We're delighted to provide you another free update to XO!

INITIAL MODDING SUPPORT:

The biggest news in this update is that weve added initial support for modding - you can freely edit ships, items and sectors!

Ships:

Stats and abilities on all existing ships in the game are now editable* - you can add or remove abilities, increase weapon loadouts and initial weapons, armor, acceleration and more. So, you want to add gunboats(fighters) to the battleship? Easy. Increase capacity on cargoships? Trivial. More weapon slots? You got it. *somewhat obviously, this can break the game if done wrong. Adding too many ship slots will break the UI, changing acceleration/top speed too much can cause unpredictable results, things like that. Keep a backup!

Items:

You can edit and add new items as well, changing their cost, charges and functionality.

Sectors:

Sector size and composition can be changed including the types of planets, factions present, number of shipyard or trade planets, and where sectors lead to.

Howto:

Simply edit the text files (make a backup first!). Most of it should be self explanatory, but read moddingGuideV1.text file for more info. The editable text files and docs are found in your StreamingAssets folder where you installed XO

NEW SHIPS:

The extremely rare Irenic Refuge is a massive shielded farmship that provides your fleet even more capacity for growth.
The Rover Maker is a jump-capable shipyard that can convert ships into other ships.
The Harvester Pusher joins the growing list of enemies; theyre equipped with a tractor beam and not afraid to use it
The Galacticonn Concenter allows you to extract ore from gas giants
The Harvester Neutralizer is equipped with ion torpedoes to blunt your offensive capabilities We had to make the difficult decision to axe the Pact Carrier. It just wasnt providing enough variety to justify the dev effort required. After launch we can revisit.

OTHER FEATURES/GAMEPLAY:

More sector goals were added; these optional missions have no timers associated with them Youre now given a list of options when an enemy boarding party tries to take over one of your ships Quite a number of events were added, we wont spoil anything but theres a fairly diverse array of rare as well as common events to spice up your voyage. Jumpgates got substantially harder if you earn a bad rep with that faction. We made a number of improvements to the tutorial as it nears completion. Random cargo types were expanded

BALANCE:

Easy mode now defaults to a harvester wave that only propagates between jumps Ion torpedo max duration (aka damage) was increased to 5 Mining/melting rates increased by 50% Damage control speed is 2x in easy mode and 1.5x slower in hard Normalize repair cost on items to 1 ore for each point repaired Lots of playtesting and improvements to enemy behavior Stowaways can now occasionally appear Caches no longer self destruct, giving you a place to leave things behind Using the refinery transmogrify to bring fleet water to zero now clears the water riot Sped up short range ship moves Enemy ships recover disabled boarding parties by tractor if equipped Added a number of stall for time options to events where it made sense Fixed some issues when starting custom games Beginners are now reminded about damage control Several events were given longer time to complete Disabled or destroyed shuttles no longer count against you for certain achievements Harvester reinforcements are now randomized

QoL and BUG FIXES:

We made substantial improvements to the UI, cleaned up a boatload of bugs and brought a number of quality of life improvements to the game. This will likely be our last QOL update until launch. Improved mouse click recognition, especially with catching right clicks Panning the camera is now bound to Mouse button 3 (you can set it to anything you like in options) Refineries now have better continuous processing options Loiter / Form Up commands are greyed out when the entire formation is selected Player-owned ships should no longer autojump Corrected an issue with ctrl+tractor failing when used with a Pact Tender Made quite a number of tweaks to ship movement Added some videos to the captains guide Items with an onTransfer effect now trigger whether they are retrieved or transferred Fixed an issue with events not properly ending Finishing the tutorial now properly gives you the Academy achievement Got rid of a nasty soft lock bug Seizing another ship would sometimes fail, no longer A good number of HUD timers were fixed/properly cleared and given abort options Fixed an edge case with the hyperspace beacon A wicked issue with ships duplicating themselves was nuked Acceleration/speed can no longer drop below zero due to an item being used Corrected an issue where multi-selecting a group of ships where one ship had no weapon was throwing an error Fixed a few collider issues that Unity likes to throw at us just to keep us on our toes Squashed an infinite loop with enemy defense ships Corrected an issue where the tractor beam would fail on a diagonal attempt where the target was below the line of no return Improved some logic issues with the demo Put a stop to an infinite lifeboat loop Fixed a bunch of duplicate or missing text messages on ship hovers Score is now modified based on your selected difficulty Nonplayer ships now follow the fleet better Logic improvements for gutted ships and boarding Fixes for unknown ship id when attacking Corrected an issue where thrusters werent showing Quicktrainers now work as they should Too many event fixes and tweaks to list

WHAT'S NEXT?

In 1.50 we will open up even more of the game to modding. You'll be able to add your own events, replace any events in the game, add your own ships including using your own 3d models, and even do a total conversion replacing all events in the game! And as we always do we will definitely be adding some more ships, more content and fixing bugs in the run up to the full release of XO! I'm so grateful for all of the support, kindness, well-wishes, bug reports, suggestions and all of the goodness I've gotten from you. Thank you so so much! It really keeps me going!

[ 2025-01-20 02:26:05 CET ] [ Original post ]

This is purely a bug fix update - Attempt to fix a bug with certain Radeon cards not displaying some text in buttons *If you have a Radeon card and have experienced this issue please let us know how this goes - Fix boarding in tutorial - Fix some cases where Taker fails to seize - Improve speed of transfers - Fix precaptured ship logic - Squash about two dozen autobugs - Adjust some more events to respect terse setting - Fix damage control flow - Adjust formation layer for visibility - Correct a game lockup when jumping - Fix issue with double trade at shipyard - Fix pirate radio transmitter - Correct some starting mission problems

[ 2024-01-26 19:09:07 CET ] [ Original post ]

This update corrects a handful of bugs from yesterday's major update. Thanks so much for the bug reports, you all are just awesome people

• Corrected an issue that could lead to a harvesterless/eventless game
• The tutorial no longer halts after the first jump
• Several events were fixed up (Lone Frigate, Overfrothed, Mining Concern, Second Command)
• An issue with double trade happening on a Corp shipyard event was fixed
• Made a ship that shouldn't show up that was showing up not show up
• Fixed the starting game text

[ 2023-12-22 21:40:55 CET ] [ Original post ]

We're delighted to provide you another free update to XO!

CUSTOM PLAY STYLES:

You can now customize how you play XO! The Harvester wave speed can be set - including movement between jumps only, which gives you effectively infinite time at a given location. You can also now control when your game is autosaved, as well as save when you want. There are a number of other options from turning off politics altogether to controlling how frequent lifeboats appear. Starting fleets were also separated from game difficulty. If you have ideas on things youd like to see added here, we welcome your feedback on the Steam forums or our Discord. Ive playtested a fair bit, but setting the Harvester wave to expand only while you jump might make the game too easy, so we may need to come back and balance that one after Ive had more player feedback. Do please chime in. We also took the opportunity to clean up the NEW GAME dialog, and add options for saving the game when exiting to the main menu and quitting.

RESOURCE DETAIL:

Hovering the Fuel, Water or Ore icon now give you a comprehensive breakdown of how much you can store, where you can store it, how much you are collecting and how much you are using. This took a little over two months to fully implement. We expect there to be some small issues, please let us know if you see anything that doesnt look right. Theres a lot going on in there.

MOVEMENT:

We spent an absolutely epic amount of time polishing up movement, which proves that a) rocket science is really, really hard and b) were not rocket scientists.
Ships and boarding parties are much better at not overshooting their targets compared to 1.47. We expect that there are still some bugs in movement, please report them when you find them. Captains be advised that if you order a ship to try and intercept a target that is moving towards you, your ship almost certainly will overshoot trying to reach the target as quickly as possible. Use waypoints or Ctrl+ orders for finer control.

NEW SHIPS:

The Pact Tender is ordinarily equipped with a tractor beam, although it can later be upgraded to a laser. It is a fast, lightly armored ship able to seize and salvage other vessels.
The Empiric Armorer The Armorer is used by the Empire to permanently add armor to ships. Passengers must be placed aboard the armorer in order to operate the factory.

NEW ITEMS:

Mk V Armorplating permanently adds +5 repairable armor to any ship in your fleet, but permanently reduces acceleration and top speed. Be advised that adding too much armor can cause a ship to be unable to move. Turbo Thrusters and Slow Burners allow you to increase acceleration in exchange for a lower top speed or increase top speed at a cost to acceleration. Both items are permanent. At the moment, they can only be found as cargo items and in trade. Should we add a factory ship for them? The Quantum Container contains a mystery upgrade. The longer you wait, the better it is! The Superplotter is even faster than Networked Computers at reducing jump plot times. And yes it can be stacked with Networked Computers.

MINIMAP ICONS:

Ship classes are now visualized on the minimap: cargoships appear as circles, farmships as drops, industryships as boxes and warships as triangles. Stations, mines, and Harvesters are also displayed with unique icons, making it a lot easier to identify what is in system at a glance. This is particularly useful when jumping in.

BOARDING PARTY UPDATES:

Pirates are now able to steal cargo when boarding a ship. Training boarding parties is a little easier now that the battleship has gained the TRAIN BOARDERS self-action. Just select and right click the battleship. Have you ever wondered what would happen if a ship under duress needed maintenance but had no slots free, because the boarding party was taking up its only slot? We did. And now you can find out. If you put a cargoship or an industryship under duress, and youre enemy with that faction, theres now a small chance of sabotage occurring. Diplomats can non longer plant explosives on stations, it was correctly pointed out that this goes against their nature. Diplomats now have a no duress boarding option, which brings a ship into the fleet without causing duress if successful, assisting those Peaceful Victory attempts. Speaking of that, having the Irenic faction leader in your fleet increases diplomats boarding success by 20%. Its now possible to ransack a jumpgate station with a boarding party after the jumpgate has been opened, for those of you fond of that kind of thing. Boarding shuttles no longer retain their previous velocity after impacting a target. If the only boarding party aboard a ship under duress is put into stasis, that ship will now try to jump and require being retaken

CONTENT:

Completing the tutorial now gives an achievement. Ordinarily Im against giveaway achievements, but I feel like completing the tutorial is an important investment that I want to reward. I put a lot of time into adding new enemy attack modes. Enemy ships now employ tractors, there are more multi-faction attack types, and more sophisticated boarding actions. A number of warship types are now more self-aware and will seek out certain types of ships, including nonplayer ships. In particular, be on the lookout for pirates. I added a number of new events early game into the rotation to help keep runs fresh, including starting station events. More events were given a stall for time option. Several new events were created that give plans as a reward. I adjusted Empire gunboat behavior and reactions at Empire jumpgates. Behind the scenes we added variables tied to ships which allows us to do a lot of fun and interesting things, but also helped us make gutting, duress, mustering and ship factories work better. I made sure an event referenced an Empire Sleeper awakening, just because I think Dune is a great movie and even greater book. I dusted off, cleaned up, added to and otherwise improved the Captains Guide. Access the Guide from the main menu in-game. When I get around to it, Ill make it even betterer. You can now continue to trade with a station that is taking damage from nonplayer ships.

BALANCE:

I rebalanced and added events to make sure that the Peaceful Victory achievement was more easily attained. Its still quite hard as you cannot disable or destroy any ships or put any ships under duress* for your entire run. *However, if you use the Resort to remove duress on any ships in your fleet before you reach the final jumpgate, you will still qualify for the Peaceful Victory achievement. I dont like to see wasted shots, so ion torpedoes gained some new rules. In version 1.48 an ion torpedo will fire if: its target has a charging or charged weapon another ion torpedo has not already been fired at this weapon, including by other ships if a target has X weapons, never fire more than X total ion torpedoes at it across all attacking ships This makes the weapon much more effective at suppressing enemy fire. Laser targeting was also improved to reduce and possibly eliminate the chance of wasted shots when defending or attacking ships. Destroying Harvester Reapers that have latched onto a ship now has a variety of possible results instead of just disabling the latched ship. Ships with a WEAPONS FREE or DEFEND ROE will now target reapers that have latched ships they are protecting or that are in their formation. You can now only have one item of Networked Computers per run. Networked computers can now also be equipped on the Irenic Questar. I increased the number of ships that start a timer before jumping away instead of straight up jumping away. Harvester warships are much slower and some now attack using large sweeping moves that cut across your entire fleet. If you have no weapon aboard the battleship, your odds of coming across a laser were increased, particularly early game. Nerfed the harvested Sector 1 jumpgate, it was way too brutal. Early game Harvester waves always come from spinward (the left), simplifying fleet defense. Irenic jumpgates can be pretty tough to crack when enemy. They now have a parley option that gives a nonviolent method to pass the gate. Mustering with a Pact Scout can now be aborted once the Scout has jumped - this will cause you to lose the Scout. Added a salvageable ship on the far side of the final jumpgate if the player jumps in without ore but with salvage ability. Added a Hypermaul spawn if the player jumps into Sector 5 with no weapons above range 4. In easy mode, added a range upgrade drop when reaching the final jumpgate with no weapons above range 4. I experimented with ship loyalty tests only popping up when you were enemy with a fleet, but it makes more sense to allow them when neutral as well. Removed the Hail Mary diplomat launch that some Irenic jumpgates would attempt. Confiscation attempts can now be made on ships that are attempting to jump away. Additional Harvester reinforcements added to prevent all quiet on the starward front scenarios. Removed Harvester wave delay items if the game is set for waves to propagate only during jump. Reapers now latch and hold abandoned ships if they have passengers aboard.

QoL and POLISH:

I read all of the feedback we get, and respond to as much as I can. I cant fully express how deeply meaningful these comments are, but Im honored to receive each and every comment, thank you. Over the last few months Ive gone over all the feedback and made a heck of a lot of changes as a result. I hope youll see the results and enjoy XO even more. You can now rename ships once they are in your fleet. Hover a ship icon in the fleet list, then hover the name of the ship and left click. If you hail a ship and the hailing ship has no space, cargo transfers are now jettisoned as containers next to the ship so the cargo can be retrieved instead of lost. Similarly, if you receive ore that exceeds your storage capacity as a result of a trade or salvage action, excess ore is now jettisoned as cargo containers. The game now handles multiple timers much more gracefully. Hovering timers now gives a little more information about what the timer is tied to. The most recent timer will always be on the left. Damaged ship parts and explosions now inherit the velocity of the ship; lasers also track to moving explosions Input is not allowed in the first 250ms when a dialog with multiple choices appears to try and catch accidental keypresses. When a target ship is already held by a tractor, aborting a new tractor hold order on the same target ship does not turn off the tractor, only the new tractor hold/move order. Bloom levels were adjusted and balanced; weapons have increased HDR emissons including the tractor beam. Among other things, this should really let you bring out your inner Klingon with those Ion Torpedoes. The resolution and sharpness for achievements and medals were increased. They really look amazing in 4K! Hovering a ship now displays its target if it has one, e.g. ATTACK RAVEN The fleet list was improved with better scroll arrows and logic. The list now extends to the bottom of the screen and is a little higher. A ships starting weapons are now shown when hovering the ship in the new game dialog. Jumpgate stations now reply when you hail them a second time. Randall our genius UI master talked me down off a cliff of adding UI where no UI should ever have been added. Thank you Randall. Playing in Master mode no longer shows the mini-tutorial tooltips. Water riots, particularly the last stage dismiss ship dialog, will not trigger (or go away) when water reaches or exceeds zero due to a shuttle or ship being destroyed during jump. Ship names and planet names are no longer be duplicated in a single run. Spare parts can now be installed using a self action or by hovering their cargo slot. Current ROE is indicated by a box on the contextual action menu. Theres no longer a rescue action on abandoned lifeboats. Did you know you can maroon passengers in those? I added another somewhat obscure way to get rid of passengers, youll have to find out how. Range rings are no longer displayed on warships without weapons Nonplayer ships do a better job of following the fleet when on a quest Damage control got a sound effect Tips and the tutorial now reference the actual key you have bound Ship timers were added to quite a lot of events and actions Warships now react better if all of their weapons are destroyed Ctrl+ actions are no longer cluttered by the ACTIONS text and RMB icon A lot of ship positions were adjusted and improved in multi-ship events Course lines for Reapers are cleared when they are destroyed A minor bug in the ultra diveboats item was fixed Hidden beacons were made to work better In multi-choice dialogs ship details are only shown when the ship icon in hovered Things like Jumpgate instructions were made clearer Crew details are dismissed when not hovered in crew transfer window Its less likely for ships to jump in on top of one another Lots of minor window position adjustments and text positioning adjustments Made some adjustments to better accommodate 1024x768 and 1366x768 resolution gameplay Simplified Reaper destruction animation Made some changes to the Elysian Hauler event based on player feedback Ye canny no more drag a ship youve already dragged into a scouting box, into a different scouting box Seized ships should, in theory, no longer be subject to certain failure events The logic for nonplayer ships following the fleet was improved

BUG FIXING:

We fixed an enormous number of bugs for this release. You can scroll through a few pages of the bigger ones in the in-game Changelog. I can't say it enough: THANK YOU so much for helping us find bugs. I am eternally grateful.

WHAT'S NEXT?

In 1.49 we will finally be adding the long awaited Pact Carrier and fighters! The last big task before release is adding support for modding. I plan on making my event creation tools available with the next update for those of you interested in creating your own events. And of course we will definitely be adding some more ships, more content and fixing bugs in the run up to the full release of XO!

[ 2023-12-21 19:51:51 CET ] [ Original post ]

XO 1.47e "Yaw Be Careful Now" This is primarily a balance and bug fixing update

Features

• All Harvester warships move much, much slower now. Reapers remain the same speed.
• The game now loads without displaying the wait for program to respond dialog
• New item: Hyperspace beacon
• Added a number of new events
• Marine, Diplomat, Shocktrooper and Mercenary boarding parties can now rescue passengers from disabled ships
• You can now use Pirate boarding parties on disabled and disabled/abandoned ships to gut them for spare parts or steal their cargo
• Boarding parties now have spinward/antispinward options
• Tractor hold and Tractor retrieve actions are no longer greyed out when the tractor is charging
• Main camera and starmap camera were made less floaty

Balance/UI

• Mining ore and melting ice were rebalanced, your feedback is appreciated on this
• Made quite a few balance and logic adjustments to individual events based on your feedback
• Cargo pirates now take over cargoships if no cargo is found
• Tractor beam range is no longer used to calculate support/protect distance on equipped ships
• Stations that are forcibly evacuated or looted now have a chance to activate weapon systems or self destruct
• Added more player options/results for ships that break away from the fleet
• Scouts are more likely to find industryships and less likely to find cargoships when mustering
• Late game, Pact Destroyers will show up much more than Pact Frigates
• Expanded results for rescuing ships before hailing them, chance of rewards and quests
• Added a tooltip when hovering the water riot countdown timer
• Water riot countdown timer now pulses periodically
• Thank you for sending feedback now only displays when all logs have completed sending
• Made Corp and Rover warships more aggressive at jumpgates
• Using Spare Parts is a little easier
• Harvester Taker is now no longer selectable/targetable when it is mated to the Harvester Carrier
• Releasing a ship no longer clears an existing melt ice/mine ore action
• Starmap: hovering a destination on the first jump, do not display resources (onboarding simplification)
• Improved the tutorial in mysteriously subtle but meaningful ways
• Added a tooltip for hovering the minimap
• Transfer actions are greyed out if the selected ship has tractored the target
• Salvaging ships with passengers aboard is no longer allowed

Bug fixes/tweaks

We also fixed over 60 bugs, many of which were submitted by you! Thank you again for your bug reports, suggestions and ideas! Check the in-game changelog for details on the bugs fixed.

