Hey there pilots, it’s time for the first beta roundup of 2018!
This month brings quite a few new changes; loads of visual tweaks, campaign updates and the beginning of the game’s final set of tracks.
64-bit
0.9.3 is going to be the first version of the game to be a 64-bit build! If you're still running a 32-bit copy of Windows you'll continue to get 32-bit builds. The 64-bit version now has the advantage of being able to load in and handle a lot more mods!
Hydrome Bed
Hydrome Bed, the first of two expert tracks, has just released on the beta branch! This new underwater track pushes your piloting skills to their max, demanding a good racing line through tight corner series and expert use of the airbrakes on the tracks two U-Turns.
Arrivon Peak
Arrivon Peak, the second expert track, is currently in development and will be releasing in the coming weeks! This track is ruthless, demanding perfect airbrake timing with the need to full brake to make it around quite a few of its corners. This track is also playing around with offroad paths which allow you to bypass the full brake corners for a slower lap time.
Here's the progress so far
Track Updates
Harpstone and Marina Rush have had updates, Harpstone being a major environment overhaul and Marina Rush being some small changes to fix scenery holes, lighting and add other small details. You can see both of them here:
Animated Airbrakes
The game now has animated airbrakes! A feature that has been requested for a very long time has finally been implemented. This is currently only for the vanilla ships, animated airbrakes for custom ships will be coming in the future.
Eliminator 2.0
Eliminator has received a fundamental update. The mode is no longer about being the last survivor but racking up points and reaching the target score first. The AI have also received a behavioural overhaul for this mode, making sure to stay near you so the action never goes away.
Campaign
The campaign has had a large update to reduce the number of events drastically, add more challenge to the time trials and add more variety. Each campaign series now only has 10 events total and Corrosion, Carbon, Asphalt and Hunted have been removed to help cut back the grind. Your campaign progress will be left as is, you might find you’ve suddenly completed events that you hadn’t before but it was important to make sure you don’t have to redo the entire campaign again if you’ve already been playing through it.
Ship Liveries
All ship liveries are now in the game and ready to be unlocked through the campaign! Each team now has an alt livery, neon livery and clean livery. The alt liveries design differ from ship to ship, some ships using updated versions of old liveries and some ships having brand new ones.
Survival Ship
Once you have reached Rank 50 the survival ship (or Barracuda Type S) will be available to you in normal play! Because it’s an even higher class Barracuda the ship activates cheat mode so you can’t save times, however if you’re looking for some challenge then this ship will be a good choice for you.
Unity Tools
The Unity Tools has been seeing some more love too with improved track editor performance, better UI organisation and more components such as material and spline animators to help add more life to your tracks!
When is 0.9.3 coming?
There's no release date for 0.9.3 yet, but it's getting closer fast! The focus is now on precision and expert tracks - two new categories of track which are built to challenge your skills as a pilot.
0.9.2.1
Got a small update for today. This just addreses some minor issues present in the release yesterday, primarily the layout creator locking up when entering playmode and some improvements to how the game handles any issues when loading UGC.
Changelog:
* Improved handling of errors in UGC loading, you should now always make it past the UGC loading screen
* Fixed layout creator locking up after calculating lighting
* Fixed G-Teks time trial event on the Urban campaign being 29 minutes long in hard mode
* Fixed NX2000 unlocking at rank 16 instead of rank 12
0.9.2 is now out!
Hey everyone! BallisticNG 0.9.2 is now available and features many new things. This update is quite a big one and it's been fun working on it, there's been a bit of everything from basic tweaks to new tracks and a whole load of interface improvements. Below is all of the most important changes, if you want to see what's coming next then check the bottom of this announcement!
Note to track creators: see bottom of the changelog for Unity Tools update
Important stuff first
The crash on exit has been fixed, it's only a workaround for the time being as we're still waiting for the cause of the issue to be fixed on Unity's end but you no longer have to fear clicking the quit button.
Barracuda now has separate leaderboards from the rest of the teams. This has resulted in the game's final leaderboard reset!
Workshop tracks now have leaderboards
Ships now use the weapon damage multiplier setting. All custom ships had their multiplier value defaulted to zero before this update, so if you've uploaded custom ships to the workshop without changing that value you'll want to update them otherwise their weapons will no longer deal damage.
