I noticed that some creatures spawn near me in air and then proceed to fall underground and walk there. After reloading game during area render i noticed that they walk on non tessellated ground (low polygon one), which differs from one that i stand on. It looks like creatures fall sooner before physics recognizes tessellated ground
Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/3LYSphx
Save file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JpCBduW...share_link

Right now in ship-to-ship combat there's no reason to use another weapon than energy beam : it is hitscan and has no ammo. Also 360° coverage is kinda weird.

I propose to revamp weapons characteristics to make space fights more interesting. I know all those ideas are not feasible or wanted by everyone, but I wanted to see what everyone could say about it, especially Haxus.


Hull vs shield damage

Separating damage between hull and shield would add more tactical depth.

Projectile -> Hull // Shields
Energy -> Hull // Shields
Missile -> Hull // Shields bypassed    OR    Hull // Shields


OR Hull type

Instead of hull vs shield, another way could be that each hull material have strenght and weaknesses.

Hull material wouldn't change HP and armor, but instead (for example) :

Metal -> Projectile / Energy / Missile
Magmium -> Projectile / Energy / Missile
Vulcium -> Projectile / Energy / Missile
Adamantium -> Projectile / Energy / Missile

This solution would be redundant with shield types tho, but could be interesting.


Cone of fire

All weapons should have a cone of fire, simulating barrels, launch tubes angle etc. Would add incentive to put more than one weapon for area coverage (especially for defense). Would also add possible blind spots for smaller crafts and vehicles to sneak by.

Projectiles weapons would get a narrow cone (30-45°)

Missiles would get a large cone (90-150°)

Energy weapons would get a large cone (120-180°)

Building weapons could keep their 360° coverage, or at least get a 180° angle.


Point Defense Turrets

All turrets could be flagged as Point Defense in the design. Their sole objective would be to destroy incoming missiles (like Guardian system in Mass Effect lore).

Energy -> short range but hitscan
Projectile -> long range, moderate precision, high speed
Missile -> long range, good precision, slowest speed


Projectile weapons

These should be the main hull-damaging weapon. Shields make them explode, which damage shields with a value dropoff.

Work has to be done on projectile speed and deviation for making it fun, without making it too hitscan.


Energy weapons

Energy beams are good against shields and missiles.

When hitting hull, it would damage it with value dropoff.


Missile weapons

Missiles bypass shields but have to be balanced by missile agility, missile speed and Point Defense systems.

There should be heavy emphasis on avoiding missiles spam if they bypass shields.

Another safer balance idea would be to make missiles the "default" weapon, moderately damaging both hull and shields.


Manual weapon fire (idea)

There should be a way to manually fire weapons as pilot and captain. This could be done with HUD elements showing the aim and pressing a key.

Could be limited to some dedicated weapons (flagged in designer) or by entering a manual fire mode.


Manual fire aiming (idea)

Aiming could be made like in Elite Dangerous : fixed and gimbal aiming.

Fixed aiming would shoot straight to where you aim.

Gimbal aiming would require a target selected, and would try to shoot at target if it is in the cone of fire.

Xian Won't Speak
Someone had a situation where Dr. Xian would not say anything.

It turned out they were in an airless environment so her voice could not be heard. She did not die because she is not allowed to die in that story segment.

The story now requires a world with a breathable atmosphere.

I added a branch at the point in Celarious' saved game. Dr. Xian will now notice there is no air and pull a pressure tent out of her gear. That enables the story to continue.

This allowed Xian to tell me about Dr. Millford. There was a bug in the expansion of the sector name field in her text so his location was not revealed. That is fixed.

If Xian drops the ring on the ground, she now announces that she did so. It can be hard to find.

Found out dropdown lists don't work when game is in fullscreen.
It prevented me from changing anything during avatar creation and scenario choice.

It was fixed by setting up the game in windowed mode.

Having done the first Relic story quest, everything worked fine with the dialogue of the ParcX delivery guy. 
However, I've just started and completed the "Dangerous Exchange" story mission, and there was no dialogue at all through it. This means that the sector Dr. Xian is supposed to reveal never happened, despite having completed the story mission by acquiring the ring. The hostile NPC also said nothing before and after spawning. I have all comms channels open and set to display on-screen:



Can provide a save with the story active if needed

No Doors In Preview
Designer preview of a building blueprint does not have doors or turbo lifts. They are present and functional when previewing a spacecraft.

Fixed.

Scenario Column Widths
Asteroid scenario window has bad column spacing on Windows. Information text is smashed into a narrow column at the left. This looks fine on Linux.

Fixed.

