Cosmoteer 0.14.0 - Little Thrusters, Big Thrusters, and Engine Rooms, oh my!

Cosmoteer update 0.14.0 is out! This is the first update of the "0.14.x" series which will focus on adding a plethora of new ship parts to the game. 0.14.0, specifically, adds a handful of new thruster types and an Engine Room that buffs adjacent thrusters. It also makes some significant balance changes to thrusters in general and has a ton of other smaller improvements and fixes which you can read about in the changelog.

2-Way & 3-Way Small Thrusters

This update adds two new variants of the Small Thruster, a 2-directional variant and a 3-directional variant:

These thrusters occupy the same space as the regular Small Thruster but can thrust in 2 or 3 directions, with the downsides being they are proportionally more expensive (costing 1000 for the 2-way and 1500 for the 3-way) and only have capacity for one battery, meaning they can run out of power faster than the regular Small Thruster. Hopefully these new variants will help to make small, maneuverable ships easier to build.

Huge Thruster

Not to be left out, larger ships have also received a new thruster type just for them, the Huge Thruster:

The Huge Thruster is a 3x3 thruster that is more than twice as powerful as the 2x2 Large Thruster and is especially useful on giant capital ships.

(As experienced players may have noticed in the above screenshots, the nozzles of both the new and existing thrusters have received a nice aesthetic upgrade to make them more appear less "flat".)

Engine Room

The Engine Room is a new support system that isn't useful by itself but increased the power (both thrust and power consumption) of adjacent thrusters by 75%.

Because the Engine Room can be placed internally, it allows ships to exert more thrust in the same amount of perimeter area. And the more thrusters you can fit adjacent to it, the more cost-effective it becomes, creating some additional strategy when designing ships.

Thruster Balance Changes

In addition to the newly-added thrusters and Engine Room, all of the existing and new thrusters have received balance updates:

1. The force that a thruster can exert is now directly proportional to its cost. Since the Small Thruster's force is unchanged, that means that Standard Thruster has received a 50% buff, and the Large Thruster has received a 60% buff. The new Huge Thruster's force is also directly proportional to its cost. (Its cost is 10,000, giving a force 2.5 times that of the Large Thruster.)

2. None of the thruster can exert any "lateral" force anymore. (Previously, all thrusters could exert some amount of unrealistic "sideways" force.) This change was made to make the game simulation less "cheat-y" and more "authentic".

3. All thrusters (except the Small Thruster and its variants) now have a "ramp-up" time depending on the size of the thruster. The Standard Thruster takes 1 second to go from zero to full thrust, the Large Thruster takes 3 seconds, and the Huge Thruster takes 6 seconds. (There is also a "grace period" after a thruster turns off during which it can turn back on in much less time.) This change was done to make the choice of choosing which thrusters to use a more interesting one: if you want a very maneuverable ship that can respond quickly, use smaller thrusters; and if you want a fast ship, or you have a large ship that just needs a lot of thrust, go with the larger thrusters.

Cosmoteer 0.13.7 - New Multiplayer Modes, Ship Design Tools, and Balance Changes

Cosmoteer update 0.13.7 is now available! This update is pretty meaty, boasting a couple new multiplayer modes, a bunch of new ship design tools to make building ships easier than ever, and some experimental balance changes to missiles and point defenses.

The full changelog lists all of the details, including lots of bug fixes and other little improvements, but here are the big-ticket additions:

New Multiplayer Modes

This update adds two new multiplayer features that should hopefully make multiplayer games more fun!

First, there is now a "Free For All" mode in which up to 8 players fight to be the last player remaining. This is a more "casual", less competition-focused mode than the Team vs Team mode, which requires more setup and coordination between the teams.

Second, both the Free For All and Team vs Team modes now have a "Shrinking Ring of Death" option. Inspired by "Battle Royale" type games, this option causes the Ring of Death (outside of which ships rapidly take damage)  to slowly shrink over the course of the match. This option is especially important for Free For All games, because it forces players to engage with other players instead of just holding back and waiting for the other players to weaken each other.

