The goal of this update was to sneak in a couple final features before 1.0 code lockdown as well as to get a start on our remaining Early Access goals, voice acting and localization.
We need to get the build as solid as we can for the v1.0 release, so going forward we will be focusing on tuning and bug fixing to ensure a great 1.0 release. After 1.0 we will again be able to look at new features, and we will hopefully see a lot of new faces joining the community with great ideas.
In this update we have added a new 100 territory map “The Clockwork Void,” as well as the “Dark Cycle,” a system of rebounding ever increasing zombie infection for the sandbox mode. Behind the scenes, we have now cast our voice actors and begun localization.
Now for the details!
The Clockwork Void:
We have added a new 100 territory map! Richard and I decided that we needed something between the 53 territory Micro Spiral and the 200 territory Milky Colossus.
We are now using this new 100 territory map as the basis for the story mode.
The original map (now called the Micro Spiral) has had years of testing with the Story, but this new map has had maybe a dozen hours. So there may be issues, please report them if you see them.
It is scary to make a change of this magnitude this late in the project, but from a high level the 100 territory map seems like the best galaxy size for first time players.
For those of you familiar with playing the story mode, a comparison to the old story mode with the smaller map would be great!
The Dark Cycle:
We have added a system of rebounding zombies to the Sandbox Mode. This has been an ongoing request from marathon players, that they want ever increasing challenges. Well the rebounding zombies should fulfill that and then some. Here's how it works...
Under the “Zombe War” section of the Sandbox Tuning menu you can now activate “Rebounding Zombies.”
One important note, we made it so that you can even activate Rebounding Zombies in old sandbox saves, so you don't need to start from scratch to bring the zombie menace back!
Rebound strength is based on the zombie generation. The sliders show how bad the next incoming generation will be. This means the values on the sliders will increase as the generation increases, but you are still able to fine tune how bad each next incoming generation will be (until it arrives)
You are also able to turn off rebounding zombies as long as the dark infection count down has not started for the next round. So, if you are fighting the zombies and need a breather between outbreaks, you can turn off the rebound for a while. It is kind of a “self serve apocalypse.”
Rebound Level Increase: For each zombie generation this is how much higher level the Zombie Alpha will be than you when it arrives. Note, this is multiplied by the current zombie generation. So if 10 levels at generation 1, then 20 levels at generation 2 and 100 levels are generation 10.
Extra Underlings: This dictates how many of the AI controlled captains will instantly become infected on the next outbreak. This is also multiplied by rebound generation.
How this works is that the weakest captains will fall to the new infection. They then have their levels buffed to somewhere between your level and the Alpha's level. So this means there will be a continuum of nasty zombies to fight and the weakest captains from the Galaxy now become highly relevant conflict wise.
In general the weakest captains will be the neutral captains, so the factions will take less of a hit than the neutrals, until you run out of neutrals... Filthy neutrals.
Extra Territory: This is how many territories the zombie outbreak will spread to on a new infection cycle. The territories are picked such that they will try to take empty territory first, but will spread into faction territory if they have to. This is also multiplied by the rebound generation.
Timer Decrease: This is how much shorter the zombie arrival timer will be for the next rebound. So the rebounds can come faster and faster based on the current generation.
Minimum Zombie Time: This sets some minimum time for rebounds, so you don't end up with zombies respawning every 10 seconds (unless you want them to)
Localization Begins:
This month we also made big strides with our localization system. We have hired translators for French, German, and Russian versions of SPAZ 2. It took some time to get the translation pipeline in order, but now the translators are busily localizing the 30,000+ lines of text.
Going forward we hope to release a system that will allow fan translations of SPAZ 2 using a system like Steam Workshop. This current round of official translation is a test bed for that future fan based system. So if someone someday wants a Latin version of SPAZ 2, then they will be able to make one by editing some XML files.
Voice Acting Casting:
Well, 300 voice auditions later we have our Elsa, Carl, and Jamison. 8 years we have worked with these characters and they finally have voices!
Casting was a huge learning experience for us, because in our combined 28 years of video game development experience, we have never directly handled acquiring voice talent. Now that we have the cast, we are excited to put on our director hats :)
We will be keeping the option to use the old Text To Speech version of the cast as well for posterity, but we think that once you hear these voice actors that it will be really hard to go back to TTS. We love you TTS, but these professional voice actors are just so, so... much better.
Additional Fixes/Changes:
Changed minimum armor repair rate to 0.1% for Sandbox mode. Setting 0% was causing armor break-off updates to be skipped, preventing parts from ever breaking off.
When ramming, less of the damage is transmitted through the skeleton of the ship so fewer parts will break off that weren't directly impacted by the ram. So your engine won't break off when you ram with your nose anymore.
Lowered the reflected back damage to the rammer when ramming by 20%
Fixed connection helper arrows remaining on when the part being connected is destroyed due to being used to smack other ships.
Made tractored parts less likely to be destroyed when they hit enemy ships while being tractored.
Fixed VR zooming on the starmap when pressing RB with the controller
Added Vertical menu offset slider for VR
Added menu distance slider for VR
Reversed combat zooming in VR mode with the controller
Custom part price multiplier slider for sandbox mode.
Fixed the auto deploy button on the tactics panel so it wouldn't be disabled when a strike craft is currently active.
Fixed controller not being able to advance dialogue in the final mission.
Fixed case where the level set dressing asteroids could get too close to the play area and look like intractable asteroids.
Going Forward:
This next update will be about tuning and bug fixing for v1.0. Schedule permitting, we will also be recording and adding the new voice acting. We also hope to have the French, German, and Russian translations completed.
VR wise, we will be getting the motion controllers working and finalizing as well so it can be tested for hopefully a parallel release with version 1.0.
So we are really really close now. Thank you all so much for taking this 13 month Early Access ride with us!
Andrew (Blorf) and Richard (Narlak)
V0.9.5 Deadspace Territory Update!
Hi all,
This update is centered around further expanding the sandbox gameplay as well as tackling many of the larger player tuning requests. There is a lot of stuff to cover, so lets dig right in!
At a high level, here are the major features/changes:
Deadspace Territory! (A way to set galaxy generation options that change its layout)
New higher starbase threat levels. (starbase threat works a lot more like captain threat now)
Missiles got a tuning boost (the continuing effort to make them relevant)
Personality based AI retreating (they tend to flee less often now)
Better in combat part attachment (fix your ship in battle hopefully with less fumbling)
Large strike craft health tuned to be less tanky. (6 star larges are less insane)
Ship Construction Undo (in construction level, back out changes when experimenting)
Zombies worth hunting (parts now have stars, they drop a lot more rez)
VR Beta (our first crack at a public VR build)
Deadspace Territory:
So one huge player request has been custom player galaxies. Creating custom maps in Maya and importing them into the game won't work because of the huge amount of connection work they require as well as the requirement to add hooks to other internal game systems for the AI. We wanted to answer those requests and deliver something that served the same purpose, so Deadspace territory was born.
A Deadspace territory is a territory with no starbase controller. This means no one owns it and no one will ever own it. It can almost be thought of as the water on your typical strategy game map. It does not restrict travel, but it does stop trade lines and acts as a natural neutral zone between empires.
Now lets delve into the settings so you can make the most of this new galaxy generation ability.
Deadspace Clusters vs.Veins:
A Cluster will form like a blob. It always tries to form in a position that connects it to the most of its own territory, but it hates to touch other deadspace. The blobs pinch factions together creating high conflict zones.
A Vein (cluster mode off) is the opposite. Veins still don't want to intersect other deadspace, but they also want to touch their own territory as little as possible. This ends up generating string like veins throughout the galaxy, forming natural empire borders. Veins create discrete pockets of territory.
Deadspace Resources:
This setting tells the galaxy generator to allow resource nodes and lore to spawn in deadspace, or to keep it totally empty.
Empty deadspace won't attract captains, so regular space will have a much higher population.
Resource filled deadspace provides more opportunity to harvest full and unowned resource nodes.
Deadspace Volume:
This is how much of the galaxy can be filled with deadspace territory, up to 50%.
Deadspace Scatter:
This is a 0-1 value of how many separate deadspace pockets you want. 0 means one big pocket, and 1 will mean the maximum number of pockets, each pocket being 1 territory. To get 2 deadspace territories, set the slider to 0.01-0.03ish area. It is a bit of a weird concept, but luckily we have pictures!
Example Layouts:
Cluster: On, Volume 50%, Scatter 0.01
This shows two large blobs of deadspace. This is due to the very low scatter value.
Cluster: On, Volume 50%, Scatter 0.25
Now instead of two big oceans of deadspace, we have a series of small lakes due to the higher scatter.
Cluster: On, Volume 50%, Scatter 1.00
Now with the scatter maxed, we have essentially a shotgun of 1 territory wide deadspace pockets.
Cluster: On, Volume 20%, Scatter 0.05
Here is an example with less overall deadspace in the galaxy. Only 20% here, so we have a lot more play area left intact.
Cluster Off, Volume 50%, Scatter 0.02
One huge set of veins has covered the entire galaxy, creating a series of small islands to seize.
