Avorion :: Patch 0.16.5 Combat Update I

Patch 0.16.5 Combat Update I - Patchnotes

Mar 26, 2018 @ 7:12am - Koonschi

These are the full patchnotes for the combat update, since the last major update on the default branch. These include all changes from the beta branch, although we didn't list changes that only affected the beta branch, such as fixes for bugs that were introduced to the beta branch or balancing that happened on the beta branch.

The update will hit the default branch in the next few hours, we're going to make an announcement once it's live!

Gameplay

"You can now switch to a sector with a ship/station of yours in it! Your current ship will stay where it is. Use this feature to easily command remote stations and ships without having to go all the way back. Random dialogs popping up were quite the nuisance, we've improved this behavoir and added a hailing system where players can decide to answer calls or just reject them - with consequences though."

Added a "Switch to Sector" command that lets a player switch to several sectors on the map

Players can now switch sectors to their own ships, alliance ships and *online* group members
The current ship stays where it is, only the player moves

Increased refresh rate (and thus accuracy) of turrets
Added a "Defensive" mode for independent targeting turrets

Turrets in "Defensive" mode prefer torpedoes and fighters over other ships

Added a Search and Rescue mission event
Added a bulletin board mission to explore a sector
Added an upgrade that increases pickup range of loot
Stations now have upgrade slots
Ships of disbanded alliances can now be claimed by everybody
Turret and system upgrade loot now only despawn when there is no player in the sector
Fighters whose mothership got destroyed can now be commanded by all ships of the same faction
Implemented passing of time for resource depots when they are loaded from disk
Implemented passing of time for shipyards when they are loaded from disk
Improved combat AI of ships so they can use PDCs and Anti-Fighter turrets correctly
Added a hailing system where players can decide to accept a dialog or not
Adventurer hails instead of popping up a dialog
Anti-Smuggle ships start hailing before popping up a dialog
Added basics for usable items

Usable, scripted items are now possible
Usable items can be used with Double-Click or Right-Click

Added a new usable item: Energy Signature Suppressor

Energy Signature Suppressors can be used to shield a sector's energy signatures
Sectors which's energy signatures are shielded won't be attacked by persecutors
Suppressors are active for 10 hours of playtime
Suppressors can be bought at NEWLY GENERATED Equipment Docks

Point Defense Chaingun/Laser (PDC/PDL)

"Good defense against fighters, very good defense against torpedoes. You're going to want some of these when getting closer to the core!"

Added Point Defense Chainguns as a new weapon
Extremely fast turning speed
Very high fire rate
Non-scaling damage with tech level
Medium range
Always independent targeting
Added Point Defense Lasers

Point Defense Lasers behave similar to Point Defense Chainguns but are more accurate
Point Defense Lasers only turn up closer to the galaxy core

Anti-Fighter Cannon (AFC)

"Specialized to fighters, especially in close-range combat."

Added Anti-Fighter Cannons as a new weapon
Very fast turning speed
Shoots projectiles that explode near the target and deal AOE damage
Lower reach than normal weapons
Deals fragment damage that's more effective vs. fighters and torpedoes
Always independent targeting

Torpedoes

"This is just the general gist of torpedoes, there's tons of changes to internals, mechanics, lots and lots of new UI etc., but we'll do you a favor and only list the most important things here."

Added Torpedoes
Torpedoes are always-seeking one-shot weapons that deal massive damage
Torpedoes must be bought at an Equipment Dock (looting them is planned)
Torpedoes are made up of a body and warhead

Torpedo body determines flight properties
Torpedo warhead determines damage, shield penetration and the like

Added a torpedo launcher block that launches torpedoes
Added a torpedo storage block for storing torpedoes
Each torpedo launcher block adds a new torpedo shaft to your ship
Torpedo shafts can be filled with torpedoes and assigned to hotkeys similar to turrets

Material of torpedo shafts determines how many torpedoes it can hold
Torpedo shafts have to be assigned to a weapon group in order to work!

If a torpedo barely misses its target, it will still explode and deal half damage

Turret Scaling

"Turrets now scale in size and slots, gaining more power and reach with every slot they use up. We've got a few special plans for more high-tier weaponry that will take up 5 slots and more. Stay tuned!"

Turrets increase in size, firepower, reach and slots, while firepower and reach scale with amount of slots

2 slot turret: 2x damage, 115% reach
3 slot turret: 3x damage, 130% reach
4 slot turret: 4x damage, 145% reach
etc.

Maximum scaling depends on the kind of turret (example: PDCs never scale)
Turret rotation speed decreases with size
Turrets can now use up more than one slot

Enemy Specialization

"In order to spice up combat, we've added specialized enemies that will be very strong in their specific area, for example destroying your shields or fighting from long range."