New Ship Design Tools

The ship designer has also received a bunch of new features in this update, including improvements to Mirror Mode and a variety of new "part brushes".

For a long time now, Cosmoteer has had a "Mirror Mode", which when turned on mirrors any changes you make across your ship's vertical "centerline" from its left side to its right side or vice-versa. However, this mode had a couple major limitations, which were that you could not move the location of the centerline (it was always exactly at the center of your ship) and that there was no way to mirror from the top of your ship to the bottom of your ship. Both of these limitations have been rectified in this latest update: You can now turn on a "horizontal centerline" instead of or in addition to the vertical centerline, and you can also click-and-drag "handles" on the ends of the centerlines to customize their locations.

Additionally, the ship designer now has a variety of new "part brushes" that can be used when any 1x1-square part is selected. These brushes are inspired by drawing programs like Photoshop and can be used to rapidly "draw" large numbers of parts in various shapes. The available brushes include block brushes up to 10x10 in size, basic shapes (line, box, oval, and triangle), and the frequently-requested "flood fill" (paint bucket) that fills in contiguous areas.

All of these new tools are available in both Build (floorplan) and Paint modes.

Missile & Point Defense Balance Changes

The balance between missiles and point defenses in this update has received a big balance overhaul. In short, both missiles and point defenses have been nerfed: Missile damage has been cut in half, and point defenses are now much less effective at shooting down missiles.

This change comes not without controversy, and I even consider it to be somewhat experimental. However, this change was done to solve a problem that was making Cosmoteer less fun. Specifically, the problem was that missiles were an extremely "binary" weapon, meaning that missiles were either over-powered if the enemy didn't have enough point defenses, or near-useless if the enemy had a decent amount of point defenses. This made ship design less interesting and many battles won-or-lost before the battle even began. While some rock-paper-scissors balance is definitely a good thing, this was too extreme for a game like Cosmoteer that is all about designing varied and interesting ships. And so the nerf to missiles means that they are less over-powered if the enemy doesn't have point defenses, and the nerf to point defenses mean that missiles aren't useless unless the enemy has an extreme number of point defenses.

The major downside I can see with this change is that it likely makes "kiters" (very fast ships armed primarily with missiles that try to stay out of the enemy's shooting range) significantly stronger. Whether they are now too strong remains to be seen.

Again, these balance changes are experimental, and this balance is likely to change more in the future.

Cosmoteer 0.13.4 - Online Multiplayer

Cosmoteer 0.13.4 has been released! The new-and-notable improvements are online multiplayer, increased weapon range, and better ship flight A.I.

Online Multiplayer

Until now, to play multiplayer with someone else you had to either be on the same Local Area Network as them, or send them your I.P. address and have them join your game. This made playing with other people online problematic because the host had to first setup port forwarding on their router (which can be a little complicated for someone who hasn't done it before) and then send everyone else their I.P. address (which can be potentially risky).

But now 0.13.4 adds "online multiplayer", which allows players to play with others online without having to share their I.P. addresses or setup port forwarding. This works thanks to what's called the "Cosmoteer Lobby Server" (or CosmoServer for short), which is a little program that players can connect to and join an online "lobby" where they can then host games and play with anyone else in that lobby, just as if they were on the same LAN. There's currently one official server called "Official U.S. East" (located in New York, NY, USA), but you can also run your own server if you want.

Unlike the servers for most other games, CosmoServer does not actually run any gameplay logic; it merely acts as a communication relay between all the connected players, letting the players themselves run the gameplay logic. The advantages of this approach are that it uses far less CPU than a conventional game server, and even more importantly, it is fully compatible with all mods. (Individual players playing games together must still have the same mods, but those mods do not need to be installed on the server.) The primary disadvantage is that it increases latency (not a huge deal in an RTS-style game like Cosmoteer). And if you know anything about multiplayer game programming, you may think that not running gameplay logic on the server would expose the game to cheating, but this is actually not true thanks to its deterministic lock-step multiplayer implementation.

