Perspective Flipping

I've been watching a lot of streams over the last two weeks, and one of the things that has struck me most is that a lot of players tend to view the game from the perspective of their ships, despite the camera offering full freedom of movement. When the enemy is above, this can lead to some awkward "neck craning", as the player tries to look up from their ships to see the enemy while also trying to issue orders on the plane. There's obviously a very strong instinct to have the high ground, which leads to players frequently clustering near the top of the map with only a brave few daring to sneak below. Fortunately, the advantage of having a game set in space is that the high ground can be relative, if we let it be.

This update introduces the ability to flip the camera perspective to make up become down, and down become up. This affects both the normal view and tactical view camera, allowing you to continue to seamlessly switch between them. The default keybind for this control+shift+space, and can be adjusted in the settings menu. If the camera flipping animation makes you motion sick, or you just don't like it, you can disable it in the accessibility settings.

Reception to the proposed change in our Discord was extremely positive, and our testers who previewed the change called it "game changing", so we hope you'll love it as much as we do.

Balance Changes

This will be our first patch since release that features a few minor balancing tweaks.

The first of these is a reduction in the Solomon's component damage reduction from 55% to 40%, bringing it in line with the Axford. In testing this reduced the time to kill under sustained gunfire from a ludicrous 15 minutes to an average of 10 (33%, in line with the increase in damage received). This makes the Solomon's interior a little more squishy when its generous armor (thick enough to bounce rail slugs in some cases) is penetrated. Because of their high point cost they tend to be one of only two or three ships, meaning players bringing battleships should have no trouble paying enough attention to maximize that armor utility, while allowing opponents with good positioning/flanking to not have to invest half the match taking one down.

Additionally, the Raines frigate is receiving a slight buff. The forward module slot (Module 5) has been increased in size to allow it to fit a wider range of support modules, including a Micro Reactor to help alleviate power concerns on dual-engine builds.

Fleet Images

The saddest thing when browsing for fleets on the Workshop is the lack of preview images. Now, fleet screenshots are automatically generated when you save your fleet and will accompany it on its journey to the Workshop if you decide to post it there. If you'd like to update your currently posted fleets with a screenshot, just load the fleet in the editor, save it once, and upload it to the Workshop again.

Soundtrack

For those of you who are loving the game's soundtrack and would like to take it with you, our amazing composer Lauren has made it available to all at the following links:
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/3mlqKlC6rcZNGaqenzi7e8
YouTube: https://youtu.be/4DbcrowJlnY
Bandcamp: https://laurenpham.bandcamp.com/album/nebulous-fleet-command-original-soundtrack-vol-1

There are also a bunch of minor changes and additions, which you can find in the full patch notes:

Changes/Features:
- The camera perspective can now be flipped 180 degress by pressing Ctrl + Shift + Space.
- Lifeboats will now fly back towards the position their parent ship arrived from, and disappear after crossing the map boundary.
- EW weapons will now continue firing in the targeted direction rather than continuing to point at the selected position when the ship is moving.
- Players who are kicked from the same lobby twice cannot rejoin that lobby again, until the host restarts their game.
- Missile ranges now contribute to the offensive range circle radius.
- Added multiplayer lobby filter to hide password protected lobbies.
- Added Modding.IModEntryPoint interface for modders writing custom code mods.
- Range plane range mark text now flips to be legible from below.
- Global north (000) direction on range plane is now identified with a thicker, yellow line.
- Adjusted Deuteranopia color palette to make red more distinct.
- Critical warning icons now match colorblind palettes.
- Control is now the default game mode when starting a new lobby.
- Fleet screenshots are now automatically generated when saving a fleet, and will be uploaded along with the fleet if it is posted to the Steam Workshop.

Balance:
- Reduced Solomon component damage reduction to 40% (was 55%).
- Increased size of Raines module 5 slot to 3x3x3 (was 2x2x2).

Bug Fixes:
- Fixed soft lock caused by having the pause menu open in the deployment screen when the arrival cinematic starts.
- Fixed texture format mismatch in a compute shader, causing crashes with some Intel drivers.
- Fixed chaff weapon group being counted as offensive for the range circle radius calculation, creating a 60m circle on ships with no other weapons.
- Fixed some damage control RPCs logging errors when exiting a game.
- Fixed NullReferenceException in DC team tokens when moving to some locations.
- DC board no longer stays open when selecting the same ship after previously deselecting it.
- Corrected range marks in Aurora stats.
- Fixed NullReferenceException when trying to pathfind to a target outside the map.