Naikari 0.5.0

It’s been months since Naikari has pushed out a release. Time to fix that! The reason this release took so long this time is because we were working on possibly the most tedious task we’ve ever worked on for either Naev or Naikari: more or less completely redesigning the universe! The redesign’s effects on the game are subtle, but important; it helps to make exploration more worthwhile (you can’t just get all the important outfits from Empire and Dvaered space anymore.

But that’s not all! This release contains a whole bunch of huge changes designed to address some criticisms brought up by a YouTuber who played Naev recently, and then was kind enough to give Naikari a try. The main theme with this update is it’s designed to make Naikari’s combat more fun and more of a focus, while also tearing down barriers to accessing content that we inherited from Naev. Having finally been able to test it, we’re very happy with the result so far, though there is still a lot of work to do. Probably the most important changes to that end are:

• Added a new automatic bounty system, which rewards you for killing random pirates, making the random pirate encounters actually beneficial to you.
• Added a new “escape jump” maneuver, which allows you to escape from a combat situation with the press of a button at the cost of some fuel and half of your armor.
• Enhanced differences between weapons; ranges and behavior vary a lot more than they previously did.
• Removed the “standing cap” system, which allows you to gain as much reputation for factions as you want, using whatever method you like.

And there’s still more; see the changelog below for a full list of changes. We hope you enjoy this release! :slightly_smiling_face: As always, please let us know what you think, and if you encounter any problems or have any criticisms, feel free to report them on the issue tracker or in the comments section.

Changelog

Major Gameplay and Design Changes

• Cargo missions now reward much more credits if they are on a route that has pirate presence.
• Increased the amount of health medium-heavy and heavier ships have.
• Weapons have been heavily altered. Weapon damage, range, and behavior vary a lot more widely than before.
• Removed the faction standing cap system. You can now gain as much reputation as you want with all factions (even the Collective). This also means all ships and outfits are available to obtain without having to resort to piracy.
• Added refined Unicorp platings, which serve as a middle-ground between the basic plating and the S&K platings. These new Unicorp X platings use the graphics of the Unicorp B platings Naev used to have.
• Added automatic bounties awarded whenever you kill a faction’s enemy within a system it has presence in (e.g. killing pirates in systems with Empire presence, or killing FLF pilots in systems with Dvaered presence).
• Coupled together Frontier and FLF standing: if you are enemies with the Frontier, FLF standing will not go any higher than your Frontier standing (and your reputation will drop to enemy status when you become enemies with the Frontier).
• Buffed the Rotary Turbo Modulator.
• Buffed the Gawain’s speed and takeoff speed. (It was already the fastest ship in the galaxy before, but the difference is now more pronounced.)
• Increased variation of commodity prices.
• Removed the mission computer bounty missions and the Assault on Unicorn mission as these are now redundant (bounties are earned without having to have a corresponding quest).
• Significantly improved the Seek and Destroy mission: difficulty levels have been added (like the old bounty missions had), the way NPCs behave is now more customized per-faction, and when you arrive at the appropriate system, you now need to locate your target within the system (similar to the ship stealing mission). The mission also now rewards you immediately upon completion instead of requiring you to land to collect your reward.
• Replaced the news entry generator, which previously just generated random filler with no connection to the story, with news entries that are relevant to the player, like mission hints.
• Added “escape jumps”, which allow you to engage your hyperspace engine without actually going into hyperspace, taking you to a distant part of the system at a cost of one jump of fuel, all of your battery charge, half of your remaining shield, and half of your remaining armor. (The maneuver takes you a distance of around 30,000 mAU.)
• Converted the Reynir mission into a hidden tutorial for the local jumps feature and changed the rewarded commodity from Food (hot dogs) to Luxury Goods (robot teddy bears), making it more rewarding.
• “High-class” planets now require 10% reputation instead of 0% to land on.
• Removed the DIY-Nerds mission (the one where you take a group of nerds to a science fair or something). It never felt all that important and wasn’t really worth doing.
• Civilians and traders will now always offer to refuel you if you cannot make a jump, even if you don’t have credits to pay them.
• Collective drones will now refuel you if you are friendly to them.
• Added a rare “refuel request” event which causes an NPC pilot who needs fuel to request assistance from the player in exchange for some credits.
• Essentially completely redesigned the universe, most notably changing what planets sell, but also changing or removing some planets and systems. The new design has the following characteristics:
  • All planets contain a common set of basic outfits, which includes the “MK1” forward-facing variant of each type of weapon, basic stat enhancers, maps, the Mercenary License, and the low-quality zero-cost cores.
  • Each faction has a different set of weapons that they sell, with Independent and Frontier planets getting the weapons of their neighbors. The Empire sells laser weapons, the Soromid sell plasma weapons, the Dvaered sell impact weapons, the Za’lek sell beam weapons, and the Siriusites sell razor weapons.
  • Made sure every planet has a purpose within the system; no more redundant, useless planets that you would never want to land on, unless those planets are “low-class” (making them useful to outlaws).
  • Planets and stations that require more reputation to land on give progressively more access to exclusive ships and outfits, and progressively better outfits in general.
  • Planets with both an outfitter and a shipyard have their outfits chosen deliberately to compliment the ships they have on offer.
  • All licenses needed to purchase all outfits and ships on a given planet are available for purchase on that same planet (no more need to go looking for the license you need).
  • Changed jump points in some locations (particularly in Sirius space) to avoid inordinate numbers of dead-end systems. Dead-end systems still exist, but they are now much less common and an effort was made to ensure that the ones that still exist are worth going to for some reason or another, or otherwise serve a legitimate gameplay purpose.
• The race mission no longer requires you to be piloting a yacht ship to participate, and the ships you race against are more varied.

