XO
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1.40c bug fix update
We made a couple of long-awaited changes to the Rover event "The Separated"
Some detail was added to the Captain's Guide
Full details in the changelog!
Gigantic Update: XO 1.40
Real Time Fleet Jump
You'll notice immediately that your fleet now jumps away visibly and in real time - warships jump away last and continue defending until finally, your battleship jumps out. During the brief jump, your battleship races ahead to emerge first. You can begin taking actions, including plotting a jump, immediately after the battleship touches down. We hope you love it as much as we do, it definitely adds drama to your jump.
Top Scores
We've also added your Top Scores to the main menu! We hope to add more stats soon, but right now we track tidbits like your best relations, the size and makeup of your fleet, and how many jumps you survived.
Captain's Guide
At long last we have a Captain’s Guide! This should hopefully answer quite a few questions. The guide is a work in progress, so expect us to add, remove and tweak entries for a while. See something missing? Let us know!
More New Features
We increased the level of ship detail in 1.40.
We added probably one of our biggest feature requests, scroll-wheeling the fleet list.
Formations received a total rewrite. The editor is the most obvious change, but formations in general should defend, fly and behave more like formations should.
We added two new ships, first the long-awaited Rover capital ship, the MegaFixer. The MegaFixer sports two military grade lasers, two ion torpedo launchers and an extra weapon hardpoint. It can fix disabled ships and also seize and hold disabled ships through jump.
The Pact Cutter is a single laser fast ship with four cargo holds, designed to rapidly deploy boarding parties and recover cargo.
In another QOL improvement, all mining ships now temporarily hold mining operations when there is no ore available, and resume once jumped to a location with ore. The same holds true for melting ice. Mining beams now assume different colors depending on their current use.
The Irenic Plasma Shield also received an overhaul, new visual effects, and a much improved UI. There's a lot to cover so head over to the Captain's Guide or Changelog for all the details.
Lasers now have a groovy visual effect when hitting targets.
Repair ships can now repair or salvage ships already seized.
We added several new cargo items. We'll let you discover them.
For new players, the tutorial was greatly expanded. Thanks to everyone who gave us suggestions for improving it.
We optimized combat effects and models to improve the framerate in large battles.
Hailing another ship now has a visible effect.
Lifeboats, shuttles and stations now have flashing beacons. This really makes it a lot easier to spot those lifeboats, and that's a good thing, because if you leave any of those behind there's now a good chance you'll take a hit to relations.
Ships on Weapons Free now automatically attack nearby mines.
The remaining boarding shuttles were modeled and added.
We added two new abilities to our extremely robust event scripting engine: a jettisonCargo action and shipSlotFree condition. With these, boarding parties now check to see if there's room for them and take appropriate action if there is no room aboard. (Among other things, muhuahahaha)
Lifeboats no longer show up in the fleet list.
Warships and mining ships now show a large indicator above the ship when they cannot fire due to being resource starved. Weapons will continue to fire as soon as resources become available.
For about four years now I've wanted to re-do the ice world. It always really annoyed me that you could see through the gaps. At long last, I was able to do that. We also improved the UI for water conditions on ice worlds.
Marines are now trainable when passengers are in the battleship's hardpoint slot
We smoothed out scrolling the galactic map.
Weapons added in an event now prefer hardpoints. Expect future events to feature different weapon loadouts as a result.
Similar to water, when there isn't enough fuel for jumping the fuel icon turns grey. The ore icon now also turns grey when ore drops below 1.
Balance
- Training boarding parties now only requires neutral relations
- Ships boarded by enemies now have a delay before jumping
- Under duress events also have a delay before jumping
- New faction leader dialog is now unskippable, so you don't miss that you've gained a faction leader
- Corp Mercenaries now have a bribe option
- Troubling events are less likely
- Marooning crewmembers just got more interesting
- Pirates can now repair disabled fleet ships
- Pirates can stay behind when asked to repair disabled ships
- Your boarding parties can now murder fleet passengers
- Boarding stations now have a chance to yield resources
- Added more ‘Kobayshi Maru’ type events - because sometimes you just have to pick the lesser evil
- When trading, factions no longer carry weapons for all factions
- Water riot dismissals now incur a -1 relationship for all passengers aboard a ship in addition to the operating crew
- Sacrificing boarding parties to the harvesters incurs a relationship hit after the first attempt
- Boarding is no longer allowed against Reapers
- Harvester events greatly enhanced, reinforcements added
- Boarding is now more consistent
- Boarding defended ships can possibly wipe out both parties
- All combat missions should now react to ships being boarded
- NPC boarding logic improved
- First of many Max enemy events added
- Adjusted Harvester jump-in location to be more forgiving
- Mission titles now always clear when events end
- Most boarding actions now include RNG results
- Stay tuned for Harvester-related boarding events
- Blockader attack events were toned down
- Beacon logic was improved for long jump quests
- Warlike relations now trigger Retribution events
- Warlike relations also now trigger Max Attack events
- Ally relations now trigger Quest events
- Duress events now respond to destroyed ships
- Several new events added
Assorted QOL/UI/Event logic improvements
- Protect order while in hold fire ROE auto switches to defend
- Mine ore/melt ice actions are greyed when impossible
- Hovering crew in the transfer window displays crew info
- Seized ships now show green slash in fleet list
- Cargoship filter now only shows cargo class ships
- Added defend + protect/support warnings in ship hover text
- Added hover text to all caches
- Camera movement and ship focus now works when dialogs are up
- Certain events were stopped from clobbering one another
- Hail reminders no longer trigger after day 20
- Removed more dialog if you select the ‘I know what I’m doing’ option at the start
- Slowed the maximum rate of water animation
- Minefields now visible immediately on jump-in
- Main menu adjusted
- Ship portraits improved
- Attacking impossible to reach targets at the rendezvous due to insufficient range now displays a warning
Bugs Squashed
- Resource hover restored
- Accidentally invisible battleship revealed
- Weapons added in an event now fire properly
- Attacking ships no longer get quite so close
- Laser cannot fire animation now only plays for friends
- Logs now show ROE properly
- Context issues with cargo transfer fixed
- Zoom/scale of some models adjusted
- Formation ships now stay in place after editing
- Ships no longer launch boarding parties when they have none
- Timer issue fixed
- Minor issue with filter and scroll arrow fixed
- Gatherer shield bug fixed
- Marines are now only trainable on Battleship
- Permariot now avoided if 8 crew (only) were aboard battleship and/or boarding parties were launched during a water riot
- Support + Weapons Free now defends station from missiles
- Corrected an issue with ships losing their fleet color
- Fixed bug with going to starmap
- Only one event is spawned when warships are disabled
- Unknown ID bug stomped
- Fixabot uses correct icons
- Fixed an event issue related to formations and protection
- Added hover text to certain attack events
- Warships only say 'hailing frequencies open' if they are
- Used item charges now save
- First use of attack hotkey now works
- Ships in trade actions now save their state
- Invisible ship issue fixed
- Logging improved
- Some friendly fire issues cleared up
- Wrong way movement issues redirected
- Double-firing issues cleared
- Haggle only works once now
- Transmog no longer throws trade warning
- Shift-clicking and waypointing no longer throws an error
- ROE animations now play when hotkeyed
- Formation + filter nor longer scrambles editor
- Scroll down arrow in fleet list no longer gets obscured
- Literally dozens of other minor fixes
Massive major big huge epic update: XO 1.39
Boarding parties
Boarding parties now add a huge new high risk/high reward dimension to the game.
