Naev Development Blarg (Page 1)

• Sporadic Naev Newsletter Vol. 4

  BY BOBBENS, ON JULY 21ST, 2024

  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!

  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.

  

  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.

  

  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.

  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.

  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.

  

  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!

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• Naev 0.11.5

  BY NAEV DEVTEAM, ON JUNE 13TH, 2024

  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:

  

  

  

  

  
  

  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

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• Naev 0.11.4

  BY NAEV DEVTEAM, ON MARCH 9TH, 2024

  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:

  

  

  

  

  
  

  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

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• Naev 0.11.3

  BY NAEV DEVTEAM, ON JANUARY 25TH, 2024

  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:

  

  

  

  

  
  

  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

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• Naev is now available as a Native Apple Silicon app!

  BY NAEV DEVTEAM, ON JANUARY 15TH, 2024

  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:

  

  

  

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