Once again it’s Monday, so it’s time for a Calypso update! I’ve done quite a bit in the past week so here is a run down of the bigger things I’ve been working on.

First, I’ve been doing quite a bit of bug-fixing. The Nexus is working properly now (and with the new starting missions), and a bug allowing people to un-neurobind and un-mod items that were neurobound and modded using the new feature has been squashed. I’ve also been pretty busy taking care of a few bugs with Subspace and am pleased to report that AI from different leaves of the area will no longer roam where they are not supposed to (and subsequently murder their comrades). I’ve also managed to track down a bug with the alien invasion reinforcement timer which was keeping their numbers low. It’s been fixed and when it’s patched, the aliens will be back in much greater numbers.

Secondly, new features! I think one that people might find most exciting are Subspace Tunnels. Subspace Tunnels are similar to Juxtapositions and the Subspace layer will feature six of them. Each one contains a very powerful alien and I am considering locking the higher DF exit (the one that would take you to your instance), until the guardian is dead. Naturally the exit to the lower DF Hub galaxies would remain unlocked so you could get out if you needed to. In case you were wondering, normally a change like this would require a universe reset to go in — however, I have also worked on some back end admin features so I will be able to add in the Subspace Tunnels without a universe reset.

A lot less exciting, I’ve been doing quite a bit of testing on all of the mod changes I talked about last week. With expanding the mods available on some items, adding some new items, and letting entirely new classes of items get mods, there are quite a few code changes that needed testing to make sure all the new functionality is working as intended. For those who aren’t aware, we’ve added mods for tractors, shield chargers and hull extensions. I’ve also added two new mods, Reinforced (reduced durability damage) and Angelic (lowered visibility and hostility).

Finally, the Bindomite event! It’s coming to a close today and I hope everyone enjoyed the chance to stock up on the commodity. When we released the Neurobind and Mod feature we weren’t able to add in all the sources of Bindomite that we wanted — only Prospecting. Hopefully the event has alleviated some of the demand. Keep in mind that prospecting won’t be the only source. DG Bosses will be dropping it sometime in the near future as well.

So, that’s this week’s look at what I’ve been up to. As always, feel free to give me feedback and you’ll hear from me again next week!

While researching the strange properties of a newly discovered resource (and seeking a way to further monetize it) a team of researchers from the Universal Mining Corporation, the Blue Photon Manufacturing Corporation and the Lyceum has stumbled upon a frightening discovery!

When exposed to extremely rare radiation found only in the depths of Subspace, strange things happen to Bindomite. Individual crystals align and combine, eventually coalescing into larger sentient beings!

Unfortunately… they are hostile. Seizing the entirely radiation supply the creatures have multiplied. The research base where they first took form has been destroyed. They have escaped!

This weekend only (Sept. 13 to Sept. 15), help the research team destroy the crystal abominations. The reward? Bindomite!

Another week, another update! This update will focus on a few new things I’m working on as well as a few of the things that went in with the patch.

First, last weeks patch and what was supposed to go in. I had quite a few features that I’d been working on pushed live in this last patch– the biggest being prospecting changes, a new Olympus daily, neurobind and mod, and scooping changes. To quickly recap; the prospecting change give nodes a lifespan, when it’s up they die and are reseeded elsewhere in the universe, the new Olympus daily, the Tidepool, neurobind and mod is a new right click feature where you can neurobind an item in exchange for random mods and the scooping changes allow you to hold down your scoop key to continually scoop items.

There was a change I was working on that wasn’t entirely ready that made its way in, those were the new character creation options — and it did created a bit of confusion with the Nexus. Rest assured, those changes have been disabled and we will be pushing a new client shortly to enable the fix.

The past week I have mainly been working on a new spawner type, the Wave Spawner. The Wave Spawner is similar to an Ambush Spawner (spawners that only spawn when a player gets ‘caught’ in their trigger area), with the main difference being it spawns multiple, predefined waves of AI. Previously, we ‘faked’ this functionality with multiple Ambush Spawners (think the UrQa vs. Mzungu battle in the Enigmatic Sector, Whiskey Outpost in the Nexus), but with this new spawner we will be able to do similar content much more easily and with much greater control.