When you launch a boarding party, a boarding shuttle streaks across space towards its target. Shuttles can be attacked, protected, disabled and rescued just like any other ship.
If the boarding shuttle reaches its target, a special mission begins. You must then decide what actions to take based on the situation. Both the boarding party and the target ship are at risk of loss.
Each faction has it’s own type of boarding party with their own strengths and weaknesses:
Pact Marines
Pact Marines are loyal and will never mutiny. They are good for putting ships under your control, and very good at disabling enemy ships, both actions that generally make for poor relations. They provide excellent defense against enemy boarding parties. Unlike all other factions, they respect the rule of law and will only board enemy ships.
Empire Shocktroopers
Fiercely loyal, Empire shocktroopers are bloodthirsty. They excel at eliminating enemy crew, disabling and even destroying ships. They can also be used to take over ships and put them under your command. Shocktroopers are the most effective of all boarders, but success always leads to a worsening of relations. Like Marines, they are excellent at defense.
Corp Mercenaries
Although they are not particularly loyal, mercenaries value ships too highly to intentionally destroy a target ship, and would prefer not to disable them. They don’t share that same value of crew and have a habit of accidentally killing them off.
In the next version we will be giving mercenaries the option to bribe captains with ore to join your fleet, but for now they are still reasonably effective at putting ships under your control -- that is, unless they mutiny and jump away with the ship. Lastly, mercenaries are very good at defense.
Rover Pirates
Pirates give you the legendary jury rigging abilities of the Rover on disabled ships, although this is a much riskier option than using a Fixer or the Rover Leader. Pirates do have a nasty habit of stealing the ship they were asked to board, but they’re pretty good at capturing and disabling ships to balance it. Pirates too are quite good at defense.
Irenic Diplomats
“Wait, but the Irenic are pacifists!” you say. True! For this reason diplomats will not defend a ship they are aboard, nor will they kill a crew or destroy a ship. However, diplomats can be asked to destroy one or more weapons aboard a ship “for the good of all.” They may even do so without being asked!
And perhaps due to the quality of their cookies, they are quite good at peacefully persuading ships to join your fleet -- as long as the diplomats are not killed in the process. The greatest strength of diplomats is that their actions never cause relations to turn negative.
Boarding Details
Any passengers aboard a warship can be trained as a boarding party, as long as relations are friendly with that faction. Training cost is 1 unit of ore. Training is immediate and cannot be reversed. Once trained, a boarding party can no longer operate a ship. Boarding parties, as long as they are alive, can be reused. Multiple boarding attempts can be made against a target.
Captains be advised: disabled ships can launch boarding parties, including those of your enemy. Do not let your guard down once a ship is disabled!
Boarding shuttles can be re-tasked in flight, including after a successful boarding action. The crew aboard shuttles continue to consume fleet water until destroyed or they mutiny and jump away with a ship.
Launching a boarding party against a ship in your own fleet transfers the boarding party to that ship (unless there is unrest aboard that ship, and in that case an event will occur).
Your tactical computer has been upgraded. Non-player ships now generally display helpful status messages when you hover them, including which ship in your fleet they have targeted!
There's plenty more to discover, but let's discuss our other major improvements:
New features
New hotkeys! You can now set Rules of Engagement (ROE) instantly on all selected ships with these hotkeys:
R: hold fiRe
V: weapons free (Vree?)
B: Berzerk
N: defeNd
And just a reminder that you can change all hotkeys in the Options menu.
The Pact Frigate and Pact Destroyer had their second cargo slot replaced with a hardpoint, giving you the option to add firepower (at the expense of no longer being able to ferry crew/cargo or do ship upgrades).
All mining ships also have had their cargo slot converted to a hardpoint, so you can double up on mining lasers.
Destroying one of your own ships now drops ore (same as with non-player ships).
You can now lay minefields directly on a target.
Plans and ships are now much more frequently available for purchase in trade events.
You can now filter your fleet for ships with boarding parties and upgrade items aboard.
Non-player ships will now use nukes defensively, while player ships always require an explicit action to launch nukes (because they have devastating area of effect damage).
Ships that come into your fleet now clear their attack orders, and ships in your fleet also clear their attack orders against that ship. This should help prevent any friendly fire incidents.
Giving a Destroy command switches the attacking ship to the defend ROE if the hold fire ROE was previously set.
Issuing a Nuke order switches the attacking ship to weapons free ROE if hold fire was previously set.
Events
It’s now possible to play in a much more aggressive style -- what I like to call Razor mode (in honor of a certain Pegasus Admiral). These Razor events give you “morally flexible” ways to add ships like farmships to your fleet. This is not an easy way to play.
Every single event was adjusted to allow for boarding. This alone took over a month and several passes, since at that time there were over 125,000 lines in our events file. (It's up past 180,000 now with boarding parties!)
One hundred and seventy eight new boarding-related events were created. We hope to expand this out over time. Right now a different event occurs based on the combination of faction boarding party, target ship class and target faction. Ships (particularly warships) respond differently if they have defenders aboard.
Most of these 178 new events are player boarding events. A few of them are enemy boarding actions and results. We hope to expand this out over time.
Lots of work was done outside of boarding, too! All trade and repair events can be restarted as long as you remain at the current location. Caches still self-destruct after they have been accessed. Trade events were made much more frequent. The number of items for sale were also increased.
Disabled and Abandoned ships now have events that are spawned each time a ship becomes disabled, abandoned (or both). Now when you crew/recrew/maroon/repair these ships interesting and unexpected things can happen! Lifeboats also have their own special events.
All cargo ships now have a chance to carry minor ship upgrades like nanorepairbots.
Enemy AI was improved for all factions. More work will likely be done there.
Many new events were created including: The Laser, ROE Your Boat, Razor: The Tanker, Razor: The Farmyard, Razor: The Share Deal, Razor: The Payfarm, The Pirate Party, The Covenant, The Comrade, The Sibling, The Dronet Plea, The Oremore, The Party, The Rescue Promise, and The Handoff.
The tutorial was massively expanded, cleaned up, improved and hopefully made clearer and more engaging. For example, the fuel resource is not displayed until jump is ready, where it is then explained. As another minor example, the battleship starts following the station so it won’t drift out of view. The explanation for water now always appears at the right time. We’ll almost certainly do even more work on this as well.
Related to the tutorial, we now track if the player jumps without hailing or engaging with an event and throw (hopefully) helpful reminders. This will likely be tightened up in the next minor update.
Many events such as The Fair Swap were made to use the new centralized crew/recrew logic.
Dozens of events were tweaked, fixed, adjusted and expanded.
Lore was added for crew, passengers all boarding parties and items.
Modeling
Models for the different boarding parties were added: Pact Marines, Empire Shocktroopers, Irenic Diplomats, Corp Mercenaries, and Rover Pirates.
Boarding shuttles were created for some of the factions. More to come!
The boarding action animation was created, but due to a horrific oversight, is not present through at least 1.39f. Penance shall be served, and we should have that added soon.
