Hi everyone,

There’s a lot going on at the moment. In the week to come we’ll be releasing a new patch (hopefully Monday) and then on Thursday the experimental Alpha 3 Skirmish galaxy will launch. Are you as excited as we are?

The new patch

The wait for a new patch has been much longer than usual (the scope of the new patch was ambitious and on top of that one of the devs was ill). But the wait is almost over. We’re expecting to release it on Monday and it’s going to be the busiest patch of Alpha 3 so far:

• Smart merging for fleet management
• Nearby player scanner
• Transferring fleets and planets to other players
• New bio-farms (increase the max population size a colony can support for all organic civs – both primary and secondary populations)
• The settings panel for automated colony development
• A fix for the ‘fleets getting stuck in a planet’ bug
• And more

You’ll be able to see full details of all new features and changes in the release notes we’ll post when the patch is released.

Alpha 3 Skirmish galaxy

In case you missed Friday’s announcement – we’re launching an Alpha 3 Skirmish galaxy on Thursday April 4th at 15:00 UTC (if there are any significant issues with the new patch we may have to push the start date back a bit).

Hi everyone,

In last Sunday’s dev diary post we revealed that the next patch would include the ability ‘to give a fleet or planet to another player’, but didn’t provide any details. Understandably players had questions and concerns on how it would work, which we’ll go over now in today’s dev diary post.

Trade mechanics for fleets and planets

The first thing we should clarify is that although we used the term ‘give’, ‘allowing another player to take ownership’ is more accurate as the other player is under no obligation to accept the fleet or planet that you offer to them – much like a trade.

These features are an early form of trade mechanics that would eventually be integrated into something more comprehensive e.g. being able to propose, negotiate and complete a deal. They’re also social mechanics and tie-in to alliances e.g. being able to transfer control of a fleet to an alliance member (a temporary loan if they transfer control back over).

Hi everyone,

Hope you’ve all had a good week! We were hoping to have been able to release a patch this week, but there are a couple of tasks we’re still in the middle of and can’t do so until they are done. Some of the features that should be in the next patch include the nearby player scanner, smart merging for fleet management, being able to give a fleet or planet to another player, and the settings panel for automated colony development. We’ll update you on the status of the next patch as soon as we can.

Addressing usability issues

In our ‘Current Priorities & Role of the Community‘ post we mentioned that the game is suffering a ‘usability crisis’, particularly from a new player perspective. In this post we wanted to provide a couple of examples of the sort of issue we need to address, and ask that you share with us on the forum any similar issues that you’re aware of.

Hi everyone,

No patch went out this week but the next one isn’t too far away! On Monday we put out a post on the Current Priorities & Role of the Community which a number of players appreciated – so take a look if you’d like to find out more 🙂

Where is everyone?

In Outscape, new players spawn near each other. Their planetary scanners aren’t close enough to detect each other, and it can be a while until a new player orders a fleet outside of their home system. While their fleets remain in their home system, they aren’t visible to other players (fleets in a system aren’t visible to scanners outside that system, likewise, fleets in orbit of a planet aren’t visible to scanners outside that planet’s orbit).

Which means when a new player joins the galaxy, it can be more than a few hours until they discover the other players nearby. In the meantime, they assume they’re alone in that part of the galaxy and are disappointed – it’s not very exciting to play an MMO and not see any other players – and their early game experience suffers as a result.

Hi everyone,

It’s been another ‘fleet management’ themed week… A patch went out on Tuesday which included rolling back the ‘ships must be within 600m of each other’ mechanic and reintroduced the ‘ships must be in a circle’ mechanic.

But what wasn’t included in that patch was the new smart fleet merging we’re still working on. So right now, merging fleets involves plonking new ships next to each other in a line outside of the fleet circle (as do auto-formations).

Smart fleet merging on the way

Before the recent updates to fleet management, merging fleets via the context menu worked by adding the new ships to the existing fleet and then applying the circle auto-formation. This avoided having to algorithmically find space for each ship, but meant any changes made by the player to ship positions were undone with each merge.

Hi everyone,

Hope you all had a good week and are having a great weekend 🙂

Fleet management is an integral part of the game and something the recent player survey showed needs work (in particular new players find it way too confusing). Battles too, which should be better looking (more cinematic, like in a space film) and tactical implications clearer e.g. splash damage from rockets.

So this week started with a new patch and big changes to fleet management. We had a ton of feedback on those changes from players which we valued immensely, so we spent the rest of the week focussing on making improvements within fleet management to hopefully move things in the right direction.

Yesterday we were able to release another patch with the first round of improvements and also added the first version of ‘automated colony development’ which you can find out more about from the wiki.

Fleet management improvements set to continue

There was one big issue with the new system which we didn’t include a fix for in yesterday’s patch, because trying to do so would have delayed us getting the other improvements out quickly enough. We’ll go over this problem again now and the idea we have to resolve it.

Addressing the difficulty rearranging ships in the new system

The newly introduced mechanics meant that ships had to be within a certain fixed ‘communication distance’ from each other (the previous mechanic dictated a minimum distance from the flagship and that distance was specific to the flagship). However, moving a ship became difficult if doing so would leave another ship in an illegal position.

For example, in the above image:

• The player wants to move ship B but is restricted in how far they can be move it because of ship C’s dependency on ship B’s position (ship C needs to remain within 600m of another ship in the fleet)
• To move ship B to the other side of ship A, ship C would first have to be moved to within 600m of ship A to remove its dependency on ship B (thus allowing ship B to then be moved)

Self-correcting ship positions

We looked at a number of ideas to fix this before deciding to pursue ‘self-correcting ship positions’. This involves removing the restriction on the ship so that it can be placed in any other legal position in the fleet. If any ship is then left in an illegal position after the move, it automatically moves into a legal position. Allowing the player to quickly and easily move ships around within the fleet.

The below series of images illustrates this in action:

The player wants to move ship B above position X.

Selecting ship B and dragging it highlights ship C blue to indicate moving ship B could leave ship C in an illegal position (and it may need to self-correct its position if ship B is moved).

The player has moved ship B to position X so ship C has automatically moved to remain within 600m of the nearest ship (ship A).

It’s a work in progress at the moment – let us know in the forum if you have any thoughts on this approach.

Other improvements needed

Another difficulty players still have is how to change the flagship. It’s currently only possible by using the ‘split fleet’ function, which isn’t ideal… This will need to be solved, including what to do if the new flagship isn’t of a high enough flagship level to support the number of ships currently in the fleet.

Balancing

Once fleet management is where it needs to be we’ll need to look at correcting any issues related to balance that may have been introduced with the changes.

Thanks everyone, see you again soon 🙂