Naev Blarg

Naev 0.13.3

2026-01-21T00:00:00Z

A lot of minor and major issues have been fixed since the 0.13.2. In particular, the save updater not adding additional cores as necessary, a rare crash when switching ships, and how the plugin manager handles zip plugins have all been fixed. Also a long standing bug where the player could get attacked by friendlies in missions has also been fixed, as well as certain exclamation marks appearing upside down. Minor fixes include Super Fast Colliders now properly being kinetic weapons, and having it easier to find wormholes. As a reminder, the new forums are up and ready if you want to discuss the game!

You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

Changes since 0.13.2

Made it easier to discover wormholes
Fixed pilots that were forced to be friendly attacking the player
Fixed some Lua SPFX being playing at different speeds
Made it so independents won’t land on a certain person’s laboratory
Fixed engine sounds not playing at correct location
poi_intro: Made the mission start conditions a bit more relaxed and don’t error on reject
minerva: allow the campaign to continue more smoothly without needing to reland
Qorellia found their lost Mission BBS
Fixed PILOT_SHIELD_DOWN_TIME not being read from constants
Fixed alert exclamation mark being upside down
Fixed unsafe memory access in editor
Fixed cooldown time bar over/underflowing with cooldown time modifiers
Editor tries to create ssys and spob path if they don’t exist
Fixed loading plugin metadata from zip files
Fixed uninstalling zip files from plugin manager
Removed nonexistent heat entry from naevpedia list
Plugin editor will keep descriptions now on reload
Super Fast Colliders are now properly kinetic damage
Fixed missing cores not getting added properly when save gets updated
Fix rare crash when switching ships
Only save configuration settings that deviate from the defaults
Spelling and grammar fixes
Translation updates

Naev 0.13.2

2026-01-09T00:00:00Z

With the fix of some more fairly important issues, we’re releasing 0.13.2. Continuing with last patch’s audio fixes, we have some more, including some mission blockers if you have EFX disabled, and some songs playing too fast in certain conditions. Other than that, some minor fixes such as NPCs missing some core outfits or antique derelicts causing drop in pirate standing have been fixed. We’ve also been able to update the flathub so you can get the latest version there if you are so inclined. Also, the new forums are up and ready if you want to discuss the game!

You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

Changes since 0.13.1

Fixed time compression affecting Lua Audio streams and non-ingame sounds
Fixed errors that occur with the escort library on initialization
Fixed some NPCs spawning with missing core outfits
Fixed space mines bugging out if they have no velocity
Fixed player forgetting about the FLF when working for them
Don’t display exit to main menu message on load if menu is open
colonel-escort: Fixed enemy not being hostile
Antique derelict no longer causes reputation penalty with pirates
Don’t error out if audio effects are not available
Spelling and grammar fixes
Fixed build failure on (some) ARM64 platforms
Translation updates

Naev 0.13.1

2026-01-03T00:00:00Z

As to be expected, some minor issues have already been found and addressed in the few days after the 0.13.0 release. We’ve gotten enough to deem it worth doing a point release, and thus 0.13.1 is born. Main fixes are related to some issues with volume, including volume resetting on load. Additionally, some OpenGL errors, weapon munitions on the minimap not appearing, and point defence firing when stealthed have also been fixed, among others. It is recommended you update to the new version when possible.

You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

Changes since 0.13.0

Fixed audio volume being reset on load every time
Fixed player escorts trying to respond to distress signals against the player
Fixed several missions using nonexistent audio.soundPlay function
Fixed black cat’s gift
Fixed weapons not being scaled logarithmically on the radar
Point defence will no longer fire when stealthed
Explicitly set gl_PointSize in the points shader
Spelling and grammar fixes
Translation updates

New Year, New Forum!

2026-01-02T00:00:00Z

Happy New Year! Although the year has barely started, we’re glad to say that 2026 is year of the Naev forums revenge! For those that remember, Naev used to have forums from 2010 to 2016, which were quite popular, however, to the dismay of many, the server was lost along with everything on it in a series of onfortunate mishaps. Although you can still view some of it on the Wayback Machine to get a kick of nostalgia, from now on, you can participate in the brand-new forums that should be less likely to catch on fire (yay working backup system). We’ve been planning to have forums for a while, but it took a while for all the pieces to fall into place.

When it comes to forums and the likes, although, there are many more modern options today, we decided to go with a more classic look, anticipating a comeback of the pre-social media era internet (one can hope). In particular, we are using Simple Machines Forum instead of the originally used phpBB (even though it is still kicking), which has the good late 90s, early 2000 look that some of us still love. Of course, it is themed to fit Naev and has 3 different colour themes you can choose from.

Only YOU can help populate the new Naev forums!

Requests for changes or improvements can be done on the forums themselves, via the forum meta board directly! Registration is already open, so feel free to drop by and leave a message. We look forward to seeing old-timers and newcomers alike!

Naev 0.13.0

2025-12-25T00:00:00Z

It’s time for the Naev yearly release. This is a big one that paves the way for plugins as first-class citizens of the Naev ecosystem. The development manual has also been changed to be web-based instead of a clunky PDF, and has been updated with many of the engine changes. It should be much more accessible for those wanting to make plugins and content for Naev, and will be constantly updated as development continues.

Plugin manager in all its glory at the time of release.

We would like to thank all the contributors who participated and helped in the making of this release that we hope will both surprise new players and veterans alike!

Secrets lurk in many places.

What’s new?

Engine migration begins: Rust + SDL3: The engine now uses SDL3 and the port to the Rust programming language has started, improving stability and paving the way for major future upgrades. This brings better support for newer platforms and fixes a lot of minor quirks with window creation and rendering.
Plugins as First-Class with Integrated Plugin Manager: Naev now includes a native plugin browser, installer, and updater, all with access to the online plugin repository built right in.
Major content additions with focus on exploration: Lots of space objects are now landable and provide different secrets for the player to find.
- 28 new missions and events
- Treasure maps!
- New intertwined Imperial minor houses
- New systems, anomalies, portraits, objects, and more
- 20+ new songs
- New and reworked outfits
- 11 new ship variants
Significant gameplay tweaks: Heat mechanism removed, pirates are less dangerous to new players, camera is truly isometric, improved forward weapon aiming for the player, and core outfits have been reworked to use a 1 or 2-slot system.
Lots of fixes, balance work, and internal cleanup: From physics touch-ups to mission fixes, weapon tweaks, save robustness, and API consistency, a lot has been improved in this release.

You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

The new version should be compatible with older save games, and will update things as necessary.

Platform support changes

With the move to Rust and SDL3, Naev now only supports macOS 11+ (previously 10.13+) and Windows 10+ (previously Windows 7+). We will keep a 0.12.x branch on Steam as the last version supporting the older operating systems, and those older releases will remain available on Codeberg and itch as well.

Changes since 0.13.0-beta.5

Lots of fixes relating audio spatialization
Change and exposed intrinsic audio spatialization settings
Mass of batteries has been decreased
More guards against NULL dereferences
Adaptive camouflage plating got a bit of jamming
Fixed Lua SPFX erroring out when SFX are omitted
Fixed creating Audio objects when they should be AudioData in several places in the code
NPCs using “The Bite” will no longer turn off the player’s afterburner
Allow passing Audio to LuaSpfx although warn
02_sciwrong: simplified logic a bit
Fixed Taiomi intro event
Fixed game freezing when finishing race with too many owned ships
taiomi10: fixed final cutscene
nelly01/02: minor fixes and streamlining

Full Changelog

Gameplay

Removed heat mechanic (to be re-added as a new mechanic in the future)
Made pirates less dangerous to new players
- Marauders are now intrinsically weaker than other pirates, especially with low pirate presence
- Made pirates less aggressive
- Change pirate spawning to be mainly marauders in low presence areas
Fuel from outfits has been tweaked a bit
NPCs now have skill levels that can affect their targeting and fighting ability
Bioships have had their skills and modifiers slightly reworked to be better balanced
Light, medium-heavy and ultra-heavy ship now have two core hull/systems/engine slots, one main and one secondary
- Effects of heavier cores can be obtained by stacking smaller ones
Engines have been reworked to be more coherent and consistent
- Tricon engines have much higher acceleration to max speed ratio
- Melendez engines have higher speed, but low acceleration and turn
- More consistency across lines
Gauntlet intrinsics are stronger and now mutually exclusive
Intrinsics from a certain trader are now stronger
Ships now disabled below a certain armour threshold regardless of stress
AI is less susceptible to stealth bomber cheese
Point defence now shoots at all ships prioritizing smaller ones after missiles
Cargo delivery missions have increased cargo amounts
Minimum stealth range also affects detection and signature
Ships can have a minimum cargo-less mass of 50% of the ship base mass
Damage over time effects now can cause faction loss and other effects
New harder difficulty
Gauntlet negative bonuses are now multiplicative
Stealthing will temporarily jam locked on munitions
Changed forward weapon aiming algorithm for the player so it is easier to shoot small ships with skill
Reflective shell now shoots thorns
Mass of batteries has been decreased

Quality of Life

Plugin manager built directly into Naev
- Access to the online plugin repository
- Can easily add or remove plugins from local or online sources
Autonav improvements
- Can automatically land when following a ship
- Improved autonav behaviour when losing a followed ship
- Disables afterburner when getting ready to land or jump
- Shooting non-point defence weapons resets autonav speed up
Combat and ambient music tries to play from where it was last stopped when applicable
Gave small untargetable time to player when using hypergates and wormholes
Ships that are scanning you use a different colour highlight
Landable but uninhabited space objects use a different icon
Deployed fighter equipment is no longer random
Added support for multiple automatic backups with 5 by default
Game will prompt if exiting the game when save data loss can occur
Escort mission revamp
- Escorts now follow the player
- Autonav will warn the player if jumping or landing will fail the mission
- Autonav will wait for escorts when landing or taking off
Radar now has a linear area and a logarithmic area (outside the circle) to show more regional information
Support for automatically restarting Naev when changing options that require it
Right-clicking on a spob or jump point will both select it and take you there
Move config file with rest of files and unified code handling local files

28 new missions and events
- Go treasure hunting
27 new outfits and reworked cores
- Outfit sets that gain bonuses as more elements of the set are equipped
11 new ship variants
New sensor anomalies
Two new intertwined minor houses of the Empire with new systems and lore
More space objects with new things to explore
New portraits
Over 20 new songs
- More variation in landing and situational music
Significant changes in jumps (hidden and otherwise)
Reworked the visuals for some weapons using shaders
Start to more strictly enforce Oxford spelling
Racing reward system reworked
Reworked escort missions so that escorts follow the player and improved how it interacts with autonav
Replaced a bunch of placeholder outfit graphics
New engine sound effects for different ship makers with more diversity

Engine

Began porting to Rust
Spatial audio parameters now exposed as engine constants
Engine now uses SDL3 instead of SDL2
Camera is isometric-ish instead of using top-view game play (can be modified by plugins)
Engine supports modifying some important constants such as those related to the physics model for use in plugins
Use instancing instead of geometry shaders for space dust
Ship Lua scripting supports “onshootany” now
Support for price_mod on tech group commodities
Mission and Event NPC’s priority default to the priority of the parent
Local maps can have a range parameter now
Intrinsic outfits for ships are defined in <intrinsics> instead of <slots> now
Systems can have waypoints that are accessible from missions
Fixed some flickering at the end of ship trails
Diff mode in the editor remembers filenames and diff names
Slots can have tags
Outfits can fit an additional slot property
Support for hiding dynamic ship stats from outfits in the equipment support
Outfits support inline Lua definitions
Can override long class names of spobs
Changed how ship statistics are computed: those from same source will be additive, while different sources will be multiplicative
New ship stats and changes
- Weapon speed with variants for cannons and turrets
- Minimum Stealth Range
- Absolute Mass
- Absolute CPU
- Temporary Invincibility
- Detection Range only affects ‘Detected at:’ range
- Ship Visibility that affects detection, signature, and stealth ranges
Intro text is no longer hard-coded and is handled via Lua
SVG image support
WGSL shader support
trigger library to handle common mission code
Game will automatically try to detect extensions for image files
Change and exposed intrinsic audio spatialization settings

Fixes

The Bite turns off afterburners
Hiding on screen display information for missions also hides system markers
Sensor anomalies now appear in the on-screen display
Fixed texture interpolation when alpha is 0 for pixels
Fixed adding commodities to space objects via tech groups
Engine glow decay is less ridiculous on ships with really weird acceleration / speed ratios
Only try to load missions and events with file names that end in .lua
Action speed can no longer be negative and disables space worthiness
Don’t show OSD frame when not visible
Can’t stack Sirius ferry pilgrim missions anymore
Add marker mission to help the player find wild space
Bioships will reset their locked slots when swapping ship and loading
jump_delay was being applied instead of jump_warmup to the engine warm up animation
Mass modifiers now affect outfit mass too
Ships will no longer appear tilted in the equipment view
dv_antiflf02: Make the vigilances less pathetic
Gauntlet properly resets outfit cooldowns
Saves try to save outfits by slot name to be more robust to changes in the future
Player can’t stealth while disabled
Getting disabled turns off stealth
Carried fighters don’t carry commodities
darkshadow: enemies shouldn’t see through stealth
Cryogenic Nanobots no longer restore health to 100% on completing cooldown regardless of damage taken
Improved AI braking skills
Game will not save in certain cases like loading the game and immediately being forced to take off by a load hook
Improved handling of fullscreen toggling and resolution changes
Faction ships no longer show up as “Unknown” when you first discover a faction
Space mines in restricted systems have infinite duration
Made Love framework ignore events that were queued before opening
Lowered reputation gains from aiding hypergate construction sites
Use higher resolution icon
Make sure Reynir only appears when you have free cargo space (reynir.lua)
Escorts spam less messages when trying to land or jump
Fixed mercenaries attacking the player when fighting pirates
Fixed waste dumping in REDACTED
Hide faction hit message when capturing if nothing happens
02_sciwrong: simplified logic a bit
nelly01/02: minor fixes and streamlining
Lots of spelling and grammar fixes
Translation updates

Naev 0.13.0-beta.5

2025-12-21T00:00:00Z

A bit over-ambitious beta, and hopefully the last, the main highlight is a rework in Rust of the audio system and re-encoding of all files as higher quality Opus files. Additionally, the opportunity was taken to add more diversity and different engine sounds to the different ships you can find. Other improvements like fixed and new portrait generation, sorting plugins by compatibility, and fixing space object circles in the editor have also made it in.

It’s fairly likely this will be the beta, so, as always, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join our Discord or Matrix chatrooms. Find out more about them here!

You can get the new version from any of the sources below:

Changes since 0.13.0-beta.4

Introduce start.toml to replace start.xml
Implemented Audio system in Rust
Restore music after a certain boss fight event ends
Systems with spobs will now have circles again in the editor
Plugin manager also sorts by compatibility
Fixed waste dumping in REDACTED
Added some new portraits
Fixed some Soromid portrait generation
New engine sound effects for different ship makers with more diversity
Hide faction hit message when capturing if nothing happens
Spellchecking and translation updates

Naev 0.13.0-beta.4

2025-12-13T00:00:00Z

This beta mainly addresses issues with Mac OS not finding saves (don’t worry they are still there). Small improvements to escort behaviour are also included.

It’s not clear whether this is last beta, so, as always, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join our Discord or Matrix chatrooms. Find out more about them here!

You can get the new version from any of the sources below:

Changes since 0.13.0-beta.3

Fix Mac OS x not finding old saves
Don’t reset escort AI when they are already landing or jumping at the right place

Naev 0.13.0-beta.3

2025-12-08T00:00:00Z

A long-standing issue has been fixed regarding bounty hunters attacking the player for fighting pirates. Other than that, we’ve been able to replace more placeholder graphics and solve an issue with NPCs not using beam weapons properly. There are also minor fixes improving the behaviour of the plugin manager, especially on mac os, made some NPCs talk properly, and adding some missing collision polygons.

It’s not clear whether this is last beta, so, as always, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join our Discord or Matrix chatrooms. Find out more about them here!

You can download the latest build from our downloads page!

Remember that you have to opt-in to the beta with steam.

Platform support changes

Changes since 0.13.0-beta.2

Make sure reynir only appears when you have free cargo space (reynir.lua)
Fix loading fonts in the plugin manager on platforms like macOS
Fix handling the –pluginmanager flag on platforms like macOS
Replaced a bunch of placeholder outfit graphics
Uninstalling a plugin will reset its disabled state
Move config file with rest of files and unified code handling local files
Added fallback server for plugin manager
Increased the distance threshold for escorts to automatically jump
Escorts spam less messages when trying to land or jump
NPCs should now use beam weapons properly instead of turning them off right away
Fixed mercenaries attacking the player when fighting pirates
Fixed bioship outfit graphics being broken
Fixed stations not having collision polygons
Fixed some generic NPCs not talking

Naev 0.13.0-beta.2

2025-11-26T00:00:00Z

The beta has already given its fruits finding some major issues including game not starting on certain platforms, and the game not saving when exiting via the small menu while landed. We’ve also taken the opportunity to significantly reduce the entire size of the game by using advanced image and audio codecs making the full game less than half the original side with no real side effects. There are also minor fixes to different aspects of the game.

Download size wins

Moving to lossy assets shrank the builds by 60-70% across the board compared to 0.13.0-beta.1:

Build	Old size (beta.1)	New size (lossy)	Reduction
Windows 64-bit installer	618.9 MiB	223.9 MiB	-395.0 MiB (~64%)
macOS universal DMG	623.2 MiB	202.5 MiB	-420.7 MiB (~67%)
Linux 64-bit AppImage	659.6 MiB	262.5 MiB	-397.1 MiB (~60%)
Source archive	550.2 MiB	150.2 MiB	-400.0 MiB (~73%)

If you notice visual artifacts or audio quality issues from the new lossy assets, please let us know (platform, location, and any steps to see/hear it help).

We don’t expect this to be the last beta, so, as always, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join our Discord or Matrix chatrooms.
Find out more about them here!

You can download the latest build from our downloads page!

Remember that you have to opt-in to the beta with steam.

Platform support changes

Changes since 0.13.0-beta.1

Fixed crash with appimage on certain systems
Fixed game not saving when exiting while landed via the small menu
Use lossy compression to significantly decrease the size of the game
Right-clicking on a spob or jump point will both select it and take you there
Fixed VN not looking up images with explicit file extensions
Properly define cargo dependency patches
Don’t specify webp for PSO-2434
maikki1: fixed warning when player boards the ship fast
Fixed new svg-based portrait generator breaking with some API usage
Fixed some strings and updated translations

Naev 0.13.0-beta.1

2025-11-23T00:00:00Z

This cycle, the beta arrives with some massive underlying technology changes and a lot of new gameplay and content. This release marks the first step into Naev’s next era with Rust-powered internals and the debut of our fully integrated plugin manager.

You should be able to continue old 0.10.0+ saves, but due to the scale of changes (especially engine-side), starting a new fresh save will give the smoothest experience. For saves older than 0.10.0, please load the save once with 0.12.6 before loading it with newer versions.

What’s new?

Engine migration begins: Rust + SDL3: The engine now uses SDL3 and the port to the Rust programming language has started, improving stability and paving the way for major future upgrades.
Integrated Plugin Manager: Naev now includes a native plugin browser, installer, and updater, all with access to the online plugin repository built right in.
Major content additions:
- 28 new missions and events
- New intertwined Imperial minor houses
- New systems, anomalies, portraits, objects, and more
- 20+ new songs
- New and reworked outfits
- 11 new ship variants
Significant gameplay tweaks: Heat mechanism removed, pirates are less dangerous to new players, camera is truly isometric, improved forward weapon aiming for the player, and core outfits have been reworked to use a 1 or 2-slot system.
Lots of fixes, balance work, and internal cleanup: From physics touch-ups to mission fixes, weapon tweaks, save robustness, and API consistency, a lot has been improved in this release.

As usual, the beta may contain bugs, weirdness, or things that go “pop” in the darkness of space. Please try it out, break things, and tell us what happened so we can fix it before the 0.13.0 final release.

You can download the latest build from our downloads page!

Remember that you have to opt-in to the beta with steam.

Platform support changes

Full Changelog

Gameplay

Removed heat mechanic (to be re-added as a new mechanic in the future)
Made pirates less dangerous to new players
- Marauders are now intrinsically weaker than other pirates, especially with low pirate presence
- Made pirates less aggressive
- Change pirate spawning to be mainly marauders in low presence areas
Fuel from outfits has been tweaked a bit
NPCs now have skill levels that can affect their targeting and fighting ability
Bioships have had their skills and modifiers slightly reworked to be better balanced
Light, medium-heavy and ultraheavy ship now have two core hull/systems/engine slots, one main and one secondary
- Effects of heavier cores can be obtained by stacking smaller ones
Engines have been reworked to be more coherent and consistent
- Tricon engines have much higher acceleration to max speed ratio
- Melendez engines have higher speed, but low acceleration and turn
- More consistency across lines
Gauntlet intrinsics are stronger and now mutually exclusive
Intrinsics from a certain trader are now stronger
Ships now disabled below a certain armour threshold regardless of stress
AI is less susceptible to stealth bomber cheese
Point defence now shoots at all ships prioritizing smaller ones after missiles
Cargo delivery missions have increased cargo amounts
Minimum stealth range also affects detection and signature
Ships can have a minimum cargo-less mass of 50% of the ship base mass
Damage over time effects now can cause faction loss and other effects
New harder difficulty
Gauntlet negative bonuses are now multiplicative
Stealthing will temporarily jam locked on munitions
Changed forward weapon aiming algorithm for the player so it is easier to shoot small ships with skill
Reflective shell now shoots thorns

Quality of Life

Plugin manager built directly into Naev
- Access to the online plugin repository
- Can easily add or remove plugins from local or online sources
Autonav improvements
- Can automatically land when following a ship
- Improved autonav behaviour when losing a followed ship
- Disables afterburner when getting ready to land or jump
- Shooting non-point defence weapons resets autonav speed up
Combat and ambient music tries to play from where it was last stopped when applicable
Gave small untargetable time to player when using hypergates and wormholes
Ships that are scanning you use a different colour highlight
Landable but uninhabited space objects use a different icon
Deployed fighter equipment is no longer random
Added support for multiple automatic backups with 5 by default
Game will prompt if exiting the game when save data loss can occur
Escort mission revamp
- Escorts now follow the player
- Autonav will warn the player if jumping or landing will fail the mission
- Autonav will wait for escorts when landing or taking off
Radar now has a linear area and a logarithmic area (outside the circle) to show more regional information
Support for automatically restarting Naev when changing options that require it

28 new missions and events
- Go treasure hunting
27 new outfits and reworked cores
- Outfit sets that gain bonuses as more elements of the set are equipped
11 new ship variants
New sensor anomalies
Two new intertwined minor houses of the Empire with new systems and lore
More space objects with new things to explore
New portraits
Over 20 new songs
- More variation in landing and situational music
Significant changes in jumps (hidden and otherwise)
Reworked the visuals for some weapons using shaders
Start to more strictly enforce Oxford spelling
Racing reward system reworked
Reworked escort missions so that escorts follow the player and improved how it interacts with autonav

Engine

Began porting to Rust
Engine now uses SDL3 instead of SDL2
Camera is isometric-ish instead of using top-view game play (can be modified by plugins)
Engine supports modifying some important constants such as those related to the physics model for use in plugins
Use instancing instead of geometry shaders for space dust
Ship Lua scripting supports “onshootany” now
Support for price_mod on tech group commodities
Mission and Event NPC’s priority default to the priority of the parent
Local maps can have a range parameter now
Intrinsic outfits for ships are defined in <intrinsics> instead of <slots> now
Systems can have waypoints that are accessible from missions
Fixed some flickering at the end of ship trails
Diff mode in the editor remembers filenames and diff names
Slots can have tags
Outfits can fit an additional slot property
Support for hiding dynamic ship stats from outfits in the equipment support
Outfits support inline Lua definitions
Can override long class names of spobs
Changed how ship statistics are computed: those from same source will be additive, while different sources will be multiplicative
New ship stats and changes
- Weapon speed with variants for cannons and turrets
- Minimum Stealth Range
- Absolute Mass
- Absolute CPU
- Temporary Invincibility
- Detection Range only affects ‘Detected at:’ range
- Ship Visibility that affects detection, signature, and stealth ranges
Intro text is no longer hardcoded and is handled via Lua
SVG image support
WGSL shader support
trigger library to handle commonly mission code
Game will automatically try to detect extensions for image files

Fixes

The Bite turns off afterburners
Hiding on screen display information for missions also hides system markers
Sensor anomalies now appear in the on-screen display
Fixed texture interpolation when alpha is 0 for pixels
Fixed adding commodities to space objects via tech groups
Engine glow decay is less ridiculous on ships with really weird acceleration / speed ratios
Only try to load missions and events with file names that end in .lua
Action speed can no longer be negative and disables space worthiness
Don’t show OSD frame when not visible
Can’t stack Sirius ferry pilgrim missions anymore
Add marker mission to help the player find wild space
Bioships will reset their locked slots when swapping ship and loading
jump_delay was being applied instead of jump_warmup to the engine warm up animation
Mass modifiers now affect outfit mass too
Ships will no longer appear tilted in the equipment view
dv_antiflf02: Make the vigilances less pathetic
Gauntlet properly resets outfit cooldowns
Saves try to save outfits by slot name to be more robust to changes in the future
Player can’t stealth while disabled
Getting disabled turns off stealth
Carried fighters don’t carry commodities
darkshadow: enemies shouldn’t see through stealth
Cryogenic Nanobots no longer restore health to 100% on completing cooldown regardless of damage taken
Improved AI braking skills
Game will not save in certain cases like loading the game and immediately being forced to take off by a load hook
Improved handling of fullscreen toggling and resolution changes
Faction ships no longer show up as “Unknown” when you first discover a faction
Space mines in restricted systems have infinite duration
Made Love framework ignore events that were queued before opening
Lowered reputation gains from aiding hypergate construction sites
Use higher resolution icon
Lots of spelling and grammar fixes
Translation updates

Advent of the Plugin Manager

2025-11-16T00:00:00Z

Adding support for plugins was one of the foundational Naev goals that was finally realized in 0.10.0! Since then, there have been some plugins made for Naev, however, due to the difficulties of finding them and such, even with the naev-plugins repository, they were never fully realized and the need for a plugin manager was glaringly obvious. Some great contributors a-random-lemurian wrote a plugin manager in python and then BlackFrame42 improved it into a usable design. However, while the python language was great for a proof of concept, packaging it was a tricky issue that was never solved.

With the great move to rust, this gave us a new opportunity to rewrite the python handling in Rust, and easily add a plugin manager to boot!

The plugin manager in all its primitive implementation glory.

This also provided a good opportunity to rework the entire plugin metadata format to a more modern one, based on toml which is a widely supported file format that will likely replace the hard to edit and read Naev XML files in the near future. The new format provides much more information, and also makes it much easier to handle with the plugin manager. Custom images are also allowed among other things.

And finally, if you haven’t noticed yet, we’ve also revamped the development manual! It is no longer a hard to parse PDF file generated by LaTeX, but now a web-focused book based on mdbook. Although it still needs a lot of work and updating, we believe it will be much more practical and easier to work going forwards, despite complaints filed by House Za’lek.

We hope these happenings will encourage people to show what they can do with the Naev engine. They’re both still a work in progress, and like always contributions are welcome to the plugin manager, the development manual, and Naev in general.

Au Revoir Github, Hello Codeberg

2025-08-30T00:00:00Z

Ever since Microsoft bought Github, we felt that the days we could stay on the platform were numbered. Despite that, Naev has stayed on Github passed our expectations, but now it seems like it is finally the time to get off the platform due to a combination of Microsoft supporting and pushing for quite bad things that we have never been able to ethically support. With the 0.13.0 release starting to poke out its head, it felt like it was the time to do the move.

For end-users, the changes should be unnoticeable, short of having to report issues on the Codeberg issue tracker instead of Github.

From a historic perspective, this is the 4th time Naev has changed platform. Originally, it was on sourceforge, then it moved to the now defunct google code, before moving to github, and now will be at codeberg. During this time the main repository also went from SVN to mercurial, before turning into a git repository as it is now. We hope there won’t be any changes for a while to come.

What is Codeberg?

Codeberg is another git hosting service based on Forgejo that is run by a German non-profit, with a focus on supporting open source development. This aligns much better with Naev’s development goals, and helps ensure a stable platform for development. Furthermore, if necessary, we can always move to another Forgejo instance fairly easy.

All the functionality of Github is retained with Codeberg, although the interface is a bit different and may take some time to get used to. You can open or follow issues at the issue tracker, download releases, or view the wiki like before.

Migration Steps (for Development)

Github will keep on working as a mirror, so you don’t have to change anything if you do not want to. However, if you want to help in development, you will have to create an account on Codeberg (although you can log in with your Github account if you prefer) and do pull requests there.

If you edit .git/config to point to https://codeberg.org/naev/naev.git (or ssh://git@codeberg.org/naev/naev.git if you use ssh on Codeberg) instead of the Github repo, you can keep on using your current repository without having to delete it and clone again.

The Github repository will no longer be monitored, so please make sure to do all pull requests on Codeberg!

Remaining Steps

While the basics have been ported, actions are still not running on Codeberg, so things like nightlies, releases, and checking if the code compiles online are not working currently. However, this should be fixed relatively soon if all goes well.

Furthermore, some repos are still not completely moved over, but this will be done over the next few weeks.