Increased Weapon Range

Cosmoteer is a game about building pretty much any kind of starship you want, from tiny fighters to huge motherships or anywhere in between. This is great for player creativity, but it turns out to be really hard to design gameplay mechanics that work well for ships of any size. In fact, the single biggest challenge when designing Cosmoteer is figuring out how to deal with the sheer differences in scale between ships.

One of the ways in which scale can be a prickly challenge is when choosing the "range" for each weapon (how far it can shoot). The goal is to pick a range that is close enough so that two ships fighting can both be seen on the screen at the same time (without zooming so far out that you can't tell what's going on) while not so close that it feels like the ships are sumo-wrestling. The big problem here is that the ideal range for small ships is much closer than the ideal range for large ships.

Until now, Cosmoteer has leaned towards picking weapon ranges that are ideal for small ships because that made the game more understandable for new players, but that of course meant that large ships would tend to fight more closely than felt comfortable or intuitive.

But the 0.13.4 update changes that in a way that makes combat between large ships happen at a more ideal range, while still keeping combat between small ships relatively close. This change has two parts:

1. The range of all weapons has been increased, most by about 50% (the missile launcher being the most notable exception that got a much smaller buff). These increases makes large capital ships choose longer default attack distances.
2. The range at which a ship will choose to attack (the default attack distance when given an order by the player, and the attack distance when chosen by the A.I.) now depends on the size of the target, such that a closer range will be chosen when attacking smaller targets and a longer range will be chosen when attacking larger targets. This means that two small fighter-sized ships attacking each other will still engage at relatively close range, while two capital ships fighting each other will stand off at longer range. (And if a small, fast ship is attacking a large, slow ship, then the small ship will try to stay at a longer range than the large ship wants, which could give the smaller ship more of an advantage so long as it is fast enough to stay away from the big ship.)

Better Ship Flight A.I.

The last change I want to mention in this post is that the flight A.I. for ships has been improved in several different ways that when combine together should make ships less "dumb" and annoying:

1. The collision avoidance algorithm has been overhauled (again) to fix a bunch of problems it had when detecting potential collisions and evading them.
2. When a ship is commanded to attack an enemy from a specific angle, the ship will now approach the enemy straight-on until it reaches attack range and only then attempt to move to the correct angle. This change prevents ships from entering combat facing the wrong direction, which was frustrating for many players.
3. Lastly, the thruster calculation algorithm now prioritizes lateral thrust 50% more than it does forward/reverse thrust, meaning that ships will now try to eliminate most lateral motion before thrusting forward towards their intended destination. This has the practical effect of preventing most cases where ships would "orbit" around their destination without ever actually arriving at it.

Cosmoteer 0.13.3 - Bug fixes & restored mod compatibility

Cosmoteer 0.13.3 has been released! When I released 0.13.2, I made a mistake which made many existing mods incompatible with Cosmoteer, much to everyone's dismay. This update restores compatibility with those mods and also fixes a handful of bugs.

Cosmoteer 0.13.0 - Multiplayer!!!

Given the lack of updates for the past couple of months, you'd be forgiven for thinking that I had stopped working on Cosmoteer. Thankfully, you could not be more mistaken!

I've actually been working on one of the biggest new features in the history of Cosmoteer: Multiplayer!

Those of you who have been following Cosmoteer for a really long time probably know that the original prototype versions had support for multiplayer in which players could design ships and battle them with their friends. But I realized that having to support multiplayer was dramatically slowing down the development of Cosmoteer, including development of singleplayer-only features. And so I removed multiplayer support from the game's code, hoping (but not expecting) that one day I would be able to bring it back.

Well, that day has arrived! I am incredibly proud and excited to announce that multiplayer is returning to Cosmoteer!

In this first version, multiplayer is a simple team-versus-team battle of up to 8 players spread across two teams. Each team has a certain amount of money (configured by the host) to spend on a fleet of up to 5 ships per player (or fewer, as configured by the host). Then the game starts and the players control their own ships, attempting to destroy the other team's fleet. The game ends and one team is declared the winner when either the other team's fleet is sufficiently destroyed or the timer runs out.

You can play with anyone on the same LAN (Local Area Network) as you, and you can also play with a friend anywhere else in the world by typing in the host computer's I.P. address. (There is not yet a public online list of games, but I hope to add that soon.)