Whats next?

We are rapidly heading towards a full release, so well be doing user interface and quality of life improvements, adding more ships, some very interesting new items as well as more events in 1.48!

[ 2023-05-28 17:02:39 CET ] [ Original post ]

Watch Brian Jamison, Creative Director of XO cover the major features of XO 1.47!

[ 2023-04-21 17:50:38 CET ] [ Original post ]

We are very pleased to release another major update to XO!

SHIP THRUSTERS and MOVEMENT:

All ships now use RCS thrusters for movement. This was the last major feature remaining prior to release and wow it was a massive effort. Weve been working on this movement update since the middle of last year. Cant wait to hear your feedback on it!

NEW SHIPS:

The Rover Free Trader is a medium warship that sports ion torpedoes and (illegal) lasers, and also comes equipped with a hacked replicator that allows you to make valuable repair items.
The Irenic Questar is a science vessel equipped with labs that allow you to research technologies and create a variety of items extremely useful to the fleet.
The Irenic Resort can repair damaged and disabled vessels and also has rest and relaxation facilities that can remove the under duress state of any ship.
The Empire Indoctrinator allows you to change passengers of another faction into a crew loyal to the Empire. Very handy for filling your carriers with gunboat crew.

LOITER and FORM UP

You can now toggle whether or not ships in a formation return to their position after completing an order. Set any formation ship(s) to Loiter and they will not automatically return to formation. Set them to Form Up and your ship(s) will return to formation. Form Up is the default for all formation ships. The hotkey for Loiter/Form Up defaults to L.
Also just a note that if you select an entire formation and then issue a Go To Waypoint order to it, the origin (or home location) for the formation will change to the new waypoint. This origin resets every jump.

NEW MISSIONS and EVENTS:

We added even more variety to missions and events including Slavers that want to trade you passengers for ore, new combat events, greatly expanded ship tragedies, and a number of surprises for you to come across along the way.

NEW ITEMS:

Several new items were added including mystery cargo, Harvester Reaper jammers, shield range upgrades, and more.

CONTINUOUS PRODUCTION:

Several ships including the Corp Refinery and Hypermaul can now produce items or transmogrify continuously - even through jump.

PLASMA SHIELD UPDATES:

We did quite a bit of overhauling to Plasma Shields. Plasma Shields now discharge if a ship or shuttle is damaged by it, making them more susceptible to overwhelming force attacks. Plasma Shields no longer automatically attack stations. We found this was leading to a lot of unintentional interstellar incidents. Plasma Shields are much, much better at defending against boarding shuttle and Reaper attacks.

BOARDING PARTY UPDATES:

Boarding shuttles now have a cargo bay to (facilitate stealing cargo and crew). Boarding parties can now board disabled ships (to repair, take prisoners or cargo, etc.). Shocktroopers can now take prisoners at stations. Fleet defense for boarding shuttles has been improved, and will likely receive more improvement in future versions.

COMBAT UPGRADES and BALANCE:

Weapon ranges are now identical for all weapons of a given type and range. (We used to have variability within each range). For example, all Plasma Shields of range 3 will have the exact same range. Enemy pirates now target unprotected ships and attempt to steal cargo and/or hijack the ship. NPC ships also target unrelated NPC ships. And as a result, actions like this will worsen non-Pact relations when they occur. So for example, if Rover Pirates board an Empire Supplyship and steal its cargo, Rover - Empire relations will worsen. Ships no longer attack or counterattack when their target becomes abandoned. Stations now respond better to various forms of attack. Jumpgates now eventually call in reinforcements. Enemy shieldships now only attack if the battleship has weapons aboard. Nuke damage capped at 30 maximum for a given blast. Harvester warships now have greater flexibility and a bit more smarts. Tractoring another ship is now considered a hostile action. Enemy warships now wait for the entire fleet to jump in before attacking. Empire Perpetuators can no longer recover disabled gunboats (because they lack the ability to repair them) Enemies now recover boarding shuttles based on the difficulty level chosen. Dramatically reduced the speed of Harvester Carriers Mixed enemy flotillas no longer spawn minefields Crews under duress now have a chance of discovering their orders were set to Hold Fire before their captors were removed. This chance increases over time. Harvesters now spawn faster at your starting location. Improved enemy ship targeting of fleet assets.

GENERAL QOL and BALANCE:

During trade, any ore that you earn that puts you over max ore capacity is now dropped as ore cargo. When jumping with unrecovered gunboats, youre now given an opportunity to abort the jump. (But seized gunboats do not throw this warning) In trade, the frequency of ship items and upgrades was increased. Several items were made easier to use by adding them to the right click context menu on equipped ships. Cross-sector events have even more additional time added to complete them fairly. Mines and Waypoints now display on the minimap. Toggling autotractor while paused no longer discharges the beam. Fuel cargo created on the Armored Fueler was buffed to 0.7 (from 0.3). Scout ships sent away using the Muster action no longer consume fleet water. Autosaving is now more resistant to corruption. Mustering in the final sector now remains within the final sector. Cleaned up the New Game UI, but a larger improvement is coming soon there. A greater number of ships can now have their cargo confiscated. If you see a ship that seems like it ought to be confiscatable, please send feedback (F8 key). Added more sound effects to a number of actions. Ore-producting ships were made more likely to appear. The Rover Dreamer is no loger available in shipyards if your max water cap has been reached. The screen edge camera rotation preference now saves properly. Even more Beginner text was moved so that it only appears in Beginner mode, so that Experienced play is faster and has less distractions. Seized ships no longer move if a transfer is made by the seizing ship. Intimidating ships now produces visible hover text on the target ship. Hotkey customization was improved and expanded. The filter UI was improved, hopefully eliminating annoyances and behavior that made it appear the game locked. Irenic Observatoria ships were made a little more common. Easy mode gains an easily obtainable Pact Scout. Snacks and Intoxicants are now 60% off! Formations and precise positioning were added to the tutorial. If you dont know about precise positioning, check it out! Faction leaders now spawn more commonly in Sector 2, as long as relations are friendly. Abandoned ships that are repaired are no longer automatically released (which can lead to them being inadvertently left behind at jump, ouch!) Added more solutions to the Get The Battleship achievement that some players more clever than I figured out. Added additional enemy reinforcements to the end game. Mining rates were adjusted up to be more favorable. Visual jump timers that display when a ship is hovered were added to quite a few ships Overall non-combat AI was improved in a number of areas. The Resourceror event was moved out of ordinary trade rotation as it was a bit of a rip-off. Scouting logic was improved. We made dozens and dozens of tweaks and adjustments to missions and events based on your feedback, thank you so much!

BUG FIXING:

For this release there are four pages (!!) of bugs that we fixed. You can scroll through them all in the in-game Changelog. We are so grateful for everyones help tracking down bugs. This game would never be what it is without all of your help and ideas. Logging was also improved to help us find bugs.

WHAT'S NEXT?

In 1.48 well be making final adjustments to UI, adding at least one new ship, more missions and events, plus the usual QOL and balance improvements!

[ 2023-04-09 21:13:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

This is a bugfix release - thanks to your excellent bug reports here's a few things we corrected: - Added new captains log entries, corrected some issues - Adding spare parts for maintenance gives immediate use option - Reinforcements now properly show up at jumpgates - Fixed several boarding-related event loops - Corrected issue where enemy ships wouldnt attack - Some pirate events were unintentionally canceling - Corrected a few textual mistakes - Prevent boarding caches - Repair caches now explode as intended - Abandoned gunboats no longer cost water - Corrected a bug with feedback submissions - Fixed an issue with invisible ships - Certain transfers no longer cause problems - Fixed some issues with the Muster command - Hypermaul now available for database hacks - Several other known bugs are still being worked on, thank you again so much for the bug reports!

[ 2022-10-26 21:07:47 CET ] [ Original post ]

1.46c is an update to Monday's big release. - New models for all gunboats - Minerboats can now be created from the Perpetuator - Muster should no longer break jump - Possibly closed off a Harvesterless exploit - Fixed issue with HUD not positioning correctly - Several other minor bugs fixed

[ 2022-10-14 20:41:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

Gargantuan Update! XO 1.46 Observing the Perpetual Conservancy We thought itd be a good idea to release a gargantuan update!

NEW SHIPS:

Empire Perpetuator

This small Empire carrier isnt able to repair gunboats, but has a mini shipyard aboard that can create entirely new gunboats. Youll still need to find the crew for them...

Empire Minerboat

This new Empire gunboat can be used for mining ore and also point defense against Reapers, boarding shuttles and missiles. Create them on the Perpetuator.

Irenic Conservancy

This Irenic industryship recycles water in the fleet, making jumps to water-poor worlds much less dangerous.

Irenic Observatoria

The powerful sensors aboard this Irenic science ship extend your jump clock 50% longer, allowing you to loiter in a system longer with an immediate escape plotted.

Corp Fueler

A Galacticonn industryship able to package available fuel into cargo. Unlike smaller fuel cargo, each of these is good for an entire jumps worth of fuel. The Fueler also increases fleetwide fuel collection speed by 20%.

Corp Hypermaul

The Hypermaul allows you to create weapon upgrade factories that produce specific weapon upgrades. Unlike store-bought upgrades, these come with no penalties.
Look for new Rover ships in our next update!

NEW SHIP ABILITIES:

Two ships in the fleet now have unique abilities. Access each ability by selecting and right-clicking the ship.

Damage control

Your Battleship just gained the ability to self repair. Select and right click on your Battleship for a Damage Control option, where you can self-repair 1 unit of armor every two days at a cost of 4 ore per unit. We hope to expand the drama and possibilities with Damage Control in the future.

Muster

The Pact Scout just gained a major new ability: Muster. This risky action sends the scout ahead several jumps, looking for either crew or ships of a certain type. The scout may be lost, particularly if you cannot reach the designated rendezvous in time.

Boarding parties

You can now launch boarding parties against Harvesters. Stations can also now be boarded, giving you quite a number of options to choose from should you successfully land a party aboard!

New missions, expanded fleet experience

We added quite a few new missions in this update, as well as some different options to existing missions. Water riots have always occurred when the fleet cant keep up with the demands of a thirsty fleet. Starting with v1.46 you have a variety of options at hand to stave off the worst before riots tear the fleet apart, including the option most favored by governments worldwide, do nothing. We continue to add depth to different actions. Not to give too much away, but for example more interesting things now happen if you seize a disabled non-fleet ship for too many days. Confiscations can now be attempted on stations that have cargo.

Improved AI

Enemy ships are now slightly more clever at targeting unprotected ships in your fleet, and will attempt different kinds of attacks involving tractor beams and boarding parties.

Beginner mode is easier

We worked a lot to make the game easier in beginner mode. More beginner starting missions and an easier end game are the most obvious improvements, but there are quite a few changes to events and early gameplay that should help there. We still have some work to do on that front. Having said that, XO is probably never going to be an easy game. Do make use of that spacebar to slow down the pace and consider your next move!

Starting fleets / Achievements

We added several new starting fleets coupled with achievements. Diplomat: earned when you become allied with all factions at the same time in a single run, this powerful starting fleet grants you an Irenic Gatherer for early ore mining and fleet defense, and an Irenic Farmship. You begin neutral with the Irenic and on a warlike footing with the Empire.
Admiral: awarded when you achieve tactical victory, this starts the game with a Battleship, Frigate and Scout. Hard: also unlocked with tactical victory, this starts you off with a weaponless Battleship, warlike with all factions, surrounded by Harvesters with a much faster propagation wave. Score is doubled.

UI/UX:

We adjusted the camera to allow a fully top-down camera. Hold the right mouse to pan the camera and use the scroll wheel to zoom in and out.

BALANCE and QOL:

• Snacks and Intoxicants can now be used [ as water ]
• Autopause in Starmap is now an option (configure in Options)
• ROE changes no longer reset ship orders
• More ships and stations are now confiscatable
• Cross-sector mission time bonus was increased
• Precise positioning key can be bound in options [ default: Ctrl ]
• All possible starting fleets are now shown along with their required achievements
• Casino pays out faster, ca-ching
• Resource collection rates adjusted
• Sped up game saves
• More items were given right click self-action powers
• Numerous small UI enhancements
• Improved logging in mysterious and inscrutable ways
• Moved some timers to ships instead of HUD
• The Victory screen was improved

BUG FIXING:

Thanks to our awesome community we were able to track down and fix a lot of bugs and exploits. A short, non-comprehensive list:

• Corrected some issues that would prevent jumping
• Destroyed jumpgates now always open the gate
• Fixed several other jumpgate not unlocking bugs
• Issues with seized ships fixed
• Problems with duplicate stasis passengers fixed
• Stasis passengers can no longer be used as operating crew
• Corrected an issue with sending scouts before the fleet jumped in
• Harvested ships no longer allow transfers
• Buying ships no longer charges double in some cases
• Glitches with transferring/rescuing boarding parties unglitched
• Mining ships should now properly resume mining after jumping
• Weapons can now be extracted from the MegaFixer
• Shut the tap on a water riot timer overflow
• Eliminated several no harvester exploits
• A cornucopia of minor text oopsies were fixed

WHAT'S NEXT?

Thanks to your feedback, ideas and participation XO keeps getting better! Version 1.47 should include a major update to movement, unless it doesnt. But we will for sure be adding more ships, more missions and additional depth to the fleet side of the game. If you have ideas for ships, items or missions you should plot a course to our Discord where you can directly suggest features and vote on them!

[ 2022-10-10 19:52:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

This minor update fixes a few bugs. Thanks for your help finding them!

[ 2022-05-10 07:11:21 CET ] [ Original post ]

Welcome to 1.45, our biggest update yet!

TRACTOR BEAMS:

All ships can now equip a tractor beam. Tractors use lots of fuel and can be temporarily disabled by ion torpedoes. Tractors have a lot of uses:

• Tractor beams, as you might expect, hold ships in place. If a ship is disabled, tractoring it will keep it from being lost in the atmosphere of a planet. You can even grab things that are already beyond the point of no return and move them to a safe zone for further recovery operations. And if the tractoring ship moves, the held ship should also come along.
• Tractors can rescue ships, cargo and shuttles that have fallen deep into a planets gravity well
• If a tractor beam has sufficient power, active ships can be held, preventing any movement. If a tractor lacks sufficient power, the object will be slowed. Since tractor beams have the longest range of any weapon, this can be used as a purely defensive strategy by holding an attacker out of range.
  
• With enough tractor power, a ship can be pushed into a planets atmosphere and held there, causing damage!
• Multiple tractor beams can be combined to slow, stop or move an incoming enemy.
  
• Tractor beams can be set to Autotractor mode, which will automatically pull in any cargo containers and lifeboats within range. Disabled ships and boarding shuttles have to be manually tractored, because they do present a danger.
• Tractors can be set to Autorepulse. In this mode they automatically push enemy ships (including Reapers), boarding shuttles, mines, (and soon asteroids and comets!) away from your ship. Entering minefields just got a lot easier!
  
• Ships will autorepulse other ships in formation that are being attacked (if in range)
  
• You must choose between autorepulse, autotractor, or manual tractoring.
• Disabled ships are not autotractored; use a Tractor Retrieve action instead. Tractor Retrieve can be used on a disabled or abandoned ship, which automatically pulls the ship in for a transfer, allowing you to cherry pick what to bring over from the wreck.
• Tractors do not hold ships through jump, but if a tractor beam is equipped on a ship that can seize, the Tractor Seize command will tractor in a seizable target and then automatically seize it which will hold it through jump.
• Enemy boarding shuttles that are retrieved by a tractor will face a boarding action; its because of this that boarding shuttles are not autotractored.

PRECISE POSITIONING:

All movement commands now give you the ability to precisely choose where the ship will position itself with respect to the target.
Hold down the CTRL key while left clicking any movement order such as Attack, Follow, Support, Protect, Nuke, etc. to enable precise positioning. This also works with multiple ships and formations.

NEW SHIPS:

The Irenic Argosy is the Irenic ship of plenty, capable of manufacturing Intoxicants and Snacks that can be sold at any trade location for a handsome profit.
The Pact Armored Refueler or ARF is a smaller tanker that can also package spare fuel into cargo containers for rapid resupply in combat or sale at trade outposts. As its name indicates, this ship is also lightly armored. Good doggie.

MAINTENANCE AND CANNIBALIZING SHIPS:

Dealing with ships that have been forced way past their normal operating limits has always been part of XO. This used to be totally random, and not very fair as pointed out by a few players. We have heard you! In 1.45 weve reworked all of those events with a maintenance simulation that puts interesting choices into your hands. Heres how it works: Once you are deeper into a run, Industryships, Farmships and Cargoships will begin to notify you that they require maintenance.
Maintenance requires one day and spare parts. Spare parts are relatively cheap and can be obtained through trade, by activating distress beacons, or by cannibalizing other ships using a Pirate boarding party. You can choose to defer maintenance on a ship, but the more jumps you wait the more likely something bad will happen to that ship. Once you install spare parts on a ship that needs maintenance, it will no longer require maintenance for the rest of the run.
The longer your run, the more ships in your fleet will require maintenance. If you choose to cannibalize a ship for spare parts, that ship becomes Gutted. Gutted ships cannot jump by themselves (unless spare parts have been re-installed aboard). Note that Disabled ships can be gutted. This new mechanic (see what I did there) replaces all random ship disaster events that used to disable Industryships, Farmships and Cargoships. At this point just about anything bad that can befall your fleet is now preventable, and also addressable before things get too out of hand. It will probably need some balancing and other tweaks, but I look forward to hearing your feedback!

BALANCE:

Added an impossible/insane mode medal for dying without pausing. Hint: use that pause! Boarding shuttles can now be used against other boarding shuttles The Rover Fixer, Empire Miner and Corp Extractor gained a cargo slot Reduced water use on Irenic Casino ships Mining lasers no longer increase in price during a run Fleet ships can now be seized even when not abandoned or disabled Your chances for coming across ore-producing ships were greatly increased Industrial shipyards are a little more balanced Hailing disabled, defended ships with non-warships now gives more interesting results Crews in stasis are better accounted for in events. For example, a boarding party in stasis no longer defends against an attacking boarding party, and ships with passengers in stasis no longer demand food in events. Timers give even more time when trying to reach a destination in another sector Lasers can now be added to MegaFixers Trade items are more balanced with less duplication Laying minefields no longer triggers automatic enemy ship aggressive actions, but being hit by a mine sure does Having a second battleship no longer adds additional fuel or water capacity Boarding shuttles gain the same vector as the launching ship when launched Added a few new enemy tractor events like cargo stealing pirates that use tractor beams Did a full logic rework on boarding actions for consistency

QUALITY OF LIFE IMPROVEMENTS

We added better camera control. The scroll wheel no longer selects ships, instead it zooms all the way in to a ship and quite a ways up and out. Looking forward to hearing your feedback on this one!
Right clicking with selected ship(s) automatically moves them to a waypoint, not sure why it took me so long to do this lol Temporarily exceeding your ore capacity while paused (by melting weapons, using ore cargo, etc) is now allowed so that ship actions that take more ore than your current capacity can be started Stasis can now be controlled by selecting and right clicking your stasis-capable ship Many ship items (such as repairbots) can also be used by right clicking the ship they are equipped on, giving you easier control The game now pauses automatically after the battleship jumps in (before the rest of the fleet arrives) -- this can be toggled on or off in Options from the Esc menu Ship abilities and benefits have been made clearer and easier to see, both when scanning and also when hovering a ship in your fleet list Timers (at least, those with negative consequences) can be immediately skipped, triggering the consequences immediately
Choices can now be selected by using the number of the choice Weapon hardpoints, gunboat hangars and cargo holds are better explained in the UI Seized ships now sit in more logical locations, making them easier to select Ships added to the fleet now immediately have a grey icon added to the fleet list so you can add them to a formation without having to wait for the entire new ship animation to complete We added better camera movement during jump, visual improvements to weapon range ring, and added boarding party types to passengers in stasis Made improvements to the Captains Guide and updated info for 1.45 A ships class is now shown on the scan dialog Fleet ship details are now available in the starmap The formation editor now shows a formations speed and flags slow ships If a ship is repaired between a destroy order being issued and the weapon being fired, dont destroy the ship when hit, just damage it Faction leader actions no longer work if the leader is in stasis Gunboats continue to be repaired through jump Individual mines can how be hovered The main menu got a little more active Non-formation ships are a little better about not jumping in on one another

BUGS

Harvested worlds no longer steal a trade event in sector 1 Several exploits closed off Stuck jumpgate(s) unstuck Log improvements Sending feedback now shows progress Trade event bugs were fixed Literally dozens and dozens of other bugs were fixed

WHAT'S NEXT?

