This is a brief demo of the incoming new item “Large Shield Battery” which is a tech 22 Shield Monkey only class super item.

The Large Shield Battery charges up primarily using shields. It takes 60,000 shields to charge up over 100 seconds, in addition to 1000 energy. That’s 600 shields and 10 energy per second if it’s able to charge at full rate. This is the first item created that charges gradually using up shields in this manner.

Upon activation, the Large Shield Battery instantly gives the owner back all 60,000 shields, as well as a group charge that gives all nearby allies within 1000 distance a tweak of +750 shields per second for 15 seconds.

There is also an entry level tech 13 version of this item that charges up 20,000 shields over 60 seconds and gives nearby allies +500 shields per second for 10 seconds.

Also for your amusement, me struggling against a gigantic ambush in Perilous Space on the test server.  Note that I put shield batteries on my slaves, too!

Welcome to my first weekly post of the new year! In this week’s post I’ll be primarily discussing some upcoming additions to the client UI that I think most players will be extremely excited about.

What I’ve been working on is a UI addition; specifically, a right click context menu for the Possessions tab of the Character dialog. This new menu contains remote slave commands that can be used on slaves in other galaxies. It currently has five options, but it was coded in a way that it’s easily expandable, so if the feature is popular and people want more, we can do that. The current options on this menu are as follows.

• Release Slave – this was the button option that is currently in the Possessions tab. Selecting the option will allow you to permanently get rid of a slave — don’t worry, it still has the confirmation dialog so we can avoid accidents.
• Leave Stasis – this is exactly like the X-Key menu option with the added benefit that you can issue the command from another galaxy.
• Follow Me – this is also exactly like the X-Key menu option and again, it can be issued from another galaxy.
• Open Inventory – this was adapted from a little known feature of the Possessions tab — if you double click on one of your possessions it will open the inventory. I put it in the menu as well so people know it’s there (the double click command isn’t very intuitive).
• Repair Ship – this will allow you to repair your slaves on the fly, provided you can pay the credit cost needed. That’s right, no more docking to repair. Slaves being repaired must be out of stasis before the command is valid.

These new options are meant to make it possible to manage slaves when you get them stuck in hairy situations while keeping the master safe; for example getting slaves out of a galaxy like Iq’ Bana while safely sitting outside or getting your slaves to return if they get lost. They won’t in any way replace the X menu that everyone is so used to using on for slaves in the same galaxy. Also, the Repair Ship command I created for the Possessions context menu has been added to the X menu as well — as a quicker way to repair slaves on the fly without tracing through menus.

So that’s it for this week’s update. As always, questions, comments and suggestions can be posted in the forums!

Happy New Years, Star Sonatans!  2013 was a pretty good year for us, and I hope 2014 will be even better.

Within the game, 2013 saw the new Subspace Assault Expansion, with a large new area, alien invasions, and tech 22.  We added prospecting, Bindomite, TSL, and transwarping.  We restructured Olympus, and improved the galaxy map.  We continued to improve the Nexus, and rearranged and improved a lot of the low to mid level content and missions.  We’ve continued to optimize and improve both the client and server and increased both the speed and reliability of both.

We did a huge revamp on the website, which now looks and functions way better than the old one, and is much more tightly integrated.  We did massive upgrades on the billing system, and improved the whole Space Point system.  We added the suggestion list, where we can propose new features that either we come up with or the players propose on the suggestion forum, and players can vote on them to let us know where out priorities should be.

We’ve recently updated the suggestion list so that it will better track what is currently under development and what has been completed.  As you can see, the solo wave-based challenges are underway, as are the class based super items that will be the rewards for those instances.  Both are coming along really well, especially the super-item rewards that we’ve been working very hard on to help make Star Sonata a little bit more action oriented and increase the cool abilities available to players.  These will be major improvements to the game that you guys should see in the early part of 2014.

Completed, and waiting for client and server patches are new extensive high score tables and improved in-game news that will bring all the lasted developer blog posts to the in-game log in screen.