This is just the beginning! This first version lays the coding foundation for more improvements to come. In the long term, I may add entirely different game modes, such as multiplayer co-op and creative modes. In the near future, I plan to add:

• A.I. players in multiplayer battles
• Observers (for streaming tournaments)
• More than two teams & free-for-all battles
• Some sort of boundary around the playing area to prevent people from being able to run away indefinitely
• Limit price per-ship and not just total price per fleet

There's lots more details and plenty of other fixes and improvements in the full changelog.

Technical Implementation

You may be wondering why I've chosen to bring back multiplayer given the fact that I originally removed it because it was slowing down development too much. Wouldn't bringing back multiplayer cause all future development to become a lot slower?

Thankfully, the answer to that is mostly "no", and the reason for that is that I've taken an entirely different approach to implementing the multiplayer code.

The original implementation of the multiplayer code required that every single change in the state of the game (such as a ship firing a weapon, a ship moving a millimeter, a crew person walking a foot, or a bullet hitting an enemy) be synchronized among all players by sending packets over the internet. This was a huge problem for two very important reasons:

1. In a game as complex as Cosmoteer with potentially dozens of ships and thousands of crew, that's a potentially huge amount data that needs to be transferred over the internet between all the players. We're talking megabytes per second of data for a large battle, which made the game really only playable on LAN or very-high-speed internet connections.
2. The code for anything that could affect gameplay even in the slightest became way more complicated due to the need to send those aforementioned internet packets. For example, if I wanted a bullet to inflict 1000 damage on an enemy ship, I couldn't just call the TakeDamage(1000) function; I first had to construct a network packet with all the needed information and send it to all other players. This made working on gameplay code far more time-consuming that it would've been without having to send all those packets.

The new multiplayer code uses an entirely different approach that's called "deterministic lockstep". Essentially, this approach requires that two computers running the same version of the game with the same initial battle setup and same player inputs will simulate the game in exactly the same way. (Not even off by a millimeter, or else the butterfly effect will cause bigger and bigger errors until the game desyncs.) There are two big advantages to using deterministic lockstep:

1. Only player inputs (commands issued to the ship) need to be turned into packets and sent over the internet. Everything else (physics, weapons, damage, etc...) will happen exactly the same way on every computer by virtue of them running completely deterministic game simulations. This saves massively on bandwidth, so much so that Cosmoteer now only uses a few KB of bandwidth per second.
2. Code that affects gameplay no longer needs to be synchronized using packets sent over the internet, so long as the gameplay code can be written to be 100% deterministic. Writing deterministic gameplay code isn't very hard as long as you know what kinds of things to avoid (primarily code whose outcome could change based on framerate).

There are, however, some important disadvantages to using deterministic lockstep:

1. The gameplay really does have to be 100% deterministic. 99% deterministic is not good enough. And non-determinism bugs can be very tricky to track down. I have written myself some pretty nice tools for debugging determinism issues, but it still took me several weeks to comb through the whole Cosmoteer codebase and convert everything to be deterministic.
2. Games that use deterministic lockstep typically have more latency than other types of games. You may notice that when playing multiplayer Cosmoteer (and most RTS games) that there's a small delay after assigning a ship an order and before you see it actually respond. That's because it has to wait for the other computers to receive the order before it can process it. In action games like first-person-shooters, this would be a huge problem, but in slower games like Cosmoteer, it's not a big issue.
3. Differences in how different CPUs compute floating-point (fractional) numbers can cause an otherwise 100% deterministic simulation to become only 99% deterministic, which due to the butterfly effect will ultimately lead to desyncs. In practice, this means that players running on 64-bit operating systems can't play with players on 32-bit operating systems. (Although there is a mode to force the game into 32-bits so that friends on different operating systems can play with each other.)

While these downsides are significant, none of them are deal-breaking, and are certainly preferable than the problems caused by the original way I implemented the multiplayer code.

All in all, getting multiplayer working again was a pretty huge undertaking -- one that I wasn't even sure I could pull off -- but in the end I think it has proven to be well worth it. And I'm looking forward to playing a ton of Cosmoteer multiplayer as a result!

