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