Nebulous: Fleet Command
Update on NEBULOUS: Fleet Command pricing
Over the course of the Early Access period there will be some price changes, and in a few days we will be adjusting the regional prices of NEBULOUS. The USD base price of the game will remain at $19.99 for now, but the regional discounts available in some other currencies will be reduced to become closer to the USD price.
We wanted to give everyone a heads up in case anyone would like to purchase at the current, lower prices. The current prices will be available until July 17.
Devlog #24: Battle Damage Assessment
NEBULOUS: Fleet Command has been in Early Access for about 4 months now, and what an exciting 4 months it has been. We use the devlog format to show off what is currently in development and explain the technical details behind the features or the reasoning behind certain design decisions. With content updates coming into players' hands pretty frequently, there hasn't been much of a need for a video like that in a while.
But with the Missile Update well underway, and with lots of cool stuff to show off that is still a little while from release, it was time to change that.
Check out the 24th devlog below, for a postmortem of the release and a preview of the upcoming Modular Missiles update.
See you in the battlespace,
- The NEBULOUS Team
Update 0.1.0.11 - Skirmish Scenarios
Most of the existing maps (with the exception of Caltrop) have been modified to have home locations for the two teams, and the Station Capture scenario has been adjusted so that the station objective spawns much closer to the defender's spawn point. This should help shift the balance a little more in the defender's favor, as they had been heavily disadvantaged by the central positioning.
Capture The Flag
This new game mode is the classic style of capture the flag that everyone knows and loves. Each team has a base location which holds a flag. Flying a ship through that sphere of influence will pick up the flag, and returning it to your base will score a point.
Centerflag
This is a modification of the traditional CTF game mode with a neutral flag located in the center of the map. Picking up the flag and taking it back to your own base will score a point for your team.
Tug Of War
This is a twist on the existing Control game mode, but with less risk of runaway leads. Each team starts with half of the required victory points, and capturing control points will shift the balance to your team. If both teams control an equal number of points, the balance will not shift. The first team to pull the point total completely to their side wins.
On the front of the first major update, we're at approximately 50% of development tasks completed, and now that this minor update is released we'll be back at it. We're about 1 or 2 weeks from having enough completed to show off in our first post-release devlog, so stay tuned for that posting on our news page soon.
As always, full patch notes follow:
Changes/Features:
- Added Team A and B "home" points closer to each team's spawn side of the map. Adjusted Station Capture game mode so the station appears at the defending team's home.
- Added Tug Of War skirmish scenario, a mirror of Control but gaining points also subtracts from your opponent's.
- Added Classic CTF scenario.
- Added Centerflag CTF scenario.
- Shooting Gallery map has been renamed to Small Testing Range.
- Added a field-of-view slider to the gameplay settings.
- Added new voice callback set.
Bug Fixes:
- Corrupted fleet and ship template files will no longer prevent the rest of the file list from loading.
- Fixed NullReferenceException causing disconnects when jamming sources changed for vaporized ships.
- Ships can no longer execute orders that the player had begun issuing before the ship was eliminated
- Fixed issue with Sprinter corvette colliders preventing shots from overpenetrating when passing directly from bow to stern.
- Fixed exploit in formations allowing slower ships to travel at a fast Guide's top speed in Loose formation.
- Fixed Solomon and Vauxhall LOD transition distances being too close.
- Fixed eliminated ships not showing as eliminated when loading a saved game.
- Fixed lifeboats ejecting from a ship that had already ejected lifeboats when loading a saved game.
Update 0.1.0.10 - Bugs and Balance
The majority of the changes in this patch are bug fixes, but we've also made a few balance changes based on player feedback. These balance changes are focused on beefing up cannons so that they sit happily in their intended niche instead of being beaten by railguns in situations where cannons should be the obvious weapon of choice. In order to improve cannon performance, we've increase some durabilities, muzzle velocities, and ranges, and tuned a few other values. Railguns have also received an increased penalty to their overpen damage, to further discourage using them as an all-around weapon instead of the fire support system they're intended to be.
