- shield tiles block movement again. I've decided that not blocking your airlocks with shields is simply an engineering consideration that the player needs to make when designing ships. The alternative absolutely breaks crew pathfinding.
- fixed a blueprint for missile tubes that unlocked a broken item
- removed the module ownership test when removing shield pixels in singleplayer design. Warning: this means you can delete shield pixels even if you don't have the ability to put them back.
- fixed a bug where system slots would retain the icon from previous bridge setups
- fixed a bug where right clicking a crystal branch to view its contents can result in the item being removed
- you can now open the log via right click as well
Wayward Terran Frontier: Zero Falls
0.6.0.04 patch notes
bugfix patchnotes - 0.6.0.03
0.6.0.01
- fixed a bug where a new agent could be saved but not loaded
0.6.0.02
- fixed a very rare crash bug which can happen when re-entering a sector with a ship that has no turrets
0.6.0.03
- fixed a bug where using the "Tractor to dock" command on a ship with no airlocks would crash the game
- scrapping a ship now attempts to transfer all cargo from that ship into your station storage
- added a global screen effect when taking damage so you can see if your character is being attacked or suffocating when viewing another screen
- crew of the player's faction no longer lock the airlocks on the ships that they command
- fixed a bug which might have lead to ships bouncing off of asteroids after their crew died
- fixed a bug where linear drag was not applying to dead ships and ships that were charging their travel drive
- phase warp drive now has a minimum speed which is greater than the fastest travel drive speed so it can never go slower than travel drive
- fixed a bug where a pirates cove entry dialogue could get stuck on one of the options
- fixed a bug where the agent who greets you at pirates cove didn't exist until after the conversation leading to a missing portrait
- finally figured out the crazy complicated matrix transformation needed to move crew from ship interior space to ship exterior space for proper EVA placement
- the player no longer starts with a repair gun, that was never intended and was only a side effect of all NPC crew having a repair gun by default
- fixed a bug where crew were ignoring ship damage in the debug arena
- crew can now tell when the module they are trying to repair isn't connected to the ship in any way and will not receive any repairing, they will move on to other tasks
- AI crew who wander aimlessly due to boredom will now typically wander to locations much closer to where they currently are, this is less taxing on the CPU pathfinding, and it causes them to run off to the opposite side of your station less often
- fixed a bug which may have prevented crew from returning to follow you after killing an enemy, not entirely sure I have fixed that bug but I fixed a thing that could have caused it
- the subspace tube will no longer be added to loot tables once the player has unlocked the research
- the subspace tube weighs less heavily on loot tables now such that it doesn't drastically reduce the amount of loot that spawns with it
- fixed a pirate blueprint that was giving the wrong ship. of course you get to keep the wrong ship if you already researched it, it is much more interesting than the correct ship
- changed how logistics handles special designs of unlocked hulls, namely they are now all available once you have the hull unlocked
- fixed the shield position on the interdict station that was blocking an airlock
- added radiators to large SSC style turret designs
- shield tiles no longer block character movement
- fixed some code which may have lead to a memory leak
- crew now return to your bar when you dismiss them instead of dropping dead on the spot...Ok actually they are still killed but we also remove the corpses now so there's less mess
0.6.0.00 Is live - Patch notes
0.6 update incoming
To say that we got carried away might cover it. I think it went down something like this:
This patch adds more dialogue than had existed in the game prior to this patch. The bugs fixed in this patch make me a bit embarrassed to think that you have been playing on the previous patch.
Or summarized another way, this patch brings the red zone of the map into the shoddy, half-finished state that the orange zone was in before, while the orange zone is now feeling very polished and streamlined.
New 0.6 features
Crew visual improvements
Everything from the ability to see the armor you have equipped to new shader effects for taking shield hits and new health bars, the crew visuals are now up to date and not using placeholder art. We also made monster movement 20% less buggy and added new art for crystals and remapped the home station interior yet again...that sort of stuff. Also interior explosions.
Crew mechanical improvements
Having crew on your team should stop being a liability and start being something you actually want. Crew serve as extra lives now, allowing you to respawn by taking their place when you die, but they also have new abilities that will make you want to keep them alive. Crew will now actually follow you when you toggle following mode, which means you can take them on adventures, and they have learned new tricks from the gunnery screen as well. Their aim has been improved by better first order intercept math, and they can actually shoot down incoming missiles if you give them a point defense weapon. Oh, and the game now has more than one crew member, and crew sometimes comment on quest dialogues, you know...there's a lot of crew stuff in this update.
General cleanup of early game
This gets its own section because of the amount of work that went into things which are hard to summarize under a single note. I played the entire beginning of the game, fixed everything that bugged me, and repeated over and over again until I hated my life and never wanted to touch this project again. Nearly everything changed a little. New prices for shop items, new values for trade goods, new station types, new map generation layouts, new system for discovering trade routes, did I mention that exploration is a thing now because the map doesn't start as explored? I added repair stations that let you re-arm the missiles in your ship and I made the phase 1 end quest not suck and the list is actually pretty big you will see the full patch notes on release.
Quests and dialogue
I made a lot of scripted events. I call them quests, but you should know they don't work like typical quests. These are self-contained logical events that trigger themselves based on conditions in the game in order to mess with the player in interesting ways. Many of the quests I created are simply a way for One to pop in and give you guidance and rewards for advancing the plot of the game, however some of them are surprises for you to find out in the world. Also I designed a system for log entries that allows the reading and storing of long-form text entries. You might find some story in the game in the form of a captain's log, and now you can keep that forever and read it when you like.
