly being used
• Added short names to some outfits such that they are easier to distinguish in the GUI
• Allied factions wont help out the player against neutral targets
• Added missing graphics for meditation chambers
• Dont allow giving the player names that cant be saved
• Updated love.filesystem to 0.11 spec renaming mkdir to createDirectory, enumerate to getDirectoryItems, and adding remove
• Fixed toggle weapon sets not turning off with only bolt weapons
• Hardened physics engine a bit to overflow that happens in 49 days of straight game time
• Fixed trivial memory leak in vpool
• Allow buying local maps where they are not sold
• Buffed Hunting Combat AI to 15% bonus
• Made Weakness Harmonizer AI not appear as an active outfit
• Outfit Lua function onshoot has been renamed onshootany
• Can toggle point defense weapons on and off
• AI will turn off weapons ionizer when going for a kill
• Players new ships should start will all the default outfits, which fixes the some Sirius psychic tests
• pilot.weapsetAdd follows the same logic as the normal equipping functions
• slim GUI uses primary/secondary colours like the info menu
• AI should be less prone to jump before their leader
• Fixed cargo being lost when swapping ships in missions and events
• chapter1: event claims all the systems just in case
• poi: renamed Pristine Derelict to Unusual Derelict
• poi_intro: fixed typo
• achack03: fixed mission not being acceptable and harja spawning forever
• achack04: fixed missing formatting string
• dv_bikers: made missiles significantly more dodgeable and changed location
• Translation updates

[ 2023-12-09 05:48:28 CET ] [ Original post ]

Its nearing the end of the year and that means time for a new Naev release! This release is once again one that revamps a lot of existing features and legacy code, while adding lots of new content and features. Like always, instead of doing a release directly, were going to be doing a series of betas to try to ensure as few bugs as possible sneak into the final release. We plan to do the official release in about two weeks from now, but it will depend on how many issues and the likes are found. Now, this release changes a lot of how the game currently plays, and, while it is highly recommended to start a new game, it should be possible to just load up your old saves without too much stuff being changed. In particular, some of the major changes are: [olist]

Significantly reworked universe map to fit existing lore

House Sirius completely reworked

Significantly improved autonav that uses lanes and is configurable

Reworked structural outfits and number of ship slots

Weapon sets are more simple with no distinction between weapons and non-weapons

Possible to legally obtain all standard factional ships and outfits

[/olist] If you try it and find any issues, please report them at the issue tracker. Discussion about the game can be had on one of the various discussion forums and chatrooms we have. Check them out here! You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

• Naev on github
• Naev on steam (select beta branch)
• Naev on itch.io

A player in a Sirius Preacher using the Seeking Chakra ability.

Changes since 0.10.6

• Gameplay Changes
  • Universe significantly overworked to be more consistent with lore
    • More landable uninhabited spobs, unique locations, and things to discover
    • Reviewed and corrected many descriptions and placement of spobs and systems
    • More in-depth and fleshed out tag system for locations
  • Ship slots and mass limits reworked such that smaller ships get more utility/structural slots to work with
  • Point defense systems that can shoot down missiles and torpedoes
  • Space object (planets, stations, etc.) properties affect quantity of missions available
  • Moved many missions and events to the vn system
  • Can sometimes find POI events with a pulse scanner equipped when entering systems
  • Changed the visuals for some of the nebulas (PSO, Mizar)
  • Pirate bribes cost more depending on your fleet and are based on points not mass
  • Missions are introduced less all at once to the player
  • Blink drives are more flexible but use energy and generate heat
  • Razor class weapons have been completely reworked
  • Can steal more than one outfit from a ship with high boarding bonus
  • diy-nerds: improved reward
• Quality of Life
  • Significantly improved autonav
    • Configurable and can use lanes
    • More efficient at reaching target locations
    • New option like follow pilots through jumps or brake when going to positions
  • Make it explicit when all the escorts have jumped or landed
  • Escorts will keep their same loadout until the game restarts
  • Player ship is no longer translucent when in stealth as it is redundant with the stealth icon
  • Show enemy/ally factions in the faction standing info window
  • Space dust is properly anti-aliased
  • Minor speed ups to patrol lane computations
  • Try to enforce minimum number of articles in the news
  • Independent patrol and bounty missions can be completed on more planets and stations
  • Can hide or prioritize missions from the info menu
  • Manual aiming model aims at the mouse location when the mouse is visible
  • Travelling merchant tells you when new wares are available and should be easier to find
  • Lua Love API should be better at handling input and not apply keys held before started
  • Increase time compression when disabled
  • Inverted how hide, evasion, and stealth value percent bonuses work. Now lower is better
  • Hide locked slots without outfits as the player cant do anything with them
  • Added volley mode to weapon sets that makes weapons fire as fast as possible, instead of staggered
  • Autonav options are now player-specific and accessible via the info menu settings button
  • Travelling merchant gives full details of the intrinsic outfits they provide
  • Selected slots in the equipment window will only show outfits that fit
  • Autonav routes consider distance travelled in-system
  • Made stress more visible in the slim GUI
  • Reworked how stats are displayed to be more visible and intuitive
  • Can show all known outfits or ships in with the map find functionality
  • Weapon sets much more flexible, verbose, and easy to use
  • Weapon sets remember slots, not outfits
  • Route is visible on all map modes now
  • Blink and flicker drives can use double tap arrow keys to move around
  • Toolkit is cached in a framebuffer for much faster rendering
  • Intrinsic outfit details now visible from the equipment menu
  • Visually indicate which pilots are scanning the player on the overlay and radars
  • Can sell all outfits on any spob with an outfitter
  • Enemies in patrol missions should not run away
  • Changed the faction standing caps to allow the player to get all ships when maxed out. Will be decreased in the future as missions are added
  • Slot icons to make it more clear what special slots a ship has
  • System markers and autonav TARGET marker will try to not overlap with jumps and spob names
• New Content
  • New mechanic for House Sirius called flow to unlock psychic powers
    • Gives passive bonuses to Sirius ships
    • Outfits allow use on non-Sirius ships
  • 8 new missions
    • Finish the Minerva campaign
    • Nebula refugees
  • Many new events
    • Abandoned stations with secrets
    • Greedy pirates looking for domination
    • Challenges of the mind
    • Mysterious signals
    • More points of interest
  • Many, many new systems and space objects
    • 67 new star systems with 123 new space objects
    • New graphics for space objects
  • Tons of new outfits
    • Sirius flow outfits
    • Completely reworked Sirius weapons too
    • Point defense systems
    • New accessories
    • Intrinsic outfits
    • and more!
  • Many new outfit graphics
  • New NPC graphics
  • More NPC and news messages
  • Added the Space Trader Society faction
  • Custom death animations for many ships
  • More ways to increase fleet capacity
  • The pirate clans are now more differentiated in terms of AI behaviour and taunts
  • More factional landing messages
  • Rehabilitation missions have been made more factional and a new rehabilitation mission for the FLF is now available
• Engine
  • Map system viewer is more compact
  • Added hook.hail_spob
  • Events support tags
  • Editor supports tags
  • Library to handle conditionals for mission computer missions
  • Added support for disabling specific patrol lanes from being generated
  • Support for Lua scripting for ships
  • Changed api of evt.claim and misn.claim
  • Missions/events load Lua as chunks instead of compiling each time
  • Significant speed-ups in collision detection with quadtrees
  • Hooks outfit_buy, outfit_sell, ship_sell, and ship_swap pass Lua objects instead of strings
  • Ships can have extra descriptions that show up on mouse over
  • More Lua API added such as pilot.armour, pilot.shield, or naev.missionList
  • Soromid NPCs can have custom descriptions based on genetics
  • Improved VN API with vn.move, vn.musicVolume, etc.
  • Improved VN handling of non-ascii fonts
  • Support for generating munitions from outfits
  • Improved derelict script to handle custom derelicts better
  • Removed some custom environment and string handling functions for standard SDL ones (requires 2.0.18 now)
  • Better handling of user locales
  • Weaker effects shouldnt overwrite stronger ones anymore
  • Spobs can use communication graphics
  • Require OpenGL 3.2 for geometry shaders now
  • Support for advanced collisions such as weapon on weapon, allowing for point defense weapons
  • Renamed thrust to accel for more consistency and simplifications
  • Support for buying intrinsic outfits
  • Ship distress moved to the message framework
  • Outfits have support for double tapping accel/left/right triggers
  • Removed toolkit fading effects
  • Support for rendering images as SDFs
  • Significant loading time speed-up with multithreading
• Fixes
  • Main menu more responsive when changing windows
  • Typo and wording fixes
  • Fixed many corner case crashes in the editor
  • Fixed cargo missions not being generated in some parts of the universe
  • Game no longer crashes when loading save with persisted Lua pointing to nonexistent systems/spobs
  • Minor improvements to many existing missions
  • Fixed crash when events trigger other events on creation
  • Fixed autonav sometimes having trouble landing with reverse thrusters
  • Qex races should be much less laggy now
  • Fixed some outfits using the wrong store images
  • Fixed system viewer not being consistent with map
  • Players escort damage is counted towards players damage
  • Avoid having missions duplicates for cases where they can significantly stack such as patrol missions
  • Fire rate and action speed should affect damage and disable of beam weapons
  • Fixed some outfits not having Activated Outfit in their description
  • Fixed ships offering 100 fuel refuels twice
  • Fixed some ships having trouble equipping because of stacking engine reroutes and such
  • Improved AIs scanning behaviour to be more robust to stealth pulsing
  • Fixed POI generating in extremely volatile systems
  • Fixed tutorial running during cinematics
  • Fixed active outfits not showing activated outfit in their summary sometimes
  • FLF no longer become true allies of the Dreamer Clan to not limit the players actions
  • Made audio system more robust to runnning out of source errors

[ 2023-12-03 07:49:04 CET ] [ Original post ]

Rather than waiting 10 years again from the previous edition of our sporadic naev newsletter, weve only let 2 years pass this time. In this edition, well talk about some improvements in 0.10.0 that may have gone under the radar, and the upcoming 0.11.0 release.