Additionally, a minor feature change that also serves to balance the ELINT rework from the last patch means that Fire Control radars are now visible to passive sensors. This will make it so players can no longer toggle their radar on, acquire a lock with a Bullseye, and toggle search radar off again. However, because FC radars are directional, the range at which you can detect them varies depending on where the dish is pointing.
The full patch notes are below:
Changes/Features:
- Fire control radars now appear on ELINT, with detection range varying based on where the dish is pointing.
- Input text boxes are now automatically focused when opening them, so you can start typing immediately.
- Component Damage Resistance has been renamed to Damage Threshold, to reduce confusion with Hull DR.
- Continuous-fire ballistic weapons (e.g. Defender PDT) now show rate of fire in stats.
- If the selected fleet uses mods, it's point cost will now be re-validated when mods are loaded in the lobby.
Balance:
- Swapped the HP values of the Mk66/Mk68 and Mk81/Mk82 so cannons are more durable.
- Increased muzzle velocity of 450mm shells to 750m/s (from 700m/s).
- Increased range of 450mm shells to 11.25km (from 9.8km).
- Increased per-ray damage of 250mm RPF to 16 (from 13).
- Increased range of 120mm shells to 7.2km (from 6.4km).
- Decreased reload time of Mk62 to 12.5s (from 15s).
- Decreased overpen damage of 300mm rail slugs to be 15% (from 30%) of full damage.
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed a rare condition related to expired Callout (e.g. MOV, ATK, etc) markers causing sensor tracks to not accept multiple missile shots being queued.
- Fixed an exploit where a fleet file could be edited between when it was selected and validated, and the game was started.
- Fixed visual tracks on the selected ship being overridden by ELINT tracks from other ships.
- Fixed ranges being incorrect on Callout markers, and ranges not appearing on Capture Point markers.
- Disabled and destroyed radars can no longer be jammed, and ships in a jamming area but with radar off will no longer generate false tracks.
- Fixed fire control radars not being affected by stat modifiers.
- Fixed missile maneuvering thruster particles being visible when outside visual range.
- Adjusted starter fleet loadouts back down to 3000 points after Adaptive Radar Receiver cost increase.
Update 0.1.0.9 - Cross-Fixed
ELINT Rework
The most substantial change in this patch is the rework of Electronic Intelligence (ELINT), the passive detection of enemy emissions, to be fully integrated with the rest of the sensor infrastructure. Previously, there were two different types of track: Tracks and Bearings. Bearings were a kind of second-class citizen, where they weren't shared across ships and couldn't be interacted with. These changes upgrade passive ELINT tracks to be first-class tracks just like your radars provide. This means that they can now have orders issued against them, and other neat things.
While being able to shoot at ELINT bearings is nice, especially for jamming, this update takes the improvements a step further and introduces automatic calculation of ES Crossfixes. When multiple bearings are being sent to the team's sensor network, they will be automatically combined to estimate a position for the emitter. These crossfixes are calculated using the actual geometry of the sensors relative to each other and the signature, not a gamified random position, so the accuracy of these fixes will improve as the angular separation between the sensors increased. Similarly, having two ships with ES sensors close together will actually degrade your fix as a whole, even if other ships are spread out.
One thing to note about these Bearing and Fix tracks is that, while they can have orders issued against them like a radar track, they do not contain any velocity information so you'll be unlikely to hit moving targets.
Ownership Transfer
I'm aware of the network issues some of our players are experiencing, especially when playing with people on the far side of the world, and understand how frustrating this can be when in a 4v4 and 25% of your team's points just disappear. While there is still plenty of network optimization left to do, I can at least mitigate the impact of these situations in the meantime by transferring the ships to the remaining players on the team. For the time being this hand-off is done automatically based on some criteria to try to give entire formations to the same player, and preference players with the least number of ships in their fleet already. If the player's entire fleet cannot be handed off to anyone due to all the remaining teammates reaching the ship limit, any ships that don't fit will be abandoned as before. Also note that this will only occur once the game has begun, if the player disconnects before or during the deployment phase their fleet will not be transferred.