Naev 0.12.6

2025-07-09T00:00:00Z

This is a minor hotfix that mainly addresses an issue with 0.12.5 that broke point defense weapons for the player. If all goes well, this should be the last 0.12.x release.

You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

The new version should be compatible with older save games, and will update things as necessary.

Naev 0.12.0 official trailer.

Changes since 0.12.5

Dvaered Negotiation 1: update the location of the target on the map
Dvaered Sabotage: no longer fail the mission if the target jumps out after boarding
Fixed point defense turning off all the time
Minor typo fixes and translation updates

The Road to Rust

2025-07-04T00:00:00Z

A long project in the making, the Naev DevTeam is now proud to announce that Naev is now partially written in Rust programming language. While still only about 5% of the C code has been rewritten, it includes many of the critical components such as the most of the rendering pipeline and initialization bits. The porting is being done in tandem with general development, so C and Rust will co-exist for a while until the port is completed and C can be dropped as necessary. Scripting will still be in Lua, which will be much easier to develop using mlua from Rust.

What does this mean?

Short-term, it means it is likely there will be more bugs and quirks, however, in the longer picture, this means that Naev will be able to make use of the inherent memory and threading safety of Rust to be much more bug-free. Rust also makes it possible to simplify significant parts of the code and thread them more easily, meaning that it is likely that performance will also go up over time.

The porting is also a good way to revise the existing codebase. With the first commit being 18 years ago, as you can expect, some parts have not aged too well. Rewriting the code in Rust will not only help modernize it, but also streamline it so that many more improvements can be easily made. Some particular example of something that will become easily possible is implementing mechanisms to modify the number of outfit slots on a ship via outfits.

What has been done?

While the port is far from over, very important aspects have already been moved to Rust side including initialization, rendering, and Lua scripting. Some low-hanging fruits have also been grabbed as a proof of concept including things like the 2D vector Lua library, damage types, and slot types. The entire build system has also been rehauled to have C and Rust work somewhat happily together. Besides having to file a lot of bug reports upstream to meson and other projects, we now figured it out with lots of not so beautiful tricks to compile both a C and Rust library separately, and then link them together in Rust. It’s a bit hacky, but it seems to work well for the time being.

What can you do to help?

There is a lot of work left to still be done. Good thing is that anyone can help! If you want to help with porting, you can look at the issue on rust porting that tries to centralize work being done on Rust. If you don’t want to do Rust, you can also help as always by testing the nightly and reporting any issues that you may find.

As always, help is also needed with artwork, sound effects, and music, including graphics for outfits and new portraits.

Naev 0.12.5

2025-05-23T00:00:00Z

This is the fifth and most likely last maintenance patch of the 0.12.0 release. It includes fixes to a major bug causing spawning ships to be much less diverse than they should have been. With the new version you should now see all sorts of ships all over instead of the same ones over and over. Furthermore, in preparation for upcoming changes in libxml, we have removed save game compression. Although Naev should still be able to load compressed save games, it will only save them without compression from now on. From 0.13.0 onwards, and on systems using newer versions of libxml, loading compressed save games won’t be possible anymore. You’ll either have to load and save with this release, or uncompress manually.

You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

The new version should be compatible with older save games, and will update things as necessary.

Naev 0.12.0 official trailer.

Changes since 0.12.4

Fixed bug causing lower diversity in ship spawning
Fixed autonav not respecting shield thresholds
Fixed AI spamming afterburners in an unhealthy way
Removed support for save game compression as libxml 2.14 disable compression by default
minerva/pirate3: fixed dialogue being weird if paying with tokens
Minor typo fixes and translation updates

Naev 0.12.4

2025-04-06T00:00:00Z

This is the fourth maintenance patch of the 0.12.0 release. It contains fixes for several crashes, including a fairly high impact one when shooting asteroids with explosive weapons. It also ensures that no pirate presence leaks into the area around the starting system, and makes sure some missions are completable. This release looks set to be the final of the 0.12.x series as we focus on the 0.13.0 release that is slated for December this year.

You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

The new version should be compatible with older save games, and will update things as necessary.

Naev 0.12.0 official trailer.

Changes since 0.12.3

More robust jump check to fix crash when creating new systems
Gave Pacifier +400 fuel bonus to match description
Made the baron comm event respect system claims
Shaky swan no longer gets killed by patrols
Fixed crash when shooting asteroids with explosive weapons
Disallow cooling down while jumping
Fixed crash with pilot.navJumpSet
Remove all pirate presence within 2 jumps of the starting system
Minor typo fixes and translation updates

Naev 0.12.3

2025-02-01T00:00:00Z

This is the third maintenance patch of the 0.12.0 release, that fixes a bunch of minor issues. Some of the larger fixes include not being able to stealth with active point defense, and distress signals causing hostility cascades which could be a problem especially in the Frontier. We don’t anticipate too many more problems and have shifted most of the focus on development of the next major release.

You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

The new version should be compatible with older save games, and will update things as necessary.

Naev 0.12.0 official trailer.

Changes since 0.12.2

Sirius preacher gives +4% shield regeneration, not +4 GW shield regeneration
Largus Gene Drive (Nyx) has a max speed of 175, not 275
Tweaked Melendez Mammoth XL and Eagle 6500 top speeds
Fixed not being able to stealth with active point defense
Fixed being able to complete the test of purification after failing
Fixed GUI getting weirdly offset in some cases
Cannibalize button doesn’t overlap with capture anymore
Don’t crash if loading a save where the player’s current ship doesn’t exist
Gauss has a reputation requirement
Derelicts are no longer space-worthy
Fixed Tartarus landing graphics
Fried now shows the stellar winds on the map
Reworked aggressivity on distress signals to be more consistent
Try to fix trails not appearing on variant ships
dv_goddard: The Siren of Halir no longer fails the mission after you get the commandos
dv_shopping: Fixed not giving the player the Fancy Key Chain
Misi will sell the Fancy Key Chain for those affected by the dv_shopping bug
oldwoman: The old woman complains again
shadowvigil: seiryuu doesn’t disappear if you land
darkshadow: four wind fighters can hurt the player
kex3: made it completable by making it much easier to dodge and have a fairer fight
Fixed stealth circles not appearing on hostile pilots if their faction is friendly
Fixed some date-related mission information not being updated
Fixed landing music playing with VN music in some situations
Significantly buffed point defense damage
Story mode gives an additional -50% fuel usage modifier
Minor typo fixes and translation updates

Naev 0.12.2

2025-01-09T00:00:00Z

This is a maintenance patch that fixes a lot of small issues here and there. It includes improvements on deployed escorts, fixing looting FLF ships causing nearby planets and other ships to become hostile, and puts Dvaered ships for sale among other things.

You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

The new version should be compatible with older save games, and will update things as necessary.

Naev 0.12.0 official trailer.

Changes since 0.12.1

Made plasma drill much easier to apply to asteroids
Don’t reset cargo if not space worthy when reloading
Truly fix the negative mass exploit
Made miners less bad at mining, their only passion
Slim GUI set formation button is no longer clickable when invisible
Removed outdated tip from NPC messages
Round faction reputation at hypergates
Hypergates no longer spoil system names for you
Fixed description of the Squadron Synchronizer Module
Deployed fighters are always aggressive (for now)
Player can’t make own escorts hostile with AoE weapons
Fuel usage is a negative is better stat
Added faction.areNeutral to get true neutral state of factions
Ammo can not become negative anymore
Made Za’lek drone weapons builtin
Be more restrictive on which factions give waste dump missions
Added the Admonisher ΩIIa for sale
Reputation can’t go above +100 or below -100
Made ship buying reputation requirements more lax, using maximum of local and global reputation
Fix overlay map not updating after obtaining map while open
Stealth Discovered Speed should be Stealth Discovered Rate
Fixed mass being displayed twice for outfits
Don’t have player.teleport break the game while the player is landing
Modified condition of many neutral missions so they don’t appear in the wrong places
Dvaered ships are now also sold in more accessible locations
FLF should not cause reputation chains making other factions hostile
Fixed the ship_buy hook referring to the ship sold when trading ships
Fixed captured ships having inconsistent load outs and not spawning near the pilot
Fixed zebra losing cylinders when thrusting
Don’t remove builtin weapons when spawning pilots naked
Fixed pilot.distress() not sending signals to spobs
lovebiz01: fixed condition allowing it to appear anywhere
dv_goddard: fixed spawning of Silent Death
harjas_vengeance: avoid certain system to make the mission easier to do.
minerva missions: fixed a ship not spawning correctly
Large cargo hulls now match the cargo difference of the small and medium hulls
Minor typo fixes and translation updates

Naev 0.12.1

2024-12-27T00:00:00Z

With big releases, come big bugs. A bug that would potentially mark the entire player’s map as known has crept into the release. It has been fixed along with other minor fixes, in particular, a bug made the obelisk tests require manual setting of weapon sets, and a persistent ship AI repeating to the player over and over that they haven’t played in a while.

You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

The new version should be compatible with older save games, and will update things as necessary.

Naev 0.12.0 official trailer.

Changes since 0.12.0

Fixed psychic orbs having trails
Crop selected spob name if it goes out of bounds in the GUI
Fix obelisk tests not setting properly the primary weapons of the player
Fleet members don’t try to investigate, only leaders do
More lenient update checks when updating saves
Pilots should no longer see through stealth when attacked from stealth
Fixed sometimes full map being partially displayed
Don’t show the “didn’t play in a while” message every time a save is loaded
Difficulty modifiers extend to the player’s escorts as well
Boarding bonus affects outfit / ship capture costs
Lowered the cost of capturing ships
Minor typo fixes and translation updates

Naev 0.12.0

2024-12-23T00:00:00Z

After a whole month of beta testing and furious bug fixing, following the tradition, we are once again doing our yearly release. This release includes many engine improvements, such as 3D ships, an in-game wiki, reworked weapon sets, notable performance increases, etc., but also a significant amount of new content including a whole new area, more and reworked missions, and ship variants among others things. We also have not forgotten significant quality of life improvements; folding messages, more visual indications for things such as important characters at the spaceport bar, filtering for the mission computer, and more!

We would like to thank all the contributors who participated and helped in the making of this release that we hope will both surprise new players and veterans alike!

Most notable changes:

Nearly all the ships are now modeled in 3D with fancy lighting and tilting effects!
You can now capture ships!
New ships and ship variants!
Faction reputation is no longer a single global value, but more nuanced and local.
Simplified and more powerful weapon sets
New challenging area to access many secrets.
In-game Wiki full of mechanics and lore explanations!

You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

The new version should be compatible with older save games, and will update things as necessary.

Naev 0.12.0 official trailer.

Full Changelog

Gameplay
- Ability to capture disabled ships
- Faction reputation is no longer universal, but varies on systems
  - Direct faction hit changes are shown as messages
  - Your actions will more directly affect ships in the system
- Significantly increase maximum potential fleet capacity
- Excess energy to battery recharge efficiency is now flat instead of varying based on charge level
- Gave the Za’lek Sting a slight detection buff
- Can only have a single patrol mission active at a given time
- Pirates are less numerous during Chapter 0
- Dvaered Arsenal has no fighter bays and fewer slots
- Lowered CPU cost of some fighter bays
- Decreased CPU and energy provided by large core slots
- Pillaging ships affects reputation
- Significantly increased the amount of fuel provided by outfits
- Camouflage burster gives a speed bonus while active and disables when out of stealth
- Can scan ships with ‘u’ key
- Gave the Quicksilver another medium structural slot
- Beam weapons have minimum delays instead of minimum durations
- Can stealth when missiles are locked on
- Deployed fighters take stress and damage over time when their mother ship is destroyed
- Electron Burst Cannons and Za’lek Heavy Drones have had their damage per second lowered
- Improved point defense
  - Spittle Tubuloid Cluster is now a utility and does more damage
  - Guardian Interception System does double damage
  - Missiles explode when intercepted
- Bounties have explicit time limits
- Derelicts should appear in remote systems
Quality of Life
- Added colourblind correction mode
- Exposed more colourblind options to the user
- Can modify game speed directly instead of using a slow mode difficulty for accessibility
- Messages get folded instead of repeating
- Asteroids no longer fade out if close to or targeted by the player
- Display fuel consumption for ships in the equipment overlay
- Added option to match speed with the slowest ship in the fleet (on by default)
- Made it so ships in the equipment screen do not change order based on value
- Mark spaceport bar tab when there is an important NPC
- Weapon set keybindings change window tabs
- Use short outfit names when displaying groups of outfits
- Shown more useful things you have when buying outfits with things other than credits
- Can sort and filter the mission computer
- Added small optional bounce to NPCs when they start talking
- Inform the player when they don’t meet mission requirements for some important missions
- Can add new plugins directly from the options menu
- Can toggle whether autonav stops when missile lock-ons are detected
- Added colour coded factional backgrounds in the shipyard
- Can rotate shipyard image for ships with 3D graphics
- Prompt when deleting notes
- Added accessibility option that allows skipping story minigames
- Can view and change all your ships in the equipment tab when there is refuelling
- Reduced space dust size by 50%
- Changed mouse click selection priority, it prefers spobs/jumps and will ignore clicks reselecting the same object
Content
- New in-game wiki with explanation on gameplay mechanics and lots of lore
- 8 new missions
  - The Onions call
- 4 new ships
- 13 new ship variants
  - Give a new twist to existing ships
- 6 new outfits
- New area with unique challenges
- New events
  - Get more Sirius abilities
  - Find the dark side of the Nebula
- New NPC portraits
- New generic NPC and News messages
- Reworked trails to make ships feel more speedy
Engine
- Support for 3D models
  - Lighting is based on system stars
  - Fancy effects for special systems
  - Ships tilt slightly when rotating
  - Simple animations are supported and used when applicable
- Support for an in-game wiki
  - Can process YAML, Lua, and markdown
  - Cross-link support
  - Support for custom widgets
- Stats (except inverted stats) are now additive instead of multiplicative
- Try to merge saves if multiple directories correspond to the same player
- More robust weapon set support that can handle multiple overlapping weapon sets
- Faster handling of asteroids with large exclusion areas
- Added fuel_usage_mod ship stat
- Fixed player losing navigation targets when unidiff is applied
- Fixed ai.idir giving wrong answer by M_PI_2 in some cases
- Threaded more loading components
- Lua require now caches chunks
- Dropped SDL_image fallback
- Use higher internal timer for all platforms
- Support for Tracy
- Spobs that are not landable yet generate presence will be shown on the map
- Warn the player if they try to use a name with all space characters
- Decoupled the collision system from the rendering system
- Added a low memory mode to use fewer and smaller textures with 3D
- Lazy load ship and outfit graphics to reduce memory usage and decrease load time
- Use clang-format to format all the C code
- Use enums internally to represent keybindings instead of strings
- Always use replaygain information when available when loading vorbis files
- Stop repeating the same warning after a fixed amount of times
- Support for outfits that don’t break stealth
- Editor has partial support for universe diffs
- Editor has separate configuration and file dialogues
- New ship stats
  - Global weapon range, damage, fire-rate and energy usage
  - Range ship stat for all specific weapon types
  - Turn, speed, and accel for launchers
  - Shield downtime modifier
- Deprecated old faction API in favour of the new one for local / global standings
- Added support for temporarily overriding faction standings
Fixes
- PSO and Mizar nebulas have trails again
- Removed fancy background mode
- Can remove fighter bays with deployed fighters
- Sol is less friendly
- Fixed rare cases where fighters would not be able to dock
- Fixed hypergate and wormhole effects getting stuck
- Obelisks tell if you have completed them already
- Fixed space dust disappearing with certain jump abilities
- Boarded pilots become permanently disabled if they lose space-worthiness
- Double tap will activate feather drive like blink engines
- Fixed camouflage burster not activating stealth
- Fixed bug where beams were counted as giving energy in the equipment optimizer
- shadowvigil: claim entire route
- sh01_corvette: should be completable on easy difficulties now
- patrol: fixed escorts and fighters becoming hostile if hostile to the mission giving faction
- Fixed debugging paranoid builds under Windows
- Fixed autonav not respecting shield thresholds
- zbh10: Godheart and friends get at most 1 fighter bay per ship now
- Fixed ESS Trinity being bribeable
- Cargo on fleets with be displayed to make room for mission cargo when necessary
- Made it so Shadow Vigil doesn’t try to go through Surano system for reasons
- blackhole/zbh09: fixed softlock during a cutscene under certain conditions
- Don’t play wormhole sound on main menu
- Don’t allow the player to sell unique ships
- Fixed corner cases where destroyed player ships would not properly be updated
- Fixed Sirius Providence flow absorption bonus
- Fixed positioning of a certain blockade
- Fixed some visual aberrations when forcing the player to land or jump
- Prioritize pilots and other objects over uninhabited planets when clicking
- Can always bribe your way to pirate’s clansworlds
- Consistently colour the ShipAI messages in the tutorial
- Made max_fps actually get respected
- Fixed map decorators not shown in editor
- Update the overlay scaling given the player’s position
- Fixed population not being updated by universe diffs
- Fixed date acquired being wrong on some platforms
- Improved pilot facing corrections when jumping
- Pirate ambush derelict events break stealth
- Mining minigame result affects yield more
- Absorption is no longer limited to the 0% to 100% range
- derelict_rescue: only allow generic target space objects
- Restored portable installs with the Windows installer
- Show intrinsic outfits in the “Other” tab
- Fixed plural form of 0 items in many cases
- Ships significantly past the mass limit are no longer space worthy
- Don’t allow ship shield/energy to go negative
- Jumping through a one-way normal / hidden jump reveals the hidden side
- Increased nebula visibility by 400 km
- Fixed map thresholds for interference
- Editor now shows dialogues on errors and allows user to choose directory to save data to
- Escorts will try to respect player’s autonav rules by default
- Don’t show stealth circles during cinematics
- Made pilots in formation less prone to spinning
- Workaround MESA driver bug that causes dark or invisible ships on AMD hardware
- Can no longer abort missions during landing animation

Naev 0.12.0-beta.3

2024-12-11T00:00:00Z

With the bug frenzy calming down, we are proud to announce version 0.12.0-beta.3. This release contains a myriad of bug fixes and should be quite close to the final 0.12.0 version that is planned before the end of the year. As always, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join our Discord or Matrix chatrooms. Find out more about them here!

You can get the new version from any of the sources below:

As a new ship variant of the Llama, the Llama Voyager shares many features but has fundamental differences such as fuel regeneration.

Changes since 0.12.0-beta.2

Fixed collisions for some ships at certain angles
Changed mouse click selection priority, it prefers spobs/jumps and will ignore clicks reselecting the same object
Fixed map decorators not shown in editor
Centered buttons at the top of the holo-archives
Show if a system has a bar in the map
Fixed conf.mouse_doubleclick not disabling when set to 0
Fixed crashes when a faction is assigned a non-existent colour
Update the overlay scaling given the player’s position
Fixed population not being updated by universe diffs
Fixed date acquired being wrong on some platforms
Round reputation values when displaying standing text for consistency
Display local standing in the information window
Fixed certain combination of opening menus locking up
Fixed fmt.number displaying wrong values when negative
Fixed spoiling of system names on the map
Improved pilot facing corrections when jumping
Can no longer abort missions during landing animation
Fixed editor crash with empty descriptions
Fixed editor crash when making links to systems with no presence
Fixed rehabilitation missions
Fixed escorts not using special outfits and abilities
Fixed escort fighters existing after undeploying escort
Fixed Certitude trails
Pirate ambush derelict events break stealth
Mining minigame result affects yield more
Absorption is no longer limited to the 0% to 100% range
derelict_rescue: only allow generic target space objects
onion04: don’t fail if something happens to the gawain after taking the cargo
traffic_01: don’t use hardcoded systems
bounty: fixed error with deadlines in certain cases
neburesearch04: don’t let the drones see through stealth and disable the player from relanding to skip stage
minerva/judugement: fixed error in VN flow
Minor typo fixes and translation updates
Increased maximum reputation for a certain hidden faction to 70
Restored portable installs with the Windows installer
Documentation fixes
Minor typo fixes and translation updates

Naev 0.12.0-beta.2

2024-11-28T00:00:00Z

A lot of major and minor issues, in addition to some minor new features, have been resolved calling for a 0.12.0-beta.2. In particular, support for lowering the saturation of the nebula, and having escorts respect your autonav preferences (you can disable it in the settings from the info menu) have been added as new features. We don’t have any intention of adding any new features before the final 0.12.0 version, and will keep on resolving bugs as they are found. As always, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join our Discord or Matrix chatrooms. Find out more about them here!

You can get the new version from any of the sources below:

As a new ship variant of the Llama, the Llama Voyager shares many features but has fundamental differences such as fuel regeneration.

Changes since 0.12.0-beta.1

Fallback for missing holo archives ship entries
Reset proteron reputation more aggressively
Fixed overlap in VN logs
Show intrinsic outfits in the “Other” tab
Shooting weapons no longer resets autonav speed up
Fixed plural form of 0 items in many cases
Made pilots in formation less prone to spinning
Ships significantly past the mass limit are no longer space worthy
Lowered the price of a certain map
Lowered presence of a certain faction
Prevent changing autonav target via Lua when jumping
Disable jettisoning cargo when landing
Removed overlap in the options menu
Don’t allow ship shield/energy to go negative
Don’t show stealth circles during cinematics
Jumping through a one-way normal / hidden jump reveals the hidden side
Escorts will try to respect player’s autonav rules by default
Increased nebula visibility by 400 km
Fixed text overlap in the holo-archives for certain languages
Fixed reputation changes not working on dynamic factions
Fixed text overlap if ship name is too long
Fixed automatic weapon sets behaving oddly with multiple ships
Fixed rare crash when setting hook on non-existent pilot
Fixed map thresholds for interference
Fixed some reputation values not being correctly rounded
Fixed OSD not advancing in a certain mission
Fixed Sirius Divinity collisions
Fixed beam weapons in “in range” mode not respecting range bonus
Fixed hiding mission OSDs and changing priority being reset on take off or jump
Fixed asking your ship AI for advice
Fixed point defense requiring toggling thrice to turn off in some cases
sensor anomaly: Nelly will no longer appear in too dangerous or risky systems
mephisto type v: lowered heat generation
seek_n_destroy: fixed hints breaking in certain cases
pir_hit_intro: fixed OSD being displayed wrong
taiomi04: update OSD after boarding ship
bounty: fixed OSD getting reset after killing/capturing target
ant_supplies: fixed hostility after jumping into system again
Editor now shows dialogues on errors and allows user to choose directory to save data to
Minor typo fixes and translation updates

Naev 0.12.0-beta.1

2024-11-16T00:00:00Z

This year, we’re starting the betas a bit early given the large amount of content modified and added. As always, this release contains a large amount of changes done during the past year which likely have introduced a lot of bugs and issues that we want to iron out before the final release of 0.12.0.

Now, this release changes a lot of how the game currently plays, and, while it is highly recommended to start a new game, it should be possible to just load up your old saves without too much stuff being changed. In particular, some of the major changes are:

Nearly all the ships are now modeled in 3D with fancy lighting and tilting effects!
You can now capture ships!
New ships and ship variants!
Faction reputation is no longer a single global value, but more nuanced and local.
New challenging area to access many secrets.
In-game Wiki full of mechanics and lore explanations!

If you try it and find any issues, please report them at the issue tracker. Discussion about the game can be had on one of the various discussion forums and chatrooms we have. Check them out here!

You can get the new version from any of the sources below:

As a new ship variant of the Llama, the Llama Voyager shares many features but has fundamental differences such as fuel regeneration.

Full Changelog

Gameplay
- Ability to capture disabled ships
- Faction reputation is no longer universal, but varies on systems
  - Direct faction hit changes are shown as messages
  - Your actions will more directly affect ships in the system
- Significantly increase maximum potential fleet capacity
- Excess energy to battery recharge efficiency is now a flat 50% instead of varying based on charge level
- Gave the Za’lek sting a slight detection buff
- Can only have a single patrol mission active at a given time
- Pirates are less numerous during Chapter 0
- Dvaered Arsenal has no fighter bays and fewer slots
- Lowered CPU cost of some fighter bays
- Decreased CPU and energy provided by large core slots
- Pillaging ships affects reputation
- Significantly increased the amount of fuel provided by outfits
- Camouflage burster gives a speed bonus while active and disables when out of stealth
- Can scan ships with ‘u’ key
- Gave the Quicksilver another medium structural slot
- Beam weapons have minimum delays instead of minimum durations
- Can stealth when missiles are locked on
- Deployed fighters take stress and damage over time when their mother ship is destroyed
- Electron Burst Cannons and Za’lek Heavy Drones have had their damage per second lowered
- Improved point defense
  - Spittle Tubuloid Cluster is now a utility and does more damage
  - Guardian Interception System does double damage
  - Missiles explode when intercepted
- Bounties have explicit time limits
- Derelicts should appear in remote systems
Quality of Life
- Added colourblind correction mode
- Exposed more colourblind options to the user
- Can modify game speed directly instead of using a slow mode difficulty for accessibility
- Messages get folded instead of repeating
- Asteroids no longer fade out if close to or targeted by the player
- Display fuel consumption for ships in the equipment overlay
- Added option to match speed with the slowest ship in the fleet (on by default)
- Made it so ships in the equipment screen do not change order based on value
- Mark spaceport bar tab when there is an important NPC
- Weapon set keybindings change window tabs
- Use short outfit names when displaying groups of outfits
- Shown more useful things you have when buying outfits with things other than credits
- Can sort and filter the mission computer
- Added small optional bounce to NPCs when they start talking
- Inform the player when they don’t meet mission requirements for some important missions
- Can add new plugins directly from the options menu
- Can toggle whether autonav stops when missile lock-ons are detected
- Added colour coded factional backgrounds in the shipyard
- Can rotate shipyard image for ships with 3D graphics
- Prompt when deleting notes
- Added accessibility option that allows skipping story minigames
- Can view and change all your ships in the equipment tab when there is refuelling
- Reduced space dust size by 50%
Content
- New in-game wiki with explanation on gameplay mechanics and lots of lore
- 8 new missions
  - The Onions call
- 4 new ships
- 13 new ship variants
  - Give a new twist to existing ships
- 6 new outfits
- New area with unique challenges
- New events
  - Get more Sirius abilities
  - Find the dark side of the Nebula
- New NPC portraits
- New generic NPC and News messages
- Reworked trails to make ships feel more speedy
Engine
- Support for 3D models
  - Lighting is based on system stars
  - Fancy effects for special systems
  - Ships tilt slightly when rotating
  - Simple animations are supported and used when applicable
- Support for an in-game wiki
  - Can process YAML, Lua, and markdown
  - Cross-link support
  - Support for custom widgets
- Stats (except inverted stats) are now additive instead of multiplicative
- Try to merge saves if multiple directories correspond to the same player
- More robust weapon set support that can handle multiple overlapping weapon sets
- Faster handling of asteroids with large exclusion areas
- Added fuel_usage_mod ship stat
- Fixed player losing navigation targets when unidiff is applied
- Fixed ai.idir giving wrong answer by M_PI_2 in some cases
- Threaded more loading components
- Lua require now caches chunks
- Dropped SDL_image fallback
- Use higher internal timer for all platforms
- Support for Tracy
- Spobs that are not landable yet generate presence will be shown on the map
- Warn the player if they try to use a name with all space characters
- Decoupled the collision system from the rendering system
- Added a low memory mode to use fewer and smaller textures with 3D
- Lazy load ship and outfit graphics to reduce memory usage and decrease load time
- Use clang-format to format all the C code
- Use enums internally to represent keybindings instead of strings
- Always use replaygain information when available when loading vorbis files
- Stop repeating the same warning after a fixed amount of times
- Support for outfits that don’t break stealth
- Editor has partial support for universe diffs
- Editor has separate configuration and file dialogues
- New ship stats
  - Global weapon range, damage, fire-rate and energy usage
  - Range ship stat for all specific weapon types
  - Turn, speed, and accel for launchers
  - Shield downtime modifier
- Deprecated old faction API in favour of the new one for local / global standings
- Added support for temporarily overriding faction standings
Fixes
- PSO and Mizar nebulas have trails again
- Removed fancy background mode
- Can remove fighter bays with deployed fighters
- Sol is less friendly
- Fixed rare cases where fighters would not be able to dock
- Fixed hypergate and wormhole effects getting stuck
- Obelisks tell if you have completed them already
- Fixed space dust disappearing with certain jump abilities
- Boarded pilots become permanently disabled if they lose space-worthiness
- Double tap will activate feather drive like blink engines
- Fixed camouflage burster not activating stealth
- Fixed bug where beams were counted as giving energy in the equipment optimizer
- shadowvigil: claim entire route
- sh01_corvette: should be completable on easy difficulties now
- patrol: fixed escorts and fighters becoming hostile if hostile to the mission giving faction
- Fixed debugging paranoid builds under Windows
- Fixed autonav not respecting shield thresholds
- zbh10: Godheart and friends get at most 1 fighter bay per ship now
- Fixed ESS Trinity being bribeable
- Cargo on fleets with be displayed to make room for mission cargo when necessary
- Made it so Shadow Vigil doesn’t try to go through Surano system for reasons
- blackhole/zbh09: fixed softlock during a cutscene under certain conditions

Sporadic Naev Newsletter Vol. 4

2024-07-21T00:00:00Z

This year we’re having another edition of our Sporadic Naev Newsletter. We’ll be covering some of the improvements that will appear in the 0.12.0 release, and more importantly, discuss a feature almost 15 years in the making: Naev going 3D! Now, this doesn’t mean gameplay is going 3D - gameplay is fundamentally unchanged - however, the ship models are now in 3D, allowing us to do new fancy effects and lower memory consumption while at it!

