Naikari 0.2.0

We have another new update to Naikari! This release contains a number of improvements we’ve been working on for the last month, including interface improvements, logo changes for special occasions, pre-installed weapons for newly purchased ships, an expanded ship stealing mission, music changes, outfit changes, and more! We hope you enjoy this release.

Changelog

• Changed the land and takeoff music to be the same as ambient music.
• Adjusted balancing of outfits and ships, most noticeably changing the Kestrel’s two large fighter bay slots to medium fighter bay slots and making the Huntsman torpedo much stronger.
• All ships now come with pre-installed weapons when you buy them, not just your first ship.
• The warning shown when warping into a system with a volatile nebula now shows exactly how much damage your shield and armor take from it, rather than only showing the direct volatility rating.
• AI pilots now launch fighters if they have fighter bays.
• Several new fighter bays have been added (mostly miniaturized versions of existing fighter bays, but also three variations of a Shark fighter bay).
• Hired escorts that are created on restricted planets and stations now pilot factional military ships.
• The Info window’s missions tab now displays the current objective according to the OSD.
• Logo now lights up red for Autism Acceptance Month, turns into a rainbow for Queer Pride Month, and turns into aromantic pride colors for Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week.
• Asteroid Scanner now always shows you scan information for asteroids you can see, rather than only after you’ve targeted them.
• Replaced Improved Refrigeration Cycle with the Rotary Turbo Modulator, which does the opposite of what the Improved Refrigeration Cycle did and serves as an equivalent to the Power Regulation Override outfit for turrets.
• Instant mode weapons now show up on the weapon bar in the Brushed GUI.
• Ship Stealing mission now allows stealing of non-designated targets, at the cost of having to pay for the entire value of the ship (meaning it can’t be used to make credits, it can only be used to steal particular ships you want to add to your collection). If it fails, it keeps running so you can steal a ship of your choice instead, and the OSD message changes to note this.
• Adjusted how much money ships carry to hopefully make illegal piracy more rewarding and make pirating pirates less rewarding, while also adding variety to piracy (some factions carry a lot of credits, some carry very little).
• Pirates no longer have a one-way hidden jump to Collective space (which served no purpose and was essentially just a death trap).
• Adjusted speed and size range of background nebulae and stars so they look nicer.
• Ship Stealing targets now lose most of their ammo in addition to armor and battery, and their armor regeneration is now disabled.
• Added a limit to mercenary group size in systems with low paying faction presence.
• Normalized some wonky presence costs, which in particular prevents Za’lek drones from outnumbering pirates in systems where they’re supposed to have lower presence than them.
• Added a new set of stations and hidden jumps to help pirates get to Sirius space.
• The Brushed and Slim GUIs now hide the radar while the overlay is open.
• Maps now each have their own individual graphics, rather than all of them sharing the same graphic. The graphics are screenshots showing a Discovery mode map window showing just the information provided by the respective map.
• Improved the way music tracks are chosen, preventing needless music changes and allowing nebula ambient music in factional areas.
• Fixed some pirates on pirate worlds being described as civilians.
• Afterburners no longer cause the screen to wobble.
• Removed the “Time Constant” tutorial, both to avoid making the system look more significant than it is and because the information about how to equip ships is redundant now that this is effectively self-documented (with all ships coming with reasonable weapons).
• Removed the ability to delete ship logs, which was a feature that didn’t have any real utility for the player and risked deleting important information.
• Simplified the ship log display, removing the “log type” selector and adding a display of the currently selected log.

Known Issues

We found in our testing that this release has no serious issues, but we did encounter some minor issues that are fixed for version 0.3.0. We decided not to include these fixes in the 0.2.0 release because they are minor and the fixes need to be tested to ensure no regressions were introduced. The fixes may be backported depending on how long it takes to get version 0.3.0 ready. The issues are as follows:

• The pirate cargo mission has a problem where it will sometimes (depending on your location) incorrectly calculate the number of jumps to the destination, leading to them rewarding less credits than they should and warning you that you don’t know the fastest route.
• Stealing cargo from other ships can sometimes cause you to have phantom standard cargo in your list with an amount of 0 tonnes. This is purely a cosmetic defect and will either sort itself out when you get more of the cargo in question, or can be fixed immediately by jettisoning the phantom cargo.