Lightspeed Frontier update for 24 November 2018

Hello there!

Yes, despite what you may have heard we're not all dead quite just yet. Development's been seriously slow the past few months and it took a while to get the random additions in order for an update release.

So let's see what's changed.

Weapon Reticles

So one of the problems with combat's always been not knowing exactly which way your guns are pointing before shooting, which led to many a misfire. That should be gone now however, with these new reticles.

There are four different reticles for different gun types.

The only ones displayed are the ones that are in the currently enabled firegroups to reduce clutter on larger ships and they stack when close as well.

Scope

With the reticles in place, you can now be a lot more accurate with long range weapons like railguns. And with increased ranges you also need a way to look at things up close.

Introducing the sniper scope that replaces boost on the shift key as default.

Reworked Space Station GUI

The cargo management and transfer systems on space stations have gotten a complete rework - not only from a graphical but also from a backend standpoint as well, with everything working somewhat differently now.

It's not completely balanced yet and will likely need some price scaling depending on galactic faction and location but it should be a lot easier to find undiscovered modules now at least.

Crafting

Instead of only player owned stations, crafting is now available everywhere (for a small fee per module). The large amount of ores was reduced to only two so it's far more practical to have a sizable stack of each in storage for repairs.

It also has a new GUI, complete with scolling and type filtering.

Cargo Transfer

In older versions of the game you could buy an infinite amount of new modules from stations which wasn't very realistic.

Now each station spawns with a random supply of modules that you can buy from a brand new cargo transfer menu.

Both of these also support right clicking and moving/crafting a selected amount of an item.

Ship Cargo Transfer

There are ship-to-ship cargo transfer menus as well now, although still very experimental.

At the moment it's a very useful feature when transferring large amounts of cargo from mostly intact derelicts.

Texturepacks

This feature was mostly added to have support for loading some sort of smaller size textures for lower end systems. It just happens to mostly allign with the way texturepacks could work so we added that instead and 2 default texturepacks:

• High (old textures, selected by default)
• Low (2-4x downscaled textures)

The texturepacks can be selected in the game launcher or set in the settings.cfg file itself.

The "textures" folder where the game sources the assets is located in the game directory with more information about texturepack creation in the readme.

Changelog:

Additions:

• added space station cargo containers
• added weapon aim indicators that show firing vectors of active weapons
• added scope
• added a right click menu to station menus for quantity selection item transfer, along with shift clicking to transfer an entire stack
• texture packs and a selection for them into the launcher and settings.cfg (more info in the textures folder)
• two stock texturepacks: High and Low (high being the stock one and low a 2-4x downscaled version)
• friendly and fleet ships now follow you into interstellar warp
• space stations now spawn with cargo inside contaiers, available for trade
• ship to ship trading (experimental)

Changes:

• Kepler Cola pallet is now obtainable and usable as a trading-only item
• reduced VRAM usage so the game doesn't go over 1GB and cause problems on older hardware
• nerfed junker weapon stats
• removed most textures from game executable, transferred them into texturepacks
• removed NPC ship ramming on loss of all guns, made them warp out instead
• removed engine boost
• removed starting velocity from shells for easier combat mechanics
• increased speed of shells
• power and shield bar rework
• lockon time reduced to a fixed amount of half a second
• tracking camera movement is now always on but available only when using the scope
• less intrusive and more transparent reticle
• separated crafting and trade menus
• menus now show item stacks like the inventory
• replaced all old ores with two new ones: Metallic and Crystalline
• reworked module recipes
• reworked crafting
• reworked trading
• various small tweaks
• extended weapon ranges

Fixes:

• fixed ship savefile name filter so it removes all forbidden chars
• fixed tooltips
• fixed a ConcurrentModificationException crash or two
• more robust mouse scroll input
• fixed green cube randomly persisting after building, though it still happens on occasion
• fixed station dashboard crash
• fixed the tutorial (again)
• various small fixes

Thanks for reading everyone, and our apologies for being so slow! Hopefully we can now finally focus on making only the questing system.