Electronic Counter-Counter Measures
A new Noise Filtering stat has been added to all of the Search and Fire Control sensors, which improves their ability to sift through noise and get a valid return. Because jamming works by artificially raising the noise floor, increasing the noise filtering capability of a sensor will reduce the effect of jamming. The Adaptive Radar Receiver has had a buff to this stat added to it, and had its point cost increased slightly commensurate with its increased utility.
Automatic Power Management
Probably the most frustrating thing in NEBULOUS is taking a hit to one of your power modules and having half your equipment go offline, even though the functional equipment sucking up all your power isn't actually doing anything. This update introduces fluctuating power draws for various components, so they will only actually consume power when they are doing something. Passive buffing components (e.g. Ammo Elevators) are considered always on, and will always consume power.
As always, full patch notes follow:
Changes/Features:
- Passive sensors (e.g. ELINT) refactored to be unified with the rest of the sensors systems:
- ELINT bearings (LOBs) are now shared across all ships, regardless of which one is selected.
- ELINT hits from two or more ships are now automatically combined into a Crossfix Track (sensors must be on separate ships, two sensors on the same ship will only produce a single bearing).
- Accuracy of crossfixes improves as the angular separation between ships with passive sensors increases.
- LOBs and Fixes are now first-class tracks, and can be fired upon in TRK mode (but don't expect to hit).
- Updated ES22 Pinard module description to describe new mechanics.
- Players (who are not the host) who abruptly disconnect due to a network issue or crash will have their ships transferred to other player(s) on their team. Ships that do not fit in the open ship slots of any teammate will be abandoned as before.
- Ship components will now only draw power when they are active, making low-power conditions much more survivable.
- Added additional 2000 and 2500 point victory conditions to Control.
- Added warning audio cue every 5 seconds when a ship has crossed the withdraw line.
- Sensor tracks will no longer show the highlight circle when hovering over them with no visual.
- Added Noise Filtering stat to search and fire control sensors. This provides a dB reduction in both ambient and jamming noise, making a sensor hard to jam.
- Added a noise filtering buff to Adaptive Radar Receiver, and a positional and velocity error penalty.
- Added additional ambient announcements to ships, which can be heard when the camera is zoomed in close, for damage control and abandoning ship.
- Increased max modifier for hull-identificationwork stat to 1000%.
- Improved rendering performance on Caltrop.
- The number of restores remaining in a DC Locker are now displayed in the tooltip in the DC Board.
Balance:
- Decreased reload time of Mk550 Mass Driver to be 45 seconds (was 60), and improved accuracy by 56%.
- Increased cost of Adaptive Radar Receiver to 30 (was 20) due to increased utility.
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed ship elimination conditions so that ships will be eliminated if they have all power/drives and command destroyed and have less than 2 restores, as the ship cannot possibly be brought back into the fight.
- Fixed thruster power values in fleet editor UI being scaled incorrectly.
- Fixed exception causing disconnect when using the POV camera on a ship that has already exploded, or exploded when in POV view.
- Added missing button click sounds to Action Menu buttons.
- Fixed ship template list not loading when a ship template had been created with a mod that is no longer loaded/subscribed.
- Fixed being able to change selected ships with number keys when a widget was open.
- Fixed intelligence identification difficulty modifier being reset on ships during initialization.
- Fixed eliminated ships set to WCON FREE firing on ships in rare situations.
- Fixed some sound effects not fading out completely regardless of distance to camera.
- Fixed widget lines sometimes being rendered in the wrong order, causing strange perspective overlaps.
- Moved Small Energy Regulator to Weapon Support category, to match Energy Regulator.
