Gigantic Update: XO 1.40

Real time jump, new ships, new effects, new items, new missions + more!

Welcome to another massive update of XO!

Real Time Fleet Jump
You’ll notice immediately that your fleet now jumps away visibly and in real time – warships jump away last and continue defending until finally, your battleship jumps out. During the brief jump, your battleship races ahead to emerge first. You can begin taking actions, including plotting a jump, immediately after the battleship touches down. We hope you love it as much as we do, it definitely adds drama to your jump.

Top Scores
We’ve also added your Top Scores to the main menu! We hope to add more stats soon, but right now we track tidbits like your best relations, the size and makeup of your fleet, and how many jumps you survived.

Captain’s Guide
At long last we have a Captain’s Guide! This should hopefully answer quite a few questions. The guide is a work in progress, so expect us to add, remove and tweak entries for a while. See something missing? Let us know!

More New Features
We increased the level of ship detail in 1.40.

We added probably one of our biggest feature requests, scroll-wheeling the fleet list.

Formations received a total rewrite. The editor is the most obvious change, but formations in general should defend, fly and behave more like formations should.

We added two new ships, first the long-awaited Rover capital ship, the MegaFixer. The MegaFixer sports two military grade lasers, two ion torpedo launchers and an extra weapon hardpoint. It can fix disabled ships and also seize and hold disabled ships through jump.

The Pact Cutter is a single laser fast ship with four cargo holds, designed to rapidly deploy boarding parties and recover cargo.

In another QOL improvement, all mining ships now temporarily hold mining operations when there is no ore available, and resume once jumped to a location with ore. The same holds true for melting ice. Mining beams now assume different colors depending on their current use.

The Irenic Plasma Shield also received an overhaul, new visual effects, and a much improved UI. There’s a lot to cover so head over to the Captain’s Guide or Changelog for all the details.

Lasers now have a groovy visual effect when hitting targets.

Repair ships can now repair or salvage ships already seized.

We added several new cargo items. We’ll let you discover them.

For new players, the tutorial was greatly expanded. Thanks to everyone who gave us suggestions for improving it.

We optimized combat effects and models to improve the framerate in large battles.

Hailing another ship now has a visible effect.

Lifeboats, shuttles and stations now have flashing beacons. This really makes it a lot easier to spot those lifeboats, and that’s a good thing, because if you leave any of those behind there’s now a good chance you’ll take a hit to relations.

Ships on Weapons Free now automatically attack nearby mines.

The remaining boarding shuttles were modeled and added.

We added two new abilities to our extremely robust event scripting engine: a jettisonCargo action and shipSlotFree condition. With these, boarding parties now check to see if there’s room for them and take appropriate action if there is no room aboard. (Among other things, muhuahahaha)

Lifeboats no longer show up in the fleet list.

Warships and mining ships now show a large indicator above the ship when they cannot fire due to being resource starved. Weapons will continue to fire as soon as resources become available.

For about four years now I’ve wanted to re-do the ice world. It always really annoyed me that you could see through the gaps. At long last, I was able to do that. We also improved the UI for water conditions on ice worlds.

Marines are now trainable when passengers are in the battleship’s hardpoint slot

We smoothed out scrolling the galactic map.

Weapons added in an event now prefer hardpoints. Expect future events to feature different weapon loadouts as a result.

Similar to water, when there isn’t enough fuel for jumping the fuel icon turns grey. The ore icon now also turns grey when ore drops below 1.

Balance
– Training boarding parties now only requires neutral relations
– Ships boarded by enemies now have a delay before jumping
– Under duress events also have a delay before jumping
– New faction leader dialog is now unskippable, so you don’t miss that you’ve gained a faction leader
– Corp Mercenaries now have a bribe option
– Troubling events are less likely
– Marooning crewmembers just got more interesting
– Pirates can now repair disabled fleet ships
– Pirates can stay behind when asked to repair disabled ships
– Your boarding parties can now murder fleet passengers
– Boarding stations now have a chance to yield resources
– Added more ‘Kobayshi Maru’ type events – because sometimes you just have to pick the lesser evil
– When trading, factions no longer carry weapons for all factions
– Water riot dismissals now incur a -1 relationship for all passengers aboard a ship in addition to the operating crew
– Sacrificing boarding parties to the harvesters incurs a relationship hit after the first attempt
– Boarding is no longer allowed against Reapers
– Harvester events greatly enhanced, reinforcements added
– Boarding is now more consistent
– Boarding defended ships can possibly wipe out both parties
– All combat missions should now react to ships being boarded
– NPC boarding logic improved
– First of many Max enemy events added
– Adjusted Harvester jump-in location to be more forgiving
– Mission titles now always clear when events end
– Most boarding actions now include RNG results
– Stay tuned for Harvester-related boarding events
– Blockader attack events were toned down
– Beacon logic was improved for long jump quests
– Warlike relations now trigger Retribution events
– Warlike relations also now trigger Max Attack events
– Ally relations now trigger Quest events
– Duress events now respond to destroyed ships
– Several new events added

Assorted QOL/UI/Event logic improvements
– Protect order while in hold fire ROE auto switches to defend
– Mine ore/melt ice actions are greyed when impossible
– Hovering crew in the transfer window displays crew info
– Seized ships now show green slash in fleet list
– Cargoship filter now only shows cargo class ships
– Added defend + protect/support warnings in ship hover text
– Added hover text to all caches
– Camera movement and ship focus now works when dialogs are up
– Certain events were stopped from clobbering one another
– Hail reminders no longer trigger after day 20
– Removed more dialog if you select the ‘I know what I’m doing’ option at the start
– Slowed the maximum rate of water animation
– Minefields now visible immediately on jump-in
– Main menu adjusted
– Ship portraits improved
– Attacking impossible to reach targets at the rendezvous due to insufficient range now displays a warning

Bugs Squashed
– Resource hover restored
– Accidentally invisible battleship revealed
– Weapons added in an event now fire properly
– Attacking ships no longer get quite so close
– Laser cannot fire animation now only plays for friends
– Logs now show ROE properly
– Context issues with cargo transfer fixed
– Zoom/scale of some models adjusted
– Formation ships now stay in place after editing
– Ships no longer launch boarding parties when they have none
– Timer issue fixed
– Minor issue with filter and scroll arrow fixed
– Gatherer shield bug fixed
– Marines are now only trainable on Battleship
– Permariot now avoided if 8 crew (only) were aboard battleship and/or boarding parties were launched during a water riot
– Support + Weapons Free now defends station from missiles
– Corrected an issue with ships losing their fleet color
– Fixed bug with going to starmap
– Only one event is spawned when warships are disabled
– Unknown ID bug stomped
– Fixabot uses correct icons
– Fixed an event issue related to formations and protection
– Added hover text to certain attack events
– Warships only say ‘hailing frequencies open’ if they are
– Used item charges now save
– First use of attack hotkey now works
– Ships in trade actions now save their state
– Invisible ship issue fixed
– Logging improved
– Some friendly fire issues cleared up
– Wrong way movement issues redirected
– Double-firing issues cleared
– Haggle only works once now
– Transmog no longer throws trade warning
– Shift-clicking and waypointing no longer throws an error
– ROE animations now play when hotkeyed
– Formation + filter nor longer scrambles editor
– Scroll down arrow in fleet list no longer gets obscured
– Literally dozens of other minor fixes