Enemies are now more specialized and some will carry torpedoes

Defender (untouched): Stronger ship that spawns in normal sectors, to defend it
Carrier: Carries fighter squads, anti-fighter weaponry
Military Ship (untouched): Default ship with armed turrets
Torpedo Boat: Attack ship that carries normal torpedoes
Disruptor: Shield breaking or penetrating ship, can carry torpedoes
CIWS: Anti-Fighter, Anti-Torpedo weaponry
Persecutor: Strong attack ship with advanced torpedoes
Flagship: High HP, carries fighters, anti-fighter weaponry and strong weapons and torpedoes
Artillery Ship: Long range weapons and torpedoes

Added icons for specialization of enemies
Added icons for military ships and civil ships
Pirates have ship classes as well now

Weapon Specialization

"We've revamped the strengths and weaknesses of many weapons so they're more specialized. We won't go into super-deep details, but here's the general overview of how we rebalanced them. Some remain mostly untouched, while others have undergone bigger changes."

Kinetic Weapons' main purpose is to do damage to hull

Ranges from low to high: Chaingun, Bolter, Railgun
General behavior of these remains unchanged

Disruptor Weapons' main purpose is to deal massive damage to shields

Ranges from low to high: Tesla, Plasma, Lightning
Range of Tesla Weapons has been increased
Range of Lightning guns has been massively increased and their accurancy improved

Artillery Weapons do mixed damage from very high range

Ranges from low to high: Cannon, Rocket Launcher
General behavior of these remains unchanged

Defensive Weapons are meant for defense against torpedoes and fighters

Anti-Fighter Cannon (see above)
Point Defense Chaingun (see above)

Special Weapons:

Laser: Mid Range, 100% accuracy
Pulse Cannon: Mid Range, shield penetration
The general behavior of these remains unchanged

Short ranged weapons have rather low damage and accuracy, but a high turning speed can fire for a long time
Mid ranged weapons have average damage, medium turning speed and can fire for some time
Long ranged weapons have high damage, slow turning speed and rate of fire and overheat more quickly
Civil weapons, such as mining lasers, salvaging lasers and force guns remain unchanged

Further Balancing

"We've added some more changes to make it more difficult (not impossible!) to fly to the center without proper equipment or ships."

Turrets can no longer be built on holo blocks
Headhunters now spawn as persecutors with torpedoes
More pirates and more different pirates are being spawned now
Added persecutors that hunt players down when they go too deep into the galaxy without proper ships or weapons

Persecutors are disabled for Beginner difficulty

Reduced price of reconstruction site setting by 50%
Reduced artificial jump calculation time by 50%

Note: Jump calculation time masks sector generation time - So it's very possible that on busy servers your calculation time may still be high.

Server

Stopped AvorionServer from creating ~/.avorion and querying pwuid when --datapath is specified
Added a --hostgalaxy cmd line option similar to --startgalaxy, but that hosts a LAN game
Chat messages that are sent with the /say command (and others) have their own message type and stand out more
Added a config option to enable invincibility for player ships when players log out

This is only enabled for a ship when the player has been logged out for at least 30 seconds and the ship wasn't damaged in the last 30 seconds

Added a /difficulty command to change the difficulty of the server

Client & UI

Added a builk assign/unassign/dismiss UI for crews
Improved layout of trade invite window
Increased amount of time radar blips are visible on the map
Gate and wormhole lines to undiscovered sectors are faded out
Reduced maximum intensity of bloom
New inventory items are set to non-recent on mouseover, not click
Improved hit feedback (damage numbers)
Hit feedback displays dodges of fighters as well
Added dps, shots until overheating weapons for overheating weapons to tooltips
Added block penetration of railguns to tooltips
Added description for no shield damage to tooltips
Improved overview of crew salary in ship tabs

Salary is displayed by default
Salary is yellow when due

Added a "Press T to Enter" text when approaching a ship that can be flown
Added scrolling for ComboBox
Added numbers to different corner blocks to tell them apart by name
Increased visibility of turret overheating displayer
Added icons for home sector and reconstruction site
Added multi-key (Ctrl-F, etc.) key assignments
Improved layout of controll settings window
Added hotkeys for fighter commands
Turrets no longer lose their favorite or trash marker when built onto a ship
Added a combo box for the ingame game menu to change difficulty

Only in singleplayer or when you have the correct permissions on the server

Added borders to dropdown menus of UIComboBox
Added a pause key
Added a warning window for applying ship plans with large block counts
Added context menus for right-click on inventory items

Mailing items can be done with RMB now
Destroying items can be done with RMB now

Misc

Improved logging when a crash happens
Improved description clarity of "All Turrets" turret upgrade
Added community localization for Turkish

Thanks Corviuse for your hard work on the translation!

