RC125 Release around the corner (semi-final changelog too)

fox Unit 01 · Fri Mar 27, 2009 1:25 pm

Alright, RC125 will probably hit everyone's doorstep sometime this weekend. For now, here's the near-final changelog (subject to modifications):
-- Slight reduction to Capital Ship spinning, thanks to Forsaken's tips - I would have done a more aggressive "no-spin" fix, however this would cause Goto, Dock, and Formation functions to all exhibit "wag" issues. In addition, the steering became very unpredictable, and given the major role of steering rates in Capital Ship balancing, this was a problem. However, this less aggressive solution, combined with the Hook-side NPC push-away, makes piloting even the Sleeper Ship a little less irritating. Also, it is much harder for other players to spin your ship at all without getting killed.
-- Sniper Turrets once again have 360 degree coverage, but only rotate at 15 degrees/sec.
-- Missiles (especially high-class ones) now use much more energy to fire. Your ship's engine must now be taken into account - the Kusari engine is no longer the best missile engine.
-- Increased cloaking device warmup time to 15 seconds, up from 10.
-- Reverted the commodity prices to previous values.
-- Seeing as the Trade Lane Buoy WPs are so small (and hard to hit), their hitpoints have been decreased substantially. They are still a good object to retreat to, but pirating Trade Lanes is now at least possible.
-- Capital Ships no longer flee as early from a fight.
-- Due to TL Buoy WPs being somewhat easily killed now, they no longer drop any turrets on death. Find somewhere else to salvage WP turrets. =P
-- LRMs have been tweaked - they now have a 5000m range and half the fire rate, but have a much higher initial velocity and deal 2x as much damage. They essentially act much more like Torpeodes.
-- Replaced the whole mishmash of huge "MOUSE FLIGHT", "TURRET VIEW", "REAR VIEW", etc. text at the bottom of the screen with a small, unobtrusive "Mouse Flight" string when the mouse is active, to clean up the HUD a little.
-- Pulse, Plasma, Particle, and Neutron weapons have had their rate-of-fire decreased to balance them with other weapon types. This is the first time normal weapons have been majorly tweaked like this since version 1.24, so please comment.
-- New FLHook implemented, with various this-and-that features (refer to the FLHook Readme.txt in the EXE folder for more info).
-- Added multiplayer support of the singleplayer storyline event system, making it possible to write scripted storyline missions for multiplayer. However, due to a myriad of bugs associated with this, only very simple scripting is being used for now.
-- NPC player-targeting clamp and hostile spawn weighting are now both set to false, thanks to the above change. No more targeting priority nonsense - NPCs will now divide themselves up equally among the targets.
-- The "AI Bots Killed" stat now functions correctly. It also counts AI Wingmen killed now.
-- Maximum number of lines in chat history raised to 127, from 32.
-- Extra debris from ship explosions is now only thrown if the lighting/debris option is selected.
-- TL Buoy WPs are now permenantly disabled when killed. They lose all turrets, as well as some/all of the lights and directional flares. Active player pirates on a server can make a Trade Lane considerably less safe now.
-- Small optimization to system structure (got rid of 102 un-needed AI Bot paths per system, and rewrote the density control code for zones). May slightly improve system memory usage/load times.
-- Small AI tweaks to prevent fights from getting too spread apart; AI should try a little harder to concentrate fighting instead of breaking off into small duels 10km away from other ships.
-- Alaska has been rebuilt - it now acts as the central PvP hub linking to all the PvP/NPC Arenas, and can now be accessed from any house via purchasing that house's PvP Token. For example, if you have the Kusari PvP Token, you may only enter/exit Alaska via Kusari; Alaska can not be used for travel.
-- Fixed an issue with the AI Companion Bot - if multiple bots of the same name were selected for a squad, the squad would never appear.
-- Set Best Path now functions across systems, as it should (thanks FriendlyFire!). Alaska is excluded from this scheme, as it now acts as the central PvP hub and would give bad path info, since Alaska can not be used for travel.
-- AI Bots in the PvP Arenas should no longer attack the random WPs scattered about, and instead focus on other ships.
-- Rare ships have been cleaned up. They no longer require a special Power Supply, but the token used to retrieve the ship is now permenantly expended upon docking with the rare ship's base.
-- There are now reputation requirements for purchasing ships. All factions will require you to be at least friendly or higher to purchase their ships. Capital Ships will require a full 90% reputation. Notable exceptions are ships sold at abandoned bases (like the Stations sold at PSMC).
-- Reduction in debris thrown by the debris tosser, which should make the "explosion debris" option more stable.
-- Fixed up the solar object hitpoints - now all system-placed station hitpoints match up with corrosponding flown station hitpoints (solar objects did not get the 1.5x HP buff from a few RCs ago; other stations mysteriously had too much health)
-- System chat is now routed to universe chat, so that everyone does not have to be in the same group to talk to one-another.

There are still some things that need to be completed, such as "upgrades" to the Save Converter to support some of RC125's new stuff (like mission scripting), and a few extra-nitpicky things (I promise I won't go overboard this time ;P )

With that, I have to run my ass off to an exam, so I'll post some more details later.

RC125 Release around the corner (semi-final changelog too)

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