State of 0.11.0

With a ton of commits and content since 0.10.0, things are starting to shape up for 0.11.0. This release has focused greatly on reworking and improving existing systems by bringing up to modern standards. In particular, things such as how weapons are implemented, how ship stats are dealt with, autonav internals, npc/news/derelict internals, reworking old missions into the visual novel system, etc. have been mainly rewritten to improve shortcomings. While this is not really visible in the end product directly, it has enabled a lots of new features and improved the overall robustness of the game. However, this release is much more than just elimination of technical debt, as this release features a lot of new content in pretty much every area of the game: more events, more missions, more lore, more outfits, and more locations. The icing on the cake are new mechanics such as point defense systems, flow mechanics, and trials. Overall this is shaping up to be quite a large release and we are excited to share it with you.

Universe Revisited

As mentioned before on the blarg, the universe has been completely rework for 0.11.0. The universe should have a much more natural feel that matches the lore, with the Sol Nebula being more omnipresent as you travel around. This has required significant changes to many systems and system objects, so that many places you knew will probably seem familiar but quite different at the same time. It may take a while to get used to.
In numbers, some 67 new systems and 123 new space objects have been added, mainly around the Sol Nebula to give a more in-depth sensation of destruction and the fragility of humankind. Besides the typical planets and stations, these systems also contain many secrets that you can uncover.

House Sirius Rework

For 0.10.0, the Soromid got a major rework by getting true bioships that can level up and learn different skills, now its only fair for the neglected House Sirius to also get the same treatment. Instead of extreme biological engineering, House Sirius relies on psychic abilities called flow. While individuals dont possess very strong powers by themselves, House Sirius has designed their ships to be powerful amplifiers to be able to unleash potent abilities on the battle field.
The player will also be able to obtain similar psychic powers and unlock the full potential through new tests that can be found throughout space. Each test will require the player to overcome obstacles in order to unlock new abilities and also increase their overall psychic powers.
While Sirius ships have flow capability built-in, other ships can also use structural outfits to enable flow capability, allowing for more customization. That said, Sirius ships get unique bonuses from flow powers which are not available to other ships.

Plugin System

Although the plugin system was introduced in 0.10.0, it has gone largely unnoticed. Currently, it is possible to replace and modify all parts of the Naev that are implemented in Lua, which includes important parts such as autonav, many outfits, ship explosions, and more! Not only that, Naev has option networking built in with enet, allowing for networking functionality. On this line, there is a very much WIP multiplayer plugin, that allows for playing with other people. To make development somewhat easier, a development manual is being worked on, which covers things like how to write content for Naev and how to structure plugins. Given the advanced programming possibilities with the Naev Lua API, the only limit is your imagination!
Oh, there is explicit support for total conversions too!

New Content

Theres also a bunch of new content being worked on. Not only have the NPCs and news you can find at the spaceport bar been greatly reworked to me more relevant to the context at hand, but many new missions, factions, and mechanisms have been implemented. The new universe has also given opportunities to diversify the different factions and make them feel more unique, from taunts to landing messages. First of all, with optimizations done to the engine, its finally possible to have efficient point defense systems, something that has been asked for by players for a long time. Point defense systems will automatically target nearby missiles, torpedoes, and even interceptors! Of course the exact specs will depend on the outfit, Guardian Systems use powerful lasers to focus on torpedoes or interceptors, while Soromid Spittle Clusters have been bio-engineered to create screens of bubbles to block weaker, but faster missiles.
A new neutral faction has been created to replace the old Traders Guild. The new Space Traders Society is an organization that spans different guilds and has important subfactions such as the mercenary guild Astra Vigilis, the Mining Vrata, and the Imperial Red Star. They have important presence in several systems where new outfits are also available for trade.
Finally, more events missions have been added throughout the universe, and although not finished yet, we expect the conclusion to the Minerva campaign to make it into 0.11.0.

Game Optimization

One issue Naev has traditionally had with the large systems it features, is slow downs when many pilots were fighting each other as a result of a primitive collision system. Well, it is no longer an issue as the current system has been reworked with quadtrees. Testing shows that it is much much faster in extreme cases, with the game easily handling hundreds of ships fighting each other without slowing down. Furthermore, many aspects of the game have been profiled and optimized such that the game should run much more fluid than 0.10.0.
Tests show that where Naev 0.10.0 would choke and become a slide show, Naev 0.11.0 will be able to run without a hitch, such as 50 Dvaered Vendettas fighting with 50 FLF Lancelots. That said, given the high levels of time compressions capital ships can reach, it is likely in some extreme cases you may experience some slow downs.

Concluding Remarks

This concludes the Sporadic Naev Newsletter Vol. 3, and see you again in the next one!

[ 2023-09-04 08:05:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

Pirates have always been an issue for the law-abiding player. They are everywhere and relentless. However, with the addition of patrol lanes in 0.9.0, the universe has become a safer place, at least where the patrol lanes exist. Although that made things much easier for the player, a gaping flaw was that the autonav system did not understand how to use these lanes. For 0.11.0, we implemented the long awaited feature that autonav will now use patrol lanes if configured to!. So how does this work? By default, autonav will use patrol lanes of non-hostile factions when jumping, and will not use them otherwise. You can configure it to not use lanes for jump, and also to use lanes for landing on planets or stations from the new settings option accessible in the info menu. The settings button replaces and incorporates the Set GUI functionality.
To get this working the entire autonav system was scrapped and rewritten, this also has the added effect of being much more accurate and efficient when travelling around. Overall its a win-win situation! Hopefully this will ease the early game and save many pilots from meeting their fate at the hands of the hordes of marauders lurking in the darkness. As always, you can opt-in to the nightly beta branch on steam, or download the nightly from itch.io or github to get the latest and greatest of Naev development. Due note that this can be unstable, and make sure to back up your 0.10 saves first!

[ 2023-07-30 13:29:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

This post is about development on Naev 0.11.0. At the 2nd anniversary of posting about implementing raymarched fancy explosions, its time to talk about trying to use the system to its full potential. And by full potential, I mean custom ship explosions! All of the factional ships have been given custom explosions, some slightly different from the standard explosions, while others have much more radical changes, including different explosion types, secondary effects, and radically different colours. Time to explode and damage have also been changed, while some explosions now do different damage types and/or apply disabling effects. This should help have the different factions and ships feel more different. [previewyoutube=TU_CwmllWjY;full][/previewyoutube] From the technical side of things, custom ship explosions are done by using Lua scripting for ships, similar as what was done for outfits. This opens up a whole new possibility of what can be done with ships, I wont cover other things being done with this yet, but it has to do with the Great House Sirius rework which brings about psychic powers. All these changes will be included in version 0.11.0 which should be released around December this year. Lots of exciting development to look for for the rest of 2023!