Nearly all ships are now in 3D!

Less Pirates in the Early Game

One of the major complaints that Naev always gets is how ruthless pirates are, especially in the early game, when the player has no proper defenses. Although the past several releases have tried to mitigate the issue by establishing a safe starting area with no pirates, and adding more introductory missions to help the player get started, for those players that strayed too far from the starting area, it was often fatal. Now, Chapter 0 will feature significantly less pirates, that will ramp up to normal when the player reaches Chapter 1. This should give the player time to get better ships and survive the pirate menace.

Universe diff support in the universe editor.

In order to implement this feature, the in-game universe editor was significantly reworked (yet again!) to support universe diffs, that is, instead of saving the entire universe, only changes with the default are saved. While this has been used only for reducing pirates, for now, this is going to come very in hand when implementing the next stages of the major campaigns, where the universe will undergo many significant changes. It will definitely be a good investment for things to come.

Naev, now in 3D!

So, while this is something that was proposed around 15 years ago, this is something that has been quite active in the works for almost 5 years now. During that time, it has been rewritten twice: first using object files and more traditional rendering, and now using gltf files with physically-based rendering. As we’re not using any sort of game engine, it was all written from the ground up, and includes some fancy things like variance shadow maps, FidelityFX filtering, high dynamic tone mapping, and super sampling. There’s still many things to do, but this finally lets us start to do fancier things that were infeasible using spritesheets. That said, spritesheets are still supported, however, 3D models are the recommended way of adding new ships.

The system you are in will subtly change the lighting on all ships.

It has taken a lot of work, but all the ancient models have been updated to work with the newest blender, and many models have seen upgrades in different aspects like texturing, engine glows, broken geometry, and animations. Some ships have had to be nearly completely remade to work with current standards. There’s still a lot to do, but they look much better, and the same model can be used in the shipyard, communication window, and in-game.

3D models support animations, such as the Zebra having rotating parts.

With 3D, we finally can also have ships tilt slightly when turning. This makes flying feel much more natural, and the tilt shows off more highlights and details of the ships. While we were hoping to add blinking lights and more details, those have not yet been implemented, but there is a real possibility that they will come sooner and later, once some logistics are figured out.

Ships tilt slightly when turning. Weapon mounts and trails adjust to the 3D models.

For now, only ships have been reworked into 3D, but we hope to have planets, stations, and asteroids to join them in the near future. Some effects such as the backgrounds, wormholes, and the likes will still be kept in 2D, however, it will all work much better together. Oh, and last but not least, we’ve taken this opportunity to add 4 new ships to flesh out a bit more the Naev universe!

Linear Energy Regeneration

Although many players had not noticed, energy regeneration in Naev used an RC (Resistance-Capacitor) charge curve, which meant that energy would regenerate faster the less you had, and slowly taper out. This was not properly conveyed to the player and has now made linear. Now 100 GW of energy regeneration will always be 100 GJ of energy generated per second. While it is not possible to keep exactly the same behaviour as before, outfits and ships have been adjusted to try to be as similar as before the change.

Quality of Life for all!

A lot of Quality of Life has also made it into the nightly. Spaceport bar is marked with red exclamation points when there is an interesting NPC, there is support for sorting and filtering mission computer missions, repeated messages get folded in the GUI, asteroids won’t disappear when the player is nearby or actively targeting them, and much more! This should ensure a smoother experience for the players and get rid of lots of small friction.

You can now sort missions and it is easier to tell when new missions are available at the spaceport bar.

Additionally, the game uses lazy loading and threading to load much faster than before, starting up much faster and using less memory in general.

Concluding Remarks

All the aforementioned fixes can be already tasted in the nightly branch which can be obtained through the steam beta, github, or itch.io. They will be included in the next 0.12.0 release which is scheduled for December if you’d rather wait for a more stable release instead of risking the bleeding edge. If you’re interested in seeing the full changelog, including things that have not been discussed here, it’s available on github. With that, this concludes the Sporadic Naev Newsletter Vol. 4, and see you again in the next one!

Naev 0.11.5

2024-06-13T00:00:00Z

This is a minor release, that mainly provides build support for BSD systems. However, an important issue where the combat hologram projector could make escorts hostile and some missing jumps in the FLF-Pirate map have also been fixed.

If you are interested on helping the Naev project, you can get in contact with other players and developers from the contact page.

You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

Naev 0.11.0 official trailer.

Full Changelog

Fixed FLF-Pirate map not providing jump information
Fixed the combat hologram projector making escorts hostile
Build system no longer libdl on platforms such as BSD

Naev 0.11.4

2024-03-09T00:00:00Z

This new version contains a diversity of fixes, including a crash when selling deployed ships, and some issues that still appeared on some platforms when using autonav. We are also glad to announce that this version includes two complete translations: Japanese and Spanish. Most of the outstanding issues have been resolved and we hope that this is the last release in the 0.11.x series.

If you are interested on helping the Naev project, you can get in contact with other players and developers from the contact page.

You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

Naev 0.11.0 official trailer.

Full Changelog

More guards against divides by zero in autonav
Fixed warnings on certain OpenGL drivers
Fixed toolkit not rerendering when right-clicking on tabbed windows
Fixed Marius enclave description
Tweaked Za’lek Diablo and Mephisto stats so that they are better suited to their respective roles
Updated flicker drive, blink drive, and hyperbolic blink engine descriptions to be more complete and correct
Initialize outfit Lua scripts when added in the equipment view so that flicker drive signature gets properly computed
Flicker drive no longer displays -10% signature range bonus twice when equipped
Fixed crash when selling deployed ship
Gave the Dvaered warlord event better criteria so they don’t attack the hypergate
shark/sh01_corvette: have the pilot jump in from the same system as the player
minerva/kex03: have mission claim the crimson gauntlet to prevent unwanted spawns
dvaered/gauntlet: have mission claim the system if it can, but not fail if it can’t
trader/trader_escort: player can only escort one group of traders at a time
neburesearch/neburesearch_01: use the correct faction when complaining
Fixed some typos and revised writing
Translation updates

Naev 0.11.3

2024-01-25T00:00:00Z

This new version hopefully fixes the bug that causes autonav to crash the game in specific conditions, fixes autonav breaking when loading old saves, and increases the yields of mining five-fold. Other minor bug fixes and translation updates are included in the update. Thanks to all those reported and involved in the fixing!

You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

Naev 0.11.0 official trailer.

Full Changelog

Don’t run discovery event when in cinematic mode
Do a better job of updating old save autonav settings
Added more checks so tutorial messages don’t appear in claimed systems
Fixed blinking not breaking stealth
Fixed auto-hail message colouring
Only do updates with positive delta ticks
Fixed cargo disappearing when buying a ship when over the cargo limit
Don’t let the player trade ships when they have mission cargo
Fixed not being able to turn off point defense weapons
Fixed Za’lek drone bay being cheaper than the mini-bay
Flicker drives can not be stacked and are mutually exclusive with other blink drives
Decreased Nexus Drill Lance mining malus from -80% to -15%
Increased all mining yields by roughly 5 times
sciencegonewrong/02_sciwrong: make the drones not hostile to other factions
neutral/baron_comm: fixed trivial warning when trying to clean up baron comm event
neutral/wastedump: fixed getting rid of cargo while landed
Translation updates

Naev 0.11.2

2024-01-15T00:00:00Z

Inside the improvements of 0.11.1, a critical bug that seems to affect release-version windows only sneaked in. This bug causes autonav to basically crash the game when activated in certain conditions. Given that this makes the game pretty much unplayable on affected systems, we created a new version that should solve the issue. Thanks to all those reported and involved in the fixing!

You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

Naev 0.11.0 official trailer.

Full Changelog

Stopped autonav from preventing wobble and overshooting by crashing the entire game

Naev is now available as a Native Apple Silicon app!

2024-01-15T00:00:00Z

Naev is now available as a Native Apple Silicon app!

Starting with 0.11.2, any versions of Naev released in the future will include native support for Apple Silicon. Nightly releases are included. This should benefit users that have an Apple device with Apple Silicon (M1, M2, etc.), with significant speedups compared to running Naev with Rosetta. For running Apple Silicon builds of Naev make sure you are running macOS 11.0 or higher. Users with Intel Macs can still run Naev on macOS 10.13 or higher.

Enjoy!

You can get this new version from any of the following sources:

Naev 0.11.1

2024-01-14T00:00:00Z

The Naev DevTeam is proud to announce the release of Naev version 0.11.1. This update fixes some issues on certain platforms with video memory corruption and crashes, and a myriad of smaller issues here and there. It is highly recommended to update to the newest version. We would like to thank all the contributors who have participated and helped in the making of this release.

You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

Naev 0.11.0 official trailer.

Full Changelog

Give all ammo back to player after doing obelisk
Fixed player being invincible after completing an obelisk
Fixed a crash when loading games while a landing hook was running
Fixed race condition in threadpool
Fixed asteroids spawning in not proper shapes
Fixed autonav wobble and overshooting
Point defense won’t shoot at disabled pilots anymore
Fixed battery descriptions
Discovering a hidden jump will make both directions known
Fixed AI trying to scan hostile targets they lost track of
Properly save and load reward_value to and from saves
Fixed events and missions being able to trigger in obelisk tests
Fixed beam weapons not hitting asteroids
Properly compute weapon range with launch_range modifiers
Fixed some range checks with inrange weapon sets
Fixed Empire Pacifier mass being too low
Fixed warning when looking at internal flow amplifier descriptions
Removed Soromid Ira turret and forward weapon stats
Fixed reality rip and avatar of sirichana abilities giving errors when the AI tries to use them
Fixed issue on some systems with indexed images
Fixed pirates and pilots that don’t care being able to disable the fake transponder
Can now see and target allies that are stealthed
Pheromone emitter won’t do anything in exclusively claimed systems
Fixed some weapons such as beams not hitting targets other than selected one
Fixed rendering order making it so most effects were below the player
Fixed fallback switch weapon sets not being found properly
Fixed bioship “Wanderer” perk giving absolute accel bonus instead of relative
Increased Neural Accelerator Interface energy regen malus to -100%
zalek/blackhole/zbh09: don’t error out when a bioship ceases to exist
kidnapped/traffic_00: fixed formatting string telling the player what system to go to
kidnapped/traffic_01: ship should spawn if taking off in the same system, not just jumping in
tutorial/nelly01: fixed derelict message not appearing
minerva/pirate4: fixed save me spam only being print once
neutral/seek_n_destroy: fixed warnings when taking off in the same system
sirius/achack/achack01: fixed not being able to accept mission
dvaered/dv_diversion: fixed not being able to accept mission
dvaered/dv_bikers: don’t allow the player to use escorts and properly update mission TODO
sirius/achack03: fixed not being able to complete the mission
neutral/kidnapped: fixed inconsistency in the name of the system to go to
shadow/shadowrun: fixed VN issues not allowing mission completion
shadow/shadowrun: changed locations to make it possible to do in the allotted time-frame
shadow/shadowvigil: fixed Seiryuu not appearing
shiplover: don’t ask the player about ships they can’t obtain
Fixed many typos
Translation updates

Naev 0.11.0

2023-12-23T00:00:00Z

Following the winter tradition, the Naev DevTeam is proud to announce the release of version 0.11.0. This is again quite a large release that has rewritten and reworked large parts of the engine and long-established mechanics to be more flexible, faster, and efficient. Many long-term players will notice that many things they had gotten used to have been changed, starting from the Naev universe itself.

We would like to thank all the contributors who have participated and helped in the making of this release.

Most notable changes:

Reworked universe map to fit existing lore
House Sirius completely reworked
Improved autonav that uses lanes and is configurable
Reworked structural outfits and number of ship slots
Weapon sets are more simple with no distinction between weapons and non-weapons
Possible to legally obtain all “standard” factional ships and outfits
Point defense weapons that automatically fire at fighters and missiles
A lot more content
Significant engine speed-ups

You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

The new version should be compatible with older save games, and will update things as necessary. However, in this release, given the big changes done to the universe, old saves will potentially have the their universe map in a bit of a mess.

Naev 0.11.0 official trailer.

Full Changelog

Gameplay Changes
- Universe significantly overworked to be more consistent with lore
  - More landable uninhabited spobs, unique locations, and things to discover
  - Reviewed and corrected many descriptions and placement of spobs and systems
  - More in-depth and fleshed out tag system for locations
- Ship slots and mass limits reworked such that smaller ships get more utility/structural slots to work with
- Point defense systems that can shoot down missiles and torpedoes
- Space object (planets, stations, etc.) properties affect quantity of missions available
- Moved many missions and events to the vn system
- Can sometimes find POI events with a pulse scanner equipped when entering systems
- Changed the visuals for some of the nebulas (PSO, Mizar)
- Pirate bribes cost more depending on your fleet and are based on points not mass
- Missions are introduced less all at once to the player
- Blink drives are more flexible but use energy and generate heat
- Razor class weapons have been completely reworked
- Can steal more than one outfit from a ship with high boarding bonus
- Differentiated more significantly the energy / kinetic / plasma weapon types
- diy-nerds: improved reward
Quality of Life
- Significantly improved autonav
  - Configurable and can use lanes
  - More efficient at reaching target locations
  - New option like follow pilots through jumps or brake when going to positions
- Make it explicit when all the escorts have jumped or landed
- Escorts will keep their same loadout until the game restarts
- Player ship is no longer translucent when in stealth as it is redundant with the stealth icon
- Show enemy/ally factions in the faction standing info window
- Space dust is properly anti-aliased
- Minor speed ups to patrol lane computations
- Try to enforce minimum number of articles in the news
- Independent patrol and bounty missions can be completed on more planets and stations
- Can hide or prioritize missions from the info menu
- Manual aiming model aims at the mouse location when the mouse is visible
- Travelling merchant tells you when new wares are available and should be easier to find
- Lua Love API should be better at handling input and not apply keys held before started
- Increase time compression when disabled
- Inverted how hide, evasion, and stealth value percent bonuses work. Now lower is better
- Hide locked slots without outfits as the player can’t do anything with them
- Added volley mode to weapon sets that makes weapons fire as fast as possible, instead of staggered
- Autonav options are now player-specific and accessible via the info menu settings button
- Travelling merchant gives full details of the intrinsic outfits they provide
- Selected slots in the equipment window will only show outfits that fit
- Autonav routes consider distance travelled in-system
- Made stress more visible in the slim GUI
- Reworked how stats are displayed to be more visible and intuitive
- Can show all known outfits or ships in with the map find functionality
- Weapon sets much more flexible, verbose, and easy to use
- Weapon sets remember slots, not outfits
- Route is visible on all map modes now
- Blink and flicker drives can use double tap arrow keys to move around
- Toolkit is cached in a framebuffer for much faster rendering
- Intrinsic outfit details now visible from the equipment menu
- Visually indicate which pilots are scanning the player on the overlay and radars
- Can sell all outfits on any spob with an outfitter
- Enemies in patrol missions should not run away
- Changed the faction standing caps to allow the player to get all ships when maxed out. Will be decreased in the future as missions are added
- Slot icons to make it more clear what special slots a ship has
- System markers and autonav TARGET marker will try to not overlap with jumps and spob names
- Slim GUI uses primary/secondary colours like the info menu
- Slim GUI now shows activated outfits and all weapons all the time
- Added short names to some outfits such that they are easier to distinguish in the GUI
New Content
- New mechanic for House Sirius called flow to unlock psychic powers
  - Gives passive bonuses to Sirius ships
  - Outfits allow use on non-Sirius ships
- 8 new missions
  - Finish the Minerva campaign
  - Nebula refugees
- 24 new events
  - Abandoned stations with secrets
  - Greedy pirates looking for domination
  - Challenges of the mind
  - Mysterious signals
  - More points of interest
- 67 new star systems with 123 new space objects
  - More interesting and unusual locations
  - Many new unique graphics
- 37 new outfits
  - Sirius flow outfits
  - Completely reworked Sirius weapons too
  - Point defense systems
  - New accessories
  - Intrinsic outfits
  - and more!
- Many new outfit graphics
- New NPC graphics
- More NPC and news messages
- Added the Space Trader Society faction
- Custom death animations for many ships
- More ways to increase fleet capacity
- The pirate clans are now more differentiated in terms of AI behaviour and taunts
- More factional landing messages
- Rehabilitation missions have been made more factional and a new rehabilitation mission for the FLF is now available
Engine
- Map system viewer is more compact
- Added hook.hail_spob
- Events support tags
- Editor supports tags
- Library to handle conditionals for mission computer missions
- Added support for disabling specific patrol lanes from being generated
- Support for Lua scripting for ships
- Changed api of evt.claim and misn.claim
- Missions/events load Lua as chunks instead of compiling each time
- Significant speed-ups in collision detection with quadtrees
- Hooks “outfit_buy”, “outfit_sell”, “ship_sell”, and “ship_swap” pass Lua objects instead of strings
- Ships can have extra descriptions that show up on mouse over
- More Lua API added such as pilot.armour, pilot.shield, or naev.missionList
- Soromid NPCs can have custom descriptions based on genetics
- Improved VN API with vn.move, vn.musicVolume, etc.
- Improved VN handling of non-ascii fonts
- Support for generating munitions from outfits
- Improved derelict script to handle custom derelicts better
- Removed some custom environment and string handling functions for standard SDL ones (requires 2.0.18 now)
- Better handling of user locales
- Weaker effects shouldn’t overwrite stronger ones anymore
- Spobs can use communication graphics
- Require OpenGL 3.2 for geometry shaders now
- Support for advanced collisions such as weapon on weapon, allowing for point defense weapons
- Renamed thrust to accel for more consistency and simplifications
- Support for buying intrinsic outfits
- Ship distress moved to the message framework
- Outfits have support for double tapping accel/left/right triggers
- Removed toolkit fading effects
- Support for rendering images as SDFs
- Significant loading time speed-up with multithreading
Fixes
- Main menu more responsive when changing windows
- Typo and wording fixes
- Fixed many corner case crashes in the editor
- Fixed cargo missions not being generated in some parts of the universe
- Game no longer crashes when loading save with persisted Lua pointing to nonexistent systems/spobs
- Minor improvements to many existing missions
- Fixed crash when events trigger other events on creation
- Fixed autonav sometimes having trouble landing with reverse thrusters
- Qex races should be much less laggy now
- Fixed some outfits using the wrong store images
- Fixed system viewer not being consistent with map
- Player’s escort damage is counted towards players damage
- Avoid having missions duplicates for cases where they can significantly stack such as patrol missions
- Fire rate and action speed should affect damage and disable of beam weapons
- Fixed some outfits not having “Activated Outfit” in their description
- Fixed ships offering 100 fuel refuels twice
- Fixed some ships having trouble equipping because of stacking engine reroutes and such
- Improved AI’s scanning behaviour to be more robust to stealth pulsing
- Fixed POI generating in extremely volatile systems
- Fixed tutorial running during cinematics
- Fixed active outfits not showing “activated outfit” in their summary sometimes
- FLF no longer become true allies of the Dreamer Clan to not limit the players actions
- Made audio system more robust to running out of source errors
- AI should be less prone to jump before their leader
- AI will turn off weapons ionizer when going for a kill
- Hardened physics engine a bit to overflow that happens in 49 days of straight game time
- Don’t allow giving the player names that can’t be saved
- Allied factions won’t help out the player against neutral targets
- Fixed pilot.setSpeedLimit not working
- Show tracking icons for non-turret bolt weapons too
- Have ships be a little less spammy distressing
- Gave unicorp storm launchers a rarity of 2 and made it more available
- Fixed resizing not working on the background and toolkit in some cases
- Turn off all weapon sets when entering stealth or changing type
- Map’s discovery mode shows system features
- Fixed rare hard crash when beams are being fired
- Fixed crash when change tab triggers a takeoff
- Buffed Scanning Combat AI to have an additional +15% tracking
- Buffed weapon ionizer to only -50% damage from -70% damage
- Soromid Arx now has one non-exclusive heavy non-bio slot
- Can only start to afterburn with enough energy for 0.5 seconds of afterburning
- Consider beam width when computing collisions

Naev 0.11.0-beta.3

2023-12-14T00:00:00Z

During playtesting 0.11.0-beta.2, we’ve found even more issues that have been fixed, including some hard crashes and some inconsistencies with weapon set behaviours. Additionally, lots more quality of life usability such as in range weapon sets only shooting when enemies are in arcs have also been added. We’re hoping this to be the last beta before the official release which should hit in a week or so. As always, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join our Discord or Matrix chatrooms. Find out more about them here!

You can get the new version from any of the sources below:

The player in a Sirius Preacher using the Seeking Chakra ability.

Changes since 0.11.0-beta.2

Differentiated more significantly the energy / kinetic / plasma weapon types
Fixed hard crash when loading when approaching certain NPCs
Fixed crash when change tab triggers a takeoff
Fixed Naev not starting on Mac OS
Fixed beam collisions (again)
Fixed rare hard crash when beams are being fired
‘in range’ option for weapon sets now takes into account weapon arcs
Buffed Targeting Conduit
Renamed ‘Point of Interest’ to ‘Sensor Anomaly’
Double-tap activating outfits breaks stealth
Nerfed Sirius Fidelity so it can no longer get ludicrous levels of action speed
Map’s discovery mode shows system features
Removed enemies from a certain hidden faction so the player won’t have standing issues with them
Non-weapon outfits no longer show switch groups they are in as hot keys
Turn off weapon sets when changing type
Fixed toggle weapon sets not triggering outfits over and over as expected
Turn off all weapon sets when entering stealth
Fixed resizing not working on the background and toolkit in some cases
Added pilot.weapsetAddType and pilot.weapsetSetActive
Gave unicorp storm launchers a rarity of 2 and made it more available
Have ships be a little less spammy distressing
Centered tracking icon in slim GUI
Show tracking icons for non-turret bolt weapons too
More short names for weapon outfits
Fixed pilot.setSpeedLimit not working
Added tutorial message when player acquires first point defense weapon
test_of_renewal: fixed weapon set defaults being incorrect and increased enemy damage
seek_n_destroy: missions should work properly when boarding the target
flf_diversion, flf_rogue: Missions should no longer be able to have ridiculously low credit rewards
ec00: changed it so you can’t hail the collective drone
escort: fixed pilots not flying in formation
Fixed many typos
Translation updates

Naev 0.11.0-beta.2

2023-12-09T00:00:00Z

During playtesting 0.11.0-beta.1, we’ve found a bunch of bugs and issues that we’ve addressed. In particular, some of the more important ones include having the slim GUI show what outfits are being activated, which is particularly useful for toggle weapon sets, and fixed some issues with collisions making it hard for fast weapons to hit their targets. As always, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join our Discord or Matrix chatrooms. Find out more about them here!

You can get the new version from any of the sources below:

The player in a Sirius Preacher using the Seeking Chakra ability.

Changes since 0.11.0-beta.1

Slim GUI now shows activated outfits and all weapons all the time
Collision system reworked (again) to take into account fast moving particles
Fixed collision polygons not properly being used
Added short names to some outfits such that they are easier to distinguish in the GUI
Allied factions won’t help out the player against neutral targets
Added missing graphics for meditation chambers
Don’t allow giving the player names that can’t be saved
Updated love.filesystem to 0.11 spec renaming mkdir to createDirectory, enumerate to getDirectoryItems, and adding remove
Fixed toggle weapon sets not turning off with only bolt weapons
Hardened physics engine a bit to overflow that happens in 49 days of straight game time
Fixed trivial memory leak in vpool
Allow buying local maps where they are not sold
Buffed Hunting Combat AI to 15% bonus
Made Weakness Harmonizer AI not appear as an active outfit
Outfit Lua function onshoot has been renamed onshootany
Can toggle point defense weapons on and off
AI will turn off weapons ionizer when going for a kill
Player’s new ships should start will all the default outfits, which fixes the some Sirius psychic tests
pilot.weapsetAdd follows the same logic as the normal equipping functions
slim GUI uses primary/secondary colours like the info menu
AI should be less prone to jump before their leader
Fixed cargo being lost when swapping ships in missions and events
chapter1: event claims all the systems just in case
poi: renamed ‘Pristine Derelict’ to ‘Unusual Derelict’
poi_intro: fixed typo
achack03: fixed mission not being acceptable and harja spawning forever
achack04: fixed missing formatting string
dv_bikers: made missiles significantly more dodgeable and changed location
Translation updates

Naev 0.11.0-beta.1

2023-12-03T00:00:00Z

It’s nearing the end of the year and that means time for a new Naev release! This release is once again one that revamps a lot of existing features and legacy code, while adding lots of new content and features. Like always, instead of doing a release directly, we’re going to be doing a series of betas to try to ensure as few bugs as possible sneak into the final release. We plan to do the official release in about two weeks from now, but it will depend on how many issues and the likes are found.

Significantly reworked universe map to fit existing lore
House Sirius completely reworked
Significantly improved autonav that uses lanes and is configurable
Reworked structural outfits and number of ship slots
Weapon sets are more simple with no distinction between weapons and non-weapons
Possible to legally obtain all “standard” factional ships and outfits

If you try it and find any issues, please report them at the issue tracker. Discussion about the game can be had on one of the various discussion forums and chatrooms we have. Check them out here!

You can get the new version from any of the sources below:

The player in a Sirius Preacher using the Seeking Chakra ability.

Full Changelog

Gameplay Changes
- Universe significantly overworked to be more consistent with lore
  - More landable uninhabited spobs, unique locations, and things to discover
  - Reviewed and corrected many descriptions and placement of spobs and systems
  - More in-depth and fleshed out tag system for locations
- Ship slots and mass limits reworked such that smaller ships get more utility/structural slots to work with
- Point defense systems that can shoot down missiles and torpedoes
- Space object (planets, stations, etc.) properties affect quantity of missions available
- Moved many missions and events to the vn system
- Can sometimes find POI events with a pulse scanner equipped when entering systems
- Changed the visuals for some of the nebulas (PSO, Mizar)
- Pirate bribes cost more depending on your fleet and are based on points not mass
- Missions are introduced less all at once to the player
- Blink drives are more flexible but use energy and generate heat
- Razor class weapons have been completely reworked
- Can steal more than one outfit from a ship with high boarding bonus
- diy-nerds: improved reward
Quality of Life
- Significantly improved autonav
  - Configurable and can use lanes
  - More efficient at reaching target locations
  - New option like follow pilots through jumps or brake when going to positions
- Make it explicit when all the escorts have jumped or landed
- Escorts will keep their same loadout until the game restarts
- Player ship is no longer translucent when in stealth as it is redundant with the stealth icon
- Show enemy/ally factions in the faction standing info window
- Space dust is properly anti-aliased
- Minor speed ups to patrol lane computations
- Try to enforce minimum number of articles in the news
- Independent patrol and bounty missions can be completed on more planets and stations
- Can hide or prioritize missions from the info menu
- Manual aiming model aims at the mouse location when the mouse is visible
- Travelling merchant tells you when new wares are available and should be easier to find
- Lua Love API should be better at handling input and not apply keys held before started
- Increase time compression when disabled
- Inverted how hide, evasion, and stealth value percent bonuses work. Now lower is better
- Hide locked slots without outfits as the player can’t do anything with them
- Added volley mode to weapon sets that makes weapons fire as fast as possible, instead of staggered
- Autonav options are now player-specific and accessible via the info menu settings button
- Travelling merchant gives full details of the intrinsic outfits they provide
- Selected slots in the equipment window will only show outfits that fit
- Autonav routes consider distance travelled in-system
- Made stress more visible in the slim GUI
- Reworked how stats are displayed to be more visible and intuitive
- Can show all known outfits or ships in with the map find functionality
- Weapon sets much more flexible, verbose, and easy to use
- Weapon sets remember slots, not outfits
- Route is visible on all map modes now
- Blink and flicker drives can use double tap arrow keys to move around
- Toolkit is cached in a framebuffer for much faster rendering
- Intrinsic outfit details now visible from the equipment menu
- Visually indicate which pilots are scanning the player on the overlay and radars
- Can sell all outfits on any spob with an outfitter
- Enemies in patrol missions should not run away
- Changed the faction standing caps to allow the player to get all ships when maxed out. Will be decreased in the future as missions are added
- Slot icons to make it more clear what special slots a ship has
- System markers and autonav TARGET marker will try to not overlap with jumps and spob names
New Content
- New mechanic for House Sirius called flow to unlock psychic powers
  - Gives passive bonuses to Sirius ships
  - Outfits allow use on non-Sirius ships
- 8 new missions
  - Finish the Minerva campaign
  - Nebula refugees
- Many new events
  - Abandoned stations with secrets
  - Greedy pirates looking for domination
  - Challenges of the mind
  - Mysterious signals
  - More points of interest
- Many, many new systems and space objects
  - 67 new star systems with 123 new space objects
  - New graphics for space objects
- Tons of new outfits
  - Sirius flow outfits
  - Completely reworked Sirius weapons too
  - Point defense systems
  - New accessories
  - Intrinsic outfits
  - and more!
- Many new outfit graphics
- New NPC graphics
- More NPC and news messages
- Added the Space Trader Society faction
- Custom death animations for many ships
- More ways to increase fleet capacity
- The pirate clans are now more differentiated in terms of AI behaviour and taunts
- More factional landing messages
- Rehabilitation missions have been made more factional and a new rehabilitation mission for the FLF is now available
Engine
- Map system viewer is more compact
- Added hook.hail_spob
- Events support tags
- Editor supports tags
- Library to handle conditionals for mission computer missions
- Added support for disabling specific patrol lanes from being generated
- Support for Lua scripting for ships
- Changed api of evt.claim and misn.claim
- Missions/events load Lua as chunks instead of compiling each time
- Significant speed-ups in collision detection with quadtrees
- Hooks “outfit_buy”, “outfit_sell”, “ship_sell”, and “ship_swap” pass Lua objects instead of strings
- Ships can have extra descriptions that show up on mouse over
- More Lua API added such as pilot.armour, pilot.shield, or naev.missionList
- Soromid NPCs can have custom descriptions based on genetics
- Improved VN API with vn.move, vn.musicVolume, etc.
- Improved VN handling of non-ascii fonts
- Support for generating munitions from outfits
- Improved derelict script to handle custom derelicts better
- Removed some custom environment and string handling functions for standard SDL ones (requires 2.0.18 now)
- Better handling of user locales
- Weaker effects shouldn’t overwrite stronger ones anymore
- Spobs can use communication graphics
- Require OpenGL 3.2 for geometry shaders now
- Support for advanced collisions such as weapon on weapon, allowing for point defense weapons
- Renamed thrust to accel for more consistency and simplifications
- Support for buying intrinsic outfits
- Ship distress moved to the message framework
- Outfits have support for double tapping accel/left/right triggers
- Removed toolkit fading effects
- Support for rendering images as SDFs
- Significant loading time speed-up with multithreading
Fixes
- Main menu more responsive when changing windows
- Typo and wording fixes
- Fixed many corner case crashes in the editor
- Fixed cargo missions not being generated in some parts of the universe
- Game no longer crashes when loading save with persisted Lua pointing to nonexistent systems/spobs
- Minor improvements to many existing missions
- Fixed crash when events trigger other events on creation
- Fixed autonav sometimes having trouble landing with reverse thrusters
- Qex races should be much less laggy now
- Fixed some outfits using the wrong store images
- Fixed system viewer not being consistent with map
- Player’s escort damage is counted towards players damage
- Avoid having missions duplicates for cases where they can significantly stack such as patrol missions
- Fire rate and action speed should affect damage and disable of beam weapons
- Fixed some outfits not having “Activated Outfit” in their description
- Fixed ships offering 100 fuel refuels twice
- Fixed some ships having trouble equipping because of stacking engine reroutes and such
- Improved AI’s scanning behaviour to be more robust to stealth pulsing
- Fixed POI generating in extremely volatile systems
- Fixed tutorial running during cinematics
- Fixed active outfits not showing “activated outfit” in their summary sometimes
- FLF no longer become true allies of the Dreamer Clan to not limit the players actions
- Made audio system more robust to running out of source errors

Sporadic Naev Newsletter Vol. 3

2023-09-05T00:00:00Z

Rather than waiting 10 years again from the previous edition of our sporadic naev newsletter, we’ve only let 2 years pass this time. In this edition, we’ll talk about some improvements in 0.10.0 that may have gone under the radar, and the upcoming 0.11.0 release.

