This week’s update is going to focus on some changes coming to the early game experience, new mission features as well as some UI modifications.

Over the past few weeks I’ve talked about putting an emphasis on the early to mid game experience. This started with my post on Arctia, continued with last week’s post on Vulcan and continues again this week with a look at the starting experience in the Nexus.

Over the last week I’ve done a lot of work on the Nexus. I think everyone can agree the current iteration is clunky, confusing and a bit unforgiving for the newer players. Many players get lost or otherwise stuck in the Nexus and that definitely doesn’t leave a good impression. So I’ve been working on making it a much more accessible and streamlined experience.

Some of the biggest changes so far are changes to the mission flow. A few months back we added in the ability to start and finishing missions on the fly, without the need to dock at a base. Paired with the mission tracker, this offers a very accessible way to get new players oriented with the game. A lot of the Nexus missions are going to use this. This is because docking after EVERY mission really is kind of boring and a little bit frustrating. Why should you have to go back to the previous galaxy to get a mission to kill guys in the next galaxy? You shouldn’t. With the changes, players are really only ever going to dock when they get a new skill or want to buy an upgrade. This will definitely help us establish a flow through the Nexus that we didn’t have before, and make the entire experience more enjoyable for the player.

Along with streamlining the starting experience, I’ve been looking at making the inventory more accessible for new players. To do this, I’ve added some new mission options. First, I’ve added the ability for a mission to equip your item rewards. This is especially useful for the starting side of the Earthforce chain where players were given a surgical laser that was essential to progression, but no help on how to equip it and switch between weapons. Now, we can automatically equip the weapon for them and just let them know via the mission which key they need to use to switch between equipped weapons. Much easier, right? Secondly, I’ve added a new mission goal that requires the player to equip a specific item. By adding new missions with this goal, we can ensure that players open their inventory and explore it a little bit. We can gradually introduce the concept of the inventory in Star Sonata with some helpful hints via mission. We can also use this tool to help explain upgrading your items which absolutely vital at the lower levels of the game.

Speaking of upgrading, one of the most confusing things for a new player is no doubt upgrading their ship. It’s a messy process that involves buying a new ship, finding the right tab on the station, moving all their gear over and reequipping everything. It also means losing any augmenters they may have gotten. To alleviate some of this confusion, at least for the very early game (techs 1 through 3) we are adding a lot more ship upgrade items. Along with this, we are removing the equipment requirement from ship upgrades, and having them only require piloting skill. Finally, we are moving where ship upgrades are listed in the trade bay from the ‘items’ tab to the ‘ships’ tab. These three changes should make getting out of that Zebucart into something useful — like a Wingship — a lot easier for new players, and getting into that new ship will in turn make the Nexus easier for them.

So that’s it for this week’s update. As always, questions, comments and suggestions can be directed to the forum post! I’ll be back again next week with another look at what I’ve been working on!

Greetings Sonatians!

Many of you were around for our 2013 player survey! We received a lot of feedback and were able to apply much of what was said into development of Star Sonata, but we discovered that there were still some questions left unanswered.

With that we created a much shorter survey to specifically ask questions about the Quality of Life while playing Star Sonata. What we mean by this is things that are annoying to use, and could be much simpler in it’s implementation. For example: the tooltips on items are frustrating to use and disappear when I’m reading them.

This survey will close at the end of April! Thank you for your feedback!

Take the Survey Now! 

This week’s update, like the update about Arctia two weeks ago, is going to focus on a new content addition that will soon be coming to Star Sonata.

This new zone is named Vulcan. Vulcan is a fiery area of space surrounding a super-hot sun that regularly flares, subjecting the surrounding area to intense heat. Vulcanites, an offshoot of the Copper Creatures that have evolved defenses allowing them to survive in this harsh environment, have begun to leave the areas closer to the sun and now threaten a Terran mining outpost nearby. It is up to pilots levels 30 to 100 to explore the depths of Vulcan and put an end to Infernus, the Vulcanite Alpha who is pushing them into Terran space!

Vulcan consists of nine new galaxies, many of which have environmental hazards. Between the flares from Vulcan itself, players have to watch for the magma pools of the Burning Basin and the steam pillars in the Magma Vents. Both of these hazards will deal damage to the player and cause fires on their ships! Vulcan will also feature four new bosses, each with their own unique loot! From the magma trailing Lavrite and the splitting Vulcanox, each of these bosses utilizes some new and exciting features that should prove both challenging and rewarding to players. Loot from the bosses will be between techs 3 and 7 and will provide some very nice new items that were previously unavailable at those tech levels like Fighter Bays and Missile Launchers. It will also contain a bevy of new weapons, energy banks and other unique gear!