This control is enabled with some key new features. First, there are the spawn features. We can set a wave to automatically spawn after a set duration, when the previous wave is cleared, or a combination of both. Secondly, there are enhanced mission control features. Each wave can be assigned a different mission requirement and the spawner will skip to the highest wave based on player missions. So for example, we can have missions to skip the first 10 of 20 waves for a spawner if you have the required mission. Thirdly, unlike traditional spawners, we can set individual teams and extra skills for each configuration. This affords us greater variety in the kind of AI we can spawn, ie, we can do a wave with Gunner and Sniper AI, etc, as well as letting us make AI that are hostile to one another with the same spawner. You can expect to see this new kind of spawner used quite a bit going forward to hopefully make some epic space battles.

Perhaps more exciting since it directly affects player, well, I’ll let the screenshot explain.

I have been working on some mod changes, including adding two all new mods. The first, Reinforced, will make your items take less durability damage when you die. The second Angelic, reduces hostility and visibility. Along with these two new mods, we are also expanding the number of items that can have mods to include Tractors, Shield Chargers and Hull Expansions. Finally, we’ll also be adding new functionality to some of the old mods so we can add them to items they couldn’t be on before — for instance, Amplified on cloaking devices to increase their cloaking power, or Rewired for engines where some turning is traded for thrust.

So, that’s an update on what I’ve been doing the past week. As always, feel free to give me feedback! Until next week!

Client:
Additions:
* New model for the Mzungu Acolyte/Kikale Mzungu Frigate
* New Neurobind and Mod feature
* Scooping changes: Scoops are now activated by holding down ‘C’, they’ll scoop a certain number of items per second as long as you hold C.

Tweaks:
* Client will now flash its task bar icon when you receive a pm and the application is not in focus.
* Your current number of Space Points available on your account is now shown under avatar (take note that it can take up to a minute for it to update after you buy Space Points on the website)

Fixes:
* Fixed Pax Scutelogica being off-center in the character selection screen
* Fixed the Behemoth+ visage

Server:
Additions:
* Added 1500 max shield to slaves for each level of remote control
* Added 2% per level resist all for slaves for each level of slave research
* Added 150 max shield to drones for each level of drone deployment
* Support for Space Points using items (Augmenter Retrieval Module and Ship Dry-dock Module)
* Aug Reset and Ship item forming item using SP (basically replacing the ticket system to pay for Augmenter Retrieval or Ship Dry-dock Module) are now available in game in free market ai base “Friedman” for 1 credits. Using it do not consume the item and will ask for confirmation before using the spacepoints.
* Galaxy wide prospecting scanners.

Tweaks:
* Made Drone Deployment skill require piloting skill
* Split out the dual-functionality of the Sticky tag and added a new Ship-bound tag for items, additionally applied it to various items that needed it
* Bhisajayu had some stat changes.
* Missions will automatically complete if they can be completed when started. Repeatable missions completed this way will automatically reopen.
* Parasites decay while in stasis.

Fixes:
* Changed the outfit hull command to required you to be docked. Outfitting your ship will unequip any items of the same class that’s given to you (eg: doing it to get a superitem will unequip your other non-sticky supers)
* Fix for drones/AI using weapons which heal the target instead of damaging it
* Prospecting Beams and DNA Extractors now properly display error messages in the client.
* Fixed the bug causing Subspace spawners to sometimes change to Zebucart Spawners.

Content:
Additions:
* Added some basic gear to the station in Lyceum just in case bad stuff happens during a class reset
* Gave Faranji Wingships a new inbuilt (replacing the mag one)
* Gave Captain Kidd a few Prawn Piece drops
* Added some new items to dungeon loot
* New T21 daily mission, The Tidepool.
* Tractoring 21.
* New T21 Tractors.
* New T22 Fighter missions.
* New Capacitors and Diffusers that reduce reflectivity.
* New items that can be built with Eridium.