All stations were made much larger. It’s purely visual, but they look much better. Thanks to intern Moe for the idea!
User Interface
The water display was completely revamped. The water icon now animates when you are gaining or losing water, and the center of the drop now clearly indicates how many more crew you can take on before triggering a water riot. Lastly, when water is at zero or less, the icon goes grey.
We also colorized the other resources and increased their size for better readability.
Resource graphs showing you the speed of resource gathering at a given location were made larger, more colorful and more consistent. Look for these when hovering the center of the minimap, hovering locations in the starmap, and viewing a location’s details in the starmap.
The ship info window was added to choice trees to help anchor which ship you’re talking to/making a decision about.
When a player has zero ore, we now grey out the Fix action and display an insufficient ore tag.
The attack order is now greyed out if the target is disabled and a tooltip was added, this should help to clarify that an explicit destroy action is required.
Contextual actions were reordered to make more sense.
When there isn’t enough ore to nuke/fire missiles/lay a minefield, we now grey out the command(s) and display a helpful message.
The protect and attack actions are now centered on their target ships, making those actions a little more clear. The attack action doesn’t always center, that’s a known issue for now.
Feedback now sends in the background.
Event results now display on the starmap in case you are there when an event ends.
The ring of doom is now more visible.
Many small but annoying UI bits were cleaned up, spacing was adjusted and things were made more consistent.
Behind the Scenes
It has been and exciting, exhausting and totally worthwhile three and a half months. It's the longest we've gone since we entered alpha without a release, but the scope of the change required this much time.
It’s difficult to understate what an epic amount of work this update represents. 178 new boarding events alone! The file that contains all of our events grew by 50%!
Overhauling existing events was an epic task. In addition to expanding many of our existing conditions, every single event had to be evaluated and adjusted to accommodate boarding.
I restructured the event file, organizing events by types. This was also a lot of work but it makes maintaining the events much easier.
We also expanded our robust event scripting with quite a few new features:
The moveCrew action was added, which allows us to move crews between ships in an event.
The randomVariable action was added, so now event results can be randomized. This was vital for boarding party actions.
The wasBoarded condition gives us the power to know if a ship has been boarded or not. Different variables and parameters can be used to resolve the boarding action in the local event or in the spawned boarding event.
Several more actions and conditions were added such as destroyWeapon, isSelected, fakejump on jumpFollow, pulseTooltip, states in getShip, board and launch boarding party actions in shipActions,
disableTrigger, and isJumping conditions.
Next up...
We already began work on the new jump animation, and have done a lot of work on improving formations so that they curve along the playfield and also respond better to commands.
Upcoming version 1.40 will have both of those new features and more events!
Bugs
We fixed about 200 bugs in this release, but most of them were never seen as they were related to boarding parties. A HUGE thank you to our Discord community and all the players who contributed bug reports.
Here are some highlights:
Event logging was massively improved. syntax highlighting was added in VIM and boy does that make a difference!
Ships no longer default to the long way around when using T or Z hotkeys.
Losing a faction leader at the rendezvous no longer triggers negative events.
Haggling no longer results in zero cost or sub-1 cost items.
The battleship no longer has maroon actions available unless it has passengers aboard.
The Diplomacy action is no longer shown against fleet ships.
Transfer/evacuate/rescue/maroon/crew/cargo transfer/etc actions were cleaned up and given better logic.
The battleship is now released from seize before the seizing ship jumps away (due to boarding or an event result).
Quests should now always spawn where they can be reached before the Harvesters expand into their space (assuming the player does not dally).
It is no longer possible to evade the relationship hit for confiscation by jumping quickly.
Upgrades are no longer duplicated in trade actions.
Lifeboats no longer jump away due to faction leader lost events.
Feedback works under Linux again.
Choice trees expand down (instead of up)
An epic number of broken tooltips were fixed
A variety of issues with the shipExists, crewCount, crew and evac actions were fixed, most of them in event logic.
A bug related to scouting and events was fixed that would result in zero events at your destination.
Trade events no longer spawn twice.
An issue with returning boarding parties from a spawned event was fixed.
Delays caused by sending ships scouting were undelayed.
A few bugs that would cause zero events to spawn at a given location were squinched.
Counterattack was removed as an accidental contextual action.
The spawnHarvesters action was added to the save game state.
The hidden rendezvous beacon no longer flashes briefly when entering/exiting the starmap.
The resetTrigger action now properly resets locationChanged and time conditions.
An issue related to the weaponCharged trigger was issued termination orders.
An error caused by transferring the molecular sieve item was corrected.
Waypoints now work properly when restoring a game.
Operating crews are now displaying properly when hovered in fleet info and scan.
The Fixabot now displays a proper model.
Harvesters now properly respawn after the tutorial.
Rendezvous beacon now restores properly from saved games.
Several projectile-based edge case issues were fixed, some of which could stick the game.
A fix was made to an Irenic-related crew mission.
getShip was made to work with boarding shuttles.
Trade and repair events are no longer possible to spawn at the rendezvous.
A lockup related to reaching the rendezvous was fixed.
The mystery of mysterious Pact passengers was solved.
Ships given the board action in an event no longer stop before reaching their target.
An issue with crew not being killed when they were meant to be was fixed.
When crew is transferred they no longer show their crew info dialog.
The nofuel tag was given text.
A bug with no events cropping up on day 5 was fixed.
Farmships no longer have counterattack actions. Whoops.
An issue that could cause zero scouted events was resolved.
Hovering Investigator details now no longer crashes the game.
An issue with boarding-related speech was talked out.
Factionleader gain/lost events now end properly.
The boarding shuttle no longer aborts boarding if the target is disabled.
Warships only have the confiscate action now.
Unfriendly factions no longer can train marines, show tooltip instead.
Boarding shuttles no longer overshoot their target regardless of closing speed.
Range rings were fixed in the formation editor.
Some issues with the relationship change animation were fixed up.
Some speed optimizations were done.
Thanks for making it this far and we have much more in store!
Price increase coming 10/24!
Here's an overview of what we've added since we entered early access:
- Ion torpedoes
- Range rings
- New ships like the Pact scoutship
- Harvester wave propagation
- Ship and fleet upgrades
- Minefields
- Fleet filters
- Cargo
- Quests
- Confiscation
- Hotkeys
- Trade and repair
- Water riot grace periods
- Waypoints
- The end game
- Native Linux support
- Speed adjustment
- Interactive music
- Beacons
- Hundreds of new missions
- A wicked number of user interface improvements
Major update: XO 1.38
Ships now display weapon range rings! Hover any weapon-equipped ship while paused to see them. Each equipped weapon shows its range. Select a ship and hover another to see ranges for both ships. Select a formation and hover it to see all ranges for the formation. Oh and mines also show their range when hovered (paused). Note, range rings only show for shieldships when the shield is off. And lastly the formation editor also shows ranges for ships in a formation but only when a ship is hovered or dragged.
We added more in the “you asked for it” category: items and crew can now be dragged between ships! We added a little extra logic that prevents dragging things that you don’t have enough ore to trade for, too.
Hovering a disabled ship now shows the Ring of Doom: the point of no return where you cannot save a disabled ship and it will burn up in the atmosphere. As a reminder, ships in your fleet can abandon to lifeboats even when they are beyond the Ring of Doom.
