It’s nearing the end of the year and that means time for a new Naev release! This release is once again one that revamps a lot of existing features and legacy code, while adding lots of new content and features. Like always, instead of doing a release directly, we’re going to be doing a series of betas to try to ensure as few bugs as possible sneak into the final release. We plan to do the official release in about two weeks from now, but it will depend on how many issues and the likes are found.

Now, this release changes a lot of how the game currently plays, and, while it is highly recommended to start a new game, it should be possible to just load up your old saves without too much stuff being changed. In particular, some of the major changes are:

1. Significantly reworked universe map to fit existing lore
2. House Sirius completely reworked
3. Significantly improved autonav that uses lanes and is configurable
4. Reworked structural outfits and number of ship slots
5. Weapon sets are more simple with no distinction between weapons and non-weapons
6. Possible to legally obtain all “standard” factional ships and outfits

If you try it and find any issues, please report them at the issue tracker. Discussion about the game can be had on one of the various discussion forums and chatrooms we have. Check them out here! 

Full Changelog

• Gameplay Changes
  • Universe significantly overworked to be more consistent with lore
    • More landable uninhabited spobs, unique locations, and things to discover
    • Reviewed and corrected many descriptions and placement of spobs and systems
    • More in-depth and fleshed out tag system for locations
  • Ship slots and mass limits reworked such that smaller ships get more utility/structural slots to work with
  • Point defense systems that can shoot down missiles and torpedoes
  • Space object (planets, stations, etc.) properties affect quantity of missions available
  • Moved many missions and events to the vn system
  • Can sometimes find POI events with a pulse scanner equipped when entering systems
  • Changed the visuals for some of the nebulas (PSO, Mizar)
  • Pirate bribes cost more depending on your fleet and are based on points not mass
  • Missions are introduced less all at once to the player
  • Blink drives are more flexible but use energy and generate heat
  • Razor class weapons have been completely reworked
  • Can steal more than one outfit from a ship with high boarding bonus
  • diy-nerds: improved reward
• Quality of Life
  • Significantly improved autonav
    • Configurable and can use lanes
    • More efficient at reaching target locations
    • New option like follow pilots through jumps or brake when going to positions
  • Make it explicit when all the escorts have jumped or landed
  • Escorts will keep their same loadout until the game restarts
  • Player ship is no longer translucent when in stealth as it is redundant with the stealth icon
  • Show enemy/ally factions in the faction standing info window
  • Space dust is properly anti-aliased
  • Minor speed ups to patrol lane computations
  • Try to enforce minimum number of articles in the news
  • Independent patrol and bounty missions can be completed on more planets and stations
  • Can hide or prioritize missions from the info menu
  • Manual aiming model aims at the mouse location when the mouse is visible
  • Travelling merchant tells you when new wares are available and should be easier to find
  • Lua Love API should be better at handling input and not apply keys held before started
  • Increase time compression when disabled
  • Inverted how hide, evasion, and stealth value percent bonuses work. Now lower is better
  • Hide locked slots without outfits as the player can’t do anything with them
  • Added volley mode to weapon sets that makes weapons fire as fast as possible, instead of staggered
  • Autonav options are now player-specific and accessible via the info menu settings button
  • Travelling merchant gives full details of the intrinsic outfits they provide
  • Selected slots in the equipment window will only show outfits that fit
  • Autonav routes consider distance travelled in-system
  • Made stress more visible in the slim GUI
  • Reworked how stats are displayed to be more visible and intuitive
  • Can show all known outfits or ships in with the map find functionality
  • Weapon sets much more flexible, verbose, and easy to use
  • Weapon sets remember slots, not outfits
  • Route is visible on all map modes now
  • Blink and flicker drives can use double tap arrow keys to move around
  • Toolkit is cached in a framebuffer for much faster rendering
  • Intrinsic outfit details now visible from the equipment menu
  • Visually indicate which pilots are scanning the player on the overlay and radars
  • Can sell all outfits on any spob with an outfitter