Tweaks:
* Various changes to The Mausoleum, given normal DG/boss loot, increased chances of Mausoleum specific loot
* Re-added the Mini-Marinus Blueprint as a drop from Mausoleum
+ Updated UZ galaxies to use the automatic wormhole unlocking where appropriate, and made the spawners one time where appropriate (gals outside of the instances won’t change till next uni, if appropriate).
* Updated the requirements on T21 skill and added a player progression (Tut bot in Sol) mission for T22 skills
* Blueprint update: Build times on most blueprints radically changed, following a general trend of a minimum build time of a few days if you have a really good prod.
* Set all the Lyceum factories (Sensors, Microchips and Augmenter Module commodities) intervals to 10 minutes
* Increased the Prawn Piece drop rate in DGs a tiny bit.
* Prospecting nodes now have a lifespan and will be reseeded when they die.

Fixes:
* Fixed an issue where DG Roc Minions dropped too many credits
* Fixed a typo in the pretender Shard missions
* Made some adjustments to the Auric Sector to inhibit slave spam
* Fixed Olympus mini bosses not dropping Unstable Shard Dusts
* Fixed a typo in the item name for the Mercury Condensers
* Fixed a bunch of typos in Augmenter Tweaking missions of Condenser spelt incorrectly.
* Fixed Qokujiii Qa’Ik visage being angled incorrectly
* Fixed Range Crystallizers Blueprint weighing 1.5b and costing 100m
* Fixed a bug with the MF Bigger Green and 4MF Slumberchrome Strontium missions
* Fixed DD22 drone stablizer factory being unusable

It’s been another week so it’s time for another Calypso Update! As you all know I’ve been making some changes to the Nexus but that’s not all. Over the past week I’ve done quite a bit of bug-fixing and iterative development on some of the new features heading your way. Perhaps the most work though has been with the Neurobind and Mod feature.

So, firstly, the Neurobind and Mod feature. In my current iteration of the feature I’ve added a few new things. One, when you neurobind and mod an item, the output text in your Event channel now displays a list of the mods added to that item. This should make bulk modding items for a very specific combination much easier.

As you can see from the screenshot above, I’ve also done a few changes to the way the client and server handle displaying the Neurobound property to the user. Previously we handled letting players know an item was neurobound by using an item’s stat string in the tooltip. This means when an item was neurobound by default, (for example, Olympus Chargers), the client would display ‘Neurobound’ in the tooltip. This won’t work for the new Neurobind and Mod feature because the stat string text in the tooltip is identical for all instances of an item — which led to the above solution. The new neurobound tag in tooltips will apply to all neurobound items, so get ready to see pretty purple text on stuff like Shards too.

Secondly, concerning the Neurobind and Mod feature.

During preliminary testing of the feature, we came to the realization that every single time an item was NB + Modded, it was always getting the [Miniaturized] modification. After a little investigation, I realized it was quirk in the way we randomly roll on mods. As probability of getting a mod approaches 1.0, so does the probability of getting the [Miniaturized] modification (as it’s the first modification to be rolled on). Unfortunately, the only way of guaranteeing a mod was passing in that 1.0 probability… however, that has been addressed. We can now specify that we want an item to get at least one additional mod, no matter what, and the function will continue to roll until a new mod has been assigned. This gives us much greater flexibility when using the mod system to assign new mods to neurobound items — that is to say we can use the same probability parameters as DG, ship-dropped items or ruin items to determine the mods that your item will get using the feature. It also allows for us to create a parameter to control it for a new bonus weekend event if we want to!

We are currently prepping for a patch and this feature is on the test server, if you have a beta client, feel free to test it out! I’ll be adding Bindomite, the commodity required to Neurobind items for sale in Sol.

I’ve been pretty busy the past week on some extremely important and interesting stuff related to the new player experience. I am sure we can all agree this is an area the game needs to improve on, and hopefully this round of changes will help!

Nexus

First, creating a new character is going to be a bit different. When you start your first character, not only will you have a faction choice (Volcom or Cadet), but also a starting ship selection choice. We are introducing three new Zebucart variants each tied to the idea of a focus for new players. In addition to the default Zebucart, we’ll be adding the Heavy Zebucart, the Zebu Freighter and the Zebu Gunship. If it’s not apparent, these are meant to allow players to experience a focus without actually being tied to one.

