Another not-entirely-huge release with some cool new features. Repairing your ship and reloading ammo is now possible on cap ships, which is an important step towards the longer-term (but not too long) goal of actually doing something interesting with the capships, and creating cool new nation-war oriented gameplay. We imagine this feature will have some impact on Border Skirmish, which will also likely be evolved and improved in the near future. Work continues on the Kourier system (Deliverator replacement), which is very nearly approaching a "testable" state. Once it is in testing, we'll thrash things out on our test server until things appear to be pretty solid, and then drop it into production. If things explode, we'll backpedal to our current situation until we can resolve any problems.
Other work also continues on faction standings, friendly fire, physical reworking of sectors and systems, improving AI responses and navigability (better capship behaviour, etc etc), totally new NPC inventory management (much better for Kourier/Deliverator work, missions, etc). Some of this stuff doesn't sound terribly exciting, but it's basically like "make capships smarter and less server intensive, so we can actually do more with them" and other similar cases. "Doing more with them" being everything from player ownership to major battles and station conquest and so on. The usual 984932 dependencies between us and The Next Really Cool Gameplay.
Changelog:
- ships can be repaired when docked to capships
- ammo can be purchased in capships
- fixed background component rendering order
- fixed rare crash on mac