The game has a new system for managing content so built in and custom content get treated the same. The old way of managing ship categories has been deprecated and categories for both ships and tracks are built automatically from the MyShip and MyTrack folder hierarchies - anything sitting in the root of these folders will be moved into an uncategorised folder.
Custom track caching has had an overhaul, there might still be a few kinks left though. If you find yourself not being able to get past the loading UGC screen, please upload your output log to pastebin and link it on the bugs forum! To get to your output logs, press Windows Key + R and enter %AppData%\..\LocalLow\Vonsnake\BallisticNG
Splitscreen is currently in a state of needing a bunch of work done. It's functional, but not the optimal experience yet!
The campaign has been rewritten from scratch and is now built out of a lot more events covering more gamemodes with unlocks (most of the unlocks are coming in a future update). This new campaign system has been designed so custom campaigns can also be implemented in the future!
User Interface
The main menu has been redesigned from the ground up to be more user friendly and intuitive. A lot of the same concepts are here, just expanded upon.
The main menu now has a quick race option if you don't care for going through all of the options custom race provides.
Ingame menus now have a select track option which lets you quickly change track and ships (these are still a work in progress)
Options menus have been remade
Added tooltips, keep elements like options highlighted for a brief period for them to pop up
Removed tutorial overlays in favour of tips on the menu and a brief handling tutorial at the start of the campaign
Fixed mouse keeping UI elements highlighted if switching to keyboard/gamepad menu inputs
Gameplay
Tournaments have been re-introduced back into the game
The prototype ships, Barracuda and Caliburn are now locked until you unlock them in the campaign
Added clean liveries
Finished all donator liveries
Rewrote ship roster selection. Roster selection for custom ships is no longer random and added options to disable roster limits for teams like Barracuda.
Updated the handling on most ships. There is still work to be done, but this is a start
Omega Harbour now has thunder like previous iterations of the track
You can now tilt and zoom the photomode camera will a controller, hold the menu special bind and move the right analog stick
Weapons
Ai can now use the energy wall in elite and hardcore
Ai's plasma hits now instakill in elite and hardcore
Ai now become more aggressive with weapons in the harder difficulties
Tremor now inflicts 50% more damage
Rockets pickup now fires three rockets into of two, the outer rockets have a spread
Improved ship hover response to being tremored
Tracks
Remade Ishtar Citadel's scenery to bring it up to level with other tracks in the game
Arrivon XI and Nova Split are now back in the game as official roster tracks, remade from scratch
Updated Omega Harbour's sky, ocean color and added some variation to lit window colors
Added sun flares
Visuals
Brightened up engine effects
Most tracks now have baked building facade glass reflections
Toned back bloom, lens effects and tonemapping
Increased view distance setting cap to 200 units
Corrected Wyvern's illumination map
The 3d medals are now the speed class icons
Other
Added Shiftdelete - Antigraviton to the soundtrack
Added Vonsnake - Zen Zeus (BnG Edit) to the soundtrack
Every ship now has a unique engine sound
Updated many sounds, most notably the plasma and explosions
The game can now read .flac and .ogg files for custom music, if metadata is present then the game will try to load that for the music's display name too
Added Discord Rich Presence support. It defaults to off, you can enable it in the gameplay options.
The SFX channel is now ran through a compressor to save your ears if loads of loud stuff starts happening
Ballistic Unity Tools (reimport package for update)
Important Note: For new features such as custom track descriptions to work, you need to remove your track caches so this information can be baked into the cache files
Added point to point tracks toggle to Scene References. With this enabled the mid laser becomes the finish line
Added ai speed multiplier to Scene References
Added custom track description and display image options to Scene References (for the new track turntable) - make sure your display image has read and write enabled otherwise the game won't be able to read it
Added zone ignore script
Added four new shaders: additive, additive vertex alpha, vertex lit (no clip) and skydome
Added Ballistic Flare (documentation on this and how to setup flare occluders will be coming soon)
Most interfaces have had an overhaul to make the tools more user friendly
Jump zone bounds and rotation offsets are now edited visually in the scene view
Added invert button to tile flag menus
Fixed setup wizard not finding track meshes by default
0.9.3 is going to be introducing the additional content that you can currently unlock throughout the campaign. This includes:
Two sets of ship liveries
Glide and Ballistic64 physic modifiers (you can currently use Ballistic64 by typing it on the menu)
Two expert tracks, these will push your piloting skills to the max
Precision runs, a series of short point to point track challenges which require pinpoint precision to navigate
A first person gallery featuring a history of the game's content iterations
The game's achievements are also going to be redone. Now that the game is in a much more finished state, the achievements can be properly designed around the game as it is now. There's also going to be a menu for managing C# mods. C# modding itself is also going to be getting documentation and examples sorted out soon also.
