Bug 1: Battle at Malvastaxx Alpha consistently crashes to the desktop when I’ve killed about half of the enemy fleet. This occurs no matter how many or few ships I deploy and there is no error message associated with it. I’m also not using any rules different from prior battles.
Bug 2: I’m not sure if this is a bug, or something I’m doing wrong with the actual game systems. I have a Frigate design utilizing 3 sniper beams. When a battle first begin, I notice the beams will fire, but after a few volleys, I never see them fire again for the remainder of the battle. This behavior is consistent no matter what tweaks I make to their orders. Anyone have thoughts of what I could be doing wrong if this isn’t a bug?
Suggestion: I’m not sure if it would be possible to modify the ship design UI at this point, but I think it would be extremely handy have a section where you can write your own notes regarding the ship your currently designing, and then having those notes appear as a mouseover tooltip in the deployment screen. I’ve had the beta less than 24 hours and I’m already swamped in ships and I forget what role I made them for and what other ships they work together with. I tried coming up with a system in the ‘Ship Name’ but it became clunky and didn’t work well.
Joe, there’s already a feature on the Ship Design screen that is exactly what you’re looking for.
Go to the Ship Design screen. Do you see the long, horizontal text-field called “Description”? It is just above the top of the right-side hull display panel which takes up the majority of this screen. It is also directly below the two shorter horizontal bars which keep track of a ship design’'s Power and Crew ratings.
Anything you type into the Description field will remain there when you save the ship design that you’re currently working on.
When you go to the Battle screen from Main Menu and then click on an the individual battle that you want, click Deploy.
When you are taken to the Deployment screen, look at the Ship Design picker at the left side of the screen. Hover your cursor over the blue silhouette of the same ship design that you wrote and saved text for in the Description field.
A tooltip will appear, displaying to you the Name you personally wrote for that design. Below the name also appears the Speed and the Cost of that ship design. Underneath all of that, the tooltip also displays the entire description which you had previously typed and saved. You cannot view this during battle, though – only during Deployment.
Please note that the amount of text you can pack into the Description field is relatively small. I have been able to reliably fit in only 30 characters, which also includes the “Space” character. The tooltip on the Deployment screen seem to truncate any longer text down to that limit – I typed-in 40, but only 30 showed-up later. I do hope that this annoying limitation is raised.
Changing the Description’s text limit to 300 characters would be a great start!
Remember that this textfield is the ONLY way that future modders of the game are going to be able to directly reach their audience IN-GAME concerning cool info about the ship designs themselves, and I’m strongly in favor of helping them beat the current excessively-tiny number of characters.
Of course, the Description input field itself on the Ship Design screen would also have to be changed to allow this, too. And the way which that field presently has NO SIDE-SCROLL BAR at all, that same UI feature will probably be required to be added for an improved Description field to function. Without any other way to laterally shift the entered text in order to view the entire thing, typing that much more text is totally impractical.
Thanks for reporting the laser bug, I will try to reproduce it and get that fixed.
We can change the description field to be a scrolling text-entry one and support longer text. thats no problem, I’ll add it to the todo list.
Ok I’ve fixed the beam weapon bug ready for the first post-beta patch (1.16). Basically when a beam weapon was delivering the killer-blow, OR their target got destroyed mid-beam by someone else, that weapon was stuck and wouldn’t fire again