You can now focus the camera on any ship: hover a ship and press the F hotkey key (or right click and select Focus). The camera will stay there until a WASD camera key is used or another ship is focused.
Speaking of hotkeys, captains be advised, hotkeys for jump are now G (go) and hail is now T (talk). This makes it much easier to play keeping one hand on the keyboard and one on the mouse. Also a reminder these can be reassigned from the main menu if this arrangement isn’t happy-making. Camera movement keys (WASD) are now remappable, too.
In the purely visual department, making the ion torpedo effect inspired me to improve the look of missiles, so I did that too! Check out the new bloomed missile exhaust! Thanks to our Discord community for helping test out colors, which you should join right now at https://discord.gg/D8DEcqj!
Items now have timed effects! Certain items now require a charging time and/or a cooldown time after use. Items can also now be restricted to being usable only on certain ships.
We now also have a Fix action for items, which acts just like the Rover Fix command and only repairs a ship if it is disabled, and then only to 1 health. Look for the Fixabot in the game. We can also trigger sound effects for these effects. For good measure, a good bit of polish was put into the UI so the use of these items made more sense.
Here are the new game items: ultra diveboats, hyperdistiller, molecular sieve, nanorepairbots, repair drone, fixabot, tritium condenser, quantum rift, superstring net. Those last two items can be used to slow or temporarily halt Harvester expansion! The other items increase resource collection or efficiency, or add various repair options.
Weapons are now color coded! Your ships fire blue lasers, missiles and torpedoes. Harvester weapons are purple, and non-fleet ships are colored by their current relationship with you. Mines are now red if hostile to your fleet ships.
We did some more work with colors too: in comms dialogs, you (as captain of the battleship) are now colored white, and your crewmembers and ships in your fleet are blue.
Weapon prices now make sense! For a long time weapon prices haven’t faithfully matched their abilities, but they do now.
Welcome the new Pact Scout, our latest addition to the fleet! This lightly armored ship is as fast as the legendary Pact Frigate but has no weapon hardpoints. Instead it has a single upgrade/cargo slot, making the Scout perfect for Enhanced Sensors or fast crew rescues where weapons are not needed.
Formations now line up numerically left to right (or antispinward as we say), starting with formation 1.
Ship information is now tied to choice dialogs, so you can more easily understand which ships you’re dealing with in a given event. For events with multiple ships, hover the ship icon to see more detail.
Ship portraits are dramatically more detailed! Check out the before/after:
The relationship hover was improved. We’ll make more improvements to this in 1.39, but a better explanation is given for what the different relation states do.
BEHIND THE SCENES:
We added the following new missions: the foundship, the cutters, the farmship intel, the scoutship, the lost scout, the iron hand, empty lifeboat events for all factions, the crofting, the smuggler, the trade dispute, the piracy report, and several Pact abandoned scout events.
The following missions were balanced or expanded: The rover turnabout, the fooding, the weaponing, the press gang, the treetmaker, the salvage op, the pecking, an empiric escort, all Harvester intro events, and many other smaller and/or global adjustments were made. Some repair caches now drop repair items.
Did a fair number of narrative fixes, too. Here’s an example: I ran through all of the narrative and made sure that it was clear when you were offering protection to a ship and when you were letting them go. Also did things like remove all mention of “supplies” as flavor text, since we don’t, um, actually track such things.
Tutorial adjustments: harvesters no longer spawn during the tutorial. It is no longer a mission, allowing other missions/fleet events to occur during extended tutorial. A pointer was tied to mouse tips. Much more work is coming there.
Harvesters in general were toned down so as not to be quite so devastating. Looking at you, Devastator.
destroyShip events were rebalanced in some cases to kill the crew (based on the new rule where crews abandon to lifeboats when destroyed)
The new addWeapon event action allows us to, yes, add weapons to ships.
We added local variables that are only ‘seen’ by the event that created them, and increment/decrement for variables to allow for future mischief. Most event variables are now local to prevent them being accidentally clobbered.
We can now mark certain ships as tradeable, which will allow me to make more shipyard-type events in 1.39.
Seized ships are now displayed when hovering Extractors, Fixers and Auxiliaries. This should help to clarify when a repair/fix command has been aborted.
We did a lot of UI cleanup, like eliminating some lower case. Many mockups were made for soon-to-be implemented UI improvements.
I created a lot of art. For example for the hyperdistiller, molecular sieve, nanorepairbots, tritium condenser, ultra diveboats. Also replaced a Pact beard, it was too similar to another one. Created the ion torpedo weapon model and its assorted icons and effects. The Fixer was made destructible.
Better logic and messages were added for when scouts fail to return.
On molten worlds the mine ore command is now greyed out instead of missing.
Faction leader loss is now logged.
Added information to cargoships to make it clearer that they add ore capacity to the fleet.
The fleet rendezvous no longer displays on the galactic map until much later in the game.
Quest beacons now also appear on the galactic map.
Quests are no longer located directly in the oncoming Harvester wave, making them unreachable.
When multiple ships are given a movement order with no specific direction, we calculate the ‘short way’ for each ship individually to prevent ships from accidentally taking the long way.
Mining lasers now work against any ship with only 1 hull point, including heavily damaged warships.
A lot of work was done to make sure formation ships properly defended one another, and in particular that missiles were being properly defended against.
Mining lasers now fire defensively even if your ship is in berzerk ROE (since they are only good for that).
We also improved combat logic such that ships no longer unload their entire batteries if only one shot is required.
Ships under the defend ROE but not in a formation will now close to combat range and return fire instead of heroically soaking up damage.
We made some further improvements to the logic that displays similar commands like ‘transfer cargo’ and ‘maroon’ to help clear up confusion.
Ship armor and slots were rebalanced.
Transmogrifying water now resets the water timer, same as using water cargo.
Quite a few test events were added; these help us test the game before an update.
Sending feedback feels instant now as it now sends in the background.
WHAT’S COMING UP
In this last cycle we experimented with ships trying to keep their combat range, but this led to a lot of frustrating chases, so we killed the feature. In the next build we will experiment with more tightly constrained movement during combat, and likely add much more shooty shooty bang bang type events.
We’ll be making some major UI improvements, notably to the Water UI.
And we will be working on the long-awaited boarding parties!
BUG FIXES:
Here’s a summary of bug fixes, we did about 3x more than this:
Much debugging was done on ion torpedoes. Much debugging. Much. M U C H. Did I mention a lot of debugging?
When sending a ship scouting, ‘lost’ ore is properly credited back when the ship returns.
Here’s a grab-bag of some issues that were fixed. We fixed a lot more than this:
addWeapon issues were resolved.
Zfighting issues were broken up.
Fixed some issues when spawning events from events.
Fixed a DOTWEEN game lockup
Fixed an issue with frozen jump plotting
ROEs show when hovered again.
Ship portraits are no longer accidentally duplicated when hovering ships for trade.
Z key no longer attacks self.
Warships no longer ‘forget’ their protect orders.
Dual material ships now display all their pieces.
Mines now properly attack shieldships.
crewCount condition now throws the right message when marooning crew.
Visited locations now properly display their resources.