Cosmoteer 0.12.12 - Balance improvements and bug fixes

Cosmoteer 0.12.12 is out! And while it's not as huge as 0.12.11 or 0.12.10, it's still got some nice stuff in it. Specifically, thanks to some great work by the community crunching some numbers, I have done a pass over all of the weapons to adjust their damage, rate of fire, and ammo usage, to make them more balanced. (Standard Cannons are no longer the clear best weapon as measured by DPS.) There's also a bunch of other improvements and bug fixes, which you can read about in the changelog.

Cosmoteer 0.12.11 - Difficulty levels, new game options, and balance changes

Cosmoteer 0.12.11 is out! And if you thought that 0.12.10 had a lot of improvements, then you will not be disappointed by 0.12.11!

The biggest and most obvious improvement can be seen when starting a new game:

When starting a new Bounty Hunter game, you are now given several options to customize your play experience...

First up, there are three difficulty levels that you can choose from: "Ensign" (easy), "Captain" (standard), and "Admiral" (hard). Each difficulty level affects what kinds of enemy ships spawn, the intelligence of their A.I., how much money you start the game with, and how much money you earn as a reward for destroying enemies. The "Captain" difficulty is the closest to the single difficulty level that's been available until now.

Second, you can also customize the size of the galaxy, which simply determines how many solar systems will be in it. "Standard" is the closest to the single size that was available until now, but you can play with a huge galaxy if you want a really long game or a small galaxy if you want a shorter experience.

And lastly, you can now choose between three different starting ships, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Or if you don't like any of them, you can even start the game with your own design. The amount of funds you'll start the game with will depend on how expensive your starting ship is -- the more expensive it is, the fewer funds you'll start the game with.

Another big change to Bounty Hunter is the presence of enemy "fleets". Now, in some cases when a single enemy would have spawned in older versions, in 0.12.11 that single enemy will be replaced with 2 or more smaller enemies that will work together as a single fleet. This means that you'll have to design your own ship(s) to be able to combat multiple enemies at once. The chance of enemy fleets spawning depends on the difficulty level selected.

This update also has a ton of big balance changes that I hope will make ship design more strategic. These include a nerf to Point Defenses (to make them less effective versus swarms of missiles), an area-of-effect buff to missiles themselves (to make them a possible counter against parts placed directly in front of shield generators), cannons now have a random "spread" (to make them less effective at sniping specific enemy parts), and Electro-Bolts can now penetrate through shields (meaning they can drain from multiple overlapping shields).

Lastly, players complained a lot about how moving parts of ships to different locations cost money to move, and so I made a change that allows you to move a part from one location to another without losing any money. Basically, if you pick up or remove a part, you'll only get a 75% refund, but then if you place the same kind of part somewhere else, you'll only pay 75% of the base cost. Once your ship fights a battle or makes an FTL jump, you'll lose the 25% discount for any parts you've removed but not re-added and you'll have to pay the full 100% price.

There are a whole ton of other improvements and bug fixes in this update, which you can read about in the changelog.

Cosmoteer 0.12.10 - Formations

Cosmoteer 0.12.10 is out! And it has a pretty nice new feature: Formations!

When multiple ships are selected, a new "Formations" button will appear, and clicking on it will let you pick from one of three pre-defined formations: Line, Wedge, and Claw.

Additionally, you can create your own formations by selecting a ship, right-clicking on another ship it should follow, holding the mouse button, and dragging the mouse cursor to where the selected ship should position itself relative to the "lead" ship. You can then save the custom formation to be used later.

And by default, when you issue a command to a group of ships that aren't already in formation, the game will automatically create an "ad hoc" formation, causing the ships to stay in their same relative positions and move at the same speed.

This update has a huge number of other improvements and fixes (possibly the largest number of individual changes in the history of Cosmoteer updates), which you can read about in the detailed changelog.

Cosmoteer 0.12.9 - A ton of bug fixes!

These past few weeks have seen an absolutely massive increase in the number of people playing Cosmoteer! There used to be less than a hundred players per day, but now there are more than ten thousand! That's amazing!