In 1.46 well add space hazards, at least one new ship, more events, plus the usual QOL and balance improvements and maybe a surprise or two!

[ 2022-05-02 00:03:53 CET ] [ Original post ]

Version 1.44 brings three new ships, achievements, new abilities for boarding parties, new events, a proper beginner mode, and a ton of balance and bug fixes!

NEW SHIPS:

Three new ships join the fleet in 1.44!
The Corp Merchant ship is a small warship that makes up for its lack of speed with plenty of cargo space.
The Rover Dreamer is a small food producing ship that is also outfitted with Empire stasis tech, allowing passengers to be put into stasis (where they consume no resources until revived).
The Rover Drencher can package available water into water cargo - just the ticket for surviving low-water worlds or staving off water riots in an overpopulated fleet.

ACHIEVEMENTS:

At long last, we've added 17 achievements!
Try and obtain a second battleship. Attempt to hold out against the Harvesters with a massive fleet. See if you can complete a run as a peacemaker.
We've also added a number of special awards for losing the game in a variety of different ways. Can you collect them all?
Also note that a couple of these achievements unlock new fleets!

BOARDING IMPROVEMENTS:

Mercenaries now have an improved bribery option that mixes in some RNG. But as long as you have enough ore you have a good chance of bribing a ship's captain to join the fleet without a need to leave armed guards aboard. Since Pact Marines cannot be used unless you are enemies with a faction, you're now given the option to declare war on a faction when one of your Marine boarding parties boards a non-enemy ship!
The Diplomacy faction leader power can now be used to try and persuade ships that you took by force to stay in the fleet -- without keeping a boarding party aboard. Right now this is only possible once you've removed a boarding party from a ship under duress. Tell us what you think!

FEATURES:

You can now leave us in-game feedback by hitting the F8 key or by clicking the leave feedback text at the bottom of the screen. Add your email if you want a reply (we do not keep email addresses or use them for anything but replying to your feedback). Quite a few new events were added, as well as additional variations for several types of encounters. We added animations for some of the more recent game actions like launching boarding parties, recovering gunboats and the like.

BALANCE and BUG FIXING:

Starting with the Beginner fleet now slows the Harvester propagation wave speed and reduces the number of Harvester enemies. The final jumpgate remains the same. If you prefer a slower pace to play, this is for you! All repair locations are now also shipyards. Shipyards specialize in either industryships or warships. Some carry ships from other factions, too. Ship prices were reduced. They also no longer increase during a run. Lastly, ships can be traded as early as day 10 in sector 2. Ships traded at a shipyard will require a crew (or you can seize them if you have a ship capable of seizing). Ever have a non-fleet ships become disabled during a mission? That used to end the mission. But now you can seize or repair those ships and keep the mission going! After a lengthy optimization of the game, Harvester Reaper swarms are back! We also reduced the number of Harvester warships to account for more Reapers on the field.
There's a much greater chance to obtain gunboats for your Empire Carrier now. Seized non-fleet ships now react if left crewed for too long. Enemy ships defend better against incoming boarding parties. Protecting ships now stay closer to protectees. Shield ranges on all Irenic shields were increased. Weapon ranging and ship closing distances were improved. We increased the number of quests available to help give you more options to add certain types of ships into your fleet. Investigators no longer show up at the final jumpgate. Marooning a faction leader aboard a non-fleet ship will now incur the same consequences as leaving them behind any other way. Marooning is no longer allowed on Harvested ships (same as the other transfer options). It's no longer possible to reset trade items by force quitting. We continue to improve the early game flow. It's not quite there yet, but it keeps getting closer. We were able to fix dozens of bugs and annoyances thanks to your great feedback! Thank you so much for your help, we deeply appreciate it.

WHAT'S NEXT?

Tractor beams. More new ships, more new items, more events, more achievements and more QOL improvements!

[ 2021-11-24 07:23:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

1.43e is a small patch to fix some minor but annoying event logic bugs, and clean up some tags. Thank you Admirals for your excellent in-game and Discord bug reports!

[ 2021-08-30 23:59:50 CET ] [ Original post ]

Watch Brian Jamison, Creative Director of XO cover the major features of XO 1.43!

[ 2021-08-25 18:04:01 CET ] [ Original post ]

XO 1.43 Rolling the Hard Six Version 1.43 brings several new ships, many new items, more events and a totally new way of starting the game!

NEW SHIPS:

Three new ships join the fleet in 1.43! The Irenic Casino ship generates ore from passengers! When passengers are aboard, right click and select the Market action to open the Casino for business; ore will be created over time at a high cost of water and fuel. Also note that the Casino requires two water whether or not its market is open.
The Rover Planner takes any weapon placed aboard and creates a plan from it (destroying the original weapon in the process). As a reminder, an unlimited number of weapons can be created from plans (given sufficient ore), and a maximum of two plans may be stored at any given time.
The Rover Snarf is able to non-destructively extract weapons from ships, allowing you to move weapons between ships, salvage weapons from disabled or abandoned ships, or even use the Snarf as a type of attack. If you do this, active warships will target and fire on the Snarf if they can! There may be some strategies to uncover there...

NEW GAME - STARTING FLEETS:

You can now rename your battleship and avatar as well as customize the look of your avatar. Your avatar name and battleship name will persist between runs, or until you change it.
Starting a new game now gives a micro-tutorial if you select the beginner mode. Both modes now start you off with a laser. Only the tutorial starts with a weaponless battleship. Future modes will probably include OG/Hard mode with no weapon. Just for fun we temporarily added a tanked option that starts you off double-enemy with everyone, a frigate, a laser and a tanker.
Youll also immediately notice that we have a proper main menu now. And you now start the game with different ship and loadout options. We plan to add more starting fleet options as unlockable achievements (in version 1.44 or 1.45)

WEAPON UPGRADE ITEMS:

There are four new items! The Supercharger, Overcharger, Extender and Optimizer are low-cost single use items that permanently upgrade one weapons stat at the cost of decreasing another weapons stat. Look for more such items in v1.44!

FEATURES:

We added a number of early game combat events to match the battleships now-beweaponed starting state. We improved the flow of the tutorial as well.
New Harvester ships were modeled to better differentiate between classes.
The auxiliary can now be seized and repaired. Boarding parties can now be launched from gunboats. Added a number of more complex/varied early events as well.

BALANCE:

The Harvester wave now starts one or two jumps away from you at game start, depending on which type of new game you choose.
Harvester warship speeds were reduced. Harvester Investigator had 1 laser removed. Rover Getter speed was increased. Ships given an attack order no longer switch to the closest target. Ships purchased at shipyards are now abandoned; you must have a crew or be able to seize them Covered off an exploit where you could fake a crew transfer and gain control of a ship. Attempting to extract weapons from a ship that is not yours is now considered an attack. Boarding parties now work even if a ship has no space aboard due to cargo, other passengers, or even weapons aboard. Cargo is jettisoned preferentially, then passengers, finally a weapon is destroyed to make way for a hostile boarding party if all else fails. Minelayers no longer target friendly ships.

UI/QOL:

Mining and market ships now pause operations when ore is at maximum. Market ships resume marketing the same way mining ships resume mining when ore is depleted. Scouting with civilian ships now asks for confirmation since they can be lost. Having more than two plans now triggers a discard one dialog. Salvage now works as a self-action when a ship is already seized. NO JUMP is only displayed where it makes sense (e.g. when jump is plotted but dialogs are up). Launch all gunboats action no longer launches disabled gunboats. Added a bunch of mouse tooltips, improvements to tooltip text, and made a number of small improvements to the overall UI.

BUGS:

1.43 is a result of a lot of your feedback! Thank you for the ideas and support! We addressed a number of bugs that were found by our awesome community, here are the most substantial ones: Hailing jumpgate stations a second time now works. Selling plans now gives the proper ore. Opening a jumpgate, then jumping away, then jumping back after it was harvested no longer gives an empty result. Boarding parties can no longer make infinite runs taking cargo from stations. Salvaging self action now works. Fixed two rare hard lockups. Fixed an issue where an enemy ship refused to jump. Rejiggered the victory dialogs to work with new menu layouts. Fixed numerous event logic issues. Several missing ship names and lore were created. Shields dont switch on until jump is complete.

WHAT'S NEXT?

More new ships, more new items, more events and achievements! Also, after this current sale we will be increasing the price of the game!

[ 2021-08-24 21:04:06 CET ] [ Original post ]

We really, really strive to have a bug-free game. An enormous amount of time is spent testing and fixing bugs before release. But 1.42b did not live up to that. Moving forward were going to release to a beta branch first before updating the main branch. Beta is available to all players, just hop on our Discord for info. Thank you so much for your patience, and in particular thank you to everyone who submitted bugs and gave great feedback! We are SO GRATEFUL!

Balance:

Time restored when using water cargo during water riots was increased. Events that change relations without player interaction should all be removed. If you spot one, please let us know ASAP. Numerous events like The Commandeered Farmship were made better. Several new events were added including The Looted Barge, The Rioting Station, and The Foreigners.

Features/QOL improvements:

- The Recall All Gunboats action only appears now when there are active gunboats that arent in the hangar - Launch All Gunboats only appears when there are gunboats in the hangar - Carriers now display a repairing progress bar when hovered - You can now store passengers in a gunboat hanger bay (slot) - Disabled, recovered enemy gunboats now automatically join the fleet - Recovered active enemy gunboats now do something... interesting - Non fleet ships given a jumpfollow command no longer try to jump if they are disabled - You can scout jumpgates now - Sector nodes no longer appear to be harvested - Training marines now immediately updates the contextual action menu for immediate launch

Future updates and upcoming price increase:

I worked on mockups for the main menu, renaming your ship, and choosing your appearance among other things, so expect those in 1.43. At least one very unusual new ship and more events are also coming in 1.43! We will continue with updates relatively frequently. We are still focused on adding new ships and items, additional events and QOL improvements. We are getting closer to announcing a release date and this is your final warning that we will be raising the price of the game one more time, reflecting all the new features and months and months of work weve put in. So now is a good time to buy before the increase! There is still time to get your feedback in and have an impact on our development, but that window is closing.

Bugs destroyed:

- You should no longer be able to exploit the game into giving you a Harvester-free experience (Sorry Ainz) - Jumpgates remain unlocked now - Jumping is now restored in cases where it was denied - Many range-related firing and closing issues were fixed - An edge case related to boarding defended ships was fixed - The status of passengers in stasis is now saved properly - Fixed a soft lock edge case at harvested jumpgates - Stations should now always spawn where jumpgates are required - Aborting the board action no longer causes text to flip out on the contextual action menu - Scripted launch boarding party actions now work as designed - Restoring a saved game, ships that were already mid-jump now resume - ShipJumpFollowAction.Execute bug was executed with extreme prejudice - A graphical glitch hovering weapons was unglitched - Enemy formations given formation attack orders now attack properly - Hovering certain mining ships no longer floods the log with errors - Invisible ships no longer show when scouting - Several boarding-related bugs were fixed that also flooded the log with errors - An issue with proximity destruct showing when it shouldnt was addressed - Fixed a problem related to destroying a farmship in an event - Scout icon no longer sticks when scouting with the planet info dialog up - A goodly number of minor text issues were corrected - Invisible ships no longer show up on the minimap - DynamicText.getText bug murdered - ShipOrderCondition.CheckState bug is no more - An issue with sweeping mines was swept clear - Range 1 lasers and ion torps should now fire properly - Abort animations now play properly - Certain integers no longer display as floats. Bad floats! - An edge case related to using water cargo during a riot was washed away - Numerous issues surrounding the board command were fixed - ShipTransferController.UpdateShipSlotsView bug was smooshed - ResourcesProjectileModel.IsResourcesAvailable bug was thrown out - another DynamicText.getText bug was demolished - PlayerContextualActionsModel bug was put away - DockedShipModel bug was mothballed - ShipsController.HoverShipSlot bug was shot down - ShipView.IshipView.SetIsActive bug was deactivated - Access now displays the right tag - Repaired gunboats no longer leave messy pieces of themselves on the playfield - SystemCollections.Generic.List bug was systematically eliminated - Invisible ships no longer appear before they should

[ 2021-07-08 06:58:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

Huge thank you to our players and especially our awesome Discord community! Thanks to your input we keep making XO better!

New Ships:

Please welcome the Empire Occupier, our first carrier! You may have seen gunboats from time to time - those Empire ships without jumpdrives? The Occupier can carry up to six of those through jump. It is also able to repair damaged boats, making it a highly valuable ship. Like the Empire Auxiliary, repair takes time and requires ore.
Also new in 1.42 is the Empire Sleeper ship! The Sleeper acts as a farmship of sorts for the Empire. Sleeper ships can put up to six passengers aboard into stasis so they do not consume resources. It takes time, ore and water to put passengers in and out of stasis, and if the Sleeper is disabled, all passengers in stasis will be immediately lost.
We also completed work on a number of new ship abilities! Look for them to arrive in 1.43 and beyond! There are functional test versions of several of these new ships in the game right now, but they can only be purchased at the (very rare) shipyard trade events right now...

Balance:

Event timers are extended by two days if the event crosses sectors Plotting a jump now only uses active ships for calculating jump times.

Features/QOL improvements:

- We are working on improving how ships deal with the range of their weapons. This is an ongoing bit of work that will spill into the next version. - Passengers aboard ships are now colored per their own faction relations with the Pact. - Ships with a single mining laser no longer autotarget and destroy mines in range while on berzerk. Ships with multiple weapons retain this ability. - Range rings now show when hovering (paused) a shieldship that has its shield(s) disabled by ion torpedoes. - Every single event in the game was overhauled to reduce the number of initial messages on hail, in some cases adding questions or additional options. We removed almost all of the combat timers, allowing for longer battles to play out. And we added more variety and some more randomness to quite a few events too! - On top of that we added a number of new events! - Sector nodes were made much more visible. - The starmap plotting line was finally made 3D! This fixed an issue where the dotted plotting line broke away if you rotated the starmap. - Repair ships now show an ore-starved icon if they run out of ore while repairing. - Repair ships also now display a progress bar when hovered. The bar fills for each point of hull / armor restored. - Boarding parties can now be launched by the type of boarding party (e.g. Marines, Pirates, etc) - Ships that are scouting no longer disappear from your fleet list and formation editor; instead their icon is greyed out. - We cleaned up more of the contextual actions for transferring crew between ships. We use several words to describe the same action: crew, maroon, evacuate, rescue, crew transfer. Theyre all the same action, but we use different words to help you understand things like the state of the target, and what kinds of passengers you have aboard the selected ship. - We added some additional hover tips for things like hovering a plan when you dont have enough ore to replicate it. - Your fleet now stays a little closer together after jump even if youre not using formations. - The way we delete save files when we detect a version mismatch was improved. - You can now attack your own shuttles, should the desire strike you. - Scanning a mine now shows its damage and range. - In trade, weapons of the same type now always have different values. - Hovering non-equippable weapons no longer displays the red nope cursor (since they can be stored in any slot), but instead adds a tooltip warning the player. - Hovering empty slots no longer shows trade tooltips. - Multi-selected ships now all display an animation when an action such as Abort is selected, and when ROE changes. - Explosions are now located on the area of the ship that is damaged. This is purely visual; we do not model ship damage at that level. - Abandoned and disabled states were added to event conditions, so, for example, fleet events no longer select disabled or abandoned ships when an active ship is needed. Internally I continued to do work on the event creation pipeline and expanded the automated tests for events. - The lowest resolution the game now supports is 1024x768. (Our recommended resolution is 2560x1920).

Future updates and upcoming price increase:

We will continue with updates relatively frequently. We are still focused on adding new ships and items, additional events and QOL improvements. We are getting closer to announcing a release date and this is your final warning that we will be raising the price of the game one more time, reflecting all the new features and months and months of work weve put in. So now is a good time to buy before the increase! There is still time to get your feedback in and have an impact on our development, but that window is closing.

Bugs smunched:

- Jumpgates now unlock when they should - Boarding parties can no longer be launched against lifeboats - Sector entry nodes are now properly labeled - Ships cargo is now properly displayed in COYA hovers - Diplomacy is no longer an option on disabled ships - Boarding shuttles and lifeboats can no longer be added to formations - Fixed an issue with incompatible weapons placed on non-warships - Dragging all ships from a formation no longer throws an error - Maroon action no longer appears if you dont have passengers aboard your selected ship - Low orbit formations no longer move veeery slowly - Ships that shouldnt ought to be showing on the minimap no longer are shown - Ships that shouldnt ought to be jumping no longer jump - Stopped a bug related to aborting waypoints - Boarding shuttles no longer display ROE options - preventSectorJump is now saving properly - An issue with conditional choices and event variables was fixed - Solved an issue with follow spinward contextual actions - Fixed a problem where adding a cargoship and then jumping was causing incorrect values to show - Targeting lifeboats no longer shows Intimidate or Diplomacy actions - Evacuate action now only shows if a station has passengers available for evacuation - The scan animation no longer plays when you set a waypoint - Numerous issues fixed with ship actions due to some required refactoring - Some integers in COYAs were incorrectly displaying as floats - Solved a strange issue in the cutters event - Hitting X multiple times no longer drops ghost ships - The addEquipment action was restored to a properly working state - Squashed two good bugs that froze the jump button - Corrected an issue related to map rotation - Adjusted an event so hailing harvested ships worked properly - Fix some tags that werent displaying the correct text - Saving games is again possible - Ships no longer always try to keep their range in combat - Fixed an issue with player contextual actions - Corrected something with setting colors that was throwing errors - Took a 2,200 mile road trip, woo - Lots of minor text errors fixed

[ 2021-06-24 17:52:23 CET ] [ Original post ]

While our last three updates have been very large, this (also very large) one brings the most game-changing aspects. We have much more in the works but this should be the last of the large updates. More on that below. Thank you to our players and our terrific Discord community! Weve listened to your feedback and ideas and you will see a lot of that in this release.

Sectors

Instead of one large galaxy, weve broken your journey into five smaller sectors. The number of jumps in a run should be about the same. Each sector is controlled by a jumpgate. Jumpgates must be unlocked to proceed to the next sector, and there are a variety of methods to do so including fleet battles and diplomacy.
Most sectors are controlled by a specific faction, giving you a larger degree of strategic choice as you build your fleet. Certain faction-specific events will now only occur in a factions sector. This affected many aspects of the game, and while we spent a lot of time testing and tweaking, its almost guaranteed there will be things we missed. Please let us know if you spot anything!

