Space Impossible BETA 14 has landed. Player teams: in. Custom factions: in. Enhanced mod support: in.

You can discuss BETA 14 and let us know your thoughts on Discord or as usual on the Steam Discussion Topic

Update Notes

Teams

You can now create an ingame team for you and your friends in multiplayer to join. Teams allow you to share resources and vessels easier, find each other in the universe better, and communicate privately.

Custom Faction Creation

Custom factions are a new feature added to the game that allows players to create factions of their choosing, including name, ship complement, icons, colors and more. This is done inside the game, but from the main menu. Take your team one step further for faction v faction scenarios, or just enhance and expand your game for you and your friends.

Enhanced Mod Support

Finally, enhanced mod support has been added. Mods can now be seen and activated from a menu and is fully supported in singleplayer or multiplayer play. This could allow creative players to do everything from custom ships, new resources, new Problems, new art or just about anything else possible ingame. It continues to support Steam Workshop for best syncing and sharing.

Due to changes with the way game content is categorized, we had to require new universes for BETA 14. Universes from BETA 13 and older cannot be upgraded.

For more indepth technical details see after the changelog

Details

NOTE: Changes marked with 📡 were inspired by feedback or bugs found by the community!

Additions

• Added some margin of error for ranging on the suit hacking tools
  
• Faction information is now fully networked including colors, portraits and icons. Can now be fully controlled from the server.
  
• Added teams
  
• Added ability for the game to load mods and multiple of them
  
• Added debug commands for teams, debug_team*
  
• Added the mod manager UI to the main menu screen
  
• Added "more options" to universe creation screen
  
• Added faction creator to universe creation "more options"
  
• Added tabbing autocompletion for the new chat console commands and new id format
  
• Added navarrows for teammates
  
• Added support for uploading mods to the Space Impossible Mod Tool
  
• Added /team for team chat (format: /team )
  
• Added /whisper for ingame PMs (format: /whisper )
  

Changes

• CHANGE: Converted all existing game assets to the new string id format. This includes all tiles, components, ships/vessels, other objects, recipes, factions, dialogue, problems, systems and everything else
  
• CHANGE: Changed if dialogue portrait isn't specifically set, the faction portrait should "always" be the default now instead of "probably" be the default
  
• CHANGE: Universe purpose generation can be more easily customized and altered via moddata setup json. Purpose can now be driven by faction and level
  
• CHANGE: Changed default universe backdrop rendering for map to use pre-calculated texture which should improve performance on mid-end GPUs and above. Super low end GPUs will still fallback to CPU SDF
  
• CHANGE: Changed how ownership/access is evaluated. Now will incorperate team and region faction deltas. This means if you piss someone off, you may not be able to use their Assembler right away until they've cooled off.
  

Fixes

• FIX: Fixed Med. Short-Line Gattling Gun Mk. 2 having 0 power requirements
  
• FIX: Fixed server disconnection message truncation due to incorrect message size
  
• FIX: Fixed an issue with system problem generation when no valid systems existed to apply the problem to
  
• FIX: Potential fix for offset main menu buttons where they would be offset incorrectly when menus transition
  
• FIX: Fixed a number of UI elements that didn't support localization
  
• FIX: Fixed localization text for the Druminence Locked Jump Gate Problem
  
• FIX: Fixed main initial tutorial popup being baked in and can now be localized
  
• FIX: Fixed a potential nullref on client if any region data is processed before local client data is received
  
• FIX: Fixed an issue with conflict data not being correctly saved between multiple game sessions resulting in conflicts not always spreading correctly.
  
• FIX: Fixed issue with dialogue fallbacks. It will now use neutral if non neutral is available and use a general default if a specific faction text isn't available.
  
• FIX: Fixed an incorrect region inspector UI panel anchor
  

Removals

• Removed old id system for content. Beta 14 and newer will not be backward compatible with older versions.
  

COMING BETA 15

With a large systems update like this, we generally follow up with a content update. BETA 15 will focus on expanding the game content and we'll be reviewing player comments and suggestions.

Additional Information

In order to unify the content id format, which were previously ints or shorts and limited to specific hardcoded categories, we switched to a string based system that at run-time is converted into a unique int format. This means when creating mods, we, the developers or players wishing to do so, can use easy to read strings for ids, including namespaces yet still benefit from fast run-time performance with id look ups. This does break any support for previous versions as it was too unwiedly at best, or impossible as worst, to make the old format work with the new format for the universe upgrade.

Mods exist with two types, server and client. Mods that are just server only, like custom factions, can be entirely self contained to the server and other players will not have to possess them in order to play. Similarly with client only mods, it is possible for some mods to only affect client graphics, and not be required by the server to operate. Other mods require both the server and client to have enabled. An example of this would be a new custom manufacturing recipe.

A universe, once created, must be loaded with the same mods active that were active when the universe was created. The game will remind you what these are if you have them turned off, so don't worry about having to remember which is which.

Mods are loaded from %appdata%/spaceimpossible/mods (or equivalent for mac and linux).

Teams are not available in Single Player.