A couple of nasty bugs where conditions would not trigger were corrected.
Perhaps we fixed the dreaded Set Delta Time projectile bug.
Sandships with defend ROE now defend against incoming nukes.
Rapidly hovering items no longer produces a bug.
Gatherers can no longer destroy ships (oops).
A formation error moving ships was corrected.
Trade/repair animations were eliminated from the galaxy view when harvested.
Fixed a game lockup that occurred when jumping just before a dialog appears
Fixed an issue where fixers and auxiliaries no longer repaired but still ate ore
Zero charge items with a charging state now destroy themselves after use
Formation editing with filters on now shows all ships in the formation editor
A bug related to mining ships joining was squashed.
Several cargo-related bugs were fixed.
A bug related to adding ships to a formation was eliminated.
Riot-dismissed ships previously given jumpFollow orders now no longer keep following the fleet.
When ships join the fleet, the resource cap no longer increases, then decreases, then increases again.
jumpFollow no longer teleports ships.
cargoCount now works properly again.
The fixabot item now properly fixes.
Dragging a repair action now works.
Briefly you couldn’t destroy enemy ships. Destruction has resumed.
Another bug that triggered when you emerged from jump was nuked.
Dual fixers now respond properly to a formation attack order. Fixers in formation also properly counterattack now.
Plasma shields now display properly in slots.
hailedBy triggers now work when leaveFleet is used in init/preTrigger actions.
Mission text and timers are now saved and restored properly.
A bug related to holdfire lasers and shields was fixed.
A bug with choices dialogs was fixed.
A bug where ships would open fire on you in defend ROE was taken care of.
We think we’ve taken care of an issue where an event that shouldn’t spawn was briefly spawned, then killed, counting against your events.
Range rings show properly in the formation editor.
Mining commands should work properly again.
Killed a bug related to dragging passengers into crew slots.
A lockup related to a timer expiring was fixed.
Crew transfer issue with a particular event fixed.
Croft can’t jump event timers fixed.
Some icon issues were fixed in speech dialogs.
Several timer issues related to events and caches were fixed.
A preTrigger issue related to timers was worked around.
Ships that leave while the join fleet animation is playing should no longer leave the animation frozen on screen
Attacking abandoned ships no longer causes relationship loss
Crew can be loaded aboard hardpoint slots that were melted
Self destruct drops correct faction lifeboat
Tags to Types in eventTemplates
Debug lack of events on certain systems.
As I mentioned, we fixed a ton more bugs than this, but I’m not sure people find this relevant so I’ll leave it here.
KNOWN BUGS:
At present we are not aware of any known bugs. That means we only have known unknowns.
Find one? Send us in-game feedback please!
Major update: XO 1.37
Harvesters, those purple pursuers that you love to hate, now spread in a wave! This was our most requested feature, and we’re really happy with the way it plays right now. This took a week to get working, about a week to add effects, and another week of tweaks and adjustments. This is a major change and we expect some more adjustments will be necessary. Let us know what you think on our official Discord!
We have now added ship and fleet items! Find these on all trade missions, and in rare cases on ordinary ships.
Our first fleet item, especially for Battlestar Galactica fans: Networked Computers. These reduce your fleet plotting time by 25%! The only downside is that they require a slot on the battleship to be used.
Our first ship item: Nanorepairbots - as you might expect, these repair damaged or disabled ships. They are multiple use with a variety of charges and repair levels available. Right now they require fuel and ore to work, but future repair items may appear that don’t require either. Also, this item only works aboard the ship it is equipped on. They can be moved from ship to ship via a transfer order.
Rounding out our items in this update are Enhanced Sensors. These speed up scouting by at least 20% when equipped on a ship. Speaking of scouting, next update look for a new ship, the Pact Scout, which is purpose built for scouting!
We have more ship and fleet items coming soon!
When a ship joins your fleet we now display an animation. Now it’s a lot clearer to see what each ship brings you. (Especially how “lesser” supply ships benefit your fleet!) These animations queue to accommodate the missions where multiple ships join your fleet. This should work no matter how you manage to bring a ship into your fleet.
The starmap no longer rotates to the direction of travel. And there was much happiness.
The new jumpFollow action means ships can now follow the player (visibly or invisibly) through jump without joining the fleet. We can now spawn ships invisibly, too. I added this functionality to all escort missions and added a few other surprises. I’m really looking forward to having more fun with this!
Since you can now jump ahead of the Harvesters, we added the ability to scout locations you’ve already visited.
Destroying a ship now does three things: any crew aboard jump into lifeboats, any cargo aboard is dropped, and a random amount of ore is dropped (also as a cargo container). There are no relationship penalties for destroying a ship.
Mine Ore and Melt Ice orders now shift ROE from Hold Fire to Defend. Attack orders also shift Hold Fire to Weapons Free. Hailing no longer switches the Hold Fire ROE to Defend.
The tutorial was cleaned up, refactored and extended. There are now options to find a weapon and choose what kind of ship to add to your fleet first.
New missions: The Weaponing, The Fooding, The Berzerked, The Berzerking (!), The Slaver, The Extortion, The Lost Empire, The Waystation, The Deep Regret, The Retriever, and some new confiscation-related random events. That puts us at over 600 missions/events!
Adjustments were made to The Outbid, The Overfull, The Unceremonious, all minelaying events like The Fireteam, The Corp Standoff, and all the Harvester intro missions to account for the new wave propagation.
We improved the layMines command to be able to drop mines directly on a target, and set up rules for how the various commands were interpreted. Mine damage has been fixed at 1, because at higher levels it was far too OP.
Some usability improvements were made to the in-game feedback system, and additional tooltips were added to make the game a more pleasant experience.
The game no longer auto-shifts back into tactical from starmap, and most dialog now displays in the starmap. We expect to have choice dialogs visible in the starmap, and trade/transfer as well, in the next update. It’s important that, for the choice dialogs at least, we don’t obscure the starmap so you can evaluate your jump options before deciding on accepting a mission. Oh and we adjusted timings so these dialogs didn’t appear during the jump sequence.
When editing a formation filters are temporarily disabled.
The size of the universe was increased to 475 from 400. It is likely we will increase it more as we rebalance post-wave propagation, but we wanted to get more player feedback first.
The speed of the Corp Tanker was slightly increased. It is now slightly faster than a heavily laden cow.
Combat ranging and auto-protection algorithms were improved, resulting in many less ships unnecessarily lost in combat. Medals have been handed out.
The shipOrderIs command was extended to include all orders including scan.
Events can now be made invisible to hemisphere selection, correcting an issue where different mission ships were appearing next to each other instead of in different hemispheres.
The Access order now has an accompanying animation.
We improved our event logging system and combined some log files for clarity.
Gas giant and starmap background colors were adjusted to make Harvested worlds much clearer.
Color palettes are now properly applied on the galactic map.
I made some tweaks to a certain event that trips a lot of people up.
Bugs:
We truly hope to have squashed the joystick-related bug once and for all.
Hotkeys are now disabled while the player is in a menu.
Two bugs that would prevent jumping were solved.
The Irenic Gatherer now has its mine ore command restored. Group mining commands should now work as expected.
Mines should properly target enemies in all cases. Mines now use the time of firing to determine positioning as opposed to time of clicking. Result = better accuracy.