Added more debug logging output

Threads print out what they were last doing on crash and where (sector)
Threads print out when they're started and stopped

Chat window now prints messages to the console

Scripting API

"We're taking the first steps towards a more modular modding API and dynamic mod loading."

Improved and added missing documentation of several callbacks
Added getCurrentLanguage() function to client API
Added a new ServerInformation chat message type
Added torpedoes to API
Implemented init.lua scripts for player, entity and sector
Removed sector.lua script and moved its contents to init.lua scripts
Fixed addScriptOnce() function so it works when scripts aren't initialized yet
Implemented a script callback "onEntityJump" for when entities jump
Added a "transferEntity" function to Galaxy to easily move entities between sectors
GameSettings class is now available on both client and server
Difficulty enum is now available on both client and server
Added script callbacks for torpedo launcher events
A new script template type for usable items was introduced

Bugfixes

"As usual, user bug reports are marked with [UBR]. Thank you everybody for reporting and keep it up!"

[UBR] Fixed an issue in whisp command for names with spaces
[UBR] Fixed several issues with hangar visuals
[UBR] Fixed an issue where the player didn't stay seated when transforming a ship to a station
[UBR] Fixed an issue where entities that don't belong to the player could be selected by dragging a rect in strategy mode
Fixed an issue where entities with faction index 0 were checked in the targeter for strategy mode selection
Fixed swapped line in screenshots
[UBR] Fixed several issues with spelling and typos
[UBR] Fixed an issue where wormholes to non-passable sectors could be created
[UBR] Fixed an issue where energy system would load battery with too high speeds
[UBR] Fixed an issue where the sun could shine through planets
[UBR] Fixed an issue where keybindings for mirroring were not taken from the config
[UBR] Fixed an issue where clicking a fighter in a squad would change the order of the squad
[UBR] Fixed an issue where buttons of hint windows could be placed outside the game window
[UBR] Fixed an issue where energy weapons fired even when disabled in energy tab
[UBR] Fixed an issue where UI of station docks wasn't rendered when in huge ships
[UBR] Fixed an exploit that allowed players to build negative-space ships leading to all kinds of glitches
[UBR] Fixed an exploit that allowed players to fly holo-only ships that were impossible to hit
[UBR] Fixed an issue where the hyperdrive was recharging while waiting in loading screen
[UBR] Fixed an issue that lead to one-way gates from start sector
[UBR] Fixed an issue where the turret factory ui showed stolen goods
Fixed an issue where the building stats UI started off at the wrong position
[UBR] Fixed an issue that lead fighters without motherships to attack gates
[UBR] Fixed an issue where beams of rotation locked turrets weren't rendered correctly
[UBR] Fixed an issue where launched fighters weren't transferred to the alliance with their mothership
[UBR] Fixed an issue where action music wasn't triggered for players in alliance ships
[UBR] Fixed an issue where turrets could be placed on hangar openings
[UBR] Fixed an issue that could lead to a crash when deleting official servers in "Join via IP"
[UBR] Fixed an issue when building two ships with the same name in a shipyard
[UBR] Fixed an issue where players in alliance ships didn't get some achievements
[UBR] Fixed an issue where player-owned stations could be exploited
[UBR] Fixed an issue where players and alliances could exploit stations
Fixed an issue where pulse conservation wasn't considered correctly when building
[UBR] Fixed an issue where salvaging and mining orders wouldn't remain over a server restart
[UBR] Fixed an issue where ingredients would get reset in turret factory after building a turret
[UBR] Fixed a rare crash when an object was moving and changing its bounding sphere (we've been looking for this one for a while, thanks to the Rusty Server Crew for helping us!)
[UBR] Fixed non-existing ship styles at alliance shipyards

Note: This only affects new alliances

[UBR] Fixed an issue that caused one-way gates
[UBR] Fixed an issue where the order of stations in the station founder gui wasn't stable
Fixed several client-sided crashes
[UBR] Fixed an issue where wreckages in a stationwreckage sector had an active deletion timer
[UBR] Fixed an issue where bonus stats in a turret factory would change when transferring it to the alliance
[UBR] Fixed a crash when resolving intersections between entities
[UBR] Fixed an issue that led to hangars and torpedo launchers not being restored after server crashes
[UBR] Fixed an issue that led to crashes when deleting a selection of blocks while mirroring is enabled

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