Update: September 2023

Welcome back for another Drifters update. This month got a little off course, but I was able to add in a lot of new content while doing some much needed cleanup on UI and backend.

Ship Editor

UI Improvements

I ended up spending way more time on the ship editor screen than I'd intended, but I was able to improve basic user functionality and offload UI logic to sub components for ease of maintenance.

I rearranged a lot of elements in the screen to streamline the experience. I added a button for getting advanced ship info (this part still needs work), freeing up a lot of screen real estate which was long overdue. I also added a second column to the ship selection sidebar which saves a lot of scrolling.

Better Weapon and Hullmod Modals

I also added in some sorting/filtering functionality to make it easier to find stuff. Among this was categorizing and sorting hullmods/weapons by faction make. I suspect as the number of weapons and hullmods continues to grow as it is being able to quickly filter things will become invaluable.

I reworked the weapon hardpoint button icons in the ship editor. I was going for more stylized icons initially, but they looked bad. So colored squares of varying sizes it is! Such minimalism, very modern.

Inventory Integration

Hullmods now require items to equip them in the ship editor. They also have an additional amount for building them in, requiring several copies of the hullmod to apply it. This functionality will be dummied out for development, but it's a simple flag to enable it.

I also went through and populated the item data for all existing hullmods.

Ships

Didn't get in any sprite reworks like I'd wanted, but I was able to populate the data for Glith ships which was missing for most of them. I also added in a new pirate ship for the added Menace ability.

Bully: The second "capital ship" of the Kleptocracy. Essentially 4 Surveyor class mining ships ripped apart and welded together, the Bully class capital ship trades firepower and armor for speed, allowing it to hunt down smaller ships with ruthless efficiency. Its broadcast system is capable of overwhelming enemy comms channels with terrifying threats of death and violence, shaking the morale of their opponents and weakening their will to fight. As with the Infestation class which is made of of cargo pods, the Kleptocracy doesn't have the manufacturing capabilities to make proper capital ships, but they CAN haphazardly glue things together to get something of a similar size.

Weapons

Hybrid Weapons

While working on the ship editor, a lot of backend stuff needed to be ripped up and redone. I ended up doing some refactors to generalize the logic for matching a hardpoint type to the weapon type for checking if they're compatible. This made it much easier to add in hybrid hardpoints and other future weapon types.

Hybrid mounts can equip either of the two types of weapons they represent. They also support equipping hybrid weapons in either of the two mounts they slot in. The new hybrid mounts are called Armament(kinetic/missile), Particle(energy/kinetic), and Fusion(missile/energy).

Impossible and Universal Weapons

Weapons can also be assigned an Impossible type, which prevents some internal technical weapons from being listed/possible to equip.

Universal will no longer match with Support and Hangar, as the latter two are supposed to be special and more ship specific.

Firing Delay Mechanic

I was able to sneak in a quick feature for projectile weapons. They now have a firing delay attribute, which exists after firing the weapon before any projectiles come out. This will likely only be used sparingly, mainly to make some larger weapons seem beefier by giving them a charge up time while also giving them a slight counterbalance. I gave the Trebuchet and Catapult artillery a decent delay.

New Weapons

I added in a handful of weapons for the Kleptocracy upon realizing they had very few of them. As is typical with those wacky pirates, most of the stuff they have is either Mad Max style, stolen from other factions, or super outdated.

• The D12 Autocannon is basically a super old variant of the more modern C-series of autocannons produced by the AFG. It's cheap and easy to obtain in large numbers, making it useful for pirates. Small Kinetic.
• The Claw is essentially a giant harpoon launcher...in space. Over time I'm kind of digging the spikey aesthetic initially started with the Injector, and wanted to channel more of it, resulting in the Claw. It has shield piercing, similar to the Jouster from the Asendency, being that they both fire massive pieces of jagged metal to big/fast for a shield to stop, though the Claw is intended to be more of a hit and run medium ranged type weapon with low uptime, rather than a brawling weapon like the Jouster. Medium Kinetic.
• The Juggler Bomblet Launcher fires a bunch of unguided slow moving bombs, serving as a cheap generalist missile slot. Medium Missile.
• While working on hybrid weapons I also added the Glith large particle weapon Vector.

Abilities

In addition to new abilities I've added in new flags to control their behavior, which can cover a lot of the weirder edge cases that were beginning to crop up in ability design. Abilities now have flags for disabling weapons while in use. They also have a flag to automatically disable them when the ship is overloaded, and another to allow them to be activated even if the ship is overloaded.

New Abilities:

• Thermal Stabilizers: Upon activation, any nearby allied ships of lower size tier that are overloaded will lose their overloaded status and be set to 50% heat or lower.
• Backpropagation: Using this ability will cause the ship to become increasingly stronger with each use. Developer Note: I'm especially happy with how this turned out as I envisioned this ability way back last summer when I was first developing the combat system. Despite seeming pretty simple on paper, the amount of prerequisite tech I had to build out to get this working has been crazy, and the fact that I was able to get it ingame in about 2 hours under a relatively straightforward implementation once I finally had said tech is a testament to how far things have come.
• Tractor Field: All enemy ships of lower size tier will be pulled towards the ship.
• Coolant Injectors: All flamethrower weapons will generate no heat while active.
• LEECH: While active, enemy energy based projectiles will be turned into "motes" and drawn into the ship. Each mote will regain stamina and lower heat by a small amount. Generates a lot of heat while in use.
• Disposable Heatsinks: Ejects heatsinks from the ship, instantly cooling the ship 50%. Limited Charges.
• Armor Patcher: Shoots globs of molten metal at friendly ships that grant Armor Regeneration status effect.
• Cloak: Becomes completely immune to most weapons. Cannot fire weapons while cloaked. Collisions with other ships still happen.

Shields

Shields will generate heat while in use.

Hullmods

Built in Hullmod Perks

Hullmods now support having differing perks depending on whether or not they've been built in. I'm not focused on using that mechanic just yet, but it was easy enough to add while I was rewriting hullmod code.

More Hullmods

Lots of new hullmods. Many of them Marrock themed.

• Chain of Command: At the start of combat a capital ship with Chain of Command will be selected and designated as a command ship. All destroyers with Chain of Command equipped will gain a boost to armor and stamina loss, so long as the command ship remains. Losing this ship will remove the buff, incur a 20% stamina penalty, and inflict Demoralized for 1 minute. Unlike other hullmods gets cheaper to equip the bigger the ship.
• Second Wind: Regain 20/15/10% stamina on winning a fight.
• Shieldless: Removes primary shield in exchange for a boost to armor resistance.
• Inferno: Flamethrowers cause more heat but have more damage
• Regenerative Plates: Every 5 seconds restore armor, scaling with ship size. Decreases ability charge rate and ion resistance.
• Thermal Redirectors: Energy weapons will do more damage above 50% heat capacity, in exchange for doing less damage below it.
• Frosty: Grants immunity to Demoralized. Built in to all Marrock ships by default

Status Effects

• Armor Regeneration: Restores armor every few seconds. Stacks with Regenerative Plates.
• Demoralized: Doubles the speed of natural stamina decay.

Collision Reworks

I went through and added in more collision layers to the combat system, simplifying some of the logic. There's still a lot I want to do with that in mind but I realize it will be a more gradual change.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed beam weapons with multiple emitters not updating the secondary emitter's range when a perk changes it
• Fixed bug with perk handler not properly updating perks with dynamic stat modifiers
• Mothballing a ship in the ship editor now properly sets the damage overlay texture