Release Candidate 0.28.1 - Quality of Life, Collision Avoidance, & Bug Fixes

Cosmoteer release candidate 0.28.1 is now available for testing! (To play this release candidate, you must opt in to test it. Please see [url=https://steamcommunity.com/games/799600/announcements/detail/3633879261310143806]this post[/url] for info on how to test release candidates.) This release candidate has a lot of quality-of-life improvements, some balance changes, improvements to ship collision avoidance, and a handful of bug fixes. We're still working hard at a bunch of upcoming improvements as part of Career 2.0, but we wanted to get these improvements out to everyone sooner rather than later. Thanks for testing! [b]RC1:[/b] [list] [*][b]Built-In Ships:[/b] [list] [*]Added 4 new Monolith combat ships: Ambassador, Averter, Middleman, and Praefectus. [*]Added 7 new Cabal combat ships: Alcor, Atria, Chasing Wind, Decrux, Lazurite Tear, Menkalinan, and Zaurak. [*]Added 3 new Cabal trade stations: Small Cabal Trade Station III, Med Cabal Trade Station III, and Large Cabal Trade Station III. [*]Added 5 new Imperium combat ships: Ani, Dromiceius, Sulla, Swallowtail, and Tinamou. [*]Added 1 new Imperium trade ship: Penguin. [*]Added 3 new Imperium arms depots: Tiny Imperium Arms Depot II, Small Imperium Arms Depot II, and Med Imperium Arms Depot II. [*]Added 3 new Fringe combat ships: Clytemnestra, Kenesary, and Quicksilver Scout. [*]Miscellaneous updates to many other existing ships and stations. [/list] [*][b]Balance:[/b] [list] [*]Small Thrusters (all variants) now have a small dynamo that generates power very slowly. This allows Small Thrusters to operate while disconnected from crew/power sources, but the rate of power generation isn't enough to perpetually sustain the thruster. [*]Increased the 1x3 Armor Wedge's penetration resistance from 2 to 4. [*]Increased EMP Missile's launch cooldown from 2 to 4 seconds. [*]Mines are now much more visible and clearly show their detonation trigger range. [/list] [*][b]Ship A.I.:[/b] [list] [*]Improved collision avoidance when avoiding moving ships/objects. [*]Improved collision avoidance when avoiding multiple ships/objects simultaneously. [*]Improved collision avoidance when trying to move away from very close ships/objects. [*]Improved collision avoidance of ships in a formation. [*]Ship formations should now do a better job of navigating around suns and storms. [*]A.I. ships will no longer deliberately target roof lights or headlights. [/list] [*][b]Career:[/b] [list] [*]Repairing damaged parts was much more expensive than was intended. Repair cost (steel/coils only) has been reduced from 57.5% of base cost to the intended 7.5%. [*]It was unintentionally often cheaper to fully deconstruct and rebuild a part than it was to repair it. This has been fixed. [*]Defense platforms will no longer surrender to players. [*]Stations will no longer hail the player from outside the player's sensor range, because that was confusing. [*]Fires will no longer be regarded by the A.I. as breaking a surrender truce. [/list] [*][b]User Interface:[/b] [list] [*]Enemies will no longer automatically slow or pause the game speed when spotted if they had previously been spotted within the past minute. [*]When a weapon's target goes out of sight range, it will now be automatically re-targeted when coming back into sight range. (Unless in the meantime the target is changed by the player.) [*]Small thrusters now display a yellow warning instead of red error when they don't have door, crew, or power access. (Because they no longer strictly require power.) [*]The U.I. Scaling setting will now be remembered per resolution or window size. [*]Except for Creative Mode, "lost ships" will now only be saved for ships that the player actually controls. [*]Added tooltips to the Resource Desired & Limits dialog that explain the functionality of the "Desired" and "Limit" numbers. [*]Updated the Large Shield Generator's description to make it clearer what it can and can't be projected through. [*]Crew distance warning icons can now be "clicked through". [/list] [*][b]Multiplayer:[/b] [list] [*]Reduced the amount of clouds and storms that will appear when using "Varied (Sparse)", "Varied (Dense)", "Ion Storms (Sparse)", and "Ion Storms (Dense)". [*]If a player joins, leaves, or changes teams, the players in the game will no longer be automatically changed to "not ready". [/list] [*][b]Performance:[/b] [list] [*]Updated to Microsoft .NET 9.0. This may slightly improve overall performance. Please let us know if you have any compatibility issues running Cosmoteer. [*]Texture and shader caching can now be disabled with the --no-cache launch argument. [/list] [*][b]Bug fixes:[/b] [list] [*]Crash when loading a multiplayer save in single-player and then trying to transfer money to another player. [*]Very rare crash caused by crew being automatically unassigned from certain jobs. [*]Multiplayer desyncs caused by transferring resources to a ship with no crew. [*]Nuke explosions could occasionally "phase" into the ships that they hit. [*]In multiplayer, engaging an inter-system hyper-jump while another player is on the galaxy map would prevent the jump from happening and could ultimately lead to a crash. [*]In Creative Mode, it was unintentionally possible to tell a junk ship to salvage itself, which would then crash. [*]A.I. ships would sometimes spawn inside storms due to a pathfinding bug. [*]Ships could sometimes erroneously try to avoid collisions with objects that were farther away than their destination. [*]A.I. ships that had surrendered to the player were sometimes not exit the star system as intended. [*]When thrusters were attached to Engine Rooms, they were not correctly lighting up as possible power supply chain targets in the resource management screen. [*]The wrong ship name would be displayed when an ally was hailed by the A.I. [*]The names of ships and stations in the Comms list would sometimes appear smaller than intended. [*]Using the "Transfer Excess Resources" options would work but then make it impossible to reset or make any further changes to the amount of resources to transfer. [/list] [/list] [b]RC2:[/b] [list] [*] Translation updates for all supported languages. [*] Velocity arrows will no longer display for off-screen ships. [*] Bugfix: The chat/message log unintentionally had a non-function text-entry box and send button when playing in single-player. [*] Bugfix: Ship icons and crew warning icons were being unintentionally rendered on top of the mission list and chat/message log. [*] Bugfix: The ship velocity arrow for the selected ship could be extremely long when viewing the build, paint, crew, or resource screens. [*] RC Bugfix: Error when trying to load saved multiplayer games from previous versions. [*] RC Bugfix: The chat box was causing off-screen ship icons to be farther from the edge of the screen than intended, even when the chat box wasn't being displayed. [/list]