State of 0.11.0

With a ton of commits and content since 0.10.0, things are starting to shape up for 0.11.0. This release has focused greatly on reworking and improving existing systems by bringing up to modern standards. In particular, things such as how weapons are implemented, how ship stats are dealt with, autonav internals, npc/news/derelict internals, reworking old missions into the visual novel system, etc. have been mainly rewritten to improve shortcomings. While this is not really visible in the end product directly, it has enabled a lots of new features and improved the overall robustness of the game.

However, this release is much more than just elimination of technical debt, as this release features a lot of new content in pretty much every area of the game: more events, more missions, more lore, more outfits, and more locations. The icing on the cake are new mechanics such as point defense systems, flow mechanics, and trials. Overall this is shaping up to be quite a large release and we are excited to share it with you.

Universe Revisited

As mentioned before on the blarg, the universe has been completely rework for 0.11.0. The universe should have a much more natural feel that matches the lore, with the Sol Nebula being more omnipresent as you travel around. This has required significant changes to many systems and system objects, so that many places you knew will probably seem familiar but quite different at the same time. It may take a while to get used to.

Stumbling upon a ruined space station in the Nebula.

In numbers, some 67 new systems and 123 new space objects have been added, mainly around the Sol Nebula to give a more in-depth sensation of destruction and the fragility of humankind. Besides the typical planets and stations, these systems also contain many secrets that you can uncover.

House Sirius Rework

For 0.10.0, the Soromid got a major rework by getting true bioships that can level up and learn different skills, now it’s only fair for the neglected House Sirius to also get the same treatment. Instead of extreme biological engineering, House Sirius relies on psychic abilities called flow. While individuals don’t possess very strong powers by themselves, House Sirius has designed their ships to be powerful amplifiers to be able to unleash potent abilities on the battle field.

The player unleashing an astral projection made of psychic energy to fight for them against pirates.

The player will also be able to obtain similar psychic powers and unlock the full potential through new tests that can be found throughout space. Each test will require the player to overcome obstacles in order to unlock new abilities and also increase their overall psychic powers.

Complete tests to unlock new psychic powers.

While Sirius ships have flow capability built-in, other ships can also use structural outfits to enable flow capability, allowing for more customization. That said, Sirius ships get unique bonuses from flow powers which are not available to other ships.

Plugin System

Although the plugin system was introduced in 0.10.0, it has gone largely unnoticed. Currently, it is possible to replace and modify all parts of the Naev that are implemented in Lua, which includes important parts such as autonav, many outfits, ship explosions, and more! Not only that, Naev has option networking built in with enet, allowing for networking functionality. On this line, there is a very much WIP multiplayer plugin, that allows for playing with other people. To make development somewhat easier, a development manual is being worked on, which covers things like how to write content for Naev and how to structure plugins. Given the advanced programming possibilities with the Naev Lua API, the only limit is your imagination!

The simple shader plugin can be useful for older hardware.

Oh, there is explicit support for total conversions too!

New Content

There’s also a bunch of new content being worked on. Not only have the NPCs and news you can find at the spaceport bar been greatly reworked to me more relevant to the context at hand, but many new missions, factions, and mechanisms have been implemented. The new universe has also given opportunities to diversify the different factions and make them feel more unique, from taunts to landing messages.

First of all, with optimizations done to the engine, it’s finally possible to have efficient point defense systems, something that has been asked for by players for a long time. Point defense systems will automatically target nearby missiles, torpedoes, and even interceptors! Of course the exact specs will depend on the outfit, Guardian Systems use powerful lasers to focus on torpedoes or interceptors, while Soromid Spittle Clusters have been bio-engineered to create screens of bubbles to block weaker, but faster missiles.

A Soromid Ira trying to stop incoming torpedoes with spittle.

A new neutral faction has been created to replace the old Trader’s Guild. The new Space Traders Society is an organization that spans different guilds and has important subfactions such as the mercenary guild Astra Vigilis, the Mining Vrata, and the Imperial Red Star. They have important presence in several systems where new outfits are also available for trade.

The Mining Vrata Guildhouse.

Finally, more events missions have been added throughout the universe, and although not finished yet, we expect the conclusion to the Minerva campaign to make it into 0.11.0.

Game Optimization

One issue Naev has traditionally had with the large systems it features, is slow downs when many pilots were fighting each other as a result of a primitive collision system. Well, it is no longer an issue as the current system has been reworked with quadtrees. Testing shows that it is much much faster in extreme cases, with the game easily handling hundreds of ships fighting each other without slowing down. Furthermore, many aspects of the game have been profiled and optimized such that the game should run much more fluid than 0.10.0.

Naev running smoothly at 60 FPS despite 50 Dvaered Vendettas fighting with 50 FLF Lancelots.

Tests show that where Naev 0.10.0 would choke and become a slide show, Naev 0.11.0 will be able to run without a hitch, such as 50 Dvaered Vendettas fighting with 50 FLF Lancelots. That said, given the high levels of time compressions capital ships can reach, it is likely in some extreme cases you may experience some slow downs.

Concluding Remarks

This concludes the Sporadic Naev Newsletter Vol. 3, and see you again in the next one!

New Autonav

2023-07-30T00:00:00Z

This post is about development on Naev 0.11.0.

Pirates have always been an issue for the law-abiding player. They are everywhere and relentless. However, with the addition of patrol lanes in 0.9.0, the universe has become a safer place, at least where the patrol lanes exist. Although that made things much easier for the player, a gaping flaw was that the autonav system did not understand how to use these lanes. For 0.11.0, we implemented the long awaited feature that autonav will now use patrol lanes if configured to!.

A Llama using the autonav system to stick to patrol lanes.

So how does this work? By default, autonav will use patrol lanes of non-hostile factions when jumping, and will not use them otherwise. You can configure it to not use lanes for jump, and also to use lanes for landing on planets or stations from the new settings option accessible in the info menu. The settings button replaces and incorporates the “Set GUI” functionality.

New player settings are accessible from the info window.

To get this working the entire autonav system was scrapped and rewritten, this also has the added effect of being much more accurate and efficient when travelling around. Overall it’s a win-win situation! Hopefully this will ease the early game and save many pilots from meeting their fate at the hands of the hordes of marauders lurking in the darkness.

As always, you can opt-in to the nightly beta branch on steam, or download the nightly from itch.io or github to get the latest and greatest of Naev development. Due note that this can be unstable, and make sure to back up your 0.10 saves first!

Ships Go Boom

2023-07-18T00:00:00Z

This post is about development on Naev 0.11.0.

At the 2nd anniversary of posting about implementing raymarched fancy explosions, it’s time to talk about trying to use the system to its full potential. And by full potential, I mean custom ship explosions!

All of the factional ships have been given custom explosions, some slightly different from the “standard” explosions, while others have much more radical changes, including different explosion types, secondary effects, and radically different colours. Time to explode and damage have also been changed, while some explosions now do different damage types and/or apply disabling effects. This should help have the different factions and ships feel more different.

Showcase of the different faction ship explosions.

From the technical side of things, custom ship explosions are done by using Lua scripting for ships, similar as what was done for outfits. This opens up a whole new possibility of what can be done with ships, I won’t cover other things being done with this yet, but it has to do with the Great House Sirius rework which brings about psychic powers. All these changes will be included in version 0.11.0 which should be released around December this year. Lots of exciting development to look for for the rest of 2023!

Naev 0.10.6

2023-07-07T00:00:00Z

The Naev DevTeam is proud to announce the release of Naev version 0.10.6. This releases fixes some minor memory leaks and some data inconsistencies. It is recommended to update to as soon as possible. We hope this is the last 0.10 release before 0.11.0.

Although it has been tested, there are almost certainly still bugs around, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join one of our chatrooms or discussion boards (here).

You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

Naev 0.10.0 official trailer.

Changes since 0.10.5

Fixed potential segfault with invalid semver strings
Fixed sign error when buying artifacts in the Baron Prince mission (sorry)
Fixed behaviour of naev.trigger with parameters
Fixed Lua spfx volume changing with game speed
Fixed memory leak in luaspfx trails
Fixed missions doing things in systems they should not
Fixed Adrenal Gland III’s time speed up effect
Fixed Misi giving upgrades for free
Fixed minor planet check in frontier war missions
Fixed silent installs on windows
Fixed typos

Naev 0.10.5

2023-04-23T00:00:00Z

The Naev DevTeam is proud to announce the release of Naev version 0.10.5. This release fixes an important crash among other minor fixes. It is highly recommended to update to as soon as possible.

Although it has been tested, there are almost certainly still bugs around, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join one of our chatrooms or discussion boards (here).

You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

Naev 0.10.0 official trailer.

Changes since 0.10.4

Start counting effect stacks from 1 not 2
Fixed launcher weapons using outfit mass instead of ammo mass
Fixed some typos
Fixed equipment of Lancelot in “Sharkman Is Back” mission
Fixed clicking on jump points also selecting planets in some cases
Fixed some events not claiming systems that could interfere with other missions
Fixed some formatting in the alt text when hovering over outfits in the equipment window
Changed music.stop() API to stop music from continuing by default
Fixed potential memory issues on some platforms
Fixed crash when changing to Japanese language on Windows using Japanese locale
nelly02: Nelly now stops recommending stuff that only does a little disable
shadowvigil: Fixed mission not spawning escorts
flf_patrol: Missions should no longer be able to have ridiculously low credit rewards
hypergate_construction: should actually claim the system
ec06: refuel tanker should provide as much fuel as possible
taiomi: fixed claim check for last mission
taiomi09: fixed smugglers becoming hostile in some cases

Universe Revisited

2023-02-12T00:00:00Z

This post is about development on Naev 0.11.0.

Since 0.10.0 was released, those of you on nightly builds have probably noticed that not much has been going on. Truth is, development has been going on in a parallel newmap branch that just got merged into main, and will appear in the next nightly. Why the parallel development? Although Naev has seen many changes during it’s development, the fundamental layout of the universe has remained largely unchanged. However, this was sort of unmaintainable due to inconsistencies with the lore of the Naev universe, and, after the release of 0.10.0, we thought it was a good idea to revisit and rethink about how the universe itself is laid out to make it more consistent.

Wunomi's World is a new world with a geostationary ring located in the reworked area near the Nebula.

What does this mean? Although an effort has been taken to try to keep most of the underlying topology, that is, what systems are connected to what systems, there were limits to what we could conserve and the result is that lots of things have been changed. This is particularly pronounced near around the Nebula with many new systems and interesting space objects being added. There are also many new secrets you can find that can be quite useful to your player character, we leave it up to you to find them.

You can try the development version if you are brave (please back up your saves first!) by getting the images available from both github and steam via the opt-in beta.

If you try it and find any issues, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join one of our chatrooms or discussion boards (here).

Some other new changes brought with the merge:

4 new missions
Space dust is properly antialiased
Planet properties affect quantity of missions available
Changed the visuals for some of the nebulas
Show enemy/ally factions in the faction standing info window
Can sometimes find POI events with a pulse scanner equipped when entering systems
Minor speed ups to patrol lane computations

Naev 0.10.4

2023-02-04T00:00:00Z

The Naev DevTeam is proud to announce the release of Naev version 0.10.4. This release fixes an important crash among other minor fixes. It is highly recommended to update to as soon as possible.

Although it has been tested, there are almost certainly still bugs around, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join one of our chatrooms or discussion boards (here).

You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

Naev 0.10.0 official trailer.

Changes since 0.10.3

Fixed crashes related to multiple effects being active at once
Fixed multiple mission_done hooks not passing parameter correctly
Fixed plugin strings not being initialized with mismatched saves
ec06: made the final battle work much better

Naev 0.10.3

2023-01-17T00:00:00Z

The Naev DevTeam is proud to announce the release of Naev version 0.10.3. This release fixes several important crashes among other minor fixes. It is highly recommended to update to as soon as possible.

Although it has been tested, there are almost certainly still bugs around, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join one of our chatrooms or discussion boards (here).

You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

Naev 0.10.0 official trailer.

Changes since 0.10.2

Fixed crash when using fits currently selected ship outfit filter
Fixed escorts always being set to aggressive when loading a save
Fixed Dvaered standing cap increase being lost after loading game
Made space dust a bit less bright when it starts turning into lines
derelict_rescue: play money sound instead of victory sound on completion
Rehab: fixed crash when aborting rehabilitation missions
Foundation Station, Efferey: fixed not using pirate landing script

Naev 0.10.2

2023-01-12T00:00:00Z

Happy New Year! The Naev DevTeam is proud to announce the release of Naev version 0.10.2. This release fixes several important crashes among other minor fixes. It is highly recommended to update to as soon as possible.

Although it has been tested, there are almost certainly still bugs around, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join one of our chatrooms or discussion boards (here).

You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

Naev 0.10.0 official trailer.

Changes since 0.10.1

Fixed escorts sometimes not following their leader and landing
Fixed autonav always wanting to go to the edge of jump points
Fixed crash when causing multiple dialogues to run in the background
Fixed outfit lua being called before initialization
Fixed not giving the AI a name when updating a save breaking the updater script
Fixed deleting last snapshot of a save switching to another pilot’s saves
Fixed saves and snapshots not displaying correct name with version mismatch
Fixed crash when deleting Lua-side fonts, should fix crash with POI
Fixed swapping ships with mission cargo sharing name with other cargo can lead to wrong cargo getting duplicated
Fixed original music at Research Post Sigma-13
Fixed music stopping after playing once in new games
Change music API to make it explicit you can temporarily disable the music engine
Set windows compatibility mode to Windows 7 when cross-compiling
legacy gui: fixed line artefacts near fuel / energy bars
pulse_scanner: fix potential error on init
patrol: don’t have an invisible time limit to reach the system anymore
taiomi: fixed some claims
zbh03: landing when hostiles spawned will fail the mission
bounties: mention there is a time limit to reach the system, not made explicit though
zpp01, zbh01: bumped chance to 30%
poi_intro: can’t board nelly again

Naev 0.10.1

2022-12-29T00:00:00Z

The Naev DevTeam is proud to announce the release of Naev version 0.10.1. This release addresses minor issues and bugs from the 0.10.0 release and does not add any new content. It is highly recommended to update from 0.10.0 as soon as possible

Although it has been tested, there are almost certainly still bugs around, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join one of our chatrooms or discussion boards (here).

You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

Naev 0.10.0 official trailer.

Changes since 0.10.0

Fixed many stations not marked as stations
FLF combatants only appear on FLF spobs
Fixed cases where the player could be forced to take off when not spaceworthy
Show engine volume option same as other volume options
Use nearest neighbour interpolation for small resolution vn images
Fix engine sound being played at high time compression values
Try to fix issue where music stops playing
Statically link libenet on steam versions
diy-nerds: fixed reward and description not matching
deliverlove: fixed credit exploit
reynir: don’t add 0 tonnes of hotdogs

Naev 0.10.0

2022-12-23T00:00:00Z

For what has become a new winter holiday tradition, the Naev DevTeam is proud to announce the release of version 0.10.0. This release contains many incredible new features, significantly improved and expanded old features, and tons of new content including multiple long campaigns. The 0.10.0 implements many of the major wanted features for Naev and will likely allow the next releases to focus much more on polish, filling out the existing universe, and more exciting new content. We would like to thank all the contributors who have participated and helped in the making of this release.

Most notable changes:

Plugin system implemented
Player fleets
Hypergates
Asteroids completely reworked
More space anomalies
True bioships
Tons of new content

Although we have gone through 2 beta releases in this release cycle, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join our Discord chat (invite).

You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

Naev 0.10.0 official trailer.

Full Changelog

New Mechanics
- Support for setting ships as escorts and thus player fleets
- Hypergates that allow for long distance travel
- Asteroid rework
  - Asteroids no longer randomly explode
  - Asteroid scanning is no longer binary, but distance-based
  - New mini-game based mining
  - More diversity in types with different rarity
- Support for restrictions for outfits and ships, such as minimum faction standing
- Significantly improved how faction reputation caps are handled
- Pilots can have intrinsic outfits
- Bioships go rawr (new skill system)
- Weapons and outfits can cause effects on ships
- More complex space objects (spob)
- Support for different difficulty settings
- New exploration mechanic with points of interest
- Unique ships to be found throughout the universe (pers)
- Manual aiming mode for weapon sets
Gameplay Changes
- Weapon types are more differentiated
- Removed nearly redundant launchers
- Nerfed beams
- Factional ships are more widely sold
- Schroedinger uses less fuel instead of getting a large bonus
- Plasma has a burning effect
- Changed spawning and behaviour of pirates to be less dangerous in populated systems
- Fighters only attack enemies visible by their carrier
- AI is better at choosing targets
- More dump targets for waste dump mission and tweaked rewards
- Removed escorts for hire in lieu of player fleets
- Pirates should avoid attacking near safeish areas
- Made slim the default GUI instead of brushed
New Content
- Added a gigantic black hole
- Added new space anomalies such as plasma storms
- Lots of new asteroid types and commodities
- More interesting places to visit and explore
- More engine sounds
- 45 New missions
  - More terraforming
  - Continuation of the Za’lek story
  - Help the Dvaered do some tasks
  - Tutorial for new mechanics
  - Secret system!
- 14 New ships
  - Certain secret faction completely revamped
- New spob graphics
- Lots of new outfits and reworked old outfits
  - Use energy to avoid death
  - Create scanning pulses
  - Blinking has animations
  - Advanced mining techniques
  - Space mines
- News revamped to be more flexible and relate more with current events
- NPCs revamped to be more flexible with many new messages
- New commodities that are only available from mining
- Fancy racing mini-game that replaces old race missions
Quality of Life
- Support for save snapshots for each pilot
- Can ask pilots to refuel you more than 100 units at a time
- Engine sound volume is configurable
- Revamped the star map to be large and more useful
- Can add notes to the star map
- Autoscroll is now an option in the VN
- Spob communication window has been redone
- Limit sound output volume when lots of sounds are playing jointly
- Redid the music engine to be less prone to play combat music
- Hide radar when overlay is open (with option to revert to old behaviour)
- Duplicate effects get collapsed into stacks in the GUI
- Allowing exiting and reloading while love framework is open (VN, etc.)
- Autonav is more flexible with positioning on jump points
- Can customize jump flash brightness
- Player will not be scanned immediately on jumping in or taking off
- Show health bars near pilots in combat (can be disabled in options)
- Escort AI is customizable
- Ship AI reminds player about things when they haven’t played in a while
- Improved mission computer display details for many missions
- Engine sounds smoothly transition on/off
Engine changes
- Work has begun on a development manual
- Plugin support with explicit support for total conversions
- All monolithic files have been split up
- Simplified terminology with spob (space objects) replacing planet/asset
- Support for tags in missions
- Player ships can store their own variables now
- Weapon outfits support some Lua scripting
- Ammunition/fighters merged into launchers/fighter bays
- Support for “shotgun”-type weapons
- Backgrounds no longer use an orthographic projection
- Minor transitions added to the toolkit
- Asteroids redone to be more flexible and easy to add using groups
- Asteroid field support in the editor
- Allow for soft claims instead of only hard claims
- Unified the event and mission headers
- Implemented per-pilot variables
- Lua scripting for spob
- AI can use special outfits
- Lots of engine rewriting and modernization that should bring some speed improvements and more flexibility when modding
- Added lua-enet library to allow for networking in plugins (off by default, requires setting in configuration file)
- Can animate loading screen
- Lowered error in physics approximation (shouldn’t be noticeable though)
Bug Fixes
- Too many to list, but we’ll try
- Fixed pilots not getting equipped at all in some cases
- Fixed looting cargo when boarding giving less than expected
- Fixed all asteroid graphics being used as debris
- Fixed some hooks not properly passing arguments
- Block certain inputs during cinematics
- Fixed disabling saving and forcing the pilot to take off not working as expected
- Fixed sounds getting stopped in many cases due to garbage collection
- Made outfit descriptions fit in the landing window for all outfits
- Many typo fixes

Naev 0.10.0-beta.2

2022-12-08T00:00:00Z

During playtesting 0.10.0-beta.1, we’ve found and fixed a critical bug, with some other more minor ones also being addressed. As always, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join our Discord or Matrix chatrooms. Find out more about them here!

You can get the new version from any of the sources below:

Defending merchants from a Pirate Phalanx.

Changes since 0.10.0-beta.1

Pirates should avoid attacking near safeish areas
Fixed crash on load when player has more than one ship.
Fixed player.setSpeed() not resetting speed as intended
Fixed pilot.comm not showing messages
Fixed typo/grammar in sightseeing and dvaered census introductory mission
Don’t display health bars with no player alive
Autonav doesn’t go only to the center of spobs
Mention escort AI settings when buying a fighter bay tutorial plays

Naev 0.10.0-beta.1

2022-12-01T00:00:00Z

So it’s that time of year again. Although a lot of new features, content, and mechanics have been added, there has also been significant effort in modernizing and rewriting large parts of legacy code in an effort to improve performance overall. As with all major releases, so much has changed that it is nearly impossible for the release to be bug free and for this purpose we wish to start doing a series of betas for public testing of the upcoming 0.10.0 release.

If you try it and find any issues, please report them at the issue tracker. Discussion about the game can be had on one of the various discussion forums and chatrooms we have. Check them out here!

You can get the new version from any of the sources below:

Attacking traders in a Pirate Hyena.

Full Changelog

New Mechanics
- Support for setting ships as escorts and thus player fleets
- Hypergates that allow for long distance travel
- Asteroid rework
  - Asteroids no longer randomly explode
  - Asteroid scanning is no longer binary, but distance-based
  - New mini-game based mining
  - More diversity in types with different rarity
- Support for restrictions for outfits and ships, such as minimum faction standing
- Significantly improved how faction reputation caps are handled
- Pilots can have intrinsic outfits
- Bioships go rawr (new skill system)
- Weapons and outfits can cause effects on ships
- More complex space objects (spob)
- Support for different difficulty settings
- New exploration mechanic with points of interest
- Unique ships to be found throughout the universe (pers)
- Manual aiming mode for weapon sets
Gameplay Changes
- Weapon types are more differentiated
- Removed nearly redundant launchers
- Nerfed beams
- Factional ships are more widely sold
- Schroedinger uses less fuel instead of getting a large bonus
- Plasma has a burning effect
- Changed spawning and behaviour of pirates to be less dangerous in populated systems
- Fighters only attack enemies visible by their carrier
- AI is better at choosing targets
- More dump targets for waste dump mission and tweaked rewards
- Removed escorts for hire in lieu of player fleets
New Content
- Added a gigantic black hole
- Added new space anomalies such as plasma storms
- Lots of new asteroid types and commodities
- More interesting places to visit and explore
- More engine sounds
- 45 New missions
  - More terraforming
  - Continuation of the Za’lek story
  - Help the Dvaered do some tasks
  - Tutorial for new mechanics
  - Secret system!
- 14 New ships
  - Certain secret faction completely revamped
- New spob graphics
- Lots of new outfits and reworked old outfits
  - Use energy to avoid death
  - Create scanning pulses
  - Blinking has animations
  - Advanced mining techniques
  - Space mines
- News revamped to be more flexible and relate more with current events
- NPCs revamped to be more flexible with many new messages
- New commodities that are only available from mining
- Fancy racing mini-game that replaces old race missions
Quality of Life
- Support for save snapshots for each pilot
- Can ask pilots to refuel you more than 100 units at a time
- Engine sound volume is configurable
- Revamped the star map to be large and more useful
- Can add notes to the star map
- Autoscroll is now an option in the VN
- Spob communication window has been redone
- Limit sound output volume when lots of sounds are playing jointly
- Redid the music engine to be less prone to play combat music
- Hide radar when overlay is open (with option to revert to old behaviour)
- Duplicate effects get collapsed into stacks in the GUI
- Allowing exiting and reloading while love framework is open (VN, etc.)
- Autonav is more flexible with positioning on jump points
- Can customize jump flash brightness
- Player will not be scanned immediately on jumping in or taking off
- Show health bars near pilots in combat (can be disabled in options)
- Escort AI is customizable
- Ship AI reminds player about things when they haven’t played in a while
Engine changes
- Work has begun on a development manual
- Plugin support with explicit support for total conversions
- All monolithic files have been split up
- Simplified terminology with spob (space objects) replacing planet/asset
- Support for tags in missions
- Player ships can store their own variables now
- Weapon outfits support some Lua scripting
- Ammunition/fighters merged into launchers/fighter bays
- Support for “shotgun”-type weapons
- Backgrounds no longer use an orthographic projection
- Minor transitions added to the toolkit
- Asteroids redone to be more flexible and easy to add using groups
- Asteroid field support in the editor
- Allow for soft claims instead of only hard claims
- Unified the event and mission headers
- Implemented per-pilot variables
- Lua scripting for spob
- AI can use special outfits
- Lots of engine rewriting and modernization that should bring some speed improvements and more flexibility when modding
- Added lua-enet library to allow for networking in plugins (off by default, requires setting in configuration file)
- Can animate loading screen
Bug Fixes
- Too many to list, but we’ll try
- Fixed pilots not getting equipped at all in some cases
- Fixed looting cargo when boarding giving less than expected
- Fixed all asteroid graphics being used as debris
- Fixed some hooks not properly passing arguments
- Block certain inputs during cinematics
- Fixed disabling saving and forcing the pilot to take off not working as expected
- Fixed sounds getting stopped in many cases due to garbage collection
- Many typo fixes

Naev 0.9.4

2022-07-20T00:00:00Z

The Naev DevTeam is pleased to announce the release of Naev version 0.9.4. With this release, the Naev 0.9 branch is definitely maybe free of bugs. In case you find one anyway, please report on this tracker, and feel free to join our Discord or Matrix (chat rooms). There’s no new content here, aside from stunning progress by the volunteer translators in the community. The new content has instead gone into pre-releases of Naev 0.10, and our attention for the rest of 2022 will be on finishing that.

You can get the latest release, and nightly 0.10-alpha builds, from any of the following sources:

Naev 0.9.0 official trailer.

Changes since 0.9.3

Fix “No error.” log spam with certain video card drivers
Fix Lua errors with tiny nebula such as Sarcophagus
Fix fake transponder cheesing rehabilitation missions
Fix errors in “Anxious Merchant”, “Dead Or Alive Bounty”, “Harja’s Vengeance”, and “The Lost Brother” missions
Fix the in-game screenshot feature, in case of odd window dimensions
Fix at least “Dvaered Diplomacy” glitching when the game is saved/reloaded (thanks to “Duke” on the Steam forums)
Update translations, including a new Spanish translation

Naev 0.9.3

2022-04-03T00:00:00Z

The Naev DevTeam is satisfied to announce the release of Naev version 0.9.3. This release addresses issues and bugs from the 0.9.2 release and does not add any new content. It is highly recommended to update from 0.9.2 as soon as possible. In particular, two fairly important bugs involving game hanging sometimes when entering certain nebula systems and crashes have been fixed.