Starmap

The starmap and galactic map are now combined. You can now rotate, zoom in/out and toggle between faction or planet type views!

Harvesters

The Harvesters now propagate planet-to-planet instead of in an expanding wave. There is a noticeable visual change that clears up some graphic problems in the wave-based method, and is now 3D. Overall the speed of the Harvester propagation wave was greatly slowed, allowing much more time to explore a sector and engage in combat.
When Harvesters arrive, they do so much more slowly, although larger and deadlier ships will show up over time. Harvester Reapers are also much slower.

Combat

Charging time was increased for all weapons, resulting in slower, more strategic battles. Ion torpedoes now prefer to hit active weapons. Stations can now launch boarding parties. Several ship stats were adjusted to further differentiate certain warships. In some cases, slots were added. Gunboats received the largest changes in anticipation of 1.42s carriers.

Events

Were most of the way through overhauling the events. Most combat timers have been removed, allowing for longer, more strategic combat. Weve vastly cleaned up the narrative, and refactored quite a few events to give more interesting options. This is an ongoing effort. The tutorial was improved and polished and a victory event was added. Faction leaders no longer appear randomly, but only in quests based on certain parameters being met in faction-owned sectors. I plan on creating many more events, so I vastly improved my event creation tools. Its now much, much faster to create events, and Im finding that I am creating more interesting and varied events as a result. Events now run the same battery of automated tests that I use for pre-launch testing, but they do it before I even try them out, massively cutting down time wasted chasing down syntax-related bugs.

Other features:

- Quests can cross sectors - Disabled ships are now more consistent - Added more lifeboat events and increased their likelihood of occuring - Greatly improved handling of lifeboats - Several new actions were added to our event system - Camera angle and drift adjustments - Improved visibility and handling of the jumpgate pointer - Playfield slightly increased to allow for larger formation size - Improved how jumpgate pointers were handled in the starmap - Added a new HUD action to better draw attention to missions

Future updates and upcoming price increase:

Future updates will be more frequent from here on out. We are now focusing on adding new ships and items, additional events and QOL improvements. And while we dont have a release date yet, we will be raising the price of the game one more time, reflecting all the new features and months and months of work weve put in. So now is a good time to buy before the increase! There is still time to get your feedback in and have an impact on our development, but that window is closing.

Bugs squashed:

- It should no longer be possible to die in the tutorial - Multiselected ships no longer choose the long way when given orders - All multiselected ships now accept orders (as long as they are able to) - Aborting multiselected orders now works as expected - Fixed the visual effect for shield mining - ROE is no longer shown on ships that have no weapons - Destroying abandoned ships no longer penalizes relationship - Fixed several issues with ships not mining ore - Formations no longer drop ships or reform when crews are transferred between ships - Quite a few boarding party issues were corrected - I began taking my cat on walks again - A bug related to laying minefields was fixed - Gatherers no longer fall behind a formation when gathering - Adjusted several items and ships to display properly in their portrait view - An issue that caused the game to lock up when ordering a fleet jump was fixed - The fleet can no longer jump away on its own - Several issues related to restoring saved games were fixed - Bugs related to hovering were fixed - Many bugs related to editing formations were squashed - Many dozens of bugs you never saw were caught internally - Several minor issues with older 3D models were cleaned up - An uncounted number of minor event tweaks were made

[ 2021-06-01 14:33:03 CET ] [ Original post ]

Watch as we take XO for a run!

[ 2021-04-11 16:42:34 CET ] [ Original post ]

Join us on a run of XO with one of the Devs. We promise close shaves, hair-raising escapes, and ships going kaboom!

[ 2021-03-29 21:31:07 CET ] [ Original post ]

Watch as we take XO for a run!

[ 2021-03-29 03:32:45 CET ] [ Original post ]

This update fixes a dozen or so annoying bugs and also contains a handful of minor features.
We made a couple of long-awaited changes to the Rover event "The Separated" Some detail was added to the Captain's Guide Full details in the changelog!

[ 2021-03-10 19:03:23 CET ] [ Original post ]

Welcome to another massive update of XO!

Real Time Fleet Jump

You'll notice immediately that your fleet now jumps away visibly and in real time - warships jump away last and continue defending until finally, your battleship jumps out. During the brief jump, your battleship races ahead to emerge first. You can begin taking actions, including plotting a jump, immediately after the battleship touches down. We hope you love it as much as we do, it definitely adds drama to your jump.

Top Scores

We've also added your Top Scores to the main menu! We hope to add more stats soon, but right now we track tidbits like your best relations, the size and makeup of your fleet, and how many jumps you survived.

Captain's Guide

At long last we have a Captains Guide! This should hopefully answer quite a few questions. The guide is a work in progress, so expect us to add, remove and tweak entries for a while. See something missing? Let us know!

More New Features

We increased the level of ship detail in 1.40.
We added probably one of our biggest feature requests, scroll-wheeling the fleet list. Formations received a total rewrite. The editor is the most obvious change, but formations in general should defend, fly and behave more like formations should.
We added two new ships, first the long-awaited Rover capital ship, the MegaFixer. The MegaFixer sports two military grade lasers, two ion torpedo launchers and an extra weapon hardpoint. It can fix disabled ships and also seize and hold disabled ships through jump.
The Pact Cutter is a single laser fast ship with four cargo holds, designed to rapidly deploy boarding parties and recover cargo.
In another QOL improvement, all mining ships now temporarily hold mining operations when there is no ore available, and resume once jumped to a location with ore. The same holds true for melting ice. Mining beams now assume different colors depending on their current use.
The Irenic Plasma Shield also received an overhaul, new visual effects, and a much improved UI. There's a lot to cover so head over to the Captain's Guide or Changelog for all the details.
Lasers now have a groovy visual effect when hitting targets. Repair ships can now repair or salvage ships already seized. We added several new cargo items. We'll let you discover them. For new players, the tutorial was greatly expanded. Thanks to everyone who gave us suggestions for improving it. We optimized combat effects and models to improve the framerate in large battles. Hailing another ship now has a visible effect. Lifeboats, shuttles and stations now have flashing beacons. This really makes it a lot easier to spot those lifeboats, and that's a good thing, because if you leave any of those behind there's now a good chance you'll take a hit to relations. Ships on Weapons Free now automatically attack nearby mines. The remaining boarding shuttles were modeled and added. We added two new abilities to our extremely robust event scripting engine: a jettisonCargo action and shipSlotFree condition. With these, boarding parties now check to see if there's room for them and take appropriate action if there is no room aboard. (Among other things, muhuahahaha) Lifeboats no longer show up in the fleet list. Warships and mining ships now show a large indicator above the ship when they cannot fire due to being resource starved. Weapons will continue to fire as soon as resources become available.
For about four years now I've wanted to re-do the ice world. It always really annoyed me that you could see through the gaps. At long last, I was able to do that. We also improved the UI for water conditions on ice worlds.
Marines are now trainable when passengers are in the battleship's hardpoint slot We smoothed out scrolling the galactic map. Weapons added in an event now prefer hardpoints. Expect future events to feature different weapon loadouts as a result. Similar to water, when there isn't enough fuel for jumping the fuel icon turns grey. The ore icon now also turns grey when ore drops below 1.

Balance

- Training boarding parties now only requires neutral relations - Ships boarded by enemies now have a delay before jumping - Under duress events also have a delay before jumping - New faction leader dialog is now unskippable, so you don't miss that you've gained a faction leader - Corp Mercenaries now have a bribe option - Troubling events are less likely - Marooning crewmembers just got more interesting - Pirates can now repair disabled fleet ships - Pirates can stay behind when asked to repair disabled ships - Your boarding parties can now murder fleet passengers - Boarding stations now have a chance to yield resources - Added more Kobayshi Maru type events - because sometimes you just have to pick the lesser evil - When trading, factions no longer carry weapons for all factions - Water riot dismissals now incur a -1 relationship for all passengers aboard a ship in addition to the operating crew - Sacrificing boarding parties to the harvesters incurs a relationship hit after the first attempt - Boarding is no longer allowed against Reapers - Harvester events greatly enhanced, reinforcements added - Boarding is now more consistent - Boarding defended ships can possibly wipe out both parties - All combat missions should now react to ships being boarded - NPC boarding logic improved - First of many Max enemy events added - Adjusted Harvester jump-in location to be more forgiving - Mission titles now always clear when events end - Most boarding actions now include RNG results - Stay tuned for Harvester-related boarding events - Blockader attack events were toned down - Beacon logic was improved for long jump quests - Warlike relations now trigger Retribution events - Warlike relations also now trigger Max Attack events - Ally relations now trigger Quest events - Duress events now respond to destroyed ships - Several new events added

Assorted QOL/UI/Event logic improvements

- Protect order while in hold fire ROE auto switches to defend - Mine ore/melt ice actions are greyed when impossible - Hovering crew in the transfer window displays crew info - Seized ships now show green slash in fleet list - Cargoship filter now only shows cargo class ships - Added defend + protect/support warnings in ship hover text - Added hover text to all caches - Camera movement and ship focus now works when dialogs are up - Certain events were stopped from clobbering one another - Hail reminders no longer trigger after day 20 - Removed more dialog if you select the I know what Im doing option at the start - Slowed the maximum rate of water animation - Minefields now visible immediately on jump-in - Main menu adjusted - Ship portraits improved - Attacking impossible to reach targets at the rendezvous due to insufficient range now displays a warning

Bugs Squashed

- Resource hover restored - Accidentally invisible battleship revealed - Weapons added in an event now fire properly - Attacking ships no longer get quite so close - Laser cannot fire animation now only plays for friends - Logs now show ROE properly - Context issues with cargo transfer fixed - Zoom/scale of some models adjusted - Formation ships now stay in place after editing - Ships no longer launch boarding parties when they have none - Timer issue fixed - Minor issue with filter and scroll arrow fixed - Gatherer shield bug fixed - Marines are now only trainable on Battleship - Permariot now avoided if 8 crew (only) were aboard battleship and/or boarding parties were launched during a water riot - Support + Weapons Free now defends station from missiles - Corrected an issue with ships losing their fleet color - Fixed bug with going to starmap - Only one event is spawned when warships are disabled - Unknown ID bug stomped - Fixabot uses correct icons - Fixed an event issue related to formations and protection - Added hover text to certain attack events - Warships only say 'hailing frequencies open' if they are - Used item charges now save - First use of attack hotkey now works - Ships in trade actions now save their state - Invisible ship issue fixed - Logging improved - Some friendly fire issues cleared up - Wrong way movement issues redirected - Double-firing issues cleared - Haggle only works once now - Transmog no longer throws trade warning - Shift-clicking and waypointing no longer throws an error - ROE animations now play when hotkeyed - Formation + filter nor longer scrambles editor - Scroll down arrow in fleet list no longer gets obscured - Literally dozens of other minor fixes

[ 2021-03-08 22:09:22 CET ] [ Original post ]

See changelog in-game for all the goodness!

[ 2021-03-02 05:31:59 CET ] [ Original post ]

See changelog in-game for all the goodness!

[ 2021-03-02 05:31:23 CET ] [ Original post ]

Boarding parties

Boarding parties now add a huge new high risk/high reward dimension to the game. When you launch a boarding party, a boarding shuttle streaks across space towards its target. Shuttles can be attacked, protected, disabled and rescued just like any other ship.
If the boarding shuttle reaches its target, a special mission begins. You must then decide what actions to take based on the situation. Both the boarding party and the target ship are at risk of loss. Each faction has its own type of boarding party with their own strengths and weaknesses:

Pact Marines

Pact Marines are loyal and will never mutiny. They are good for putting ships under your control, and very good at disabling enemy ships, both actions that generally make for poor relations. They provide excellent defense against enemy boarding parties. Unlike all other factions, they respect the rule of law and will only board enemy ships.

Empire Shocktroopers

Fiercely loyal, Empire shocktroopers are bloodthirsty. They excel at eliminating enemy crew, disabling and even destroying ships. They can also be used to take over ships and put them under your command. Shocktroopers are the most effective of all boarders, but success always leads to a worsening of relations. Like Marines, they are excellent at defense.

Corp Mercenaries

Although they are not particularly loyal, mercenaries value ships too highly to intentionally destroy a target ship, and would prefer not to disable them. They dont share that same value of crew and have a habit of accidentally killing them off. In the next version we will be giving mercenaries the option to bribe captains with ore to join your fleet, but for now they are still reasonably effective at putting ships under your control -- that is, unless they mutiny and jump away with the ship. Lastly, mercenaries are very good at defense.

Rover Pirates

Pirates give you the legendary jury rigging abilities of the Rover on disabled ships, although this is a much riskier option than using a Fixer or the Rover Leader. Pirates do have a nasty habit of stealing the ship they were asked to board, but theyre pretty good at capturing and disabling ships to balance it. Pirates too are quite good at defense.

Irenic Diplomats

Wait, but the Irenic are pacifists! you say. True! For this reason diplomats will not defend a ship they are aboard, nor will they kill a crew or destroy a ship. However, diplomats can be asked to destroy one or more weapons aboard a ship for the good of all. They may even do so without being asked! And perhaps due to the quality of their cookies, they are quite good at peacefully persuading ships to join your fleet -- as long as the diplomats are not killed in the process. The greatest strength of diplomats is that their actions never cause relations to turn negative.

Boarding Details

Any passengers aboard a warship can be trained as a boarding party, as long as relations are friendly with that faction. Training cost is 1 unit of ore. Training is immediate and cannot be reversed. Once trained, a boarding party can no longer operate a ship. Boarding parties, as long as they are alive, can be reused. Multiple boarding attempts can be made against a target. Captains be advised: disabled ships can launch boarding parties, including those of your enemy. Do not let your guard down once a ship is disabled! Boarding shuttles can be re-tasked in flight, including after a successful boarding action. The crew aboard shuttles continue to consume fleet water until destroyed or they mutiny and jump away with a ship. Launching a boarding party against a ship in your own fleet transfers the boarding party to that ship (unless there is unrest aboard that ship, and in that case an event will occur). Your tactical computer has been upgraded. Non-player ships now generally display helpful status messages when you hover them, including which ship in your fleet they have targeted! There's plenty more to discover, but let's discuss our other major improvements:

New features

New hotkeys! You can now set Rules of Engagement (ROE) instantly on all selected ships with these hotkeys: R: hold fiRe V: weapons free (Vree?) B: Berzerk N: defeNd And just a reminder that you can change all hotkeys in the Options menu. The Pact Frigate and Pact Destroyer had their second cargo slot replaced with a hardpoint, giving you the option to add firepower (at the expense of no longer being able to ferry crew/cargo or do ship upgrades). All mining ships also have had their cargo slot converted to a hardpoint, so you can double up on mining lasers.
Destroying one of your own ships now drops ore (same as with non-player ships). You can now lay minefields directly on a target. Plans and ships are now much more frequently available for purchase in trade events. You can now filter your fleet for ships with boarding parties and upgrade items aboard. Non-player ships will now use nukes defensively, while player ships always require an explicit action to launch nukes (because they have devastating area of effect damage). Ships that come into your fleet now clear their attack orders, and ships in your fleet also clear their attack orders against that ship. This should help prevent any friendly fire incidents. Giving a Destroy command switches the attacking ship to the defend ROE if the hold fire ROE was previously set. Issuing a Nuke order switches the attacking ship to weapons free ROE if hold fire was previously set.

Events

Its now possible to play in a much more aggressive style -- what I like to call Razor mode (in honor of a certain Pegasus Admiral). These Razor events give you morally flexible ways to add ships like farmships to your fleet. This is not an easy way to play. Every single event was adjusted to allow for boarding. This alone took over a month and several passes, since at that time there were over 125,000 lines in our events file. (It's up past 180,000 now with boarding parties!) One hundred and seventy eight new boarding-related events were created. We hope to expand this out over time. Right now a different event occurs based on the combination of faction boarding party, target ship class and target faction. Ships (particularly warships) respond differently if they have defenders aboard. Most of these 178 new events are player boarding events. A few of them are enemy boarding actions and results. We hope to expand this out over time. Lots of work was done outside of boarding, too! All trade and repair events can be restarted as long as you remain at the current location. Caches still self-destruct after they have been accessed. Trade events were made much more frequent. The number of items for sale were also increased.
Disabled and Abandoned ships now have events that are spawned each time a ship becomes disabled, abandoned (or both). Now when you crew/recrew/maroon/repair these ships interesting and unexpected things can happen! Lifeboats also have their own special events. All cargo ships now have a chance to carry minor ship upgrades like nanorepairbots. Enemy AI was improved for all factions. More work will likely be done there. Many new events were created including: The Laser, ROE Your Boat, Razor: The Tanker, Razor: The Farmyard, Razor: The Share Deal, Razor: The Payfarm, The Pirate Party, The Covenant, The Comrade, The Sibling, The Dronet Plea, The Oremore, The Party, The Rescue Promise, and The Handoff. The tutorial was massively expanded, cleaned up, improved and hopefully made clearer and more engaging. For example, the fuel resource is not displayed until jump is ready, where it is then explained. As another minor example, the battleship starts following the station so it wont drift out of view. The explanation for water now always appears at the right time. Well almost certainly do even more work on this as well. Related to the tutorial, we now track if the player jumps without hailing or engaging with an event and throw (hopefully) helpful reminders. This will likely be tightened up in the next minor update. Many events such as The Fair Swap were made to use the new centralized crew/recrew logic. Dozens of events were tweaked, fixed, adjusted and expanded. Lore was added for crew, passengers all boarding parties and items.

Modeling

Models for the different boarding parties were added: Pact Marines, Empire Shocktroopers, Irenic Diplomats, Corp Mercenaries, and Rover Pirates. Boarding shuttles were created for some of the factions. More to come! The boarding action animation was created, but due to a horrific oversight, is not present through at least 1.39f. Penance shall be served, and we should have that added soon. All stations were made much larger. Its purely visual, but they look much better. Thanks to intern Moe for the idea!

User Interface

The water display was completely revamped. The water icon now animates when you are gaining or losing water, and the center of the drop now clearly indicates how many more crew you can take on before triggering a water riot. Lastly, when water is at zero or less, the icon goes grey.
We also colorized the other resources and increased their size for better readability. Resource graphs showing you the speed of resource gathering at a given location were made larger, more colorful and more consistent. Look for these when hovering the center of the minimap, hovering locations in the starmap, and viewing a locations details in the starmap.


The ship info window was added to choice trees to help anchor which ship youre talking to/making a decision about.
When a player has zero ore, we now grey out the Fix action and display an insufficient ore tag. The attack order is now greyed out if the target is disabled and a tooltip was added, this should help to clarify that an explicit destroy action is required. Contextual actions were reordered to make more sense. When there isnt enough ore to nuke/fire missiles/lay a minefield, we now grey out the command(s) and display a helpful message. The protect and attack actions are now centered on their target ships, making those actions a little more clear. The attack action doesnt always center, thats a known issue for now. Feedback now sends in the background. Event results now display on the starmap in case you are there when an event ends. The ring of doom is now more visible. Many small but annoying UI bits were cleaned up, spacing was adjusted and things were made more consistent.

