Halp Halp! It's Happening! Beta 2.2 Inbound

[Roger Wilco Jr]

I thought 2.2 was supposed to have the option to collect remote bounties/pay remote fines? I don't see it.

Yeah, I saw that on the station contacts page. I actually had to use it because I collected several bounties in an Anaconda in a system w/o a place to land it. I read somewhere that they are in low security systems, which sounds about right for where I was.

PS. it would be nice to be able to land SL fighters at outposts or anywhere.

[uvelius]

Any information on the engineered Limpets mods?

[Loriath]

Any information on the engineered Limpets mods?

Nope, not an area of interest for me, and nothing has popped up by the Dev's on my feed watcher regarding it. I only dig into a few threads over on the Main Forums and rely on my Dev Post RSS feed for everything else.

[TorTorden]

Beta 4 coming in: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthrea ... ost4571503

Greeeeeeetings Commanders,

I'm pleased to be able to inform you that there is a fourth beta update which will be going out this morning.

This update includes a Hutton Truck-load of updates, please see the change log below. It will also require up to 2 hours of downtime on the beta servers.

As always, thank you for your continued testing and feedback, please continue to give your thoughts on the 2.2 beta forums!

Thanks!

2.2 Beta 4 Change Log

Stability Fixes

- Fixed crash in the ship launched fighter tutorial
- Fixed crash in the SRV tutorial
- Fixed soft-lock on station services home screen if you spam click the quick refuel/reload/repair button
- Fixed the game locking up when editing/deleting a bookmark
- Fixed crash when finishing VR experience tutorial
- Trying to switch into a retrieved fighter crashes the game fixed
- Fixed an occasional crash in open vr on startup. Prevent presenting when SDK Rendering isn't setup
- Fixed CQC CTF assert when picking up a flag after previously dropping a flag
- Fixed an error in terrain cube sphere mapping
- Prevent attempting to eject a cargo unit that is already queued for ejection
- Livery modules are no longer added to the list of newly purchased modules
- Don't try to access control bindings while they're loading

General Fixes & Tweaks

- Basic flight tutorial, change the way we detect pitch/roll/yaw input so that it also works with mouse controls
- Updated the ship throttle tip in basic flight tutorial to also show throttle axis if present
- Fixed sub targets panel not updating when scanning beacons (nav beacons, tourist beacons etc)
- Fixed headlook not working in station menu
- Fixed missing icon on Science & Research contact screen
- Preparation ethos icon is truncated in Powerplay menu fixed
- Removed VR Missions on platforms that don't support VR
- Audio: Fixed some missing audio in the tutorials
- Various text fixes
- Latest translation batch added

Passengers

- Improved the UI flow when selecting which cabin to place your passengers in
- Plugged in Head of State passengers to the passenger sightseeing missions
- Passengers do not eject themselves after failing a bulk mission until you discard the mission from your Transactions tab fixed
- When you abandon a mission and the passengers eject themselves, the message you receive should now appear in your inbox
- NPC chatter/ AI behaviour seems incorrect during PassengerVIP CEO kill chance wrinkle fixed
- Passenger satisfaction now decreases when taking hull damage if they don't react well to danger
- Updated the values, meaning passengers will get more disgruntled at lower ranks, but remain the same amount as before at higher ranks
- Chief medical officer still expects goods wrinkle after declining it fixed
- Updated the sightseeing kill wrinkle, to have its own hand in state - allowing you to continue to kill the spawned enemies if you want to
- Allow sightseeing to be completed even if a cargo wrinkle is active
- Long distance expedition rewards shouldn't increase with each jump
- Abandoning a long distance expedition should now impact faction reputation
- Make pods the most important thing when working out if we can take passengers
- Make passenger cabins replicate properly
- Ensure that a new destination wrinkle doesn't send you to the port you've just come from
- Updated the passenger quantity for the luxury cabin - can now support 8 passengers
- Removed the destination marker for the visit tourist location wrinkle
- Fixed not getting an inbox message about returning to the nearest dock after abandoning a passenger mission
- Updated the states to prevent it sticking on disgruntled checks
- Cannot accept PassengerStowaway mission message when there is one cabin remaining fixed
- Passenger cabins in the inventory panel now match the surrounding styling better
- If a tourist beacon is planetary, stop non-horizons people from accepting it
- After dying with passengers on board and returning to the game there is no message saying that your passengers ejected from the ship fixed
- Updated the passenger VIP templates with the state change effects for new destination system