  • Enemies in patrol missions should not run away
  • Changed the faction standing caps to allow the player to get all ships when maxed out. Will be decreased in the future as missions are added
  • Slot icons to make it more clear what special slots a ship has
  • System markers and autonav TARGET marker will try to not overlap with jumps and spob names
• New Content
  • New mechanic for House Sirius called flow to unlock psychic powers
    • Gives passive bonuses to Sirius ships
    • Outfits allow use on non-Sirius ships
  • 8 new missions
    • Finish the Minerva campaign
    • Nebula refugees
  • Many new events
    • Abandoned stations with secrets
    • Greedy pirates looking for domination
    • Challenges of the mind
    • Mysterious signals
    • More points of interest
  • Many, many new systems and space objects
    • 67 new star systems with 123 new space objects
    • New graphics for space objects
  • Tons of new outfits
    • Sirius flow outfits
    • Completely reworked Sirius weapons too
    • Point defense systems
    • New accessories
    • Intrinsic outfits
    • and more!
  • Many new outfit graphics
  • New NPC graphics
  • More NPC and news messages
  • Added the Space Trader Society faction
  • Custom death animations for many ships
  • More ways to increase fleet capacity
  • The pirate clans are now more differentiated in terms of AI behaviour and taunts
  • More factional landing messages
  • Rehabilitation missions have been made more factional and a new rehabilitation mission for the FLF is now available
• Engine
  • Map system viewer is more compact
  • Added hook.hail_spob
  • Events support tags
  • Editor supports tags
  • Library to handle conditionals for mission computer missions
  • Added support for disabling specific patrol lanes from being generated
  • Support for Lua scripting for ships
  • Changed api of evt.claim and misn.claim
  • Missions/events load Lua as chunks instead of compiling each time
  • Significant speed-ups in collision detection with quadtrees
  • Hooks “outfit_buy”, “outfit_sell”, “ship_sell”, and “ship_swap” pass Lua objects instead of strings
  • Ships can have extra descriptions that show up on mouse over
  • More Lua API added such as pilot.armour, pilot.shield, or naev.missionList
  • Soromid NPCs can have custom descriptions based on genetics
  • Improved VN API with vn.move, vn.musicVolume, etc.
  • Improved VN handling of non-ascii fonts
  • Support for generating munitions from outfits
  • Improved derelict script to handle custom derelicts better
  • Removed some custom environment and string handling functions for standard SDL ones (requires 2.0.18 now)
  • Better handling of user locales
  • Weaker effects shouldn’t overwrite stronger ones anymore
  • Spobs can use communication graphics
  • Require OpenGL 3.2 for geometry shaders now
  • Support for advanced collisions such as weapon on weapon, allowing for point defense weapons
  • Renamed thrust to accel for more consistency and simplifications
  • Support for buying intrinsic outfits
  • Ship distress moved to the message framework
  • Outfits have support for double tapping accel/left/right triggers
  • Removed toolkit fading effects
  • Support for rendering images as SDFs
  • Significant loading time speed-up with multithreading
• Fixes
  • Main menu more responsive when changing windows
  • Typo and wording fixes
  • Fixed many corner case crashes in the editor
  • Fixed cargo missions not being generated in some parts of the universe
  • Game no longer crashes when loading save with persisted Lua pointing to nonexistent systems/spobs
  • Minor improvements to many existing missions
  • Fixed crash when events trigger other events on creation
  • Fixed autonav sometimes having trouble landing with reverse thrusters
  • Qex races should be much less laggy now
  • Fixed some outfits using the wrong store images
  • Fixed system viewer not being consistent with map
  • Player’s escort damage is counted towards players damage
  • Avoid having missions duplicates for cases where they can significantly stack such as patrol missions
  • Fire rate and action speed should affect damage and disable of beam weapons
  • Fixed some outfits not having “Activated Outfit” in their description
  • Fixed ships offering 100 fuel refuels twice
  • Fixed some ships having trouble equipping because of stacking engine reroutes and such
  • Improved AI’s scanning behaviour to be more robust to stealth pulsing
  • Fixed POI generating in extremely volatile systems
  • Fixed tutorial running during cinematics
  • Fixed active outfits not showing “activated outfit” in their summary sometimes
  • FLF no longer become true allies of the Dreamer Clan to not limit the players actions
  • Made audio system more robust to runnning out of source errors