Like I explained in my post on Arctia, you will be seeing a fair number of zones like this making their way into game in the future. Arctia was the first, Vulcan the second, and between myself and another of the content developers, we have no shortage of ideas. The plan is to ensure we have enough zones of this nature and that they are visible enough, that players have a clear leveling progression without having to do missions if they don’t want to. Vulcan covers a very wide range and players could end up spending a lot of time there leveling from the Vulcanites,

Also like Arctia, the missions in this zone will be fairly minimal. There will be an introductory missions to help players get to know the zone and explain the usage of heat diffusers and fire extinguishers, followed by a set of boss kill missions with some fairly interesting rewards. In general though, the zone itself is the main attraction. Players will want to do it for the loot and experience so they can get stronger and move on.

So that’s it for this week’s update. I hope you’ve enjoyed a first look at Vulcan as I’ve enjoyed working on it immensely. I’ll be back again next week with another update, but until then, feel free to post questions, comments and suggestions in the forums! Until then!

This is a beta client patch needed to connect on test, without it youll experience glitches when seeing drones.

* Code needed to fix the inactive drones wandering off (need server update and is the reason why the new client is needed on new server)
* Multiple crash fixes (7 new crashes were tracked and fixed, at least 2 remain)
* Massive performance optimisations (about 30% fps and 1000% logic fps depending on the scenario).
* Higher precision fps and logic fps display / calculation (previous system was losing precision the higher the value was, so an fps of above 66 could be anything from 80 fps to 50 fps due to timer precision, which in turn caused slowdown in the fps smoothing system), new system support fps up to 1,000,000 with 2 decimal precision).

If you do not have the beta client and wish to install it. It can be downloaded from http://www.starsonata.com/dl/StarSonata_2_beta.exe. The installation is separated from the live client, and it is recommended you keep the live client at hand reach, in case beta client update break it for you.

Hey guys! Sorry for the radio silence since the contest’s conclusion. We’re having to do much in the way of manual work in order to track everyone’s points. The contest was way more popular than we anticipated! We are expecting winners to be announced late March-Early April, with a new contest announced shortly after (with much less manual work involved).

I can’t say much about the new contest yet, only that it involves a new system Jey’s been designing for the past month and that new system involves skins for player ships.

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day! This week’s update will focus on some more bug fixes, changes and new features that will soon be coming to Star Sonata. Keep reading to find out more!

Let’s start with new features, they’re probably the most exciting. As I am sure everyone is aware, with the class rebalance we added in drone destruction. Since the reset when that change went in I’ve seen a lot of destroyed drone husks littering the universe. It seems a lot of players forget about something like an Acme Combat out in Perilous space and just leave it! It’s no wonder I’ve seen so many requests for the ability to abandon drones — which is a new feature you will see in an upcoming patch.

I’ve added options to both the target options menu (x-key) and the context menu in your possessions tab of your character window that allow you to abandon drones. This option will be available for any drones owned by your character. Using it will bring up a confirmation (for the possessions menu variant), and if you really are sure, will do one of two things depending on the type of drone you are trying to abandon. If it is a permanent drone, it will disappear and be gone forever. If it is a temporary drone, it will go inactive (regardless of timer or other states) and gain an Abandoned prefix. This will sever all ties the drone has to you. Abandoned drones will still exist in the game however and can be scooped by any player. This could no doubt lead to some pretty lucky finds time and again!

As for changes, there is one coming up for the chain laser effect that directly deals with chain shield transferences. I’ve updated the chain laser code so it properly subtracts shields from the healer for all targets hit, not just the primary target. This change comes on the heels of another that hit with the class rebalance; splashing healing lasers also take shields from the healer for each target hit. Both these changes are pretty important to making a wider variety of healing lasers available for players which we definitely intended to do at some point in the near future.

And for some fixes! One thing that was completely overlooked with the addition of the Blue Photon Test Ranges was modded gear. Modded gear can drastically alter the maximum shield banks of the drones and lead to some extremely skewed results. To fix this I’ve added a new option to our ‘shipyard’ or the part of the code that loads up all the AI ship configurations to disallow a ship from starting with modded gear. When this change hits everyone’s drones in the testing range will always be identical. This will make your damage testing mean a bit more. Another fix that is coming also deals with the testing range and that’s that Testing Dummies will no longer be rad-exable. I am sure people think that is is funny they managed to get them out, but they were never intended to leave the galaxy.

