I’ve turned attention away from long term expansion pack (campaign) stuff today to get patch 1.29 released for the core game. If you have entered an on-line code the game will autopatch sometime over the next 24 hours. If not, you will have to wait until I push the patch out to steam, gamersgate etc. People who kindly bought direct (the really cool people) can redownload the whole game if they really want to, or wait for the auto-patch.
The changes are thus:
1) Fixed a number of typos (thanks david!)
2) Game now automatically creates a new almost-empty default design if you delete every ship design, to prevent empty design list crash.
3) The range circles are now also shown on the currently dragged ship on the deployment screen
4) Fixed display bug where the tooltips over the deployment screens ship blueprints didn’t take race and ship bonuses into account.
5) Fixed crash bug when changing races before you have ever viewed the choose mission screen.
6) Fixed bug relating to messages corrupting or not being deletable.
7) Tweaked the expert fleet for the multari mission to make them harder.
8) Added a new rebel ship hull -> The Midgard frigate.
9) Made the startup online message check multi-threaded, to speed up startup times.
Also, I changed a server setting so that up to 2,000 challenges get downloaded when you hit refresh, so that means less ‘where the hell is my challenge’ mysteries. A longer term fix will happen one day.
In other news, I just put this in (for patch 1.30). It’s a new bit of UI that shows you the shield strength of individual shield modules.
Sometimes lucky enemy shots can skew the damage to one module more than another, meaning you can have one shield taken out, and the others intact, even though physically the modules aren’t destroyed. That effectively permanently reduces your max shield strength, as each module effectively acts like a concentric mini-shield in it’s own right. This was not clear, so hopefully this UI can at least let you spot it happening such as in this situation where the leftmost shield is on low strength, but the rightmost one is taken out.