Although it has been heavily tested, there are almost certainly still bugs around, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join our Discord or Matrix (chat rooms).

You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

Naev 0.9.0 official trailer.

Changes since 0.9.2

Bug fix: if the German translation was active, casino minigames’ explanation (Erklärung) didn’t work
Fix errors/slowdown in Diversion from (…) missions
Fix bug in “Waste Collector” mission
Fixed a bug that allowed the player to get infinite escorts
Work around bugs in at least one OpenGL driver
Fix crash when unidiff changes assets that the player has targeted
Player actually has to pay for stealing outfits
Fixed game hanging when entering some volatile nebula systems

Naev is now on Matrix!

2022-02-08T00:00:00Z

Over the past few weeks we have been experimenting with bridging our Discord community to Matrix; an open network for secure, decentralized communication. Please note that Discord will continue working as normally.

Why would we do this?

The answer to that is two-fold:

Matrix, by design is decentralised, which means anyone can host their own server and have control over their data. For some people this may be the reason they refuse to use Discord entirely.

If something bad happens to Discord we will have some record of the discussions that have been had since these two networks have been bridged, and have an alternative place to discuss Naev.

What do you mean by ‘bridging’?

To cater to individuals who dislike Discord and to increase our presence online we decided to create a Matrix community and bridge it to our Discord. This means that any messages sent on either platform will be synchronized between the two. This includes edits, mentions, and more.

What is this Matrix thingy?

To learn more about Matrix, check out their handy Introduction guide.

How do I join?

To join our Matrix Space, you can click on this badge:

You can also get to a list of all our forum boards and chatrooms on the new Contact page.

Thanks for reading and happy chatting!

Naev 0.9.2

2022-01-20T00:00:00Z

The Naev DevTeam is satisfied to announce the release of Naev version 0.9.2. This release addresses minor issues and bugs from the 0.9.1 release and does not add any new content. It is highly recommended to update from 0.9.1 as soon as possible.

Although it has been heavily tested, there are almost certainly still bugs around, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join our Discord or Matrix (chat rooms).

You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

Naev 0.9.0 official trailer.

Changes since 0.9.1

Fix reward messages in the Particle Physics campaign
Can no longer steal a certain Soromid ship
Enhanced the logic for deciding whether it’s safe to save the game after landing
Fix mission bugs: “Assault on Unicorn”, “Emergency of Immediate Inspiration”, “The Search for Cynthia”
Fix zombie autonav toward deselected targets

Naev 0.9.1

2022-01-02T00:00:00Z

The Naev DevTeam is proud to announce the release of Naev version 0.9.1. This release addresses minor issues and bugs from the 0.9.0 release and does not add any new content. It is highly recommended to update from 0.9.0 as soon as possible

Although it has been heavily tested, there are almost certainly still bugs around, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join our Discord chat (invite).

You can get the latest version from any of the following sources:

Naev 0.9.0 official trailer.

Changes since 0.9.0

Minor countermeasures for long player ship names
Fix mission breakage in “Minerva Pirates 4”, “Runaway Search”, “Particle Physics 3”, “Shadow Vigil”, “Baron Prince”, and “Dvaered Ballet”
Fix exploit in “Travelling Merchant” event (mission prize for sale that shouldn’t have been)
Fix many missions that explicitly attack the player overriding stealth and visibility mechanics
Fix some text labels that couldn’t be translated from English
Fix equipment slot information displaying over filter widget
Fix phantom acceleration after an auto-board and undock sequence
Darkened nebulas and lowered default background darkness
Improved upstream metainfo for packagers
Can no longer steal a certain Za’lek ship
Fix crash under certain conditions when using the console
Masochists and LTS distro packagers may build with Meson 0.54 (no subproject fallbacks) or 0.53 (also no “meson compile”, only “ninja”)
Slightly reduced rendered nebula quality to stop breakage on some intel GPUs
VN music uses logarithmic scale like internal music
Fixed some offset issues with the slim GUI

Naev 0.9.0 is now available on FlatHub!

2021-12-24T00:00:00Z

With the holidays right around the corner here’s an early (or late) gift from the Naev DevTeam to those who prefer using Flatpak as their mode of installing packages! We hope you enjoy playing!

See full release details

Most notable changes are:

Electronic warfare revamp with stealth and illegal cargo and outfits
Systems have patrol routes for dominating factions
Visual novel system for new missions with support for mini-games
Complete rebalance and overhaul of most outfits that can have complex behaviours now
Rehauled backgrounds, new trails, and other graphical improvements
Lots of new content including 40 new missions

Please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join our Discord chat (invite).

You can get the latest version from FlatHub:

Naev 0.9.0

2021-12-23T00:00:00Z

With global pandemic raging and chaos all around, the Naev DevTeam is proud to announce the release of version 0.9.0. This represents almost 9,000 commits from 0.8.2, and a major step forward for Naev. Graphics and mechanics have been greatly overhauled. We would like to thank all the contributors who have participated and helped in the making of this release.

Most notable changes are:

Electronic warfare revamp with stealth and illegal cargo and outfits
Systems have patrol routes for dominating factions
Visual novel system for new missions with support for mini-games
Complete rebalance and overhaul of most outfits that can have complex behaviours now
Rehauled backgrounds, new trails, and other graphical improvements
Lots of new content including 40 new missions

Although we have gone through 3 beta releases in this release cycle, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join our Discord chat (invite).

You can get the latest version from any of the following three sources:

Naev 0.9.0 official trailer.

Full Changelog

New mechanics
- Added new utility outfits with complex effects
- Changed ship classification, removing rare classes while adding Interceptor and Battleship classes
- Illegal cargo and ship-to-ship detection
- Pilots can now go into stealth mode
- Systems have “patrol routes” patrolled by the governing faction
- Electronic warfare parameters are simplified and visible
- Added escorts for hire
- Some simple minigames have been added
- Scramblers and jammers have fixed chance to mess up missiles depending on their resistance
- Restricted systems where dominant faction will attack on sight
- Some bulk freighter-class ships added
- Systems can have different effects on all ships in them
- Fake transponder replaces fake id
Visual improvements
- New fancy system rendering effects
- Ships and rockets now have engine trails
- Beam visuals have been made more flexible and pretty
- Jumping visuals improved
- Redid the shake visuals and added a small damage visual
- Most special effects implemented as shaders
- Most small visuals redone to be more visible and clean
- Similar presences are now merged in map
- Overhauled all the backgrounds
Gameplay changes
- Pirates split into multiple clans and marauders
- Added discovery messages as you explore the universe
- Overhauled NPC AI
- Overhaul and rebalance of most outfits
- Wanted ships no longer aggro defense forces (bounties)
- Bribed pilots don’t become hostile again unless attacked
- Stress now decreases based on ship mass
- Merged the Independent and Civilian factions
- Game now tracks meta-data like ships destroyed and time played
- Trade lane routes made explicit
- More common and useful derelict ships
- Missiles have lock-on reduced and in-flight calibration added
- Tutorial redone with Ship AI that is also accessible from the info menu
- New ships including the Starbridge
- Tweaked outfit distribution
Quality of Life
- Autonav supports landing and boarding
- Comm window reworked and you can bribe multiple pilots at once
- Possible to change or unequip ships with deployed fighters
- More fine-grained autonav reset control by setting enemy distance
- Added autoequip functionality
- Able to filter equipable outfits
- Minimal view mode for the map
- More visible map markers
- More in-game tutorial-ish explanations for new mechanics as you encounter them
- You can now favourite your ships to help with sorting
- Redid boarding window to be more intuitive and easier to loot what you want
- Paste support for input stuff
- Translation completion status is shown in the options
- Support for updating old saves
- In-depth proof-reading
- New outfit graphics
New locations
- Added gambling resort “Minerva Station”
- Revamped and improved some existing locations
- Several new planets and systems
40 New missions
- Challenge adversaries in the Crimson Gauntlet
- Follow happenings on “Minerva Station”
- Invade the frontier with the Dvaered
- Ship enthusiast quiz
- Deliver fancy contraband all over the universe
- Raid trader convoys
- Rescue derelict crew
- Small early game tutorial-ish campaign
- Neutral campaign to transform the universe
- Help the Za’lek do particle physics
- Meow
New translation(s) in progress: Czech, French, Korean, Portuguese, and Japanese
Engine Changes
- Added an optimizer to improve automatic outfitting choices
- A ton of new ship stat attributes have been added
- Support for Lua-based hooks in Outfits for complex behaviours
- Support for post-processing shaders
- Added rendering and update hooks in the Lua API
- Added image format support beyond PNG (notably WebP)
- Support for arbitrary ship display classes
- Game data now handled by PhysicsFS, allowing for multiple sources and easier modding
- Meson is now the only build system, and development builds can integrate all assets/translations without being installed
- Fonts now use distance fields and much better in many cases
- Improved how Lua was being loaded
- Added library that supports lots of Love2D API in Naev
- Added Visual Novel library
- Added card games
- Added dynamic factions
- Added dynamic commodities
- Lua support for advanced sound effects
- Most markers and indicators use signed distance functions now
- Internally using linear colourspace
- Faction presence computed with base and bonus values
- Virtual assets have been redone and are more flexible than before
- Point value system for ships to help with presence and other things
- Support for shipstats at a system level
- Initial support for 3D models
- Proper support for line breaks in most languages
- Most objects (ships, planets, etc.) have tags that can be used from Lua
- Lots of optimization

Naev 0.9.0-beta.3

2021-12-12T00:00:00Z

As the bugs start to settle down, it is time for a third 0.9.0 beta release. This release fixes the issues listed below. As always, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join our Discord chat (invite).

To get the new version you can:

Opt-in to the beta channel via steam
Download the new version from here.

Attacking traders in a Pirate Hyena.

Changes since 0.9.0-beta.2

Fixed warning about cargo rush deliveries when you don’t know the best route
Fixed another crash related to pilot removal
Fixed wonky backgrounds during death cutscenes, for the sake of other players of course
Fixed crash when techs are first patched to planets through unidiff
Fixed potential spurious warnings about incomplete translations, even when running in English
Fixed failure to resolve regional translations (like pt_BT or pt_PT) from the locale
Fixed VN log text overlap issues
Fixed commodities not being added through unidiff
Fixed safe lane rendering alpha being wrong
Fixed misbehaviours with Maikki, Nelly 2, Shark 3, Shipwreck, Travelling Merchant, Warlords Battle, and Particle Physics 2
Fixed backgrounds accumulating when messing with options
Fixed issues with board scripts getting deferred with respect to boarding script
Fixed some instances of background text interfering with how foreground text was drawn
Fixed some missions causing trouble when saved/reloaded (due to dynamic factions)
Fixed minor Ship AI issues (rename at game start)
Fixed autonav via the map during a landing sequence
Fixed autonav giving away autofollowed pilots and unknown destination systems
Improved speed and accuracy of autonav stopping
Improved mission marker behavior (show planets more, always clean up at end of mission)
Kicked Empire patrols out of the Arandon system
Gave pirate ships dodgier outfits
Proofread too many parts of the game to mention
AI should only try to jump to systems with their faction presence
Wrap OSD titles as necessary
Don’t allow illegal characters in pilot name
Be kinder to old video drivers
More meow
More music

Naev 0.9.0-beta.1

2021-12-01T00:00:00Z

It’s been a very productive year. With almost 8,500 commits from 0.8.2. For reference, this is roughly one third of all the commits in the entire Naev source code have been done this last year. As you can guess, with so many changes altering fundamental things including most of the core gameplay mechanics, there is a high chance that many things have been broken and things lack polish. For this reason, like with the 0.8.x releases, we are going to do several betas as we near the final 0.9.0 release, which we hope to be able to get out this year. Of course, this will depend on how many bugs and issues are found.

If you try it and find any issues, please report them at the issue tracker. Discussion about the game can be had on Discord (discord invite).

To get the new version you can:

Opt-in to the beta channel via steam
Download the new version from here.

Attacking traders in a Pirate Hyena.

Full Changelog

New mechanics
- Added new utility outfits with complex effects
- Changed ship classification, removing rare classes while adding Interceptor and Battleship classes
- Illegal cargo and ship-to-ship detection
- Pilots can now go into stealth mode
- Systems have “safe lanes” patrolled by the governing faction
- Electronic warfare parameters are simplified and visible
- Added escorts for hire
- Some simple minigames have been added
- Scramblers and jammers have fixed chance to mess up missiles depending on their resistance
- Restricted systems where dominant faction will attack on sight
- Some bulk freighter-class ships added
- Systems can have different effects on all ships in them
- Fake transponder replaces fake id
Visual improvements
- New fancy system rendering effects
- Ships and rockets now have engine trails
- Beam visuals have been made more flexible and pretty
- Jumping visuals improved
- Redid the shake visuals and added a small damage visual
- Most special effects implemented as shaders
- Most small visuals redone to be more visible and clean
- Similar presences are now merged in map
- Overhauled all the backgrounds
Gameplay changes
- Pirates split into multiple clans and marauders
- Added discovery messages as you explore the universe
- Overhauled NPC AI
- Overhaul and rebalance of most outfits
- Wanted ships no longer aggro defense forces (bounties)
- Bribed pilots don’t become hostile again unless attacked
- Stress now decreases based on ship mass
- Merged the Independent and Civilian factions
- Game now tracks meta-data like ships destroyed and time played
- Trade lane routes made explicit
- More common and useful derelict ships
- Missiles have lock-on reduced and in-flight calibration added
- Tutorial redone with Ship AI that is also accessible from the info menu
- New ships including the Starbridge
Quality of Life
- Autonav supports landing and boarding
- Comm window reworked and you can bribe multiple pilots at once
- Possible to change or unequip ships with deployed fighters
- More fine-grained autonav reset control by setting enemy distance
- Added autoequip functionality
- Able to filter equipable outfits
- Minimal view mode for the map
- More visible map markers
- More in-game tutorial-ish explanations for new mechanics as you encounter them
- You can now favourite your ships to help with sorting
- Redid boarding window to be more intuitive and easier to loot what you want
- Paste support for input stuff
- Translation completion status is shown in the options
New locations
- Added gambling resort “Minerva Station”
- Revamped and improved some existing locations
- Several new planets and systems
40 New missions
- Challenge adversaries in the Crimson Gauntlet
- Follow happenings on “Minerva Station”
- Invade the frontier with the Dvaered
- Ship enthusiast quiz
- Deliver fancy contraband all over the universe
- Raid trader convoys
- Rescue derelict crew
- Small early game tutorial-ish campaign
- Neutral campaign to transform the universe
- Help the Za’lek do particle physics
- Meow
New translation(s) in progress: Czech, French, Korean, Portuguese, and Japanese
Engine Changes
- Added an optimizer to improve automatic outfitting choices
- A ton of new ship stat attributes have been added
- Support for Lua-based hooks in Outfits for complex behaviours
- Support for post-processing shaders
- Added rendering and update hooks in the Lua API
- Added image format support beyond PNG (notably WebP)
- Support for arbitrary ship display classes
- Game data now handled by PhysicsFS, allowing for multiple sources and easier modding
- Meson is now the only build system, and development builds can integrate all assets/translations without being installed
- Fonts now use distance fields and much better in many cases
- Improved how Lua was being loaded
- Added library that supports lots of Love2D API in Naev
- Added Visual Novel library
- Added card games
- Added dynamic factions
- Added dynamic commodities
- Lua support for advanced sound effects
- Most markers and indicators use signed distance functions now
- Internally using linear colourspace
- Faction presence computed with base and bonus values
- Virtual assets have been redone and are more flexible than before
- Point value system for ships to help with presence and other things
- Support for shipstats at a system level
- Initial support for 3D models
- Proper support for line breaks in most languages
- Most objects (ships, planets, etc.) have tags that can be used from Lua
- Lots of optimization

Naev 0.9.0-beta.2

2021-12-01T00:00:00Z

There’s nothing like a release announcement to lure the bugs into the open. Our second 0.9.0 beta release fixes the ones listed below. As always, please report any issues on this tracker, and feel free to join our Discord chat (invite).

To get the new version you can:

Opt-in to the beta channel via steam
Download the new version from here.

Attacking traders in a Pirate Hyena.

Changes since 0.9.0-beta.1

Prevented Naev from losing the player’s (pre-0.9.0-beta) licenses on first load
Fixed missing credits and translation coverage data
Prevented players from getting stranded without access to fuel
Mission script fixes for “Helping Nelly” and “The one with the Visit”
Outfit script fix for “Weapons Ionizer”
Fixed issues impacting at least some Windows / Intel graphics combinations
Hulls are more widely available
Improved some of the map outfits
Do not render systems with unknown assets as restricted
Added gamma correction to Options
Fixed reproducible crash when boarded pilots get removed
Added counterfeit licenses to pirate worlds
Remove minor energy malus from sensor array and jump detector
Electron burst cannon is no longer widely available
Improved phrasing

Sporadic Naev Newsletter Vol. 2

2021-08-22T00:00:00Z

So it’s been over 10 years from the first edition of our sporadic naev newsletter, so it seems like it might be a good time to have the second edition. In the previous edition, we talked about the state of 0.5.0 and the introduction of big systems and electronic warfare. In this edition, we’ll talk about the state of 0.9.0 and new features like stealth and safe lanes.

State of 0.9.0

We’ve passed 5,500 commits from 0.8.2. This is going to be the largest amount of content and changes from any release ever with tons of graphical improvements, new mechanics, and new content added all over. It is already all live in the nightly images which are available from both github and steam via the opt-in beta. That said, it is recommended for you to back up your save or use a new one if you attempt to do this. At the current moment, you will lose many outfits and experience hiccups trying to use an old save game. Unlike the official releases, the nightly is still rather unpolished.

Currently there is no hard ETA for the release, but we hope to release it within the year and follow a more timely release cycle. We hope that we’ll be able to do a feature freeze in a couple of months and focus exclusively on polish until the release. As always, we will release one or more betas before the official release to try to debug potential issues.

Electronic Warfare Overhaul

Electronic warfare was originally introduced in 0.5.0. With the move to big systems, it no longer made sense for all ships to be visible at all times. Furthermore, we wanted to differentiate the roles between smaller and larger ships, while aiding survivability of small ships by making it harder for the largest of turrets to track them and hit them. While this worked well to some extent, it was never transparent to the player. We’ve revamped it this time around to be fully visible to the player. Each ship, depending on its mass and bonuses, will have three separate values: detection, evasion, and stealth, that control when the ship is first detected, when the ship details are shown and scanning is possible, and finally how well the ship can stealth.

Electronic Warfare Redux - this time with understandable values!

Hiding is the most important attribute that controls when ships are detected at and affects both evasion and stealth. Evasion is usually 75% of detected at value, and controls how well turrets and missiles track a ship. Furthermore, it controls the distance at which a ship is scanned at. Scanning a ship allows you to see the details of cargo and outfits. Furthermore, patrol ships will scan your ship and make sure you don’t have illegal cargo.

Player being scanned by a fleet led by an Empire Admonisher.

That leads us to the final mechanic: stealth! Stealth allows ships to become completely invisible if no ships are within their stealth distance. When stealthed, ships get a -50% penalty to all movement: max speed, thrust, and turning. However, they cease to appear on all system sensors. This allows ships to sneak past systems or ships, opening lots of opportunities for contraband, piracy, and survival.

Looking at nearby ships in stealth mode.

Safe lanes

One of the last major gameplay changing features is safe lanes, which have been recently incorporated into the main branch. Safe lanes consist of routes in space that are more regularly patrolled. Most traders and factional systems will use these routes, while areas away from space lanes will naturally lead to more pirate activities. Core systems with many planets and stations will naturally lead to more safe lanes, while systems far away from core systems will end up having sparser lanes, or none at all.

Safe lanes that look like Pacman.

Ship Classification Redux

This is a more minor change, but rare ship classes, such as cruiser ships, or motherships have been removed. Other similar classes have been merged, such as heavy drones and fighters, which retain the name of fighters. Furthermore, fighters have been split into fighters and interceptors (light fighters), and cruisers have been split into cruisers and battleships (heavy cruisers). This changes are mainly there for the equipment algorithm and AI to exploit.

Rebalance

Nearly all the outfits in the game have been modified or completely revamped. Core outfits and weapons have been designed to be based around 6 tiers: interceptor, fighter, corvette, destroyer, cruiser, and battleship. Utility outfits have been made to be based on conditional behaviour such as being below a certain armour threshold, or temporary behaviours. Finally, structural outfits have been made be stronger and play a more significant role in outfitting and not being left as an afterthought. Many new outfits have been added to fill in missing slots and roles, with many left to come.

Visual Novel Framework

Another fairly large change is a Lua based visual novel framework that has been written from scratch. It allows to show images and special effects while having text progressively appear. This greatly enhances some of the storytelling ability of the game and allows creating more complex conditional branching behaviours.

A friendly Minerva Station Terminal informing the player about their tokens.

Furthermore, the entire system is based on the LÖVE framework which we recently started to partially support by mimicking the API in Naev, and allows for nearly infinite customizations.

The Visual Novel Framework has infinite flexibility.

Future Steps

There are lots of other improvements we have not mentioned in this newsletter: linear programming-based equipment optimization, discoveries, new missions, new ship attributes, more shader support, etc. We might go deeper into new features in future blarg posts as we refine and polish the mechanics.

With regard to what is coming up, there are no too major things left to do. Besides overall polish, which will take most of the time, some new missions have to be written, in-system objects implemented, jamming rework, pricing rebalance, and a few odd ends here and there. We’re hoping for a release within this year, but given the ambition and scope of 0.9.0, we’d rather delay and have a better release, than rush it and have it be unplayable.

If you wish to contribute to Naev, we have lots of things that can be done, even without programming experience! From making cooler beauty shops for comm and shipyard window, adding an uninhabited frontier, more loading screens, new character artwork, new outfit artwork, more missions, gameplay testing, etc. Tasks to be done can be found on the issue tracker, and discussion can be had on Discord.

This concludes the Sporadic Naev Newsletter Vol. 2, and hopefully the next will be sooner than 10 years from now.

Future Goes Boom

2021-07-18T00:00:00Z

This post is about development on Naev 0.9.0.

Even though explosions in space games generally defy the laws of physics, they are some of the better and necessary eye-candy. However, explosions in Naev remained unchanged since about 13 years ago. While not necessarily awful, they have always left a bit more to be desired. One idea that has been around for ages has been to try to redo them in procedural shaders to look better and more variable. With the recent shader improvements, it has never been a better time to revamp the other special effects.

Mace rocket mining is the best way to mine.

The explosions have been redone with ray marching and are completely procedural: each explosion should be completely unique. Furthermore, the explosion parameters can be tweaked to create plasma clouds or other special effects, replacing a large amount of image-based animations we were using. Images speak louder than words, so see for yourself the new explosions in action!

Goddard-class cruisers bites the dust.

Beam Me Up

2021-07-02T00:00:00Z

This post is about development on Naev 0.9.0.

So fact is, beams are cool. They can hit multiple targets and do a lot of damage while being accurate. Sure they have short range and bad tracking, but they more than make up for that in coolness factor. We thought about it and decided the only way to make beams cooler is to sprinkle some shader goodness on top. Not only will this make beams look great at any resolution, but it will also allow creating new beams easily, as there is no longer a need to muck around with graphic images.

In the blarg post about Lua outfits, some of the new beams were already shown:

The Combat Hologram Projector used to distract a Pirate Kestrel while the beams do their job.

There are also a lot of new beam graphics, some of which are not used yet, but open up a lot of exciting new possibilities. Look forward to more and fancier beams in the future.

Overview of the different beam animations.

Naev History

2021-06-21T00:00:00Z

Howdy!

This post coincides with the 11th year this blog has been up in some form.

In early 2020, the new incarnation of naev.org was born, and with the new site came an unfortunate lack of the older historical posts from the old WordPress Naev site. With Naev being one of the older open source game projects out there (and one my my personal early forays into FOSS games) I realized that the history of this project is a good record to keep.

With more than 10 years of history here it would be a crime not to attempt to restore as much of the old content as possible. With recent updates to the Blarg you can now browse through almost all of the posts from years past; be it explanations of ‘new’ mechanics, past releases, or some extra fun posts. As important as viewing the past is it also lets us see how far this project has come and how far we can continue to expand this awesome game.

On top of all this restored Blarg content, we will be attempting to bring older releases of Naev to modern Linux and Windows systems, on Steam, Itch.io and on our Github Releases page. This will give any brave souls the chance to see where Naev was at various points in time. Be it for nostalgia’s sake or to see how things were 5 years ago.

Present day sees a lot of cool new things brewing in the development builds of Naev, but I’ll leave that for future Blarg posts :)

As always, feel free to join our Discord and say hi.

Happy Reading!

Utility Outfits

2021-06-06T00:00:00Z

This post is about development on Naev 0.9.0.

Most non-weapon outfits in Naev have consisted of simple modifications, with some notable exceptions like afterburners. This has always meant that most of the game is built around setting up outfits, without non-weapon outfits playing an active role in combat. In order to allow much more flexible outfit design, we have incorporated Lua, the widely used scripting language in Naev and other projects, into the outfits.

The result? Now outfits can react to environmental conditions or trigger in certain instances. Furthermore, the behaviours don’t have to be fixed, but can be dynamically set during runtime. This allows doing simple things like having outfits give you bonuses above certain shield levels, or depending on nearby ships. Below are some examples of what can be done with this.

The Emergency Stasis Inducer will automatically trigger when your ship takes armour damage. Not only will it slow down time around you, it will also speed up your ship for a great bullet time effect!

The Emergency Stasis Inducer in action!

Do you like holograms? Would you like to project a fully equipped model of your ship into space to distract your enemies while you blast them into smithereens? The revolutionary Combat Hologram Projector does just that!

The Combat Hologram Projector in action!

Have you ever felt so angry that you wanted to slow down time and get a large bonus to damage while you damage yourself? Think no further, the Berserk Chip does just that, without making you turn green and rip out of your shirt!

The Berserk Chip in action!

Of course, it would only be right to pay homage to the original Cloaking Device by implementing it in Naev. While active, nobody will see you, and you will be able to do what you please freely.

The Cloaking Device in action!

Other than these showcased outfits, there are many more to explore, however, we leave that up to you to look forward to in-game!

Fancy Jumping

2021-05-02T00:00:00Z

This post is about development on Naev 0.9.0.

Given that the old jump animation was a bit bland, fading in and out from white, we decided to give it a new spin with GLSL shaders. Furthermore, it is now possible to use multiple different jump animations. Currently only two are used in-game, but this might be extended in the future.

A quicksilver jumping into a new system.

Trails for EVERYTHING!

2021-04-09T00:00:00Z

This post is about development on Naev 0.9.0.

By moving to newer versions of OpenGL in version 0.8, we have modernized the rendering pipeline of Naev, however, we have not been making full use of that power. Well, at least not up until now. We are proud to present trails for ships and missiles! These are generated procedurally using GLSL shaders, and are capable of having complex animations. There are currently a total of 7 different trails depending on the ship and missile, ranging from cool to very cool.

A llama crossing paths with some other ships.

A quicksilver crossing paths with the Za'lek.

Ships can have special trails in the nebula.

Naev LÖVE

2021-03-14T00:00:00Z

This post is about development on Naev 0.9.0.

Disclaimer: the LÖVE project has nothing to do with Naev. We just thought their API was cool and decided to implement it.

As you may know, the Naev scripting engine is written in Lua. Since the original releases of Naev, the Lua ecosystem has seen an incredible growth, being using in notable games and software. One of these great frameworks is LÖVE, which is a 2D game API. While we haven’t rewritten Naev in LÖVE, what we have done is implement a subset of the LÖVE API in Naev. In combination with the dialogue systems we had already implemented in Naev, we were able to extend it such that LÖVE games could be launched inside of Naev using the Naev engine. Since a picture says a thousand words, let us see some examples taken from simplegametutorials.

Flowers demo running in Naev

We can see the game is being run inside a dialogue window inside of Naev. Mouse input is passed and it reacts to user input.

Snake demo running in Naev

An independent game loop can also be run inside of Naev, along with keyboard input to create a snake game.

Of course what game is complete without a Sokoban minigame?

Sokoban demo running in Naev

Since Naev itself has asteroids, it seems like the next logical steps is to run an asteroids clone inside of Naev.

Asteroids demo running in Naev

Although we haven’t shown any original mini-games. The LÖVE API has a nearly infinite potential for creation. In future posts we will show some of the different ways it is being used in Naev.

Naev 0.8.2 Release!

2021-02-12T00:00:00Z

We are proud to announce the 0.8.2 release of Naev. This fixes some issues found in 0.8.1. We don’t expect there to be many remaining issues, but if you do find any, please report them at the issue tracker. Discussion about the game can also be had on Discord (discord invite).

You can get the latest version from any of the following three sources:

Changelog:

Gameplay
- Fixed duplicate rewards from pirate ship-stealing missions. (Sorry.)
- Fixed the Advanced Nebula Research mission’s failure condition in case you don’t stick with the transport ship. (Sorry.)
- Fixed the “The one with the Runaway” mission so the captured drone doesn’t appear back in space.
Engine
- Fixed a bug loading games with short (1-character) names.
- Tweaked chances of seeing Spaceport Bar missions.
- Updated German translation.
- Fixed “configure” script when the system has a “cxsparse” library and no “csparse”.
- Fixed source .tar.gz so ./configure is immediately usable again. (Note: 0.9.x will use Meson for builds.)