The other major project we are making great progress on is a big class rebalance spearheaded by yclepticon and s_m_w.  There have been lots and lots of discussions, maths, and testing going on, and these class balance changes are already in large part on the test server.  This is going to give more active and interesting roles to every class and improve the game for everyone across the board.

After the class balance and class super items go in, we plan another big round of suggestions and suggestion voting to help determine the major improvements to bring you during the rest of 2014.

We love working on Star Sonata and constantly improving it.  Thank you to everyone who plays Star Sonata who make all of this possible.

It’s that time of the month for a monthly event! Since the new year is right around the corner, we’re gonna extend the event to the 31st! This month we have +75% experience and +25% augmenter drop chance!

It started on December 27th at 12:01am EST and it will end on December 31st (Tuesday) at around 12:30pm EST!

Enjoy!

EDIT: Surprise! We’re extending it through the 2nd at 12:30pm EST! Happy New Year!

This is a very brief look at two more new superitems that are arriving with the class rebalance, both for Snipers.

The first is the Flak Device and is available at tech 5 and 17. This device fires a volley of exploding projectiles and fills the surrounding space with flying shrapnel hitting all nearby enemies.

The second, the Sniper Ricochet Device is available at tech 9 and 20. This devices fires a fast moving physical projectile that can bounce between targets up to five times; quickly dealing with smaller enemies or ricocheting between larger ones to deal significant damage.

Both of these devices will give Snipers a bit more AoE utility which is something they’re currently lacking. As always, questions, comments and feedback can be directed to the forums!

This week’s update is going to focus on some bug fixes and changes made to various weapons, as well as a new addition to the weapon effects system! Keep reading to find out more.

A while ago I worked on a fairly big addition to the weapons system called the ‘Weapon Effects’ system. Since I’ve never written a blog on this before, I’ll explain it a little. The weapon effects system allows us to attach various effects to any of our weapons that are triggered on various conditions. A few examples of weapon effects are Laser Splash, Warhead Splash or Projectile Ricochet and we can specify if the effect should fire on hit, miss, near miss, etc. When I added the system Chain Lasers were also moved into the new system.

Unfortunately, Chain Laser has never worked exactly the same as it did before the migration to the new system. It’s either bounced the wrong direction, bounced off into nothing, only bounced once or not even bounced at all. I’ve spent a large chunk of time this past week debugging the chain weapon effect and have gotten it into a much better state. I think it’s safe to say that when I get this fix patched live Chain Lasers will be a lot more usable and should once again work the way everyone expect them to!

The big reason for taking this time to look at the Chain Laser code was preparation for a new weapon effect that shares some of the functionality of a Chain Laser. This new effect is called the Chain Projectile (or Mutalisk Bullet, but we can’t actually call it that). It will be similar to a Chain Laser in that it bounces between targets but it will also have the advantages of a projectile such as tracking and knockback. Expect to see it used in one of the new Class Superitems that we’ve been working hard on for the rebalance!

Finally, I’ve made a few more additions to warheads and the warhead effect for the upcoming class rebalance. The most notable of these is the addition of support for parasite injection to warheads and warhead effects. Going forward we will be able to do some extremely interesting missiles utilizing this support. For example, this past week I made a powerful fire parasite for warheads and added it to the new Incendiary Missiles as well as Lancer Missiles. We are also planning on changing missiles like Entanglement missiles to inject a heavy sludge instead of doing agility reducing tweaks.

That’s it for this week’s update and this one will be the last of the year. I’ll be taking some time off for the Christmas holiday so I won’t have anything to report next week. As always feel free to post comments, questions and suggestions in the forum post. I hope everyone enjoys the holiday season and I will be back in 2014!

So here we are boys and girls, robots and exotic genderless lifeforms, computers and mechs. Christmas, a time to be joyful and eat lots of food. Candy Canes to find and Spiked Egg Nog to drink and more goodies than the eye can see to stuff into your Gigantic Stocking. As usual we’ve run our annual Astro-Santa Letter competition of which we have picked five winners; Epicnija, Tom Daedalus, Reaper Pride, Platinum and AfriendlyCanadian. These five will get some pretty rewards, as well as their letters in game for you to collect during the event and deliver to Alabaster Snowball in Lapland, off Bipolar and Sol.

