Dev Diary #14

Hi everyone,

After a bit of a hiatus the dev diary is back and will continue again on a weekly basis.

With the launch of the new Alpha 3 galaxy, Christmas and New Year, closing the Alpha 2 galaxy, and then the Q1 2019 Outscape Roadmap & Survey Findings post we put out – we put it on hold temporarily.

Hotfixing a hotfix

This week we applied a hotfix to the server to fix an issue with synchronization. It was causing fleets to appear in the wrong place at the wrong time e.g. outside of scanner range, UFOs in scanner range, fleets jumping back and forth. Just general weirdness 🙂

We fixed that, but it led to having to fix that hotfix with a hotfix as another issue with different visual bugs caused FPS drops and game crashes. Including the giant fleet icon (or “Mothership” 🙂 ).

Useful weapons stats

One change that might have flown under the radar as it was slipped in with the 2nd hotfix mentioned above – improvements to how weapons stats are presented.

Now we can see damage per second (DPS) of every weapon – energy, kinetic and of course missiles and torpedoes. This small change should make it much easier to understand the damage your ships can do. Let us know on the forum if you think we could improve things further.

Weapons on the wiki

Speaking of weapon stats – the wiki pages related to weapons have had a bit of an overhaul:

• Ship Weapons
• Energy Weapons
• Ordnance Weapons
• Orbital Bombers
• Fighter Carriers

If you have any feedback on any of these pages, you can leave it on the “Discussion” tab each wiki page has, or in the wiki section on the forum. We really need your help getting the wiki to the great resource for players we want it to be and welcome your contributions 🙂

Research automation

Another simple but handy feature we’re looking to add in the next patch is related to automation – a high in-demand area with players.

The game was designed so that players that can’t get online frequently can still compete in a galaxy with players that can. If a player’s research queue empties, and they can’t get online to queue anything up, their research team is sat idly by wasting valuable time.

We’ve added a new “Auto research” checkbox right under the Research queue:

• If you have this option enabled and your research queue is empty, a new technology will be added automatically
• It will be the technology that has the shortest research time that hasn’t yet been researched (if there are more than one with the same time the selection will be random between them)

This way if you can’t log into the game for some time you won’t lose any precious research points. But it won’t be as optimal as choosing what to research yourself based on your own priorities.

Anything in this post you want to discuss? The new research automation, weapon stats display… let us know in the forum.

That’s it for today. Thank you very much and see you next time! 🙂