Behind the Scenes

It has been and exciting, exhausting and totally worthwhile three and a half months. It's the longest we've gone since we entered alpha without a release, but the scope of the change required this much time. Its difficult to understate what an epic amount of work this update represents. 178 new boarding events alone! The file that contains all of our events grew by 50%! Overhauling existing events was an epic task. In addition to expanding many of our existing conditions, every single event had to be evaluated and adjusted to accommodate boarding.
I restructured the event file, organizing events by types. This was also a lot of work but it makes maintaining the events much easier. We also expanded our robust event scripting with quite a few new features: The moveCrew action was added, which allows us to move crews between ships in an event. The randomVariable action was added, so now event results can be randomized. This was vital for boarding party actions. The wasBoarded condition gives us the power to know if a ship has been boarded or not. Different variables and parameters can be used to resolve the boarding action in the local event or in the spawned boarding event. Several more actions and conditions were added such as destroyWeapon, isSelected, fakejump on jumpFollow, pulseTooltip, states in getShip, board and launch boarding party actions in shipActions, disableTrigger, and isJumping conditions.

Next up...

We already began work on the new jump animation, and have done a lot of work on improving formations so that they curve along the playfield and also respond better to commands. Upcoming version 1.40 will have both of those new features and more events!

Bugs

We fixed about 200 bugs in this release, but most of them were never seen as they were related to boarding parties. A HUGE thank you to our Discord community and all the players who contributed bug reports. Here are some highlights: Event logging was massively improved. syntax highlighting was added in VIM and boy does that make a difference!
Ships no longer default to the long way around when using T or Z hotkeys. Losing a faction leader at the rendezvous no longer triggers negative events. Haggling no longer results in zero cost or sub-1 cost items. The battleship no longer has maroon actions available unless it has passengers aboard. The Diplomacy action is no longer shown against fleet ships. Transfer/evacuate/rescue/maroon/crew/cargo transfer/etc actions were cleaned up and given better logic. The battleship is now released from seize before the seizing ship jumps away (due to boarding or an event result). Quests should now always spawn where they can be reached before the Harvesters expand into their space (assuming the player does not dally). It is no longer possible to evade the relationship hit for confiscation by jumping quickly. Upgrades are no longer duplicated in trade actions. Lifeboats no longer jump away due to faction leader lost events. Feedback works under Linux again. Choice trees expand down (instead of up) An epic number of broken tooltips were fixed A variety of issues with the shipExists, crewCount, crew and evac actions were fixed, most of them in event logic. A bug related to scouting and events was fixed that would result in zero events at your destination. Trade events no longer spawn twice. An issue with returning boarding parties from a spawned event was fixed. Delays caused by sending ships scouting were undelayed. A few bugs that would cause zero events to spawn at a given location were squinched. Counterattack was removed as an accidental contextual action. The spawnHarvesters action was added to the save game state. The hidden rendezvous beacon no longer flashes briefly when entering/exiting the starmap. The resetTrigger action now properly resets locationChanged and time conditions. An issue related to the weaponCharged trigger was issued termination orders. An error caused by transferring the molecular sieve item was corrected. Waypoints now work properly when restoring a game. Operating crews are now displaying properly when hovered in fleet info and scan. The Fixabot now displays a proper model. Harvesters now properly respawn after the tutorial. Rendezvous beacon now restores properly from saved games. Several projectile-based edge case issues were fixed, some of which could stick the game. A fix was made to an Irenic-related crew mission. getShip was made to work with boarding shuttles. Trade and repair events are no longer possible to spawn at the rendezvous. A lockup related to reaching the rendezvous was fixed. The mystery of mysterious Pact passengers was solved. Ships given the board action in an event no longer stop before reaching their target. An issue with crew not being killed when they were meant to be was fixed. When crew is transferred they no longer show their crew info dialog. The nofuel tag was given text. A bug with no events cropping up on day 5 was fixed. Farmships no longer have counterattack actions. Whoops. An issue that could cause zero scouted events was resolved. Hovering Investigator details now no longer crashes the game. An issue with boarding-related speech was talked out. Factionleader gain/lost events now end properly. The boarding shuttle no longer aborts boarding if the target is disabled. Warships only have the confiscate action now. Unfriendly factions no longer can train marines, show tooltip instead. Boarding shuttles no longer overshoot their target regardless of closing speed. Range rings were fixed in the formation editor. Some issues with the relationship change animation were fixed up. Some speed optimizations were done. Thanks for making it this far and we have much more in store!

[ 2020-11-18 18:59:30 CET ] [ Original post ]

After over one year in early access and 39 big updates since alpha release we're raising XO's price to $19.99, just ahead of our massive new boarding party upgrade! Here's an overview of what we've added since we entered early access:

• Ion torpedoes
• Range rings
• New ships like the Pact scoutship
• Harvester wave propagation
• Ship and fleet upgrades
• Minefields
• Fleet filters
• Cargo
• Quests
• Confiscation
• Hotkeys
• Trade and repair
• Water riot grace periods
• Waypoints
• The end game
• Native Linux support
• Speed adjustment
• Interactive music
• Beacons
• Hundreds of new missions
• A wicked number of user interface improvements

[ 2020-10-21 17:46:50 CET ] [ Original post ]

The Rovers now have their own unique weapon: the ion torpedo! Instead of causing damage, a torpedo hit temporarily disables a weapon. Hits also disable unarmored ships, but cannot be used to destroy a ship. What use is a destroyed ship to a Rover, right? All Fixers are now equipped with this weapon. Fixers have also been buffed to have 4 armor. Only lasers, mining lasers and shields destroy incoming ion torpedoes.
Ships now display weapon range rings! Hover any weapon-equipped ship while paused to see them. Each equipped weapon shows its range. Select a ship and hover another to see ranges for both ships. Select a formation and hover it to see all ranges for the formation. Oh and mines also show their range when hovered (paused). Note, range rings only show for shieldships when the shield is off. And lastly the formation editor also shows ranges for ships in a formation but only when a ship is hovered or dragged.
We added more in the you asked for it category: items and crew can now be dragged between ships! We added a little extra logic that prevents dragging things that you dont have enough ore to trade for, too. Hovering a disabled ship now shows the Ring of Doom: the point of no return where you cannot save a disabled ship and it will burn up in the atmosphere. As a reminder, ships in your fleet can abandon to lifeboats even when they are beyond the Ring of Doom.
You can now focus the camera on any ship: hover a ship and press the F hotkey key (or right click and select Focus). The camera will stay there until a WASD camera key is used or another ship is focused. Speaking of hotkeys, captains be advised, hotkeys for jump are now G (go) and hail is now T (talk). This makes it much easier to play keeping one hand on the keyboard and one on the mouse. Also a reminder these can be reassigned from the main menu if this arrangement isnt happy-making. Camera movement keys (WASD) are now remappable, too. In the purely visual department, making the ion torpedo effect inspired me to improve the look of missiles, so I did that too! Check out the new bloomed missile exhaust! Thanks to our Discord community for helping test out colors, which you should join right now at https://discord.gg/D8DEcqj!
Items now have timed effects! Certain items now require a charging time and/or a cooldown time after use. Items can also now be restricted to being usable only on certain ships. We now also have a Fix action for items, which acts just like the Rover Fix command and only repairs a ship if it is disabled, and then only to 1 health. Look for the Fixabot in the game. We can also trigger sound effects for these effects. For good measure, a good bit of polish was put into the UI so the use of these items made more sense. Here are the new game items: ultra diveboats, hyperdistiller, molecular sieve, nanorepairbots, repair drone, fixabot, tritium condenser, quantum rift, superstring net. Those last two items can be used to slow or temporarily halt Harvester expansion! The other items increase resource collection or efficiency, or add various repair options. Weapons are now color coded! Your ships fire blue lasers, missiles and torpedoes. Harvester weapons are purple, and non-fleet ships are colored by their current relationship with you. Mines are now red if hostile to your fleet ships.
We did some more work with colors too: in comms dialogs, you (as captain of the battleship) are now colored white, and your crewmembers and ships in your fleet are blue. Weapon prices now make sense! For a long time weapon prices havent faithfully matched their abilities, but they do now. Welcome the new Pact Scout, our latest addition to the fleet! This lightly armored ship is as fast as the legendary Pact Frigate but has no weapon hardpoints. Instead it has a single upgrade/cargo slot, making the Scout perfect for Enhanced Sensors or fast crew rescues where weapons are not needed.
Formations now line up numerically left to right (or antispinward as we say), starting with formation 1. Ship information is now tied to choice dialogs, so you can more easily understand which ships youre dealing with in a given event. For events with multiple ships, hover the ship icon to see more detail. Ship portraits are dramatically more detailed! Check out the before/after:
The relationship hover was improved. Well make more improvements to this in 1.39, but a better explanation is given for what the different relation states do.

BEHIND THE SCENES:

We added the following new missions: the foundship, the cutters, the farmship intel, the scoutship, the lost scout, the iron hand, empty lifeboat events for all factions, the crofting, the smuggler, the trade dispute, the piracy report, and several Pact abandoned scout events. The following missions were balanced or expanded: The rover turnabout, the fooding, the weaponing, the press gang, the treetmaker, the salvage op, the pecking, an empiric escort, all Harvester intro events, and many other smaller and/or global adjustments were made. Some repair caches now drop repair items. Did a fair number of narrative fixes, too. Heres an example: I ran through all of the narrative and made sure that it was clear when you were offering protection to a ship and when you were letting them go. Also did things like remove all mention of supplies as flavor text, since we dont, um, actually track such things. Tutorial adjustments: harvesters no longer spawn during the tutorial. It is no longer a mission, allowing other missions/fleet events to occur during extended tutorial. A pointer was tied to mouse tips. Much more work is coming there.
Harvesters in general were toned down so as not to be quite so devastating. Looking at you, Devastator. destroyShip events were rebalanced in some cases to kill the crew (based on the new rule where crews abandon to lifeboats when destroyed) The new addWeapon event action allows us to, yes, add weapons to ships. We added local variables that are only seen by the event that created them, and increment/decrement for variables to allow for future mischief. Most event variables are now local to prevent them being accidentally clobbered. We can now mark certain ships as tradeable, which will allow me to make more shipyard-type events in 1.39. Seized ships are now displayed when hovering Extractors, Fixers and Auxiliaries. This should help to clarify when a repair/fix command has been aborted. We did a lot of UI cleanup, like eliminating some lower case. Many mockups were made for soon-to-be implemented UI improvements.
I created a lot of art. For example for the hyperdistiller, molecular sieve, nanorepairbots, tritium condenser, ultra diveboats. Also replaced a Pact beard, it was too similar to another one. Created the ion torpedo weapon model and its assorted icons and effects. The Fixer was made destructible. Better logic and messages were added for when scouts fail to return. On molten worlds the mine ore command is now greyed out instead of missing. Faction leader loss is now logged. Added information to cargoships to make it clearer that they add ore capacity to the fleet. The fleet rendezvous no longer displays on the galactic map until much later in the game. Quest beacons now also appear on the galactic map. Quests are no longer located directly in the oncoming Harvester wave, making them unreachable. When multiple ships are given a movement order with no specific direction, we calculate the short way for each ship individually to prevent ships from accidentally taking the long way. Mining lasers now work against any ship with only 1 hull point, including heavily damaged warships. A lot of work was done to make sure formation ships properly defended one another, and in particular that missiles were being properly defended against. Mining lasers now fire defensively even if your ship is in berzerk ROE (since they are only good for that). We also improved combat logic such that ships no longer unload their entire batteries if only one shot is required.
Ships under the defend ROE but not in a formation will now close to combat range and return fire instead of heroically soaking up damage. We made some further improvements to the logic that displays similar commands like transfer cargo and maroon to help clear up confusion. Ship armor and slots were rebalanced. Transmogrifying water now resets the water timer, same as using water cargo. Quite a few test events were added; these help us test the game before an update. Sending feedback feels instant now as it now sends in the background.

WHATS COMING UP

In this last cycle we experimented with ships trying to keep their combat range, but this led to a lot of frustrating chases, so we killed the feature. In the next build we will experiment with more tightly constrained movement during combat, and likely add much more shooty shooty bang bang type events. Well be making some major UI improvements, notably to the Water UI. And we will be working on the long-awaited boarding parties!

BUG FIXES:

Heres a summary of bug fixes, we did about 3x more than this: Much debugging was done on ion torpedoes. Much debugging. Much. M U C H. Did I mention a lot of debugging? When sending a ship scouting, lost ore is properly credited back when the ship returns. Heres a grab-bag of some issues that were fixed. We fixed a lot more than this: addWeapon issues were resolved. Zfighting issues were broken up. Fixed some issues when spawning events from events. Fixed a DOTWEEN game lockup Fixed an issue with frozen jump plotting ROEs show when hovered again. Ship portraits are no longer accidentally duplicated when hovering ships for trade. Z key no longer attacks self. Warships no longer forget their protect orders. Dual material ships now display all their pieces. Mines now properly attack shieldships. crewCount condition now throws the right message when marooning crew. Visited locations now properly display their resources. A couple of nasty bugs where conditions would not trigger were corrected. Perhaps we fixed the dreaded Set Delta Time projectile bug. Sandships with defend ROE now defend against incoming nukes. Rapidly hovering items no longer produces a bug. Gatherers can no longer destroy ships (oops). A formation error moving ships was corrected. Trade/repair animations were eliminated from the galaxy view when harvested. Fixed a game lockup that occurred when jumping just before a dialog appears Fixed an issue where fixers and auxiliaries no longer repaired but still ate ore Zero charge items with a charging state now destroy themselves after use Formation editing with filters on now shows all ships in the formation editor A bug related to mining ships joining was squashed. Several cargo-related bugs were fixed. A bug related to adding ships to a formation was eliminated. Riot-dismissed ships previously given jumpFollow orders now no longer keep following the fleet. When ships join the fleet, the resource cap no longer increases, then decreases, then increases again. jumpFollow no longer teleports ships. cargoCount now works properly again. The fixabot item now properly fixes. Dragging a repair action now works. Briefly you couldnt destroy enemy ships. Destruction has resumed. Another bug that triggered when you emerged from jump was nuked. Dual fixers now respond properly to a formation attack order. Fixers in formation also properly counterattack now. Plasma shields now display properly in slots. hailedBy triggers now work when leaveFleet is used in init/preTrigger actions. Mission text and timers are now saved and restored properly. A bug related to holdfire lasers and shields was fixed. A bug with choices dialogs was fixed. A bug where ships would open fire on you in defend ROE was taken care of. We think weve taken care of an issue where an event that shouldnt spawn was briefly spawned, then killed, counting against your events. Range rings show properly in the formation editor. Mining commands should work properly again. Killed a bug related to dragging passengers into crew slots. A lockup related to a timer expiring was fixed. Crew transfer issue with a particular event fixed. Croft cant jump event timers fixed. Some icon issues were fixed in speech dialogs. Several timer issues related to events and caches were fixed. A preTrigger issue related to timers was worked around. Ships that leave while the join fleet animation is playing should no longer leave the animation frozen on screen Attacking abandoned ships no longer causes relationship loss Crew can be loaded aboard hardpoint slots that were melted Self destruct drops correct faction lifeboat Tags to Types in eventTemplates Debug lack of events on certain systems. As I mentioned, we fixed a ton more bugs than this, but Im not sure people find this relevant so Ill leave it here.

KNOWN BUGS:

At present we are not aware of any known bugs. That means we only have known unknowns. Find one? Send us in-game feedback please!

[ 2020-07-22 19:38:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

Harvesters, those purple pursuers that you love to hate, now spread in a wave! This was our most requested feature, and were really happy with the way it plays right now. This took a week to get working, about a week to add effects, and another week of tweaks and adjustments. This is a major change and we expect some more adjustments will be necessary. Let us know what you think on our official Discord! We have now added ship and fleet items! Find these on all trade missions, and in rare cases on ordinary ships. Our first fleet item, especially for Battlestar Galactica fans: Networked Computers. These reduce your fleet plotting time by 25%! The only downside is that they require a slot on the battleship to be used. Our first ship item: Nanorepairbots - as you might expect, these repair damaged or disabled ships. They are multiple use with a variety of charges and repair levels available. Right now they require fuel and ore to work, but future repair items may appear that dont require either. Also, this item only works aboard the ship it is equipped on. They can be moved from ship to ship via a transfer order.
Rounding out our items in this update are Enhanced Sensors. These speed up scouting by at least 20% when equipped on a ship. Speaking of scouting, next update look for a new ship, the Pact Scout, which is purpose built for scouting! We have more ship and fleet items coming soon! When a ship joins your fleet we now display an animation. Now its a lot clearer to see what each ship brings you. (Especially how lesser supply ships benefit your fleet!) These animations queue to accommodate the missions where multiple ships join your fleet. This should work no matter how you manage to bring a ship into your fleet. The starmap no longer rotates to the direction of travel. And there was much happiness. The new jumpFollow action means ships can now follow the player (visibly or invisibly) through jump without joining the fleet. We can now spawn ships invisibly, too. I added this functionality to all escort missions and added a few other surprises. Im really looking forward to having more fun with this! Since you can now jump ahead of the Harvesters, we added the ability to scout locations youve already visited. Destroying a ship now does three things: any crew aboard jump into lifeboats, any cargo aboard is dropped, and a random amount of ore is dropped (also as a cargo container). There are no relationship penalties for destroying a ship.
Mine Ore and Melt Ice orders now shift ROE from Hold Fire to Defend. Attack orders also shift Hold Fire to Weapons Free. Hailing no longer switches the Hold Fire ROE to Defend. The tutorial was cleaned up, refactored and extended. There are now options to find a weapon and choose what kind of ship to add to your fleet first. New missions: The Weaponing, The Fooding, The Berzerked, The Berzerking (!), The Slaver, The Extortion, The Lost Empire, The Waystation, The Deep Regret, The Retriever, and some new confiscation-related random events. That puts us at over 600 missions/events! Adjustments were made to The Outbid, The Overfull, The Unceremonious, all minelaying events like The Fireteam, The Corp Standoff, and all the Harvester intro missions to account for the new wave propagation. We improved the layMines command to be able to drop mines directly on a target, and set up rules for how the various commands were interpreted. Mine damage has been fixed at 1, because at higher levels it was far too OP. Some usability improvements were made to the in-game feedback system, and additional tooltips were added to make the game a more pleasant experience. The game no longer auto-shifts back into tactical from starmap, and most dialog now displays in the starmap. We expect to have choice dialogs visible in the starmap, and trade/transfer as well, in the next update. Its important that, for the choice dialogs at least, we dont obscure the starmap so you can evaluate your jump options before deciding on accepting a mission. Oh and we adjusted timings so these dialogs didnt appear during the jump sequence. When editing a formation filters are temporarily disabled. The size of the universe was increased to 475 from 400. It is likely we will increase it more as we rebalance post-wave propagation, but we wanted to get more player feedback first. The speed of the Corp Tanker was slightly increased. It is now slightly faster than a heavily laden cow. Combat ranging and auto-protection algorithms were improved, resulting in many less ships unnecessarily lost in combat. Medals have been handed out. The shipOrderIs command was extended to include all orders including scan. Events can now be made invisible to hemisphere selection, correcting an issue where different mission ships were appearing next to each other instead of in different hemispheres. The Access order now has an accompanying animation. We improved our event logging system and combined some log files for clarity. Gas giant and starmap background colors were adjusted to make Harvested worlds much clearer. Color palettes are now properly applied on the galactic map. I made some tweaks to a certain event that trips a lot of people up.
Bugs: We truly hope to have squashed the joystick-related bug once and for all. Hotkeys are now disabled while the player is in a menu. Two bugs that would prevent jumping were solved. The Irenic Gatherer now has its mine ore command restored. Group mining commands should now work as expected. Mines should properly target enemies in all cases. Mines now use the time of firing to determine positioning as opposed to time of clicking. Result = better accuracy. A formation-related hail order issue was fixed. Unused waypoints now clear. Unity Prefabs, I hurl insults at thee. Emergency replacement events now honor faction-specific tags. We may have finally put an end to the dreaded SetDeltaTime bug. A few errors related to formation attacks and formation firing distance were cleaned up. An error that was thrown when using a shipDestroy command is no longer plaguing us. Gunboats and Half Gunboats now display their ship types when hovered in scout reports. Phantom operating crews were briefly visible on Corp mining colonies, but have been told to resume hiding.
Disabling Empire warships now works as expected in all cases. The timer now stops properly on The Peaceful Protest event A bug related to ship filters was trapped and ground into dust. Harvested worlds no longer show trade or repair mission animations in starmap. Theoretically they should also not display in the galactic map, too. Heru squnched a bug having to do with projectiles. Pact Destroyers no longer mistakenly show +0.5 fuel when added to the fleet. Starting a new game clears any in-progress new ship animations. 796 UnassignedReferenceException errors were assigned. A double-spawn event bug was undoubled. A few naughty rewired errors were disciplined. An edge case that would cause ships to get stuck was unstuck. We took care of a bug where attacking another ship would lock ships in place. A few ship not found bugs were found and fixed.