[ 2023-07-17 02:26:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

The Naev DevTeam is proud to announce the release of Naev version 0.10.6. This releases fixes some minor memory leaks and some data inconsistencies. It is recommended to update to as soon as possible. We hope this is the last 0.10 release before 0.11.0. Although it has been tested, there are almost certainly still bugs around, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join one of our chatrooms or discussion boards (here). You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

[previewyoutube=CNBk1DK046k;full][/previewyoutube]

Changes since 0.10.5

• Fixed potential segfault with invalid semver strings
• Fixed sign error when buying artifacts in the Baron Prince mission (sorry)
• Fixed behaviour of naev.trigger with parameters
• Fixed Lua spfx volume changing with game speed
• Fixed memory leak in luaspfx trails
• Fixed missions doing things in systems they should not
• Fixed Adrenal Gland IIIs time speed up effect
• Fixed Misi giving upgrades for free
• Fixed minor planet check in frontier war missions
• Fixed silent installs on windows
• Fixed typos

[ 2023-07-07 12:30:52 CET ] [ Original post ]

The Naev DevTeam is proud to announce the release of Naev version 0.10.5. This release fixes an important crash among other minor fixes. It is highly recommended to update to as soon as possible. Although it has been tested, there are almost certainly still bugs around, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join one of our chatrooms or discussion boards (here). You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

[previewyoutube=CNBk1DK046k;full][/previewyoutube]

Changes since 0.10.4

• Start counting effect stacks from 1 not 2
• Fixed launcher weapons using outfit mass instead of ammo mass
• Fixed some typos
• Fixed equipment of Lancelot in Sharkman Is Back mission
• Fixed clicking on jump points also selecting planets in some cases
• Fixed some events not claiming systems that could interfere with other missions
• Fixed some formatting in the alt text when hovering over outfits in the equipment window
• Changed music.stop() API to stop music from continuing by default
• Fixed potential memory issues on some platforms
• Fixed crash when changing to Japanese language on Windows using Japanese locale
• nelly02: Nelly now stops recommending stuff that only does a little disable
• shadowvigil: Fixed mission not spawning escorts
• flf_patrol: Missions should no longer be able to have ridiculously low credit rewards
• hypergate_construction: should actually claim the system
• ec06: refuel tanker should provide as much fuel as possible
• taiomi: fixed claim check for last mission
• taiomi09: fixed smugglers becoming hostile in some cases

[ 2023-04-23 08:30:18 CET ] [ Original post ]

This post is about development on Naev 0.11.0. Since 0.10.0 was released, those of you on nightly builds have probably noticed that not much has been going on. Truth is, development has been going on in a parallel newmap branch that just got merged into main, and will appear in the next nightly. Why the parallel development? Although Naev has seen many changes during its development, the fundamental layout of the universe has remained largely unchanged. However, this was sort of unmaintainable due to inconsistencies with the lore of the Naev universe, and, after the release of 0.10.0, we thought it was a good idea to revisit and rethink about how the universe itself is laid out to make it more consistent.
Wunomi's World is a new world with a geostationary ring located in the reworked area near the Nebula. What does this mean? Although an effort has been taken to try to keep most of the underlying topology, that is, what systems are connected to what systems, there were limits to what we could conserve and the result is that lots of things have been changed. This is particularly pronounced near around the Nebula with many new systems and interesting space objects being added. There are also many new secrets you can find that can be quite useful to your player character, we leave it up to you to find them. You can try the development version if you are brave (please back up your saves first!) by getting the images available from both github and steam via the opt-in beta. If you try it and find any issues, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join one of our chatrooms or discussion boards (here). Some other new changes brought with the merge:

• 4 new missions
• Space dust is properly antialiased
• Planet properties affect quantity of missions available
• Changed the visuals for some of the nebulas
• Show enemy/ally factions in the faction standing info window
• Can sometimes find POI events with a pulse scanner equipped when entering systems
• Minor speed ups to patrol lane computations

[ 2023-02-12 06:16:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

The Naev DevTeam is proud to announce the release of Naev version 0.10.4. This release fixes an important crash among other minor fixes. It is highly recommended to update to as soon as possible. Although it has been tested, there are almost certainly still bugs around, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join one of our chatrooms or discussion boards (here). You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

[previewyoutube=CNBk1DK046k;full][/previewyoutube]

Changes since 0.10.3

• Fixed crashes related to multiple effects being active at once
• Fixed multiple mission_done hooks not passing parameter correctly
• Fixed plugin strings not being initialized with mismatched saves
• ec06: made the final battle work much better

[ 2023-02-04 06:22:55 CET ] [ Original post ]

The Naev DevTeam is proud to announce the release of Naev version 0.10.3. This release fixes several important crashes among other minor fixes. It is highly recommended to update to as soon as possible. Although it has been tested, there are almost certainly still bugs around, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join one of our chatrooms or discussion boards (here). You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

[previewyoutube=CNBk1DK046k;full][/previewyoutube]

Changes since 0.10.2

• Fixed crash when using fits currently selected ship outfit filter
• Fixed escorts always being set to aggressive when loading a save
• Fixed Dvaered standing cap increase being lost after loading game
• Made space dust a bit less bright when it starts turning into lines
• derelict_rescue: play money sound instead of victory sound on completion
• rehab: fixed crash when aborting rehabilitation missions
• foundation station, efferey: fixed not using pirate landing script

[ 2023-01-17 04:30:52 CET ] [ Original post ]

Happy New Year! The Naev DevTeam is proud to announce the release of Naev version 0.10.2. This release fixes several important crashes among other minor fixes. It is highly recommended to update to as soon as possible. Although it has been tested, there are almost certainly still bugs around, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join one of our chatrooms or discussion boards (here). You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

[previewyoutube=CNBk1DK046k;full][/previewyoutube]

Changes since 0.10.1

• Fixed escorts sometimes not following their leader and landing
• Fixed autonav always wanting to go to the edge of jump points
• Fixed crash when causing multiple dialogues to run in the background
• Fixed outfit lua being called before initialization
• Fixed not giving the AI a name when updating a save breaking the updater script
• Fixed deleting last snapshot of a save switching to another pilots saves
• Fixed saves and snapshots not displaying correct name with version mismatch
• Fixed crash when deleting Lua-side fonts, should fix crash with POI
• Fixed swapping ships with mission cargo sharing name with other cargo can lead to wrong cargo getting duplicated
• Fixed original music at Research Post Sigma-13
• Fixed music stopping after playing once in new games
• Change music API to make it explicit you can temporarily disable the music engine
• Set windows compatibility mode to Windows 7 when cross-compiling
• legacy gui: fixed line artefacts near fuel / energy bars
• pulse_scanner: fix potential error on init
• patrol: dont have an invisible time limit to reach the system anymore
• taiomi: fixed some claims
• zbh03: landing when hostiles spawned will fail the mission
• bounties: mention there is a time limit to reach the system, not made explicit though
• zpp01, zbh01: bumped chance to 30%
• poi_intro: cant board nelly again

[ 2023-01-12 05:31:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

The Naev DevTeam is proud to announce the release of Naev version 0.10.1. This release addresses minor issues and bugs from the 0.10.0 release and does not add any new content. It is highly recommended to update from 0.10.0 as soon as possible Although it has been tested, there are almost certainly still bugs around, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join one of our chatrooms or discussion boards (here). You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

[previewyoutube=CNBk1DK046k;full][/previewyoutube]

Changes since 0.10.0

• Fixed many stations not marked as stations
• FLF combatants only appear on FLF spobs
• Fixed cases where the player could be forced to take off when not spaceworthy
• Show engine volume option same as other volume options
• Use nearest neighbour interpolation for small resolution vn images
• Fix engine sound being played at high time compression values
• Try to fix issue where music stops playing
• Statically link libenet on steam versions
• diy-nerds: fixed reward and description not matching
• deliverlove: fixed credit exploit
• reynir: dont add 0 tonnes of hotdogs

[ 2022-12-29 09:23:58 CET ] [ Original post ]

For what has become a new winter holiday tradition, the Naev DevTeam is proud to announce the release of version 0.10.0. This release contains many incredible new features, significantly improved and expanded old features, and tons of new content including multiple long campaigns. The 0.10.0 implements many of the major wanted features for Naev and will likely allow the next releases to focus much more on polish, filling out the existing universe, and more exciting new content. We would like to thank all the contributors who have participated and helped in the making of this release. Most notable changes:

• Plugin system implemented
• Player fleets
• Hypergates
• Asteroids completely reworked
• More space anomalies
• True bioships
• Tons of new content

Although we have gone through 2 beta releases in this release cycle, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join our Discord chat (invite). You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:



[previewyoutube=CNBk1DK046k;leftthumb][/previewyoutube]