A very WIP screen of the new build selector.

• The Zebucart won’t receive any changes.

• The Heavy Zebucart will be a slightly slower, more armored Heavy Fighter with a big energy pulse gun superitem.

• The Zebu Freighter will be an even slower, but significantly more spacious Freighter with a special Zebu Drone superitem.

• The Zebu Gunship will be a mini-capship with a missile launcher, a missile superitem (and of course, a Capital Engine).

Expanding on this idea, we will also be adding a bunch of new ships from Techs 1-3 to the Nexus (mainly in the freighter and capital varieties) so players can continue along their ‘focus’ as they progress through the Nexus. When the players are sent to Janitor’s Outpost at level 10, they will be asked to choose their focus. The missions have been rewritten to be more new-player friendly. I hope that adding some new character creation elements and pushing focus choice forward will help new players connect to their character a bit more — as well as make it a bit easier to understand Star Sonata’s rather unique class system.

These aren’t the only changes happening to the Nexus though. Almost as important, we will be offering Drone Deployment and Remote Control in the Nexus. More importantly though, we are changing the way the very first missions work when a new player logs into the game.

I created a new option for galaxies allowing them to specify a mission to be given to players when they enter a galaxy. Using this, when a player enters the starting galaxies, Earthforce Outpost or Volcom Testing Grounds, they will be given a short, interactive mission chain that should help familiarize the controls and the basics of combat. Hopefully this is much more exciting than docking to pick up a mission which is the first thing a new player is required to do now.

Mission Enhancements

Other than some Nexus tweaking, I’ve been working on some other interesting features. If you haven’t done any missions in Subspace, you might not be aware of the auto-complete and auto-start features we have for missions now. They allow players to start and complete missions on the fly. For these, as well as the ‘auto-accept on galaxy entrance’ tag I recently worked on, I’ve added an attribute called “display pop up”. Enabling this for an auto-mission tag means when the mission completes (or starts) it will display a mission dialog in the client, IE, you are getting a “transmission” from the mission giver while you are flying about.

Second, I’ve been working on a feature that might seem more interesting to more players than the above changes — that is an auto-complete feature. If you dock at a space base and accept a mission that you have the ability to complete right away, the mission will be automatically completed. In addition, if the mission is repeatable, it will reopen the mission automatically for you. I am sure the appeal of this feature is instantly understood when it comes to turn-in missions. Instead of sitting and sifting through the mission list in Lyceum and tediously clicking until all 40 of your Avalon Whatever Blueprints are gone, you can quickly turn the entire stack into Mentions.

Hopefully everyone has enjoyed another look into what’s been going on behind the scenes at Star Sonata! Be back next week with another update!

Those of you who’ve been reading our daily dev blog posts, would know that I’ve been working on some project, amongst other things including some new AI. Well, the bulk of the project is nearing the end, so I thought I’d tell you all about it!

The Crucible, is the name of the project, and is a new sort of Arena. Once it’s complete it’ll be located off of Arena Lobby with the arena galaxies. Beginning from the relatively recently suggestion ‘wave solo instance’ area, the result so far I feel is looking pretty good.

The Crucible consists of 24 waves, split up into 6 stages, each wave spawns after the previous wave has been cleared, the end of each stage is marked with a boss. In some ways it’s quite like a DG with no wormholes. Most of the AI have been taken from other locations, but there are a few new things in the mix (notably the bosses).

Each class will get it’s own version of The Crucible, with specific AI for their class, and class will get their own specific rewards, although the rewards haven’t been fully fleshed out yet, there will definitely be goodies in there. The area is suited for all levels, as the AI range from lowly Helgas and Roswells all the way up, past Zaphragi fleets to some new AI.

The Crucible is currently on our test server, but only for Engineers. A lot of boss scripting is involved to get it to work correctly, once I’m sure that it’s okay, I’ll duplicate it and make the suitable adjustments for the other classes. The missions to try it out (as well as the entrance) are located in Arena Lobby over at test.starsonata.com on port 3032.

