Naev Development Blarg (Page 3)

• Naev 0.11.0

  BY NAEV DEVTEAM, ON DECEMBER 23RD, 2023

  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.

  
  

  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

  BY BOBBENS, ON DECEMBER 14TH, 2023

  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:

  

  

  

  

  
  

  

  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

  BY BOBBENS, ON DECEMBER 9TH, 2023

  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:

  

  

  

  

  
  

  

  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

  BY BOBBENS, ON DECEMBER 3RD, 2023

  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.

  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:

  1. Significantly reworked universe map to fit existing lore
  2. House Sirius completely reworked
  3. Significantly improved autonav that uses lanes and is configurable
  4. Reworked structural outfits and number of ship slots
  5. Weapon sets are more simple with no distinction between weapons and non-weapons
  6. 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:

  

  

  

  

  
  

  

  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

  BY BOBBENS, ON SEPTEMBER 5TH, 2023

  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.

  

  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 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.

  

  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!

  

  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 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.

  

  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.

  

  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!

  ---