Bug Fixes - 11
• Critical - Ship upgrades were not saving correctly due to an error in the save code
• Critical – Due to a ‘more than’ ‘less than’ sign error, the threat detection range of AI ships hostile to you was borked and they would not attack the player. <><><><>
• You were unable to jettison ‘Isonium’ from cargo
• You could not select a target from tactical view once zoomed out fully – related to scaling and collision detection
• Audio Warnings were occurring relative to friendly or neutral vessels
• Sending distress calls was borked – allies would never respond even though they indicated they were en route
• When an alien race terminated communications the departing message was not seen because the chat history was being cleared immediately
• A second thrust image was being draw for the frigate which only has one engine exhaust
• Jettison all option now inputs the total quantity of the item you are jettisoning into the amount field
• Various fixes to ship descriptions
• You could send a counter offer during trade even if you did not input an offer in the offer field, leading the AI to accept your offer of 0 credits.
• The jump drive acquisition was borked.

User Experience - 6

• Your crew will inform you if you try to activate a mining or gas beam beyond the required distance and also if you don’t have an active target to mine.
• Adjusted the wall of text which greets the player at the beginning, it is now a fence of text
• Revamped the in game play tips/guide to be in line with the changes made in this version and to be more instructive
• Added a tutorial which will commence immediately on undocking for the first time from the starting space station. This tutorial can also be commenced by opening the in game tips window and selecting restart tutorial. It can be done anywhere any time. The tutorial includes instruction and walk-through on: space flight, combat, mining, targeting, communications and several other game systems
• Adjusted some tool tips and tweaked some placement of interface windows
• You can mouse over the fuel icon in the VDU and see how much fuel is remaining (in digits)

Gameplay - 5

• The battle jumper device now works more smoothly and draws energy per jump, not constantly
• Added overload engines ability – increased turn rate/speed boost while activated – heavy drain on ship’s capacitor
• Added overload shields ability – increased shield mitigation to incoming damage – heavy drain on ship’s capacitor
• Adjusted cluster torpedoes to be more useful
• Added emergency jump ability – use ful in emergencies, when activated in a few seconds your ship will jump to a random distance thousands of units of distance from your previous location – this damages your engines slightly and has a cool down

Game Design Changes

There has been a major change to the way special weapons/abilities are acquired. Instead of random alien technology scattered far throughout the galaxy which no one might find and therefore never use (even though clues to their location was included in alien comms). These abilities these devices granted are now linked to the experience of the crew.

Your crew as it is now are assigned to various stations (this is unchanged). They earn experience in the station they are assigned to as you engage in combat, exploration or sell resources (again unchanged). Now as they increase in skill points, the abilities which were linked to the devices are unlocked. These abilities are not final and are heavily skewed to tactical since most of the devices were either defensive or offensive in nature.

Crew Abilities

o Navigation –

o At 25 experience points or more he gains the ability to manipulate the ships standard engines to create a temporary jump field (emergency jump) this jumps you only a short distance and damages your engines since this was not the intended function of those engines to begin with

o At 50 experience points or more he gains the ability to manipulate the ship’s shields to form a cloaking field around the ship rendering the ship undetectable to targeting sensors of hostile vessels.

o Tactical –
o At 25 experience points he gains the ability to enable proximity detonations on your torpedo projectiles.

o At 50 experience points he gains two abilities 1) point defense and 2) flak cannons

o At 75 experience points he gains the ability to fire cluster torpedoes

o At 100 experience he gains the ability to fire a fustrum torpedo (huge AOE mass damage) weapon and the spear torpedo (passes through anything in its path killing it)

• Engineer –
o At 25 experience he learns how to manipulate the defense systems to overload shields which grants a large increase to shield resistance but drains the ship’s capacitor. At this experience level he also learns how to overload engines to grant a large increase in turn rate/max speed.

o At 50 experience points he learns how to use Nanite robots to repair the ships damage

o At 75 experience points he learns how to use the defense systems to polarize the hull to mitigate damage to the armor plating.

• Operations –
o At 25 experience points he learns the ability to fire a pulse barrier, which detonates all incoming fire and disables enemy ships engines for a time
o At 50 experience points he learns the ability to manipulate the ships engines to form a jump field for a split second which jumps the ship a few hundred meters. Useful for avoiding incoming fire.

o At 75 experience he learns the ability to manipulate the gravitational fields of the hyper engines to put the ship out of phase with the universe. All weapons fire will pass through your ship, but this damages your hull over time while active

o At 100 experience he learns how to invert the shield systems to create a kinetic barrier which is impenetrable to all weapons, however it is a heavy drain on the ship’s capacitor.

• Logistics -
o By default they know how to use the mining beam and gas extraction beam, but they increase in efficiency and yield the more experience points they have.

o At 50 experience points he learns how to use the ship’s mining beam to double as a tractor beam to tractor ships or wreckages.

Content: - 4

• Updated the planet graphics with some new ones
• Added several new effects for the new abilities. An overlay of a shield appears around the ship when overload shields is activated and the thrusters turn red when overload engines is on.
• Some voice over’s which can be disabled
• New music tracks