Naev 0.8.1 Release!

2021-01-09T00:00:00Z

We are proud to announce the 0.8.1 release of Naev. This fixes some important issues found in 0.8.0. Due to popular demand, time constant (previously known as time dilation) has been reduced significantly. We don’t expect there to be many remaining issues, but if you do find any, please report them at the issue tracker. Discussion about the game can also be had on Discord (discord invite).

You can get the latest version from any of the following three sources:

Changelog:

Gameplay
- Lowered large ships’ time constant (renamed from time dilation) by 50% of the deviation from 100%.
- Tweaked Za’lek ships’ stats and outfit slot behavior to match expectations.
Engine
- Restored macOS support. (Catalina users will have to bypass Gatekeeper: See https://codeberg.org/naev/naev/wiki/FAQ for details.)
- Fixed a crash-loop when the “saves” folder gets populated by Steam data (or other files) and no Naev save files.
- Fixed intermittent error messages about the “Lua Spawn script for faction ‘Trader’”.
- Fixed rare/potential bugs in font and save-file code.
- Fixed crash when navigating landing screens with the tab key.
- Updated German translation.
- Improved text in minor ways.

Naev 0.8.0 Release!

2020-12-17T00:00:00Z

We are proud to present the 0.8.0 release of Naev! This has over 4,000 commits from 0.7.0 and has been under development for the past 3.5 years. The backend and interface has been revamped to be modern with lots of improvements all over the board. Some examples include unicode and internationalization support. We would like to thank all the contributors who have participated in this release.

Some of the more notable gameplay changes include making missiles and fighter bays not require ammunition, changed how some pilots spawn, time passes faster in larger ships, and a revamped commodity/economy system.

We don’t expect there to be many issues, but if you do find any, please report them at the issue tracker. Discussion about the game can also be had on Discord (discord invite).

You can get the latest version from any of the following three sources:

Full changelog:

Gameplay
- Overhaul of the interface to be more sleek and functional
  - Interface is much more slick
  - Dark theme to be more consistent with space
  - Font uses outlines to be more readable
- New map overlay with adjustable opacity
- Added rarity indicator to ships and outfits
- Changed fonts
- Indicate non-common NPC with exclamation marks
- Added accessory slot and unique accessory outfits as mission rewards
- Simple economy model implemented with map visualizations
- Added travelling merchant who sells unique items
- Made missiles and fighter bays reload while in space
- Modified the balancing of missiles
- Added asteroids and mining
- Improved player GUI
- Brushed GUI is now the default
- Improved and fixed escort system
- Made Pirates and FLF spawn in a fairer way
- Made time pass at different rates for different ships (“Time Dilation”)
- Made piracy missions available from any Independent or black market planet
- Substantially increased pay for unique missions (10x in most cases)
- Made references to the player gender-neutral
- Made combat music vary from faction to faction
- Made it so AI ships spawn with cargo
- Improved AI behaviours
- Nerfed Quicksilver
- Added the ability to buy “fake IDs” from pirate strongholds
- Made jammers into activated outfits that increase cloaking
- Added Soromid organic ships that level up organs
- Improved and expanded NPC portraits
- Commodities can be sold/bought everywhere
- Added a “slow mode”, which runs the game at half speed (like an easy mode)
- Added a ship log which records events
- Added a “system map” which displays information about known remote planets
- Added support for giving commands to individual escorts
- New intro images replacing old placeholders
- Increased pirate name variety for bounty missions
- Ships now travel with you automatically for free, as with outfits
- Added map decorators showing locations of factions and the Nebula
- Added a dogfight aiming helper
- More music
- New and/or improved missions
  - New Za’lek mini-campaign
  - Completed the FLF campaign
  - Fixed up the Collective campaign
  - Improved the Shark (Nexus Shipyards) campaign
  - Improved the Dvaered anti-FLF campaign
  - Added and improved piracy missions
  - New minor Soromid campaign, “Coming Out”
  - New tutorial mission at the start of a new game
  - Various newly added and improved generic missions
Engine
- Support for compilation with Meson
- HiDPI-awareness
- Support for translations
- Added shaders to speed up and improve graphics
- Added support for non-ascii direct character input
- Added support for map decorators
- Removed support for Lua 5.0
- Removed support for SDL 1, only SDL 2 is supported
- Added support for translating
- Made the OSD compact itself to avoid showing redundant information
- Made Autonav able to follow ships
- Consolidated the effects of cloaking and jammers under cloaking
- Added workaround for ALSOFT buggy version that crashes
- Added a polygon-based collision algorithm
- Added some symbols for partial colorblind accessibility
- Support #include in shaders
- Multiple font support
- Many bugfixes

Naev 0.8.0-beta.4

2020-11-30T00:00:00Z

It so happens that instead of having things cool down and prepare for the release, development has instead accelerated with 1473 commits from the previous beta. For this reason, we are going to do a final beta for 0.8.0, aiming to release full 0.8.0 by the end of this year. We would like to say that we don’t anticipate too many issues with this beta, but given the amount of code changed anything can happen. For this reason, please try it and find any issues, please report them at the issue tracker. Discussion about the game can also be had on Discord (discord invite).

Download the new version from here.

Some changes from 0.8.0-beta.3:

Overhaul of the interface to be more sleek and functional
Interface is much more slick
- Dark theme to be more consistent with space
New map overlay with adjustable opacity
Improved AI behaviours
Nerfed Quicksilver
New Za’lek mini-campaign
HiDPI-awareness
Support for translation
Support for compilation with Meson
Many bugfixes

Steam Branches and Soundtrack

2020-09-10T00:00:00Z

We have added support for the latest beta and nightly automated builds on Steam. You can opt-in by right-clicking in the library and selecting the branch you want from the opt-in beta. The generation of these branches is all automated and there are no differences with using the downloads available on github.

We have also added support to generate a soundtrack using all 54 tracks from the game. This can be created by using the make soundtrack command from the source code. This has also been added to steam, and we are working to make this available on other sites such as soundcloud.

Naev 0.8.0-beta.3

2020-09-02T00:00:00Z

Since a lot of fairly important stuff in the engine has changed, we have decided to do yet another beta. From this release on we have also moved to semver version notation. For this reason all the version tags on github have been regenerated. We don’t anticipate many issues from now on and expect to release the full version of 0.8.0 shortly. We don’t anticipate too many issues with this beta, but if you try it and find any issues, please report them at the issue tracker. Discussion about the game can also be had on IRC (#naev on irc.freenode.net) or Discord (discord invite).

Download the new version from here.

Some changes from 0.8.0-beta.2:

Added rarity indicator to ships and outfits
Changed fonts
Indicate non-common NPC with exclamation marks
Added accessory slot and unique accessory outfits as mission rewards
Added travelling merchant who sells unique items
Many bugfixes

Naev 0.8.0-beta2

2020-08-14T00:00:00Z

Given significant changes since 0.8.0-beta1 we have decided to do another beta before the final release (last one hopefully.) We don’t anticipate too many issues with this beta, but if you try it and find any issues, please report them at the issue tracker. Discussion about the game can also be had on IRC (#naev on irc.freenode.net) or Discord (discord invite).

Download the new version from here.

Some changes from 0.8.0-beta1:

Improved and simplified the look of the interface
- Interface is much more slick
- Font uses outlines to be more readable
Simple economy model implemented with map visualizations
Improved and expanded NPC portraits
Commodities can be sold/bought everywhere
Added a “slow mode”, which runs the game at half speed (like an easy mode)
Added a ship log which records events
Added a “system map” which displays information about known remote planets
Added support for giving commands to individual escorts
New intro images replacing old placeholders
Increased pirate name variety for bounty missions
Ships now travel with you automatically for free, as with outfits
Added map decorators showing locations of factions and the Nebula
Added a dogfight aiming helper
More music
Added some symbols for partial colorblind accessibility
Many bugfixes

Naev 0.8.0-beta1

2020-06-11T00:00:00Z

With 3 years since the last release we are happy to announce the first (and likely last with no hiccups) of version 0.8.0. This version contains a ton of fixes and new contents, including major gameplay mechanic changes. We don’t anticipate too many issues with this beta, but if you try it and find any issues, please report them at the issue tracker. Discussion about the game can also be had on IRC (#naev on irc.freenode.net) or Discord (discord invite).

Download the new version from here.

The changelog is as follows:

Gameplay
- Simple economy model implemented
- Made missiles and fighter bays reload while in space
- Modified the balancing of missiles
- Added asteroids and mining
- Improved player GUI
- Brushed GUI is now the default
- Improved and fixed escort system
- Made Pirates and FLF spawn in a fairer way
- Made time pass at different rates for different ships (“Time Dilation”)
- Made piracy missions available from any Independent or black market planet
- Substantially increased pay for unique missions (10x in most cases)
- Made references to the player gender-neutral
- Made combat music vary from faction to faction
- Made it so AI ships spawn with cargo
- Added the ability to buy “fake IDs” from pirate strongholds
- Made jammers into activated outfits that increase cloaking
- Added Soromid organic ships that level up organs
- New and/or improved missions
  - Completed the FLF campaign
  - Fixed up the Collective campaign
  - Improved the Shark (Nexus Shipyards) campaign
  - Improved the Dvaered anti-FLF campaign
  - Added and improved piracy missions
  - New minor Soromid campaign, “Coming Out”
  - New tutorial mission at the start of a new game
  - Various newly added and improved generic missions
Engine
- Added shaders to speed up and improve graphics
- Added support for non-ascii direct character input
- Added support for map decorators
- Removed support for Lua 5.0
- Removed support for SDL 1, only SDL 2 is supported
- Added support for translating
- Made the OSD compact itself to avoid showing redundant information
- Made Autonav able to follow ships
- Consolidated the effects of cloaking and jammers under cloaking
- Added workaround for ALSOFT buggy version that crashes
- Added a polygon-based collision algorithm

Hello World!

2020-01-01T00:00:00Z

After a longer than expected hiatus, the Naev website is back! It has been completely redone and is also hosted on github.

While development has slowed down, it has not completely stalled. Besides many different bug fixes and code tweaks, some new missions have been added.

Furthermore, although the IRC channel (#naev on irc.freenode.net) still exists, we have also created a discord for the Naev project. You can join it with this discord invite.

Hopefully 2020 will bring more developments in the Naev project. Happy new year to all!

Naev is on steam!

2017-07-17T00:00:00Z

After a long road, Naev 0.7.0 is now available on steam! At the current time Windows and Linux (64 bits) are supported.

We note that Naev will still remain an open source project, and no steam-specific changes have been done, i.e., Naev on steam is the same as on github. Finally, Naev will remain free on the steam store and updated with releases.

Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/598530/Naev/

Naev Steam Trailer

Naev 0.7.0 Release

2017-07-08T00:00:00Z

We are proud to release Naev 0.7.0, which will also be the first release included on Steam (thanks again for the Greenlight and sorry for the delay!). This version includes new missions and a swathe of improvements and fixes overall and contains patches from 25 different contributors.

At the current time, we are not providing Mac OS binaries, but when someone gets around to that will we include those too.

Download: https://github.com/naev/naev/releases/tag/v0.7.0

Blog: https://naev.org/

Forums: http://forum.naev.org/ (Forums are lost.)

Changes since 0.6.1:

New missions
Initial asteroids support
Initial fleet formation support
Fixed screen scaling
Mission fixes
Lua backend unified
Lua console tab completion
Generalized claim system

Naev 0.6.1 Release

2015-11-15T00:00:00Z

It’s been a while, but we’re proud to announce Naev 0.6.1. This is a minor release that has a slew of fixes, improvements and missions. It fixes some important issues that cropped up in the previous release and thus we highly encourage everyone to update to 0.6.1.

This release would have not been possible without the help of both onpon4, nenau, and Ian D. Scott who have been very active of late. We would like to once again thank all contributors for making this release possible.

Download: https://github.com/naev/naev/releases/tag/v0.6.1

Blog: https://naev.org/

Forums: http://forum.naev.org/ (Forums are lost.)

Changes since 0.6.0:

Improved AI (nenau)
New Missions (onpon4, nenau)
Changed how action loss is handled (onpon4)
Lua AI rewrite (Ian D. Scott)
Misc fixes and improvements.

Naev 0.6.0 Release

2015-03-17T00:00:00Z

The Naev development team is proud to announce the release of Naev 0.6.0, our first stable release in nearly three years.

This release features over 1600 commits from some 38 contributors, as well as small fixes from many more. Its main features are the core slots system, which allows ships to be more heavily customized, as well as full SDL2 support, which greatly improves Naev’s fullscreen behaviour among other things.

Download: https://sourceforge.net/projects/naev/files/naev-0.6.0/

Blog: https://naev.org/

Forums: http://forum.naev.org/ (Forums are lost.)

Changes since 0.5.3:

Features:

Core slots system.
- Ships must have a core system, engine, and hull equipped to take off
- Ships’ attributes are mostly defined by their cores
- Total of 95 core outfits
Naev’s data is now stored in a zip file, making contributing easier than ever.
Greatly improved SDL2 support (now default)
- Support for window resizing and toggling fullscreen without restarting
- Drag-and-drop ndata loading when ndata can’t be found
- Fake fullscreen is used by default to avoid turning off other monitors
- Fullscreen toggling via keybind (F11 by default)
Improved keyboard-and-mouse gameplay, with an optional WASD layout
Autonav improvements
- Autonav resets time accel instead of aborting (onpon4)
- Improved autonav behaviour when pushed off of jump points
Activated outfits get hotkeys by default
Fuel is now provided for free at spaceports
Auto-braking (Ctrl-S by default) in lieu of a dedicated Active Cooldown key
Ships only need to be spaceworthy when taking off (Avihay)
Added on-screen “PAUSED” indicator (can be disabled in conf.lua)
Local system maps can be bought from the landing screen

Content:

Greatly expanded galaxy
- 150+ new systems and 500+ new planets
- Za’lek faction added (Viruk and Lineth)
- Expanded pirate space (Lukc)
New missions
- Added 6 repeatable missions
- Added 10 scripted missions
- Greater mission availability in Soromid space (BSoD-naev)
- New Sirius mission string, “Heretic” (l0k1) Several repeatable pirate missions (Lukc)
- New FLF mission and two neutral missions by brognam
3 new songs by Askyel and saturn6
Innumerable typo and content fixes by PhoenixRiver, perey, m1foley, ids1024, and others
Cargo missions are longer-range (up to 6 jumps)
Added hidden jumps, currently only discoverable via special maps

Technical:

Error logs are now stored to help with issue reporting
- Windows: %APPDATA\naev\logs\
- OS X: ~/Library/Application Support/naev/logs/
- Linux: ~/.local/share/naev/logs/
Fixed save corruption issues on Windows
Dynamic news support for missions and events BariumBlue
See the news Lua API module for more information

GitHub & Issue Tracker Changes

2015-03-14T00:00:00Z

We’ve been gradually migrating away from Google Code for a long time now — First we switched to Git and migrated our repositories to GitHub, then we moved the wiki to wiki.naev.org, and lastly downloads moved to SourceForge due to ndata’s size growing.

The only Google Code service we’ve been making use of these past few years has been the issue tracker, and with the recently-announced impending shutdown of Google Code, now seems as good a time as any to finish our migration.

We’ve also decided to shuffle our repositories around a bit to make Naev’s GitHub presence more cohesive. To that end, Naev’s main repository is now github.com/naev/naev instead of bobbens/naev. If you’re a contributor or have a fork of Naev, don’t worry — bobbens/naev remains as a redirect to naev/naev, so you don’t need to update your Git configuration.

Secondly, all issues have been migrated to github.com/naev/naev/issues, and that’s where new issues should be submitted. All issues and their comments have been preserved, but if you have an open bug and want to be notified when it’s updated, please subscribe to it on GitHub.

As we were only using Google Code for issue tracking and it was otherwise chock full of outdated information, we’ve shuttered the site and it now redirects to the blog.

0.6.0-beta2 Release

2015-03-05T00:00:00Z

The Naev development team is proud to announce the release of Naev 0.6.0-beta2, which will hopefully be the final beta release before 0.6.0 stable. This release brings a few minor features, a slew of bugfixes, and improved SDL2 support.

The most notable features mostly relate to the SDL2 improvements: Naev’s resolution can now be changed on the fly, and it can be made fullscreen or windowed without restarting. It also uses “fake” fullscreen by default (as many modern games do) to avoid turning off other screens.

Download: https://sourceforge.net/projects/naev/files/naev-0.6.0/

Blog: https://naev.org/

Forums: http://forum.naev.org/ (Forums are lost.)

This release’s highlights include:

Greatly improved SDL2 support (now default)
- Support for window resizing and toggling fullscreen without restarting
- Drag-and-drop ndata loading when ndata can’t be found
- Fake fullscreen is used by default to avoid turning off other monitors
- Fullscreen toggling via keybind (F11 by default)
Error logs are now stored to help with issue reporting
- Windows: %APPDATA\naev\logs\
- OS X: ~/Library/Application Support/naev/logs/
- Linux: ~/.local/share/naev/logs/
Added on-screen “PAUSED” indicator (can be disabled in conf.lua)
Local system maps can be bought from the landing screen
Fixed save corruption issues on Windows
Fixed emergency shield booster energy consumption
Improved autonav behaviour when pushed off of jump points
Various mission bug and typo fixes
Cargo missions are longer-range (up to 6 jumps)

As this is a beta release, we’re hoping to iron out any remaining issues, particularly with missions and other scripted content. If you run into any issues while playing, please report bugs and issues at our issue tracker or drop by our IRC channel (RIP Freenode).

One small note regarding the change to SDL 2: A number of key names have changed, mostly on the numpad. Any controls with unrecognized keys will be reset to their defaults on first run.

Right now we have Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux binaries available, both 32-bit and 64-bit.

0.6.0-beta1 Hotfix for Windows

2015-02-20T00:00:00Z

We’ve just released updated Windows installers to remedy save corruption and a related crash.

Simply download and re-run the installer. It’s fine to run over top of the existing install, and you do not need to re-download ndata.

Windows (32-bit) Windows (64-bit)

The issue affects all versions of Windows, as long as save compression is enabled (which is the default). You may also want to delete all backup saves, located in %APPDATA\naev\saves\ with the extension .ns.backup, though this isn’t required.

0.6.0-beta1 Release

2015-02-17T00:00:00Z

Our last release was 0.5.3, way back in April 2012. Two years, ten months and some 1400 commits later, we’ve finally prepared another release.

We are proud to announce the 0.6.0-beta1 release today, and with any luck the final 0.6.0 stable version will be released before March.

Download: https://sourceforge.net/projects/naev/files/naev-0.6.0/

Blog: https://naev.org/

Forums: http://forum.naev.org/ (Forums are lost.)

A full changelog will accompany the stable release, but a few of the highlights include:

Core slots system.
Naev’s data is now stored in a zip file, making contributing easier than ever.
Greatly expanded galaxy, including a new faction, Za’lek
Activated outfits get hotkeys by default
Fuel is now provided for free at spaceports
Improved keyboard-and-mouse gameplay, with an optional WASD layout
Auto-braking (Ctrl-S by default) in lieu of a dedicated Active Cooldown key

Additionally there’s a slew of minor improvements, tweaks, new missions and the like for your enjoyment. As this is a beta release, we’re hoping to iron out any remaining issues, particularly with missions and other scripted content. If you run into any issues while playing, please report bugs and issues at our issue tracker or drop by our IRC channel (RIP Freenode).

Right now, we have builds available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, both 32-bit and 64-bit.

Lastly, one small note for those compiling from source: While Naev nominally supports SDL 2, several important things don’t function properly, like modifier keys and the mouse wheel, and error logging on Windows. We’re aiming to sort this out before 0.6.0 stable, but we advise players to stick with SDL 1.2 for the time being.

ndata is dead, long live ndata

2014-05-29T00:00:00Z

So here’s a recent development that may interest some of you out there. As you may know, Naev’s game data (sounds, images, script files, etc) comes packaged in an archive called ndata when you download a stable version. It’s a simple thing, little more than a concatenation of the files, but the trouble with it was that we were using our own format. This made it rather annoying to do anything with it other than just play the game.

As of today, ndata’s format has changed, thanks to nloewen. It is now an uncompressed zip archive. This format is ubiquitous and supported by everything and its uncle, so it is now much easier to get at the data files themselves when downloading a stable release. The main upside to this is that people who are interested in how the game works, or in changing parts of the game can directly start tinkering without the need to re-download the data files from git.

It’s a small change that doesn’t affect the game itself, but I’m happy to see the switch finally made.

Helloooo

2014-05-20T00:00:00Z

Hello everyone, here’s an update about the state of affairs surrounding Naev. I know, right? Yes, it’s been almost two years since our last post. You might think that that means little or nothing has been happening with the project, and mostly this is true, but not entirely.

Let’s start with the thing that prompted this post in the first place. A great man once said:

“One does not simply get greenlit on Steam.”

But, as we all know, Sean tends to be wrong about these things. As a matter of fact, Naev has been officially greenlit. This came as something as a surprise, since although people did occasionally comment and vote on the Greenlight page it was by no means a hive of activity. But there you have it. Needless to say this is good news indeed.

In other news, work has been going into the core slots system that currently only exists in the development version. The system is described in earlier posts, and Deiz has been improving the core outfit definitions. You can view his notes on the wiki. Once that is finished we’re hoping to get the game ready for a new release numbered 0.6.0. We may yet run into issues that have to be resolved first, but we’d really like to get a new release out the door in hopes of rekindling interest in the project. Fingers crossed!

There has also been some discussion recently about the relationship between armour and shields within the game. There is some writing about that on the wiki as well. It should be noted that this is not a proposal or anything we plan to do, at this point we haven’t decided on any course of action and the floor remains open for debate.

Other than that a whole slew of minor corrections and content has also been constantly creeping in from a lot of different people. We hope this will make the experience smoother and more enjoyable for everyone.

That’s it for now. Let’s hope there won’t be too much time until the next blog post.

Naev on Steam Greenlight

2012-09-05T00:00:00Z

We have added an entry on Steam Greenlight for Naev, in hopes of reaching a larger audience for the game. Whether the game accrues enough upvotes to be published on Steam is of secondary importance – every extra pair of eyes that sees our entry is good for us.

Slots branch merged

2012-08-19T00:00:00Z

Hello readers, it’s been a long time since our last post. I hope you’re both doing well.

Development has been pretty slow in the last months. It hasn’t entirely ceased though, and today I can tell you that a pretty major change to the game has been finalized and is now in the master git branch. The way ships work has been changed, and that’s what most of this post is going to be about. There have also been some other changes I’ll briefly mention at the end. Hang tight, it’s going to be a long one.

The basis of the new system is a refinement of the ship slots. Up until now, ships had three types of slots: utility, structure and weapons. This is true even now, but it is now also possible for slots to be specialized. We can demand an outfit be installed in a certain specialized slot, and we can enforce that specialized slots can only take certain outfits. This allows us to gear certain ships to certain roles, and that will be important later when we deal with fleets.

For example, imagine a Carrier class ship. This ship might have a number of specialized slots that will only take fighter bays. We can also create special fighter bay outfits to go in these slots that are better (lighter, higher capacity, less CPU, etc) than the fighter bays you can install in any slot. This means that a Carrier has much greater potential for carrying fighters than a Cruiser of equivalent size.

One size will no longer fit all, in the future.

Ship core equipment

Currently our most important (in fact only) use of the new slot system is found in every ship in the game.

Up until now, you’ve known your ships by their abilities. Some ships were faster, some slower, some had more energy in the tank, some had more CPU to spend. With this new mechanic, that has changed completely. With a few exceptions, ships have been stripped of all their numbers. Instead, these numbers are granted by certain special equipment installed on the ship. This special equipment we call “core outfits”, or more briefly, cores.

Each ship has three “core slots”: one for its engines, one for its core systems, and one for its hull mod. Every ship can only equip one single outfit of each kind, and each ship MUST have one of each kind installed, or the ship will not fly! The interpretation of each core outfit type is as follows:

A ship with its core slots installed. The orange text in the tool tip indicates the slot specialization.

Engine core slots are just that, the ship’s engines. Engines determine how fast a ship can accelerate, the ship’s maximum speed, the base fuel capacity, and the mass limit (more on this one below).
System core slots can be thought of as the heart of the ship. Systems determine energy generation and capacity, shield generation and capacity, as well as CPU capacity.
Hull core slots represent the structural configuration of the entire ship. Most importantly hull cores affect armour, damage absorption and cargo space, but some hulls can do other things as well, such as make a ship more stealthy or increase energy regeneration. Hull mods also greatly contribute to a ship’s mass.

Of course, there is a healthy variety of all core types available. When you buy a ship it will come with very low end cores, so you’ll have to invest to increase your ship’s performance!

Ship stats

Hang on, I hear you saying. If all ships now take their performance values from cores, doesn’t that mean all ships are the same if you install the same cores in them? Why yes, that would be the case if we just kept it at this. But no, there’s more.

Where every ship was the sum of its values before, it now is (mostly) the sum of its ship stats. Ship stats are modifiers specific to that ship. For example, a ship might have a 15% bonus to energy generation. This means that whatever energy regeneration is granted by its outfits will be multiplied by 1.15. This makes it attractive to install a good system core, and maybe extra energy generators as well. On the other hand, a ship might have a penalty to its maximum speed. This means that engines you mount on the ship will have reduced performance. So, even if you use the same core outfits, two different ships might well behave very differently.

Ship stats are usually scalars like that, but they can do other things as well. For example, there is a ship stat that enables a ship to jump through a jump point without having to brake and charge up its hyperdrive first! A ship with this ship stat will make hyperjumps a lot easier.

A ship with its core slots installed. The orange text in the tool tip indicates the slot specialization.

Now, perhaps confusingly, it is possible for outfits to grant ship stats to a ship. This seems illogical (they are called SHIP stats, after all), but it is very useful because it allows us to make outfits that grant ships special abilities, while ALSO allowing ships to come with those special abilities out of the box. For example, there is a “Reverse Thrusters” ship stat that allows ships to thrust backwards – when you press the reverse key, the ship will slow down instead of turning around, and eventually fly backwards. This ability might be standard on a certain class of fighters, but it’s also possible for pilots to mount an outfit on their ship that gives them the same thing, if they’re willing to spend a slot on it.

Mass limit

I’ve written up the basics of the new slots system now, but this is one thing I want to explain in more detail.

First, let’s examine this “mass limit” that I mentioned earlier in this post. It’s a new concept that didn’t exist in the game before. Every engine has a mass limit value, for example 100. This value determines the maximum mass the engine can support at maximum efficiency. If the ship becomes heavier than this limit, the engine isn’t capable of pulling all that weight anymore and the ship will become slower and more sluggish. The mass acts as a divisor for the engine’s efficiency, such that when the ship is twice as heavy as the mass limit, the engine will only function half as well.

Now, you might feel that this mass limit thing is an arbitrary limitation, and it is. Let me explain why it exists. You see, it leads back to the issue of ships behaving the same if the same outfits are installed. It is entirely possible for capital ships to install fighter engines, because the slot system allows you to install outfits into any slot that is at least big enough. Obviously, we don’t want capital ships to race around like fighters though! So we need to make sure that capital ships benefit most from capital ship engines. The way to do it is, of course, by adding mass to the equation. At the same time, we want to make sure that the BIG engines are capable of pushing the big ships around, which raises the question of how to balance that. You can just give big engines a lot of output to compensate for the ship’s mass, but that would mean the engine is always a lot worse than it says on the tin, and that’s not fun for the player. So instead, I chose to arbitrarily define a maximum mass at which the engine is guaranteed to perform optimally. This is easier to work with on the balancing side of things.

Other changes

The following is a list of changes made that don’t directly relate to the slots system. I probably forgot a few things, though.

Fuel consumption has been changed so small ships use 100 fuel per jump, medium ships use 200, and large ships use 400. This is done to counteract the fact that larger ships have more slots, and can therefore equip more fuel tanks. This gave large ships a much greater operational range than small ones. The flipside of this is that buying fuel off NPC ships is going to be more tedious, but we have some ideas about easing that.
The Auxiliary Processing Unit outfits no longer exist. Sorry! The only way to increase your CPU capacity is by upgrading your core system.
The galaxy now contains secret shortcut jumps. You can’t find these jumps unless you have a special scanner, and even then you probably need some hints to find them. Note that the scanner isn’t sold anywhere yet, and there are also no hints to be had yet. But this is a work-in-progress.

A ship with its core slots installed. The orange text in the tool tip indicates the slot specialization.

Some work has gone into the equipment screen. The outfit list is now tabbed, each tab corresponding to a class of outfits. The tab letters, as seen on the right, stand for Weapons, Utility, Structure, Core and Xeverything. Hopefully, this can be further improved and applied to the outfitter screen as well.
For developers: All game data is now found under the dat/ subdirectory. This was done to make the relationship between the game data and the ndata file more apparent.
For developers: Lua scripts from the dat/scripts/ subdirectory can now be included into other scripts by only their name. The game will look in this directory for includes.

Naev 0.5.3 Release

2012-04-15T00:00:00Z

The Naev development team is proud to announce the release of Naev 0.5.3. This release fixes several bugs and introduces a few minor features. We aim for this to be the final release in the 0.5.x series, with 0.6.0 following in the not-so-distant future and bringing significant changes to ship equipping.

Perhaps most importantly, we’ve introduced a non-gameplay feature, portable mode. On launch, Naev will now look for a file named datapath.lua in the same directory as the Naev binary. The Windows installer provides this as an option, making it easy to install and run Naev from removable media.

