Naikari: Eye of Chaos 0.11.0

We’re massively overdue for an update to Naikari: Eye of Chaos. This is largely due to personal life events (most notably a legal name change), but that hasn’t stopped us from getting some interesting things done for this release!

The biggest focus of this release has been continuing work on the Hakoi Pirates campaign. It’s still incomplete, but several new missions have been added to it, featuring an infiltration into pirate ranks and a prelude to an impending crisis. These aren’t the only new missions added; a new generic repeatable mission has also been added which spawns out in space, following up from the Space Family mission, where you rescue someone and drop them off on any inhabited planet.

But that’s not all we worked on in this release. We also made several tweaks to gameplay and the interface to touch up the experience in several areas. A map has been added to the Cargo tab of the Ship Computer, which helps easily figure out where you should go to sell commodities you’ve picked up from derelicts or asteroids. Less-than-lethal weaponry has been substantially buffed. The way reputation loss works has been tweaked in such a way as to avoid punishing you for self-defense quite so severely. And very notably, the formula used to calculate speed penalty for going over engine mass limit has been adjusted in a way that makes keeping within your engine mass limit much more important than it previously was.

These are the changes we feel are the most significant, but there have been several other smaller changes as well. See the changelog for a full list of changes.

As always, if you try this release, please let us know what you think!

Changelog

Major Changes

• Added a trio of outfits called “Thrust Bracers” (one for each slot size). These outfits boost engine mass limit in exchange for use of a structural slot.
• Added a map to the Cargo tab in the Ship Computer which works the same way as the map on the Commodity tab in the land window.
• Added an event where a pilot is in distress and needs rescue, following the Space Family mission (but these follow-up rescues have a less strict completion requirement of just needing to land on an inhabited planet).
• Removed the “Buy Local Map” button which was previously found on every planet. This means you can now only buy a local map at planets with an outfitter.
• Increased the power of less-than-lethal weaponry; damage output of Heavy Ion Cannon, Heavy Ion Turret, and Medusa Missile outfits has been substantially buffed, and damage penalty when using Weapons Ionizers has been decreased from -70% to -20%.
• Added more missions to the Hakoi Pirates campaign.
• Touched up the way reputation loss from combat is handled in an effort to avoid punishing the player for self-defense.
  • Killing a faction’s ships alone now only drops your standing down to as little as -20%. (Your standing can still go below that as a result of distressing, so this only protects against further standing loss for self-defense.)
  • Attacking civilians now causes standing losses to all main factions present in the current system, in a manner similar to standing losses that happen when you attack a faction’s allies.
• Increased the speed penalty for going over the engine mass limit. Going slightly over will still be fine in general, but the situation where the wrong engine was often ideal has been substantially mitigated. It’s also now virtually impossible to fly a large ship with medium or small engines without the help of thrust bracers.