On to the second point of this blog post, the aforementioned new AI. After waiting which must be about two years now since I had the idea for Tech 22 skills to be released, I’ve finally added the final stage of AI.

These new birdies will be appearing in The Crucible, as well as in the wild (where they belong) as late as next universe. They may also appear in dungeons.

First off, sorry for the lack of posts last week! We had a slight hiccup with our daily blog posts, mostly due to a communication issue and a bug with WordPress. Hopefully sometime this week you’ll be seeing an update from Blue Dwarf regarding his ongoing projects.

I will be absent from the daily meetings for two whole weeks as I am going to Pax Prime for a Work/Vacation. I plan on promoting the game by handing out FREE 3 month subscription cards. How cool is that? Following PAX Prime I’m taking my first real vacation in… I don’t even remember to see some family I haven’t seen in over a year. After taking non-stop classes for a few years and not having a legitimate break from… life(?), I’m pretty stoked to have just a few days to myself and family.

I’m going to take this blog post to discuss a little bit of what I’ve been doing this past week. I’ve been getting ready for PAX PRIME! As I mentioned I am going to be promoting the game while I’m there. We unfortunately, were unable to get a booth space this year because all booths sold out at the conclusion of last year’s PAX Prime! What we plan on doing instead is handing out some ultra-cool three month voucher cards. I’ve been busy designing the cards, learning our new voucher system and trying to update our site accordingly. Thanks to a very awesome community member my progress on the Free to Pay vs Pay to Play features page is coming along nicely. I’ve also learned more about HTML, CSS, and javascript than I really wanted to know, and am working on a whole new page dedicated to in person promotions going forward.

One item I also wanted to discuss was our monthly events, I said it would be every fourth Friday of the month, yet when I put it into my calendar to be scheduled, I made it be the LAST Friday of every month. Well, August has 5 Fridays. I was so caught up on my preparation for PAX that it didn’t even occur to me to double check the date. That was an oops on my part and I’ve adjusted my calendar appropriately. Regarding Monthly events I personally feel as though they’re getting stale and repetitive. The problem is, there’s not a whole lot we can change easily.  The game has a bunch of parameters that can globally change various things within the game. Many of these are specifically for the administrative side of things and are rather boring, but a few, like EXP and Augmenter drop chance, can easily be changed on the fly. I’ve had a smattering of suggestions from players. One that particularly interested me was the idea that roaming ubers spawn rate was increased.

Before I conclude I want to address the blog itself. I know our blog posts have been erratic. We’ve had Daily blog posts, and then big project posts like Calypso’s updates. So what kinds of blog posts do you like? Daily meeting posts? Or individual big project type posts?  A little combination of both? Let us know!

To conclude I want to let you guys know that we are looking into doing a patch very soon. It will go onto Livetest first, where we will post the patch notes for you guys to scrutinize to your heart’s delight. If you help us out by testing any of these issues and document what you did to test, we may reward you with in game goodies, or even some space points.

PS. I will be posting updates from PAX Prime on my twitter and the Star Sonata twitter account. Check them out!

Again, it’s been a bit since I’ve posted an update on the specifics of what I’ve been working on, so here is your Calypso Update! Over the past few weeks I’ve had two major projects in the works, both of them from the Suggestions system.

The first, at number three, are the proposed scooping changes.

In case you aren’t aware, it was proposed we change scooping from a button spam to a ‘hold the button down and just keep scooping’ type operation. To facilitate this, all scoops will have two new values. The first is a ‘scooping range’ value. Any debris that is within this radius of your ship will be eligible to scoop. The second is a ‘scoops-per-second’ value. This will determine how fast your ship can scoop items while you keep the scoop key held down.

Along with that change, I’ve also added a new feature we plan to use on some scoops called ‘Vacuum Scooping’. A vacuum scoop will not only function as detailed above, but it will have a third new value called ‘vacuum range’. All debris within this range will be slowly pulled towards your ship until it is in scooping range and can be scooped. This means stuff like scooping credits in a DG is going to get a lot easier.