After 0.9.3 the game is going to be on the home stretch. Public updates will come much more frequently as bugs are fixed and everything is polished up for the big 1.0 release!
Have fun with the update, more is coming soon!
BallisticNG now has a Gamepedia wiki! | Small 0.9.2 progress update
Hey everybody, I recently contacted Curse to get a new BallisticNG wiki setup. We previously had a Wikia wiki but it was proving too slow and tedious to maintain so we're now moving everything over to Gamepedia with a fresh new look.
The wiki is very much in its early days, only a handful of pages currently exist and the backend CSS and templates are still being actively added to and changed. If you want to contribute, feel free to come help out!
The wiki over time is going to feature pages on all of the game's content (including cut and other unused content), project history, in-world technology explanations, guides and all of the game's modding documentation. The end goal is to provide a database of accurate and interesting information about the game!
If you want to get involved with the wiki, be sure to join the game's discord and talk on the #ballistic-wiki channel! - https://discord.gg/0136l5AIRn7eiT70A
0.9.2 progress
To keep everybody updated with progress, 0.9.2's main feature is now in development! This is the new campaign, a much more fleshed out series of 14 main events covering all gamemodes. This makes the new campaign much longer with a more diverse configuration of events possible. This is the last major milestone before release, after which the remainder of pre-1.0 development is going to be about fixing bugs and attending to the smaller details!
More information will be coming soon!
Beta Branch Roundup - October
It’s time for the second beta branch roundup! This month has seen a lot of progress on the new menu as well as the return of Nova Split and Arrivon XI in their final forms. So without further delay, let’s dive into what’s new:
New Menu
The new menu is now fully functional, it lacks a few screens which are to be added in the near future but it’s usable enough that it’s replaced the old menu entirely! All content in the game now has references loaded into memory when the menu starts, it’s extremely quick to load and allows for some useful things such as leaderboard support for workshop tracks. Both ships and tracks are categorized too now, this is now handled automatically based on your UserData folder structure to make it easy to organise your content.
If you were previously a Patreon donator then the new menu now has a ship turntable that allows you to select them properly without the need of the console. This will also be true for the three alt liveries which will be introduced in the coming months.
You can now also change track and ship ingame from the pause menu, the next track option will also be replaced with this in the future.
Here’s some showcases of what everything looks like:
Gameplay Changes
Speed pads are now much more powerful, their trailing boost is the same but the push applied when over them is much stronger. Weapon wise there have been a few bug fixes regarding warnings and ships now fire three rockets, the outer rockets spread making it harder to hit opponents.
The game can now also load .flac and .ogg files for custom music, if metadata is available in the files then the game will try to read them to display as the song name too.
XP is no longer gained in events, it’s being stripped from rewarding small achievements like perfect laps and is instead being used only for getting medals in campaign events. This will tie it into the game’s upcoming progression system where unlocks are tied to campaign completion.
New Content
Nova Split and Arrivon XI have now been added back into the game, remade completely from scratch to bring them up to scratch with the latest improvements to the game’s visual fidelity and art direction. These two tracks are now also being fully implemented into the campaign as standard tracks, bringing the standard track roster up to 12.
There have also been some visual updates overhaul. Bloom, lens effects and tonemapping setups have been altered for every track to make their effects more subtle. With this is also sun flares, these flares are subtle additions to add some extra eye candy.
And the new sun flares in action
Thanks for reading and hopefully you enjoy the updates! If you want to join the beta branch to see all of the new stuff in action you can do so by right clicking the game in your steam library, going to properties, the beta tab, select beta from the dropdown and then clicking close. The game should then update automatically, if it doesn’t then restart Steam and it will.
Beta Branch Roundup - September
Hey everyone!
This is a new format of announcement I'm starting where at the start of each month the changes to the game's beta branch will be summarised for the previous month. So to start this off, here's the summary for September!