Additionally this year there a few new treats, a small collection of sound projectors have been added and a new collection of missions. As well as all this, this year we have a very special guy visiting, I don’t want to say much but it should be very amusing (for me at least).

The Christmas Holiday event will run from the Saturday 21st December at 00:00 until Sunday 5th January at 00:00.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year Star Sonatarians!

This is a small patch, mostly to get the stuff needed by this year christmas event in and a few bug fixes / improvements and will be live at 23h00 SS time (see homepage for current server time).

Client changes:

• particles system change, higher fluidity and shorter trails all around (smoother animation as well), on very high especially (lower graphic also gain smoothness but not as much)
• particles system massive performance increase. This patch improved the performance of the particles rendering system by nearly 300% (which allowed us to make most existing case much smoother without impacting performances)
• greatly improved memory bandwidth and rendering efficiency (speed if it was your bottleneck) on all dynamically generated meshes, (like the suns and the spheres used in some projectiles), also fixed a memory leak on that side which was one of the last remaining known client crash
• added /lkc distortion for those who dont like the distortion effect on laser / trans applied at veryhigh, /lkc 1.1 would disable them completly.
• more debug data to help me pinpoint the last known crash still existing (the one where you alt tab during an autopilot jump and it sometime crash). I am sure there are other crashes left, but the 2 mentioned here are the last 2 i was able to prove existed.
• fixed a bug that caused engine particles to not update after an engine change until you undocked a second time.
• Added new assets for the holidays.

Server changes:

• Fix for the crash that has been happening every 26-30hours for the past week.
• Event galaxies now have their own layer on the map.
• Added support to missions to be open for set periods of time automatically (event missions automaticly becoming unavailable after a set time).
• new christmas missions and content.
• Made untanglers which stop tweaks stop imparted weapon affects
• Fix Seer Virus Transmission Laser intro mission (Leo Branton chain)
• Changes to the Bhisajayu and Samgrahak’ayu Healing Burst and Regenerative Burst super items.

Jan 16 EDIT:

There was a micro patch between Dec 20 patch and Jan 16 that fixed a bug related to healing experience not degrading properly.

How fast can my Shield Monkey do 1 million damage?  In this video, I test against one of the new test targets.

We have been testing every class against these test targets to measure total dps output more accurately.  It’s nice, because it lets us measure classes like Shield Monkey, Engineer, and Gunner, for which straight up math estimates from their skills and augs aren’t sufficient due to slave, drone, and missile damage.

The test target instance is live on the test server with a wormhole in Sol.  How long does it take your character to do 1 million damage?  Upload a video to prove your might!

Looks like it’s my turn to answer the weekly dev questions!

My questions this week are from Arias:

1. hours of SS played weekly?
2. what content have you influenced recently?
3. you work on weapons and zones, so what are your current projects?

These days I play about 10 hours of SS per week. I mainly log on to fiddle with my bases and do an occasional run with my team, but I’m planning to get more active when the new class skills go live!

My first project was to make a new balance sheet for Sebastopols (Lion Incinerator type weapons).  Blue Dwarf and I worked together on that, which is what made the popular Vervaardiger weapons possible.  Since then, I spearheaded the rebalance of manhours on many blueprints, with a focus on making most projects build in a few days at most, if not instantly.  I also do little things behind the scenes, like helping Calypso balance the shields and resistances of bosses in the Aveksaka zone.

My current main project is, of course, the class rebalance. My role in the project is to work out stats for all the skills and super items so that every class gets a useful role that they can excel at in squad-based play, while also being able to enjoy the game in solo PvE and in PvP. I am very happy with how everything is turning out, and look forward to sharing our work with you all!

After the class rebalance begins to wrap up, I am planning to put some serious thought into userbases (and Player versus Base combat, in particular).  I am also interested in working with a few other developers to revamp the low- to mid-level experience in Star Sonata.  If you have any thoughts on these projects, don’t hesitate to send them along to me!