What's not so amazing are all the bugs that people are now finding in the game. (It turns out that when ten thousand people play your game, they find all the bugs...)

And so I present to you Cosmoteer version 0.12.9, which is just chock full of fixes for many of those bugs that people have found in the past couple of weeks.

Also, the number of bugs that have been caused by new updates has convinced me that from now on I should do more testing before I release updates to everyone. To that end, I am planning, for most updates, to first release what I'm calling "unstable release candidates" that any interested players can opt-in to playing, with the understanding that these unstable versions are likely to be more buggy than the "official" stable updates. As 0.12.9 you can opt-in to unstable updates in the settings under the "Misc" tab. Hopefully this extra testing by the community will make the official updates much more stable.

Cosmoteer 0.12.8 - Bug fixed and balance tweaks

Cosmoteer 0.12.8 is out! This update has a ton of important bug fixes, but it also makes a few balance changes, including making FTL jumps use less fuel and reducing the effectiveness of Electro-Bolts. You can read the full changelog here.

Cosmoteer 0.12.7

Cosmoteer 0.12.7 has been released with a variety of unrelated improvements.

The most important change that everyone should know about is that the location in which saved games and ships are stored has been moved from Saved Games\Cosmoteer (the old location) to Documents\My Games\Cosmoteer (the new location). I made this change because some players for some reason didn't have a Saved Games folder on their computer and thus were unable to play the game. When you run Cosmoteer for the first time after updating to 0.12.7, the game will attempt to automatically move all of your existing saved games and ships to the new location, but if that fails for some reason then you'll have to move them manually.

0.12.7 also has a few balance changes, most notably being a "fix" to a deliberate flaw in the ship A.I. that prevented it from properly staying at the desired distance from the enemy. This has the effect of making "kiter" ships (ships with long-range weapons like missiles and a lot of reverse thrust) much more viable. I'm not sure that's actually a good thing for the game's current balance, but the proper counter to kiters certainly should not be a gimped A.I. (I'm considering adding tractor beams as a way of countering fast ships.)

Lastly, I have paid off the "internet mafia" (my word, not theirs) to get what's called a "digital signing certificate" that I can use to "prove" to Windows that I, a real person named Walter Destler, am the author of Cosmoteer. So now, when you run the installer, you'll get a dialog prompt that looks something like this:

The real reason for doing this is that, in theory, anti-virus programs are more trusting of applications that have digital signatures. I'm hoping this will reduce the number of problems that overly-aggressive anti-virus programs cause with Cosmoteer. Only time will tell!

Cosmoteer 0.12.6 - Balance and bug fixes

I just released version 0.12.6 of Cosmoteer. It's mostly bug fixes, but it does reduce the cost of the FTL Drive to 10,000 (to make sure players can afford to buy one after completing the first sector) and tweaks missile balance and physics.

See the changelog to get the full details.

Cosmoteer 0.12.5 - A.I. tweaks and bug fixes

Cosmoteer 0.12.5 has been released. This is a minor update that makes the A.I. smarter about choosing which targets to attack and also has a handful of bug fixes.

The full changelog is available here.

Cosmoteer 0.12.4 - Harder A.I.

Cosmoteer 0.12.4 is out!

The big feature is a much smarter version of the "BountyBrain" ship A.I. (called "BountyBrainHard") that will actually target and focus its fire on specific enemy weapons and systems. This A.I. will be used for all enemy ships in Bounty Hunter except for the enemies in Amateur sectors.

This release also has a bunch of bug and crash fixes, and it also reduces memory usage significantly (by about 150-200 MB).

The full changelog is available here.

Cosmoteer 0.12.3 - A.I. tweaks and bug fixes.

Cosmoteer 0.12.3 has been released! It has several improvements to the ship A.I. that should make A.I. versus A.I. battles and tournaments more competitive. It also has a variety of bug and crash fixes.

Read the full changelog to get all the details.

Cosmoteer 0.12.2 - Critical Bug Fix

Cosmoteer version 0.12.2 has been released to fix a nasty crash bug that was introduced in 0.12.1. I strongly recommend that all players update to avoid crashes.

