Naev 0.5.0 Release

BY BOBBENS, ON JUNE 3RD, 2011

The Naev devteam is proud to announce the release of Naev 0.5.0! This release is the result of over a year of hard work done by nearly 30 committers. This release is just a step in the path for ultimate greatness and a major step forward in the maturity of Naev. It has many major gameplay changes and signifies the coming of age of Naev, which has now exceeded the tag of Escape Velocity clone.

Due to the size of the 0.5.0 ndata, downloads shall from now on be hosted at Sourceforge instead of Google Code due to the latter’s arbitrary size limits.The rest of the project infrastructure will remain unchanged.

In the future, a shorter release cycle will be used, with focus on the remaining features left before content can be the main focus which include asteroids, dynamic economy and fleet AI, among others.

Some statistics of the release to give an idea of the magnitude: 961 files changed, 91734 insertions(+), 25431 deletions(-)

Download: https://sourceforge.net/projects/naev/files/naev-0.5.0/ Blog: https://naev.org/ Forums: http://forum.naev.org/ (Forums are lost.)

List of changes since 0.4.2:

For Players

• Larger universe
  • Expanded Dvaered, Frontier, Empire and Pirate territories
  • All-new Sirius and Soromid territory
• Big systems
  • More planets per system
  • Much larger planets, many new planet and station graphics
  • Players must fly to jump points before jumping to another system
• Overlay map for in-system navigation
• Mouse interactivity
  • Planet, ship and jump point targeting
  • Contextual click actions (board, hail, land, etc.)
  • Optional mouse-controlled flying
• Electronic warfare
  • Ships have cloaking and detection abilities
  • Sensor range depends on cloak vs detection
  • Turrets no longer track all ships equally
• Time model changes
  • In-game time progresses in real-time
  • Dynamic time compression speeds up long journeys
• On-map security rating abandoned in favour of faction presence indicators
• System backgrounds (nebulae, stars and more!)
• Fancier new GUI
• Brand-new tutorial that is independent from the main game
• Outfit slots now have sizes
• Weapon sets allow easy configuration of different weapon combinations for each ship
• Ship and weapon heat system
  • Weapons start with perfect accuracy, and become inaccurate as they overheat
  • Severe overheating causes rate of fire to drop
• Damage absorption and penetration system
• More diverse planetary inventories (see the tech system below)
• Random bar NPCs
• Sound system improvements
• Smarter autonav behaviour
• … and plenty more (new missions, ships, outfits, portraits, etc.)

For Developers (Missions 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
  • Can create and manipulate planets, systems and jumps
• 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
• Replaced old timer system with new hook-based timer system
• Improvements to the in-game Lua console
• Missions can now use more than a single mission marker
• ndata-locating code is much-improved
• Lua/Luajit and CSparse system libraries can be used instead of internal ones
• SDL_image is no longer a dependency
• Events can now be saved
• GUIs can be written in Lua
• Camera API allows much greater camera flexibility
• Vast amounts of other Lua API additions and enhancements