Cluster Off, Volume 50%, Scatter 0.20
Now we still see lots of islands, but the veins are now not touching.
Cluster Off, Volume 20%, Scatter 0.20
Finally we have only 20% of the galaxy veined into deadspace. Look at that ripe territory on the bottom right... Only two connections in.
Hopefully with these examples you will be able to make the most of the new deadspace generator. Each galaxy should now be a little different and you won't know what was generated until you uncover those territories, so this should add a lot to early exploration. We hope you like it.
Starbase Threat Changes:
One problem since the big strike craft update (v0.8.0) was that starbase threat became too low due to the new increased threat being brought to the table by the beefy strike craft. In short, 80 used to be a lot, but now it isn't so we needed a better way of measuring Starbase threat and more importantly keeping AI captains away from the big ones longer.
Starbase threat now maxes out at 150:
But it wasn't just a number change. We have changed how starbase threat is calculated. It used to be a flat rate per expansion level, but now it is a combination of expansion level and the owner's level since the starbases inherit the perks of the owner.
So what this means is early on a fully upgraded base may be around threat level 100 or so, but at the owner levels up and gets new perks, that starbase's threat will also increase. We now show a starbase's level when you mouse over it as well so you better know what you are getting into.
The last four starbase expansions cost an increased amount of scrap:
This was to offset the new higher threat levels for starbses. So it takes a little extra work to get the starbase maxed out.
Starbase health now matters:
Starbase health now impacts threat so captain can whittle down a base by damaging it and running away.
There was also a bug where starbase health was not being saved and would reset to 100% each time you reloaded. This has been fixed. Health really matters for starbases now.
Also, Starbase health is properly taken into account when you start a battle with them now, so attacking weakened starbases will be a lot easier. Use those bounties to soften the bases before attacking yourself.
Starbase Notes:
Starbases inherit their owner's perks as well at strike craft star levels. So we now adjust the max threat level of their starbase based on that. This means not all fully expanded starbases will be of the same threat level, but higher leveled captains will have higher threat leveled bases. So as you level up, the bases you own will increase in threat. Another good reason to place the highest level captains in charge of bases.
Missile Tuning:
Missiles have been a hot topic for a while now, and we wanted to improve them further based on continuing feedback. So here's what we did.
First off, there were requests for a better faster missile. We re-purposed the old starter missile for this. It is now a very fact intercepting missile. Here are the stat changes:
Normal Missile:
Damage increased 25%
Reload 20% faster
Range increased 33%
Speed 33% faster
MUCH more agile and has 10x the thrust. (its faaast)
Also: Ion SRM damage increases 33%
Torpedo damage increased 36%, speed up 33%, range up 33%
Cloud torpedo damage up 33%, speed up 33%, range up 33%
SRM damage up 25%
Personality based AI retreating:
Raise your hand if you are tired of chasing retreating captains. So the retreat mechanic is good, but it is used way too often by the AI, so we decided to make retreating heavily personality based.
Captains have a bravery trait. ( Note: It will be invisible when it is normal)
Bravery
Cowardly = Retreat very likely (even more likely than before)
Timid = Retreat likely (about as likely as pre v0.9.5 was for all captains)
Normal = Less likely retreat than before v0.9.5
Courageous = much less likely retreating.
Fearless = almost never retreats.
So overall there should be quite a bit less retreating, at least right off the bat. They will still run if the odds are stacked way against them, but it takes much higher odds for some captains now.
Better in combat part attachment:
Attaching parts while in combat has been a problem for a while. It is just hard to do while being shot at. Here's what we did.
Snap distance for attach points increased in combat levels to improve on-the-fly building. This means that the parts are MUCH more magnetic in combat. We realize you probably aren't fine tuning a design while a particle hose just removed your engine, so they snap right on now if they see a good spot to attach nearby.
We also added a much stronger auto-levelling system to the ships when the tractor is on. One problem was that you cant attach a part while the ship is banked because the attach points don't line up with the combat plane, now we un-bank you when the tractor is on using a good dose of physics.
Strike Craft Tuning:
Large strike craft are too strong. This comes up a lot as well. If you have been around since launch you would have never thought those words would be uttered, but they are too strong.
First off we lowered large strike craft health by 33% so they don't take forever to kill at high star levels.
If that isn't enough we have further ideas to lower their health tanking, but we want to see how this sits with players first.
Second and more importantly, strike craft now take a bit of splash damage when they are medium and large, depending on size. This means area of effect weapons will impact them more. It still is no where near as much AoE damage as a large mothership takes, but it keeps warheads somewhat useful against the big and slow ones.
Also:
Small strike craft health up 33%
Small strike craft armor up 17%
Ship Construction Undo:
In the ship construction level, you can now undo changes made while experimenting with your design. This system will remember the initial ship configuration you had when you first entered the construction instance and you can always revert to it.
Hopefully this combined with the root core hot swapping from last update will make design experimentation a lot less painful.
Zombies Worth Hunting:
Zombies parts now have stars. These stars follow the same rules as regular factions, so larger zombie infections = greater chance of higher star parts. This should make them more appetizing to hunt for parts vs other captains late game.
Note: this also means that zombie ships will be stronger than before. Beware.
Zombies now also drop 100% of their Rez supply on death. Previously it was 25%. So zombies are a decent Rez farm as well now. Just don't get infected.
The VR Beta:
Richard has been spending time on our stretch goal of a VR build and has been making some good progress behind the scenes this update.
One important note is that Richard's VR time is not taking away from regular game development time. Core game development, as above, always takes priority, but at this point in any project when we are stabilizing the game and tuning, content work ceases and usually the art team moves to another project.
In the case of MinMax there are only two of us, and we are not going to split focus with another project so Richard now spends that downtime on the VR build. There have actually been quite a few rendering improvements that have come along into the main game as a side effect of the VR build as well.
Now onto the VR build itself.
Right now we are not “officially” a Steam VR title. Only the two of us here have even tried it, so it is very much a beta. We want to make sure it is decent before we add that tag to the game.
We are going to release it as a Beta build on Steam that you need to opt into.
We will create a new sub-forum for VR topics.
The current build has been tested on the Vive and Rift.
The VR build requires a controller and will not work with a mouse and keyboard. There are plans to get the Vive and Rift hand controllers working for a future update.
Please give it a try if you have one and let us know how it works for you. Literally 2 people have seen this, so we want to know.
Galactic Colossus costs less to fund new starbases so building large empires is not so expensive. Was +500 scrap per base, now is +250.
Added Blueprint Drop Rate Multiplier to sandbox sliders
Fix for replacing an allied captain in battle, then reloading the game causing a non interactable battle.
Removed the limit of max zombie thralls on Hard. So zombies can take over the whole galaxy just like on insane.
Bandit strike craft get half the stars compared to captains of the same level. This is more in keeping with their junk part but large fleet theme.
Lowered strike craft threat calculation strength by 50%. They were making fleets seem much more powerful than they were, this lead to wild changes in threat level based on the number of strike craft in a fleet.
Bandit threat calculation takes 33% less threat from strike craft to better represent that their strike craft are not an issue if you kill the mothership (weak point)
Flak cannon chance to hit targets in cloud increased from 50% to 67%.
Fixed issue where initial threat level calculation for strike craft was too high, but reset on load which would have lead to early game threat level confusion.
Fix for too many spawn crates causing bandit hive to fail to become red.
Prevent levelup exploit when using a single core to cheese battles. max levelups now capped to 4 per battle.
Added special Alert_EnemyAttack autosave for when the AI attacks the player to prevent loss of regular autosave progress.
Fixed case where zombies would attack while player's level was still below the player ignore level when the player was harvesting resources.
Fixed a rare bug where you could join a fight against an ally when a captain from a different faction was also aiding your ally.
Updated Unity 5.4.4 to Unity 5.4.5 (Tried Unity 5.6.0f3 but it still contains a bug that needs fixing before we can use it (issue: 899009)
Fixed bug where faction relations were not being properly capped between -100 and 100.
Fixed bug whereby executing captains could increase overall faction relations beyond what losing that captain from the faction should have caused.
add base construction hint on create faction that other faction leaders will not be happy.
add base construction hint on build rebel starbase that other faction leaders will not be happy.
On easy mode, only allow one war on the player at a time.
Leech Beams now work on large strikecraft and battlewagon knows how to target them with leech beams properly.
Distance numbers now also show on the currently locked target as well as the current contextual action target for strike craft and drones.
Added starmap distance number to the enemy bounty list in the captain info page.
Fixed starbase tip to report the right unlock level for building when the unlocking is changed for sandbox mode.
Wingmen won't trade Rez at stations because the player may have given it to them to help them keep up.
Fixed a possible case where it was possible for wingmen to ignore a player battle and not join.
Made wars more likely between factions when they run out of space to expand.
Fix for having to move that 1 pixel after battle to reach the scavenge field.
Captain info on mouse over was not reporting the relations values that took into consideration faction standing. This meant you could see someone with -5 relations being friendly instead of neutral. This is now fixed and shows the final relations which are used for hostility calculations. (Derived Relations)
Added gamplay option Toggle Combat Zoom (instead of right mouse hold)
Added combat zoom Controller and Mouse sensitivity slider to gameplay options.
