Wow, it took a ton of work, but the first "unstable release candidate" (meaning: expect bugs) for update 0.14.0 is now available for testing! This update has a ton of new stuff in it, including three new thruster types, an Engine Room, re-thought thruster balance, major modding updates, and a ton of other fixes and improvements.
Download 0.14.0_rc1
Note that thruster balance has received a major update, and I'm not just counting the new thrusters and Engine Room. I have also made two important, experimental changes to thrusters in general that I'd like you to try out and give me feedback on:
Small Thrusters (including the new 2-way and 3-way variants) now only do 10% lateral thrust (down from 30%), and all larger sizes of thrusters now have no lateral thrust at all.
The Standard, Large, and (newly-added) Huge Thrusters can no longer achieve maximum thrust instantly: The Standard Thruster takes 1 second to achieve full thrust, the Large Thruster takes 3 seconds, and the Huge Thruster takes 6 seconds. This was done to create more of a difference (and thus more interesting decisions) between the different thruster sizes. Smaller thrusters are better when you want nimble ships, whereas larger thrusters are better for larger ships that need a great amount of thrust.
Also, I'm not planning to release the final 0.14.0 update until after April 29th. This is for two reasons:
1. I want to give modders plenty of time to update their mods for 0.14.0.
2. I'm going on vacation starting this Friday and won't be back until the 29th.
Full Changelog:
- New Flight-Related Parts:
- 2-Way Small Thruster, which is like two Small Thrusters in a single unit.
- 3-Way Small Thruster, which is like three Small Thrusters in a single unit.
- Huge Thruster, which is an even more powerful 3x3 thruster.
- Engine Room, which increases the thrust and power consumption of adjacent thrusters by 50%.
- Updated most of the built-in ships to use these new parts.
- The Standard, Large, and (newly-added) Huge Thrusters now require some amount of time to achieve full thrust. The Standard Thruster takes 1 second to achieve full thrust, the Large Thruster takes 3 seconds, and the Huge Thruster takes 6 seconds.
- Standard, Large, and (newly-added) Huge Thrusters can no longer exert lateral thrust.
- Reduced the lateral thrust of Small Thrusters (including the new 2-Way and 3-Way variants) from 30% to 10%.
- Improved sprites for thruster nozzles.
- The Ammo Factory now produces two bullets every second instead of one bullet every half a second. This is to prevent crew from picking up only one bullet when only one is available.
- Crew are now less likely to leave their posts to go get ammo or power for another system.
- When a ship is spawned and crew are teleported from their beds to their various stations, the crew will no longer be teleported to completely separate sections of the ship to which they could not have ordinarily walked.
- Ships outside the Ring of Death now take damage much more evenly and with less randomness.
- Improved collision avoidance so that ships no longer get stuck in a state where all their thrusters are firing against each other.
- Ship collision avoidance will no longer cause ships to go outside the Ring of Death.
- The Sensor Array no longer loses its power after an FTL jump.
- The Sensor Array is now back in the Miscellaneous category.
- Brushes now have hotkeys: 1 through 0 for the 1x1 through 10x10 brushes. Ctrl+L for the Line brush. Ctrl+B for the Box brush. Ctrl+O for the Oval brush. Ctrl+T for the Triangle brush. And Ctrl+F for the Fill brush. The can all be changed in the settings.
- Pressing Alt+F to focus and match rotation will now keep the ship's "Flight Direction" pointing up.
- Added a settings option to turn off the pulsing-red for illegal blueprints.
- Right-clicking on a procedural ship no longer opens the procedural ship editor unless the game is running in Developer Mode, as was always intended.
- Bugfix: Crash on the host if disconnected from the server at the same time the game ends.
- Bugfix: Crash in Creative Mode when pressing Enter if the selected ship is targeting another ship that was just destroyed or went out of sight.
- Bugfix: Crash with error message "Trying to set effect parameter InheritVelocity of type Halfling.Geometry.Vector2D but it already has a different type.".
- Bugfix: Crash when hosting a game while using a mod that doesn't have a version number.
- Bugfix: Pathfinding issue causing crew to not use conveyors even when it is optimal.
- Bugfix: The "Require Ctl To Select Parts" setting couldn't be modified if the "Micromanaging Your Ship" tutorial had been seen.
- Bugfix: Mirrored part selection and deletion wasn't ignoring the rotation of some parts whose rotation was supposed to be ignored.
- Bugfix: Sometimes hovering the mouse cursor over a part would show the tooltip for that part even if the Show Ship Part Tool-Tips settings is turned off.
- Bugfix: Having more than 999 crew on a ship would cause the crew count text in the Crew tab to wrap. It now shrinks instead.
- Modding: Mod, part, door, and ship IDs are now required to be in 'author.id' format.
- Modding: Mod IDs are now required.
- Modding: Added a "buff system" that allows parts to alter the capabilities of other nearby parts.
- Modding: Refactored the Data folder organization, including moving and/or renaming many files and directories.
- Modding: Parts no longer have the concept of an "operational" status; use toggle components instead.
- Modding: Added new "Logic Glue" part components: DelayTrigger, ToggleTrigger, ModeToggle, MultiToggle, MultiValue, RepeatingTrigger, DamageTrigger, and HealthToggle.
- Modding: Added an OperationalToggle component that can add and remove other components based on the state of a toggle component.
- Modding: Blueprint sprites are now proper part components.
- Modding: UI stats are now proper part components.
- Modding: Indicator sprites must now be hooked up to toggle components.
- Modding: A part no longer provides ship command if it has the "command" category. It must now have a CommandProvider component.
- Modding: The AmmoConverter component can no longer directly play media effects but is now a trigger that can trigger just about anything.
- Modding: Fixed crash when a SpawnBullets hit effect is used to spawn only one bullet.
- Modding: See the Mod Upgrade Guide for more details about all the modding changes.