[ 2020-05-29 23:10:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

In 1.36 we did a lot of work on Rules of Engagement (ROE) and the various attack commands!

Rules of Engagement

ROEs govern how ships react to enemies as they move through space. For example, attacking with the Berzerk ROE will ignore all incoming projectiles. And if you are attacked while in Defend ROE, you will defend against projectiles but you wont shoot back on the attacker. While with Weapons Free your ship will fire on both projectiles and the attacking ship if attacked. Now that ROEs work properly, we added more goodness. When you Protect a civilian ship, it draws fire away from the civilian ship toward the protecting warship. [previewyoutube=Vk0iarHzmDI;full][/previewyoutube] Weve also added a Support command. Supporting ships will fire on projectiles targeting the ship you are supporting, but wont draw fire. This cleanly gives you the ability to dedicate ships to fending off projectiles while using others to concentrate on damaging ships. Right now Support only works on warships, and Protect is restricted to civilian ships. Let us know what you think, should we expand these commands to work on all ships? Weve added a lot of tactical possibilities now. Im delighted that its all finally working as designed. We went through a lot of events to try and make sure the improved ROEs work properly but theres a good chance we missed some. If you see anything strange, please submit an in-game bug and well get it fixed right up.

Mines

We also did a lot of work on mines. We have a new event action, layMines. Hmmm, I wonder if you can guess what it does? So we added a good number of minefields and minelayer-related events. Because you cant have enough mines. Remember that mines are now attackable, so if you dont have an Empire Blockader in your fleet to minesweep them, you can blast them. You can now also use nukes to clear minefields. Scanning mines now works as expected. And to top it off, mines now make appropriately satisfying crashing sounds as they impact and explode against the hulls of their hapless victims. Oh, Empire Blockaders can now sweep enemy minefields to gain extra ore and safely clear a path as well. [previewyoutube=1BVggplHRVA;leftthumb][/previewyoutube]

Content

A bunch of new content was added: The Barricade, The Minebait, The Layers, The Blockers, The Pecking, The Change, The Empire Blockade, The Blockade Runner, The Plan, The Fireteam, ROE Your Boat, The Protecting and The Picking. Trade and repair events were added for all factions, so you no longer see that Irenic trader in Empire space trying to barter with you. A number of events were also adjusted or improved.
And those events where farmships just jump away? They have all been refactored into quests where theres a chance to get a farmship. The original idea was meant to help, but it just caused frustration. Ive begun to go through some events with formations and tighten them up, beginning with The Irenic Convoy event. Speaking of making things more understandable, with the use of our new weaponIsCharged condition and resetTrigger actions, Ive begun to craft more early game show me how the monster works type events. As an added bonus, these types of events only show up if you started the tutorial or asked for tips when you started your current run.

User Interface

Were starting to improve the visibility of major effects in the game. Relationship changes are the first of a few to come, and they look like this: [previewyoutube=aY-91XhUQqw;full][/previewyoutube] Tell us what you think! Starting a new game and melting weapons now pop up a sanity-preserving are you sure type dialog. Youre also asked to confirm before trading ore for a weapon you cannot yet equip. Let us know if you think they should be in other places. It is now possible to do crew rescues or cargo transfers to ships with only one hardpoint and no ordinary slots if you melt the weapon down first. Desperate times may call for desperate measures, right? Nuking disabled ships now destroys them. Using water cargo while the water riot timer is ticking down will buy you some extra time, depending on how much water you throw at the fleet and how badly you are in water debt. Filtered ships are now updated dynamically and reflect things like ships sent scouting. More tooltips were added, including when youre out of ore but trying to lay minefields, and when you cannot transfer cargo to a ship but want to use it to clear space. A handful of tweaks were made to the UI to clean things up. We added action animations for Maroon, Transfer, Cargo Transfer, Crew Transfer, Access, Lay mines, Minesweep, Retrieve, and Rescue. [previewyoutube=cxDwphEwQ0Y;full][previewyoutube=cxDwphEwQ0Y;leftthumb][/previewyoutube][/previewyoutube] We created over 50 in-game test events to help expedite testing, and they are making a huge difference. We improved our logging as well. In the unintentionally coincidental department, XO player cirind let us know on Discord that in a game he was playing on Easter day, a Harvester Investigator was destroyed only to return three days later. We can confirm this is not an Easter egg!

Bug Fixin

Several bugs that prevented the jump button from working were fixed. A bug with transferring crew in The AWOL event was made good. A bug that crashed the game after trade was given no quarter. Some issues with transfer and confiscate were fixed up. A hold fire ROE given to a shieldship allows laser fire from within the (now off) shields range. The fleet filter now works without having to scroll to the last ship in the fleet first. Mining lasers no longer attack warships. Success conditions now trigger properly while jumping. Events spawned using spawnEvent now respect the procedural rules of each event. Our so-called emergency events also respect these rules. The relationship change animation was adjusted not to play while dialogs were up, as it was too distracting. The tooltip for passengers in filters now says passengers instead of crew. An issue where you would lose water at the rendezvous was drowned. A bug where you couldnt transfer passengers from a frigate was undone. Heru stopped a pretty nasty bug from locking up the Unity editor. Hovering water was fixed up a bit. The scan animation no longer plays randomly when issuing a waypoint order. An issue with text being squashed in story mode was unsquished. A few z-fighting brawls were broken up. Certain animations no longer show up in ghostly form in the rendezvous. The unknown ship id error that was cropping up frequently was fixed. When restoring a save game with zero ore, ore is now properly displayed instead of hidden. Laid minefields were throwing errors, but thats been fixed. Minesweeping got a thorough overhaul. Some cargoCount bugs were fixed. Fixed an issue with the Rescue animation and some other animations. A bug that was causing choices to grey out was fixed. Hovering the battleship crew once caused issues, but no longer. The rendezvous beacon no longer shows after it is reached. A few dozen bugs not worthy of more detail were fixed, mostly related to combat and ROE.

Known issues

For Windows + Mac, none that we are aware of at this time. Find a bug? Report it in-game please!

Known issues, Linux edition

When submitting feedback in Linux the game says no Internet connection but we still receive your feedback. When alt-tabbing from the game in Linux, the sound can go wonky. Restarting restores sound to normal.

[ 2020-04-30 00:37:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

Captains, be advised that issuing a hail order now automatically sets your ROE to Defend. This was done to minimize the number of interstellar incidents that were occurring as warships cruised up on enemy ships intending to talk, and their overeager crews opened fire before communications could begin.
You can now filter the ships in your fleet! Ships can be selected by crew, passengers, ship types, damaged status and cargo type. So no more hunting around for that ship with the Irenic passengers, or that time-critical fuel cargo. And you can quickly toggle the filter on and off at the bottom of the fleet list. Theres a little tweaking yet to be done on that, so expect some additional polish there, and for the time being if you find the filter window doesnt want to go away, hover any ship in your fleet.
In preparation for upcoming minefield events (yup), we made mines targetable. You probably know that you can recover your own unused mines for ore. Well, enemy minefields can now also be cleared if you have a minelayer (gaining you ore). So well probably rename that command to Minesweep or Sweep mines for the next version. Head over to our Discord and vote for that and other things as well! Trade and repair events are now more evenly spaced throughout the universe. Rejoice. I expanded our emergency events to include one for each faction. If you choose a lifeboat to leave behind due to a water riot, an appropriate dialog now displays instead of a blank one. The collider for the cargo container was improved, making it easier to select. We lifted an artificial limit on the number of missions that can simultaneously run. We added a couple more save points to feedback and automatically reported bugs to help us track down those pesky bugs. We also increased the amount of info saved to our logs. I created an animation for the Maroon action, added a proper icon for the Rover Hideyhole, and mocked up the ship joining the fleet animation. If the player is playing from the tutorial or has asked for hints, theres a new bit of dialog that pops up letting the player know theyve unlocked higher level ships when the factions relationship goes to neutral. I have a new event action, clearOrders, which allows me to issue the equivalent of an Abort action on any ship. Armed with that I made some adjustments to several events. I improved a few events in other mysterious ways: The Hunt, The Unexpected, all cache events and The Farmship Quest. New content: The Family Farmship (quest). I also have another event action, isROE, which allows me to set triggers based on the ROE of a certain ship. Ive used these primarily for testing, but Im sure I can think of some entertaining ways to use them in events.

User Interface

Scouting results are a little more clear thanks to some tooltips when you hover them. We added several tags based on the quality of each resource, as well as tags that should invite players to scout when they hover unscouted resources. We added quite a number of tooltips, including showing a warning when the selected ship has no free cargo space. The speed slider now has a tooltip, and so does the cargo transfer action. I made quite a few behind-the-scenes adjustments, finally replaced the checkbox and X with final art, tightened up some window placement, and added two new animations: confiscate and maroon. The attack command is now greyed out and a tooltip displays if you try to attack an armored ship with a mining laser. Hovered cargo items persist the same way that weapons do, allowing the player to compare more easily. We did a little work preparing for localization, pulling a few stray instances of non-localizable content into the system. This is ongoing work. If you protect an enemy ship (as you might need to in certain missions) a tooltip warning is shown. A good bit of work was done cleaning up the contextual commands for crew, rescue, evacuate, maroon, cargo and crew transfer. Theyre all the same command but context is used to give better cues for what is possible. These commands should now appear as designed.

Bugs Kasmunched

I was really disappointed that we deployed with a couple of nasty bugs last week. So I spent a few days creating a large suite of interlocking events that help me QA the game before we deploy. I continue to add to those tests. We rushed out a couple of updates after deploying 1.34 last week. One had to do with the new quest system. Another one took care of a problem with attacking with missiles or shields. Some bugs related to minefields were fixed. Waypoints are getting better about being cleared, but theyre not quite there yet. A bug related to transfer orders on shieldships was also taken care of. Some glaring errors in the scan dialog were fixed. Heru nuked a bug that cropped up when hovering ship slots. The battleship orbiting your current destination on the starmap has returned. Ships briefly didnt appear in the fleet list when they joined, but thats all fixed now. You can now destroy ships with missiles, muhuhahaha. The transfer window overrides custom event tooltips, instead displaying appropriate contextual tooltips when hovering crew and cargo. Stations were incorrectly showing operating crew in scan and transfer dialogs, that has been taken care of. Passengers were also briefly not showing correctly when doing a crew transfer.
Duplicate triggers in The Unceremonious were fixed. Found and fixed a duplicate tag that was wreaking havoc on a contextual tooltip. Shieldships were not disabling ships, but they do now. Made a minor tweak to The Decoy fixing a timer that shouldnt have been visible. An event was throwing strange hail messages, but thats been corrected. An inconsistency in our event tags was corrected, which corrected some lingering issues. Right mouse button icons should appear as designed in transfer dialogs.

Known issues

The fleet filter dialog can stick; hovering a ship in the fleet filter unsticks it. The fleet filter button sometimes doesn't register a click; clicking the scroll down arrow below it first should help.

Known issues, Linux edition

When submitting feedback in Linux the game says no Internet connection but we still receive your feedback. When alt-tabbing from the game in Linux, the sound can go wonky. Restarting restores sound to normal.

[ 2020-04-04 00:16:58 CET ] [ Original post ]

So this is the first time since July of 19 that weve taken more than two weeks to release an update. Cargo slots and quests are a major upgrade that touches virtually all parts of the game. We hope youll find it chock full of goodness and worth the wait! Obligatory COVID-19 statement: We both work in relative isolation and do not expect to be impacted. We will continue to work on the game full time. We are wishing health and safety for all during the pandemic. To paraphrase Douglas Adams: The secret is to wash the hands together, guys.

Cargo

Many ships now store cargo. Right now we have resource cargo containing fuel, water and ore. We will be adding many more types of cargo in the very near future including items that give ship and fleet upgrades! Resource cargo doesnt increase your fleet capacity, but acts as a reserve you can use to increase your available resources at any time. Need to jump during a firefight but low on fuel? Use that fuel cargo! Need water to stop a water riot? Use that water cargo! Need a few more ore to get that weapon? Use your ore cargo! And you can also trade cargo items for much-needed ore. However, if you use cargo and are already at or near capacity, that resource will be lost, with two exceptions: you can temporarily exceed your ore cap if youre already trading. And if you are at your water cap but have too many crew, using water cargo will reset the water riot timer. As you play youll come across quite a few ships with cargo already aboard them. So say hello to the new confiscate command. Confiscate allows your warships to board cargo-carrying ships and, you guessed it, confiscate their cargo. After the confiscation, all related ships jump away and you will incur a relationship penalty. This also bypasses any event that might have happened if you hailed the ship instead of confiscating. Oh and one last thing confiscations may not always go as planned! But wait, theres more! Remember that destroy command? Well now when a ship is destroyed, it drops a cargo container which slowly drifts into the gravity well. The retrieve command allows any ship with free space to pull the cargo aboard. So you now have some more interesting decisions to make, captain.
You can store cargo in any open slot on a ship. Some ships also have hardpoints which are used to permanently mount a weapon. Hardpoint slots can also be used to store cargo or passengers. Weapons can be stored on ships, but they only operate if they are dropped into the correct hardpoint (e.g. plasma shields on Irenic warships). You can transfer non-operational weapons between ships using the transfer command. Once a weapon is equipped, it can only be melted down for ore. In the future we will be adding a new ship type that can extract hardpoint-mounted weapons. Cargo items can be reordered on an individual ship by dragging and dropping. Right clicking on a cargo item uses it. One last thing: you cannot move, transfer or drag your battleships operating crew out of their operating slot, but you can with all other ships in your fleet.

Quests and Content

Its been a long time coming, but we now fully support multi-jump missions! We call them quests. This update also brings more than 20 new events: the decoy, the accidental discharge, the herkyjerk, the laborers, the corp hating wolfpack, the mixup, the upgrade, the treetmaker, the poisoning, the ill, the farmship quest, the confiscation, the cargo runners, the panic, the dropped, the panic, the hunt, the expired, the provider, and numerous confiscate events. We also added starmap beacons to all missions that require a jump.

Other Functionality

Ship orders now display in your fleet list, making it easier to see what your fleet is up to!
Shielded ships given the hold fire ROE now drop their shields. All pirate events were improved using crewCount conditions. Ships given an attack order should be better about keeping their target and not switching to other ships attacking them. Ships marked as transferrable but not evacuable will not show crew. Ships marked evacuable but not transferrable will only show crew, not cargo.

UI and Game Balance

Harvester Reapers now emerge from their Carrier a little less frequently. I added logic to spread out certain types of abandoned ships from appearing quite so frequently, as it was feeling way too repetitive. I improved the tutorial event that talks about formations. The main tutorial was also improved, and some further improvements were made to an event by the name of the result and the defecting foodship. Based on feedback I started removing the events where farmships jump away in fear, replacing them with more directly helpful events as the jumpy events were definitely not producing the desired result. We did a substantial amount of work on adding tooltips for actions and to help explain why things may not be working as expected. Hovering non-functional weapons, trying to transfer to ships that are full, hovering crew in hardpoint slots, and many other places received this treatment. Along those lines, we are continuing to grey out and give tooltips for actions that are disallowed, for example, trying to attack an armored ship using a mining laser. Were beginning to roll out expanded tooltips for players who choose [begin tutorial] or [show tips] when starting a new game. Certain mouse tooltips were disabled in the scan dialog, since that is a non-interactive view. I made an adjustment to windows so that the game doesnt cut off important info for those brave souls playing XO in 1024x768 resolution. The water riot dismissal dialog was made ever so slightly clearer.

Technical Stuff / Devlog

From here on out Im mostly giving technical details and a fuller devlog. Fair warning! Quest and rendezvous arrow beacons are now only shown if the destination is not visible. A unique animated quest beacon is now used. With the getPassenger action I can now have passengers aboard a given ship speak in events. This was fairly important for certain quests. I added passenger as a job type as well. Emergency repair events were added. These spawn when the procedural engine cannot find a compatible repair event and the player has jumped to a repair beacon. Compatible crew will now automatically move to the operating crew slot on an abandoned ship if they were aboard as passengers. I created lore for all of the new cargo items. Heru added linebreaks to the lore descriptions to give me more flexibility. I created the confiscate animation (this will be implemented in the upcoming v1.35), and an animation for go to waypoint but Im not sure if I will be including it. I mocked up the fleet list filter, which is next up on our priority list to develop. This will enable you to quickly filter the ships in your fleet so you can find passengers, items and damaged ships easier. I mocked up a more granular hover for the water UI, and we implemented that. It needs a little tweaking, but it should help disambiguate water. I also mocked up the confirmation dialogs well be using for melting (destroying) items and starting a new game. And I mocked up an improved ship detail based on some excellent player feedback, and expanded tooltips for planet resources. I added hardpoints to all of our 3d models. I created the cargo container 3d model and icon.

Cargo and Items: a Deeper Dive

Im very excited about adding more item types. We designed items very similar to how we designed events, using YAML and an add-as-you-go model that has served us well. Now that the hard work is done, it should be much easier to add different kinds of items that improve a ship, or add fleet powers. (Networked naviputer for faster plot times, anyone?) On the event backend, there is now a transferrable action that I can apply to any event ship that allows cargo to be transferred or not, giving me a lot of narrative control. Several new events make use of this. I can also trigger a transfer between ships in an event using the startTransfer action. This is actually how all confiscation actions are done in the game. Using our procedural engine Im able to craft specific types of events that will only pop up when youre, say, trying to confiscate goods from a corp ship when you have hostile relations and a factory foodship in your fleet. And I also have an addShipItem action that I can use to give ships cargo in an event. The new cargoCount and takeCargo/putCargo conditions round out my ability to incorporate cargo fully into our event system. On the design side I balanced item amounts, ship slots, and frequency of cargo. Expect all of this to change as we continue to balance and add different items. Its pretty generous right now, but I do like having too much cargo and being forced to decide what to keep. I continued to make small but measurable improvements to the script that I use to make events from spreadsheet entries, mostly to support these new functions, but also to expand existing actions so I can more easily create quests.

