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]

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