Only display mouse sensitivity sliders for mouse mode and controller sensitivity sliders for controller mode, less menu pollution.
Added Invert Y selector for the combat scope separate from the 3rd person cam to gameplay options.
Fixed AI captain joining player faction request text so that when they offer 0 scrap it doesn't show “0 Scrap” as if that was something being received.
Going Forward:
We hope to start interviewing voice actors in the very near future and to get a good start on localization. Right now those are the two big tasks keeping up from 1.0, and it is time to start tackling them.
Beyond that we also hope to deliver a medium sized map (100 territories) as well as a sandbox mode to rebound the zombie infection so it comes back stronger each time you kill them until you are finally overwhelmed.
SPAZ 2 is getting really close to v1.0 now and it has been an amazing year of early access. The community interaction has taken SPAZ 2 way beyond where it could have been without you all, and we are so thankful for your patience and insight!
Andrew (Blorf) and Richard (Narlak)
V0.9.1 Super Sandbox Upgrade!
Hi All,
This update was all about replayability. We are going to get right into the guts of the update because there is a lot to read!
At a high level, here are the major upgrades:
Flight physics got a big upgrade, which also lead to a 20% CPU savings.
Improved missiles to make them a more viable choice.
Added ability to hot swap the root core in the inventory level.
Changed Fighter energy consumption to be on attack only.
Added an Insane difficulty mode for experts who hate themselves.
Added Extended core modes (now have up to 21 cores)
Upgraded the sandbox mode with 73 sliders and new pre-defined game modes.
Added the Milky Colossus (a huge 200 sector map!)
One important note:
This was a huge update, and we are just two people. We tested this as best as we could, but the breadth of changes in this update would require an army to test properly. The old map has had three years of testing and the new map has had about a week. Also, we tried to apply logical limits to the tuning sliders, but there are thousands of permutations to the possible tuning now. So we “think” everything is good, but we expect a few hot fixes to come in the next couple days as you find and hopefully report weirdness. The game just got a whole lot bigger...
Flight Physics Improvements:
One of our big goals was to optimize the physics a little more to allow for more cores and to take some of the pressure off slower CPUs. The end result of this work is that there should be about 20% less physics load on the CPU, and when the load gets high, fps drops will be less noticeable. So it was a pretty big win.
The root of the upgrade is that we now use physics for everything flight related. This means the ship handling will feel slightly different and may be a bit foreign at first. The ship banking used to be controlled by a forced rotation over time that overrode physics (this lead to some nasty problems we will discuss below as well.) This is why the banking could feel a bit robotic, because it was. Now we use some crazy vector math to handle the banking with physics forces.
From your perspective:
Some ships will bank more quickly and others more slowly than before. Since the banking is using real physics the shape along the spine of the ship matters. It takes very little force to rotate a pencil along its length, but a lot more to rotate something with wings sticking out from the center line.
Root core placement matters. This is where the physics is centered (somewhat) So if you put the root core up front you can make turns that can slide out the tail end on fast turns (this feels pretty good) Experiment with a placement you like.
Ships now nose down or up on turns. Ship pitch rotation is no longer locked, so on turns they look a lot more dynamic.
One extremely awesome side effect is that ramming and collisions look fantastic. If you see an arena event with the Krule Intention ship, try it out and you will see what the new physics can do.
Extra physics info for nerds:
So physics and the frame rate update at different speeds. This means that physics needs to interpolate between drawn frames to look smooth. Now when we were doing the robotic banking, it was fighting this interpolation because we were forcibly changing the physics all the time. This lead to a “tick” it was really fast and you may have never noticed it, but you probably heard it (ears are better at picking this stuff up) So if you did a high speed turn in the past your engine sound would kind of warble. That warble was the sound of the physics being reset dozens of times per second. Tick Tick Tick. Drove us nuts but we didn't know what it was until we fixed it. Now the engines hum instead of yodel.
At high frame rates the visual tick became visible. The camera is fixed to the ship, so the ship itself never ticked as it rotated because the camera ticked with it, however the entire rest of the environment (aside from the skybox) WOULD tick since the actual thing ticking was the ship with the camera attached. These subtle little tick tick tick when looking at asteroids and turning... All fixed.
Sound and flight are a lot more smooth now. We like smooth.
Missile Upgrades:
The missiles have come up a lot on the forums recently as not being viable, and we agree, so we set out to fix that.
Missiles now shoot twice as often, but do half damage (dps is unchanged)
Missiles get a 3 second point defense buffer before being lockable. This prevents them being popped while next to the parent ship.
Flak cannons now work like flak cannons and are not 100% effective within the flak cloud. Some missiles will make it through the shrapnel, others will be damaged, others destroyed. Expect around 50% to survive with some remaining level of health.
Missiles, Torpedoes, and Warheads have a short warm up time before being fired while in initial formation with the mothership (to prevent friendly fire accidents)
Missiles, Torpedoes, and Warheads have 50% more health.
Ion Warhead clouds now have a 1 second lifespan but do 2x damage. This makes them the shield killers they are meant to be.
Root Core Hot Swap:
In the inventory level, you can now re-position the root core without disassembling your entire ship. Right click the root core, then right click a sub core where you would like to place it.
Please report any anomalies with this. The code to make this work is really fiddly, but we figured the convenience to the player outweighed insanity of writing it.
Fighter Energy Consumption:
In the unending battle to make fighter fun but not overly epic compared to other weapons, we have adjusted their power consumption to only consume while the fighters themselves are actively trying to kill something. This brings them back into line with the power consumption of other weapons systems.
Insane Difficulty:
Its back and less fair than ever. This difficulty mode is about pain, and please do not try this mode with less than 50 hours of experience. It will hurt you.
Details:
AI does 2X damage.
You do 0.5X damage.
AI levels MUCH more quickly. You can still out pace them, but barely. They get a base of 97.5% of your experience. Expect the AI to stay ahead of you for a good long while.
Zombie provinces can now have 2X as many zombies. They will vacuum factions to death.
Zombies will do 2X damage (that is 4X total... there's some hard zombies)
Outside of the difficulty slider there are 73 other sliders which are not connected that you can use to inflict pain on yourself.
You have been warned...
Note: Insane mode is still in the works so there is not achievement for it yet, but there probably will be someday once we know it is settled and evil enough.
Extended Core Modes:
The physics improvements above have had the side effect of making the long awaited extended core modes possible. They do eat a fair share of CPU so keep that in mind, and the story will still use the good old 15, but if you want bigger ships, they have arrived...
Note: this applies to the whole galaxy. All captains get the extra cores.
There are 6 modes:
Default: normal progression (15 cores total)
3 Early: Your starter ship will now have 6 cores instead of 3, normal progression. (18 total)
3 Late: This extends the end game allowing cores to be added further along in the level tree (18 total)
6 Early: Start with a 9 core ship. (21 total)
6 Late: Greatly extend the end game core perk hunt. (21 total)
3 Early and 3 Late: This one starts you bigger and ends you bigger, and is quite fun. (21 total)
Why the odd number MinMax? 21? What you smokin?
The reason for 15, 18, and 21 is to allow 3 X N brick shapes for synergies without wasted dangly bits. We hate dangly bits...
Super Sandbox Sliders:
So, there are now 73 sandbox sliders, and with great power comes great responsibility. Awesome new modes are at your finger tips, but it is also possible to make a horrible untuned mess. Try for the first option, and please don't blame us for the second.
To help with this, we have made a few pre-built game modes using the sliders to act as helper examples for your own tuning templates.
Game Modes:
Default: Good old default. This is what the story uses.
All Unlocked: If you want it all and you want it now, well this is for you.
Epic War: Brutal marathon conquest.
Rising Star: Carve out an Empire... Somehow.
Hidden Menace: While bandits rule, dankness looms...
For most players the game modes above will be a great starting point and will add tonnes of replayability.
For those of you who like to get your hands dirty, read on...
Advanced Mode:
When you select a game mode, you can inspect the sliders below in the advanced section to see what they did. This allows you to use a game mode as a starting point and then tweak it however you want.
Once you have the sliders where you want, you can save them and that will become your new sandbox default when loading the menu. There are ways to save multiple tuning files but more on that later...
Tuning Categories:
Starmap Setup: These build the galaxy and cannot be changed after generation. These are very powerful and define things like the levelup mechanics and faction spread, the guts of how the galaxy will play out.
Note: the rest of the sliders can be changed in game at any time.
Starmap Meta: This is how the metagame works. How many systems are needed to make part sizes, how many perks you can pick from on levelup, the levelup speed.
Combat: This one is really powerful, and it is the reason alt-F8 exists. You can change darn near everything about combat in here, live. Expect to spend a good while fiddling in here.
Zombie War: How strong is the infection and how hard is it to overcome.
Resources: Feast or famine it is up to you.
Raids: Adjust the power, effectiveness, and frequency of raids.
