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SpaceCorps 2027 0.4.0

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@rorychatt rorychatt released this 27 Sep 21:59
· 24 commits to main since this release
v0.4.0
f2b0d38

SpaceCorps 2027 0.4.0 is a graphics overhaul. Every alien now has a body of its own that moves and shows when it attacks, Skylab becomes a 3D space station that grows as you build it, ships and stations are lit by the nebula around them, the sun casts real shadows, hulls show their panels, rivets and running lights, explosions and warps bend space, and a new Graphics Quality setting picks the right detail for your computer. An alien's rewards now go to the pilot who hit it first, a double click attacks, and every pilot's company shows before their name. This release also brings a new ship, the Kitefin, 88 missions for levels 1 to 8, respawns at your company's base, a new logo, bonus codes, the game in Hungarian and new names for two aliens.

The game plays on the public server https://spacecorps-game.sliplane.app. Your pilot, ships, items, credits, clan and world carry over.

Download page: https://spacecorps.github.io/play/
On Hangar: https://hangar.sliplane.app/p/spacecorps/spacecorps-2027

What's new

The Swarm gets real bodies

  • Every alien has its own model instead of a recoloured Seeker: the Seeker (a slim scaled lancet), the Phantasm (a violet pinwheel around a floating core), the Bulwark (an isopod in forged bronze armour with glowing amber seams and claw legs), the Gorvane (a crimson manta with a glass crest) and the Crystalys (a crystal star with orbiting shards).
  • Aliens move: fins flap, plates breathe, wings ripple, crowns and orbiting shards turn.
  • You can see when an alien turns on you, not only from its laser. The Bulwark raises its armour plates and bares its glowing seams, the Gorvane arches its wings and spreads its pincers, the Crystalys spins up its crown and orbiting shards, and every alien's weak points flare.
  • The pointing hand now covers the big aliens all the way to their wing tips and shards.
  • WP Sources and the wiki show the new aliens: their icons on the milestones (hover one to see the alien move) and in the wiki's list, and each alien's own model in its wiki article.

New alien names

  • The Class IV cruiser of x-3 and x-4 has a new name, the Gorvane, and the test alien on Alpha is now the Brood Matriarch. Same aliens, same rewards: your kills, statistics and WP Sources progress carry over under the new names.

First hit claims the kill

  • An alien's rewards now go to the pilot who hit it first, not to whoever lands the last shot. Your first hit claims the alien, and every hit after renews your claim.
  • If you don't hit it for 10 seconds, your claim lapses and the next pilot to hit it claims it. It also ends when your ship is destroyed or you leave the map, and coming back doesn't bring it back.
  • When the alien is destroyed, the pilot holding its claim gets everything: credits, Thulium, XP, honor, the kill for quests and Wipe Points, and its cargo crate. If you finish an alien someone else claimed, you get nothing, and the Game Log says so.
  • Select an alien another pilot has claimed and the target panel shows "Claimed by" that pilot and "No reward". Hover it for the details.
  • Company pilots never claim an alien. One they finish still pays the pilot holding its claim.

Attacking

  • Double-click an alien or a pilot of another company to select it and open fire, as the attack key does. A pilot of your own company is only selected.
  • The lock holds when you fly past your target. Before, clicking just beyond it often dropped the lock and stopped your fire, and with the camera turned a click could select an alien out of sight behind the view.
  • The Flight controls card on the Dashboard and the Firing help card show the double click.

A new ship: the Kitefin

  • The Shop sells a fifth ship, the Kitefin, for 200,000 credits. It sits between the starter Protos and the Ostirion.
  • It carries three lasers, five generator slots (2 core, 3 support), 16,000 hull and a base speed of 175. That is twice the Protos's hull, with a third gun and a faster drive.
  • The Ostirion still has twice its hull, a third core generator slot, a second ability slot and more speed.
  • The Kitefin is a kite-shaped light gunship with a forked tail, in sea teal and coral. Its wiki page has the full stats.

Missions for levels 1 to 8

  • Mission Control has 88 missions for pilot levels 1 to 8, grouped by level on its Missions page. Take a level's missions in any order, up to five at a time. Each level's missions give most of the experience you need to reach the next level.
  • Every level ends with a Special. It opens once the level's ten other missions are done, and it also pays items: lasers, shield parts, cores, ship fragments. Level 1's missions come with a few starter items too.
  • From level 2 on, the missions take you to higher sectors step by step, up to the PvP centre and other companies' borders at level 8. Each task names its sector, and only kills and flying there count. Distance flown inside a safe zone doesn't count toward a patrol.
  • A timed mission shows its limit before you accept it, and a countdown after. In Beta and Gamma, where aliens are tougher, the limits are longer.
  • Rewards show their item icons. Experience, credits, Thulium and honor are multiplied by your world as before; items and booster hours are the same in every world.
  • Missions you already completed stay completed. A reward you hadn't claimed yet pays the better of the old and the new reward. An active mission whose tasks changed is dropped without penalty, and you can take it again.
  • The wiki lists every mission under Mechanics › Quests.