Update 0.1.0.8 - Sustaining Performance
Performance Improvements
The last two weeks have had me buried head-first into optimization work to improve frame rates and the general experience. Due to the heavily simulation-based nature of this game, our bottleneck for performance is almost always due to the CPU and not graphics rendering. The sensors system is the most complicated of all the game's systems, particularly when there are lots of objects to track. For example, large groups of missiles.
For those who aren't aware, all sensors in Nebulous gain and lose tracks in an "acquisition cycle" once per second, and update those tracks every 1/4 second. These cycles occur simultaneously, for all ships, in the same frame. This leads to large spikes in frame processing time whenever the sensors are doing work. Fortunately, we can spread this load out across multiple frames in order to smooth out those spikes and keep performance consistent, which was the first optimization I made.
There are also a number of other optimizations that were made, including huge optimizations in point defense target prioritization (the main culprit of slowdown with lots of missiles), caching of radar cross-section calculations, and more. If you're interested in the specifics, they'll be discussed in detail in a future devlog.
Overall, you can expect significantly improved performance even when large numbers of missiles are flying.
Dynamic Time Dilation
However, even these significant optimizations can't keep us at 60fps when 300 missiles are on their way. In order to help maintain a framerate that allows you to move your camera and continue issuing orders in these dire circumstance, I've implemented dynamic time dilation synchronized across all multiplayer clients.
When fixed frame processing time becomes too long on average (so it will take a second or two to kick in), the game will automatically begin slowing down time to allow more processing capacity. The time dilation will increase and decrease dynamically to try to maintain a reasonable framerate, and will return to 100% when the large load is gone.
New Maps
This update is adding two exciting new maps, including the largest we've ever added and the first to introduce a 10 player limit.
Caltrop, a spike-covered ice comet for 6 players:
Canyon, a dusty ravine between two massive rocks with lots of holes to hide in for 10 players.
Light Cruiser Buffs
Every hull has a primary job it's designed for, and the boundaries of that job can be stretched a lot by how the player configures it. In general, the hulls excel in their primary purpose, but the Light Cruiser tends to fall short. The CL is primarily designed for anti-support roles: beating up on groups of smaller ships before they can get to the main force. Unfortunately, its current stats don't tend to work out in its favor in most of the engagements it should be purpose-built for.
In this patch we're buffing the Vauxhall in a few ways. It's armor has been increased to 30cm, making it much more resistant to 120mm HE and forcing smaller ships to shift to AP to do damage. We've also bumped its top speed by 2m/s, giving it more chance to run down faster ships when paired with the appropriately-buffing engines. Finally, 250mm HE-RPF is getting a slight damage increase to 13 damage per fragment to increase its offensive capabilities. These changes should give the CL some more favorable match-ups against its primary targets, specifically Corvette and Frigate swarms.
If you're interested in contributing to balance changes, don't forget to join our Discord and get the appropriate role in the #welcome channel: Join Our Discord
Full patch notes follow:
Changes/Features:
- Made optimizations for the following systems:
- Sensors and sensor networks, distributing their load of acquiring/updating tracks across multiple frames.
- Reduced repetition of work in point defense prioritization.
- Caching of radar cross-section calculations when the viewing angle has not changed significantly.
- Reduced frequency of network position updates for missiles.
- Added dynamic time dilation, synchronized for all players, when fixed frame processing time becomes too long.
- Added an encouraging message when multiplayer game hosts attempt to quit before the battle is resolved.
- Missile track number and range text is no longer displayed unless the mouse is hovered over the track, to remove clutter and increase performance.
- Clicking a player's name in the Battle Report will open their Steam profile, allowing you to friend/message them.
- Added a player list accessible in battle by pressing the ~ key.
- Players can now be muted by clicking the mute button in the player list. Players you have blocked via Steam will be muted by default and cannot be unmuted until they are unblocked.
- VLS launchers will now iterate through the full set of launchers before returning to the start, rather than the first available one.
- MLS launchers will now iterate launchers in sequence instead of dumping each load in turn.
- Added priority-based sorting to HUD markers, so you can always select your ships in the middle of a mass of your own launching missiles.