Cloaking: Tune the cloaking mechanics to your liking
Misc: This is a little bit of everything else that doesn't fit in a category. There are some cool things in there like determining how much rez parts and goons consume, if any.
Important notes:
In sandbox mode we try not to lock you down, so if a tunable won't break the game we let you tune it while the sandbox is running. If you made a bad choice, and that choice wasn't used to generate the galaxy, just change it :)
To access tunables while the game is running look in the options menu (not available in story mode)
Also if you are tuning ships, you can press Alt-F8 to bring up the menu more quickly.
We also allow you to save your own tuning table. Each time you load the sandbox menu it will default to your saved tunings.
Note: You can even share these tuning files with friends (if you rename them they will appear in the pre-defined tuning lists at the top of the sandbox menu)
Located here: C:\Users\MinMax\AppData\LocalLow\MinMax Games\SPAZ 2\Cloud\Tunables
Just rename MyTunables to something else and it will appear in the game modes menu. The hope is to someday set these via workshop, but there is no reason people can't share them themselves for now.
The Milky Colossus:
Saved the best for last. It is finally here! The giant map! Not much more to say than that. Go, explore, have a new adventure.
Well there is a tiny bit more to say. So the new map is huge and has 1 week of testing. We think it all works, but it is huge and has 1 week of testing. If you see anomalies, please let us know. Did we mention that it is huge and has 1 week of testing?
Other Fixes and Changes:
Fixed issue with controller input scaling with frame rate. Now rates are constant like with the mouse.
Fixed issue where if you press escape on the select difficulty menu while already in a game it would revert to the galaxy creation screen.
Zombies should respawn with a full compliment of 0 star parts. on hard zombies do 33% bonus damage now (offsets their poor parts) on insane 2x.
Fixed a bug where in rare cases a save could become corrupted due to a loading timing issue and subsequent save. Sprung up in V 0.9.0.
Fixed sound persistence issue where too many looping audio sounds were active on the starmap after loading from a combat instance. Got some CPU back on starmap.
Ai captains start with more real parts.
In inventory level the firing arcs are now easier to test since guns will always fire instead of only firing if they can hit something.
Zombies get strike craft at zombie starbases. Keeps them threat relevant.
Zombies levelup more aggressively. To keep them closer to the top of the heap.
Zombies wont attack transports on easy and normal, but will on hard and insane.
Fixed capital transports returning to parent station after they are attacked.
Fixed Join my faction and kick from faction not appearing when an Ai captain is in battle
Bandit hive interaction text show when they are blocked by battle to avoid confusion as to why the fight button is inactive.
Fixed demand surrender not showing why the option is disabled in some cases.
Fix for beeping warning sound going off when a missile wants to fire in battlwagon mode.
Added a frame limiter for then Vsync off. 30,60,90,120,144 selectable.
Fixed it such that games with zombies deactivated will not spawn zombie roids in missions.
Going Forward:
We expect a few hotfixes to come out as a result of all the changes in this build, but we are on deck to get them out as quickly as possible.
While I am working on script optimization, and an endless mode for the zombie infection, Richard will be exploring our big stretch goal, VR. He will likely make a separate post talking about that in the near future.
Long term the major goals left are VR, Voice Acting and Localization. Beyond that there is the ongoing support of the new systems, bug fixing, tuning, and the addition of features as they are needed or just sound really cool.
Thanks again for your support and great ideas!
Andrew (Blorf) and Richard (Narlak)
V 0.9.0 The Merging Is Complete. (Engine Upgrade)
Hi All,
We have finished upgrading from Unity 5.0.4 to Unity 5.4.4. The last time we upgraded the engine was before we entered early access. This is a huge change and is the first major SPAZ 2 engine update that you will have been exposed to.
The main reason to upgrade the engine was to stay compliant with the ever changing operating systems and technology. The last engine version was already two years old, and we feel it is critical to stay up to date to ensure SPAZ 2 continues to work for years to come.
We tested the build as best as two people can, but there may be issues here and there. Please keep your eyes out for bugs and weird issues, and if you see them, please report them on the bug forums here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/252470/discussions/2/
So this update isn't about new stuff, in fact ideally the game looks and plays identically to v 0.8.8. The goal was to get everything working as it was in v0.8.8 and then build on that foundation for the rest of the project. Since gameplay didn't change between v 0.8.8 and v0.9.0 we can roll back to v0.8.8 without breaking saves. We want to ensure that we don't disrupt peoples' progress.
First a note about dual monitor setups:
So between Unity 5.0.4 and Unity 5.4.4 somewhere monitor 0 and 1 became swapped in the engine. What this means is that your monitors may be swapped next time you play. We tried to make this as painless to fix as possible and have added an in game display switcher to the Display Menu.
Beyond that, we also detect if you have dual monitors and place a one time helper button on the main menu to fix the problem. The big yellow button will go away as soon as you start a game, and it will never return. We wanted to make sure people wouldn't be frustrated by the unintended swap.
Loading/Spawning Performance Improvements:
As discussed in the v0.8.8 announcement, multiplayer wasn't going to work. See: https://steamcommunity.com/games/252470/announcements/detail/240217815948540606
Although experimenting and trying multiple methods to bring multiplayer online ate most of the time between v0.8.7 and v0.9.0, we were able to make some improvements. Also, again, thank you all for your amazing understanding and kindness about this.
After v0.8.8 we began to remove the Unity 4 legacy networking hooks from the game (took 3 days, there were tons). This means that all of our spawning routines and level loading now flow directly from function calls instead of traveling through a virtual network layer and object lookup system before reaching their eventual destinations.
What this means to you... Speed. You should notice that there is much less hitching when ships spawn and level spawning should be really fast. Everything is essentially on a direct pipe now.
DirectX11 Support:
SPAZ 2 is now DX11 capable. If your card only runs DX9, don't worry, the game will default to DX9 if DX11 is not present.
People with DirectX11 capable video cards can expect frame rate improvements. Visuals wise, the game should hopefully look identical, just faster.
There were rendering improvements for everyone across the board, especially on the map due to some shader changes.
Please report any rendering issues you see. We tried to catch em all, but there is a lot of stuff out there.
Camera input standardized:
We found a really odd bug that has been around forever and fixed it. It turns out when vysnc was off and frame rate was really high in some cases, like the ship assembly level because there is almost nothing in there, the mouse input would slow way down. What was happening was the mouse input was being divided by the frame speed. This meant higher frame rates, slower mouse.
What this also meant was lower frame rates, faster mouse. The mouse input changing based on frame rate is just bad so we fixed it.
Since we played with vsync on we never noticed the issue until now.
Now at low and high frame rates the mouse input should be consistent.
What this means to you: You may need to readjust your mouse sensitivity, but once you adjust it, it will be consistent.
The Starmap Background:
This was an artistic change that would not effect save games, so we let this one in. The Starmap now has a cool 3D background. It adds a lot of depth to the Starmap... Badum tish... I will see myself out.
Going Forward:
The next version will focus on the sandbox and improving tuning and replaybility.
We hope to release a large set of game mutators for the sandbox.
We want to make missile builds more viable.
A new map for the Starmap!
A first crack at a really hard insane difficulty mode for experts.
Beyond that there will be a focus on physics and script performance improvements. Rendering wise we probably have done all that can be done, but we think we can squeak out some more frame rate by taking a bit more load off the CPU. Never hurts to try anyhow.
Thanks everyone!
Andrew (Blorf) and Richard (Narlak)
V0.8.8 Progress Update. Some Bad News.
It has been a hard month upgrading from Unity 5.0.4 to 5.4.4 and there have been some really unexpected road bumps. We still aren't fully 5.4.4 ready, but one thing has become clear, the Arena multiplayer isn't going to work.
Between Unity 4 and 5.1 Unity's multiplayer backend fundamentally changed, but we always thought we could transpose our multiplayer code into the new system without too much difficulty. But we can tell you after 4 weeks hard at it, we have made no progress... at all.
We have tried four new multiplayer solutions as well as made a good try to resuscitate the legacy networking from Unity 4 but at this point we feel that the mounting wasted time and dead ends are really hurting development progress.
There has been considerable interest in a coop multiplayer mode. In the past we have posted why that would not be possible, as it would be like running a 300 player server on a local machine. So coop multiplayer wasn't part of the plan, but Arena was...
The Arena multiplayer which we had hoped to deliver was at least something, but so far it has received very limited interest on the forums. So now we have hit this multiplayer upgrade road block and we need to make a hard decision.
Do we keep pressing ahead on Arena multiplayer which likely will only have a small following and will take many more months than expected, or do we spend that time making the single player better. We think it is more important to make the game better.
We have tried to make it very clear on the store page that in its current form SPAZ 2 is a single player game and we requested that people not purchase the game for multiplayer features not yet implemented, but we know many of you are still going to be quite disappointed.
First of all, we are very sorry and embarrassed at this failure to deliver on our part. We let our enthusiasm get ahead of us.
Secondly, we have contacted Steam and have asked them remove the two week since purchase time requirement for refunds. We are still waiting to hear back from Steam about this, but it should be possible. So if you picked up SPAZ 2 early and sat on it waiting for multiplayer, and didn't elapse the two hour playtime limit, you should be able to refund it soon.