A formation-related hail order issue was fixed.
Unused waypoints now clear. Unity Prefabs, I hurl insults at thee.
Emergency replacement events now honor faction-specific tags.
We may have finally put an end to the dreaded SetDeltaTime bug.
A few errors related to formation attacks and formation firing distance were cleaned up.
An error that was thrown when using a shipDestroy command is no longer plaguing us.
Gunboats and Half Gunboats now display their ship types when hovered in scout reports.
Phantom operating crews were briefly visible on Corp mining colonies, but have been told to resume hiding.
Disabling Empire warships now works as expected in all cases.
The timer now stops properly on The Peaceful Protest event
A bug related to ship filters was trapped and ground into dust.
Harvested worlds no longer show trade or repair mission animations in starmap. Theoretically they should also not display in the galactic map, too.
Heru squnched a bug having to do with projectiles.
Pact Destroyers no longer mistakenly show +0.5 fuel when added to the fleet.
Starting a new game clears any in-progress new ship animations.
796 UnassignedReferenceException errors were assigned.
A double-spawn event bug was undoubled.
A few naughty rewired errors were disciplined.
An edge case that would cause ships to get stuck was unstuck.
We took care of a bug where attacking another ship would lock ships in place.
A few ship not found bugs were found and fixed.
Beta 1.36 "Being Mineful"
Rules of Engagement
ROEs govern how ships react to enemies as they move through space. For example, attacking with the Berzerk ROE will ignore all incoming projectiles. And if you are attacked while in Defend ROE, you will defend against projectiles but you won’t shoot back on the attacker. While with Weapons Free your ship will fire on both projectiles and the attacking ship if attacked.
Now that ROEs work properly, we added more goodness. When you Protect a civilian ship, it draws fire away from the civilian ship toward the protecting warship.
[previewyoutube="Vk0iarHzmDI;full"]
We’ve also added a Support command. Supporting ships will fire on projectiles targeting the ship you are supporting, but won’t draw fire. This cleanly gives you the ability to dedicate ships to fending off projectiles while using others to concentrate on damaging ships.
Right now Support only works on warships, and Protect is restricted to civilian ships. Let us know what you think, should we expand these commands to work on all ships?
We’ve added a lot of tactical possibilities now. I’m delighted that it’s all finally working as designed. We went through a lot of events to try and make sure the improved ROEs work properly but there’s a good chance we missed some. If you see anything strange, please submit an in-game bug and we’ll get it fixed right up.
Mines
We also did a lot of work on mines. We have a new event action, layMines. Hmmm, I wonder if you can guess what it does? So we added a good number of minefields and minelayer-related events. Because you can’t have enough mines.
Remember that mines are now attackable, so if you don’t have an Empire Blockader in your fleet to minesweep them, you can blast them. You can now also use nukes to clear minefields. Scanning mines now works as expected. And to top it off, mines now make appropriately satisfying crashing sounds as they impact and explode against the hulls of their hapless victims.
Oh, Empire Blockaders can now sweep enemy minefields to gain extra ore and safely clear a path as well.
[previewyoutube="1BVggplHRVA;leftthumb"]
Content
A bunch of new content was added: The Barricade, The Minebait, The Layers, The Blockers, The Pecking, The Change, The Empire Blockade, The Blockade Runner, The Plan, The Fireteam, ROE Your Boat, The Protecting and The Picking. Trade and repair events were added for all factions, so you no longer see that Irenic trader in Empire space trying to barter with you. A number of events were also adjusted or improved.
And those events where farmships just jump away? They have all been refactored into quests where there’s a chance to get a farmship. The original idea was meant to help, but it just caused frustration. I’ve begun to go through some events with formations and tighten them up, beginning with The Irenic Convoy event.
Speaking of making things more understandable, with the use of our new weaponIsCharged condition and resetTrigger actions, I’ve begun to craft more early game ‘show me how the monster works’ type events. As an added bonus, these types of events only show up if you started the tutorial or asked for tips when you started your current run.
User Interface
We’re starting to improve the visibility of major effects in the game. Relationship changes are the first of a few to come, and they look like this:
[previewyoutube="aY-91XhUQqw;full"]
Tell us what you think!
Starting a new game and melting weapons now pop up a sanity-preserving ‘are you sure’ type dialog. You’re also asked to confirm before trading ore for a weapon you cannot yet equip. Let us know if you think they should be in other places.
It is now possible to do crew rescues or cargo transfers to ships with only one hardpoint and no ordinary slots if you melt the weapon down first. Desperate times may call for desperate measures, right?
Nuking disabled ships now destroys them.
Using water cargo while the water riot timer is ticking down will buy you some extra time, depending on how much water you throw at the fleet and how badly you are in water debt.
Filtered ships are now updated dynamically and reflect things like ships sent scouting.
More tooltips were added, including when you’re out of ore but trying to lay minefields, and when you cannot transfer cargo to a ship but want to use it to clear space.
A handful of tweaks were made to the UI to clean things up.
We added action animations for Maroon, Transfer, Cargo Transfer, Crew Transfer, Access, Lay mines, Minesweep, Retrieve, and Rescue.
[previewyoutube="cxDwphEwQ0Y;full"][previewyoutube="cxDwphEwQ0Y;leftthumb"][/previewyoutube]
We created over 50 in-game test events to help expedite testing, and they are making a huge difference. We improved our logging as well.
In the unintentionally coincidental department, XO player cirind let us know on Discord that in a game he was playing on Easter day, a Harvester Investigator was destroyed… only to return three days later. We can confirm this is not an Easter egg!
Bug Fixin’
Several bugs that prevented the jump button from working were fixed.
A bug with transferring crew in The AWOL event was made good.
A bug that crashed the game after trade was given no quarter.
Some issues with transfer and confiscate were fixed up.
A hold fire ROE given to a shieldship allows laser fire from within the (now off) shield’s range.
The fleet filter now works without having to scroll to the last ship in the fleet first.
Mining lasers no longer attack warships.
Success conditions now trigger properly while jumping.
Events spawned using spawnEvent now respect the procedural rules of each event. Our so-called ‘emergency’ events also respect these rules.
The relationship change animation was adjusted not to play while dialogs were up, as it was too distracting.
The tooltip for passengers in filters now says passengers instead of crew.
An issue where you would lose water at the rendezvous was drowned.
A bug where you couldn’t transfer passengers from a frigate was undone.
Heru stopped a pretty nasty bug from locking up the Unity editor.
Hovering water was fixed up a bit.
The scan animation no longer plays randomly when issuing a waypoint order.
An issue with text being squashed in story mode was unsquished.
A few z-fighting brawls were broken up.
Certain animations no longer show up in ghostly form in the rendezvous.
The ‘unknown ship id error’ that was cropping up frequently was fixed.
When restoring a save game with zero ore, ore is now properly displayed instead of hidden.
Laid minefields were throwing errors, but that’s been fixed.
Minesweeping got a thorough overhaul.
Some cargoCount bugs were fixed.
Fixed an issue with the Rescue animation and some other animations.
A bug that was causing choices to grey out was fixed.
Hovering the battleship crew once caused issues, but no longer.
The rendezvous beacon no longer shows after it is reached.