Note that if you want to use portable mode with your existing saves, you’ll need to migrate your files manually. For Windows users, this means moving %APPDATA%\naev\ to naev-data\ within the directory Naev is installed to.

Download: https://sourceforge.net/projects/naev/files/naev-0.5.3/

Blog: https://naev.org/

Forums: http://forum.naev.org/ (Forums are lost.)

Changes since 0.5.2:

Portable mode, allowing for Naev’s user data files (saves, screenshots, etc.) to be placed in arbitrary locations.
Afterburners now gradually overheat and have no fixed duration.
Active cooldown allows for rapid ship cooling.
Many typo fixes in missions and lore.
Fixed several rare crashes.

End of the 0.5 Release Cycle

2012-04-07T00:00:00Z

Since 0.5.2′s release two weeks ago, a number of bugs have been caught and fixed, and several minor features have been implemented. We’ve decided to do another release in the short-term (0.5.3) which will hopefully be the last of the 0.5 series.

Following 0.5.3, our major focus will be implementing and polishing the slots proposal (essentially, making a ship’s core systems separately upgradable). This and a number of smaller features will be incorporated into 0.6.0.

Therefore, in order to make sure the last of the 0.5 releases is as bug-free as possible, we urge everyone to report any and all issues. Testing with a Git master build is preferred, as several issues have been fixed since 0.5.2, but bug reports from 0.5.2 are welcome. Check the issue tracker to make sure it’s not a duplicate. Safe flying!

So, afterburners

2012-04-02T00:00:00Z

As some of you may have noticed, the last few releases have introduced changes to the afterburner outfit. Where you could run it continuously so long as your ship had energy before, now it can only be on for a certain about of time, after which it needs to recharge. Also, in 0.5.2, activating the afterburner will abort the autonav.

The reasoning behind this is that the afterburner is a combat-oriented outfit, whereas most people were using it to speed up their ship during travel, particularly during rush missions. Effectively, an afterburner would speed up a ship – a lot – for no appreciable cost. This we wanted to discourage. Speed at long ranges should come from speccing for speed by going light on weapons and using passive outfits, not from abusing the afterburner.

However, some people raised some legitimate complaints about the changes we made. For instance, making the afterburner recharge over the same time period irrespective of how long it was on is unpleasant and counter to what you might expect. Aborting the autonav was just an added irritation, not an incentive not to use the afterburner. After all, afterburning in 1x time would still get you to your destination in less in-game time than not using it in time compression would. Finally, limiting the afterburner’s time wasn’t really making the afterburner ineffective at speeding up the ship over long distances, it was only making it a bit LESS effective.

Reason for us to tackle the problem from a different angle. The afterburner should not be made annoying to use. Instead, it should simply be made unfit for the purposes it wasn’t intended for. To do this, we picked up an idea we discussed early in the afterburner overhaul: making afterburners generate heat.

Heat based afterburners

In their latest incarnation, afterburners generate heat when active, in the same way weapons generate heat when being fired. And, like weapons, afterburners get less effective when they heat up. When the afterburner starts to overheat, the speed and thrust bonuses it provides decrease, until afterburning is no faster than regular thrusting.

An afterburner that's heating up

Because heat drains into the ship much slower than it builds up when afterburning, the afterburner can’t be on all the time even if energy permits. In fact, for the player it’s best to use the afterburner only occasionally and in short bursts. This naturally makes it more suitable for use in combat than for speed boosts across large distances.

The heat based afterburners behave just like the original ones otherwise. They don’t have an enforced recharge cycle and can be used at any time, with the sole exception that it will shut off automatically when completely overheated, and can only be turned on if it’s cooler than 70% of its maximum heat.

Getting rid of heat

Afterburners using heat is nice, but it adds another source of heat to a ship that is already having to deal with heat from other sources. When a ship’s hull heats up, the outfits installed in it won’t cool as fast, or not at all. Especially in combat, this can be a big problem – both for the player and the AI. In fact, a fight can degenerate in what I call “heat deadlock”, where all parties have heated up so much that their weapons aren’t shooting much anymore, so shield regeneration outpaces damage done across the board.

A Lancelot in Active Cooldown mode. When the bar has completely emptied, the cycle is complete.

To combat this, we have introduced a new mechanic to the game, called Active Cooldown. When in Active Cooldown, a ship very rapidly loses its heat until both hull and outfits hit the baseline temperature. The process depends largely on the ship, with small ships taking less than 10 seconds to cool and big ships taking around 30. When you consider that under normal circumstances, it can literally take hours and hours (real time!) to lose heat, Active Cooldown is a very, very fast way to lose heat.

So, you wonder aloud to nonexistent auditory organs, what’s the catch? There are two catches, as it turns out. The first catch is that to enter Active Cooldown, a ship must be stationary, and while it is cooling, it can’t take any other action. So in a combat situation, Active Cooldown makes you very vulnerable. The second catch is that heat is lost at an exponential rate – the longer you wait, the faster heat is lost. This means that it is highly desirable to wait until the end of the Active Cooldown cycle, as opposed to waiting only a portion of the time and then getting back into action. Active Cooldown can’t effectively be “pulsed” to quickly lose some heat in the middle of a fight.

Hopefully, these two changes to gameplay will go a long way in making afterburners the tools they’re meant to be without being disruptive to gameplay, as well as making heat much less of a problem to prolonged trips through the galaxy.

Lua API Docs Added to Naev.org

2012-03-29T00:00:00Z

Naev’s Lua API documentation has finally been integrated as a part of naev.org, under its very own subdomain: api.naev.org.

Some may note that the documentation has been around for some time, and that’s true. In fact, the effort dates to 2008, and has been kept in sync with the code ever since. It’s historically been hosted on a small VPS by bobbens, with a handful of links to it peppered throughout the Wiki, as well as a mention in the IRC channel’s topic (RIP Freenode) (though I suspect 95% of IRC users never read channel topics).

With any luck, making the API documentation more easily accessible will spur on some mission developers. I’d be remiss if I didn’t reiterate a bit of the API documentation’s preamble: Naev includes an in-game Lua console, accessible via F2, by default. It provides access to the majority of the Lua API (excepting a few things that are tied to missions and events, such as the hook module) and is a useful tool for ~~cheating~~ testing code snippets for use in missions.

So, venture forth to Alteris and try something like:

for k,v in ipairs(pilot.get( faction.get("Pirate") )) do v:setHealth(0, 0) end

… because as everybody knows, you’re not having fun until you’re surrounded by spontaneously-exploding pirates.

Naev 0.5.2 Release

2012-03-25T00:00:00Z

The Naev development team is proud to announce the release of Naev 0.5.2. This is mainly a bugfix release, though it also introduces a small amount of content in the form of missions and outfits.

The new asset discovery mechanics have bothered quite a few people, so we’ve introduced a jump scanner outfit that greatly increases jump detection range, as well as local maps which behave similarly to the traditional star maps found in 0.5.0 and earlier releases.

Now, as per usual it’s time for some statistics, from 0.5.1 to 0.5.2:

83 files changed, 2408 insertions(+), 574 deletions(-)

More than half of the added lines come from the dat/ directory tree, thanks in large part to a new event and a repeatable mission for the Sirius faction.

Download: https://sourceforge.net/projects/naev/files/naev-0.5.1/

Blog: https://naev.org/

Forums: http://forum.naev.org/ (Forums are lost.)

Changes since 0.5.1:

New events and missions
New outfits
House Soromid now has a logo
More ways of mapping the universe
Disabling damage leaks through shields
conf.lua-tweakable font sizes for accessibility
Bug fixes

Naev 0.5.1 Release

2012-03-01T00:00:00Z

The Naev development team is proud to announce the release of Naev 0.5.1. It’s been nearly nine months since the release of 0.5.0, but we hope the release is worth the wait. With contributions by some twenty people, it’s one of our larger releases.

0.5.1 was originally intended to be a small feature release, released soon after 0.5.0. Needless to say, that didn’t happen. However, in the time since, 0.5.1 has ballooned into a sizeable release unto itself. We’ve implemented a number of proposals that bring us a few steps closer to our goal for the far-off version 1.0, developed a fair bit of new content, and polished up innumerable things.

As per usual, we encourage players to start new pilots in 0.5.1 for an optimal experience. Of course, older saves can still be loaded, but there are some caveats. Specifically, due to asset and jump discovery, a 0.5.0 (or earlier) save will have its map appear as a series of unlinked systems, as the jumps must be discovered. A number of older missions have also been heavily tweaked, so in-progress missions in older saves may need to be manually aborted.

And now, for some slightly-misleading statistics, from 0.5.0 up to a few days ago:

804 files changed, 48017 insertions(+), 35760 deletions(-)

As well as some less-misleading ones, from the src/ directory:

346 files changed, 14799 insertions(+), 8806 deletions(-)

Since 0.5.0, Naev’s core code has grown by almost 6,000 lines, and we’ve gained more than 12,000 lines, in total.

Download: https://sourceforge.net/projects/naev/files/naev-0.5.1/

Blog: https://naev.org/

Forums: http://forum.naev.org/ (Forums are lost.)

List of changes since 0.5.0:

For Players:

Many new missions, and improvements for older ones.
Soromid faction added.
- Full array of ships for the faction.
- Populated northern area of the galaxy.
New disable mechanic
- Disabling damage is separate from regular damage.
- Player ships can now be disabled, boarded and looted!
- Disabled ships will recover automatically over time.
Jump points, planets and stations must now be discovered through exploration.
Maps now reveal fixed routes, mostly between major factions’ space.
Fancier map search shows details about found items.
New planet and station graphics.
Large AI ships now have greater weapons diversity.
General usability improvements for low resolutions.
Missiles lock on gradually, depending on electronic warfare values.
The tutorial has been substantially expanded and reworked.
Active outfits allow for powerful, temporary abilities to be toggled.
New key bindings make the it possible to use the keyboard most of the time.
- Autonav is now more flexible and can travel to planets in addition to systems.
- Navigate the spaceport with keytips.
Improved faction reputation logic.
- Factions now have ceilings for reputation gained through killing.
- Missions are necessary to elevate your standing beyond this.
- Completing major missions can increase the reputation ceilings.
Landing permissions enhanced beyond the simple boolean (hostile or friendly) model.
- Landing at military and other special assets typically requires high reputation with a faction.
- When you don’t meet the required standing but aren’t hostile, assets are marked ‘restricted’.
Overhaul of spaceport bar NPCs. NPCs will now often say meaningful things and can even help the player out by hinting at missions or updating his galaxy map.
Complete ship health rebalancing.
Store user data in XDG-compliant locations (*nix-only)
Misc. bug fixes

For Developers:

Faction standing and land permission code moved to Lua.
- Reputation is now handled with per-faction scripts.
- Special assets can have unique landing code (e.g. requiring a particular mission to be done)
Large amount of Lua API additions and changes.
Greatly enhanced the in-game universe editor.
XML data (ships, planets, etc.) has been split into individual files to allow greater modularity.
Various faction specific scripts have been reorganized to be in a more logical location, and these script have been tied closer to the master faction definition.
Generally less crash-prone when loading corrupt data.
Misc. bug fixes

XDG Part Deux

2012-02-20T00:00:00Z

As with the previous post, this pertains solely to *nix (primarily Linux and Mac OS X) users. Windows users are warned to avert their eyes to avoid irreversible Unixification.

I’m not a fan of pushing maintenance duty onto end-users, so I’ve done some work to automate the XDG configuration update process bobbens mentioned.

When first running the next release, if old configuration files exist (in ye olde ~/.naev) a prompt will show up, offering to automatically invoke the update script. This will hopefully reduce the process down to simply clicking “Yes” for most users.

Of course, you’re welcome to click “No”, as well. To hopefully handle all distribution cases (whether Naev is run from loose files in a Git checkout, installed via a package manager or grabbed directly from SourceForge) the script is both included in the single-file ndata and available as a standalone file.

With any luck, the configuration update will be smooth and painless. It should also make the coming release less painful for bobbens, because I think if we’d gone the full-manual route and asked package maintainers to correctly run the script for each user, they’d be demanding his head on a pike.

UNIX gets XDG Compliancy

2012-02-19T00:00:00Z

This change only affects UNIX platforms (that includes linux and mac os x). Now in git master we have recently merged changes that should bring Naev up to the XDG Base Directory specification. What does this mean? First off it means that no longer will Naev’s per user stuff sit in “~/.naev” but instead it will be split up so that:

config is in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME or “~/.config/naev”
saves and screenshots are in $XDG_DATA_HOME or “~/.local/share/naev”
nebula and misc cache stuff are in $XDG_CACHE_HOME or “~/.cache/naev”

The bad news, this means that you will have to run our script to move stuff over or it won’t recognize your old config or saves. We should be detecting that and displaying a warning. To update to the new paths all you have to do is run:

$ ./naev-confupdate.sh

However, we do believe this will be better in the long run. Package maintainers should look into incorporating that script for users in post-install hooks or the likes to avoid trouble. Sorry for any inconveniences this may cause.

Activated outfits

2012-02-11T00:00:00Z

Okay, so, on those activated outfits, they’re now up and running in the Git version. For those of you who are curious about how it works, I’ll explain it briefly.

Running a jammer while the afterburner cools down.

An activated outfit is a piece of equipment that does something when manually activated in space. While it’s off it does nothing, but it also doesn’t use any energy. On the other hand, once an activated outfit is turned on the benefit it gives is usually quite noticeable, and can make a big difference if used right.

This means that the abilities activated outfits give you are highly situational and give you more things to worry about than just fly, point and shoot. In some ways, we are moving a little closer to the common skill bar you find in many action RPGs. Like those skills, our activated outfits can have a cooldown period too, which means you need to wait a certain time before you can use that same outfit again.

At the moment, we only have two activated outfits, those being the Missile Jammer (which slows down missiles close to you) and the Afterburner. But we have plans for quite a few other outfits. For example, how about an outfit that instantaneously transports your ship to another part of the system, or an outfit that lets you quickly recharge your shield at the cost of a big chunk of energy? The possibilities are many.

Activated outfits will be in the next release.

Naev is on Desura!

2012-02-03T00:00:00Z

~~I suppose I should qualify that with an almost.~~ Thanks to the efforts of #naev IRC regular oldtopman, we’re all set up ~~and awaiting final approval~~. ~~Once we go live,~~ Naev ~~will be~~ is available via Desura on all of our usual supported platforms (32 and 64-bit Linux, Windows and Mac OS X). The Desura client is presently exclusive to Windows and Linux, but Naev will still be downloadable on OS X through Desura’s site.

For those unaware of Desura, it’s a digital distribution platform. I’ll let Desura’s own about page do the rest of the talking.

Without further ado, here’s a link to Naev’s Desura page:

Update: As of now, Naev is live on Desura!

More happenings

2012-01-23T00:00:00Z

Hello everyone, and a belated happy 2012. It’s been rather quiet here on the blog, but I assure you that’s only because nobody has been posting on it. Elsewhere we’re all still tinkering away on the project, and we’re hoping to build toward a new release in the near future. Before we can do that though, we need to put the finishing touches on the active outfit system. You see, we plan to add outfits you can install on your ship and activate once in space for all sorts of effects… Oh, but I can see you’re not very interested in that. So, let’s move on to something else that’s been happening:

Asset and jump discovery

Discovering assets (that’s planets and stations) and jump points used to be easy. Jump into a system, glance at the system map, voila, they’re all there. But that is changing. Just as ships become undetectable if they’re far away from you, so can assets and jump points be invisible to you, using much the same mechanics. For an easy example, look at the following screencaps:

NOTE These screenshots have been lost to time :(

As you can see, it’s now possible for assets to not be shown on the map until the player discovers them. Now, I should point out that most planets tend to be fairly hard to miss in a star system, so when you jump into a new system you will usually discover all of them immediately, just like it’s always been. The example above isn’t representative in that respect – I simply modified the hide values for the purpose of showing how it works. However, if the system has high sensor interference (inside the nebula, for example), it may be more difficult to find the planets within.

Space stations tend to be a fair bit smaller than celestial bodies however (yes yes, except THAT one). You may have to scout around a system a bit before they appear on the map, and if the station actually makes an effort of being inconspicuous (think hidden military or pirate bases), you won’t easily find them.

Jump points, too, are more difficult to detect than your average planet. You usually won’t spot any jump points other than the one you entered from when jumping in, which means you can’t plot a course to the next unknown system before first finding the way there. So how will you know where the jump points are then? Well, you could fly around and look for them yourself, but there are a number of things you can do to find them more reliably:

Follow other pilots. Especially traders often travel to other systems, and they know all the major routes. If you see a trader fly away from a planet, try following it. Chances are it will lead you to a jump point.
Talk to NPCs in the spaceport bars. Not only do NPCs offer you missions sometimes, they will also give you helpful information. Some may even offer to update your map with locations of assets or jump points if you don’t know them already.
Buy maps. As of the next version of Naev, the Star Map outfit has been replaced by a collection of pre-defined maps. Each map reveals one or more star systems, and may or may not reveal jumps and assets belonging to them. Buying a map for the Empire Core, for example, will immediately update your map with systems in Empire space, as well as the jumps leading from one to the other.

There are also rumors of new, exotic types of jump points, such as hidden jump points that can’t be detected without special equipment, known only to a selected few. There also seems to be a kind of jump point that can’t be detected at all, and that only be used from the other side…

Disabling Revamp

2011-10-16T00:00:00Z

So, this was done a while back; finally getting around to posting about it. Briefly, we’ve changed how disabling works: Instead of auto-disabling when a ship reaches 30% base armour, you can now take disabling damage. As for how this works, weapons can now deal two types of damage: normal and disabling. Disabling damage is only applied when your armour is hit, and this increases your disable damage. If the amount of disabling damage taken exceeds your current armour, your ship is disabled. This applies to all ships and will make it so now you have to outfit to safely disable ships. However, specialized new missiles come to the rescue and provide disabling damage so that you don’t have to sacrifice shield piercing abilities for your cannons/turrets.

As a side note, this now means the player’s ship can be disabled. If your ship is disabled, you can be boarded, so prepare to see pirates boarding your poor, sad ship and looting your hard-earned funds. As a side mechanic, disabled ships do automatically recover after a while, so this means clumps of disabled ships won’t accumulate around dangerous jump points. There are limits to what they can steal, so don’t worry about losing all your credits to a lone pirate. We believe that this will make the game more interesting, especially as we introduce more complex mechanics that will interact with this.

NOTE This screenshot has been lost to time :(

Recent developments

2011-07-24T00:00:00Z

It has been some time since you’ve heard from us, so I’m taking it upon myself to give you all an idea of what’s going on with Naev.

The first thing I should mention is that is is summer for Naev, and summer usually means a lull in activity. It has to do with lots of other things happening in summer, many of them outdoor ones. I think you get the idea.

That said, things have been happening since the 0.5.0 release. The original plan for the next version, 0.5.1, was, and I quote:

14:16 bobbens we can do safe lanes

14:16 bobbens for starters

14:16 bobbens although I’m not sure on the safe lane stuff how to procede

14:16 bobbens we can either go safe lane “simple implementation” first

14:16 bobbens for quick release

14:16 bobbens or go quadtrees and asteroids first

14:16 bobbens for a slower crazy release

Once this discussion was over, we promptly started working on completely different things. One of those things is the revised faction standing mechanic, described in a previous blarg post. But there is more.

Disabling

For instance, work is ongoing on a revised disabling system. Up until 0.5.0, ships would become disabled once they sustained enough damage (to be precise, once armour fell below 20%), and that was the end of it. However, one of our team members (it was me) felt that this was undesirable, and designed something different. Rather than always being disabled through damage directly, ships now accrue “stress” damage, which builds up as weapons do damage, and falls naturally over time. Once stress damage equals the amount of armour the ship still has left, the ship becomes disabled. Assuming the ship is not destroyed afterward, it will come back online after a certain amount of time.

The important part in the above is that stress damage needs to reach the amount of armour health left on the ship. The direct implication of this is that ships with low health are more easily disabled than ships with high health, without tying the concepts of “low” and “high” to the ship’s maximum amount of health. This means that a small ship can be reliably disabled without running the risk of destroying it, for example.

The introduction of stress damage in itself also gives us the opportunity to differentiate weapons further. In practice, this means that most weapons will do minimal amounts of disable damage, much less than their actual physical damage, so that it’s almost impossible to disable a ship before killing it. On the other hand, certain other weapons will deal a lot of stress damage and limited amounts of physical damage, so that stress damage easily builds up toward the critical level.

Missiles

One of our current efforts is to make missiles more meaningful while at the same time not placing too much emphasis on them. In 0.5.0, most missiles are mostly useless, for various reasons. For instance, damage was low and the likelihood of missiles hitting fast targets or targets with jammers was rather low. One of our team members (it was me again) came up with an alternative missile system that would allow missiles to be more useful while hopefully not be too dominating.

In the new system, a missile weapon must acquire a lock on the target before it can fire. To acquire this lock, the target must be kept within the missile lockon area, which is an arc in front of the ship for normal launchers and everywhere for turreted launchers. The time the launcher takes to lock on depends on the lockon time defined for that launcher, and on the level of stealth of the target. As a general rule, small targets are more stealthy than bigger ones. So while an interceptor missile might lock on to a capital ship very quickly, a heavy torpedo would take a very long time to lock on to a fighter. Stealth is further affected by electronic warfare outfits such as passive scramblers and, to be implemented, jammers that must be activated and provide a short-term boost.

Once fired, missiles are quite good at finding their targets. Unlike most of the old missiles, all missiles now predict where their target is going to be, so unless the target can actually outmaneuver the missile, the missile will usually hit. The new missiles also do considerably more damage, so being hit by one can be quite painful. The aim is that most missiles are optimally suited to a certain class of ship, however, dealing too little damage to seriously hurt targets bigger than that and being too slow and sluggish to catch faster ones.

Ship health

A somewhat minor change, but perhaps worth mentioning here is the overhaul of ship health. Where ship armour and shields more or less linearly increased as the ships got bigger and heavier, one of our team members (it was me, sorry) felt a different philosophy should be followed.

Small ships now rely mainly on their maneuverability and their shields, as before. Their hulls are made out of bread, relatively speaking, so only a few hits will be enough to destroy them. Avoiding fire in an engagement is key to survival.

Big ships have received substantial cuts to their shielding. While they still have more shielding in absolute terms than smaller ships, the increase becomes less and less as ships get bigger. On the other hand, armour has been drastically increased. The idea here is that big ships, as big and lumbering as they are, will run out of shields in most serious encounters, but survive on armour for a considerable time after that. When combat is over shields will come back up but armour will not. In this manner, capital ships will get worn down between engagements, and will eventually have to return to a friendly planet or station to make repairs. Of course, this assumes combat will be sporadic and intense, as opposed to constant and niggling (as is currently the case!). All in good time.

I should also mention that shield regeneration has been boosted across the board, hopefully enough to make the regeneration actually matter in the middle of combat. I’m sure we’ll be tweaking that more in the future.

Soromid

Following contributions of some great ship models by Viruk, a new faction has been added to the Naev galaxy. The Soromid already existed as a lore writeup previously, but now they also own ships, stations and planets. In the future, they will also receive their own weapon specialization, and of course their own missions.

You can see a map of their territory to the right. It is located in the north of the galaxy, where previously there were only empty systems. Not anymore!

Also

Our team leader bobbens is working on a personal project as well. You can see the result here.

NOTE Unfortunately the above mentioned screenshot is lost, and there is some mention of bobbens’ toe. I wish I could tell you what that was all about - Synchro

Expanding on faction standing and landing

2011-06-20T00:00:00Z

To provide a brief overview: In 0.5.1, the landing and faction standing mechanics will be changing in a big way. They’re both no longer hard-coded in C, having been moved to flexible Lua scripts that can operate differently for each faction.

Important military outposts and such will now be restricted to factional allies, seldom (if ever) accepting bribes, and attaining standing with a faction will require campaign missions rather than just killing the faction’s enemies.

They don't take kindly to outsiders at Dvaered High Command.

Landing

Landing has long been a rather simple mechanic in Naev. Plainly, being neutral or friendly with a faction means you can land on any of their assets — up to, and including, their primary military and political headquarters. Likewise, if you’re hostile with a faction, you can simply bribe your way into the spaceport.

Yet somehow, it seems that high-ranking bureaucrats and military officers might frown on enemies of the state traipsing around their headquarters after throwing a few credits at the landing control officer. As such, it’s become a priority to do away with the overly-simplistic permission system.

Our new mechanic for this is rather more nuanced. As we’ve done with many things, landing is now handled through Lua — the behaviour is no longer hard-coded in C. The simplistic landable-if-not-hostile model has been replaced with a ternary system that can operate differently per-faction: while civilian worlds will let neutral strangers land, important factional outposts will typically be restricted to allies. Correspondingly, a backwater civilian settlement that you’re hostile with is likely to turn a blind eye if you pay them off, while officers at a military outpost will tend to be far less lenient.

The restricted assets are also divided into tiers. While an outsider will be able to land at most of a faction’s military assets after doing a number of missions for them, key assets such as faction home worlds will remain off-limits to all but close allies.

Standing

A second, closely-related mechanic is faction standing. Like landing, it’s also far from optimal in 0.5.0 and earlier — you can become a faction’s trusted ally simply by going on a brief rampage and killing off a number of their enemies’ ships.

This may even happen inadvertently through normal gameplay. It’s a given that players are attacked by pirates in many areas of the galaxy, and since pirates are a common enemy among many of the lawful factions, simply fighting off pirates ingratiates players with all of these factions.

For 0.5.1, it’s undergoing a substantial revamp. Like landing, the previously hard-coded behaviour has been replaced with a flexible Lua solution. Generally, killing alone won’t take you terribly far. To become an ally of a faction, it will be necessary to do missions for them.

Grunt-work such as cargo ferrying and patrol missions won’t go all the way, either. Each faction has two ceilings on standing. The first is the point at which killing stops increasing your standing, and the other is the limit on how far normal missions can raise it.

To become a faction’s ally, you’ll need to do campaign missions for them. The reputation limit that regular missions can reach will be increased by the campaign missions, essentially representing an increased willingness for the faction to trust you.

The way reputation is gained through killing is also changing. The 0.5.0 reputation system is essentially omniscient. If you kill a pirate out in the middle of nowhere with no witnesses, your standing will still go up with all pirate enemies.

The new system operates on two levels. Killing a faction’s enemies in systems that the faction inhabits will trigger a normal standing increase, because you’re directly defending them and their populace. The other case is where you’re fighting a faction’s enemies outside of the faction’s space. In this instance, killing a faction’s enemies only increases your standing if the faction has a ship that’s within sensor range.

Plainly put, a faction should only take notice if your actions affect them in a direct manner. The Empire shouldn’t care if you kill a pirate deep within Sirius space, nor vice versa.

We hope that these mechanics will make general faction relationships more compelling, and ideally they will serve to distinguish factions from each other, rather than faction standing polarizing into lawful versus lawless, with one group of factions at 100% and the other at -100%.

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.

Naev 0.5.0 Release

2011-06-03T00:00:00Z

Screenshot of Naev 0.5.0.

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

OpenAL showcase

2011-05-18T00:00:00Z

With 0.5.0-beta2 out the door I decided to work on more videos to show off missions and fancy things we do in Naev. I first decided to record the OpenAL effects (EFX) we do in the nebula. For this I decided to show off the “Destroy the FLF base” mission. If you do not want to be partially spoiled I recommend you do not watch the video. Although it is really cool.

Effects to notice:

Positional sound (basic for OpenAL)
Doppler Effect (depends on velocity)
Air absorption factor (sounds like you’re under water)
Reverb (also helps make it sound like you’re underwater)
Speed of sound changes (depends on nebula density – also for sounding underwater)

For the implementation I’m using the SW OpenAL implementation by KittyCat. Which should work on all systems that support Naev, so I highly recommend it. With the SDL_Mixer backend you do not get all these fancy effects. Some of these effects are also active when not in the nebula and especially notable is the pitch shift with time compression. So I highly recommend you all use the OpenAL backend.

Now without further ado here is the showcase video of the mission:

FLF Base showcase video

I’m not an OpenAL expert, so if anybody has any advice or recommendations, I’d love to hear them. This isn’t final so it may sound different in the 0.5.0 release. Of course I haven’t touched this part of the sound code in 2 years or so. We’ll see.

(Sorry for the 4:3 resolution also, I promise I won’t do it again)

Naev 0.5.0-beta2 is here!

2011-05-14T00:00:00Z

The Naev devteam is proud to announce the release of Naev 0.5.0-beta2. This is the second beta and is closer to a release candidate than a beta. We do not anticipate any major issues unlike with 0.5.0-beta1. We prefer to have another beta so the 0.5.0 release is rock solid.

Links are available on the downloads page.

Screenshot of Naev 0.5.0-beta2.

The changelog is as follows:

Features
- All missions reviewed for playability, many fixed and otherwise improved
- New mission and other minor content additions
- Timed cargo missions are less punishingly difficult
- Weapon cycling account for heat – coolest fires first
- GUI improvements
  - Ship heat is represented by a bar
  - Turrets have an indicator for how well they can track the current target
  - Better-optimized for narrower screens
  - New graphics
    - New background nebula images
    - Several new portraits
    - New planets and systems
    - Autonav exit condition can be set to anywhere between missile lock and 100% armour
    - Time acceleration multiplier can be limited to avoid lagging on slower computers
    - Minor improvements to ship and outfit availability
    - Sound system improvements
    - Support for using system Lua/Luajit/Csparse libraries
Bugs
- Credit modification glitches fixed
- Remedied a variety of minor compiler issues
- Typo fixes in missions, planet and outfit descriptions
- Ships will no longer jitter when taking damage while getting ready to jump
- Many graphical elements (player messages, target indicators, etc.) now ignore time accel
- Camera no longer jitters when flying away from targets rapidly or in the nebula
- Camera fixes for afterburner rumble in conjunction with the Sol nebula
- OSD text can never overflow past the translucent background.