EDIT: Update from Steam: Their system is unable to remove the automated 2 week ownership time limit, but our Steam contact has kindly offered to handle the refund requests by hand. If you meet the refund requirements above and want a refund, please contact us at contact@spazgame.com with a link to your Steam profile, and we will forward your link to our contact for a manual refund.
Above Refund Offer Available Until July 16 2017, need an end date else we will be pinging our Steam contact forever.
Thirdly, we plan to use the time we recover to double down on content and replayability. We can get to these features sooner now and make them bigger. We are going to build new maps for the sandbox mode, release an greatly expanded set of sandbox gameplay mutators, add a much more difficult insane difficulty level, and we will focus on making the end game more challenging once you have that massive battleship.
We hope that this will in some way make up for our failure with the multiplayer Arena mode.
Currently we are still working on the upgrade to Unity 5.4.4 and it will feature DirectX 11 support as well as quite a bit of rendering optimization. Removal of the legacy networking hooks should also lead to CPU performance recovery. Once that is ready, we will dive back into work on the single player campaign at full speed to make SPAZ 2 the best it can be.
Thank you for your support and understanding
Andrew (Blorf) and Richard (Narlak)
V0.8.6 The New Year Update
Hi All,
Well we have been back at it for the last couple of weeks and it is time to push a new build :) It was great to have a little time with our families over the holidays, and thanks very much to you all for being understanding about that too. We appreciate it!
The goal of 0.8.6 was to tie up the smaller loose ends before we did our big 0.9 engine and multiplayer push. 0.8.6 is by no means the end of work on the single player, but for the next little while our focus will be on getting the engine upgraded to Unity 5.5+ (we are running v5.01 right now) and then to start on the multiplayer game modes. So single player will likely not change for a couple of months as we delve into these new major tasks.
There may end up being an experimental build to opt into as we do the engine changes and very likely for the multiplayer changes so stay tuned for that too.
Fighter Changes
Fighters have been getting a lot of love in the last few builds, and now we think that we are zeroing in on something really workable for them. One of the big issues that has come up in the forums, and our meetings, was how fighters didn't work according to the rules of the other weapon systems.
So fighters took no energy to use and were also able to attack during the reload cycle of the mothership, which is meant to be a battle lull for evasion and positioning. This meant that fighters were essentially a damage over time weapon that was free to use.
A lot of cool ideas have swirled around the forums on how to deal with this, and what we settled on was to make fighter bays consume a small amount of power over time.
This was really important because it works with the next piece of the puzzle.
Fighters return to their hangars and reload when the mothership reloads. So when the mothership reloads, fighters will not be fighting and will instead repair and rearm.
The power consumption over time here is important because a 100% carrier build would never need to reload therefore their fighters could still be fielded forever. Now carriers need to be concerned about power if they want to keep their fighters fighting for as long as possible.
Another fairly major change was the conversion of Shooter fighters to Defender fighters. So there was a lot of discussion on wanting to manage fighter roles, but instead of adding even more interface, we decided to take the underutilized Shooter fighters and convert them into dedicated Defender fighters with a good stats boost.
So if you want fighters that stick with your mothership and form a fighter screen, you choose Defenders. Otherwise, choose other fighter types, and they will kill whatever they find in range, while using your targeting and contextual actions to guide them as well. Defenders will attack enemy ships within their close range and since they are stronger than zappers, they are a good close range choice as well.
Details:
- Shooter fighters converted to defensive fighters that protect their parent ship.
- Defenders 50% more health
- Defenders 50% more weapon range
- Defender damage up 20%
- Fighters do not target exploding ships anymore
- Fighter better at picking secondary targets as primary targets become invalid
- Fighter bays consume a small amount of capacitor power continually
- Fighters come home and dock to repair and rearm while the mothership is in reload mode. This prevents them from creating constant pressure (damage over time) to an enemy ship and gets them back being part of the attack vs. reload cycle like with other weapons.
- Fighter ammo capacity doubled. Now that they are part of reload mechanic, they can stay out a lot longer.
- Fighters launch 50% faster
- Staggered the fighter spawn rates to make the spawn audio not stack
Disbanding Starbases
We have added the ability to disband a starbase now. There was a good post on the forums outlining the reasons why players would want this, and we agreed, so here it is.
The main use is to change the focus of a Starbase, so making the Starbase root be a Militia core for example may be something you want to do to take advantage of the shield bonuses.
In other cases, you may want to clear some space for another faction to grow.
Details:
- Added Disband Starbase button to the Assign Starbase menu.
- Scrap refund (50%) for disbanded starbases
- No disbanding starbases that are waiting for battles.
Capital Transports for All!
Another fairly common topic has been the Capital Transport and how inadequate it was for large empires. We were considering having one transport per 5 provinces, but in the end settled on actually giving each province its own Capital Transport. So this means you will see more of them on the map, and if you see one, it will be full of taxes.
So now you don't need to manage sending them to the right bases at the right times. You don't need to worry about them making stupid decisions on which taxes to pick up either. They launch on a schedule now and you just wait to collect all the juicy taxes.
When/If you start your game in progress, don't be alarmed if you see a large amount of Capital transports incoming on the capital. All the provinces will send theirs right away but will soon settle into a schedule and they will arrive over time instead of in bursts.
Details:
- Every starbase now has its own Capital Transport.
Protecting The Loot
We all hate is when some captain ninjas out loot from beneath us. Now there are a couple ways to prevent this.
The first one is the "Get Lost!" button. You need to be in contact with another captain to use it though, because bullying from across the galaxy isn't that threatening.
If your threat is high enough, the other captain will leave the current province for 3 minutes of starmap time (this is a long time) But to prevent abuse, you can only tell a captain to leave one province at a time. Telling a captain to "Get Lost!" has a much lower relations hit than attacking them.
The other way to keep people out of your loot is now to fight them. Battle circles now block scavenge nodes and resource nodes. This means that if you are fighting someone, no other captain can come and sneak off with the loot anymore. So if you see a node you can't harvest and there is a battle nearby, that is why.
Details:
- Added Get Lost Button
- Battle circles now block resource harvesting from nodes
War and Peace
We have upgraded the faction leader logic to do a better job of picking the initial wars when a new game starts. So before initial wars were random, which lead to factions across the galaxy from each other being at war. This was a pretty useless war since the faction members rarely came into contact. Instead, we now ensure that initial wars require border contact. This means that some factions may start with no wars if they are isolated, but as they grow, they will come into contact with other faction borders and wars will happen as they already naturally do.
Peace has also become a little more logical as well. So as factions are separated, they will be more likely to declare peace if their borders are no longer in contact.
Details:
- AI much better at picking initial wars on new game start. Should lead to more logical border conflicts.
- When faction borders do not touch for a while, peace treaties will be more likely.
And the Rest...
What is left was mostly fixes and quality of life stuff that we wanted to get to before we jumped into the engine upgrade/multiplayer. Since we will be away from single player likely for a couple of months we wanted to get these quick fixes in. There are still a couple pages of single player issues we want to deal with before v1.0 but the issues below were either really quick fixes or good bang for the buck type things.
Details:
- Fixed rare captain stuck at starbase case.
- Fixed case where time would progress when not moving on load
- Fixed prev / next ship both going to next ship.
- Fixed rare Miniguns and Flak ignore incoming missiles after parent ship was destroyed.
- Fixed pop in fighter engine sounds on spawn.
- Fixed rare case where ships would move away from the center of the instance trying to track to their warp in start position instead of end position.
- Fixed stores generating parts with multiple small hangars vs. one larger and better hangar. Still possible to add small hangars via the catalog part constructor if you are a weirdo.
- Fixed particle hose continuing to fire after being broken off
- Fixed automated part recovery after battles for: Border Raids, Bandit Swarms, Mining Ops, and “The Signal” mission.
- Fixed upgrading starbases adding scrap to the stockpile.
- Fixed tooltips for slider bars not showing up in mouse mode.
- Fixed bug where the traits for the player character were being shown. We can't read your mind... yet.
- Fixed hot swapping parts losing their icon.
- Fixed case where Start a Raid side objective could not be completed.
- Target lock indicator always available, even without missiles since strike craft and fighters look at it for targeting cues.
- AI faction leaders better at recruiting captains so their factions become more full.
- The loot screen won't be pushed after a battle when there is no loot.
- Profiles can be deleted in the Change Profile menu now (if they are not currently active)
- When exit the trade window with another captain, they will reconfigure their ship with the parts you traded them if they are better than their current parts (good for wingmen and helping out faction members)
- More accurate analog slider when using controller
- Hold SHIFT for slow sliders for keyboard users
- The catalog weapon toggles are more clear overall
- Added a toggle all weapons button for catalog
- Some side objectives now have a “select” instead of a “move to” button when you do not need to be in physical contact to complete them
- Command point perk counting fixed
On to v0.9.0!