Fighters

- Increased boost speed of all fighters
- Rebalanced default speed for some fighters to make them inline with their original design (the Empire Fighter was too fast compared to the others)
- Increased DPS of fighter weapons by 12.5%
- Increased fighter production capability of the size 7 hanger module
- Fixed fuel gauge disappearing when switching back to mothership
- Missing avatar faces on the orders panel fixed
- NPC crew do not have appropriate backgrounds when in your ship or in the fighter fixed
- Added warnings why can't a player deploy a fighter
- Move "Orders" to the top of the menu when interacting with AI fighters/main ship
- Fighter descriptions hooked up
- Able to issue orders using both fighters in the role panel even though only one is deployed fixed
- After hiring, crew sometimes displays negative numbers fixed
- Balance displayed in the Crew Lounge is incorrect fixed
- AI Crew don't appear to be gaining any xp from combat in fighters fixed
- Fixed logic error for allowing non horizons crew in to the crew lounge to fire crew they might have hired when they had horizons
- Added default numpad keys for the new order bindings to each control scheme
- Added in better descriptions for the fighter specific stats
- Re-launching fighters resets ammo and pip setup fixed
- Fixed radar not showing hostiles/allies correctly when switching vessel in a conflict zone
- Helm 'Details' tab should go to ship description
- Audio: Velocity of the ship launched fighter is now set to the same as long as the fighter stow interface is not active
- Audio: Fixed "self" explosions to be triggered to ship launched fighters

Missions

- Ensure that a new destination wrinkle doesn't send you to the port you've just come from
- Fix the calculation of dimensions for portraits in non 16:9 resolutions
- Removed two examples of settlements metadata giving missions the idea that they can be used as skimmer massacre targets
- Switched from MM: SS time format to MMm SSs format for inbox messages detailing a remaining duration for part of the mission. This format avoids the ambiguity from a string like 20:30 (is it 20 minutes, or twenty hours?)
- Updated massacre skimmer missions to reference the skimmer system

Weapons

- ECM balance tweaks: guided missiles and torpedos hit by an ECM charge will now gain a major drunk effect if they did not already have it, causing them to veer off target most of the time. Technically you can still be struck, but previously ECM'ed torpedos would maintain an almost straight trajectory which for ships unable to dodge would mean they got hit anyway
- Dedicated keybinding for ECM. CM do not have to be in a fire group, holding this down will charge the first ECM module on your ship that is ready to go, and releasing will fire it
- Experimental balance change reworking how heat weapons function, similar to our earlier proposal but adjusted with player feedback. Aim of the changes:
- Thermal diminishing returns cut in much harder, previously they would start at 60% and prevent you going over 190%, whereas they will now start at 65% and prevent you going over 95% (down from 80%/120% in our earlier proposal). This means that heat from external attacks alone can never cause module or hull damage
- The heat effects of Thermal Shock are doubled
- The heat effects of Thermal Cascade are 25% more than they are on live (the previous beta heat nerf is being reversed, and then a small buff), combined with a slight nerf to PackHounds to stop them being so superior to other missiles
The goal here is for heat not to be a primary damage mechanism, but be there to punish your target for doing things that generate heat spikes such as SCBs, boosting or firing the hotter weapons. We also want to make it so that it is never worthwhile to stack a lot of heat weapons together: You will get the new full effect from a smaller number of weapons than before, but it can never get anywhere near as deadly and stacking more weapons beyond that point is counterproductive
- Drop the damage of packhound missiles slightly, from 9 per missile to 7.5. They're doing slightly more damage than we wanted given their relative immunity to point defences, and dwarfing normal missile launchers

Ships

- Increased size of internal fuel tank for Beluga and Orca
- Enlarged hit locations on Imperial Fighter so its weapons can take damage
- F63 Condor and Eagle side panels obscured by canopy geometry
- Type 7 Bobbleheads slot 1 and 10 are incorrectly rotated fixed
- Equipped bobbleheads in the Beluga Liner clip into pieces of the GUI fixed
- Tweak up the minimum speed before taking damage when landing on a planet's surface
- Keelback landing gear floating above ground when landing on planet fixed
- Fixed zfighting issues with loading screen for the Federation Fighter
- Adjusted hitcheck for Diamondback Explorer
- Fixes for hanger cameras and decal slots on the imperial Eagle
- Fixed Decal issues on the Cobra MKIV
- Fixed fuel scoop UI position for Fed Assault Ship, Corvette, Imperial Courier, Fed Dropship, Fed Gunship, and Vulture
- Fixed some holes in the mesh for Fed Gunship, Assault Ship and Dropship
- Fixed smoothing group issues on the Type 7
- Taipan's left decal no longer missing
- Taipan fighter decals pass to make them more legible
- Added slight improvements to how accurately ships are snap to the planet's surface
- Audio: Fixed some issues with Imperial Fighter
- Audio: Beluga audio fixes
- Audio: Reduced the volume of the Taipan and Imperial Fighter boosts
- Audio: Added in another layer to the Taipan orientation sounds to give them more weight at lower speeds
- Adjusted mix of the landar/spacedar transition noise. Made a bit softer

SRV

- SRV Bay - Scarab does not show initial vehicle specs despite being selected
- Audio: Added the oxygen mask sounds to the SRV
- Audio: Tweaks to wavescanner so not so overwhelming at organics locations
- Audio: Added spread to wavescanner attenuation shareset, so doesnt pan as harshly