Skylab becomes a station you build

  • Skylab is now a 3D space station you can orbit. The Core sits in the middle with six docking ports: Solar, the Credit Farm and the Thulium Farm dock at theirs, and your active ship waits in the docking bay.
  • Every module changes shape as it levels (at levels 5, 10, 15 and 20), and a row of lamps on its collar shows its exact level.
  • You can see what each module is doing. Upgrades put up scaffolding with construction drones and a hologram of what is being built. Modules you haven't built yet show as holograms. A full farm stacks its cargo and sends up a beacon of light, a switched-off module goes grey, and in a power deficit the lights flicker red.
  • A chip over each module shows its name and level, with a ring for a farm's storage or an upgrade's progress. Hovering a module lights up its outline.
  • Click a module or its chip, or press 1–4, to open its panel beside the station: production, power, storage, Collect, the power switch, and what the next level costs. The camera swings round to show the module with the rest of the station behind it. The old card list is still there under List.
  • Collect All empties every farm at once, and a meter shows how much of your power you use.
  • What your farms have stored is always yours to collect. Switching a farm off, upgrading it or running out of power only stops its production: Collect and Collect All still take what it holds. Until now such a farm couldn't be collected until it was back on, done upgrading or powered again.
  • In a power deficit your farms now stop producing (they used to keep producing while collecting was paused), and a notice says so. They start again when you make enough power.
  • A module already at the Core's level now says which Core level it needs, instead of offering an upgrade that fails.
  • A new station, with only its Core, shows Build Solar instead of a power alarm.
  • The page's subtitle no longer says "(WIP)".

Light and shadow

  • Each sector's nebula now lights the ships and stations in it. The sides the sun misses take a soft glow from the sky instead of going flat grey, and metal panels reflect the nebula's clouds.
  • The sun casts shadows. Ships shadow each other and the station's deck as they fly over it.
  • Space is black again, and each sector keeps the colours of its sky.
  • Edges are smoother: 4× multisampling on most computers instead of a blur filter.

Ships and stations up close

  • Every hull now shows the detail painted into it: panel lines, rivets, worn edges, glossy and matte plating.
  • Engines, canopies and conduits glow only where they were painted to. Navigation lights and the station's window rows shine and bloom.
  • The jump gates show their plating and hazard stripes, and the space inside their ring shimmers.
  • Ship previews in the Hangar, Shop and Wiki are sharper, with studio reflections and deep, true paint colours.

Effects

  • Warps twist the space around the vortex, and a ring of bent space follows the flash.
  • Explosions burn white-hot at the core and push a wave of bent space outward. Their smoke is darker and thinner.
  • On High and Ultra, engines leave a faint heat haze.
  • Engine trails stay smooth at any frame rate, even at 30 fps.
  • Shield hits stay on your ship while it turns.
  • When you jump, the new sector's sky is there the moment you arrive.

Graphics settings

  • Settings › Graphics › Graphics Quality is now a preset: Auto, Low, Medium, High or Ultra. It sets Detail, Resolution and Particle Quality together. Change any of those and the preset shows Custom.
    • Auto picks for your graphics card:
      • Low on basic graphics.
      • Medium on integrated and Apple graphics, at 75% resolution on very large screens such as a Retina MacBook's.
      • High on dedicated graphics cards and on Apple's Pro, Max and Ultra chips.
    • Detail is new. It sets anti-aliasing, lighting, shadow and glow quality.
    • Resolution is the old Graphics Quality setting (50, 75 or 100%).
  • Your graphics choices are remembered on your computer, so the start and login screens already use them.
  • Your graphics preset stays on this computer. It doesn't change the settings the web client or your other computers use.
  • If you used to play with low graphics or particles, you keep the cheapest settings.
  • Changing the quality in flight may pause the game for a moment while it prepares the new settings. Texture detail changes the next time you start the game.
  • Damage you take is now a brighter orange-red, easier to read over red nebulae.

In flight

  • The minimap is divided into squares, lettered A, B, C… across and numbered 1, 2, 3… down, lined up with the grid under your ship. Your square shows next to your coordinates, like B-4.
  • Settings › General › Show Map Grid turns off the grid lines under your ship.
  • Damage numbers now show only for your own fights: the damage you deal and the damage you take. Other pilots' fights still show their lasers, but no numbers, wherever you look.
  • Mission Control opens from the Mission Control bubble on the station, which shows whenever any part of the station is on screen, or from the new Mission Control button in the toolbar while you are in a station's safe zone. Clicking the station itself now flies you there, like clicking anywhere else.
  • Click Config in the Ship window to switch configuration, or press your Switch Config key (C by default). After a switch, a small countdown shows the seconds until you can switch again.