Both these change also mean the way scoops use energy has to be changed as well. Instead of using a small chunk of energy every time you hit the scoop key (which is the way it currently works, scoops will subtract from your overall EPS in the same way shield chargers or other equippable items with an energy requirement do. This delta in the EPS will only be applied while you are actively scooping of course.

Don’t be worried that these changes will make scooping feel unnatural though. These are more of an addition to current scooping functionality than a complete change of how scoops work. If you want to spam your scoop key, by all means, go ahead. But it will be a lot easier to just scoop and hold.

The second, at number nine, is the Neurobind and Mod feature.

Again, if you aren’t aware, this feature will introduce a new right-click option in your client, “Neurobind item…”. Neurobinding and item will require one Bindomite, a new commodity that will be a global drop at all levels (and also be found in prospecting nodes). In exchange for neurobinding the item, the item will be given a roll at the mod system with a minimum of one mod guaranteed (more are possible however!). The “Neurobind Item…” option can only be used on non-neurobound, unequipped items while docked, so yes, you can neurobind an item that is already modded to get more mods on it. However, you will want to be careful. Once an item is neurobound you can’t go back and you will be stuck with whatever mods have been randomly assigned.

Both these changes are about to hit testing so it shouldn’t be too long until you see them (as well as some other suggestions that you guys have voted up!).

Sorry for the lack of a blog yesterday. There wasn’t anything new and exciting to report. Today we had our usual quick meeting plus a meeting with myself, Jeff, Jey, and Kalipso to discuss SS as a whole. Meetings for 1.5 hours today! Woo!

First the dev specific updates!

Jey found the memory corruption issue! Huzzah! This was the source of most of the crashes here recently. We’re crossing our fingers that most of the crash issues have been resolved. (Knock on wood)

Thomas is finishing up our new front page and it’s looking snazzy!

I honestly forgot what Kalipso and Jeff have been doing, mostly bug fixes from what I gather? (it’s late and I forgot to take notes).

I took yesterday largely off to recoup since I haven’t had a day off in 10 days.  I also worked some on our F2P vs P2P page to adequately explain what all goodies you can do as a F2P and what perks you get when you move P2P. I wrestled with JavaScript and taught it a lesson, and thankfully Thomas and SI had more experience with JavaScript than I and were able to help me make JavaScript work with our crappy CMS page editors.

Blue Dwarf has been still working on something with the balance sheets. Yes, they’re still evil.

As I said we had a big meeting today to discuss marketing and how to frame the game as a whole. Jeff wrote up a good document showing how the game is really all over the place and it’s hard to try and peg down what exactly Star Sonata is to a new player. Marketing & advertising Star Sonata has been a right challenge since we have no real central vision. Essentially we are all over the place with different features and ideas, but we haven’t really capitalized on one thing and become the best at it.

Thus, after a very quick deliberation, we have decided we want to focus Star Sonata in a skill based action MMO. We want you to be able to hone in your skills and fight real time to defeat your enemies. We discussed a little bit on how we want our end game to look, but those ideas are very raw and in need of much refinement, and especially with the launch of T22, we’re in no rush to make any sort of change or addition to the end game.

Now that I have a good idea of how we want to take the game, I can now effectively advertise around that. We also know that all the marketing & advertising in the world isn’t going to do anything if our entry to the game is… crap. While the Nexus is fun for some, nothing spectacularly grabs you in that first five seconds of play, and it doesn’t really jive with our idea of positioning SS as a skill based action type game. One of our main priorities then is going to be to vastly improve the entry to Star Sonata to show off what the game is and grab your attention so you don’t click that X in the top right corner.

We won’t be doing any radical changes to game structure, or removing features, so don’t worry. Star Sonata will still have all the kickass features and content it has already. What we’ve decided is that we would like to focus new additions being added to the game around this “Skill & Action Based Combat” idea.

This was one of the first meetings we had where everyone in attendance was largely in agreement about what was being said, which is great. We’ll have more blogs coming up describing what we’d like to add moving forward.