Cosmoteer 0.12.1 - Balance Improvements

Cosmoteer version 0.12.1 has been released! This is a minor update that contains mostly balance changes and bug fixes. The biggest balance change is a dramatic reduction in how much fuel is used when making an FTL jump, but there are also some balance changes to Point Defenses and Electro-Bolts, as well as a handful of ship and crew A.I. tweaks.

The full changelog lists all of the updates included in this release.

Cosmoteer 0.11.0 -- Fog of War & U.I. Improvements

Last week I released version 0.11.0 of Cosmoteer. It, and version 0.10.7 before it, add some significant new features and improvements to the game's user interface.

The most important new feature in 0.11.0 is the "Fog of War":

If you play RTS games, you are likely already familiar with the basic concept. Your ships can only "see" so far away, and anything farther than your ships' sight range is hidden in the "fog of war". In the above screenshot, the darkened areas of the background indicate areas that are too far from your ships to see.

Currently, the locations enemy ships that are outside of your own ships' sight will still be indicated with pulsing red dots, which you can see in the lower-right corner. These tell you where you need to go to find something to fight, but offer no additional details such as the size or armaments of the enemy.

The Fog of War changes gameplay, because now there's some risk involved in choosing to fight an enemy. It may turn out that the enemy is too powerful for you to defeat, and you'll need to run away. Occasionally needing to run away also has the added effect of making fast and maneuverable ships more important.

Version 0.10.7 also added a "Minimap":

The minimap is a long-requested feature that provides a simple overview of the locations of friendly and enemy ships. Unlike most RTS games which are played on a fixed-size battlefield, the playing area in Cosmoteer has no walls or borders and is infinite for all practical purposes. Therefore, the minimap automatically adjusts to show an area containing all of the ships in the game. The grid in the background always maintains the same spatial distance between lines, and so you can use the grid to estimate distances between ships.

Version 0.10.7 also added what I call the "Miniview":

The miniview is basically a "picture-in-picture" view of a single ship, allowing you to view one ship in the main view and another ship in the miniview at the same time. My hope is that it solves one of the biggest usability problems that Cosmoteer has had up to now, which is that during combat you can't watch both your ship and the enemy ship at the same time without zooming out and losing a lot of the important simulation details.

The miniview also isn't just for show, either -- you can also hover the mouse cursor over ship parts to see their health and right-click on them to target, all without having to move the main camera.

The miniview is customizable, but by default, it is automatically displayed during combat and will show either your ship or the enemy ship -- whichever one you're not looking at in the main view. When displayed, the miniview replaces the minimap, which is generally less useful during combat anyway. Both the miniview and the minimap can be resized as desired to take up more or less space on your screen.

Cosmoteer 0.10.5 -- User Interface Refresh

Cosmoteer 0.10.5 is out! While there aren't any major new gameplay features per se, the changelist is still among the longest to date!

The biggest and most obvious change is that the user interface has received a complete visual overhaul -- gone are the boring gray boxes, replaced with a spacey blue-and-green theme complete with sound effects and animations.

Before

After

Aside from the visual changes, there are also some small-but-important changes to the actual functionality of the user interface.

First, the player can no longer (by default, although this can be reverted in the settings) simply click on or drag a box around specific parts to select them -- the player must now hold the Ctrl key while clicking. This is because my playtesting showed that many new players would accidentally click on parts of their ship and then be unable to give their ship orders, which was confusing and frustrating for them. By requiring the Ctrl key be held, it's now almost impossible to accidentally select parts without meaning to.

Second, because you can't upgrade your ship until you repair it, the game now only shows either the repair button or the build button, never both at the same time. (When your ship needs repairs, the repair button is shown in the place of the build button.) In some playtests, players got confused about why they couldn't press the build button, and so this change should hopefully make that more obvious.

Lastly, turning on "blueprints mode" is no longer a strange toggle that appears next to the build button after pressing it -- it is now a simple checkbox item in the '...' menu, and the game now remembers your preference.