Bugs Smooshed

Honestly it took weeks to cover off all the edge cases and wacky interactions that adding cargo items caused. This was not fun. But we think weve gotten the vast majority of cargo-related bugs taken care of. I wont categorize each one of them here. Just know there were a hell of a lot of them. Part of our delay getting 1.34 finished also came about from implementing the new starmap beacon. We surfaced a substantial issue where events were not ending when they were supposed to, and fixing that ended up being quite a beast. We believe we have well and truly eradicated joystick and controller lockups. Some files were moved out of the default folder which we hope will eliminate the bug that required Admin privileges to run XO. An annoying bug that was minor but was flooding our bug reporting software, CreateJumpOutIntro, was nuked. So long! The protect order now protects as designed. Ships no longer fire on ships once they start jumping. A scouting bug that made copies of ships was fixed. Item dragging was disabled while the formation editor was active, as it was screwing things up. Scouts in progress are now fully cleared on a new game. A getShip/shipExists bug was fixed. Unduplicated a name duplication error. Fixed a bug where killCrew didnt. A bug where only the scan animation was being played was fixed. Fixed an event that had two occurIf conditions. One of those blank dialogs related to Pact Frigates was unblanked. Fixed a missing tag, Early_evac_pact_crew An adjustment needed to be made to the hover line for scout reports, so I made it. A number of ships were not displaying their name in scout reports, that should all be fixed now. A nasty bug related to the destroy action was taken care of. A bug preventing rescues was fixed. Minor fixes were made to the former haven event and all events with evac conditions.

Known issues

Destroy ship currently does not work when using missiles. Rescues and transfers are sometimes not started when the target ship is in high orbit. Waypoint markers sometimes do not clear when reached.

Known issues, Linux edition

When submitting feedback in Linux the game says no Internet connection but we still receive your feedback.

[ 2020-03-21 00:08:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

The biggest news in 1.33 is a large number of bug fixes, and a lot of behind-the-scenes work to solidify the games architecture. But we also added quite a few new events! Every time you rescue a faction crew theres now a chance of something positive or negative happening.
In 1.33 we made some changes to game balance: the battleships water capacity was raised to 8 from 6. Repair amounts in repair caches were increased. And a common ore reward was adjusted down to 6 from 8 (to prevent wastage due to reaching ore capacity). We added a frame rate limiter in options -> graphic settings, so if you have a decent graphics card it won't be to running XO at 450fps. Narrative was added to help explain why ships in your fleet jump randomly and to gently suggest formations. Additional narrative was added to explain repair options (which only appears the first time any damaged ship is added to the fleet, if tips were selected at the start). We added a dashed line to the formation editor that shows where mining ships need to be placed in order for them to be able to mine. All pirate events were made repeatable. Yar. We did a lot of internal work on the codebase to give us more maintainability and hopefully less bugs related to Unity prefabs deciding to break just because. This actually required a lot of work, consuming about half of the dev time for this cycle, but we think the investment is worth it. We added the by: tag to the isDisabled condition, which allows us to set up different results depending on which ship did the disabling (say, Harvesters vs. the player). I did an early mockup for improving the fleet list, adding current ship orders to it. Aborting a waypoint order now clears the old waypoint. In preparation for our upcoming quests, specifying a destination more than one jump away is now a fixed distance instead of a random distance. If a formation leader is sent scouting, a new faction leader is now designated. I added an emergency repair event for the procedural engine to fall back on. The juryRigged condition now also triggers as true when a Fixer does a fix on the target. Some minor adjustments were made to our wizard-mode to help us test. I created a smaller 3D model to be used for hovering ships discovered by scouting. The quest beacon logic was improved so that it no longer overwrites the rendezvous text. For some reason, we didnt have an icon for the Empire ammo dump, so I created that. The Tracker event was improved, but we decided to put it on ice until a new piece of functionality is complete. I finalized the technical spec and UI design for slot unification, which were working on now. And we added additional information to our logging to help us diagnose issues.

Bugs Obliterated

A pretty nasty and rare lockup bug was found and dispatched. Almost as nasty, a bug that prevented the player from jumping (ever) was cleared and we are pleased to restore full jump service to you. Scouting with the Auxiliary while the battleship is seized no longer erases the battleship and it is no longer possible to scout with the Aux while the battleship is seized. It used to be that a player would receive resources before a ship, which could cause resources to be lost if the player was at or near their resource cap. Thats been fixed. An odd edge case was covered off that had to do with crewing and removing crew from ships in an event that included a jump. Hovering ships in the scouting report now always shows the type of ship or station. The maroon command no longer pops up in a couple of inappropriate places. Mouse pointer nope no longer displays when hovering the tactical arrow. Nested group conditions now work as they should. When adding a ship to an existing formation, the formation stays in place and the newly added ship goes to join it, rather than vice versa in some cases. When a ship returns from scouting, formations no longer sometimes try to rejoin it. The scoutship always tries to rejoin the formation instead.
The opacity layer behind tooltips now displays properly when text is split due to being close to the screen edge. Fleet ships no longer temporarily revert to their faction color when repaired. Ships returning from scouting should no longer lose their health bar in the fleet info list. Arrows no longer ant-march on the playfield when hovering scan in the context menu. The tactical arrow now pulses every time the comms in progress warning is pulsing. The juryRigged condition now works properly. Weapon icons in trade were stretched weirdly, but now they display as intended. Save games now properly restore ship ids from spawned events. The shipOrderIs condition now works properly with both the [fleet] and [player] tag. Setting an antispinward waypoint no longer creates a phantom arrow ant march. The waypoint icon is no longer smunched. The water quality arrow position was fixed. A rewired error was wired back up. The fuel/water/ore quality hover in the minimap briefly went horizontal, but its properly vertical now. In some cases the lower fleet info scroll arrow was going invisible, that should work now. Shield pips should now keep up with the shielded ship instead of deorbiting. The following buggy events were unbugged: The Collaborator, The Prisoner Ransom, all Rover pirate events, the Elysian Hauler, The Gauntlet. An OnShipCrewHover bug was taken care of, as was the dreaded transform.localPosition bug.

Known issues

For Windows and Mac, none that we know of.

Known issues, Linux edition

When submitting feedback in Linux the game says no Internet connection but we still receive your feedback. When alt-tabbing from the game in Linux, the sound can go wonky. Restarting restores sound to normal.

[ 2020-02-07 01:27:45 CET ] [ Original post ]

We can now branch events from within events. If youve read some of the discussions in our forums here, you know how excited we are about this! Branched events can even be made aware of things ships have done in the prior event, which opens up some really fun possibilities. In 1.32 event branching is in place on all crew rescues. The more dynamic tier 2 branching is only in Rover crew rescue events right now. Well be adding more branched events over time.
Hotkeys have been expanded to include Jump, Hail, sCan, goto waypoint (X) and attack (Z). All of these keys are remappable in options. You can also now swap mouse axes in options. Hotkeys have been disabled in the feedback form, so youll be spared from accidentally jumping or attacking. So now to set a waypoint, just select the ship, hover where you want the ship to go, and hit X. Scanning works with or without a ship selected, just hover the ship you want to scan and hit C. Of course you can still use the context menu. The enter key also now acts as continue for all dialogs. The escape key still skips all dialog (until the next choice). The rendezvous can no longer be Harvested by between-jump expansion. Itll make more sense when you get there. Also, water riots no longer trigger once you reach the rendezvous, this includes after you achieve victory too. I did UI design and technical specification work for our upcoming next major update which is... slot unification and cargo! Yes, ship slots are about to become multipurpose! When we finish implementing this feature it will allow civilian ships to carry weapons (but not use them, at least not without modifications), and cargo items will be introduced. Well talk more about this when it is ready! Tooltips now appear when you hover trade and repair destinations in the starmap. When you hover the attack action, and your ship is in the defend ROE, we now display a tooltip letting you know your ROE will be auto-switched to weapons free. All Devastators have been adjusted to jump in much farther away from the fleet, should you be unlucky enough to jump into Harvester-controlled space. This should somewhat delay the devastation. Trade and repair events no longer spawn when overrun by Harvesters, and their starmap icons are also removed. Similarly, once visited, trade/repair events no longer will spawn at a given destination and the starmap icon is removed. Some of you may have noticed some shenanigans going on with a Harvester ship in an event called The Tracker. That event just became a little more interesting.
Work was done to prepare the game for quests - we now have a quest beacon that we can deploy that works very much like the rendezvous beacon, showing direction when the beacon is off map and the actual beacon above the destination when you are nearby. Theres a bit more functionality there and of course content needed too before we will spring those on you. As far as timelines go, quest functionality will be completed after slot unification. I adjusted the narrative in The Prisoner Exchange event to suggest using the defend ROE. Thats a stopgap for some upcoming improvements. On our Discord, player opinions are split almost perfectly 50/50 between automatically changing the ROE to defend when hailing vs. having some narrative pop up reminding the player that theyll be opening fire when they arrive. We havent decided what the best course of action is, so have your say on our Discord! Events can now be tagged as repeatable, an essential bit of functionality for certain types of event branching. In an event we can now identify this specific ship that has done an action, for example, the ship that destroyed ship X, or the ship that tried to hail ship Y. This was more groundwork for branching and quests and gives us even more interesting outcomes for our events. Also in preparation for quests, I expanded the number of jumps away an event can be. I made minor tweaks to events like The Patch and The Prisoner Ransom. And Ive been gearing up to be adding more content, so I improved the scripts I use to help me generate events. Ive also been doing a better job of documenting everything in case, you know, anyone ever wants to mod XO. :)

Bugs Munched

Controllers are now fully disabled by default, we hope that fixes some of the left mouse not working errors out there. The Q/E hotkeys didnt want to work during comms, but they were given lots of encouragement and do their job happily now. Attack orders now clear properly after a shieldship is disabled, allowing it to be repaired and recrewed without annihilating other ships with its shield. Some rendezvous platforms lost their names, they have been renamed. We think we finally obliterated that minor but annoying jump ring bug. Bye bye rings! A wacky bug in The Assist event was squashed by the big foot of doom. Plans, ship and resource icons as well as the greyed out jump button temporarily quaffed invisibility potions. The effects have worn off. The formations window wanted to close automatically whenever a ship was dropped on it, we fixed that. I fixed The Outbid event, made a minor adjustment to the Fixer Flotilla (all the Fixers really means ALL the Fixers) A fair amount of tuning was done to our new spawn event functionality, and also for quest beacons. Trade events didnt want to appear but weve coaxed them back out. A few smallish bugs were briefly bringing on the pain, but theyre gone now. We did a considerable amount of internal restructuring to make the game easier for us to maintain and expand. This is still in progress.

Known issues

Some events display 'unknown ship id' instead of the ship. If you see one of these, would you kindly let us know the name of the event (e.g. The Sleeping Monkey) or send us in-game feedback? That way we can get that fixed right up.

Known issues, Linux edition

When submitting feedback in Linux the game says no Internet connection but we still receive your feedback. When alt-tabbing from the game in Linux, the sound can go wonky. Restarting restores sound to normal.

[ 2020-01-23 01:11:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

This build brings three new hotkeys: Q E and J. Q/E toggle between Tactical, Starmap and Galactic views. J will jump your fleet, assuming your fleet can jump. You can bind those keys to anything you like: Esc -> Options -> Configure Keys. All game actions are bindable actually. :) Were working on several more hotkeys that will appear in the next version, but we wanted to fix a few hot bugs first, thus we bring you 1.31 a little early.

Captains Be Advised

Starting in 1.31 ships with the Defend ROE are now automatically switched from Defend to Weapons Free when given an attack order. Since, you know, you told them to attack and all. This means your warships will auto fire on enemy warships until you tell them to stand down. If people are hating this, well switch it back, but (DEFEND + ATTACK) just kind of didnt make sense.
The rendezvous marker now shows up when any planet is hovered (after day 50 that is), and the marker itself is now visible in the starmap. We agree, it is too ginormous right now. Rendezvous water and fuel quality are now pegged to 100%. A new event was added, The Fair Swap. Event fixes were made to The Unrefined, the Commandeered Farmship.
In our event system, the [fleet] tag now includes the battleship Jump ready is now displayed in the planet info screen when appropriate Lifeboat and refugee events now have a vastly lesser chance of spawning at the same time. Shieldships can now be relied on to always counterattack, even against other shieldships, subject to all existing rules, conditions and local laws where applicable. New games now cannot start on a trade/repair event. The configure keys dialog was given a minor facelift. I moved all devastators to start much, much further from your fleet when you jump into Harvester space. It should take slightly longer for them to destroy your fleet now.

Bugs eradicated

The cannot attack bug and hopefully all of its frustrating variants have been squashed with vengeance. Accidental verybigs in the events are no longer causing verybig problems, which should kill off that I cant jump problem. Mining ore no longer mysteriously stops. This will not prevent labor strikes in the future. Ships no longer fire on you as they are jumping away. For the record, that was a bug, not additional cruelty. The rendezvous marker no longer flashes onscreen if it isnt supposed to. Confusing! Waypoints stand a better chance of being cleared by ships once they are reached. We think we fixed the [unknown ship id] bug, but its just a thought. Do please let us know if it returns.
Water riots are now adding and subtracting properly and zero now really means zero. Faction leader lost events now properly trigger. Gaining a faction leader events should work now as well. Hailing a non-fleet frigate with a non-Pact ship now displays the appropriate go away or I shall taunt you a second time message. The weapon detail view should never again allow the minimap to peek through. No fair! The mining laser and shield models have now been restored to their former glory. Those weapons are no longer masquerading as lasers. Some edge cases were cleaned up in The Crushed event. The Fixed was similarly fixed.

Known issues

If youre having trouble clicking, try unplugging controllers, rudder pedals, joysticks and the like. We are still trying to whack this bug. We'll get it. Hotkeys trigger in the background when you are writing feedback, which can cause an unexpected jump. This will be fixed in 1.32 if not sooner. The three ring bug has been definitively identified but not yet squinched.

Known issues, Linux edition

When submitting feedback in Linux the game says no Internet connection but we still receive your feedback. When alt-tabbing from the game in Linux, the sound can go wonky. Restarting restores sound to normal.

[ 2020-01-09 03:25:33 CET ] [ Original post ]

We're excited to be featured on the legendary SpaceGameJunkie podcast this Tuesday January 7th, 2020 at 4PM PST! Join us here: https://www.spacegamejunkie.com/stream/

[ 2020-01-06 01:21:01 CET ] [ Original post ]

Trade and repair events are now clearly indicated in the starmap! These kinds of events also appear much more frequently. Next up for trade will be ship and fleet upgrades, and were very excited about that!
You can now buy ships in a limited number of late game events! We will be adding more ship purchase events over the next weeks. Theres a chance well even add shipyard icon to complement the trade and repair icons. Let us know what you think in the forums here or our Discord. Theres a new Harvester ship: the Investigator. Its still somewhat rare, but this light warship will probe your fleet, offering up earlier combat-oriented challenges as you strive to save humanity.
New content was added with eight new events: The Smackdown, The Drydock, The Unceremonious, The Fusion Overload, The Prisoner Ransom, the Prisoner Exchange, The Investigator, and The Tracker. All of the narrative was shifted away from suggesting to the player run directly for the rendezvous (since this is a very bad strategy). The rendezvous narrative and beacon now appears starting at day 50. The rendezvous beacon shows up whenever you hover a destination, not just your current location. The trade icon in the starmap was animated, and the repair icon was made to rotate. As part of the trade overhaul, I removed the trade timers that were no longer needed. Also part of this overhaul required adding explicit end conditions to all trade and repair events. All this took a few passes to get right.
We did a little work on cache events too. Caches are not considered trade events. We removed them from the new trade and repair system; they are now purely bonus events that dont count as a full trade or repair event. The jumpSound subtag now works as designed, allowing me to designate if a ship should be in the system or arrive via a sound and jump animation. The rate at which Harvesters expand was slightly reduced to give players more agency when deciding where to jump. We added a backup trade event in case one isnt available because of procedural reasons, and then expanded it out to have several varieties. Two cache events can now never ever spawn at the same time, as nice as that would be. Repair cost was adjusted down massively from 5 to 2.

Bugs fully smunched

A huge shout out to Josh aka NightKiller0011 for helping identify and test a starmap glitch we had with the first push out of 1.30! 1.30b fixes the issue which was due to Unity forgetting its quality settings. Our update checklist has been updated so this wont happen again. A rare lockup bug related to trade events was eradicated. An event with a Pact crew and weapon now ends as it should. The Rover Cant Jump event now acts appropriately. The Bloody Decks now excludes the cruiseliner for reasons we hope will become clear at a later date. Several Harvester intro events were displaying an incorrect tag in the mission reminder area, but that was rectified.

Known issues

If youre having trouble clicking, try unplugging controllers, rudder pedals, joysticks and the like. We are zeroing in on this bug. If your ship isnt shooting, try changing its ROE (select the ship or formation and right click) Mining ore with mining lasers stops after a certain amount of time and does not restart until you jump again.

Known issues, Linux edition

When submitting feedback in Linux the game says no Internet connection but we still receive your feedback. When alt-tabbing from the game in Linux, the sound can go wonky. Restarting restores sound to normal.

[ 2020-01-03 05:36:28 CET ] [ Original post ]

Have an idea to make XO better? Head over to our Discord or post to our lively Steam forum!

Changelog

The biggest feature this week is the new water riot grace period. This may have been our most requested feature, and it took a little tweaking to get right. It may still need a little tweaking, let us know how you feel about it. You now have a two day grace period to correct any low water situation before riots force you to dismiss ships from your fleet. This makes water a lot more forgiving. I am going to try out some riot-specific events to spice things up, but those are not yet in the game, so enjoy your riot-free riots while you can. It should be less likely for a Harvester carrier to spawn in the middle of your fleet. More tweaking may be necessary here, do let us know if it happens to you - the best way to do that is by sending in-game feedback. We also adjusted how and where Harvesters spawn and their spawn order.
When you receive a Plan, it should now always be something you can immediately use. Deferred gratification has been indefinitely postponed. We added warnings to the plot course screen when a low or no resource condition is likely to occur. This should help players take the appropriate action, whatever that may be. Three new events are now live: the Evac, the Fire Station and the Overwhelmed were added. The faction tag was expanded to allow for multiple factions. This allows us to add farmship events believably to Empire worlds, where previously there were none. Ill may add some pact-only farmship events later, but Ill be focusing on adding Empire + Rover/Corp/Irenic events first. Right clicking while in waypoint placing mode now cancels the waypoint. In this mode a tooltip is now shown. Ships that move to a waypoint now have offsets so they dont dogpile on each other. Formations and formation movement are now locked to an orbital line. Formation speeds were normalized. Marooning a crew now appropriately docks your relations with the maroonees. Always wanted to use that word in a sentence. Tooltips have been added to the Transmogrify window to ease understanding. setTooltip actions, such as tutorial text, are now always overridden by ordinary UI tooltips. I improved the conditions in an event type to allow for more actions. A completely empty tag is now used for clearing tooltips, and it looks much better now. Farmship events now spawn a tad more frequently. Mines now strike non-fleet Empire ships if the player drops a minefield. Some events were restructured for consistency. All events had to be expanded to include the new factions array, which turned out to be quite the picnic. Thank goodness for VIM, thats all I have to say. Hovering the JUMP button when you don't have enough fuel now displays a tooltip and what we lovingly call MousePointerNope. An abandoned ship in your fleet now tells you that it is abandoned via the magic of tooltippery. The loading screen now says... wait for it... loading. When you send feedback you also get a sending popup to ensure folks the game is not broken. Non-essential windows are auto-closed before going to starmap to better allow for course plotting. Visually I finalized the look of the starmap course lines. That's the last bit of non-production art in the game!