A few dozen bugs not worthy of more detail were fixed, mostly related to combat and ROE.
Known issues
For Windows + Mac, none that we are aware of at this time. Find a bug? Report it in-game please!
Known issues, Linux edition
When submitting feedback in Linux the game says “no Internet connection” but we still receive your feedback.
When alt-tabbing from the game in Linux, the sound can go wonky. Restarting restores sound to normal.
Beta 1.35 "X Filtration in Effect"
You can now filter the ships in your fleet! Ships can be selected by crew, passengers, ship types, damaged status and cargo type. So… no more hunting around for that ship with the Irenic passengers, or that time-critical fuel cargo. And you can quickly toggle the filter on and off at the bottom of the fleet list. There’s a little tweaking yet to be done on that, so expect some additional polish there, and for the time being if you find the filter window doesn’t want to go away, hover any ship in your fleet.
In preparation for upcoming minefield events (yup), we made mines targetable. You probably know that you can recover your own unused mines for ore. Well, enemy minefields can now also be cleared if you have a minelayer (gaining you ore). So we’ll probably rename that command to “Minesweep” or “Sweep mines” for the next version. Head over to our Discord and vote for that and other things as well!
Trade and repair events are now more evenly spaced throughout the universe. Rejoice.
I expanded our emergency events to include one for each faction.
If you choose a lifeboat to leave behind due to a water riot, an appropriate dialog now displays instead of a blank one.
The collider for the cargo container was improved, making it easier to select.
We lifted an artificial limit on the number of missions that can simultaneously run.
We added a couple more save points to feedback and automatically reported bugs to help us track down those pesky bugs. We also increased the amount of info saved to our logs.
I created an animation for the Maroon action, added a proper icon for the Rover Hideyhole, and mocked up the ‘ship joining the fleet’ animation.
If the player is playing from the tutorial or has asked for hints, there’s a new bit of dialog that pops up letting the player know they’ve unlocked higher level ships when the faction’s relationship goes to neutral.
I have a new event action, clearOrders, which allows me to issue the equivalent of an Abort action on any ship. Armed with that I made some adjustments to several events.
I improved a few events in other mysterious ways: The Hunt, The Unexpected, all cache events and The Farmship Quest.
New content: The Family Farmship (quest).
I also have another event action, isROE, which allows me to set triggers based on the ROE of a certain ship. I’ve used these primarily for testing, but I’m sure I can think of some entertaining ways to use them in events.
User Interface
Scouting results are a little more clear thanks to some tooltips when you hover them. We added several tags based on the quality of each resource, as well as tags that should invite players to scout when they hover unscouted resources.
We added quite a number of tooltips, including showing a warning when the selected ship has no free cargo space. The speed slider now has a tooltip, and so does the cargo transfer action.
I made quite a few behind-the-scenes adjustments, finally replaced the checkbox and X with final art, tightened up some window placement, and added two new animations: confiscate and maroon.
The attack command is now greyed out and a tooltip displays if you try to attack an armored ship with a mining laser.
Hovered cargo items persist the same way that weapons do, allowing the player to compare more easily.
We did a little work preparing for localization, pulling a few stray instances of non-localizable content into the system. This is ongoing work.
If you protect an enemy ship (as you might need to in certain missions) a tooltip warning is shown.
A good bit of work was done cleaning up the contextual commands for crew, rescue, evacuate, maroon, cargo and crew transfer. They’re all the same command but context is used to give better cues for what is possible. These commands should now appear as designed.
Bugs Kasmunched
I was really disappointed that we deployed with a couple of nasty bugs last week. So I spent a few days creating a large suite of interlocking events that help me QA the game before we deploy. I continue to add to those tests.
We rushed out a couple of updates after deploying 1.34 last week. One had to do with the new quest system. Another one took care of a problem with attacking with missiles or shields.
Some bugs related to minefields were fixed.
Waypoints are getting better about being cleared, but they’re not quite there yet.
A bug related to transfer orders on shieldships was also taken care of.
Some glaring errors in the scan dialog were fixed.
Heru nuked a bug that cropped up when hovering ship slots.
The battleship orbiting your current destination on the starmap has returned.
Ships briefly didn’t appear in the fleet list when they joined, but that’s all fixed now.
You can now destroy ships with missiles, muhuhahaha.
The transfer window overrides custom event tooltips, instead displaying appropriate contextual tooltips when hovering crew and cargo.
Stations were incorrectly showing operating crew in scan and transfer dialogs, that has been taken care of. Passengers were also briefly not showing correctly when doing a crew transfer.
Duplicate triggers in The Unceremonious were fixed.
Found and fixed a duplicate tag that was wreaking havoc on a contextual tooltip.
Shieldships were not disabling ships, but they do now.
Made a minor tweak to The Decoy fixing a timer that shouldn’t have been visible.
An event was throwing strange hail messages, but that’s been corrected.
An inconsistency in our event tags was corrected, which corrected some lingering issues.
Right mouse button icons should appear as designed in transfer dialogs.
Known issues
The fleet filter dialog can stick; hovering a ship in the fleet filter unsticks it.
The fleet filter button sometimes doesn't register a click; clicking the scroll down arrow below it first should help.
Known issues, Linux edition
When submitting feedback in Linux the game says “no Internet connection” but we still receive your feedback.
When alt-tabbing from the game in Linux, the sound can go wonky. Restarting restores sound to normal.
Major Update: beta 1.34
So this is the first time since July of ‘19 that we’ve taken more than two weeks to release an update. Cargo slots and quests are a major upgrade that touches virtually all parts of the game. We hope you’ll find it chock full of goodness and worth the wait!
Obligatory COVID-19 statement: We both work in relative isolation and do not expect to be impacted. We will continue to work on the game full time. We are wishing health and safety for all during the pandemic. To paraphrase Douglas Adams: “The secret is to wash the hands together, guys.”
Cargo
Many ships now store cargo. Right now we have resource cargo containing fuel, water and ore. We will be adding many more types of cargo in the very near future including items that give ship and fleet upgrades!
Resource cargo doesn’t increase your fleet capacity, but acts as a reserve you can use to increase your available resources at any time. Need to jump during a firefight but low on fuel? Use that fuel cargo! Need water to stop a water riot? Use that water cargo! Need a few more ore to get that weapon? Use your ore cargo! And you can also trade cargo items for much-needed ore.
However, if you use cargo and are already at or near capacity, that resource will be lost, with two exceptions: you can temporarily exceed your ore cap if you’re already trading. And if you are at your water cap but have too many crew, using water cargo will reset the water riot timer.
As you play you’ll come across quite a few ships with cargo already aboard them. So say hello to the new confiscate command. Confiscate allows your warships to board cargo-carrying ships and, you guessed it, confiscate their cargo.
After the confiscation, all related ships jump away and you will incur a relationship penalty. This also bypasses any event that might have happened if you hailed the ship instead of confiscating. Oh and one last thing… confiscations may not always go as planned!
But wait, there’s more! Remember that destroy command? Well now when a ship is destroyed, it drops a cargo container which slowly drifts into the gravity well. The retrieve command allows any ship with free space to pull the cargo aboard.
So you now have some more interesting decisions to make, captain.
