Space Impossible BETA 13 has landed. It now has an improved post-player-death and respawn experience. It also sees the addition of the ability to buy and sell vessels. It has a new way to take control of vessels you previously were unable to take control of--in the form of a suit based hacking tool. In addition to the usual bug fixes and changes, some noticeable networking improvements have been made that should make larger scale encounters a bit better performing.

You can discuss BETA 13 and let us know your thoughts on Discord or as usual on the Steam Discussion Topic

Patch Notes

Improved Respawn

Sometimes you just get blown up. You did your best, and you are still left as a floating debris field in space. Well, it has been a long time coming, but we finally put our heads together, went over player feedback, and improved the respawn experience. When you find yourself dead, you now have a number of options to choose from. You can pick where you spawn: at your home station, a nearby trader's drift, or, if faction is high enough, a nearby station. Once you select a location, you can choose from the standard starting Venture, to a stripped-down, component-less version of your previous vessel, or the full shebang, if you have the spacebucks for it.

Vessel Trading

In a related vein, you can now buy and sell vessels. Vessels for sale will appear near specific stations in specific regions, and be attached to a sales frame. This frame can be tampered with, but often at a cost to your reputation so consider that before attempting any theft. Simply hail the vessel you wish to purchase, and if you have the money, it can be yours. Make sure to take ownership of it, and feel free to fly off in your new ship.

Likewise, selling of ships is now possible. The Scrappers are always looking for new acquisitions, and will buy almost anything you can tow towards their station. It will require a tractor beam, so keep one handy, but you may be surprised by what they will buy. A great new way to get rid of excess tiles and components.

Hacking

There is also the new hacking tool available on the EVA suit. Hacking allows you to take control of nearly any object in Space Impossible, as long as it's not already under control by someone, and adds a tiny little bridge to it. This can be great when waiting for a friend to bring a backup ship and you are clinging on to an asteroid for dear life, or perhaps helping yourself to the largest piece of debris from a battle field. You will have to figure out how to best use it for your playstyle.

Network Optimisation

Last but not least, we took a good look at networking statistics in our ever focused desire to improve overall game performance. We found a number of often sent, not too large messages and bundled them together. This should improve performance almost everywhere, especially anywhere more than two vessels are active at a time, or in areas with high amounts of space items, like after a battle.

Details

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

Additions

• Can now pick a location to respawn: home, nearest trader's drift, nearest station (if standing high enough); depending on location more vessel choices including a free "stripped" vessel are available
  
• Added new "Barely Functioning Engine" for stripped vessel respawn. Same thrust, but worse everything else. Doesn't require power and fits in all mount sizes
  
• Added suit hack tool that allows players to add a bridge to any object that is not currently controlled
  
• Added ability to clear ownership of a vessel at the independent and scrapper stations. Indepedent will only scrub Pirate or Lawless vessels.
  
• Added batched messaging for entity target updates, reducing overall message count.
  
• 📡Added ship buying - Players can now purchase preconfigured and ready to go ships from specific traders
  
• 📡Added ability for scrappers to now buy tractored vessels
  
• Added new reinforcement AI that will leave the region when no targets are left. This stops reinforcements from hanging around, clogging up a region. Currently affects normal station reinforcements, conflict fleets and transponder call-ins.
  
• Added sv_spoolupmult and sv_spooldownmult commands to override spoolup/down times. Smaller numbers is faster.
  
• Added capability for an entity selector in a command use to a comma delimited list (ex: /remove 12,45,67,83)
  

Changes

• CHANGE: Player respawn vessel is now set when entering a region as opposed to the previous "exit construction"
  
• CHANGE: Changed entity updates, item spawning and engine activation networking support batching, significantly reducing total message count and improving performance
  
• 📡CHANGE: Scrappers will no longer target player owned vessels for scrapping
  
• CHANGE: Scrappers should no longer attempt to scrap tractored vessels
  
• CHANGE: Scrappers have been added to the visible faction list due to their increased role in ship buying and selling.
  