Full Changelog

• New Mechanics
  • Support for setting ships as escorts and thus player fleets
  • Hypergates that allow for long distance travel
  • Asteroid rework
    • Asteroids no longer randomly explode
    • Asteroid scanning is no longer binary, but distance-based
    • New mini-game based mining
    • More diversity in types with different rarity
  • Support for restrictions for outfits and ships, such as minimum faction standing
  • Significantly improved how faction reputation caps are handled
  • Pilots can have intrinsic outfits
  • Bioships go rawr (new skill system)
  • Weapons and outfits can cause effects on ships
  • More complex space objects (spob)
  • Support for different difficulty settings
  • New exploration mechanic with points of interest
  • Unique ships to be found throughout the universe (pers)
  • Manual aiming mode for weapon sets
• Gameplay Changes
  • Weapon types are more differentiated
  • Removed nearly redundant launchers
  • Nerfed beams
  • Factional ships are more widely sold
  • Schroedinger uses less fuel instead of getting a large bonus
  • Plasma has a burning effect
  • Changed spawning and behaviour of pirates to be less dangerous in populated systems
  • Fighters only attack enemies visible by their carrier
  • AI is better at choosing targets
  • More dump targets for waste dump mission and tweaked rewards
  • Removed escorts for hire in lieu of player fleets
  • Pirates should avoid attacking near safeish areas
  • Made slim the default GUI instead of brushed
• New Content
  • Added a gigantic black hole
  • Added new space anomalies such as plasma storms
  • Lots of new asteroid types and commodities
  • More interesting places to visit and explore
  • More engine sounds
  • 45 New missions
    • More terraforming
    • Continuation of the Zalek story
    • Help the Dvaered do some tasks
    • Tutorial for new mechanics
    • Secret system!
  • 14 New ships
    • Certain secret faction completely revamped
  • New spob graphics
  • Lots of new outfits and reworked old outfits
    • Use energy to avoid death
    • Create scanning pulses
    • Blinking has animations
    • Advanced mining techniques
    • Space mines
  • News revamped to be more flexible and relate more with current events
  • NPCs revamped to be more flexible with many new messages
  • New commodities that are only available from mining
  • Fancy racing mini-game that replaces old race missions
• Quality of Life
  • Support for save snapshots for each pilot
  • Can ask pilots to refuel you more than 100 units at a time
  • Engine sound volume is configurable
  • Revamped the star map to be large and more useful
  • Can add notes to the star map
  • Autoscroll is now an option in the VN
  • Spob communication window has been redone
  • Limit sound output volume when lots of sounds are playing jointly
  • Redid the music engine to be less prone to play combat music
  • Hide radar when overlay is open (with option to revert to old behaviour)
  • Duplicate effects get collapsed into stacks in the GUI
  • Allowing exiting and reloading while love framework is open (VN, etc.)
  • Autonav is more flexible with positioning on jump points
  • Can customize jump flash brightness
  • Player will not be scanned immediately on jumping in or taking off
  • Show health bars near pilots in combat (can be disabled in options)
  • Escort AI is customizable
  • Ship AI reminds player about things when they havent played in a while
  • Improved mission computer display details for many missions
  • Engine sounds smoothly transition on/off
• Engine changes
  • Work has begun on a development manual
  • Plugin support with explicit support for total conversions
  • All monolithic files have been split up
  • Simplified terminology with spob (space objects) replacing planet/asset
  • Support for tags in missions
  • Player ships can store their own variables now
  • Weapon outfits support some Lua scripting
  • Ammunition/fighters merged into launchers/fighter bays
  • Support for shotgun-type weapons
  • Backgrounds no longer use an orthographic projection
  • Minor transitions added to the toolkit
  • Asteroids redone to be more flexible and easy to add using groups
  • Asteroid field support in the editor
  • Allow for soft claims instead of only hard claims
  • Unified the event and mission headers
  • Implemented per-pilot variables
  • Lua scripting for spob
  • AI can use special outfits
  • Lots of engine rewriting and modernization that should bring some speed improvements and more flexibility when modding
  • Added lua-enet library to allow for networking in plugins (off by default, requires setting in configuration file)
  • Can animate loading screen
  • Lowered error in physics approximation (shouldnt be noticeable though)
• Bug Fixes
  • Too many to list, but well try
  • Fixed pilots not getting equipped at all in some cases
  • Fixed looting cargo when boarding giving less than expected
  • Fixed all asteroid graphics being used as debris
  • Fixed some hooks not properly passing arguments
  • Block certain inputs during cinematics
  • Fixed disabling saving and forcing the pilot to take off not working as expected
  • Fixed sounds getting stopped in many cases due to garbage collection
  • Made outfit descriptions fit in the landing window for all outfits
  • Many typo fixes

[ 2022-12-23 03:26:53 CET ] [ Original post ]

During playtesting 0.10.0-beta.1, weve found and fixed a critical bug, with some other more minor ones also being addressed. As always, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join our Discord or Matrix chatrooms. Find out more about them (here!) You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

• Download the beta from GitHub
• Opt-in to the beta branch on Steam
• Download the Beta versions on our Itch.io Page

Changes since 0.10.0-beta.1

• Pirates should avoid attacking near safeish areas
• Fixed crash on load when player has more than one ship.
• Fixed player.setSpeed() not resetting speed as intended
• Fixed pilot.comm not showing messages
• Fixed typo/grammar in sightseeing and dvaered census introductory mission
• Dont display health bars with no player alive
• Autonav doesnt go only to the center of spobs
• Mention escort AI settings when buying a fighter bay tutorial plays

[ 2022-12-08 03:57:51 CET ] [ Original post ]

So its that time of year again. Although a lot of new features, content, and mechanics have been added, there has also been significant effort in modernizing and rewriting large parts of legacy code in an effort to improve performance overall. As with all major releases, so much has changed that it is nearly impossible for the release to be bug free and for this purpose we wish to start doing a series of betas for public testing of the upcoming 0.10.0 release. If you try it and find any issues, please report them at the issue tracker. Discussion about the game can be had on one of the various discussion forums and chatrooms we have. Check them out on out here! You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

• Download the beta from GitHub
• Opt-in to the beta branch on Steam
• Download the Beta versions on our Itch.io Page

Changes since 0.9.4

• New Mechanics
  • Support for setting ships as escorts and thus player fleets
  • Hypergates that allow for long distance travel
  • Asteroid rework
    • Asteroids no longer randomly explode
    • Asteroid scanning is no longer binary, but distance-based
    • New mini-game based mining
    • More diversity in types with different rarity
  • Support for restrictions for outfits and ships, such as minimum faction standing
  • Significantly improved how faction reputation caps are handled
  • Pilots can have intrinsic outfits
  • Bioships go rawr (new skill system)
  • Weapons and outfits can cause effects on ships
  • More complex space objects (spob)
  • Support for different difficulty settings
  • New exploration mechanic with points of interest
  • Unique ships to be found throughout the universe (pers)
  • Manual aiming mode for weapon sets
• Gameplay Changes
  • Weapon types are more differentiated
  • Removed nearly redundant launchers
  • Nerfed beams
  • Factional ships are more widely sold
  • Schroedinger uses less fuel instead of getting a large bonus
  • Plasma has a burning effect
  • Changed spawning and behaviour of pirates to be less dangerous in populated systems
  • Fighters only attack enemies visible by their carrier
  • AI is better at choosing targets
  • More dump targets for waste dump mission and tweaked rewards
  • Removed escorts for hire in lieu of player fleets
• New Content
  • Added a gigantic black hole
  • Added new space anomalies such as plasma storms
  • Lots of new asteroid types and commodities
  • More interesting places to visit and explore
  • More engine sounds
  • 45 New missions
    • More terraforming
    • Continuation of the Zalek story
    • Help the Dvaered do some tasks
    • Tutorial for new mechanics
    • Secret system!
  • 14 New ships
    • Certain secret faction completely revamped
  • New spob graphics
  • Lots of new outfits and reworked old outfits
    • Use energy to avoid death
    • Create scanning pulses
    • Blinking has animations
    • Advanced mining techniques
    • Space mines
  • News revamped to be more flexible and relate more with current events
  • NPCs revamped to be more flexible with many new messages
  • New commodities that are only available from mining
  • Fancy racing mini-game that replaces old race missions
• Quality of Life
  • Support for save snapshots for each pilot
  • Can ask pilots to refuel you more than 100 units at a time
  • Engine sound volume is configurable
  • Revamped the star map to be large and more useful
  • Can add notes to the star map
  • Autoscroll is now an option in the VN
  • Spob communication window has been redone
  • Limit sound output volume when lots of sounds are playing jointly
  • Redid the music engine to be less prone to play combat music
  • Hide radar when overlay is open (with option to revert to old behaviour)
  • Duplicate effects get collapsed into stacks in the GUI
  • Allowing exiting and reloading while love framework is open (VN, etc.)
  • Autonav is more flexible with positioning on jump points
  • Can customize jump flash brightness
  • Player will not be scanned immediately on jumping in or taking off
  • Show health bars near pilots in combat (can be disabled in options)
  • Escort AI is customizable
  • Ship AI reminds player about things when they havent played in a while
• Engine changes
  • Work has begun on a development manual
  • Plugin support with explicit support for total conversions
  • All monolithic files have been split up
  • Simplified terminology with spob (space objects) replacing planet/asset
  • Support for tags in missions
  • Player ships can store their own variables now
  • Weapon outfits support some Lua scripting
  • Ammunition/fighters merged into launchers/fighter bays
  • Support for shotgun-type weapons
  • Backgrounds no longer use an orthographic projection
  • Minor transitions added to the toolkit
  • Asteroids redone to be more flexible and easy to add using groups
  • Asteroid field support in the editor
  • Allow for soft claims instead of only hard claims
  • Unified the event and mission headers
  • Implemented per-pilot variables
  • Lua scripting for spob
  • AI can use special outfits
  • Lots of engine rewriting and modernization that should bring some speed improvements and more flexibility when modding
  • Added lua-enet library to allow for networking in plugins (off by default, requires setting in configuration file)
  • Can animate loading screen
• Bug Fixes
  • Too many to list, but well try
  • Fixed pilots not getting equipped at all in some cases
  • Fixed looting cargo when boarding giving less than expected
  • Fixed all asteroid graphics being used as debris
  • Fixed some hooks not properly passing arguments
  • Block certain inputs during cinematics
  • Fixed disabling saving and forcing the pilot to take off not working as expected
  • Fixed sounds getting stopped in many cases due to garbage collection
  • Many typo fixes