Also, if you want to keep track of beta branch updates there's a new thread I've been keeping updated which you can find here - http://steamcommunity.com/app/473770/discussions/5/1495615865217094819/
Point to point tracks
Point to point tracks have been implemented, internally this feature is going to be used for short objective based tutorial tracks coming in the final campaign but these are also available in the Ballistic Unity Tools, mentioned below.
Photomode Controls
You can now tilt and zoom the camera in photomode using a controller, hold down the menu special bind and use the right analog stick to adjust both of these settings.
Sounds and Music
The wall scrape sound has been updated to give more of an impression of metal scraping. Shiftdelete, one of the game's contributing composers, has sent over his new song Antigraviton to be used ingame. This new song is used both in-game and as a menu song.
Have a listen over on Shiftdelete's soundcloud - https://soundcloud.com/shiftdelete/antigraviton
In-game changes
The firepower stat has now been implemented, the default ingame teams are currently still using the default value of 1 but any custom ships will not have their firepower stat applied.
The donator liveries have also been finished and will be ofically available when the new menu goes live! Wyvern's illumination map was also fixed, it hadn't been updated to the MkII model's texture map.
Menus
A UI tooltip system has now been implemented, this is currently only active on the new menu but will be rolled out across all interfaces over time.
Speaking of the new menu, the new menu now has some basic screens setup! You can now check out the new options menu from it and access the custom race screen, there is also a brand new quick race screen which will discussed at a later date.
Ballistic Unity Tools
If you're working on custom tracks, make sure you reimport the unity package for the following updates:
Added point to point scene toggle to scene references script - the middle checkpoint laser becomes the end of the track when this is enabled
Added Survival Ignore script - attach this to any objects you want survival mode to ignore when updating meshes and materials
Added three new shaders
Additive - additive transparency with no lighting, usful for effects like light shafts
Additive Vertex Alpha - ditto, but vertex colors are applied (vertex alpha is used to affect transparency)
Vertex Lit (No Clip) - same as VertexLit but isn't distance clipped
BallisticNG has now transitioned to paid - 0.9.1 is now out!
BallisticNG has now transitioned to paid, thank you to everybody for the support! If you are expecting key(s), they are being obtained as this announcement goes out and we are aiming to have them sent to you in the next 48 hours. If you do not get your key(s) by the 24th, hop onto the discord server and tag @developer and we'll be happy to help you out. If you currently own the game in its free state, you will continue to own it and receive updates until you uninstall the game.
The past two weeks have been busy and the game has seen a number of interface changes as the game’s development starts shifting into providing a better user interface. With the first post 0.9 update released, we are now going to be working on the new main menu. If you want to get involved and provide feedback on the development on the new menu, be sure to jump on the below mentioned beta branch and join our Discord server to discuss it!
Donator Liveries
While those receiving donator livery keys will be able to activate the key when they recieve it, the liveries are still in development (we have a couple of ships done already) and will only be officially available when the new menu is done. In the meantime you can use a console command to access them for the teams that already have them setup. Press Ctrl + Backspace and enter setliverydata 0 1 0. This will set the ship liveries to the donator liveries, if you do not own the donator liveries then the game will default back to the normal liveries.
When you have activated the liveries, your name on menus will show up as the BnG accent yellow/orange.
Beta Branch
The beta branch is now taking the place of our old developer branch which was active during the game’s Patreon days, this branch is open for anybody to jump into and out of at any time! This will always be updated with new features as they are implemented. A quick quality check is performed before updates go live so while it’s very likely bugs will arise, it’s very rare that updates will completely break the game on this branch.
0.9.1
0.9.1 is the first of many updates to 0.9 leading up the 1.0 release. This release provides a bunch of changes and new features, including the implementation of Rewired!
Please note: there is currently an issue where the game will hang on quitting back to desktop, this is caused by a specific issue with Unity’s new .NET backend - the issue has been reported to Unity. The game utilizes .NET 4.6 for the convex hull generation of shields so we can’t switch back to .NET 2.0 at this stage. As this only affects the game when you quit and we are still in Early Access we have decided to release with this problem present, however we want to let players know we are aware that it exists and will be keeping an eye on Unity’s updates to patch it as soon as possible.
Engine
Implemented Rewired - the entire input backend has been updated. Rewired fixes many of the game’s input issues caused by Unity. The game will now recognise multiple controllers for use in splitscreen, a much wider range of controllers are supported and you now have more calibration options to play around with in the input menu. You can also bind as many inputs as you like to an action, allowing for quality of life improvements like d-pad and analog steering at the same time!
