We can now branch events from within events. If you’ve read some of the discussions in our forums here, you know how excited we are about this! Branched events can even be made aware of things ships have done in the prior event, which opens up some really fun possibilities.
In 1.32 event branching is in place on all crew rescues. The more dynamic tier 2 branching is only in Rover crew rescue events right now. We’ll be adding more branched events over time.
Hotkeys have been expanded to include Jump, Hail, sCan, goto waypoint (X) and attack (Z). All of these keys are remappable in options. You can also now swap mouse axes in options. Hotkeys have been disabled in the feedback form, so you’ll be spared from accidentally jumping or attacking.
So now to set a waypoint, just select the ship, hover where you want the ship to go, and hit X. Scanning works with or without a ship selected, just hover the ship you want to scan and hit C. Of course you can still use the context menu.
The enter key also now acts as ‘continue’ for all dialogs. The escape key still skips all dialog (until the next choice).
The rendezvous can no longer be Harvested by between-jump expansion. It’ll make more sense when you get there.
Also, water riots no longer trigger once you reach the rendezvous, this includes after you achieve victory too.
I did UI design and technical specification work for our upcoming next major update which is... slot unification and cargo! Yes, ship slots are about to become multipurpose! When we finish implementing this feature it will allow civilian ships to carry weapons (but not use them, at least not without modifications), and cargo items will be introduced. We’ll talk more about this when it is ready!
Tooltips now appear when you hover trade and repair destinations in the starmap.
When you hover the attack action, and your ship is in the defend ROE, we now display a tooltip letting you know your ROE will be auto-switched to weapons free.
All Devastators have been adjusted to jump in much farther away from the fleet, should you be unlucky enough to jump into Harvester-controlled space. This should somewhat delay the devastation.
Trade and repair events no longer spawn when overrun by Harvesters, and their starmap icons are also removed. Similarly, once visited, trade/repair events no longer will spawn at a given destination and the starmap icon is removed.
Some of you may have noticed some shenanigans going on with a Harvester ship in an event called The Tracker. That event just became a little more… interesting.
Work was done to prepare the game for quests - we now have a quest beacon that we can deploy that works very much like the rendezvous beacon, showing direction when the beacon is off map and the actual beacon above the destination when you are nearby. There’s a bit more functionality there and of course content needed too before we will spring those on you. As far as timelines go, quest functionality will be completed after slot unification.
I adjusted the narrative in The Prisoner Exchange event to suggest using the defend ROE. That’s a stopgap for some upcoming improvements. On our Discord, player opinions are split almost perfectly 50/50 between automatically changing the ROE to defend when hailing vs. having some narrative pop up reminding the player that they’ll be opening fire when they arrive. We haven’t decided what the best course of action is, so have your say on our Discord!
Events can now be tagged as repeatable, an essential bit of functionality for certain types of event branching.
In an event we can now identify this specific ship that has done an action, for example, the ship that destroyed ship X, or the ship that tried to hail ship Y. This was more groundwork for branching and quests and gives us even more interesting outcomes for our events.
Also in preparation for quests, I expanded the number of jumps away an event can be.
I made minor tweaks to events like The Patch and The Prisoner Ransom.
And I’ve been gearing up to be adding more content, so I improved the scripts I use to help me generate events. I’ve also been doing a better job of documenting everything in case, you know, anyone ever wants to mod XO. :)
Bugs Munched
Controllers are now fully disabled by default, we hope that fixes some of the left mouse not working errors out there.
The Q/E hotkeys didn’t want to work during comms, but they were given lots of encouragement and do their job happily now.
Attack orders now clear properly after a shieldship is disabled, allowing it to be repaired and recrewed without annihilating other ships with its shield.
Some rendezvous platforms lost their names, they have been renamed.
We think we finally obliterated that minor but annoying jump ring bug. Bye bye rings!
A wacky bug in The Assist event was squashed by the big foot of doom.
Plans, ship and resource icons as well as the greyed out jump button temporarily quaffed invisibility potions. The effects have worn off.
The formations window wanted to close automatically whenever a ship was dropped on it, we fixed that.
I fixed The Outbid event, made a minor adjustment to the Fixer Flotilla (all the Fixers really means ALL the Fixers)
A fair amount of tuning was done to our new spawn event functionality, and also for quest beacons.
Trade events didn’t want to appear but we’ve coaxed them back out.
A few smallish bugs were briefly bringing on the pain, but they’re gone now.
We did a considerable amount of internal restructuring to make the game easier for us to maintain and expand. This is still in progress.
Known issues
Some events display 'unknown ship id' instead of the ship. If you see one of these, would you kindly let us know the name of the event (e.g. The Sleeping Monkey) or send us in-game feedback? That way we can get that fixed right up.
Known issues, Linux edition
When submitting feedback in Linux the game says “no Internet connection” but we still receive your feedback.
When alt-tabbing from the game in Linux, the sound can go wonky. Restarting restores sound to normal.
Changed files in this update