[ 2022-12-02 06:22:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

EDIT: We have pushed a fix for macOS users running into issues launching the game, please let us know in the Discussion forums if you run into any issues. The Naev DevTeam is pleased to announce the release of Naev version 0.9.4. With this release, the Naev 0.9 branch is definitely maybe free of bugs. In case you find one anyway, please report on this tracker, and feel free to join our Discord or Matrix (chat rooms). Theres no new content here, aside from stunning progress by the volunteer translators in the community. The new content has instead gone into pre-releases of Naev 0.10, and our attention for the rest of 2022 will be on finishing that. You can get the latest release, and nightly 0.10-alpha builds, from any of the following sources:

• Naev on github
• Naev on steam
• Naev on itch.io
• Naev on flathub

[previewyoutube=62Pe011BnnU;full][/previewyoutube]

Changes since 0.9.3

• Fix No error. log spam with certain video card drivers
• Fix Lua errors with tiny nebula such as Sarcophagus
• Fix fake transponder cheesing rehabilitation missions
• Fix errors in Anxious Merchant, Dead Or Alive Bounty, Harjas Vengeance, and The Lost Brother missions
• Fix the in-game screenshot feature, in case of odd window dimensions
• Fix at least Dvaered Diplomacy glitching when the game is saved/reloaded (thanks to Duke on the Steam forums)
• Update translations, including a new Spanish translation

[ 2022-07-20 12:20:04 CET ] [ Original post ]

The Naev DevTeam is satisfied to announce the release of Naev version 0.9.3. This release addresses issues and bugs from the 0.9.2 release and does not add any new content. It is highly recommended to update from 0.9.2 as soon as possible. In particular, two fairly important bugs involving game hanging sometimes when entering certain nebula systems and crashes have been fixed. Although it has been heavily tested, there are almost certainly still bugs around, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join our Discord or Matrix (chat rooms). You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

• Naev on Github
• Naev on Steam
• Naev on itch.io
• Naev on Flathub

[previewyoutube=62Pe011BnnU;full][/previewyoutube]

Changes since 0.9.2

• Bug fix: if the German translation was active, casino minigames explanation (Erklrung) didnt work
• Fix errors/slowdown in Diversion from () missions
• Fix bug in Waste Collector mission
• Fixed a bug that allowed the player to get infinite escorts
• Work around bugs in at least one OpenGL driver
• Fix crash when unidiff changes assets that the player has targetted
• Player actually has to pay for stealing outfits
• Fixed game hanging when entering some volatile nebula systems

[ 2022-04-02 16:09:54 CET ] [ Original post ]

The Naev DevTeam is satisfied to announce the release of Naev version 0.9.2. This release addresses minor issues and bugs from the 0.9.1 release and does not add any new content. It is highly recommended to update from 0.9.1 as soon as possible. Although it has been heavily tested, there are almost certainly still bugs around, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join our Discord or Matrix (chat rooms). You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

• Naev on github
• Naev on steam
• Naev on itch.io
• Naev on flathub

[previewyoutube=62Pe011BnnU;full][/previewyoutube]

Changes since 0.9.1

• Fix reward messages in the Particle Physics campaign
• Can no longer steal a certain Soromid ship
• Enhanced the logic for deciding whether its safe to save the game after landing
• Fix mission bugs: Assault on Unicorn, Emergency of Immediate Inspiration, The Search for Cynthia
• Fix zombie autonav toward deselected targets

[ 2022-01-21 03:16:34 CET ] [ Original post ]

The Naev DevTeam is proud to announce the release of Naev version 0.9.1. This release addresses minor issues and bugs from the 0.9.0 release and does not add any new content. It is highly recommended to update from 0.9.0 as soon as possible Although it has been heavily tested, there are almost certainly still bugs around, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join our Discord chat (invite). You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

• Naev on github
• Naev on steam
• Naev on itch.io
• Naev on flathub

[previewyoutube=62Pe011BnnU;full][/previewyoutube]

Changes since 0.9.0

• Minor countermeasures for long player ship names
• Fix mission breakage in Minerva Pirates 4, Runaway Search, Particle Physics 3, Shadow Vigil, Baron Prince, and Dvaered Ballet
• Fix exploit in Travelling Merchant event (mission prize for sale that shouldnt have been)
• Fix many missions that explicitly attack the player overriding stealth and visibility mechanics
• Fix some text labels that couldnt be translated from English
• Fix equipment slot information displaying over filter widget
• Fix phantom acceleration after an auto-board and undock sequence
• Darkened nebulas and lowered default background darkness
• Improved upstream metainfo for packagers
• Can no longer steal a certain Zalek ship
• Fix crash under certain conditions when using the console
• Masochists and LTS distro packagers may build with Meson 0.54 (no subproject fallbacks) or 0.53 (also no meson compile, only ninja)
• Slightly reduced rendered nebula quality to stop breakage on some intel GPUs
• VN music uses logarithmic scale like internal music
• Fixed some offset issues with the slim GUI

[ 2022-01-02 05:16:59 CET ] [ Original post ]

With global pandemic raging and chaos all around, the Naev DevTeam is proud to announce the release of version 0.9.0. This represents almost 9,000 commits from 0.8.2, and a major step forward for Naev. Graphics and mehanics have been greatly overhauled. We would like to thank all the contributors who have participated and hepled in the making of this release. Most notable changes are:

• Electronic warfare revamp with stealth and illegal cargo and outfits
• Systems have patrol routes for dominating factions
• Visual novel system for new missions with support for mini-games
• Complete rebalance and overhaul of most outfits that can have complex behaviours now
• Rehauled backgrounds, new trails, and other graphical improvements
• Lots of new content including 40 new missions

Although we have gone through 3 beta releases in this release cycle, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join our Discord chat (invite). You can get the latest version from any of the following three sources:

• Naev on github
• Naev on steam
• Naev on itch.io

[previewyoutube=62Pe011BnnU;full][/previewyoutube]

Full Changelog

• New mechanics
  • Added new utility outfits with complex effects
  • Changed ship classification, removing rare classes while adding Interceptor and Battleship classes
  • Illegal cargo and ship-to-ship detection
  • Pilots can now go into stealth mode
  • Systems have patrol routes patrolled by the governing faction
  • Electronic warfare parameters are simplified and visible
  • Added escorts for hire
  • Some simple minigames have been added
  • Scramblers and jammers have fixed chance to mess up missiles depending on their resistance
  • Restricted systems where dominant faction will attack on sight
  • Some bulk freighter-class ships added
  • Systems can have different effects on all ships in them
  • Fake transponder replaces fake id
• Visual improvements
  • New fancy system rendering effects
  • Ships and rockets now have engine trails
  • Beam visuals have been made more flexible and pretty
  • Jumping visuals improved
  • Redid the shake visuals and added a small damage visual
  • Most special effects implemented as shaders
  • Most small visuals redone to be more visible and clean
  • Similar presences are now merged in map
  • Overhauled all the backgrounds
• Gameplay changes
  • Pirates split into multiple clans and marauders
  • Added discovery messages as you explore the universe
  • Overhauled NPC AI
  • Overhaul and rebalance of most outfits
  • Wanted ships no longer aggro defense forces (bounties)
  • Bribed pilots dont become hostile again unless attacked
  • Stress now decreases based on ship mass
  • Merged the Independent and Civilian factions
  • Game now tracks meta-data like ships destroyed and time played
  • Trade lane routes made explicit
  • More common and useful derelict ships
  • Missiles have lock-on reduced and in-flight calibration added
  • Tutorial redone with Ship AI that is also accessible from the info menu
  • New ships including the Starbridge
  • Tweaked outfit distribution
• Quality of Life
  • Autonav supports landing and boarding
  • Comm window reworked and you can bribe multiple pilots at once
  • Possible to change or unequip ships with deployed fighters
  • More fine-grained autonav reset control by setting enemy distance
  • Added autoequip functionality
  • Able to filter equipable outfits
  • Minimal view mode for the map
  • More visible map markers
  • More in-game tutorial-ish explanations for new mechanics as you encounter them
  • You can now favourite your ships to help with sorting
  • Redid boarding window to be more intuitive and easier to loot what you want
  • Paste support for input stuff
  • Translation completion status is shown in the options
  • Support for updating old saves
  • In-depth proof-reading
  • New outfit graphics
• New locations
  • Added gambling resort Minerva Station
  • Revamped and improved some existing locations
  • Several new planets and systems
• 40 New missions
  • Challenge adversaries in the Crimson Gauntlet
  • Follow happenings on Minerva Station
  • Invade the frontier with the Dvaered
  • Ship enthusiast quiz
  • Deliver fancy contraband all over the universe
  • Raid trader convoys
  • Rescue derelict crew
  • Small early game tutorial-ish campaign
  • Neutral campaign to transform the universe
  • Help the Zalek do particle physics
  • Meow
• New translation(s) in progress: Czech, French, Korean, Portuguese, and Japanese
• Engine Changes
  • Added an optimizer to improve automatic outfitting choices
  • A ton of new ship stat attributes have been added
  • Support for Lua-based hooks in Outfits for complex behaviours
  • Support for post-processing shaders
  • Added rendering and update hooks in the Lua API
  • Added image format support beyond PNG (notably WebP)
  • Support for arbitrary ship display classes
  • Game data now handled by PhysicsFS, allowing for multiple sources and easier modding
  • Meson is now the only build system, and development builds can integrate all assets/translations without being installed
  • Fonts now use distance fields and much better in many cases
  • Improved how Lua was being loaded
  • Added library that supports lots of Love2D API in Naev
  • Added Visual Novel library
  • Added card games
  • Added dynamic factions
  • Added dynamic commodities
  • Lua support for advanced sound effects
  • Most markers and indicators use signed distance functions now
  • Internally using linear colourspace
  • Faction presence computed with base and bonus values
  • Virtual assets have been redone and are more flexible than before
  • Point value system for ships to help with presence and other things
  • Support for shipstats at a system level
  • Initial support for 3D models
  • Proper support for line breaks in most languages
  • Most objects (ships, planets, etc.) have tags that can be used from Lua
  • Lots of optimization

