A beta for BallisticNG 1.2.2 is now available!

What's the beta for?

1.2.2 is going to be making major changes to the game's balance to address a large disconnect between the singleplayer and multiplayer combat experience and better balance large combat encounters with lots of weapons going off. We're also focusing on the AI so it navigates the track more human like and is held back in the lower difficulties in a more believable way that reflects player piloting skills instead of just handicapping their raw speed. We've started this beta so you can help give early feedback on the changes. This will help shape the final release of this version.

Give us feedback!

This beta is very important in figuring out how the changes impact a wider range of players so we strongly encourage you to let us know what you think. You can do so in the Steam forums or on our discord, which you can find here: https://discord.gg/ballisticng Before giving feedback please make sure you're on the beta version. To do this, make sure the version shown at the bottom right of the main menu says 1.2.2-beta.

Joining the Beta

Right click the game in your library, head to properties, the beta tab, select beta from the dropdown and then close the window. The game should then begin updating. If it doesn't then restart Steam.

Ai Changes

The Ai have seen major changes in how they navigate the track and how the game manages their difficulty level. Ai ships now navigate the track based on time instead of relying entirely on track sections. This results in the AI having a much higher resolution understanding of the track that greatly helps define their racing line. We're now also using this new higher resolution understanding of the track to tweak the Ais racing line, pitch control and airbrake usage to simulate the skill of a real player instead of just capping or artificially inflating their speeds. Ai will now also work with the ships grip stat instead of using their own, which now makes picking a higher handling ship an even better option for new players then before. All of these changes put more emphasis on a good racing line and better pitch control as you climb up the AI difficulties.

Weapon Changes

Weapons have been re-balanced alongside ship shield and firepower stats to make eliminations harder and reduce the massive gap between ship defensive and offensive capabilities. The combat was originally built around the player dealing lots of damage to AI and the AI dealing little damage to the player. This had been the balance in the game from 2015 to now, which has proven to cause issues with Multiplayer since everybody is dealing the player damage which was insanely unbalanced. These changes remove that weaker AI design and puts everybody on an equal playing field, while reducing the damage of weapons to accommodate.

Changelog (not final)

Ai

• Increased minimum shield before pitting from 25% to 50%
• Ai now spread themselves apart a bit at the start of the race
• Reworked Ai/Autopilot rotation so they simulate steering the ship as a player
• Ai ships now slow down if their steering exceeds the ships turning capabilities
• The AI warning for missiles is now triggered when they pick the missile up instead of when they lock onto the player
• Ai no longer start boost on Novice
• Ai now begin to brake if they are about to collide with another ship in front of them
• Difficulty configurations are now reloaded every race so gamemodes can modify them without the changes persisting over the entire game session
• Rewrote AI track navigation to be time based instead of section offset based
• Fixed an issue where AI would use airbrakes and slow down on track sections like maglock drops, loops and corkscrews
• Ai are now slowed down when the game applies wall avoidance forces
• The angle to route entrances is now taken into account when the AI is determining the distance before it makes a navigation decision
• Ai are now less agressive with weapons for the first 40 seconds in Race and Knockout

Ships

• Rebalanced shield and weapon stats. The menu stats for these are also now accurate:
  • Shield and weapon stats are now more closely packed together
  • Barracuda Model A and C still the strongest shielding by a large margin but have generally been nerfed
  • NX2000 shield stat hasn't been changed but now has a menu stat of 1/10
• Reduced wall collision damage by 30%. Survival has been adjusted to accomodate for this change so ships take the same damage as before.
• Ship cannon fire rates/sound type are now determined by a separate option on the ship instead of being automatically calculated
• Rewrote airbrake drift code to correctly respond to analogue inputs
• Decreased maximum angle for ship to ship nose bounce collisions
• The afterburner speed increase now trails for slightly longer
• Reduced slowdown and camera shake from rear ship to ship bumps

Weapons

• Removed AI damage multipliers and rebalanced damages to reflect player vs player combat
  • Ai now deal the same damage as players
  • Reduced tremor damage from 0.7% per physics tick to a single 5% on first impact
  • Reduced rocket damage from 35 to 12
  • Reduced missile damage from 30 to 10
  • Reduced cannon damage from 0.8 to 0.5
  • Reduced hunter damage from 30 to 8
  • Reduced hellstorm damage from 36 to 12
  • Reduced plasma damage from 90 to 70
• Increased emergency pack pickup threshold from 10% energy to 25% energy
• Increased tremor distance from 75 sections to 120 sections
• The energy wall collider is now disabled before it starts fading out
• Reduced tremor pickup weighting from 30 to 12
• Reduced energy wall pickup weighting from 25 to 5
• Reduced slowdown from cannons
• Fixed tremors flinging ships high into the air when on sections marked as AOOB

Campaign

• Greatly reduced AI speed on the base game 1v1 events
• Rebalanced the first half of the base game campaign to introduced experience and expert difficulties more gradually

Photo Mode

• The players engine trail is now swapped out for the AI trail

Multiiplayer

• Fixed mines being spawned with the wrong rotation

Music

• Added Xpand - Menu 2 the soundtrack DLC
• Added Paused Playback option (enabled by default)
• Fixed various issues with custom music embedded in tracks when continuous playback is

Audio

• Custom sounds are now read from their absolute path instead of relative to fix them not loading on MacOS

Code Mods

• All assemblies are now loaded before executing mod registers

Engine

• Section floor widths are now calculated and cached for use by the AI
• A warning is now thrown to the output log when there are racing lines but none are available for the AI to use
• Fixed an issue with the position calculation where it would use the same section for both ships on different routes

Commands

• Added test_damage
• Added gm_timescale

Tracks

• Fixed survival disable not working on custom tracks
• Fixed arrivon peak's racing lines not being available to AI
• Fixed start line position tracking issues on Luna

User Interface

• Added handling of an edge case for the resolution selector where Unity might not return a resolution to the game on very specific Linux setups
• Added option to show all ships on the position bar (Game -> General -> Misc)
• The AI difficulty is now shown on the campaign event details box

Unity Tools

• Added cannon type stat to custom ships under the combat settings foldout
• Built in ship stat prefabs now read from .XML files in the Assets/ShipStats folder and now includes all ships. You can now also add your own XML files to this folder to make your own stat prefabs!