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 ]