[ 2021-12-23 05:48:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

As the bugs start to settle down, it is time for a third 0.9.0 beta release. This release fixes the issues listed below. As always, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join our Discord chat (invite). To get the new version you can:

• Opt-in to the beta channel via Steam
• Download the new version from here.

Changes since 0.9.0-beta.2

• Fixed warning about cargo rush deliveries when you dont know the best route
• Fixed another crash related to pilot removal
• Fixed wonky backgrounds during death cutscenes, for the sake of other players of course
• Fixed crash when techs are first patched to planets through unidiff
• Fixed potential spurious warnings about incomplete translations, even when running in English
• Fixed failure to resolve regional translations (like pt_BT or pt_PT) from the locale
• Fixed VN log text overlap issues
• Fixed commodities not being added through unidiff
• Fixed safe lane rendering alpha being wrong
• Fixed misbehaviours with Maikki, Nelly 2, Shark 3, Shipwreck, Travelling Merchant, Warlords Battle, and Particle Physics 2
• Fixed backgrounds accumulating when messing with options
• Fixed issues with board scripts getting deferred with respect to boarding script
• Fixed some instances of background text interfering with how foreground text was drawn
• Fixed some missions causing trouble when saved/reloaded (due to dynamic factions)
• Fixed minor Ship AI issues (rename at game start)
• Fixed autonav via the map during a landing sequence
• Fixed autonav giving away autofollowed pilots and unknown destination systems
• Improved speed and accuracy of autonav stopping
• Improved mission marker behavior (show planets more, always clean up at end of mission)
• Kicked Empire patrols out of the Arandon system
• Gave pirate ships dodgier outfits
• Proofread too many parts of the game to mention
• AI should only try to jump to systems with their faction presence
• Wrap OSD titles as necessary
• Dont allow illegal characters in pilot name
• Be kinder to old video drivers
• More meow
• More music

[ 2021-12-12 04:42:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

Naev 0.9.0-beta.2

BY UNCOMBEDCOCONUT, ON DECEMBER 1ST, 2021 Theres nothing like a release announcement to lure the bugs into the open. Our second 0.9.0 beta release fixes the ones listed below. As always, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join our Discord chat (invite). To get the new version you can:

• Opt-in to the beta channel via Steam
• Download the new version from here.

Changes since 0.9.0-beta.1

• Prevented Naev from losing the players (pre-0.9.0-beta) licenses on first load
• Fixed missing credits and translation coverage data
• Prevented players from getting stranded without access to fuel
• Mission script fixes for Helping Nelly and The one with the Visit
• Outfit script fix for Weapons Ionizer
• Fixed issues impacting at least some Windows / Intel graphics combinations
• Hulls are more widely available
• Improved some of the map outfits
• Do not render systems with unknown assets as restricted
• Added gamma correction to Options
• Fixed reproducible crash when boarded pilots get removed
• Added counterfeit licenses to pirate worlds
• Remove minor energy malus from sensor array and jump detector
• Electron burst cannon is no longer widely available
• Improved phrasing

[ 2021-12-02 01:41:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

Naev 0.9.0-beta.1

BY BOBBENS, ON DECEMBER 1ST, 2021 Its been a very productive year. With almost 8,500 commits from 0.8.2. For reference, this is roughly one third of all the commits in the entire Naev source code have been done this last year. As you can guess, with so many changes altering fundamental things including most of the core gameplay mechanics, there is a high chance that many things have been broken and things lack polish. For this reason, like with the 0.8.x releases, we are going to do several betas as we near the final 0.9.0 release, which we hope to be able to get out this year. Of course, this will depend on how many bugs and issues are found. If you try it and find any issues, please report them at the issue tracker. Discussion about the game can be had on Discord (discord invite). To get the new version you can:

• Opt-in to the beta channel via steam
• Download the new version from here.

Full Changelog

• New mechanics
  • Added new utility outfits with complex effects
  • Changed ship classification, removing rare classes while adding Interceptor and Battleship classes
  • Illegal cargo and ship-to-ship detection
  • Pilots can now go into stealth mode
  • Systems have safe lanes patrolled by the governing faction
  • Electronic warfare parameters are simplified and visible
  • Added escorts for hire
  • Some simple minigames have been added
  • Scramblers and jammers have fixed chance to mess up missiles depending on their resistance
  • Restricted systems where dominant faction will attack on sight
  • Some bulk freighter-class ships added
  • Systems can have different effects on all ships in them
  • Fake transponder replaces fake id
• Visual improvements
  • New fancy system rendering effects
  • Ships and rockets now have engine trails
  • Beam visuals have been made more flexible and pretty
  • Jumping visuals improved
  • Redid the shake visuals and added a small damage visual
  • Most special effects implemented as shaders
  • Most small visuals redone to be more visible and clean
  • Similar presences are now merged in map
  • Overhauled all the backgrounds
• Gameplay changes
  • Pirates split into multiple clans and marauders
  • Added discovery messages as you explore the universe
  • Overhauled NPC AI
  • Overhaul and rebalance of most outfits
  • Wanted ships no longer aggro defense forces (bounties)
  • Bribed pilots dont become hostile again unless attacked
  • Stress now decreases based on ship mass
  • Merged the Independent and Civilian factions
  • Game now tracks meta-data like ships destroyed and time played
  • Trade lane routes made explicit
  • More common and useful derelict ships
  • Missiles have lock-on reduced and in-flight calibration added
  • Tutorial redone with Ship AI that is also accessible from the info menu
  • New ships including the Starbridge
• Quality of Life
  • Autonav supports landing and boarding
  • Comm window reworked and you can bribe multiple pilots at once
  • Possible to change or unequip ships with deployed fighters
  • More fine-grained autonav reset control by setting enemy distance
  • Added autoequip functionality
  • Able to filter equipable outfits
  • Minimal view mode for the map
  • More visible map markers
  • More in-game tutorial-ish explanations for new mechanics as you encounter them
  • You can now favourite your ships to help with sorting
  • Redid boarding window to be more intuitive and easier to loot what you want
  • Paste support for input stuff
  • Translation completion status is shown in the options
• New locations
  • Added gambling resort Minerva Station
  • Revamped and improved some existing locations
  • Several new planets and systems
• 40 New missions
  • Challenge adversaries in the Crimson Gauntlet
  • Follow happenings on Minerva Station
  • Invade the frontier with the Dvaered
  • Ship enthusiast quiz
  • Deliver fancy contraband all over the universe
  • Raid trader convoys
  • Rescue derelict crew
  • Small early game tutorial-ish campaign
  • Neutral campaign to transform the universe
  • Help the Zalek do particle physics
  • Meow
• New translation(s) in progress: Czech, French, Korean, Portuguese, and Japanese
• Engine Changes
  • Added an optimizer to improve automatic outfitting choices
  • A ton of new ship stat attributes have been added
  • Support for Lua-based hooks in Outfits for complex behaviours
  • Support for post-processing shaders
  • Added rendering and update hooks in the Lua API
  • Added image format support beyond PNG (notably WebP)
  • Support for arbitrary ship display classes
  • Game data now handled by PhysicsFS, allowing for multiple sources and easier modding
  • Meson is now the only build system, and development builds can integrate all assets/translations without being installed
  • Fonts now use distance fields and much better in many cases
  • Improved how Lua was being loaded
  • Added library that supports lots of Love2D API in Naev
  • Added Visual Novel library
  • Added card games
  • Added dynamic factions
  • Added dynamic commodities
  • Lua support for advanced sound effects
  • Most markers and indicators use signed distance functions now
  • Internally using linear colourspace
  • Lots of optimization
  • Faction presence computed with base and bonus values
  • Virtual assets have been redone and are more flexible than before
  • Point value system for ships to help with presence and other things
  • Support for shipstats at a system level
  • Initial support for 3D models
  • Proper support for line breaks in most languages
  • Most objects (ships, planets, etc.) have tags that can be used from Lua
  • Lots of optimization