Other Changes

• All bar missions are prevented from spawning in Hakoi and Eneguez until you finish the Ian Structure missions.
• The Empire Recruitment mission is now guaranteed to send you to a nearby planet with commodities as well as missions.
• Removed a random chance that existed of pirates attacking to kill (meaning they will now always stop attacking and board you as soon as you’re disabled).
• Added some rescue code to the starting missions in case the player takes off their weapons, installing new laser cannons for them in the moment that they’re needed.
• The Options menu now always shows 1280×720 as a stock resolution choice, even if not listed as a supported mode by the OS (since that is Naikari’s default resolution), and no longer shows a choice with the resolution you were at when opening the Options menu.
• Double-tap afterburn is now disabled by default.
• Replaced “cycles” with “galactic years”, which are 36,000,000 galactic seconds long (360 galactic days). Lore-wise, time units are now defined in relation to our 24-hour Earth days, meaning the new galactic year is exactly 360 days.
• The economy system no longer tracks “price knowledge”. The player now always has perfect knowledge of pricing variation for all discovered planets and systems.
• The patrol mission now rewards you immediately upon completion without having to land in the faction’s territory first.
• Changed the unit of mass used from tonnes to kilotonnes (meaning we no longer have the silliness of space carriers weighing less than naval aircraft carriers, etc).
• The game no longer refuses to resize a maximized window if you tell it to in the Options menu. (This change also fixes bugs with the code that implemented this restriction.)
• Changed the way autonav detects “hostile presence” for the purposes of determining whether to reset the speed that time passes. It now only counts ships that are close enough that one of the two ships will be within weapon range soon (or already are). This avoids most unnecessary time slowdowns while also being cautious enough to give advance warning to the player.
• Made it so that the debris graphics in asteroid fields are entirely separate from the asteroids themselves, making it more obvious which asteroids are real and which are just decoration.
• Changed the relation between real-world time passage and in-universe time passage: one real-world second is now equal to 750 in-universe seconds, rather than 30 in-universe seconds as before. In tandem, the primary components to a date have been changed from year, hour, second to year, day, second. (In-game time-related things have been changed to now use days instead of hours; for example, jump time is now one day instead of one hour.)
• Changed the distance unit used from kilometers to thousandths of an astronomical unit (mAU).
• Changed the display of unidirectional jumps in the map to use the color black for the exit-only side, rather than white. This is a bit more intuitive and also should be easier to see for colorblind players.
• Auto-saves are no longer disabled when landing on planets that do not refuel you. Instead, the design philosophy is being shifted to ensuring that unwinnable states are impossible anywhere you’re allowed to land.
• Made NPC mercenaries no longer explicitly enemies with pirates (though they will still usually attack pirates due to their “bounty hunting” behavior).
• The System Info display now shows planets’ color and character (indicating whether or not they can be landed on) on the selection list, which makes it much easier to navigate.
• Default weapons for ships now vary (instead of all of them using laser weaponry); Sirius ships have razor weaponry, Dvaered ships have kinetic weaponry, and Za’lek ships have beam weaponry. (Soromid ships already had bio-plasma weaponry since that was the only option.)
• Improved the patrol mission’s detection of hostile ships and made it more sensitive.
• Reworked bullet graphics to make better use of what’s available. There are no longer large numbers of weapons using the same graphics as each other.
• Race missions now use random portraits, rather than always one particular portrait.

Bugfixes

• Fixed some problems with the way the Combat Practice mission closed out.
• Fixed the rescue script that activates when you take off, which had several small problems in how it worked caused by changes that weren’t properly accommodated.
• Fixed a bug which caused the game to sometimes try to change to an arbitrary small resolution (640×480 in all observed cases) on some systems (noticed on Windows, but may have affected others) when clicking OK in the options menu.
• Fixed a problem where the Waste Dump mission would make your own escorts hostile toward you if you aborted it while in space.
• Extremely high turn rates no longer have the potential to mess up autonav during time compression.
• Fixed a rare bug caused by dying while in the landing procedure.
• Fixed possibility of dying while landing due to nebula volatility.
• Added code to prevent phantom 0 kt cargo entries from showing up in your cargo list.
• Fixed escorts of AI ships not jumping when their leader jumped (which left them adrift in the system indefinitely).
• Fixed the player being allowed to board and steal credits from their own hired escorts.
• Adjusted the music script to hopefully fix an uncommon bug where combat music played while landed.
• Fixed a double land denial message when attempting to land on something you’re not allowed to land on with the land key.
• Fixed a game-breaking bug where the “animal trouble” event made it impossible to proceed with the game without rescuing yourself via the Lua console due to a script error.
• Fixed spawning of hostile mercenaries by the third Nexus mission (it was spawning the mercenaries, but failed to set them as hostile to the player).
• Fixed Za’lek non-drone ships being impossible to hail, as with drones.
• Fixed AI ships which spawned prior to you entering a system being uncooperative and/or unresponsive.
• Fixed a 14-year-old bug where the comm_no flag of AI ships (the one that caused the text “No response” to be printed rather than showing the comm window when you hailed them) pointed to an arbitrary ship, rather than necessarily pointing to the relevant one. This usually didn’t have noticeable effects, except that it caused Za’lek boss ships to be unresponsive, as if they were drones, most of the time.