• CHANGE: Adjusted default faction standings so most factions hate scrappers less and hate gate bosses more
  
• CHANGE: Lamp hull variants are no longer better than basic hull. They now have the mass and health of light hull
  
• CHANGE: Most dialogues will now use a dynamic price, including price mods from factions, instead of a hardcoded value
  
• CHANGE: Changed wasp_infested wreck template to remove bridges as well as weapons and shields
  
• CHANGE: Improved object placement to use rectangle bounds instead of circle bounds. This includes better placement for wrecks and any other objects that are compounded (i.e. a station with a space wasp nest)
  
• CHANGE: Updated/tweaked some of the trade item art, moved it to its own art sheet
  
• CHANGE: Objects that were considered "abandoned" (e.g. wrecks) now require the hacking tool to take control. Hacking these objects will force the control access type to public.
  
• CHANGE: Region localized player faction is now sent to the player. This allows the player's client to correctly display region localized values during dialogue or on object mouse over
  
• CHANGE: Modified AI movement to attempt to solve an issue where the AI would finish its path but still unable to see their target.
  
• CHANGE: AI leaving regions will now try to join a nearby fleet region when warping out instead of creating one fleet per ship.
  
• CHANGE: Suits should no longer become primary targets just because they pass the "Enemy" threshold. They are now evaluated like other objects, and no longer take priority over more threatening objects.
  
• CHANGE: Adjusted bounds padding for AI pathing to significantly discourage vessels from attempting to squeeze through tight gaps when it would make more sense to go around, especially when not in combat
  
• CHANGE: Changed chunking code to fix an issue with multi-tile bridge mounts and preference the new "Main Bridge" component over total bridge count when present
  
• CHANGE: Load template preview now correctly shows materials and colors on tiles
  
• CHANGE: Load template previews will now better fit the window, scaling to size of the object instead of grid size
  
• CHANGE: Improved star system UI performance, especially when large numbers of regions are present.
  
• CHANGE: Cleaned up much of the automated dialogue to reduce repetition and reduce space, improving loading times
  

Fixes

• FIX: Fixed Begillium region in starter system potentially using the wrong template and not spawning any Begillium.
  
• FIX: Fixed being able to incorrectly enter regions that should not be enterable when using r-click
  
• FIX: Fixed an issue where quitting the game at the respawn screen would allow the player to respawn in the previously controlled vessel, this will eliminate some dupe issues
  
• 📡FIX: Fixed an issue where star system station count was being incorrectly tallied when it came to ensuring a station of a specific faction is present for a Problem
  
• FIX: Fixed self destruct not working correctly with multi-tile mounts
  
• FIX: Fixed scrapper temporary enhancement incorrectly giving money instead of costing money when first acquired.
  
• FIX: Fixed some wreck templates that were not correctly removing components when they should have.
  
• FIX: Fixed an issue where certain region modifiers were not correctly removing objects if a player was present when the region was updated.
  
• FIX: Fixed conflict distress call where crew leave their ship. Ship was getting set to wrong faction.
  
• FIX: Fixed several region templates for starter system asteroid fields from having "owned" oresteroids.
  
• 📡FIX: Fixed several language file typos
  
• 📡FIX: Fixed an issue where item looting at the end of a conflict battle could incorrectly cause the battle to incorrectly "re-end", re-triggering battle success dialogue
  
• FIX: Fixed an issue with a certain non-conflict debris fields behaving as if they were conflict battles
  
• FIX: Fixed Scrapper Transporter not tractoring certain vessels
  
• FIX: Added a potential fix for a rare thread related issue in networking when sending a message
  
• FIX: Fixed issue where suit mouse target was lagging by one update on the region server
  
• FIX: Fixed seeding of region events when using spawn method other than spawnasreinforcement
  
• FIX: Fixed an issue where object tags were not being counted correctly by the region they were in
  
• FIX: Fixed a bug in playerinfo networking
  
• FIX: Fixed issue with client file in networking rate calculation
  
• FIX: Fixed an error when trying to set server variables to invalid values
  

Removals

N/A

COMING BETA 14

We know we had said BETA 13 was going to feature player factions, but we wanted BETA 13 to be a smaller, faster delivered update after the bulging BETA 12, so we moved player factions to BETA 14. BETA 14 will be just player factions, as we add and deliver that long requested feature.