[ 2021-11-28 18:42:31 CET ] [ Original post ]

This post is about development on Naev 0.9.0. So its been over 10 years from the first edition of our sporadic naev newsletter, so it seems like it might be a good time to have the second edition. In the previous edition, we talked about the state of 0.5.0 and the introduction of big systems and electronic warfare. In this edition, well talk about the state of 0.9.0 and new features like stealth and safe lanes.

State of 0.9.0

Weve passed 5,500 commits from 0.8.2. This is going to be the largest amount of content and changes from any release ever with tons of graphical improvements, new mechanics, and new content added all over. It is already all live in the nightly images which are available from both github and steam via the opt-in beta. That said, it is recommended for you to back up your save or use a new one if you attempt to do this. At the current moment, you will lose many outfits and experience hiccups trying to use an old save game. Unlike the official releases, the nightly is still rather unpolished. Currently there is no hard ETA for the release, but we hope to release it within the year and follow a more timely release cycle. We hope that well be able to do a feature freeze in a couple of months and focus exclusively on polish until the release. As always, we will release one or more betas before the official release to try to debug potential issues.

Electronic Warfare Overhaul

Electronic warfare was originally introduced in 0.5.0. With the move to big systems, it no longer made sense for all ships to be visible at all times. Furthermore, we wanted to differentiate the roles between smaller and larger ships, while aiding survivability of small ships by making it harder for the largest of turrets to track them and hit them. While this worked well to some extent, it was never transparent to the player. Weve revamped it this time around to be fully visible to the player. Each ship, depending on its mass and bonuses, will have three separate values: detection, evasion, and stealth, that control when the ship is first detected, when the ship details are shown and scanning is possible, and finally how well the ship can stealth.
Electronic Warfare Redux - this time with understandable values! Hiding is the most important attribute that controls when ships are detected at and affects both evasion and stealth. Evasion is usually 75% of detected at value, and controls how well turrets and missiles track a ship. Furthermore, it controls the distance at which a ship is scanned at. Scanning a ship allows you to see the details of cargo and outfits. Furthermore, patrol ships will scan your ship and make sure you dont have illegal cargo.
Player being scanned by a fleet led by an Empire Admonisher. That leads us to the final mechanic: stealth! Stealth allows ships to become completely invisible if no ships are within their stealth distance. When stealthed, ships get a -50% penalty to all movement: max speed, thrust, and turning. However, they cease to appear on all system sensors. This allows ships to sneak past systems or ships, opening lots of opportunities for contraband, piracy, and survival.
Looking at nearby ships in stealth mode.

Safe lanes

One of the last major gameplay changing features is safe lanes, which have been recently incorporated into the main branch. Safe lanes consist of routes in space that are more regularly patrolled. Most traders and factional systems will use these routes, while areas away from space lanes will naturally lead to more pirate activities. Core systems with many planets and stations will naturally lead to more safe lanes, while systems far away from core systems will end up having sparser lanes, or none at all.
Safe lanes that look like Pacman.

Ship Classification Redux

This is a more minor change, but rare ship classes, such as cruiser ships, or motherships have been removed. Other similar classes have been merged, such as heavy drones and fighters, which retain the name of fighters. Furthermore, fighters have been split into fighters and interceptors (light fighters), and cruisers have been split into cruisers and battleships (heavy cruisers). This changes are mainly there for the equipment algorithm and AI to exploit.

Rebalance

Nearly all the outfits in the game have been modified or completely revamped. Core outfits and weapons have been designed to be based around 6 tiers: interceptor, fighter, corvette, destroyer, cruiser, and battleship. Utility outfits have been made to be based on conditional behaviour such as being below a certain armour threshold, or temporary behaviours. Finally, structural outfits have been made be stronger and play a more significant role in outfitting and not being left as an afterthought. Many new outfits have been added to fill in missing slots and roles, with many left to come.

Visual Novel Framework

Another fairly large change is a Lua based visual novel framework that has been written from scratch. It allows to show images and special effects while having text progressively appear. This greatly enhances some of the storytelling ability of the game and allows creating more complex conditional branching behaviours.
A friendly Minerva Station Terminal informing the player about their tokens. Furthermore, the entire system is based on the LVE framework which we recently started to partially support by mimicking the API in Naev, and allows for nearly infinite customizations.
The Visual Novel Framework has infinite flexibility.

Future Steps

There are lots of other improvements we have not mentioned in this newsletter: linear programming-based equipment optimization, discoveries, new missions, new ship attributes, more shader support, etc. We might go deeper into new features in future blarg posts as we refine and polish the mechanics. With regard to what is coming up, there are no too major things left to do. Besides overall polish, which will take most of the time, some new missions have to be written, in-system objects implemented, jamming rework, pricing rebalance, and a few odd ends here and there. Were hoping for a release within this year, but given the ambition and scope of 0.9.0, wed rather delay and have a better release, than rush it and have it be unplayable. If you wish to contribute to Naev, we have lots of things that can be done, even without programming experience! From making cooler beauty shops for comm and shipyard window, adding an uninhabited frontier, more loading screens, new character artwork, new outfit artwork, more missions, gameplay testing, etc. Tasks to be done can be found on the issue tracker, and discussion can be had on Discord. This concludes the Sporadic Naev Newsletter Vol. 2, and hopefully the next will be sooner than 10 years from now.

[ 2021-08-21 16:53:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

This post is about development on Naev 0.9.0. Even though explosions in space games generally defy the laws of physics, they are some of the better and necessary eye-candy. However, explosions in Naev remained unchanged since about 13 years ago. While not necessarily awful, they have always left a bit more to be desired. One idea that has been around for ages has been to try to redo them in procedural shaders to look better and more variable. With the recent shader improvements, it has never been a better time to revamp the other special effects.
The explosions have been redone with ray marching and are completely procedural: each explosion should be completely unique. Furthermore, the explosion parameters can be tweaked to create plasma clouds or other special effects, replacing a large amount of image-based animations we were using. Images speak louder than words, so see for yourself the new explosions in action!

[ 2021-07-18 10:55:34 CET ] [ Original post ]

This post is about development on Naev 0.9.0. So fact is, beams are cool. They can hit multiple targets and do a lot of damage while being accurate. Sure they have short range and bad tracking, but they more than make up for that in coolness factor. We thought about it and decided the only way to make beams cooler is to sprinkle some shader goodness on top. Not only will this make beams look great at any resolution, but it will also allow creating new beams easily, as there is no longer a need to muck around with graphic images. In the previous blarg post about Lua outfits, some of the new beams were already shown:
There are also a lot of new beam graphics, some of which are not used yet, but open up a lot of exciting new possibilities. Look forward to more and fancier beams in the future.

[ 2021-07-02 06:50:25 CET ] [ Original post ]

This post is about development on Naev 0.9.0. Most non-weapon outfits in Naev have consisted of simple modifications, with some notable exceptions like afterburners. This has always meant that most of the game is built around setting up outfits, without non-weapon outfits playing an active role in combat. In order to allow much more flexible outfit design, we have incorporated Lua, the widely used scripting language in Naev and other projects, into the outfits. The result? Now outfits can react to environmental conditions or trigger in certain instances. Furthermore, the behaviours don't have to be fixed, but can be dynamically set during runtime. This allows doing simple things like having outfits give you bonuses above certain shield levels, or depending on nearby ships. Below are some examples of what can be done with this. The Emergency Stasis Inducer will automatically trigger when your ship takes armour damage. Not only will it slow down time around you, it will also speed up your ship for a great bullet time effect!
Do you like holograms? Would you like to project a fully equipped model of your ship into space to distract your enemies while you blast them into smithereens? The revolutionary Combat Hologram Projector does just that!
Have you ever felt so angry that you wanted to slow down time and get a large bonus to damage while you damage yourself? Think no further, the Berserk Chip does just that, without making you turn green and rip out of your shirt!
Of course, it would only be right to pay homage to the original Cloaking Device by implementing it in Naev. While active, nobody will see you, and you will be able to do what you please freely.
Other than these showcased outfits, there are many more to explore, however, we leave that up to you to look forward to in-game!

