Dev Update - 14.05.2015

[Flip]

From https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=144955

Hi everyone,

As you can imagine it’s another busy week here. We had the Mac release and are preparing for next week’s Powerplay beta.

With the Mac release we’re excited that the first of the new platforms has joined PC on our store and on Steam as well. The Mac development has aided the PC development as well with some of the optimisations working across both platforms. These changes will be included in the Powerplay update and will benefit lower spec machines in particular, but changes like the new shader caching can benefit high end machines as well. Mac development will now focus on keeping it in step with the PC release as well as continuing to look at specific issues as they arise.

The bulk of the team are pushing forward with next week’s Powerplay beta and as I’ve mentioned before the update is huge and while the new Powerplay feature is the headline component there are a host of other changes and additions as well. One significant change will be how turrets work in game:

Control: To help give players more control over when their turrets are firing, they now interact with fire groups. Turrets not in the currently active fire group will not track targets or attack (it doesn’t matter if they’re set to primary or secondary bindings). In addition, the Target Only mode is changing:

- When set to Target Only, turrets in the active fire group will track the target as before, but will not fire.
- Target Only weapons can be manually fired. When the player attempts to fire the weapon while it is tracking, the gun will start firing and will ‘latch’ on until you lose sensor contact with that target, switch fire groups or otherwise disable the weapon. Moving out of range or fire arc does not break the latch.

This means Target Only mode can now be used to initiate fights and attack illegal targets, but the pilot bears all responsibility for any crimes!

Turrets set to Fire At Will are no longer able to accidentally commit assault crimes. They will check if their target is legal before firing (or that it’s someone you’ve already assaulted) and do not fire at a target that would be a new crime, any ships hit accidentally by stray shots will not punish you for the hit.

There are some other improvements to how turrets react to targets moving and what causes them to wobble or lag behind. We think the changes will give a more interesting experience and allow turrets to be more accurate at range but possible to outmanoeuvre in a close fight. It should also add more variation between turrets, where smaller turrets are better able to track and hit fast moving ships.

We’ve also been reviewing the feedback from the addition of the reckless flying crime inside starport no fire zones. We are looking at changing this from the current implementation in the following ways:

- If the collision is shield damage only then no crime is committed.
- If hull damaged is caused then it is a fine.
- If a ship is destroyed then it is a bounty offence.

This change isn’t confirmed for the Powerplay update yet.

Another addition is pilots to the cockpit, so when you look at another ship you’ll see a pilot in the flight chair.

Looking beyond Powerplay and for localisation we are keen to expand the game into many new languages and want to do so in such a way that the translation is of good quality and fits that of the game and its fiction. So we will shortly be trialling working with the community to create game translations with the addition of Spanish language support. If that trial is successful then we’ll be looking at using the method to include more languages in the future. You can see the announcement for the trial here:

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=144954&p=2230959#post2230959

Thanks

Michael

[Colin The Grey]

Hmm looks like I will be fitting turrets to Arnie in the near future

[TomoRosso]

We’ve also been reviewing the feedback from the addition of the reckless flying crime inside starport no fire zones. We are looking at changing this from the current implementation in the following ways:

- If the collision is shield damage only then no crime is committed.
- If hull damaged is caused then it is a fine.
- If a ship is destroyed then it is a bounty offence.

I doubt this will have any impact on the mindless morons that go around ramming inside/near stations - who will care little about fines and bounties.

[UnmarkedBoxcar]

It will be a great change not having to keep switching turrets from target only to forward fire in order for them to stop firing when I don't want them to (which is often.)

[GlobusDiablo]

...Another addition is pilots to the cockpit, so when you look at another ship you’ll see a pilot in the flight chair....

A few emotes á la Dark Souls 2 would be awesome.

A friendly wave, and an angry gesture come to mind.