Starting Monday (assuming v0.8.6 is all good) we will begin the large task of upgrading Unity from v5.01 to v5.5+. This will be a major task as we expect it to take up to a month due to the amount of game objects that will need to be changed. Literally thousands of them will have now defunct components on them and they will need to be rejigged to the new multiplayer back end.
Probably a week before the official release of v0.9.0 we will open up an experimental branch for people to test out. This will just be the upgraded engine without multiplayer yet, but it will need some testing because there will be over a year of Unity changes in the new engine and some things are sure to go awry over a time span like that.
Once we are happy that v0.9.0 is stable and working just like v0.8.6, but with the upgraded engine, we will release that build and start multiplayer work.
There will be more details on the multiplayer plans as part of the release notes for the Unity v5.5 engine upgrade. Learning what Unity v5.5 can do may guide some of our multiplayer design, so it is best to wait on that until we see v5.5 alive and running the game.
Thanks everyone for your continued support!
Andrew (Blorf) and Richard(Narlak)
V0.8.4 Brain Surgery!
Hi all,
Here's what we have been working on for the last couple of weeks. We have been trying to tie up as many loose ends as possible before we make the engine upgrade to support multiplayer in v0.9.0. We hope you like it!
Escape Pod Interactions:
You can now intercept escape pods on the starmap and then do terrible things to them. Messing with escape pods is considered taboo in the galaxy, so expect any witnesses to be unhappy about your pod fishing.
Re-education (lobotomy) - Costs more scrap the higher level the enemy captain
- Gives the captain the “passive” trait (lobotomy)
- Captain loses all hostile traits.
- Resets the relations to 0
- Only seen in neighboring provinces, so do somewhere secluded
- Good way to install a leader who is neutral toward you (will also be a passive leader)
- Medium relations hit.
Execution - Is free!
- A new low level captain with a blank slate will spawn elsewhere in the galaxy, same face different captain. (prevents depopulation)
- If the captain was a faction leader that hated you, this can improve faction relations if the new leader doesn't hate you as much.
- Capital will move to the new leader's starbase if you kill the leader.
- Only seen in neighboring provinces, so do somewhere secluded
- Good way to get revenge and be rid of some troublesome captain forever.
- High relations hit
Cure - Converts a zombie back to being human for a lot of rez
- Everyone in the galaxy likes this. (everyone hears about it)
- Cured captain is very happy with you
- Vaccinated against re-infection for a while (3 starmap minutes)
Faction Neutralization:
When faction members are defeated in battle, if there are no remaining starbases from their faction, they will become neutral. This means that you can now wipe out a faction. Kill the starbases, then kill the captains so they can't respawn into the faction.
Starbase Bounty Increase:
Starbase bounties were far too low, allowing players to wipe out empires far too easily late game simply by using scrap. You can still do it, but it will now be a lot more expensive so you will need to strategize more in how you spend.
The minimum starbase bounty is calculated based on the owner's tech level and the starbase's size.
The Chipper!
We have added what we call the chipper on the inventory screen. You access the screen from the starmap in the bottom button array.
If you want to be rid of parts and don't want to drag them to a starbase to sell, you can chip them on the spot. You will get 50% of the scrap price that you would have gotten at a starbase, so hauling is better. But if you don't want to haul, and don't want the parts to weigh you down, then chip em and make your own scrap.
Select the parts that you want to chip and transfer them to the other side of the inventory screen. There you can either chip them, or drop them into space as before as a scavenge field (good way to get pursuers off your back sometimes, especially zombies)
Infected parts are special, since they have zombie goo all over them, they give you Rez instead of scrap when chipped. So now you need to decide if you want to clean that infected part, or convert it to some much needed Rez.
The Disinfector
When we added the chipper, we also added a much simpler way to clean your stored parts. The Disinfector works just like the chipper, but in this case, you can transfer your stored infected parts and then disinfect them by spending goons. This means you no longer need to attach a part to your ship to clean it of infection.
Battle Wagon Logic Upgrade:
We have changed Battle Wagon's target acquisition logic based on used feedback. So how it works now is that Battle Wagon's guns will prioritize shooting at your contextual target (E), then your locked target, and then anything it can possibly hit.
So Battle Wagons tries first to kill what you told your fleet to kill, then it will try to kill whatever you may be looking or shooting at yourself, then it will scan for anything it can hit.
The reason this works so well is that if you are actively shooting, you override Battle Wagon mode so you will always be hitting what you want if you are pressing the fire button.
A neat side effect of this new system is also that Battle Wagon can now shoot asteroids and junk if you target them with (E).
The Fighter Swarm:
Fighters now work like a swarm of angry bees and instead of needing to be directed, fighters will now seek and destroy enemies within their attack radius. Their target acquisition also takes hints similar to Battle Wagon. So fighters will prioritize your E target, then whatever you are pointing at, and then anything in range.
Some effects are that you no longer "need" to use E to send fighters after enemy ships, which will then allow you to keep your Carrier strike craft our of weapons' range more easily.
If there is no (E) target, fighters will automagically sweep to whatever you are shooting at. So if you start shooting at a ship or an enemy strike craft, you will notice your swarm of angry little bees swarming to that target naturally as well.
Mining Op Upgrades
So the Mining Op was underwhelming resource wise vs. time required to mine. We are hoping these new changes will make mining op's more of a treat to try when you see one pop up.
- There are double the resource rocks in the Mining Op now.
- Each resource rock contains double the amount of Rez.
- We added a second tractor beam to the mothership to make pickup faster.
- Rez drops from rocks come in larger denominations, now in 1,2,5,10 (was 2,5)
- Resource rocks won't drop explosive wisps anymore (so you don't risk breaking the rogue miner crates, causing an unwanted battle.
Threat Levels and Strike Craft
Strike craft will now play their proper role in threat level calculations. Large ones in particular will make a big difference, and now the threat levels should be much more reasonable, at least when it comes to a fleet's strike craft factoring in.
Final Battle Readiness:
We noticed a reoccurring problem with players not realizing when the final battle was ready to start, or not knowing what they had to do to start the final battle. We have made this a lot more explicit. Now when the final battle is ready the helper tip tells the player to kill the capital base, there is a callout indicating readiness (also in sandbox which had nothing)
But most importantly we have changed the war meter once the final battle is ready. Once you achieve the threshold for the final battle, the war meter will stop counting and will instead tell you to go fight.
Prestige Command Points
A great player suggestion came up to add command points to the prestige system, so we did. Command points are now infinitely leveling. This means that given a high enough level, you could now field four large strike craft. Prestige command point levels will give you 2 points instead of the usual 8 for main levelups.
Other Tweaks and Fixes:
- Fixed stash showing values with markup
- Fixed long profile names warping in trade window
- Torpedoes and Bombs (and all missiles) got a health boost. Bombs and torps got a bigger health boost.
- Flak cannon damage down 20%
- AI more willing to accept peace if losing badly in a war
- Fix for autosaves being blocked for 15 seconds after a battle.
- Autosaving is forced to happen on game exit regardless of timing of last autosave.
- Accept/Decline on quit to main menu and quit to desktop.
- Large Bounty Hunter engine received a dispenser slot (hangars/krule)
- Fix for possible control lockout when restarting a single player game from in game.
- Increased medium bandit hive threat from 35->40
- Increased large bandit hive threat from 45->55
- Special twiddling of phase 2 final fight ships if > 11 cores. Was causing unwinnable scenarios.
- Fix for non progression if complete final mission without starting a faction
- Small strike craft health + armor up 50%
- Hammerhead has a higher banking angle when turning.
- Clear to spine, and clear ship in the inventory menu don't make a noise anymore
- The following mothership parts now support small turreted weapons.
- Science --Large Nose: Flat Deck
- Civilian -- Large Engine: Camel Back
- Militia-- Large Engine: Horizon Back
- Miners -- Large Nose: Foundry
- Hunter -- Large Nose: Sting Nose
- Added Ion barrels to the final mission in cease players need some extra shield popping potential.
- The whole reticle turns red when a target is in range now, to make it more obvious.
- Player core in scan view will show both total ship stats and core stats.
- Lots of improvement with the controller in menus
- Zombie Capital threat now shows as ??? since it is outside the usual threat assessment system and also MYSTERY wooooh...
Moving Forward
Next, we will be working on v0.8.5 which contains mostly tuning and bug fixing tasks to get us solid for our extended work on v0.9.0.
Version 0.9.0 will be the big engine upgrade and multiplayer rewrite required for Unity 5.5 (We are currently on v0.5.0.2)
Once we upgrade the engine, we will need to rewrite our multiplayer back end to comply with the major multiplayer changes in Unity since v5.1. That upgrade will take us offline for a while, but we will have more details upon the release of 0.8.5.
We don't expect that it v0.8.5 will be ready before January due to us taking a little time off to be with our families over the holidays. We will be pushing fixes to v0.8.4 though as needed.
We look forward to seeing you all again in 2017!
Andrew (Blorf) and Ricard (Narlak)
V0.8.0 Released! (Say Hello To My Little Friends)
Hi Everyone,
We have just released v0.8.0 and it is our biggest one yet. There are quite a few major changes in this update. Lets dig into the details.