Added weapon modding API (documentation for this will be coming closer to the release of 1.0 - see the modding folder for an example script)
(Scripting) Reworked gamemode constructor - see the example gamemode to see the changes, if you currently have any custom gamemode mods installed you will need to remove them otherwise the game will break!
Non-interface oneshot sounds will now pause when the game is paused
Added autoexec functionality, create a txt file in the userdata folder called autoexec.txt and write commands to have them executed when the game starts. Each line in the file defines a command
Gameplay
Photomode can now be used with a controller (check the input menu for binds). You can currently only move and rotate the camera, FoV controls and tilting will be added in the future!
Controllers now vibrate in response to more events (using weapons, boosting, bottoming out, etc)
The autopilot now has a maximum extended duration of three seconds when searching for a straight to disengage at
The autopilot’s shield now only protects you against 50% of all damage
You can now steer the autopilot into junctions
If you play on a track that forces 2280 mode without being in 2280 mode originally, 2280 mode will now disable when you have finished on that track
The AI can now use the cannons and plasma, plasma hits from the AI will deal 50% shield energy loss
User Interface
Ng UI elements can now wrap their navigation (Ng elements are new UI elements slowly being transitioned in - they are the UI elements which are fully animated)
Rewrote and updated all result screens - the medals from 0.4 have also returned!
Redesigned HUD
Redesigned countdown display
Scroll rects can now auto scroll to selected elements and be controlled with controller's (right stick by default) - this is currently only applied to the input menu and will be rolled out to new interfaces as they develop
The tutorial hints are now more in the way, we’ve seen screenshots where people have them open at the end of the race so the idea is to make sure you see and read them. Remember you can turn them off in the pause menu, we are looking for feedback on this change!
Button prompts have been updated to text only for the time being, this was changed because of the rewired implementation, button prompts will return to being icons in a future update
Ballistic Unity Tools
Added Trm Editor (see documentation from the game's mod sub-menu for information on what this is and how to use it)
Two small updates
Hey everyone, I want to provide a small update on two things.
If you havn’t read the previous announcement, please read that first as it will provide context. http://steamcommunity.com/games/473770/announcements/detail/1439318968088458913
Free Package
First thing, after having re-read my conversation with Valve to double check a few points I had re-read the answer to my question on what will happen with current players. As it turns out I had misunderstood it, apologies as this was a mistake on my behalf.
As long as you do not uninstall the game you will continue to receive updates for free. I had misinterpreted the answer explaining that the free copy would be removed, this is not the case and you will only lose your free copy when you uninstall the game.
Regardless of this, we will still be sending out free keys shortly after September 21st to those mentioned in the previous announcement as this will activate the paid copy of the game and provide said people with the donator liveries.
Input Problems
Secondly I want to address a small problem with the game which some people have been posting about in the discussions and on the previous announcement. This is regarding input and it suddenly breaking.
The game is using an input library being replaced shortly which has shown for its own reasons to corrupt its saved data. In order to fix this you need to delete the game’s registry entries so they can be recreated.
Before applying the fix below myself and the Neognosis team are not liable for any damage to your computer caused by editing the Windows Registry. It is strongly adviced that you only follow the instructions below if you are an advanced user and have handled with the Windows Registry directly before.
To do this you want to press Windows Key + R, in the window that pops up type regedit.exe and press enter. On the left hand side navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Vonsnake and delete the BallisticNG folder. This removes all Unity and input preferences and input should function as normal once you start the game back up.
Sorry for this inconvenience, with the game going paid this is now a top priority to fix as soon as possible.
BallisticNG 0.9 is now out and the game will soon be transitioning to paid - read for details
BallisticNG 0.9 is now out! This update has been about polishing up content ready for the final quality of life improvements coming in our 1.0 release. There is also some additional news about the future of the game, you can read about that below the changelog!
