Demo v0.14.3 patch notes - 9/19/2023

[courtney]

Reality Break Demo build v0.14.3 has gone live!

Courtney's dev notes: This build's primary focus was a lot of behind the scenes work to improve initial startup time. Depending on whether you're doing a cold start or otherwise, startup time has decreased by 2 to 5 seconds. Please let me know if you see any strange behavior during startup. The other focus of this build was fixing lots of bugs that were impeding enjoyment of the game for groups of players, particularly with some of the Epic item abilities.

Performance

• Substantially improved game startup time, including threaded initialization of the gameplay database as well as amortizing preallocation of objects for the pooling system over multiple updates.

Quality of Life

• Made player ship collider flatter in the Y-axis so that it's far less likely to run into debris that is close to the plane of gameplay.
  
• Made rewritten items sell for bonus credits to stations and other traders.
  
• The Scrap flag is now cleared on ejected and equipped items.

Balance

• Dormant Warships are now more challenging: their missiles fire outward from their pods, and gain a brief buff to their homing rate shortly after launching.

Gameplay

• Implemented Colossus Quantumheart's unique affix as energy gained when Health is damaged. (Courtney's note: this affix wasn't working because it had never been implemented, whoops!)

Bug fixes

• fixed Fate Core taking too long to Analyze due to a regression
  
• fixed Into the Vortex tutorials showing up erroneously before it's possible to do so during Cycle 2
  
• fixed Insane in the Mainframe expert goal not showing up
  
• fixed currency dropping in the Chaos Vortex
  
• changed Damage Output calculation so that it no longer averages weapons or drones together, but instead stacks them (Courtney's note: this is used for the Overall Damage Output calculation in the Ship dialog as well as for the Equip Compare delta indicators)
  
• fixed a bug with rewriting item Affix Types that could cause certain values to change when actually applied to the item because they were being unnecessarily recalculated, and without certain bonuses they warranted (Courtney's note: e.g., +2 Twinbolt rewrite becoming a +1 Twinbolt on the item)
  
• fixed Negatron Collider item's unique affix not working
  
• fixed item Drawbacks that were rewritten not working if the item had multiple functions (Courtney's note: e.g., Epic Turbolaser Oncoming Storm has both "fire turbolaser" and "apply drawback" functionality)
  
• fixed certain item rewrite paths generating blank rewrite entries without a proper icon or stat name
  
• reduced intensity of Area Scan blip for Credits
  
• changed ship engine thrust to contribute to movement speed logarithmically rather than linearly, fixing out-of-control-even-if-hilarious movement
  
• clarified display string for Cheaper Fate Core Rewrites talent
  
• fixed Fate Core showing Dissolve instruction
  
• fixed all pilots in the Profiles dialog showing the pilot image variant for the most recently created pilot
  
• fixed equipped items with Discovered affixes not lighting up the Discovery UI indicator on their item frame
  
• fixed input help string for scanning the Conduit showing {0} instead of Conduit (Courtney's note: Conduit.)
  
• fixed "rewrite in progress" fx using scaled time
  
• fixed Multishot description to be less confusing when it interacts with other sources of projectile split, such as Twinbolt
  
• fixed loot generation fallback items not having correct subtype (Courtney's note: this fixes the Strontium Repeater Artifact Laser sometimes rolling as a Secondary weapon. I'm happy to see players hacking my demo to get access to some of this stuff, haha)