- Formations will no longer automatically clear when the guide ship is eliminated, allowing more opportunity to use the ALD command.
- Updated general UI button sound to be less harsh.
- Add new maps "Caltrop" for 6 players and "Canyon" for 10 players.
Balance:
- Increased Vauxhall Light Cruiser speed to 26m/s (was 24m/s) and armor thickness to 30cm (was 24cm).
- Increased damage of 250mm HE-RPF to 13 per fragment (was 10).
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed color picker not matching correct Hue when opening it after returning to the main menu.
- Fixed camera getting stuck at an incorrect orientation when flipping view at the deployment screen when the cinematic starts.
- Fixed ship summary bar being below the selected ship when the camera was flipped.
- Fixed repair teams who do not have restore capability being assigned restoration jobs and not consuming restores.
- Fixed coroutine failing to start error when a mount's status changed while the UI was hidden.
- Fixed degraded thrust from destroyed thrusters not always being applied in the correct direction.
- Fixed chat background staying on screen when all messages have faded out.
- Fixed light on Riposte destruction effect not fading correctly.
- Fixed exceptions occuring when saving a singleplayer game while missiles were in the process of launching.
Update 0.1.0.7 - "High Ground" is Relative
Perspective Flipping
I've been watching a lot of streams over the last two weeks, and one of the things that has struck me most is that a lot of players tend to view the game from the perspective of their ships, despite the camera offering full freedom of movement. When the enemy is above, this can lead to some awkward "neck craning", as the player tries to look up from their ships to see the enemy while also trying to issue orders on the plane. There's obviously a very strong instinct to have the high ground, which leads to players frequently clustering near the top of the map with only a brave few daring to sneak below. Fortunately, the advantage of having a game set in space is that the high ground can be relative, if we let it be.
This update introduces the ability to flip the camera perspective to make up become down, and down become up. This affects both the normal view and tactical view camera, allowing you to continue to seamlessly switch between them. The default keybind for this control+shift+space, and can be adjusted in the settings menu. If the camera flipping animation makes you motion sick, or you just don't like it, you can disable it in the accessibility settings.
Reception to the proposed change in our Discord was extremely positive, and our testers who previewed the change called it "game changing", so we hope you'll love it as much as we do.
Balance Changes
This will be our first patch since release that features a few minor balancing tweaks.
The first of these is a reduction in the Solomon's component damage reduction from 55% to 40%, bringing it in line with the Axford. In testing this reduced the time to kill under sustained gunfire from a ludicrous 15 minutes to an average of 10 (33%, in line with the increase in damage received). This makes the Solomon's interior a little more squishy when its generous armor (thick enough to bounce rail slugs in some cases) is penetrated. Because of their high point cost they tend to be one of only two or three ships, meaning players bringing battleships should have no trouble paying enough attention to maximize that armor utility, while allowing opponents with good positioning/flanking to not have to invest half the match taking one down.
Additionally, the Raines frigate is receiving a slight buff. The forward module slot (Module 5) has been increased in size to allow it to fit a wider range of support modules, including a Micro Reactor to help alleviate power concerns on dual-engine builds.
Fleet Images
The saddest thing when browsing for fleets on the Workshop is the lack of preview images. Now, fleet screenshots are automatically generated when you save your fleet and will accompany it on its journey to the Workshop if you decide to post it there. If you'd like to update your currently posted fleets with a screenshot, just load the fleet in the editor, save it once, and upload it to the Workshop again.
Soundtrack
For those of you who are loving the game's soundtrack and would like to take it with you, our amazing composer Lauren has made it available to all at the following links:
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/3mlqKlC6rcZNGaqenzi7e8
YouTube: https://youtu.be/4DbcrowJlnY
Bandcamp: https://laurenpham.bandcamp.com/album/nebulous-fleet-command-original-soundtrack-vol-1
There are also a bunch of minor changes and additions, which you can find in the full patch notes:
Changes/Features:
- The camera perspective can now be flipped 180 degress by pressing Ctrl + Shift + Space.
