Category: gratuitous space battles

Hey there, remember Limpet Modules in Gratuitous Space Battles 2! You know…these things…

Well I’m updating them for the next patch. In the past, we had two forms of limpet launchers, Weight-based ones (Which stuck to an enemy fighter and weighed them down, thus slowing them and making them easier to hit) and Tracer ones, which did the same but gave an overall bonus to hit rather than affecting speed. Now we have two more..

The REPAIR limpet and the REFUEL limpet. These do what their names suggest, in that they repair and refuel YOUR fighters and gunships mid-battle. They have to clamp to the fighters just like the ordinary ones, meaning they *will* slow down your ships temporarily while they do the business, but on the plus side it means those ships can often be repaired and refueled without having to fly all the way back to the nearest carrier to do so.

More information on these, and visuals of it happening in this INCREDIBLY EXCITING GSB2 blog video thingy below. If you like this sort of video blog thing let me know and I’ll keep doing them,. They take decades to upload from the field I work in, so I don’t get to do them that often.

So…today I uploaded the windows copies of Gratuitous Space Battles 1.29. (Other platforms will follow). Here are the highlights of the patch (but a lot more has changed).

Identical voice messages now need twice as long a delay between repeats.

Were you getting as bored with ‘Enemy systems scrambled’ as I was? If so… this makes it less annoying :D

Fixed bug the formation order in a sub-deployment didn’t load in correctly.

When you loaded in sub-formations (squads) on the deployment screen, you sometimes had formation lines going off into nowhere. Fixed!

Damage indicator feedback in-battle adjusted to be less ‘spammy’ when multiple shots hit in close proximity.

Still not perfect, but where you get lots of fighters attacking a single ship, you are no longer blanketed with UI popups…

2 New missions added (Pyrataxian Ambush & The Slarthoon Belt).

Oh yeah!..And one of them is a cool new ‘ambush’ style layout where you start the battle surrounded. I’m interested to see how people get on with that one…

Mid-battle and end-battle statistics now track radiation damage in full.

This was very annoying, but now its fixed so you can see just how effective these weapons can be. Spoiler: very effective.

There is still a lot of balancing stuff to do, and lots more to add. The good news I have found and fixed another hard-to-reproduce sound-related random crash bug, so the game should be super-stable now. If you had crashes before, please try the new build it is TONS better. That sound bug was a horrible multi-threaded related crash that only happened at certain combinations of CPU speed and game-speed, but I found a way to reproduce it with some cunning Sleep() calls on my ninja PC. Definitely fixed now!

I plan on adding some new features, and new missions over the coming weeks. We are still very interested in getting people to do lets plays and review the game, or add it as a steam curator./ If you have a popular youtube account / steam curator account, email cliff@positech.co.uk and say you want a copy :D.

I’m still working on bug fixes and other tweaks and improvements for Gratuitous Space Battles 2. There were, i have to admit, more bugs than I expected. I expected bugs in beta, and a look at the change-list will show you I fixed a LOT of them. What I didn’t expect was such a huge difference between the number of reported bugs in beta and those on release. I can only assume beta players were more forgiving, or maybe expected bugs they didn’t report to get spotted and fixed anyway. With a simple game thats possible, but with a big complex beast like GSB2 and 1 programmer…not so much. If you find a bug in 1600×900 res only when you have bloom turned off, on an asteroid map where you are using decoy projectors against camoflaged enemy dreadnoughts… There is a good chance I never encountered that combination. There is only one of me :D

So here is the change-list (so far) for the next patch…

1) Mouse wheel now scrolls the message screen inbox.
2) Inbox now formatted better. Also this screen now has a ‘challenges’ button.
3) Fixed bug where some combinations of graphics options could result in a blurred white battle screen.
4) Fixed crash bug in ship design screen when a ship encounters layers with zero physical sprites.
5) New tutorial message pops up (English only) when you try to save a fighter/gunship design with no engines or fuel tank.
6) Fixed graphical bug on some resolutions on the ship design screen when changing hull size types.
7) Ship design loading dialog now sorts by name correctly.
8) Fixed shader error message / potential problem on ship design screen for screen resolutions of 900 height.
9) Fixed bug where fighters who started returning to a carrier would not pick a new carrier if their first choice was destroyed.
10) Fixed cursor flickering on some low-spec machines.
11) Added new options to the in-battle visual options to toggle on/off asteroids/hulks/nebula clouds.

I’ll likely push this out tomorrow. I’ll probably also increase the unlock costs of a lot of items as well, and maybe sneak in a performance boost I worked out whilst looking at some code…

One of the things I’ve learned, AGAIN, releasing GSB2 is that vocal people get very angry about lists of content. GSB2 has 11 missions. The expectation is that people then enjoy challenges against each other, but people seem to keep complaining that there are only 4 races and 11 missions. GSB1 had 4 races too, but apparently because extra races got added in DLC, those are expected in the base game, so people expect 8 races and 20 missions.

The irony is, that sort of stuff is pretty cheap and easy top do (although with GSB2 it would boost the download size a lot). Adding another 11 missions is relatively easy (compared to the thousands and thousands of hours that went into the ship-editing and engine-redesign). I guess adding extra missions will be one thing that encourages people to leave better steam reviews, that and increased stability, which I’m pretty sure I have now, and even more so with this next patch.

So lesson learned, don’t ship with the amount of content you think makes sense and is reasonable. Ship with double that. I’ve already set aside time to do it.

In the meantime, if you are enjoying the game, please leave a steam review. I know 99% of you don’t leave reviews, which means I’m kinda dragged down by the 1% who had crash bugs which are now fixed but never changed their reviews. :(

Bugger.

On another topic, I’ve been pretty miserable lately. I’ve got increasingly sick of checking email/forums/tweets each day to get another few pages of abuse, snark, sarcasm and bile thrown at me. Pretty much every game developer I know gets the same treatment. Apparently this is acceptable behavior. It isn’t. I’m trying to dial-down my use of sites like twitter, facebook and public forums and stay away from the corrosive atmosphere of people online. Lets not even mention the steam forums, and the abuse you see there.

So you might be see me post a lot more about technical topics as opposed to business / pricing / sale / industry stuff. There is nothing you can say online on those topics that doesn’t apparently invite abuse and sarcasm. Not to mention ‘advice’ from people who have never sold anything in their lives, but apparently can see immediately why I am so penniless and unsuccessful.

Bah :D