Now for a final small bug fix update; I’ve finally found and corrected the issue causing desync for mobile drones. This was the result of the new inactive flag not being properly serialized to the client. So pretty much, the server knew the drone wasn’t mobile anymore, but the client didn’t and chose to render it as if it was still mobile. Now that that flag is properly sent to the client we should be free of any more weird drone sync issues!

So that’s it for this week’s update! As always, questions, comments and suggestions can be directed to the automatically generated forum post! I’ll be back against next week with another update!

* Made it so that you must be docked to equip or unequip a super item
* new feature: Made untanglers that can break gremlins remove all your current ones as well as stop new ones from being added
* Moved all the lyceum galaxies to the new map layer.
* Updated lyceum galaxies with new coordinates.
* Updated spawner times on all color empire galaxies.
* AoE weapon effect can now do percent damage.
* Fixed stat string for elect temp tweaks
* rebalanced Color Empire cloaks.
* Replaced “Satanic” energy tweaks with “Sacrificial” energy tweaks in the drop lists
* Fixed a bug with drones/bases not launching missiles/fighters
* Fix so Sniper Analysis properly works with beam weapons.
* Sniper Analysis critical bonus no longer scaled by level of Sniper (always get full 100% regardless of sniper level)
* Scruples in Hyper now have enough energy to fire their missiles.
* fixed mission sob floaty issue for spawners that don’t give credit
* fixes on the team score display.
* Fixed a typo on the GOUQE
* Added Plague Device and Hidden Plague Device super items
* Added AI tags for most class super items so that your slaves can use them
* Added the ability for missiles/fighters to have 360 degree launch aiming with some missile launchers/fighter bays, or when launched from bases or drones
* Made salvos of multiple missiles launch in a spread pattern, instead of randomly
* Made bases/drone only launch 1 salvo of missiles at a time, and only attempt to launch a missile when the missile bay is fully ready, so they don’t queue up wasted missiles
* Marked the Locution as non-captureable
* Shield Redistribution device laser no longer is affected by NT

and most importantly
* CRUCIBLE is added to arena lobby

This week’s update is going to focus entirely on some new content that I’ve been working on as well as some long term goals for the early to mid-game!

For a while we have heard complaints that the game is lacking in the low to mid-game. Last year, after our all team meeting, we went ahead and did an analysis on low to mid game missions and ultimately ended up restructured the existing missions in game to ensure there is a clear leveling path up to 500 (if you do pretty much everything). That however didn’t do very much to introduce new content; new content is something that is definitely needed and ultimately what I think players really wanted. With T22 and the class rebalance out of the way, I have some time to actually start working on some new content for the lower levels! So, for the past two weeks I’ve spent nearly all of my time between bugfixing working on a new content zone known as Arctia. Arctia is a custom dungeon for players levels 20 to 50. It’s comprised of seven new galaxies, a bunch of new AI and items and contains two new bosses with unique loot tables.

I’m very excited about Arctia, and that’s because Arctia is a kind of prototype for new low level content zones going forward. Instead of being heavily mission based like most of the low level content (like Nexus), this zone is more about running the custom dungeon and getting loot and XP, in the vein of Blue Outpost or Protoplasmica. I think ultimately, for the new player, the concept of dungeon, boss, loot, is a very easy one to digest. There are still some missions, but the missions don’t overwhelm the experience. It also has pretty wide level range so you can stay there for a while if you want to level up off AI instead of doing missions elsewhere.

Arctia is also just the beginning. Going forward I’m going to be spending a fair amount of time working on more low to mid-level zones to fill content gaps. I’ll also be revamping some existing ones so they are more manageable for the single player by reducing teamed AI swarm (I’m looking at you Infernal Tempest and Bonnet). The end goal is to have a full series of custom zones that newer players can do for XP and useful loot if they don’t feel like running around for the Paxians or trawling Earthforce Space for AI.  The end goal is to also have enough of these that there is overlap between the level ranges on each one so players have multiple options on where they choose to level. For example, Arctia overlaps with Blue Outpost for the levels 20 to 50 range. Players can bounce between the two if they get bored. Ultimately, what I’d love to see is a lot of choice in the lower levels. Players need to be able to progress however they see fit. If they want to do exploration or missions or just hunt AI, there will be places they can do any of that.

