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Episode 4 Now Available!

  • Deltree
  • 04/29/2012 10:58 PM
  • 5194 views
GREETINGS HUMANS

Episode Four: Forever and Ever is now available for download! Here's a full list of changes:

-More, more, more! New enemies, missions, social scenes, articles, weapon components, music, and optional areas!
-Two new playable characters (one story, one hidden).
-Two new random Splices and three new bounty hunts!
-Enemies starting in Episode Four will now choose from several different weapons when attacking.
-The Rank system has been overhauled. Ranks come much faster now, and rank bonuses are much more potent.
-The critical chain now maxes at 99.
-The critical chain now adds a bonus to dodge rate for your pilots.
-Ros' generic dialog "roughness" may now change if his or her personality changes enough due to in-game choices.
-Cassidy's final weapon upgrade now functions correctly.
-The boost merchant in the black market should not randomly refuse to speak. Again.
-Allies no longer lose their Drift status if the ZOC shifts in their favor.
-Fixed some weirdness with some of the personal storage lockers.
-Fixed a crash bug that occurred when losing to the Cryocarrier.
-Fixed a few spots where nodes were incorrectly inaccessible.
-Rare instances where equipment could be changed in battle should be fixed.
-The leftmost enemy fleet in Episode 3 Mission 3 should no longer be optional.
-The Hole & Corner Merchants have upgraded their wares for Episode 4.
-The merit "By a Thread" is now considerably more fair to achieve.
-The merit "I'm Insured" has had it requirements toned down.
-The "No surrender" merit requirement has been toned down considerably.
-Fixed an issue where merits 17 and 18 might not trigger.
-Creating weapons using Quality 9 or 10 Electrical Nodes will now properly create Electrical weapons.
-Crafting a X-Type Property weapon will now name the weapon with the type (H/S/P) it protects. Not retroactive.
-Rare instances where an enemy having the exact amount of health left to use a weapon were causing the game to lock up. This should no longer occur.

Special thanks once again to all my hard-working testers!

Posts

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Craze
why would i heal when i could equip a morningstar
15150
DOWNLOADING NAO
I am free to flood the wikis! :DDD

...That is, if I can remember the tropes used. I need to take notes. @_@
Downloading effective immediately!
Some minor errors to report, still:

-The new naming convention for shields is really handy (would it be possible to do something similar with weapons?), though "Insulator" does get truncated when paired with "Systems". It's only by one letter though, so you can probably change it to "System" and be fine.
-More fragment repetition. 2-7 in splices 6/7 and 1-3 in splices 8/9 is the same. 2-2 of 6/7 and 1-8 of 8/9 are also identical.

Edit: Oh, also, unrelated, but I notice that the track "Prowling" seems to be excluded from the soundtrack tab. Odd that I didn't notice that until now.
Deltree
doesn't live here anymore
4556
The name length limitation makes me say no, but I could probably replace the property tags with a property/type permutation. Only problem is that would take forever. We'll see!

Keep the minor stuff coming; since the final release is not far off I'll just have it lumped all together unless something super serious emerges.

I'll add that MP3 too.
Oh, yeah, adding a third word would be impossible. I was thinking you might be able to change the second word to reflect type as well as shell, though, sort of like with enemy weapons? Right now they pertain to property and shell, which is kind of redundant, since the first word already tells the property. Like you said, we'll see.

Speaking of weapon nomenclature, is "Skyburst" supposed to be for quality-10 luminous weapons? It sounds more dramatic than "Point", and also seems to fit the pattern of high-level weapon adjectives being compound words. Even if not, I would recommend it if the quality-10 luminous Ballistic name is something other than "Burst", since it would avoid the "Skyburst Burst" problem I mentioned a while back.
Deltree
doesn't live here anymore
4556
The name are pieced together based on the components' quality levels. Hopefully I'll have some time to scrutinize them since I haven't messed with that code much since Episode 0.

"Point" used to be "Singularity" but when I was cutting down on lengths that was one I changed. I may change it back if the suffixes are short enough.
"Point" used to be "Singularity"


Ah, that makes a lot more sense. It is pretty long though, I can see why you shortened it. Character length limits are such a pain. :/

By the way, I notice that luminous Auroral weapons only have two weapon animations, while most others have three. This does make for a somewhat jarring shift from a weak, flickering light to a sudden blinding ray once you hit quality 6 or so. Do you plan to make an intermediate animation of some kind for the final cut, or do you think it's too minor?
Craze
why would i heal when i could equip a morningstar
15150
CONSISTENCY IS CKING
Deltree
doesn't live here anymore
4556
It is, especially with OCD!

Double check that animation - it uses a simple offset equation to pick out an animation from the list (the animation changes for quality 1-4, 5-7, and 8-10), so it should be broken for every weapon and not just a specific property. The difference between the second and third animations in this case is pretty minor.
Quick question - are the rank bonus improvements retroactive or do you have to make a new character to get the most benefit? Thanks!
Deltree
doesn't live here anymore
4556
Not retroactive, unfortunately. There shouldn't be a huge difference overall as long as you didn't grind out to Rank 20 or something beforehand.
Thanks! I think my highest was 16 or so. I went ahead and started playing and haven't had any problems. Finished all the bounty missions, now to figure out how to get that hidden character...
I got stuck on that one for a while. Hint: Talk with your crewmates.
Finally figured it out. I feel stupid now, heh.
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