The Video
This update was huge. It deserved a video, and here it is. Please give it a watch to provide context to what you will read below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUz1HE2IdYs
Configurable Strike Craft and Hangar System
This one was a major player request. People wanted strike craft to matter more and be configurable. We heard you and here is what we did.
The Hangar System
The mothership now contains up to 4 hangars (start with 2, unlock 2 more.) These hangars can be used to build multiples of any strike craft that you can afford, up to the command point maximum. The hangar menu has replaced the strike craft menu.
Command Points
Command points dictate how many total strike craft you can build. Different sized strike craft consume different numbers of command points. So command points dictate your strike craft reserve while hangars dictate how many you have active at a time.
Command points are increased through the perk system.
Hull Selection
Once you select a hangar, you can then select the hull to place in that hangar. Hulls are unlocked through combat using a blueprint system similar to SPAZ 1.
Weapon Selection
Once you select a hull, you select the weapons for that hull. All the strike craft have had their weapon mounts totally redone. Each strike craft has its own unique set of mounts and it is up to you to pick the mount config that best suits the weapons that you want on the strike craft.
The Blueprint System
Its back! So now when you kill a strike craft there is a chance that a blueprint will drop. These blueprints first unlock the strike craft as a hull that you can build, but over time, they are used to improve the hull as well.
So as you pick up blueprints, your strike craft hulls will gain stars which boost their stats significantly. As strike craft get more stars, blueprints for those hulls drop less frequently since they are getting harder and harder to improve upon.
If you had a game in progress, we estimate what your blueprint progress should have been, so you don't need to restart unless you want to.
New Strike Craft Sizes/Features
Strike craft now come in three sizes.
Small
These are the strike craft that you are used to. They drive their weapons off of their reactor (so no reloading) and don't have shields. They are very fast and pack quite a bit more punch than they used to. They are also pretty inexpensive so are great if you are on a budget or want to flood wave after wave at an enemy.
Medium
These strike craft are quite a bit larger than the smalls, and some of our old craft have been scaled up to fit this new role. They can field medium sized weapons but are still able to drive them off their reactors (this means no reloading.) The medium strike craft also have weak shields. Mediums can do quite a bit of damage but can't soak nearly as much as their bigger more expensive siblings.
Large
These strike craft are behemoths and can take on smaller motherships by themselves. They use large sized weapons and as such also need to use a reactor and capacitor combo like a mothership. This means that they need to reload and sometimes cannot fire or boost their shields, just like a mothership. By the time you face these strike craft, your mothership better be of a decent size or they will take you apart. Large strike craft have strong shields and can soak a lot of damage.
Junk Class
There are three scrap class strike craft. One for each size class. These are always unlocked and are cheaper than their non Junk counterparts. They also take fewer command points to field, so are sometimes a good option if you need strike craft to distract an enemy. They also get blueprint upgrades and can become quite powerful.
8 New Strike Craft!
The new strike craft size system meant we needed some new strike craft. There are 6 new larges, 1 new medium, and 1 new small.
The Short Bus (Small/Junk) Our beloved bus is back from SPAZ 1. This is the cheapest strike craft in the game and a great bullet sponge.
The Mule (Medium/Junk) Also making a return from SPAZ 1 is the Mule, the old mining ship. It fields two small launchers and 2 medium turrets.
The Freighter (Large/Junk) Another SPAZ 1 alumni. This ship is bristling with small turrets and small launchers.
The Star Spot (Large) You may recognize this as well from SPAZ. It is a heavily modified Sun Spot, turned on its side. 4 omni turrets for defense as well as a large turret and large dispenser mount.
The Gold Digger (Large) This is a new beast. It is a heavy carrier capable of carrying two large fighter hangars (or Krules if you roll that way) Up front it has 2 omni cannons and there are 2 small turrets in the back.
The Shatter (Large) The Shatter is the Bounty Hunter's newest strike craft. It supports 4 medium launchers and 2 medium turrets. It is a dedicated launcher platform with a couple of defensive turrets for anyone getting to close.
The Hammerhead (Large) Most peoples' favorite ship from SPAZ 1. We had to bring it back. It is a turreted monster as it always was. Two large turrets in the front, and 2 medium turrets in the back. It is just a big pile of nasty.
The Star Cruiser (Large) You can't have a Hammerhead without a Star Cruiser. So it is back too :) The Star cruiser is the only strike craft capable of fielding warheads, and two of them at that. It also supports two small launchers (put fighters in there) and there are two turrets mainly for point defense.
And the Rest All the strike craft have had their weapon mounts/stats overhauled as well, so none of them got away without an upgrade. Some also got a size upgrade. The Triglave for example is now a lot bigger and beefier.
Combat Hangar Management
In Combat you can now use the Tactics Panel (TAB) to call in your strike craft.
Hangars have two modes now, auto deploy and manual deploy. If you set your hangars to manual deploy, then in combat you have total control of when your strike craft arrive on the scene. This can allow you to sweep enemy strike craft from the level and then call in your fleet when you are ready to concentrate on the enemy mothership.
Lots of New Weapons
While we were working on the strike craft upgrade, we realized that some mount types did not have enough weapon variety to make the certain strike craft viable/interesting to configure. This plus a few beers lead to a burst of new weapons, because instead of just solving the problem we decided to go to town a little bit. Weapons are fun to build.
The Particle Hose
We didn't have an Uzi, now we do :) That was pretty much the conversation there. It is a really fun bullet hose style weapon. The bullets do not do much damage individually, but there are a whole lot of bullets. The particle hose is a medium sized weapon so it will only appear on medium and large parts.
Micro Hangars
We really wanted to support people having fighters earlier on in the game. Some people love fighters, so holding them back until large parts appeared wasn't fair. So...
There are three new micro hangars. Small launcher mounts can now fit a tiny hangar that holds two zappers. Medium launcher mounts can hold a hanger that holds 4 zappers or shooter fighters as well.
The Flak Cannon!
It has finally arrived, four years too late for SPAZ 1, but it is here. We now have a turreted version of point defense to complement the minigun. Flak cannons are long range defense systems that will try to pop slow moving targets at a distance. They create a large cloud of flak and can sometimes pop multiple missiles at once.
Flak cannons are not great at short range defense and the flak puffs will not explode too close to the ship as to prevent damaging themselves.
The Cloud Torpedo
The Cloud Torpedo drops ion bomblets as it flies. This serves two purposes. The bomblets fly ahead of and around the torpedo to soak up point defense fire instead of the torpedo, and those bomblets that do hit do ion damage to lower enemy shields before the torpedo impacts to wreck the hull. The Cloud Torpedo is best used at long range to give it the maximum time to deploy all of its bomblets.
The Ion Shotgun The Ion Shotgun fires long range and somewhat tightly grouped ion projectiles. Its purpose is to take down shields at range. It is a small turreted weapon so it is a great early shield popping solution. Note: The Ion shotgun fires blue (Ion) projectiles whereas regular shotguns shoot red.
The Mac Hammer It is a medium sized assault shotgun that says go away... loudly. Very high damage and high spread but with a short range.
The Plasma Dispenser Take a pulse cannon and turn it up to 11. It shoots a multitude of very slow moving and very long range explosive plasma charges. Each plasma charge also explodes on impact causing splash damage. It is a devastating weapon. It only appears on large parts and is quite rare... Thankfully.
CUSTOM ORDER PARTS
We had to capitalize that one. It is the number one requested feature that we have seen. We resisted at first because we felt that it went against the scrounging/empire building nature that we wanted to build for SPAZ 2, but SPAZ 2 is a game about building, and tying your hands is really not fair.
So... Here's how we tie your hands... Custom Order parts are expensive. The most effective way to build your ship will still be to use what is available in the stores and adapt to that. Later, once you have an empire of your own, take territory that best will produce the parts you want. That will always be best.
However, now there is a new custom order panel in the catalog. How it works is whatever you search for in the catalog, if it can be built, someone will be willing to build it for you, but at 5x the cost. late game, when you are swimming in money, this allows you to upgrade more freely, but early game you really need to think about that extra expense.
Sometimes the custom order criteria will come up blank. For example if you ask for a small wing with a chainsaw beam on it, that can't exist so it won't be built. If a custom part can be built though, it will. There are actually over 3000 part/weapon combos it has to search to determine viability of a request.
When custom ordering a part, it will always be built at the space station that has the lowest markup. This means that you will get the best price possible, and it is always delivered (there is no extra delivery charge in this case)
You can set the number of stars you want on a part as well, but it will become very expensive, very quickly.
Final Thoughts
Thanks to everyone with your patience waiting for this update as well as your great suggestions. As you can see, we hear you and we are all making SPAZ 2 better together!
For those of you with games in progress. You should not need to restart. We refunded the price of all your current strike craft as scrap so you didn't lose anything and we also tried to figure out a reasonable blueprint progress for your saves.
For everyone else. This update was major open heart surgery on the flow of the game so there may be issues, especially balance issues. We look forward to hearing from you about them and will tune/fix as quickly as possible.
Now get in there and try this new stuff out! :)
Andrew(Blorf) and Richard(Narlak)
Note: v0.8.2 now released to tune the large strike craft, also syngeries.