Auto Save
Auto save of the game was requested.

Game now auto saves hourly. This save does not create a check point; it just updates the current saved game. This avoids creation of zillions of check point saves.

Kicked From Designer
If the game is minimized for a bit while in the designer, you are kicked out to some uninhabited world.

Fixed. This was caused by code whose purpose was to prevent people from remaining in a design studio after logging off of the multi player game.

Crash Empty Handed
Game crashed because I pushed the wrong button while walking around with nothing in my hand.

Fixed.

One Way Intergalactic Wormholes Broken
It was reported that one-way intergalactic wormholes do not work. They are found at stellar black holes.

Fixed a bug that made them not work.

Traversed a one way intergalactic wormhole.

Destination in new galaxy is the same distance from the core as the wormhole was in the originating system. The destination galaxy was much smaller than the origin galaxy. This left my ship far out in deep space, viewing the new galaxy from afar.

I made a change to scale the destination location according to the size change in galaxies. If you are near the edge of the origin galaxy, you will arrive near the edge of the destination galaxy.

Rotation around the Z axis of the galaxy is consistent. That means a one way intergalactic wormhole will always arrive at the same location in the destination galaxy, wherever that happens to be.

This change affects all one way intergalactic wormholes, including the ones that already exist.


Blueprint Description Contains <br>
Blueprint descriptions contain <br>. I thought all html was removed.

Fixed.

Mating References
I saw references to mating in tool tips and avatar controls.

Fixed. Removed all references to mating I hope, including some off hand comments by npcs.

Gliding Flyer Crash
When riding a flying animal that cannot hover, the game locks up if I hold the brakes until the animal comes to a stop. This also happened if your avatar was a gliding flyer and you held the brakes to stop.

Fixed.

Riding Animals Broken
Riding on animals doesn't work at all. There are all sorts of control issues and the animal won't move.

Fixed.

Later...

Stuck In Time Bug
A problem was reported when a ship entered a new solar system and time seems to stop. Nobody can move or do anything.

Fixed.

On very large building sites, the edges are rendered incorrectly. See the images below:




The reason it seems to be a rendering issue is because I can still walk on the "empty" triangles between the jagged peaks, as if it was a smooth line instead. 



Here's what the problematic sites look like in the designer:




The sites in question are set to the following settings:
Grade: Level
Blend: Flat
Pavement: Asphalt/Concrete
Rocks: Remove
Grass: Remove
Shrubs: Remove
Trees: Remove

The site in the first image is aligned to the south.

Can also see that they're meant to be smooth while placing:


Vid of the behaviour:
https://files.catbox.moe/0es89d.mp4

Stack Size
A crash was reported due to a stack overflow.

Stack size was increased in the Windows builds, both 32 bit and 64 bit versions.

Save Game
Partial save of current game on exit reported to break saved game files.

Game saves are now performed using a QSaveFile object. It is intended to handle the issues involved.

Game Save Files
Recently it was desirable for a player to send a copy of their saved game, to debug an issue. Unfortunately there is no obvious way to do this. He ended up sending the entire 'Hazeron Starship' folder, which is overkill.

The list of saved games at the beginning now has an option to save a game to a file and to restore the current game from a file. You pick the file.

In doing this I found it helpful to add an entry for the 'Current Game' to that list. In the player's case, there were no other saved games except the current game. Previously no list was shown when that was the case, making it impossible to save the current game to a file.

On windows build designer sometimes teleport you into primeval world when it's left unattended for some time.
Steps to reproduce:
- Open any design
- Minimize designer completely
- Do any tasks on PC for 5-15 minutes (web surfing, watching videos, playing games)
- Open up designer. Most of the time it will load primeval world
Designer just did that while i was writhing this post. Debugger remain silent

Designer can crash, usually randomly. I had most crashes while using face mode and/or texturing parts close to camera (1-2 meters or closer)
One time debugger catch exception "std::bat_cast at memory location". Dunno what that means and i don't know how to use debugger anyway

Save game became corrupted after one day of playing. I recall saving manually then exiting the process normally. When attempting to reload the save the game simply crashes to desktop seconds after clicking play also unable to create another character without removing the save files entirely due to same crash on character creation. if the save file is of any use for your debugging I can send it to you.

I believe a "simple" solution to the issue for now is making the game able to recognize file corruption instead of crashing along with an option built into the game to enable a certain number of automatic save backups by simply pushing the previous save file into a backup folder.

I think this will would help significantly when the game goes live as loosing hours of work can be extremely frustrating if we don't manually backup game saves and would result in a negative play experience