Naev 0.5.0-beta1 released!

BY BOBBENS, ON APRIL 2ND, 2011

The Naev team is proud to announce the long-awaited 0.5.0-beta1 release. This is a beta release and therefore isn’t quite ready for the general public. While it’s highly unlikely that it will set your cat on fire and send threatening messages to your family, there are no guarantees.

It’s been over a year since 0.4.2, but this is a major step forward in maturity. The original intent for 0.5.0 was to work out many of the important low-level features and gameplay mechanics to avoid jarring shifts in gameplay in future releases. Feature creep being what it is, 0.5.0 has perpetually grown more ambitious over time. We hope to do a better job of “release early, release often” after this beta.

Compared to 0.4.2, Naev 0.5.0 is essentially a new game. While older saves can be loaded in 0.5.0-beta1, we highly recommend that players start new games. Many things have changed: The galaxy looks quite different, some older missions are absent or have been wholly rewritten, and there’s a wealth of new ships and equipment. For the best experience, start fresh.

On a side note, a number of songs in this release are encoded at a lower quality than in Git, for size reasons. Google Code has a “technical limitation” of 200 MB per file and our current Git ndata size is 214 MB (and growing). We may have to distribute the final 0.5.0 release through BitTorrent or another hosting service for this reason.

We don’t expect this release to be perfect (it’s a beta after all), and what we need most right now are testers to run through the many 0.4.2-era missions and other content. The more testing the beta gets, the better the final release can be. So please, report any issues to us via the Google Code bug tracker or on IRC.

Changelog (long, but still likely missing some things):

For Players

• Bigger universe
  • Expanded Dvaered, Frontier, Empire territories
  • All new Sirius territory
  • Preliminary Soromid area (Not inhabited yet)
  • New Pirate system
• Big systems
  • More planets in systems
  • Bigger planets in systems, more planet graphics
  • Players must fly to jump points before jumping to another system
• Electronic warfare
  • Ships have cloaking and detection abilities
  • Sensor range depends on cloak vs detection
  • Turrets no longer track all ships equally
• Fancier targeting method
• Random bar NPCs
• On-map security rating abandoned in favour of faction presence indicators
• More diverse planetary inventories (see the tech system)
• Outfit slots now have sizes
• System backgrounds (nebulae, stars and more!).
• Fancier new GUI.
• Weapon sets allow to easily configure different weapon configurations for each ship.
• Heat system replaces accuracy making ships more accurate at first.
• Overlay map helps navigate and visualize the environment.
• Mouse targeting.
• Damage absorption and penetration system.
• Continuous time model.
• New tutorial that is independent from the main game.
• Mouse flying.
• Images in intro.
• Lots more content!

For Developers (mission and likewise)

• Faction presence
  • Replaces security and simple fleet spawning
  • Fleet spawning is now controlled through lua on a per-faction basis
• Universe and System editor
  • Allows easy and quick modification of the universe
  • Allows creation and manipulation of planets, systems and jumps
  • Allows selection of planet graphics
• New tech system
  • Techs are groups containing outfits, ships or other techs.
  • Assets (formerly planets) sell whatever is in their assigned techs.
• Hook improvements
  • Pilot hooks pass arguments by default
  • You can now pass custom arguments to hooks
  • Many new hooks.
• Removed old timer system to new hook-based timer system
• Improvements to the in-game console
• Missions can now use more than a single mission marker
• SDL_image is no longer a dependency.
• Events can now be saved.
• GUI can be written in Lua.
• Camera can be modified.

That’s all for now, good luck and good flying!