Better Bombers, Funky Fighters, and Realistic Ramming! v0.7.0
Hi Everyone,
It has been a busy month since the big synergy update. Richard and I both took a staggered week off before the end of summer to get some much needed rest/family time. It was great to recharge, and we are right back at it full force now. It has already been 4 months since our initial Early Access release and there have been huge improvements thanks to your suggestions and support.
The latest patch was all about tuning and fixing high priority quality of life issues. Thanks very much for your understanding on letting us prioritize this vs new features for this push. That being said, a couple of fairly major improvements happened so we decided to call them out.
Fighter Upgrade:
There was a great discussion thread about the problems with fighters and some good solutions to make them better, so we implemented them. Fighters are now a LOT more potent, but also are on a leash. This means that though their range is that of a long range weapon, and you need to be in range to use them. So more boring picking a ship apart for 30 minutes at massive long range with no threat. Get fighters in range, and they go to work, get out of range, and then return home to defend, rearm, rebuild. Bombers do quick heavy damage and then need to return to the ship to rearm, Fighters stay and fight a lot longer, but do less damage. More detail in the notes below.
Ramming Upgrade:
Another hot topic has been ramming. It was fun but overpowered. We didn't want to lose the fun, but we wanted to add a little more realistic risk to the ram. So since ramming is hull to hull impact, we wanted both hulls to take appropriate damage. This means that you as the rammer will now need to be a little more careful what you ram and with what part of your ship. Think of a part's armor as its hardness for the sake of a ram. If a hard nose, hits a soft wing, the wing takes a lot of damage and the nose not much at all. So the ramming is more part based now. Ram with your most armored parts into their least armored parts to do the most damage to them and the least to yourself.
Build Notes:
-Fighters now have limited range to prevent boring ultra long range kiting over long periods of time to take down almost any target. Instead, we want you to now fly near max weapon range and be in some danger while using the fighters, in return, fighters can now do much damage, much more in tune with other large size weapons.
-Bombers and Ion Bombers shoot twice as fast and their bombs do 4x as much damage. They have to reload more often now. Bombers now complete fast/heavy strikes, and then return to the hangar to reload.
-Bomber and Ion Bomber hangars now support 6 fighters instead of 4.
-Shooter Fighters now have 8 per hangar instead of 6.
-Shooter Fighters can now shoot 20 times before reloading (vs 10 before)
-Zapper Fighters can now shoot 25 times before reloading (vs 16 before)
-Shooters now do 3x more damage
-Zappers now do 2.5x more damage
-Decreased fighter build time from 10 seconds to 6 seconds
-Fighters much more careful about damaging parent ship.
-Fighter incidental friendly fire vs allied ships greatly reduced.
-Fighters much better at docking on fast moving ships.
-Bandit hives have 1 fewer strike craft defenders to offset the stronger fighters they now have.
-Fighters don't launch in ship building level
-Fighter bay controls don't clutter ship building level tac pan
-Ramming damages Station cores and Bandit Hives armor AND health now.
-Ramming damage lowered.
-Ramming with high armor parts now does much more damage vs low armor parts
-Ramming damage now reflected back on the rammer as well, but at a lower rate
For most effective ramming, outfit a high armor nose and hit at high speed on low armor parts like engines or wings.
-Fixed round off issue in surrender cargo menu
-Fix for a goon rounding case where it seems you have enough goons but are an arm and a nose short and thus your ship takes slight damage over time.
-If player's current faction destroyed, player now starts their own faction with their existing starbases.
-Zombie respawn pods travel 50% faster
-Fixed respawn pods moving at top speed when game loaded.
-Turned off part size rarity as a rarity factor in trading prices. (was pointless + confusing)
-Fixed fleet training mission if had broken strike craft.
-Missiles prevented from firing in ship building level
-Fixed bug where number of bounties on a captain was dictating the number of chasers.
-Max bounty chasers at any given time is 1 for easy, 2 for normal, 3 for expert.
-Added 15 second safety time after winning a battle where you wont get ganked.
-When not defending their territory, Very large ships won't bother with much smaller ships anymore.
-Removed tactics panel buttons for Fighters/Krule. Not needed anymore with fighter changes and need room for future strike craft updates.
-Save game name length limited to 30 characters to prevent loading failures.
-Captain's friends will not steal from their resource nodes
-Captain's faction members will not steal from their resource nodes.
-Resource nodes become attractive for ransack at variable richness now, not just at 50% full.
-Battles will block any resource nodes underneath them so AI captains can't swipe the contents while you are battling to protect them.
-When the player defeats a captain, they will be afraid of the player for a while so they won't just respawn and come running right back after the player anymore. They take time to build up a bit first.
-Dropping junk parts into space does not create a junk field anymore since they have no value.
-Zombie ships don't take infector ball damage anymore. They are already infected :)
-AI captains, including wingmen, know how to evade area hazards now. Infection clouds, toxic clouds, ion clouds, mass bomb gravity wells.
-Zombies can level up like other captains to keep them competitive.
-AI Captains with positive relations with the player won't run from the player anymore.
-Increased Minigun damage
-Fixed current/reserve strike craft meter on the hud, was misreporting in some cases.
-Fixed rogue menu sometimes appearing when a courier made a delivery.
-7 Star part icon added for the lottery winners
-New battle ring icon for battles involving starbases to better differentiate them. Also visible from high zoom to find trouble spots more quickly.
-Fixed broken off parts being lost forever in all Bandit Hive attacks, including “The Signal.”
-Fixed player strike craft being invincible in the final story mission
-Scavenging bonus defaults to 10% of node total now from 0% so very large nodes don't take forever to scavenge if no one has the scavenging boosting perk.
-Texture optimizations (less memory use)
-Less button lock delay on Faction Members menu (allows faster switching between screens)
-Faster, more subtle menu sweep effect.
-Adjusted game complete text to be more generic, in case you are already playing a sandbox game.
-Added toggle for automatic map target focus in gameplay options.
-Super interesting spelling fixes.
-Custom portrait system for your mothership. Here's how it works.
-add a folder called CustomPortrait if it doesn't exist
-texture must be called MugShot.jpg
-texture must be jpg format
-texture must be a power of 2 texture (512x512, 1024x1024)
-best texture size 512x512
Moving Forward:
For our next update we will be conducting a major rework of the Strike Craft system. This will include implementing a blue print collection system similar to what we had in SPAZ 1. The mothership will now construct strike craft on its own using Scrap. We will also be adding an all new set of large strike craft as well as new unlockable configurations for the existing strike craft as their stars increase. This will be a pretty major change that will require rewriting some of the game flow and dialogue as well, so it will take some time, but we think the end result will be a really exciting addition to SPAZ 2.
Expanded Synergies v0.6.1
Hi All,
Expanded Synergies
We have been tinkering with Synergies due to your feedback since their initial launch last week. The main issue really came down to, why bother using them they don't do much. Well I think we fixed that. Here we go...
First off, we put together a video explaining the system and its new bits and pieces. Please give it a watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHNuypZnEBY
The biggest change is that synergies now spread to attached wings, noses and engines. The peripheral parts do not add to the synergy, but they do feed off the synergies of the cores that they are attached to.
An additional bonus is now weapon damage is effected by synergies. So if you have a well synergized mass driver for example, it can do up to 80% more damage on top of any subsystem bonuses in the part itself. Synergies can add a lot of punch to a part.
Now this is a really big change and some things will be out of tune. Engines will be faster, turning will be faster etc because everything has been sort of turned up to 11 right now due to the bonuses. That will all be tuned, but we wanted to get this change into your hands for feedback and fun.
Now you have a real decision to make. Create an L with 4 wings that are synergized to 10% or create a well synergized ship with 2 wings, but those two wings are 80% more powerful. When the synergy bonuses of the cores are taken into consideration, there should be a lot of thought involved with making your perfect ship.
Death to the Freeze Bug!
- Rewrote the ship engine sound effects system to finally kill the sound freeze forever and ever and always. If you get a freeze after v0.6.1, please report it to us. We really want to know. We will cry, but we want to know.
Hotfixes
- Added a strike craft readout to the hud. Active/Reserve
- Fixed set bounty side objective happening before you can boutny
- Level 1 bandits get fewer strike craft so less overwhelming early on
- Mining Ops are richer in Rez rocks. More/Bigger rocks with more in em. - Added the Hive Level to the mouse over info on the starmap
- Boosted 3 way synergy 30->40%
- Boosted 4 way synergy 60->100%
- +/- in trade screen no longer reversed
- speleen -> spleen
- Strike craft counts now show up yellow on the map if not in your faction since they are bad things
- Tutorial text and image updates
- Assign starbase menu shows distance in light years from captain to base.
- Fixed brake/reverse hint in into when in screen relative control mode
- Province name shown on scan viewer for starbase comms screen and mouse over.
- The usual spelling fix-o-rama
- Pushing "Back" in controller mode won't change the camera in addition to displaying the icon legend while in the tactical menu.
Hi All,
Hi Everyone,
Hi Everyone,