List of Bugs Fully Squashed

We may have fixed the issue with rudder pedals, joysticks and controllers hijacking input. Fixed a bug that prevented people from being able to type in the feedback field. Fixed a bug that was causing Harvesters to appear right behind the fleet when they first jumped in. While we may have accidentally discovered insane mode it is a little too cruel for ordinary play. You can now select and deselect ships in your fleet list as you would expect. Ships should now retain their fleet color when abandoned, damaged, repaired and the like. The minefield somehow reverted to an older size, so I corrected that. Bad minefield! Courses can now be plotted correctly again, and scouting now should work as expected. An issue where the maroon command wouldn't show up has been fixed. We think we fixed a formation controller bug that has been popping up. And formations going to waypoints should always reach the waypoint now. We think. And a dictionary-related bug was also hopefully wiped out.

Known issues

If youre having trouble clicking, try unplugging controllers, rudder pedals, joysticks and the like. Some Linux users are experiencing strange graphic effects. Please help us diagnose this by posting your experience on the discussion thread here or on our Discord. Feedback is partially working from the native Linux version, but we still have no idea why it isn't fully working, probably something to do with networking. If you have an idea why, please hit us with a cluebat.

[ 2019-12-20 22:25:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

Two builds in one update! Our normal cadence is one build a week, but kicking off Early Access was very special so were a little ahead of schedule. Have an idea to make XO better? Head over to our Discord or post to our lively Steam forum!

Changelog

Warship armor was doubled for all ships except the battleship. We will be making additional changes to improve the feeling of combat, including adding more combat events. This weeks big feature is the waypoint command, aka Suggestion #65 on our Discord. You can now tell ships and formations exactly where to go, and they will go there and orbit until you tell them to do something else. This took most of the week to get right, and theres still a few enhancements well be adding. "Waypoint" narrowly won out over "go to" in voting on our Discord. Most gamers think of a waypoint as a type of waypoint called a fly-through waypoint - something that you pass through on your way to an endpoint. This was verified after at least five minutes of extensive research. Turns out that a waypoint can be any navigational point. Maybe we will add multiple waypoints if such things are necessary to, say, avoid a minefield. Ahem.
Per Suggestion #33, it is now possible to delay the Harvesters appearing for a short while by jumping before the Harvesters arrive. Let us know if this scratches that itch. A new event was added that hopefully does a better job explaining how low quality fuel locations can lead to badness if you get into a laser battle and need to jump quickly. Thanks for the feedback on that one! Hovered ships now display counterattacking instead of attack directly when counterattacking. Disambiguation. Its a thing. Abandoned ship events are now more responsive to things like being disabled and being crewed with the wrong crew. That ended up taking much longer than expected. The return to comms message was relocated to where it made more sense - right above the button you need to click. Right clicking on a plan in your inventory moves it back to the trade dialog, preventing the accidental deletion rage quit syndrome. We believe that over the long term this will save many keyboards. Mouse tooltips now wordwrap when on the edges, and should always display an opacity layer. The UI for displaying resources in the minimap was slightly improved for readability. It should no longer be possible to jump into a location and have zero events happen. This took a fair bit of tweaking to get right. Combat, damaged and disabled events were adjusted to percentages to allow for easier ship armor level balancing should it be necessary.

List of Bugs Eradicated

An issue was fixed when trying to return a plan to a trade menu with zero items. Ships should now properly display the fleet color (blue) when repaired, instead of reverting Shieldships attacking a laser-equipped ship with a defend ROE now counterattack properly. Losing a faction leader at the rendezvous no longer works the same way as when the fleet isnt at the rendezvous. The Elysian Hauler event now ends properly when you jump. Turns out spelling counts. The formationAttack tag was acting in a cowardly and unbecoming manner and has since been disciplined. An adjustment was made to our event spawning algorithm to ensure that missions, non-missions, timed events and fleet events all play nicely together. They should be doing that now. Timers were appearing too soon on a few events, they should not do that any more. I verified that all escort missions have decrew blocks. An issue that led to [unknown ship] tags was fixed.

Known issues

If youre having trouble clicking, try unplugging controllers, rudder pedals, joysticks and the like. Some Linux users are experiencing strange graphic effects. Please help us diagnose this by posting your experience on the discussion thread here or on our Discord. Feedback is not working from the native Linux version and we have no idea why. If you have an idea why, please hit us with a cluebat.

[ 2019-12-11 04:04:31 CET ] [ Original post ]

Were going Early Access on Monday so we may be pushing one last update late Sunday night. We are psyched! Congratulations to Drive By Pancakes for being the first human to achieve Victory in XO! An XO t-shirt will be winging its way over, and if you come across a certain Rover ship bearing Pancake's name, hopefully the Croft will bring your fleet luck. A huge thank you to all the suggestions, feedback, bug reports, email, comments, tweets and other electronic missives from our awesome Kickstarter backers! It has been so, so great to hear from so many people loving XO!

Changelog

Ships now move in the closest direction if you just click the action (e.g. attack). You can change direction by highlighting the movement arrows. This should make movement even easier. Save games are now resumed paused. Much better. Faction leaders are now visible when doing crew transfers or scanning ships in your own fleet. Theyre still hidden on non-fleet ships and will remain so. Hovering a formation now displays ships forming up making it clearer that a formation is waiting for all ships to arrive before executing an action. What happens when you achieve victory was cleaned up, adding in all the goodness that happens when you lose - stopping the game and ensuring that it couldnt be resumed after a save, and numerous things of that nature. End game is now 100% complete. Credits now roll when you achieve victory, as well as the victory song. :) Elapsed time was removed from the end game and victory screens; it wasnt really working and may have been giving the wrong idea. Trying to speedrun XO will result in failure. You have been warned. The game over dialog was made similar to the victory screen. Except, you know, for the victory bits. Some end game bits were adjusted for fairness and sanity. No spoilers here. Quite a few conditions were added to quite a lot of events to accommodate things like destroying pirates. This led to me doing a pretty big rework of the pirate-style events, and they work a lot better now. Shields no longer have an effect on abandoned ships, making it substantially easier to repair hostile shieldships. I found time to add some more events, but I spent more time cutting dialog and tightening up quite a few events. Theres a lot more to cut. ^isRendezvous and ^victory are now the default for events.

List of Bugs Eradicated

Ships and formations now defend themselves properly when they are given the defend ROE. A different bug that prevented ships in formation from attacking when a formation ship was disabled was eradicated. Weapons free now properly attacks anything hostile/enemy in range, closest first. Mining lasers now take out nukes just like their big sisters do. The formation forming up tag logic was cleaned up. A seized, crewed ship (or a recrewed ship) that is given a jumpaway order (by an event for example) will properly break away and jump. You can no longer get a fake victory by restoring a savegame from the rendezvous. A bug preventing jumping was unbugged. Our event victory and isRendezvous tags were tested and debugged and fully work now. The left arrow had stopped pulsing when the comms in progress was pulsing. Fixed. Melting a ships weapon no longer strips it of all actions. The nuke was restored to its proper level of nukification. If you tried to nuke a Harvester carrier just as it was jumping in, it would cause a problem. Now it just fails elegantly. An unusual issue that was causing the battleship to rotate and change direction when other ships spawned was put down. We unmapped a couple of controller buttons as they were doing a save/exit when pressed and it was looking like a crash. Controller support is pretty awful right now, dont try it. Scouting should work properly on Mac. A couple of bugs related to resuming from victory conditions were cut off. More than a big handful of autobugs were summarily fixed by Heru.

Known issues

If youre having trouble clicking, try unplugging controllers, rudder pedals, joysticks and the like. Feedback is not working from the native Linux version and we have no idea why. If you have an idea why, please hit us with a cluebat.

[ 2019-11-30 06:05:40 CET ] [ Original post ]

What do we believe makes an excellent Early Access experience? A great playable game to start, regular updates, and the ability to have your voice heard!

A great playable game to start

XO is already a full experience, and a tough one at that. With 30+ ship types, over 500 events, and more than 10,000 words of narrative, it never plays the same way twice. "XO is a fascinating twist on the scifi roguelike..." - Many A True Nerd "positively addictive" - Kickstarter backer "Fantastic game, 10/10." - Kickstarter backer But we have much more planned, including plenty of adjustments to improve the experience.

Weekly updates since July 2019

In July 2019 we entered alpha testing with our Kickstarter backers. Since then we've released an update at least once a week right here on Steam - that's 25 updates and counting! As two full time veteran game developers we're confident in our ability to continue at that pace and respond rapidly to issues that will inevitably arise.

Have your voice heard

Thanks to our Kickstarter we already have an awesome player community and have been responding to player requests for months now. As an Early Access supporter you will be able vote on the 70+ player suggestions already in the queue -- and add your own suggestions! Since the project began in 2015 we've been all about listening to our players and improving the game while keeping to our overall vision. We've exhibited at huge events like PAX all the way down to one-on-one playtests. We know how valuable your input is. Please join us on XO's journey! Brian Jamison Creative Director Jumpdrive Studios

[ 2019-11-26 22:07:45 CET ] [ Original post ]

Included in this release is the end game! Try your best to make it to the rendezvous. All we can say is, youd better have a good sized fleet when you get there And the first person who posts a victory screenshot to our Discord is going to get something special. Linux users, you can now play XO natively. For Linux only sending feedback is broken, so use Discord or email please.

Changelog:

Like previous versions this will erase your current save. Tooltips were improved for all forms of unequippable weapons, for when a ship is full, and other trade-oriented cases. Tooltips now word wrap and display if the mouse is too low (looking at you, formation button) I narrowed the triggering conditions on some of the hardest events, and also made some changes to how abandoned ships appear, particularly early game. Were continuing to have actions visible but greyed out with a tooltip explaining why a particular action isnt available. Fix and repair are the latest actions to get this treatment. Tab now works on the feedback form. The mouse icon now always has an opacity layer behind it. Mission objectives should no longer overlap. After the death jingle plays, we now switch to main menu music. Refreshing. The tactical arrow now pulses when the return to comms text is visible in the starmap. Many, many narrative tweaks were made to improve consistency and tighten up the text, and include new features like the rendezvous beacon. The tutorial was given a clear ending. Harvesters now do more than just give an empty box when they are hailed. Save/restore was added to the native Linux version. A certain shield you may encounter was rotated to its proper orientation, and made so that it didnt accidentally destroy certain things. Youll know it when you see it. Our first rev at score was added. Event ships respond more appropriately to players arbitrarily taking pot-shots at unarmed vessels. You know who you are. Reminders that its a really, really, really extremely good idea to hail all ships were added to all relevant events and their conditions were tightened so they only trigger in cases where they ought to be seen.

Bugs:

Fixed a last minute missing bit of something with the end game. A case where a ship failed to attack when ordered to do so was corrected. An event was spawning two gunboats but now it only spawns one as intended. A quick refactor to the way the addEquipment tag interacted needed some additional love, so it got that. our addEquipment tag needed a fix to stop it from duplicating items. Formation logic was cleaned up. Theres still a couple of minor issues that well address next week, but Heru swatted down several issues. A sound effect bug was fixed before yall even heard it. A bug related to ships jumping away was fixed. Certain conditions related to our procedural event picker needed fixing, so Heru fixed them. Some tweaks were made to get tooltips working the way we wanted. A number of events were tweaked and fixed in minor ways. Jeez-o-pete I hope Ive found all the typos.

Known issues:

Joysticks, rudder pedals and some controllers may need to be unplugged before play. There is a bug related to scouting and jumping that we will have fixed in an interim release soon.

[ 2019-11-25 22:48:07 CET ] [ Original post ]

Version 1.23 The Rebeaconing is now live on Steam! Yes, this will erase your existing save. At long last, the Mac version is ready to play! Native Linux is next; we have one major bug related to save/restore that needs fixing first. XO runs well under Steam Proton for Linux.

CHANGELOG:

Mines and minefields were given a thorough polishing. Multiple mines no longer attack the same target. Recovering minefields now works as designed. Minefields are restricted to the playfield, and a mine-equipped ship no longer fires minefields in self defense. You can now lay a minefield while paused. Range and minefield size were finalized, although the ore cost is likely to increase. And a few bugs related to saving and restoring minefields were cleaned up. If you can find a Blockader, theyre pretty groovy now! You can no longer rescue or crew transfer ships that have been latched by the Harvesters. You /can/ order an abandon ship, however. Attempting to rescue a ship that later becomes harvested now cancels the rescue action. The mouse pointer is now constrained to the game window. If you have dual/triple monitors let us know if you are still experiencing issues. Scanning abandoned ships now shows the faction crew required in the crew box. I made some abandoned ship events have less abandonment issues. The tanker was given an angry hail for when it is angry. I made quite a lot of adjustments to the end game. Its becoming quite the little challenge. Heru added a couple of tweaks and bug fixes as well, and fixed a long standing bug related to placement of certain items. Those brutally nasty devastators now occur much less frequently and only according to certain conditions towards the end game. They were a little too devastating. Scouts no longer display on the galactic map when in jump. The speed selector width was increased. Missions now should no longer push you back the way you came, but ever foward. The feedback form was improved: you can now use the enter key, word wrap is enabled, and a thank you message (or an oopsie message) is delivered on success. Text is now erased (but not the email address) on a successful send. Well add a tab key for switching fields in v1.24.

BUGS:

We really hope we solved the aksoundengine.dll bug. We solved an issue with the Mac version that was wacking out the starmap and galacting map. I fixed The Forsaken. Best not to ask. Theyre forsaken. A bug related to end game tags was corrected. A bug related to Rover ships will hopefully no longer occur. The death jingle now gives way to main menu music instead of whatever was previously playing. Music and sound effects now default to 50%. Starmap music now only plays when you are paused in starmap and not jumping, giving an audible clue that the game is or is not paused. Conditions were expanded to flesh out a number of events that had a certain flow. A minor bug with disabled trade ships was fixed. The scout lost warning text was adjusted to make it clearer. Ships with mining lasers that are disabled under shield now display the correct tooltip and hover text. Game over now resets music to the ambient state. Mellow. An issue with the arrow keys conflicting with the mouse pointer was caught and grilled before release. The rendezvous beacon in the starmap now displays more or less when it should. Quite a number of other minor errors were cleaned up.

Known issues:

There's an issue related to scouting that makes it impossible to use the starmap. If this happens, save and exit, the game should be playable on restore. We will have this fixed soon. If youre having trouble clicking, try unplugging controllers, rudder pedals, joysticks and the like. This is a temporary workaround.

[ 2019-11-16 22:38:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

XO's latest update is now live on Steam. Turn the music back on, play with game speed and tell us what you think!

CHANGELOG:

You can now speed up and slow down the game with a handy speed slider. Try combat at half-speed! Yes, we will be hotkeying this and other actions soon. We now have interactive music as designed! Music that had no business in the start of the game no longer appears, hooray. The death jingle now plays, and starmap and main menu music play. In the starmap, a beacon now appears showing the direction of the rendezvous when you hover your current location. Theres a known bug that only shows the beacon while Harvesters are present which will be fixed in 1.23. Arrow keys and enter now work for most actions. Well continue to add keyboard functionality into the game. Shields now fully and properly block lasers from firing if the firing ship is under them. Ships that are blocked now display a message in their hover state. Attack is greyed out when this is occuring, and a mouse tooltip appears explaining why. I experimented with a Harvester delay mechanic: if you jump before the Harvesters show up, you gain one additional full day of Harvester-free time. It works, but I need to weigh whether or not it adds or detracts from the game. Let me know what you think! Ships that are attacked but are outside of their own weapon range attempt to get close enough to fire, unless they have a hold fire ROE or are in a players formation. Nukes and mines now show their ore cost to fire. Weapons are now sorted in trade views. Minefields can now be deployed while paused. Minefield spacing and mine range were also adjusted. When ore is zero, fix and repair commands are now greyed out and appear with an appropriate mouse tooltip.

BUGS:

Thanks to some solid bug reports, I fixed dozens of minor issues with events, made some nice tweaks, and expanded out some others. Some timers were fixed or adjusted as well. I discovered that pirate events werent spawning in v1.21 so I fixed that. I also improved some of the logic in those events. The pirates - they are back and worse than ever! There were a wicked couple of bugs that locked a ship into an attack state when it was attacked (or ROE changed to weapons free) (erasing its existing order), and Heru nuked those. We believe we took care of a sound-related bug and aksoundengine.dll errors. Relationship changes as a result of event choices now show earlier, giving better feedback through the color change in faction captains. The maroon command now works as designed, helping to make it clear that you can put the wrong faction aboard some ships, but theyll be left behind if you do. Several cases related to crew transfers were cleaned up and tooltipped to make it very clear what can and cannot be done in a given context. When jumping while paused, seized ships now stay with the seizing ship instead of appearing randomly on the tactical playfield. Scouting with a formation leader no longer throws an error. When we erase an old save game we show a message. We also cleaned up the game reset when that happened. A couple of fresh nasty bugs were caught before deployment.

Known issues:

The starmap rendezvous beacon does not display unless the Harvesters are present at your current destination. If youre having trouble clicking, try unplugging controllers, rudder pedals, joysticks and the like. This is a temporary workaround.

[ 2019-11-09 21:38:59 CET ] [ Original post ]

Version 1.21 How many gigawatts does it take to fix a fixer is now live on Steam! This will erase your existing save. If XO confused you, try the tutorial again. It has been worked, reworked, expanded and polished.

CHANGELOG:

A new advanced start option that eliminates all tips was added. The intermediate start that skips the tutorial but still presents tips as the game unfolds remains. Fuel use for weapons now says efficiency making it clearer that more pips = better. All harvested planet types now show up much clearer in the starmap. A new command maroon was added. This helps reinforce when attempting to crew abandoned ships with a non-compatible crew, and suggests a rather Machiavellian strategy for averting an upcoming water riot. Some tweaks were made to ensure this works properly. You can no longer issue a crew command from the battleship on an abandoned ship unless you have passengers and a tooltip is shown if this is tried. On all other ships this is possible to allow for swaps. Im actively testing the end game, although it is still not turned on in 1.21, saving/restoring also now works. It is currently both way too hard and way too easy, so more work will be needed before it is ready for testing. A couple of minor functional pieces are being added to end game as well. Mac and Linux versions are looking promising. Well release Mac first, possibly as soon as a week or two, and then Linux.

BUGS:

Turns out trade and repair events were not spawning correctly (huge oopsie), they are now. We added several new event conditions to support the tutorial, and these had to be tested and debugged. It should now be running smoothly and as expected. A bug was fixed where a battleship in formation under repairs would cause other ships in the formation to behave strangely after emerging from jump. You can now properly attack a reaper with the mining laser. Fixers can now fix in all conditions where they should be able to fix. The icons for transmogrify now show correctly. Hovering a ship during a water riot no longer displays an upside down portrait of a character. I added additional lore to explain other game functions and rules. More to come. A lot of polish was done with the events, catching loopholes and correcting minor issues. I also cleaned up some tags with missing text. A few variations of a hard crash bug were hopefully once and for all eliminated. A dialog bug with some Harvester intro events was dispatched. A time-related bug that was cropping up from time to time was summarily dispatched. Several automatically submitted bugs were confirmed and removed, including an annoying non-issue that will now stop flooding our bug reporting system.

Known issues:

If youre having trouble clicking, try unplugging controllers, rudder pedals, joysticks and the like. This is a temporary workaround. We think Windows 7 users might have a problem running the game. Do you run Windows 7? Let us know!

[ 2019-11-02 00:10:23 CET ] [ Original post ]