Bugs fixed
There were some big ones. Like, systemic bugs that made the entire play experience feel less smooth and prevented delivery of existing content. Did you know that sectors were never loading half of their content if an AI ship was the first to explore it? I learned that this patch and the result is that the game world now generates the way I had intended. For the first time, as a developer, I can fly a ship around in the game and what I see matches what I think I ought to see based on how it was programmed. To imagine that people have been enjoying the game before this was true gives me great hope for the future, and also a great desire to hide under my bed because nothing makes sense any more.
Targeting and threat toggling
You can target things now! yay! or maybe I should say you have to target things now. . What matters is that the little target lead UI widget, as well as launching missiles now requires a target lock, and that requires having working sensors. There are also added benefits, such as now you can see exactly who your crew is shooting at from the other consoles, and you can even toggle their aggression on a faction by faction basis. Using the crew order button you can now flag an entire faction for Marv to shoot at, or unflag them if he is getting you in trouble at a trade port. If no factions are flagged your crew will just sit there looking for missiles to shoot down instead of fighting.
Red zone content
We added an entire zone effectively. It has space dungeons, a few quests, some new shops, and a lot of new tech that you can unlock. It also offers access to a few new ship hulls including an entire new size category of ships for you to play with. I had plans to make the entire red zone into a streamlined story driven experience but I can only write so much dialogue without releasing an update so that content will just have to come in the next few updates. To be clear the world content is in this update, the helpful dialogue and scripted harassment that tells you what to do isn't, so you will need to wander around and look under some rocks in order to find new stuff.
Release date:
I want to say this will release right before the weekend on May 5th, so that's what I'm going to say. Reality is it will release when it is done, and right now we are still debugging content in the red zone which should be finished before may 5th. So there it is: may 5th...probably.
There will likely be one or two more update going out to the internal tester branch between now and the 5th. Hopefully everything will go smooth and neither me nor Jan will decide to add one last thing at the last minute that will break everything.
-George
Info on upcoming phase 3 patch
Initially I was working on content for phase 2 QOL, and I completed all the code on a new orange-zone scripted event as well as some dialogues for existing things that were poorly explained in the early game. Player mobility, lack of early game direction, difficulty of early upgrades were all going to be the goal of the patch. Then at some point in a moment of inspiration I changed the generation algorithm for the entire red zone and started writing quests to interact with the player in that zone. Now that the scope of the patch has grown so much, I can't release it until all the little pieces are in or it will just seem like a step backwards.
Crew gonna be cool
So lets talk about some of the improvements coming in the next mega-patch.
First of all, the quality of life stuff is pretty good this time. I went on a big push to make Marv less of a useless prick. The goal for crew has always been a very challenging one to design because I decided I wanted crew to have agency and to be "real" in the sense that ships are not the AI characters of the game, their crew is. The issue with that is that all of the activities I want the player to take are ship-related which means I needed an AI smart enough to be helpful without requiring the player to constantly micro-manage them.
In the beginning I erred on the side of crew independence, knowing that I didn't ultimately want a lot of crew micro-management and so opting to not include any significant way of controlling them. This saved me lots of time on designing interfaces that would have been thrown out, but it lead to crew being a burden. Crew would attack things you didn't want attacked, they would steal your ship, and when you went places they'd monopolize airlocks you needed with their stupid idle faces, all while being no good at repairing or shooting your guns for you. Most of this was the result of the player's crew using the exact same AI as all other crew.
So with the goal of making crew an actual asset to the player I worked on their AI a lot. They now respect the one command you do have (follow/hold) better by actually following on one setting and by not turning into a ship thief on the other. They also have a new context-sensitive command that they obey while you are flying your ship to tell them what factions they are and are not allowed to attack. In the past they held a grudge forever against any faction that had fired on your ship, to the extent that their aggro table caused memory leaks and huge save files at one point, now the player has control and their crew won't gun down civilians at every trade station unless you tell them to. Note that part of this AI update required a visual cue to the player of what your AI was actually targeting so part of this patch contents is a full ship targeting UI system designed from scratch that ties into sensor strength and other systems like missiles.
Next, so that you would actually want AI manning your guns, I sat down and solved a popular request: point defense logic. Your AI crew will now attempt to shoot down incoming missiles if they have a console connected to point defense weapons such as flak or hail turrets.
Add in some bug fixes to AI like an issue where they repaired stupid and you can begin to see how a scripted event that adds a new form of warp drive enhancement module and a new crew member can expand into endless quality of life improvements and side projects preventing me from ever progressing the game's story. At some point I just said to hell with this and started making phase 3 content. To be clear, I have added the second segment to the player mobility enhancements I had planned. That content is finished, but I don't want to release it because I am now absorbed by charging full speed ahead towards phase 3 story content. I started breaking things in the code and making a mess of everything with new content.
Phase 3 story content
We're directing the player to pack their bags and head towards the red zones on the map. I have plans for how the player is going to make friends, be blown up by enemies, and unlock a whole lot of cool new stuff. Specifically, phase 3 introduces a new size category of ships and unlocks all the coolest parts of the tier 2 tech spectrum. In this case by "unlocks" I mean "introduces" because you'll still need to go exploring to find things.
Unlock progression in phase 3 is about introducing slightly larger ships while drastically increasing the spectrum of viable ship customization. We are introducing and working to better flesh out the system of activated modules so that your bridge has a role and your design has more effect on how your ship fights. We are also introducing new weapon systems that have been in the code but which weren't attainable in single player such as missiles and beams. I mentioned adding crew members that don't suck, the plan is for them to have interesting auras so you might actually pick one over another and we are also working on other unlockables like our first secret event that will allow you to unlock a sort of "hero" ship with a back-story and special abilities.
The story of phase 3 is also going to require me to write a whole bunch of dialogue and prepare some new character portraits. Dammit.
Current status
So I always do one of these paragraphs where, after telling you what's in progress, I tell you how far we are along developing them. Ohh, lets make a list, since I didn't have a list in this blog yet.