0.9 Changelog
Engine
Updated game to Unity 2017.1 running on .net 4.6
Removed FMOD implementation for custom music - custom music is now streamed natively into Unity using NAudio
Added support for Corsair’s Utility Engine
Unity logs can now be routed through the ingame console (use unitylog true command)
You can now write custom gamemodes, documentation will be coming for 1.0 - see Modding/Scripting folder for an example gamemode
Gameplay
Track pad tiles are now updated to 3d pads when playing in 2280 mode
Fixed several AI steering bugs
Loads more tweaks to 2280 mode
The camera now collides with collidable scenery
Added hunter weapon
Added eliminator gamemode
Increased hyperthrust strength by 50%
Increased mine deployment speed by 8%
Weapon warnings now announce the weapons name instead of just saying warning - voices recorded by HellfireWZ at WipeoutZone.
Added hidden settings for voices (will be implemented into the menu for 1.0s new frontend) - check settings.ini once you have launched the game after updating
Tracks
Removed non-standard tracks, the focus has instead gone on improving the standard tracks by a large margin. These removed tracks will be coming back with the polish they deserve at a later date. This decision has been made because we want BallisticNG’s content to be as high quality as possible, and we feel that having these legacy tracks that we do not have time to update brings the overall quality down. While these tracks will be returning in a future update, we have a member of the community who is very interested in preserving them in their current states and releasing them as custom tracks - some of the removed tracks are compatible as custom tracks so these files will be sent over to be uploaded onto the workshop very soon.
Added Tokyo Bowl, Underpass and Luijazui Park drag tracks
Misc
Updated models and textures for all projectiles, the track cameras and the rescue droid
Updated shield effect - now uses a convex hull generated at runtime too
Updated several audio effects
Updated menu root with a new selection tab setup which will also be present in the new menu to come
Unity Tools
Added 2280 speed/weapon prefabs and placer tool
Tracks can now be toggled as 2280 only
BallisticNG is going from free to paid
On September 21st we are going to be transitioning from a free game to a paid game - costing $5 or your regional equivalent and then $8 when we leave Early Access. A list of questions and answers are below, however because this is a controversial move based on our ethic throughout the game’s development I want to first take the time to explain why we have made this important decision.
Part 1 BallisticNG initially started off as a fan project and wasn’t really built to become what it has now, the game’s gone through an insane amount of overhauls and restructurings in a short period to suit what we believe the baseline of quality on Steam should be. There’s three of us working on the game and when development started we all had a fair amount of free time to dedicate without much worry about finances. Jump to now and we’re looking to make BallisticNG and future games our day job. We’re extremely grateful to the generous fans who have been donating on Patreon every month and the one off donations we get through paypal as we wouldn’t be as far as we are now without you guys - this support throughout the past year has been instrumental to the state of the game now.
Although we did not meet our first goal on Patreon financially, we did meet the goal regardless. This goal was to rewrite a large amount of the game’s core systems to allow new gamemodes to be programmed with support for custom gamemodes programmed in C#. As of 0.9, this goal has been fully reached.
We’re invested in continuing on with game development as an independent group, but if we are to do that then we need to take what once was a hobbyist fan project and make the final transformation into a professional game that we stand behind on the Steam storefront. We want to continue to develop BallisticNG in the long term to add additional features such as online multiplayer with a competitive infrastructure, improved modding tools with much better capabilities and as much free additional content as we can think up. In order to do this, we need BallisticNG to be our source of stable income which pays the rent and food bills.
Regarding Patreon, part of our decision to make this transition was that we believe Patreon for our specific scenario is very anti-consumer and doesn't encourage us to make a better game more than it does give us an excuse to be lazy. While this is not the case regardless, we do not like that Patreon was opening this possibility over time.
Part 2 We want to bring as many existing players over to the paid version of the game as possible, which is why anybody who has donated a lifetime of $5 or more on Patreon or Paypal will be getting a free key. With 1.0, those same people will also be getting the donators liveries as advertised on our Patreon rewards. If you have been developing mods that do not infringe on the copyright of others, we would also like to invite you over to the paid version so get in touch with us on our Discord server (tag @developers) or by sending an email to ballisticng@gmail.com.
Finally we would like to apologise for the break of the always free promise, given the scope of BallisticNG it was a naive and shortsighted decision. In an ideal world we would have wanted to have kept the game free forever. This let down is a lesson learned for future projects and a mistake we will not be making again.
When the game switches to paid, as long as you do not uninstall the game you will continue to have access to the version you were at - you just won’t receive updates or have access to steamworks based features anymore.
Q&A
How much will the game cost? The game is going to be sold for $5, we believe that this is a fair price which is affordable to the majority of existing players. When we leave Early Access we will have a more complete experience, and as such will slightly increase the price to $8.