You can store cargo in any open slot on a ship. Some ships also have hardpoints which are used to permanently mount a weapon. Hardpoint slots can also be used to store cargo or passengers.
Weapons can be stored on ships, but they only operate if they are dropped into the correct hardpoint (e.g. plasma shields on Irenic warships). You can transfer non-operational weapons between ships using the transfer command.
Once a weapon is equipped, it can only be melted down for ore. In the future we will be adding a new ship type that can extract hardpoint-mounted weapons.
Cargo items can be reordered on an individual ship by dragging and dropping. Right clicking on a cargo item ‘uses’ it.
One last thing: you cannot move, transfer or drag your battleship’s operating crew out of their operating slot, but you can with all other ships in your fleet.
Quests and Content
It’s been a long time coming, but we now fully support multi-jump missions! We call them quests.
This update also brings more than 20 new events: the decoy, the accidental discharge, the herkyjerk, the laborers, the corp hating wolfpack, the mixup, the upgrade, the treetmaker, the poisoning, the ill, the farmship quest, the confiscation, the cargo runners, the panic, the dropped, the panic, the hunt, the expired, the provider, and numerous confiscate events.
We also added starmap beacons to all missions that require a jump.
Other Functionality
Ship orders now display in your fleet list, making it easier to see what your fleet is up to!
Shielded ships given the hold fire ROE now drop their shields.
All pirate events were improved using crewCount conditions.
Ships given an attack order should be better about keeping their target and not switching to other ships attacking them.
Ships marked as transferrable but not evacuable will not show crew. Ships marked evacuable but not transferrable will only show crew, not cargo.
UI and Game Balance
Harvester Reapers now emerge from their Carrier a little less frequently.
I added logic to spread out certain types of abandoned ships from appearing quite so frequently, as it was feeling way too repetitive.
I improved the tutorial event that talks about formations. The main tutorial was also improved, and some further improvements were made to an event by the name of the result and the defecting foodship.
Based on feedback I started removing the events where farmships jump away in fear, replacing them with more directly helpful events as the ‘jumpy’ events were definitely not producing the desired result.
We did a substantial amount of work on adding tooltips for actions and to help explain why things may not be working as expected. Hovering non-functional weapons, trying to transfer to ships that are full, hovering crew in hardpoint slots, and many other places received this treatment.
Along those lines, we are continuing to grey out and give tooltips for actions that are disallowed, for example, trying to attack an armored ship using a mining laser.
We’re beginning to roll out expanded tooltips for players who choose [begin tutorial] or [show tips] when starting a new game.
Certain mouse tooltips were disabled in the scan dialog, since that is a non-interactive view.
I made an adjustment to windows so that the game doesn’t cut off important info for those brave souls playing XO in 1024x768 resolution.
The water riot dismissal dialog was made ever so slightly clearer.
Technical Stuff / Devlog
From here on out I’m mostly giving technical details and a fuller devlog. Fair warning!
Quest and rendezvous arrow beacons are now only shown if the destination is not visible. A unique animated quest beacon is now used.
With the getPassenger action I can now have passengers aboard a given ship ‘speak’ in events. This was fairly important for certain quests. I added passenger as a job type as well.
Emergency repair events were added. These spawn when the procedural engine cannot find a compatible repair event and the player has jumped to a repair beacon.
Compatible crew will now automatically move to the operating crew slot on an abandoned ship if they were aboard as passengers.
I created lore for all of the new cargo items. Heru added linebreaks to the lore descriptions to give me more flexibility.
I created the confiscate animation (this will be implemented in the upcoming v1.35), and an animation for ‘go to waypoint’ but I’m not sure if I will be including it.
I mocked up the fleet list filter, which is next up on our priority list to develop. This will enable you to quickly filter the ships in your fleet so you can find passengers, items and damaged ships easier.
I mocked up a more granular hover for the water UI, and we implemented that. It needs a little tweaking, but it should help disambiguate water.
I also mocked up the confirmation dialogs we’ll be using for melting (destroying) items and starting a new game.
And I mocked up an improved ship detail based on some excellent player feedback, and expanded tooltips for planet resources.
I added hardpoints to all of our 3d models.
I created the cargo container 3d model and icon.
Cargo and Items: a Deeper Dive
I’m very excited about adding more item types. We designed items very similar to how we designed events, using YAML and an add-as-you-go model that has served us well.
Now that the hard work is done, it should be much easier to add different kinds of items that improve a ship, or add fleet powers. (Networked naviputer for faster plot times, anyone?)
On the event backend, there is now a transferrable action that I can apply to any event ship that allows cargo to be transferred or not, giving me a lot of narrative control. Several new events make use of this.
I can also trigger a transfer between ships in an event using the startTransfer action. This is actually how all confiscation actions are done in the game. Using our procedural engine I’m able to craft specific types of events that will only pop up when you’re, say, trying to confiscate goods from a corp ship when you have hostile relations and a factory foodship in your fleet.
And I also have an addShipItem action that I can use to give ships cargo in an event.
The new cargoCount and takeCargo/putCargo conditions round out my ability to incorporate cargo fully into our event system.
On the design side I balanced item amounts, ship slots, and frequency of cargo. Expect all of this to change as we continue to balance and add different items. It’s pretty generous right now, but I do like having too much cargo and being forced to decide what to keep.
I continued to make small but measurable improvements to the script that I use to make events from spreadsheet entries, mostly to support these new functions, but also to expand existing actions so I can more easily create quests.
Bugs Smooshed
Honestly it took weeks to cover off all the edge cases and wacky interactions that adding cargo items caused. This was… not fun. But we think we’ve gotten the vast majority of cargo-related bugs taken care of. I won’t categorize each one of them here. Just know there were a hell of a lot of them.
Part of our delay getting 1.34 finished also came about from implementing the new starmap beacon. We surfaced a substantial issue where events were not ending when they were supposed to, and fixing that ended up being quite a beast.
We believe we have well and truly eradicated joystick and controller lockups.
Some files were moved out of the default folder which we hope will eliminate the bug that required Admin privileges to run XO.
An annoying bug that was minor but was flooding our bug reporting software, CreateJumpOutIntro, was nuked. So long!
The protect order now protects as designed.
Ships no longer fire on ships once they start jumping.
A scouting bug that made copies of ships was fixed.
Item dragging was disabled while the formation editor was active, as it was screwing things up.
Scouts in progress are now fully cleared on a new game.
A getShip/shipExists bug was fixed.
Unduplicated a name duplication error.
Fixed a bug where killCrew didn’t.
A bug where only the scan animation was being played was fixed.
Fixed an event that had two occurIf conditions.
One of those blank dialogs related to Pact Frigates was unblanked.
Fixed a missing tag, Early_evac_pact_crew
An adjustment needed to be made to the hover line for scout reports, so I made it.
A number of ships were not displaying their name in scout reports, that should all be fixed now.
A nasty bug related to the destroy action was taken care of.
A bug preventing rescues was fixed.
Minor fixes were made to the former haven event and all events with evac conditions.
Known issues
Destroy ship currently does not work when using missiles.
Rescues and transfers are sometimes not started when the target ship is in high orbit.
Waypoint markers sometimes do not clear when reached.
Known issues, Linux edition
When submitting feedback in Linux the game says “no Internet connection” but we still receive your feedback.