1.3 Beta 1

New releases and announcements from George and the staff.
NIGHTHAWK620
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I was wondering what happen to Jenna? So far I have not been able to have her join me. Is she still in the game.
NH620
NIGHTHAWK620
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george moromisato wrote:
NIGHTHAWK620 wrote:I got a warning from McAfee stating that the program has an annoying something or other malware which had the yellow color code and downloaded anyway. It may not be seeing or knows the program. Their may be something in the program that it doesn't recognize, this also happens with another program I use but McAfee sees it as a possible virus or red code.
Could you send or post the screenshot of the warning? I'd like to see it. Thanks!
I will try. That has always been hard for me to do. Win 8.1 on Dell Laptop Inspiron 17/17R .
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Aury
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Jenna was never removed afaik - I believe that you need to visit the militia bar at the correct rank, otherwise you may miss her entirely
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Wolfy wrote:Jenna was never removed afaik - I believe that you need to visit the militia bar at the correct rank, otherwise you may miss her entirely
This be true. I find her in every game.
[spoiler=]And you may need to do repeated bar sessions before she will appear. Sometimes it takes several tries to get her. And make sure to not get promoted to Major before encountering her, else you may never get her.[/spoiler]
NIGHTHAWK620
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Thanks Wolfy and FAD guess I was moving too fast and missed her. Will try to get her in another game.
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 More or less random 1.3-related comment: The more I see the turning thrusters, the less I like them. I thought I would get used to them, but I really just haven’t. I keep thinking something’s wrong with my ship every time I turn when I first fire up the game (and it’s even worse after having been using mod ships that don’t have them), and they’re distracting in heavy fire fights (particularly if my shields are down).
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Atarlost
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I would hope turning thrusters aren't completely removed. I have one ship that has visible thruster clusters to link them to, but for the most part I'm not using them.
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NIGHTHAWK620
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I have three different games being played. All three have crashed. Have sent debug & game saved files. Will try to set up more game with different combinations of adventures & ships. Will send results as they crash. The crash seem to happen when I gate between Point Juno - St. Kat. back and forth selling, buying, and storing stuff. Well back to the task.
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I like many of the changes. Being able to use the whole screen is very nice. The thrusters and projectile trails look good, although some low level NAMI missiles have much thicker trails than other similar weapons. Turning jets were distracting at first, but I got used to them quickly. I'm not sure how I feel about the new thermo cannon graphic. I guess it's more realistic, but it looks more like a kinetic weapon.

In general I like the new maneuvering calculations. The Wolfen doesn't suddenly go from speedboat to oil tanker when you load it past a certain point. But I feel like it's harder to turn exactly one facing. (Oh, that's because you doubled its turn speed.) If you don't hold the key long enough, you won't turn at all and it only takes a tiny bit longer to turn multiple facings. Maybe a quick tap could turn a minimum of one facing? (But disable turning for the amount of time that would take so you can't hammer it to turn faster than normal.) Alternately, have you considered tracking ships' angles with more precision, so thrust and forward weapons can go in any direction, but just displaying the closest facing? That would be a big change to combat strategy in some cases and make long range aiming harder, but howitzers are a bit OP, so maybe that's not bad.

I agree the map should be reverted. The 3D makes it harder to judge distances and angles accurately and causes a distracting flickering all over since individual pixels jump as the perspective shifts. And there's no reason for the gridlines to end, especially short of the outer orbitals. Some features that might be nice would be: closer and farther out zoom levels, ability to pan away from your ship (and reset to center), and an indicator of the direction to the center of the system when you're far away.

The new health bars are nifty, but the scaling is somewhat misleading. If I'm not mistaken, the first half of the bar shows the health of the lowest armor segment and the second half shows compartment health. With many weapons, that means they drop to half almost instantly, then go down extremely slowly. It might be more accurate to only use compartment health (unless other changes are made) or have multiple (possibly overlapping) bars like the Mass Effect series.