- Lifeboats will now fly back towards the position their parent ship arrived from, and disappear after crossing the map boundary.
- EW weapons will now continue firing in the targeted direction rather than continuing to point at the selected position when the ship is moving.
- Players who are kicked from the same lobby twice cannot rejoin that lobby again, until the host restarts their game.
- Missile ranges now contribute to the offensive range circle radius.
- Added multiplayer lobby filter to hide password protected lobbies.
- Added Modding.IModEntryPoint interface for modders writing custom code mods.
- Range plane range mark text now flips to be legible from below.
- Global north (000) direction on range plane is now identified with a thicker, yellow line.
- Adjusted Deuteranopia color palette to make red more distinct.
- Critical warning icons now match colorblind palettes.
- Control is now the default game mode when starting a new lobby.
- Fleet screenshots are now automatically generated when saving a fleet, and will be uploaded along with the fleet if it is posted to the Steam Workshop.
Balance:
- Reduced Solomon component damage reduction to 40% (was 55%).
- Increased size of Raines module 5 slot to 3x3x3 (was 2x2x2).
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed soft lock caused by having the pause menu open in the deployment screen when the arrival cinematic starts.
- Fixed texture format mismatch in a compute shader, causing crashes with some Intel drivers.
- Fixed chaff weapon group being counted as offensive for the range circle radius calculation, creating a 60m circle on ships with no other weapons.
- Fixed some damage control RPCs logging errors when exiting a game.
- Fixed NullReferenceException in DC team tokens when moving to some locations.
- DC board no longer stays open when selecting the same ship after previously deselecting it.
- Corrected range marks in Aurora stats.
- Fixed NullReferenceException when trying to pathfind to a target outside the map.
Update 0.1.0.6 - Key Bindings
Keyboard shortcuts have two primary contexts: widget open and widget closed. The same key can be used for multiple actions, as long as their context is different. Some keys, like the movement keys for the camera, cannot overlap with anything else.
Full patch notes below:
Changes/Features:
- Added key rebinding, accessible via the settings menu.
- Track projections on the sphere widget will now turn yellow when the tracks are inside the seeker cone representation.
- Rotated locked plane normal for sphere widget. Pressing the H key will toggle a vertical locking plane for the current azimuth.
- Default WCON status at start of the game is now FREE. If you don't want your ships to automatically return fire, set it back to TIGHT.
- Double-clicking on a lobby will now attempt to join it.
- Added a faint background to in-game chat messages.
- Weapons firing on a target that is out of range will now indicate "Out of Range" in their status tooltip instead of "Bearing To Target".
- Narration in Tutorial 6 will now pause until each waypoint is placed while arranging the first waypoint strike.
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed glitchy rendering of some widget lines.
- Fixed KIL and PRI buttons not being greyed out when not opened on a track.
- Fixed some sound effects not having the audio mixers correctly applied to them.
- Disabled threaded nameplate texture compression, they are now done on the main thread. The game will stutter a bit while generating nameplates, but should resolve some crashes.
- Camera will no longer end up inside ships when focusing from very small objects such as missiles.
- Fixed Steam rich presence showing "%map_name%" when in the tutorial missions.
Patch Notes - 0.1.0.5:220215-0358
- Enabled aggressive texture scaling (down to 1/8th resolution at Very Low) at lower graphics settings to further reduce video memory demand.
- Made map boundary line more obvious in tactical view.
- Lobby passwords are now masked with *'s.
- Added message log to tutorial missions, accessible through the escape menu.
- Pressing the H key when using the sphere widget will toggle locking the cursor onto the horizontal plane, for easy horizontal direction picking.
- Added player slot limit dropdown to lobby settings. Note that full lobbies (i.e. 4/4 players) will not be returned in queries when refreshing the lobby list.
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed tutorial dialog messages not waiting for the continue button to be clicked if the escape menu was opened in the middle of a line.
- Fixed players getting disconnected if they send a lobby chat message when the host is starting the game.