Cosmoteer 0.10.0 -- Bounty Hunter 2.0 and FTL Drives

Yesterday, I released Cosmoteer 0.10.0.

This is a big release, and it features a ton of little improvements along with two big, related features: a revamped "2.0" Bounty Hunter game mode, and F.T.L. Drives for ships.

Bounty Hunter 2.0

For about the past year, the standard mode of play, "Bounty Hunter", has been pretty simplistic. You, the player, start with a single ship and destroy enemy ships in the immediate vicinity to earn money which can then be used to upgrade your own ship or purchase additional ships. As you destroy enemy ships, additional enemies spawn nearby, and as your own ship or fleet increases in power, the larger, more powerful enemies swill spawn as well.

This simple kill-reward-upgrade-repeat loop has been fine for testing and iterating on the core ship construction and combat gameplay mechanics, but it honestly wasn't very engaging for the player. Killing an endless stream of ships over-and-over again in the same location with little choice gets repetitive really fast.

Bounty Hunter 2.0, while not solving all of the issues of Bounty Hunter 1.0, seeks to create a much stronger foundation upon which further improvements can be built. Instead of playing in a single location with an unlimited supply of respawning enemies, the game is now played across a large galactic map:

Each location in the galaxy map (the green icons) has only a handful of enemies, and they don't respawn as you destroy them. Instead, once the player destroys all of the enemies in a location, they must move on to another location. Each location has a small colored "shield" icon that indicates the strength of enemies present there:

In Bounty Hunter 1.0, the game itself determined the difficulty of enemies that the player would face, which meant that for many players the enemies were either too easy or too difficult. This new system gives the player a degree of choice in what strengths of enemies they will face, and lets the player pace their own difficulty curve.

More importantly, this new galaxy map now provides a strong foundation on which more gameplay can be added. In the future, as the player explores the galaxy, they will encounter space stations to trade with, pirate bases, asteroids to mine, vessels in distress, and more. These features will be added to the game over time as they are developed.

The galaxy map itself is procedurally generated, usually with 4-6 solar systems full of planets and moons. Each location is "attached" to a nearby planet or moon, which then appears in the background during gameplay to give visual variety and a better sense of location. The planets, moons, and stars themselves are procedurally generated using Perlin Noise. Blue, red, and yellow nebulas also abound in the galaxies, which determine the color of the background during gameplay.

F.T.L. Drives

In order to move from location to location within the galaxy, the player must construct at least one F.T.L. (Faster Than Light) Drive on their ship. Once constructed, the FTL drive allows the player to perform jumps to other locations.

Jumping, however, is not free. F.T.L. Drives use a new kind of "fuel" resource. Like credits, fuel is earned from destroying enemy ships, and then it is spent to perform an F.T.L. jump. The amount of fuel spent is determined by the distance of the jump, the size of the ship(s) making the jump, and the efficiency of the ship's F.T.L. Drives.

Efficiency is a new concept in Cosmoteer that determines how much fuel is used when an F.T.L. jump is performed, and its gameplay purpose is to make the number and placement of F.T.L. Drives on a ship a strategically important decision. When adding an F.T.L. drive to a ship, the game displays a green/yellow/red overlay indicating which areas of the ship are close to an F.T.L. drive (green) compared to which areas are far from one (red).

The farther (more red) areas greatly increase the amount of fuel need to perform an F.T.L. jump. And so to minimize the amount of fuel used, the player will want to place multiple F.T.L. drives around their ship in a variety of locations, making as much of the ship green as possible.

If the player ever runs out of F.T.L. fuel, they can purchase additional fuel for credits, but doing so is extremely expensive, and so it is almost always preferable to improve the efficiency of one's ship.

Because the amount of F.T.L. fuel earned from destroying enemies depends on the size of the enemy ship, as your own ship(s) grow in size, it becomes much less cost-effective to battle enemies that are smaller and weaker than yourself. (If you spend fuel to jump a very large ship to a location with small enemies, it is unlikely that you will earn enough fuel to recoup the fuel that you spent getting there.) My intent when balancing fuel costs vs rewards is that a ship with 75+% efficiency that fights ships its own size will generally break even on fuel.