When will you be charging? The change is going to happen two weeks from this announcement, on the 21st of September.
What’s going to happen to Patreon? Once we begin charging on Steam, the Patreon will be shut down. We will then be sending out your key for the game as quickly as possible after this - there’s not a large amount of people so this should take around 72 hours at the maximum.
How will I receive my key? We are going to be sending keys for Patreon donators out on Patreon itself, people who have donated on Paypal will have the key emailed to them on the email they donated with. As mentioned above for modders, jump onto our Discord server or shoot us an email at ballisticng@gmail.com. As an additional note, active Patreon donators on our Discord server can expect their key to be sent via PM.
What about the developer branch? The developer branch is going to be removed and the beta branch will instead take its place. It will be open to anybody who has purchased the game and will be updated as frequently as the developer branch is now until 1.0.
Will there be any DRM? BallisticNG is going to be completely DRM free, it will continue to function as it does now where the game does not require Steam to be running and will only disable Steamworks features when no instance of Steam is found - features such as the workshop, leaderboards, achievements and in the future, online multiplayer.
Will there be any other locations to download the game? Not for the time being, BallisticNGs downloads are going to be removed from Itch.IO and will instead be replaced with a link to the Steam store. When 1.0 is released we will aim to get the game released on GoG too.
Will there be any mac/linux builds? 0.9 will be getting the unoffical mac and linux build as normal, however we still need to coordinate how we are going to properly handle multi operating system builds in the long term. There are a few technical issues to overcome first, we do want to provide offical multi operating system builds in the future though and we will be finding a solution soon.
What’s the plan for transitioning out of early access? We have two phases planned for the transition. Phase one is a preliminary update which patches in a new menu and integration of the Rewired input library. Phase two is the remainder of the features. It is possible these updates will be split into several smaller updates, such a 0.10 before entering 1.0. You can see the full list of planned changes/additions here:
A new menu - replacing the main menu and ingame menus with new controller and mouse friendly interfaces
A new userdata folder structure for mods and inbuilt support for automatically generating mod content categories from mod folder hierarchies that you can manage ingame
A built in C# mod manager which lets you decide if they are enabled and their execution order
Fast test feature for the Ballistic Unity Tools so you can build your track and have it load up in an instance of the game without the fuss of going through menus
A much more diverse and longer campaign which utilizes the XP system added in 0.8 to provide unlocks, such as alternate liveries
Implementation of Rewired, an input library that bypasses Unity’s input system and is well respected for its controller compatibility - this will also introduce a variety of other options for configuring axes and will allow multiple controllers to be detected for splitscreen.
A rewrite of the weapons system so custom weapons can be implemented into the game
Final ship stat and AI balancing
Remove legacy achievements and implement new achievements
Dev-15/08/2017 now up on the beta branch!
A new update is now available on the beta branch! There has been quite a lot of new stuff since the last update at the beginning of the month:
To see every single change since the last update, head on over to our discord server and check the changelog channel!
Weapons
Some weapons have had some tweaks and updates. Mines now deploy slightly faster and when you collide with them you will now always hear the sound. The hunter now no longer collides with scenery and it now always hits its target.
The Hellstorm has also been added. This weapon will lock onto 4 ships surrounding you and will fire an extremely fast, highly damaging and highly slowing missile at each of them. This is most useful in Eliminator, mentioned below!
2280 mode
2280 mode has had some sound design changes. All of the ship maneuvers have new sounds that incorporate hydraulics and servo motors into them. You will now also hear the engine modulate as you boost and steer.
Ballistic Unity Tools
Ballistic Unity Tools has had a small update with a 2280 track pad editor and a toggle to let you make your tracks only playable in 2280 mode. Reimport the unity package to update!
Gamemodes
Eliminator is now in the game! The aim of eliminator is to be the last ship alive - play in the higher AI difficulties for some chaos! Once there is only two ships left, you enter last man standing where you both loose shield energy, all forms of shield energy regeneration and shielding are disabled and you can only pickup missiles to deal the final blows to the other ship.
You can also now program your own gamemodes! See the modding/scripting folder for a readme and example gamemode, and the modding/documentation folder for a work in progress HTML page. Our discord server has a scripting channel that you can come in and chat on!
Tracks
A new Cassandra is now here and Zephyr Ridge has had a total makeover!