Environment

- Fixed crash site collision on debris
- Fixed the buggy pad in mining object layer, so it snaps to position only, not orientation
- Added fade to organic seed decals to fix cut off on extreme slopes
- Added some more variety to mysterious places
- Fixed some misaligned tunnels in an installation
- Fixed a mysterious thing finding it's way into a cargo canister when being ejected
- Fixed chatter table for trespass zone
- Added depth prepass on fumaroles/ice rocks (slight optimisation)
- Stellar schematics updated for White dWarf, Black Hole, Neutron Star
- Ice Rocks - sublayer tiling rate reduced
- Tunnel Texture in some Installations has a LOD issue with tunnel walls fixed
- Audio: Rebalanced organics audio mix
- Audio: Mix tweaks to crystal sinewave scanner element as it was dominating the mix when in a fumarole field
- Audio: Changes to organics collisions to improve ratio of collision sound triggering
- Audio: Fix for radio chatter not triggering near settlements
- Audio: Some rebalancing for settlement security voice 3 to be clearer on stereo mix
- Audio: Set correct compression settings on Hyperspace stress noises
- Audio: Tweaked micro resource collect GUI sounds

Stations/Ports

- Typo when selecting primary/secondary economy in station generation was changing station types
- Fixed a missing access panel on some of the large landing pads, which allowed you to see through the pad at a certain distance
- Audio: Various ATC fixes

Outfitting/Shipyard

- A module category will appear in the wrong place on the Store Multiple menu if no modules of that type are equipped fixed
- Shipyard - B button doesn't work on sell ship popup fixed
- Stop clearing the remote ships list when we list the ships available at this station - this stops the remote ships list sometimes being cleared when we update
- Added some additional code to track whether a ship is being delivered "here" to control the local ship tab highlighting
- Accessing the livery via the station home screen no longer skips the 'which vehicle' step (if applicable)
- Fixed failing to go back behaviour when using the livery link from homes screen
- Fixed missing blurred background when picking which vehicle to livery
- Overhanging buttons and items in outfitting list fixed
- Changed outfitting filter options to use vectors instead of bitmaps to try to improve clarity
- First module highlighted statistics missing if purchasing to an empty slot fixed
- Removed the swap module option while previewing a fighter or an SRV as the web support is currently not available. This shouldn't cause any issues as the only swappable modules on fighters and SRVs are decal slots
- Updated icons and animation for ship transfer to improve clarity and remove WIP items
- Fixed focusing issues in the modifications screen in outfitting
- Fixed several issues with ship transfer timers
- Updated outfitting button icons to improve clarity

Controls

- Fighter order control bindings no longer visible on non Season 2 clients
- Xbox One: Fixed fighter order control bindings not appearing

Star Jets

- The FSD boost level now uses the larger effect out of synthesis and jet cone supercharge, rather than always using the latter if set
- FSD supercharge status now persists between sessions rather than being wiped on game load
- Added a random initial rotation to stellar jet billboards
- Re-enable jets for OSX

Rendering

- Prevent luminosity class VI sub-dwarf protostars selecting a white dwarf as it's nearest visual class (Please note: a side effect of this is that various TTauri or Herbig protostars will change from white to red/purple. This is not a bug, and is a slightly better representation of their actual temperatures)
- Fixed light cones disappearing when you got behind the source

Player Journal

- Suppress heat warning event if docked
- Tweaks to the “Location” event
- Added a mechanism to import star system names into visited stars cache
- Include Powerplay info in the FSDJump and Location events
- Include PowerplayOrigin in CargoDumped event if relevant

[TorTorden]

Done some quick checks.

Perfomance seem a bit better, I can get pretty much stable 90fps in stations using the new VR high, although spending a few minutes in station seem to tank it somewhat, better but still work to be done.
(The memory bug in live has not reared it's head in either beta 2 or 3, so that's sorted and several hours of play)

And the Beluga has gone from a 32 ton fuel tank (class 5) to a class 7 and 128 tons, now that's an upgrade..

[JohnLuke]

Sweet!

Thanks for posting the beta 4 info, Bob.

Looks like a lot of great improvements and fixes.

[Roger Wilco Jr]

Two question:
1. What are VR Missions?
2. What is this Player Journal?

[Xebeth]

Two question:
1. What are VR Missions?
2. What is this Player Journal?

1. I think (but not sure) that there are training missions for VR
2. There is now a system that logs your activities (visited systems, fights, deaths, etc, etc...) it writes a text file,with the idea that 3rd party apps can import it and create a log for you.

[TorTorden]

Also, there seem to be a few new engineers out and about and a lot of them seem to just require fish.
I also tested farseer and all her blueprints only require fish atm.

She doesn't mod anything she normally doesn't but now if you have access in game you can get a good FSD to play around with easy.
(if you dont have rank 5, she sells fish, so just spam those lower mods)

Also.
Mental challenge of the day.

Fill a 128t tank with a class 4 scoop..

[Xebeth]

All Engineers now just want fish again and have rapid levelling.

New Engineer Lori Jameson (great granddaughter of the Cmdr Jameson) does lightweight life-support and increased integrity fuel scoops and AFMUs - nice for explorers.

She also does other bits and pieces like lightweight Kill Warrant Scanners, SCBs, etc...

edit: Also just seen she sells something called a 'Rocket Propelled FSD Interrupter', which apparent fires a dumb-fire missile that causes an FSD to re-boot (at the cost of overall damage). Of course this may be available all over the place, but only just seen it.