So you can get a better idea of just what this zone offers, I’ve gone ahead and made a short preview video!

So that’s it for this week’s update. I’ll be back again next with with another update on what I’ve been up to. As always, feel free to post questions, comments and suggestions in the forums!

Since micropatches arent worth a single post everytime, and i been doing quite a few lately. Ill keep this blog post updated with micropatch notes.

February 26
* Server crash fixes
* removed event code generation from instances
* Seer mines are no longer scoopable.
* Fixed a bug that caused repair attempt to error with impossibly long time.
* Fixed a bug causing drones to not fire at ai drones.

February 28
* Fixed High Priest Chamber not giving a lockout
* Fixed a server crash

March 03
* High Priest’s Blessing is now Neurobound.
* Fixed lockout issues on High Prophet boss fight.
* Reduced spawn time for the High Priest’s Blessing in the Key Chamber.
* Fixed spawn time on Weapons 22 Boss adds.

March 04
* Slave Ph.D. is now properly accounted for when transferring a slave.
* Skill Resetting now checks slave slots used, etc, and will deny the reset if you would exceed limits after the reset.
* RP Warship uses weaker missiles.
* Using a demo kit on a destroyed base will kill you if you couldn’t normally undock in that ship.

March 07
* Fixed a bug causing drones repairs to eat away money if you did not have enough credits to repair it all at once.
* Made it so client specify if an item can be partial repaired or not in the repair widget tooltip (in the top bar) (drones are the only item that can’t).
* Fixed repair cost display for drones.
* Fixed a bug with drones/bases not launching missiles/fighters
* New sounds and textures in the client for future content (not in use on live yet)
* Increased delay before tooltips show up (from 0.7 to 2 sec) and the deadzone allowed for the mouse to be considered paused (from 15 to 40 pixels).
* Gremlin now interrupt autopilot (was not a problem in c1 because the autopilot was too stupid to adapt to a grem, but since the c2 autopilot is quite a bit more aggressive it tend to completely counter gremlins and as such, gremlins will disable it.

This week’s post is going to primarily focus on some post-reset bug fixes — of which there were some, but nearly as many as there could have been thanks to the class rebalance testing phase! Keep reading to find out more.

Primarily this past week I dealt with some of the issues that weren’t found and fixed during the class rebalance testing phase. I figured I would go into a few of them in a bit more detail.But first, map issues!

There were definitely a few map issues this reset. First, Iq’ Bana this universe ended up spawning in Emphatic Biology! Which meant to get there you needed to go through an engineless galaxy. Hardly ideal. So a new wormhole to the area was added in Anomu. Secondly, there was an issue with Lyceum. Splitting up the galaxies left the Earthforce Space layer map a little cluttered. So I took a bit of time and rearranged the galaxies on the map and move them all to the Serengeti layer. Instead of a jumble of crossing links, you now have what you see below.

I think everyone will agree it’s much neater! I’ve also updated the galaxy files so the map should stay that way for future universes as well.

There were a few bugs missed during the testing phase, mainly there have been a few issues with drones and missiles. First, drones and bases were healing friendly destroyed drones, this is obviously a problem since healing a destroyed drone over an active drone makes the healing pointless (and the destroyed drone can’t even get hit by the heal). When I added the destroyed drone feature, I accidentally overlooked adding a check to ignore destroyed drones in the drone and base attack code. It was a simple fix to add a check in to make sure destroyed and inactive drones were ignored. Secondly, destroyed and inactive drones weren’t properly evaporating when players logged off. This was leaving a mess in some galaxies. This issues is due to the fact that destroyed and inactive drones skipped their idle (so they didn’t attack enemies, heal friends, follow, etc). I’ve added some additional code to make sure they’ll evaporate even if they are destroyed or inactive! Both these drone fixes should go live sometime soon.

And then there were the missile issues. It was discovered that missiles were inheriting some damage bonuses they weren’t supposed to and that is detailed here. There was also an issue with missile bays. They would sometimes think they had a full queue even when the queue was empty. This was a tricky bug that ended up being a bit beyond my reach to do in a reasonable amount of time, so I passed it off to the code wizard, Jey. It’s since been fixed and we have a new queuing system for missiles!

That’s it for this week’s update. This is a short update, and that’s because besides bugs, I spent a large amount of time this week working on a special project that I am continuing to work on this week. Expect an announcement next week on exactly what this is! Until then, feel free to post questions, comments and suggestions in the forums!