[ 2021-06-06 10:28:11 CET ] [ Original post ]

This post is about development on Naev 0.9.0. Given that the old jump animation was a bit bland, fading in and out from white, we decided to give it a new spin with GLSL shaders. Furthermore, it is now possible to use multiple different jump animations. Currently only two are used in-game, but this might be extended in the future.

[ 2021-05-02 09:04:54 CET ] [ Original post ]

This post is about development on Naev 0.9.0. By moving to newer versions of OpenGL in version 0.8, we have modernized the rendering pipeline of Naev, however, we have not been making full use of that power. Well, at least not up until now. We are proud to present trails for ships and missiles! These are generated procedurally using GLSL shaders, and are capable of having complex animations. There are currently a total of 7 different trails depending on the ship and missile, ranging from cool to very cool.

[ 2021-04-09 04:39:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

Disclaimer: the LVE project has nothing to do with Naev. We just thought their API was cool and decided to implement it. As you may know, the Naev scripting engine is written in Lua. Since the original releases of Naev, the Lua ecosystem has seen an incredible growth, being using in notable games and software. One of these great frameworks is LVE, which is a 2D game API. While we havent rewritten Naev in LVE, what we have done is implement a subset of the LVE API in Naev. In combination with the dialogue systems we had already implemented in Naev, we were able to extend it such that LVE games could be launched inside of Naev using the Naev engine. Since a picture says a thousand words, let us see some examples taken from simplegametutorials.
We can see the game is being run inside a dialogue window inside of Naev. Mouse input is passed and it reacts to user input. Of course what game is complete without a Sokoban minigame?
In future posts we will show some of the different ways it is being used in Naev. For more details, please see the blog post.

[ 2021-03-14 03:21:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

We are proud to announce the 0.8.2 release of Naev. This fixes some issues found in 0.8.1. We don't expect there to be many remaining issues, but if you do find any, please report them at [the issue tracker](https://github.com/naev/naev/issues). Discussion about the game can also be had on Discord ([discord invite](https://discord.com/invite/nd2M5BR)).

Changelog:

Gameplay

* Fixed duplicate rewards from pirate ship-stealing missions. (Sorry.) * Fixed the Advanced Nebula Research mission's failure condition in case you don't stick with the transport ship. (Sorry.) * Fixed the "The one with the Runaway" mission so the captured drone doesn't appear back in space.

Engine

* Fixed a bug loading games with short (1-character) names. * Tweaked chances of seeing Spaceport Bar missions. * Updated German translation. * Fixed "configure" script when the system has a "cxsparse" library and no "csparse". * Fixed source .tar.gz so ./configure is immediately usable again. (Note: 0.9.x will use Meson for builds.)

[ 2021-02-12 05:11:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

We are proud to announce the 0.8.1 release of Naev. This fixes some important issues found in 0.8.0. Due to popular demand, time constant (previously known as time dilation) has been reduced significantly. We dont expect there to be many remaining issues, but if you do find any, please report them at the issue tracker. Discussion about the game can also be had on Discord (discord invite). Changelog: * Gameplay - Lowered large ships time constant (renamed from time dilation) by 50% of the deviation from 100%. - Tweaked Zalek ships stats and outfit slot behavior to match expectations. * Engine - Restored macOS support. (Catalina users will have to bypass Gatekeeper: See https://github.com/naev/naev/wiki/FAQ for details.) - Fixed a crash-loop when the saves folder gets populated by Steam data (or other files) and no Naev save files. - Fixed intermittent error messages about the Lua Spawn script for faction Trader. - Fixed rare/potential bugs in font and save-file code. - Fixed crash when navigating landing screens with the tab key. - Updated German translation. - Improved text in minor ways.

[ 2021-01-10 02:52:33 CET ] [ Original post ]

We are proud to present the 0.8.0 release of Naev! This has over 4,000 commits from 0.7.0 and has been under development for the past 3.5 years. The backend and interface has been revamped to be modern with lots of improvements all over the board. Some examples include unicode and internationalization support. We would like to thank all the contributors who have participated in this release. Some of the more notable gameplay changes include making missiles and fighter bays not require ammunition, changed how some pilots spawn, time passes faster in larger ships, and a revamped commodity/economy system. We don't expect there to be many issues, but if you do find any, please report them at the issue tracker. Discussion about the game can also be had on Discord (discord invite).

Full changelog:

Gameplay

* Overhaul of the interface to be more sleek and functional * Interface is much more slick * Dark theme to be more consistent with space * Font uses outlines to be more readable * New map overlay with adjustable opacity * Added rarity indicator to ships and outfits * Changed fonts * Indicate non-common NPC with exclamation marks * Added accessory slot and unique accessory outfits as mission rewards * Simple economy model implemented with map visualizations * Added travelling merchant who sells unique items * Made missiles and fighter bays reload while in space * Modified the balancing of missiles * Added asteroids and mining * Improved player GUI * Brushed GUI is now the default * Improved and fixed escort system * Made Pirates and FLF spawn in a fairer way * Made time pass at different rates for different ships ("Time Dilation") * Made piracy missions available from any Independent or black market planet * Substantially increased pay for unique missions (10x in most cases) * Made references to the player gender-neutral * Made combat music vary from faction to faction * Made it so AI ships spawn with cargo * Improved AI behaviours * Nerfed Quicksilver * Added the ability to buy "fake IDs" from pirate strongholds * Made jammers into activated outfits that increase cloaking * Added Soromid organic ships that level up organs * Improved and expanded NPC portraits * Commodities can be sold/bought everywhere * Added a "slow mode", which runs the game at half speed (like an easy mode) * Added a ship log which records events * Added a "system map" which displays information about known remote planets * Added support for giving commands to individual escorts * New intro images replacing old placeholders * Increased pirate name variety for bounty missions * Ships now travel with you automatically for free, as with outfits * Added map decorators showing locations of factions and the Nebula * Added a dogfight aiming helper * More music * New and/or improved missions * New Za'lek mini-campaign * Completed the FLF campaign * Fixed up the Collective campaign * Improved the Shark (Nexus Shipyards) campaign * Improved the Dvaered anti-FLF campaign * Added and improved piracy missions * New minor Soromid campaign, "Coming Out" * New tutorial mission at the start of a new game * Various newly added and improved generic missions

Engine

* Support for compilation with Meson * HiDPI-awareness * Support for translations * Added shaders to speed up and improve graphics * Added support for non-ascii direct character input * Added support for map decorators * Removed support for Lua 5.0 * Removed support for SDL 1, only SDL 2 is supported * Added support for translating * Made the OSD compact itself to avoid showing redundant information * Made Autonav able to follow ships * Consolidated the effects of cloaking and jammers under cloaking * Added workaround for ALSOFT buggy version that crashes * Added a polygon-based collision algorithm * Added some symbols for partial colorblind accessibility * Support #include in shaders * Multiple font support * Many bugfixes

[ 2020-12-17 03:30:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

It so happens that instead of having things cool down and prepare for the release, development has instead accelerated with 1473 commits from the previous beta. For this reason, we are going to do a final beta for 0.8.0, aiming to release full 0.8.0 by the end of this year. We would like to say that we dont anticipate too many issues with this beta, but given the amount of code changed anything can happen. For this reason, please try it and find any issues, please report them at the issue tracker. Discussion about the game can also be had on Discord (discord invite). Note that to try this beta you have to opt into the beta from the game property menu. Some changes from 0.8.0-beta.3:

• Overhaul of the interface to be more sleek and functional
• Interface is much more slick with a dark theme to be more consistent with space
• New map overlay with adjustable opacity
• Improved AI behaviours
• Nerfed Quicksilver
• New Zalek mini-campaign
• HiDPI-awareness
• Support for translation
• Support for compilation with Meson
• Many bugfixes

[ 2020-12-01 03:45:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

We have some exciting news for you all. First of all, we have made the game soundtrack publicly available as a steam soundtrack. This should be accessible from the store page. These are all songs included in the base game, but just bundled differently for easier listening. Next, as we work hard on the new 0.8.0 version with a lot of changes, we have automated the entire system so that now betas and nightly builds are available on steam! You will have to right click on the game in your library and opt-in to either the beta or the nightly. The beta will consist of the latest manually tagged beta release, while the nightly is built every night using the latest source code! Due to this, expect to find bugs and issues in both. That said, we would love to hear about the issues you encounter and thoughts about some of the new mechanics. If you try either the beta or the nightly and find any issues, please report them at the issue tracker. Discussion about the game can also be had on Discord (discord invite).

[ 2020-09-10 03:59:45 CET ] [ Original post ]