Other Changes

• Enabled the teleport event which can happen when a Za’lek test engine is equipped. (The code was there, but it was turned off.
• Touched up the way audio volume and “brown noise” is handled during time compression. Now, in nearly all cases, maximum time compression leads to regular audio getting muted and the compression “brown noise” playing at full volume. (Previously, this was highly dependent on the TC Velocity setting as well as the speed of your ship, which could lead to situations with some ships and with some TC Velocity values where maximum time compression would come with an obnoxious, continuous high-pitched screeching noise coming from the engines.)
• The Nexus campaign now follows the Baron Prince mission and is more directly tied into the Baron campaign.
• Removed the third Nexus mission.
• Added a portrait for Baron Dovai Sauterfeldt and adjusted the initial description of his appearance to match. The portrait is used in the Shark mission.
• Lowered risk reward for cargo missions (which means their rewards don’t shoot quite as high in areas with high pirate presence).
• Jump transition shader is now black instead of white.
• Board key now auto-targets a boardable pilot if none is selected (like the land and hyperspace keys).
• Distance you can gather gatherables from is based on the size of your ship, rather than a constant.
• Adjusted the AI refueling code so it’s a bit more reliable when the pilot it’s trying to refuel is moving.
• Changed the explanation of what a “skate-board” is in the Prince mission.
• Removed the “Ian’s Courage” mission (since its purpose is outdated and it contradicts the direction we’re now taking Ian Structure’s character).
• OSD entries will now abbreviate themselves if there is not enough room to show all OSD entries of every mission.
• Reworked the way reputation gain and loss from combat is calculated. The effect is fairly subtle, but it should make these reputation changes feel less static.
• Removed the “visible messages” option; maximum visible messages is now controlled by the GUIs.
• Reorganized the Options menu to make it more compact and intuitive.
• Removed pirate maps from standard pirate outfitters and instead added them as possible offerings from black market dealers on pirate strongholds.
• Introduction mission (“Point of Sale”) now hilights the planet it tells you to land on.
• Added an explanation of what “TC” means in Ian Structure’s second mission.
• Removed the “Hitman” missions in Alteris.
• The OSD now hilights missions in the current system orange instead of white (so you can see at a glance which entries are most immediately relevant).
• Added a new Ragnarok Beam shop graphic recently added to Naev.
• The sub-entries in the OSD used by the second Ian Structure mission now get hilighted alongside the main entry.
• Slightly changed some of the UI colors: text entry boxes now display white text instead of green, the Lua console now prints gray text instead of green, the list hilight color has been changed from green to dark blue, the news feed is now white instead of green, and the dots indicating full knowledge of a system in the discovery mode of the starmap are now gold instead of green. (In short, there’s a lot less of the color green.)
• Dvaered reputation is no longer gained when you do Empire missions.
• Increased the time the game will wait before spawning the Baron mission after declining it.
• Progress toward gaining Dvaered standing is now displayed in the OSD for the fourth Hakoi Pirates mission.
• Changed default value of TC Velocity from 5000 to 2500.
• Dvaered pilots from the warlords battle event are no longer used by other missions and events. (This fixes a bit of weirdness when it interacts with the Seek and Destroy mission.)
• Improved the visibility of the filled dots in the travel and discovery modes of the starmap; they are now smaller, but with black outlines.
• Changed the “friend” and “hostile” colors to make them more colorblind-accessible, particularly with protanopia and deuteranopia. (The previous colors weren’t entirely terrible, but they weren’t the most ideal choice.)

Bugfixes

• Fixed an issue with radar clicking in the Legacy GUI.
• Fixed a regression which caused speed limitation to not work correctly at very small values.
• Fixed image arrays (e.g. outfit lists) causing mouseover alt-text to show up when keyboard navigation was used even if the mouse wasn’t over the image array.
• Fixed player selling fuel getting counted as mission earnings for the purposes of hired escorts (which caused them to take a cut from the sale).
• Fixed an issue where some fighter bay shop graphics would get stretched in certain contexts (such as the GUI’s weapon display).
• Fixed Shipwrecked August staying hilighted after you rescued its occupants.
• Fixed a bug which caused autonav actions to not successfully supersede and cancel auto-hyperspacing.
• Fixed the Credence in the Teenager mission spawning with empty shields and battery.
• Fixed the Credence in the Teenager mission coming with credits and cargo that you were able to loot.
• Fixed some repetitiveness in the text of the third Hakoi Pirates mission.
• Fixed Laser Turret MK1 mistakenly having twice as much mass and damage output as intended.
• Fixed the Seek and Destroy mission not spawning an informant at load time.
• Fixed an issue where the Seek and Destroy mission could refer to bar informants as “the pilot”.
• Fixed a bug where attempting to clear target while Autonav is attempting to board would lead to the nearest boardable target getting immediately selected. (Clearing the target while attempting to auto-board now aborts Autonav.)
• Fixed a grammar error in the Power Overdrive Module description.