We hope you enjoy this release!

Naev 0.5.0-beta1 released!

2011-04-02T00:00:00Z

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.

The Naev 0.5.0-beta1 release.

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!

What if Naev had cheat codes?

2011-03-17T00:00:00Z

Many of you will have used the in-game Lua console to cheat, or at least know how to. But I was thinking, what if cheating was a feature? So I came up with this for the on-start event:

``` godsequence = {“left”, “right”, “left”, “right”, “target_clear”, “target_clear”, “target_clear”, “hail”}

function create () player.pilot():addOutfit( “Laser Cannon MK1”, 2 ) hook.input(“input”) isgod = false godcode = 0 end ```

function input(key, pressed) if pressed and key == godsequence[godcode + 1] then godcode = godcode + 1 if godcode == #godsequence then togglegod() godcode = 0 end elseif pressed and godcode > 0 then godcode = 0 input(key, pressed) end end

function togglegod() isgod = not isgod player.pilot():setInvincible(isgod) if isgod then player.msg("God mode!") else player.msg("God mode off.") end end

As you can see (or not), it adds a cheat code to the game much like the codes for old console games. The only way it would be better is if it responded to “IDDQD”, but that can’t work for a variety of reasons.

Note, this isn’t actually ingame. You’re going to have to keep using the console to get your mad cheats.

New tutorial

2011-03-16T00:00:00Z

You’ve all seen it. The message asking you if you wanted to play a tutorial whenever you created a new pilot. Well, I’m pleased to say that message won’t be bothering you anymore, because the tutorial has a new face.

Main menu with tutorial button

So, a new tutorial. What is different? Well, first of all the tutorial isn’t based in the regular game anymore. Where the old tutorial desperately tried to give you a quick crash course on how to play right at the start of the game, this tutorial is accessed right from the main menu, taking its time in a special training environment, teaching the basic concepts without worrying about the player flying off somewhere because, well, he can’t. So, hopefully, the new tutorial will make the learning process smoother for new players.

Another thing that is different is that the new tutorial is split up into several distinct modules, each module focusing on a limited selection of concepts and ignoring all the rest. This is good, because it means that our fledgling, ignorant player-in-training can revisit specific parts of the tutorial without having to sit through the whole thing again.

At present, six tutorial modules are coded up. These are: Basic operation, Interstellar Flight, Communications, Basic Combat, The planetary screen, and Missions and events. A further two, Advanced combat and Trade, will eventually be added. I say eventually, because both combat and trade are parts of the game that are in for a serious overhaul. Writing tutorials about them now would be pointless.

Most of you will already know how to play the game, so a new tutorial won’t help you much, but hopefully this step has made Naev that much more accessible to new players.

Merge into Master

2011-03-12T00:00:00Z

As a good sign of what’s going on, all changes have been merged into master and development is now going to be done there. Some stats on the change:

naev: Edgar Simo master * rc7d316d / (9 files in 3 dirs): Merge branch 'balance' of git://github.com/Deiz/naev into tutorial (+1161 more commits...) - http://bit.ly/fmcrdB

[bobbens@ghanima (~/usr/prj/naev)] $ git diff origin | wc -l 133349

As you can see it’s a pretty big change. I’d consider it a new game. Anyway, on the 0.5.0 beta we’re waiting on finishing the new tutorial and then we’ll do some quick check ups and code analysis before the release. This won’t be the official release, just a beta as it’s still buggy and such. However it does give a change to get some mass testing done to get a nice polished 0.5.0 release. So after over 1000 commits and 100k line diff we are finally nearing the awaited 0.5.0 release, albeit with like a 3 month delay of the original goals, however this release is so ambitious I believe it’s totally worth it.

Manual Zoom and Dizzyness

2011-03-07T00:00:00Z

It has come to my attention that numerous people become dizzy while playing Naev. As it is to my interest that no physical discomfort happen while playing Naev I’ve dealt with probably the first cause which is the zoom. While the zoom is nice to have automatic (and you can tweak it’s behaviour), it seems like it can make people dizzy. So Naev now has an option to enable manual zoom. It is controlled by mouse wheel, however I’ll probably add key bindings in the near future.

Location of the checkbox to enable manual zoom.

This is a start. If anybody experiences dizziness still with Naev 0.5.0 I’d be very interested in feedback and investigation into what exactly triggers it to try to solve the issue.

Wikinaev

2011-01-21T00:00:00Z

As part of our move to become more independent from Google’s services, which should allow us more flexibility and comfort, we have decided to host our own wiki. This wiki will allow us to organize proposals, todo and overall design considerations by centralizing them. This does not make either the forums or the mailing list obsolete, but complements them. It’s not fully fleshed out yet, but it is already far superior to the old one. If you are interested in Naev and would like to contribute to the wiki, feel free.

One decision we have taken on the wiki is that we do not want every planet to have it’s own article. The wiki should focus on general information for both developers and players, without recording individual details. So, while the Empire faction gets it’s own page, the planet Em 5 does not. As with all wikis, we ask that you please do not add stuff you would like to see in game directly without getting the approval of a devteam member. However, you are completely free to write a proposal and submit that for review. You are all welcome to use the Naev wiki, let the editing begin!

Naev Etymology

2011-01-14T00:00:00Z

Today we’ll talk about the name of this game: it’s history, pronunciation and how to write it. First off a bit of history, as you probably do know, NAEV originally stood for “Neutron Accelerated Extreme Velocity” although “Not Another Escape Velocity” was also widely accepted. The original idea was to sort of create an improved clone of the original Escape Velocity game. However with the 0.5.0 release we will transcend that. Naev is no longer a clone and therefore no longer an acronym, it is now a proper noun. So from now on no more NAEV, only Naev! You may notice I have been changing that, this unification of criteria will make it easier to handle and no longer cause confusion.

Now onto pronunciation, how is it pronounced? In case someday we hold a Naev meet or the likes we should all know how to pronounce it so we don’t make a mess and fools of ourselves (we probably will anyway). The proper way to pronounce Naev is /nɑ.ɛv/ if I got right my symbols (would need confirmation). I know most of you pronounce it more like knave, but trust me, that is wrong.

For those who still have doubts on how to pronounce: Naev Pronunciation

Naev /nɑ.ɛv/ An open source action/RPG space video game.

NOTE Unfortunately it looks like we will have to rely on phonetic spelling due to a missing sound clip.

0.5.0 Alpha Gameplay

2011-01-08T00:00:00Z

Recently the new x.org brought me frustration. My open source driver broke down and I was left without being able to run Naev. After realizing I needed a kernel upgrade I found out the biggest benefit of gallium3d: I can make videos! So kudos to the open source ati driver team. Here’s a video showing off preliminary 0.5.0 alpha gameplay in the balance branch.

Things to note:

I’m using forward cannons, swivel for the win!
Using HatlessAtlas’ new AI, it’s harder to follow and track them
Pretty backgrounds (for those who haven’t seen 0.5.0 in action)
Smooth camera and dynamic zoom (zoom will be revised a bit more probably)
New rumble (it’s preliminary, but much smoother)
Penetration model (I barely get hurt – maybe more balancing needed)
New weapons

This is not meant to be a really serious video, just me fooling off and showing my awesome ship build and mad skills.

Naev 0.5.0 Skirmish

0.5.0 Status Update

2010-12-31T00:00:00Z

Lots of you have complained about accuracy in Naev and hitting stuff with forward mounts. As part of the increased range and weapon rants it was unbearable in the sense you never hit anything unless you went point blank. I am proud to announce the implementation of swivel forward mounts. That means all weapons have a tendency to correct minor errors in accuracy. The longer the range generally the more they compensate. This also works similar to turrets with electronic warfare, but generally the accuracy is much higher with forward mounts than with turrets. Hopefully this will make forward mounted weapons actually usable.

You can check out the changes in the every unstable balance branch on github.

NOTE This screenshot has been lost to time :(

0.5.0 Status Update

2010-12-21T00:00:00Z

We haven’t posted in a while, so I decided to update even though we don’t have anything spectacular done (depending on your definition of spectacular). So what is going on? As you may know the current development and broken branch is the balance branch (This branch is now long dead, unsure of the commit sha). This branch is active and will mangle your saves if you load it. Why? It’s caused by the implementation of the weapon rant, which makes it so all the weapon are changed. Some retain their name, but most get lost in the transition. This is unavoidable and will happen to everyone once it’s merged back, but it shouldn’t happen again then.

Other things, ewarfare has more or less been balanced. We’ve introduced another parameter for heat. So the more your ship heats up, the more visible it is. The equations are also tweaked in such a way they make more sense and are cooler overall. Also turrets finally use it, so you can’t track a fighter with a long range anti-capship turret. This all may still need fine tuning but it is working quite well.

Another major change which has broken a lot of missions is the fact we’ve changed the time model. Previously time only changed when you landed or jumped. Now time will change while flying too. That means that slower ships will waste more time in system while jump times will be very similar. This sort of makes everything more interesting and realistic which is quite cool. However it means we have to revamp all our cargo missions which we want to rethink anyway when we do economics. For now we’ll probably keep them similar to how they’ve always been, but in the future we’ll change it.

Finally mentioning some changes we want to do. With google being more and more evil, we’ve been thinking of completely foregoing both google code and google groups. We’re working on having our own wiki which shouldn’t take too long to be available. If someone is really interested in helping out we can sort of speed it up and spread the half-finishedness. It still needs lots of love. Secondly we’re considering the possibility of also hosting our own mailing list, but we’ll see about that. That hasn’t even been started.

Closing words on the release. The original intention was to release end of 2010, however we believe it is much more important to have a good solid release than a half-finished rushed release that will need a dozen bugfixes to be playable. We would like to still release at the end of 2010, but chances are we’ll just do a beta at the start of 2011. There’s still much to do, need to finish some stuff and then fix everything we broke. To speed up the release we are trying to delay changes that aren’t fundamental, however we also want this release to sort of establish the maturity of Naev, but chances are 0.6.0 will be the true maturity once we get there.

tl;dr We’ll release when it’s ready :)

NOTE This screenshot has been lost to time :(

Correct Physics

2010-11-23T00:00:00Z

WARNING: TECHNICAL POST

After much insistence on Deiz that something was wrong since we needed a hack to get ships to properly display 100% speed, we’ve finally found the culprit. Some old code of mine that what it did was:

c void limit_speed( Vector2d* vel, const double speed, const double dt ) { double vmod; vmod = VMOD(*vel); if (vmod > speed) /* shouldn't go faster */ vect_pset( vel, (vmod-speed)*(1. - dt*3.) + speed, VANGLE(*vel) ); }

What does this mean? It may seem like a good idea to limit the speed by modulating the velocity directly. There is also a dt in there to try to make it not frame dependent. However let’s analyze the consequences.

The important question is: what is the maximum velocity? The way stuff is done we’re cascading the limit_speed with the physics model. We can simplify it to an euler integration (it’s actually runge-kutta but I’ll talk about that a bit latter):

v_1 = v_0 + a dt

Everyone should be familiar with that. I won’t go into details from where that comes from. Basically it means that the current velocity is the last velocity plus the acceleration times the time that passed from the last instant. This is then chained to the limit_speed which does:

v = (v_1 - v_{max})(1 - 3dt)

So we can write the composite form as:

v = (v_0 + a dt - v_{max})(1 - 3dt) = v_0 + a dt - v_{max} - 3 dt v_0 - 3 a dt^2 + 3 dt v_{max}

Now we can see the problem. What should be linearly dependent on the dt to cancel out the dependency on the frame rate is now quadratically dependent (notice 3 a dt^2). This means that the velocity now does indeed depend on the frame rate. That’s bad. The physics model shouldn’t depend on the frame rate. How can we fix that?

The most logical and simple solution would be instead of hardcoding a limit_speed function outside of the physics engine to integrate it. What does the physics engine work with? Forces. What should we do? Create a virtual force dependent on velocity.

A bit on our physics engine. The physics in NAEV is modelled as differential equations and is solved generally with Runge-Kutta. It all sounds really complicated but it isn’t too much. If you want to go into detail take a look at src/physics.c.

First the philosophical meaning of this force. What does it represent? Why do ships have speed limits? This limit represents the ship’s stabilization systems. To allow the ships to have artificial gravity (the ones that do) and fly around so well with turning, they need complex stabilization systems. So what we’re modelling is some sort of drag force.

Now onto the force itself. After much discussion ranting and throwing of equations we finally managed to model it. The current model is:

f_{stabilization} = k (v - v_{max})

It’s much more simple, behaves really well and allows really simple max speed calculations. Your max speed is when the forces acting on your ship are 0. When does this happen? Easy, v_{realmax} = speed + \frac{thrust}{k}. We’ve found that a good value is k = 3 .

Other notes, while doing this revamp I improved the current engine. Thrust is relative to the ship, that means that rotations are smoothed out really nicely by the Runge-Kutta algorithm. Same happens with the new stabilization force. This means the physics are smoother than ever. The system was also improved to handle fast ships and jump ins without instability. What we saw originally was that when your ship was moving really fast, the stabilization force caused instability in the physics engine. This meant your ship would end up at infinity about a second after jumping in. However the new improved engine can handle any speed by chopping up the simulation more finely when the ship is going fast.

Other notes we also have a hybrid physics engine now, in the sense it can do both Runge-Kutta and Euler for different objects at the same time. I’m quite proud of it. The player may be asking what to make of all this? Well you probably won’t feel a thing, but let me assure you it’s much more awesome.

EDIT: It’s been pointed out that if you go back to the equation originally you could have looked at how the units did mismatch. We all learn from our mistakes, how stupid they may be :) .

Fancy new menu

2010-11-16T00:00:00Z

After lots of nagging and harassing of developers we finally have it! The great epic new fancy main menu background, and what could be fancier than naev itself? Yes the background is a system (specifically it’s the start system for now). It’ll be a bit fancier in the future but you can now enjoy the awesomeness. No more boring backgrounds! Check it out!

NOTE The screenshot has been lost to time :(

NAEV 0.4.2 is now available in openSUSE

2010-11-12T00:00:00Z

While development continues towards 0.5.0, increased availability of the current stable release is always a good thing. NAEV can now be found in the openSUSE Games repository.

See here (this link is dead :() for downloadable packages for openSUSE 11.3. There are also packages built for a number of other RPM-based distributions, including Mandriva and Fedora listed by the build servicehere (this link is dead :(), downloadable from here (this link is dead :(). It appears that you’ll need the naev and naev-data packages; after installing both, NAEV should be ready to play.

Big Big Systems

2010-11-10T00:00:00Z

So what happens when you take big systems and inject them with pure essence of big? You get Big Big Systems. How big are we talking? If an old system maybe had an effective radius of 3.75 kpx or so, now we have radius of 25 kpx. That’s a pretty big increase. How long does it take to fly across it? It’s likely faster than before thanks to dynamic time compression.

A brief overview of how this is handled; There are currently two ways to trigger dynamic time compression:

Activate autonav
Right click on the overlay map

What it does, essentially, is increase the time compression until your ship reaches an “effective” speed of 2500 m/s. That means all ships behave nearly identically, be it capital ship or light fighter. This means that capital ships are much more playable now.

Can’t leave you without a pretty screenshot, so this is what a big big system looks like. As you can see there’s a YOU and GOTO on the map and dynamic time compression is at 27.1x. My Empire Hawking is flying from YOU to the GOTO. On the map overlay you can also see friendlies flying nearby.

So what’s next? Balance. Balance? Balance! It’s going to still take a while, but it’ll be damn well worth it. For those following Git, big big systems are still in the balance branch and haven’t been merged into bigsys yet.

NOTE The screenshot has been lost to time :(

Mouse Targeting

2010-10-24T00:00:00Z

Possibly what could be considered the last of the large planned features has been implemented. This is mouse targeting. Well what does mouse targeting mean. It has two implications, the first is that in the regular game screen while flying around you can now target ships. However you can also target jump points, planets and ships with the overlay map. This means that you do not necessarily have to go through long boring cycles to try to select a ship to board, or a ship on the map.

Hopefully the feature will be cool and enjoyable for all. If someone doesn’t exactly like the implementation or think it could be better (or more natural) don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.

Finally, what is next? Well now we have the long complicated task of balancing and implementing new outfits. This daunting task will be done in the “balance” branch as it will most likely mess up everything. We’ve already integrate some of the ideas from the forums like the damage rejection. It seems like we may be ahead of schedule for 0.5.0, but I make no promises.

Next steps to 0.5.0

2010-08-23T00:00:00Z

I’ve been asked multiple times what the ETA for 0.5.0 is. For now, the answer is “when it’s done”, but going over the TODO, it seems like it’ll be around New Years. Many of our original goals are done, but the list seems to grow faster than features are finished; here’s what’s left:

Weapon Revamp – Removes secondary weapons in favour of dynamic player-defined weapon groups (WIP).
Tech Editor – Incorporate a technology editor to allow balancing technology and the likes much faster.
Finish GUI – With the weapon revamp we should be finally able to get a new awesome epic GUI done. This builds upon the Lua infrastructure we now have for GUI development.
Finish Electronic Warfare – One of the major 0.5.0 objectives. It’s more or less implemented, but needs to actually have the outfits and ships use it. The major issue is balancing, which is complex to say the least. This is when we merge ewarfare into bigsys.
Advanced Time Compression – Sick of flying around slow in your big capital ship? Dynamic time compression will make travel fast and fluid when out of combat. When you enter combat you’ll revert to your ship’s normal handling characteristics. This is mainly to allow large slow ships to be less tedious to fly, especially in big systems.
Overlay Map – We want a Diablo 2-style map overlay in the big systems, the current infrastructure isn’t cutting it. With big systems there’s so many things in each system it’s hard to keep track of things in the minimap. An overlay will allow you to see whole systems, more or less, without sacrificing the minimap’s usefulness in combat. You’ll be able to toggle it on command.
Finish Big Systems – With the overlay and electronic warfare done we want to finally complete big systems. This means systems will be even larger and you’ll have intra-system travel and combat. Time compression will make it all painless and the overlay will make it so you don’t get lost. This is when everything gets merged into master.
Beam Rewrite – Beam weapons are due for a makeover. They’re currently an awful hack. They shall be moved into their own infrastructure and be upgraded to comply with OpenGL ES specification. The AI will also start using them efficiently.
Mouse Usage – Target cycling is cute, but when each system has 30+ ships in visible range, selecting a specific ship is tedious. This will allow mouse targeting and limited mouse flying (have the ship face the mouse, etc.) among other things.
Heavy Testing – This is a huge release, so a beta will likely be released. NAEV is typically quite stable and bug-free, but we’d like to avoid pure-maintenance releases in 0.5.*. We’ve had our share of embarrassing bugs during past releases and we don’t want that to happen again.

As you can see there’s a lot of stuff left. That’s a lot of work not to mention all the new content we’re getting done in parallel. You might think that 0.5.0 is the end of the line but we have many many more ideas which will most likely be for 0.6.0. So as you can see we aren’t being lazy nor inefficient, we’re just overly-ambitious. The end goal is to have 0.5.0 be a mature and stable platform for which all you modders and content developers will be able to mess with. Anyway, bear with us, this release is going to be epic. Most of you who only played up to 0.4.2 will have to relearn the entire game as it’s much more advanced. However don’t fear the change, it’s for the better and has been all heavily discussed and analyzed before being implemented. If you still worry, feel free to grab a copy of the ‘ewarfare’ branch on git and drop us some a line on IRC, the forum or the mailing list.

Some stats to give you an indication of the magnitude of the change:

bobbens@ghanima (~/usr/prj/naev)] $ git diff NAEV-0.4.2 | wc -l 78621

Yes, that’s nearly 80k line changes in the diff from the latest version and that’s with the gigantic TODO we have left. Scary, huh?

Bobbens out.

Background effects: Improving screenshots since 2010.

2010-08-16T00:00:00Z

Space is an immense, largely vacuous void. The ratio of nothingness to interesting phenomena is pitifully high. Among even those rare phenomena, the amount perceptible by the human eye pales in comparison to wider-wavelength recording combined with false colours.

Fortunately, however, NAEV is a game, not a simulator. It’s a bit boring to fly over endless blackness with nothing but stars to keep you company. Ships and large planets, while pretty, come and go with alarming rapidity.

To that end, we’ve endeavoured to make NAEV more visually enticing by implementing support for background graphics. In all, there are more than 30 backgrounds, with more to come, hopefully. I suppose it’s time to let the pictures do the talking (Note: They’re much larger in-game):

NOTE The screenshots have been lost to time :(

Save the Events!

2010-08-12T00:00:00Z

After a post in the forum reminded me that it’s stupid that events can’t save themselves. I have decided to correct that. So finally after ages of having events sort of naturally die we have persistent events. Events work different from missions and in this aspect too. For an event to be saved you must explicitly tell it to be saved with evt.save(). This will make it save itself. Also added sanity checks, but there is always the danger (unlike with missions) that an event goes crazy and can’t complete. The player since he has no control over this won’t be able to eliminate it and over time we may have an issue with event bloat in save games. Hopefully this won’t happen since I’ve added checks for the common cause of events becoming inert, which is not having any hooks.

Either way I hope having events can lead to a more dynamic universe in the sense that some small scripted actions can appear randomly. Something like scientists screaming in falling elevators but in outer space. So keep your eyes open for scripted coolness in development version (or 0.5.0 when it’s released).

Arch Linux: NAEV now included in Community repository.

2010-07-29T00:00:00Z

The packages (naev and naev-data) are still quite new, so some mirrors may not have synced yet.

Special thanks to cleanrock, who created and maintained the Arch User Repository PKGBUILD, and to those who voted for NAEV’s inclusion in the official repositories, without which we’d likely not be packaged.

NAEV forum added.

2010-07-24T00:00:00Z

To complement this blog, we’ve now added a forum to the site.

It’s somewhat bare at the moment, but it should provide a good venue for feedback, and it’s certainly a more familiar format for many users who aren’t used to mailing lists and IRC channels.

The observant NAEV players among you may have noticed that the blog and forum logos differ from what’s in-game (as of 0.4.2). That’s thanks to Scaatis, and there’s a forum thread on the art he’s contributed here: (NOTE This linked to the lost forums). Typographical geeks may notice that the new logo is in fact an ambigram.

In time we’ll also roll out a proper (non-Google Code) Wiki here on naev.org and integrate it with the forum.

It’s shiny and new.

2010-07-16T00:00:00Z

I’ve griped numerous times that between releases, NAEV is a very quiet project.

The vast majority of our discussions occur on our IRC channel (Freenode), which typically has around 30 users. Each of our releases sees thousands of downloads, yet even the mailing list has less than a hundred subscribers.

That is to say, our discussions never reach more than 5% of our user base, and that’s being very generous.

So, in the hope of alleviating that and keeping interest in the project between releases, we’re going to be posting status updates here. Hopefully it’ll also provide a good venue for questions and answers, for the less IRC-inclined.

Sporadic NAEV Newsletter Vol. 1

2010-07-16T00:00:00Z

Hello,

As I’m aware, much of our community isn’t on IRC, so I’ve decided to start a Sporadic NAEV Newsletter to try to show off what is going on and what we’re doing these days with NAEV. This could be the last and I don’t know when the next will be done, hence “sporadic”. Off we go!

State of 0.5.0

As the changelog indicates, we’ve been working on two of the major features of 0.5.0. Namely, the all-famous big systems and electronic warfare. Currently development is being done off of master to keep that “playable” while we develop separately. There are two branches you can check out:

bigsys (Has big systems – Last updated in May.)

ewarfare (Has big systems and electronic warfare – Cutting edge.)

The idea is to try to finish electronic warfare and merge ewarfare into bigsys. Then merge bigsys into master leaving most of the release done. Afterwards polish and content would be added to get a well-rounded epic release.

Currently there is no ETA for release, but it should be out before the end of this year, potentially much sooner depending on available time and volunteers. As with 0.4.0 there will be one or more beta releases when we’re nearing release completion. The first will probably appear when bigsys is merged into master.

Big Systems

Flying over a large planet.

So what are these famous big systems? Well as the name states, it consists of making the current systems much larger. Not just in terms of system size, either – Planet and station graphics are now much larger, too. To be able to balance the gameplay with larger systems and to add more interesting missions, jump points have been added. You can no longer jump in or out from arbitrary points – Interstellar travel is done through fixed points. This removes the ability to simply outrun your enemies – They’ll sit on the jump point and wait you out. Missions can also make use of this, requiring players to bypass blockades, or set up their own.

Getting ready to jump.

Another major feature is that now ships really land. They shrink and then disappear into the planet’s atmosphere (or station landing bay). This means you can no longer gank NPCs while they sit over planets, which adds more realism. Needless to say, NPC pilots are also able to take off from planets.

As big systems is a really big update, a whole bunch of new features have been added to round it out. First the universe has been expanded and many more planets have been added – Most systems now have several planets. This is now done via the in-game editor that appears when developer mode is enabled (–devmode in the console).

Secondly, the entire spawn system has been overhauled. There is now a governing spawn AI for each “presence” of a faction in a system. You define assets that create “presence” that bleeds over the map and that will automatically spawn the ships. It is much more robust and sane, although until it’s better balanced (and electronic warfare is finished) it leads to perpetual, chaotic battles in contested systems.

Lastly, the entire tech system has been overhauled using labels and groups instead of a 0-10 “sophistication” level, which allows for increased diversity among planets.

Outfit Sizes

One of the newest features (recently merged into the electronic warfare branch) is the concept of slot sizes. All low, medium and high slots now have a secondary attribute, size. Sizes can be light, standard or heavy and indicates how large of an outfit you can mount in a slot. This is added as a hard limit because with CPU power being the only true limiter, it was quite easy to put fighter bays and huge batteries on small ships, making them nearly impossible to fly.

A Pacifier with a mixture of heavy and standard slots.

The slot sizes also allow better differentiation among ships. Which is to say, a fighter with six light high slots can’t come close to matching the firepower of a cruiser with six heavy high slots.

In the future we’ll also have unique slots – Used for very large weapons (i.e. spinal mount) that only fit on purpose-built ships.

New House: Sirius

The Sirius House has been implemented with custom graphics by enigmatic. It is not done yet, but you can fly around their systems and check out their ships. We hope to have missions and more content for them before the next release.

Future Steps

The current plan is to try to actually balance the electronic warfare branch while creating all the weapons discussed on the Weapon Trees Rant. The idea is to first implement as many of the weapons that do not need more advanced functionality and then balance them as discussed in the electronic warfare thread so that the evasion, cloaking and detection parameters make sense.

Afterwards it will be merged into bigsys branch and work will be done to better integrate the two. Basically, we’ll consider whether systems should become larger, and what sort of time compression scheme should be implemented for intra-system travel. Most likely at this time we’ll try to implement the Lua GUI scripting so that the user interface can be more advanced and players can even customize it themselves.

Finally, bigsys will merge into master and the first beta will be released soon after. During this time we will concentrate on polish and content to try to make an epic 0.5.0 release.

And so concludes Volume 1 of the Sporadic NAEV Newsletter (SNN).

Edgar

Naev Blarg

Naev 0.13.3

Changes since 0.13.2

Naev 0.13.2

Changes since 0.13.1

Naev 0.13.1

Changes since 0.13.0

New Year, New Forum!

Naev 0.13.0

What’s new?

Platform support changes

Changes since 0.13.0-beta.5

Full Changelog

Gameplay

Quality of Life

Contents

Engine

Fixes

Naev 0.13.0-beta.5

Changes since 0.13.0-beta.4

Naev 0.13.0-beta.4

Changes since 0.13.0-beta.3

Naev 0.13.0-beta.3

Platform support changes

Changes since 0.13.0-beta.2

Naev 0.13.0-beta.2

Download size wins

Platform support changes

Changes since 0.13.0-beta.1

Naev 0.13.0-beta.1

What’s new?

Platform support changes

Full Changelog

Gameplay

Quality of Life

Contents

Engine

Fixes

Advent of the Plugin Manager

Au Revoir Github, Hello Codeberg

What is Codeberg?

Migration Steps (for Development)

Remaining Steps

Naev 0.12.6

Changes since 0.12.5

The Road to Rust

What does this mean?

What has been done?

What can you do to help?

Naev 0.12.5

Changes since 0.12.4

Naev 0.12.4

Changes since 0.12.3

Naev 0.12.3

Changes since 0.12.2

Naev 0.12.2

Changes since 0.12.1

Naev 0.12.1

Changes since 0.12.0

Naev 0.12.0

Full Changelog

Naev 0.12.0-beta.3

Changes since 0.12.0-beta.2

Naev 0.12.0-beta.2

Changes since 0.12.0-beta.1

Naev 0.12.0-beta.1

Full Changelog

Sporadic Naev Newsletter Vol. 4

Less Pirates in the Early Game

Naev, now in 3D!

Linear Energy Regeneration

Quality of Life for all!

Concluding Remarks

Naev 0.11.5

Full Changelog

Naev 0.11.4

Full Changelog

Naev 0.11.3

Full Changelog

Naev 0.11.2