This also points to a balance issue with compartments. I suspect they have damage reduction based on the WMD rating of the weapon, similar to stations. I don't necessarily object to large enemies being tougher than they used to be, but I think this makes them too dependent on what weapon is being used. For instance, it tends to make howitzers even more advantageous than they already were. And it seem illogical for the armor to be the softest part of the ship. I think it would be better to give them tougher armor and/or more compartment health, but less or no damage reduction.

I had escorts drift off a few times on my last playthrough. I think it can happen when they're hit by a weapon with impact while ordered to wait.

I made significant use of MAGs for the first time. They're not bad, but the 800F and ZG24 seem only marginally better than the lower level ones, not nearly as good as the stats suggest.
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Atarlost
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NMS wrote:I like many of the changes. Being able to use the whole screen is very nice.
I don't like it. It puts the VDU tracking dots too far from the center and at some angles behind the HUD. Maybe move them to the same circle as the mission arrows or another circle just outside them.
NMS wrote:In general I like the new maneuvering calculations. The Wolfen doesn't suddenly go from speedboat to oil tanker when you load it past a certain point. But I feel like it's harder to turn exactly one facing. (Oh, that's because you doubled its turn speed.) If you don't hold the key long enough, you won't turn at all and it only takes a tiny bit longer to turn multiple facings. Maybe a quick tap could turn a minimum of one facing? (But disable turning for the amount of time that would take so you can't hammer it to turn faster than normal.)
Yes, Please do this fix, George.
NMS wrote:Alternately, have you considered tracking ships' angles with more precision, so thrust and forward weapons can go in any direction, but just displaying the closest facing? That would be a big change to combat strategy in some cases and make long range aiming harder, but howitzers are a bit OP, so maybe that's not bad.
This would make long range aiming even harder.
NMS wrote:The new health bars are nifty, but the scaling is somewhat misleading. If I'm not mistaken, the first half of the bar shows the health of the lowest armor segment and the second half shows compartment health. With many weapons, that means they drop to half almost instantly, then go down extremely slowly. It might be more accurate to only use compartment health (unless other changes are made) or have multiple (possibly overlapping) bars like the Mass Effect series.

This also points to a balance issue with compartments. I suspect they have damage reduction based on the WMD rating of the weapon, similar to stations. I don't necessarily object to large enemies being tougher than they used to be, but I think this makes them too dependent on what weapon is being used. For instance, it tends to make howitzers even more advantageous than they already were. And it seem illogical for the armor to be the softest part of the ship. I think it would be better to give them tougher armor and/or more compartment health, but less or no damage reduction.
Agreed. If internal structure has neither resistance nor WMD requirement it has several beneficial effects. First, it makes autons less terrible in that they can kill a ship once the player cracks the armor with a real weapon. Second, it creates a niche for finishing weapons that do lots of low type damage if the internal structure values are sufficiently large. Currently there are a number of otherwise useless weapons that could fill that niche: the KM500 and 550 for certain since area fragments tend to not work properly against capital ships.
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NMS wrote:I feel like it's harder to turn exactly one facing. … If you don't hold the key long enough, you won't turn at all and it only takes a tiny bit longer to turn multiple facings.
 I’ve run into this quite a bit, myself. I’ve seen a few calls to map “H” and “;” to turn one facing in the past, and while it’s not a bad fix idea, I can see it being abused fairly easily. On the other hand, maybe mapping them to turn at, say, half the normal speed might alleviate some of the abuse issues but still make more precision maneuvering possible.
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Code: Select all

<Effects>
    <Effect type="rotateRight" posAngle="72" posRadius="16" posZ="5" rotation="80" effect="&efIonBeamDefault;"/>
</Effects>
I would expect the above thruster effect to fire when I rotate the ship to the right. But, it fires when I rotate the ship, no matter the direction.

Is this intentional? or is this a bug?

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Atarlost
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It fires the opposite turning thruster when you stop turning.
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pixelfck
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Atarlost wrote:It fires the opposite turning thruster when you stop turning.
:oops: Ok, now I see it. I should stop tapping the ship around.
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Amariithynar
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Hot damn, 1.3 finally got released? Welp, looks like I'm loading up this gem of a game once again.
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