Skylab numbers

  • Skylab has a third view, Table: every module's level against its cap, production per hour, what its storage holds against its capacity, power and status in one table, with each module's Build or Upgrade. A module being upgraded always shows its time left.
  • Hover any Build or Upgrade button (the cards, the station's module sheet, the table) to preview the next level: what changes ("2,744/h → 3,842/h"), what it costs, how long an upgrade takes (building is instant), and whether the Core has to go up first.
  • The upgrade comparison now shows storage too, and the Core's upgrade shows how far it lets the other modules go.
  • With the Core at level 20, a module at level 20 now shows Max Level. It used to offer an upgrade to level 21, which was refused.

Ready to claim

  • A small (!) marks what you can do right away: Wipe Point rewards ready to claim, and Skylab farms whose storage is full. It shows on the sidebar's Season & Profile and Skylab rows, on the WP Sources tab and its milestones, and on a full farm's card and its chip over the station. In flight, the Return to Base button carries it. Hover it to see what is waiting and where.
  • A full farm has stopped producing until you collect it, and you can collect it whatever it is doing.

A new logo

  • SpaceCorps 2027 has a new logo, a crescent planet with its orbit and moon. It is the app icon on macOS, Windows and Linux, and it heads the start screen, the sign-in card, the sidebar and About.
  • Settings › About has a Special Thanks section.

Company tags

  • Every pilot's company now shows before their name as a letter in the company's colour, for example "[M] nova": on the name tags in flight, your own included, in the target panel and in chat.
  • Company pilots keep their names as before, and pilots who haven't joined a company show no tag.

Bonus codes

  • The Thulium page has a new Bonus code card. Type a code you got from us, for example at an event or on Discord, and click Claim (or press Enter).
  • What the code gives goes straight to your account, and the card lists it: credits, Thulium, items with their icons, booster time, and ships, which go to your hangar. A code never gives you a second copy of a ship you already own.
  • Each code works once per pilot, and it stays claimed after a season ends. Some codes may only be claimed by a limited number of pilots, until a given date, or from a given pilot level.
  • Codes aren't case-sensitive. If a code doesn't work, the card tells you whether it isn't valid, you already claimed it, or you already own the ship it gives.

One program on Windows and Linux

  • The Windows download unpacks to one program: spacecorps2027.exe now holds all of the game's files, with no assets folder next to it. The Linux tar.gz's spacecorps2027 does the same.
  • Updating from an earlier version removes the old assets folder once the new version has started correctly.

Languages

  • The game is now available in Hungarian: every page, the HUD, the help cards, quests and server messages. Pick Magyar in Settings › General › Interface Language, or in the language menu in the bottom-right corner of the start screen. On a system set to Hungarian the game picks it by itself.
  • Everything new in this release is in all eleven of the game's languages.

Respawn and launch

  • When your ship is destroyed you now always respawn at your company's base (M-1, T-1 or G-1) in your world, wherever you died, and also when you close the game on the death screen. You used to come back in the sector you died in when it was one of your company's. The death screen says where you'll respawn.
  • The launch window names the sector you'll actually fly to. It used to say "sector 1-1" every time.

Fixes

  • The mouse pointer now shows what you can do: a hand over buttons, links and anything else you can click, a text cursor in text fields, grab and resize arrows on windows you can move or resize. Before, it stayed an arrow everywhere, on every system.
  • Holding Shift in flight shows the second hotbar row, the one Shift+1 to Shift+9 use, even when it's empty. Before, an empty row only appeared while you picked Ammo, Rockets or Extras for it.
  • Windows: Shift no longer stays held after you press both Shift keys and let go. The second hotbar row stayed on screen, and 1 to 9 used the Shift+1 to Shift+9 slots.
  • Windows: the game's taskbar button, Alt+Tab entry and title bar show the SpaceCorps icon instead of a blank one.
  • Admins: the Admin menu shows for every pilot the server names as an admin, and a refused restart or update keeps the Admin page open and says why.
  • The server version at the bottom of the flight screen is the server's own. It always said 1.0.0.
  • The Brood Matriarch, the test alien on Alpha, starts on M-1 after every server restart instead of on a random sector.
  • After a respawn, the cargo of your own wreck, which often lies where you come back, no longer looks like loot: its card says Your wreck, and a click on it flies you there and says that only other pilots can salvage it.
  • Chinese and Japanese text wraps by stricter line-breaking rules: "——" and "……" stay together, and wrapped lines no longer run past the edge of their box.

Updating

  • From 0.2.1 or later: the game downloads 0.4.0 by itself. Click Restart to Update, or quit the game, and it installs. If you installed the game with Hangar, Hangar updates it.
  • The download is about 16 MB bigger than 0.3.4's: the new aliens, the station's parts and the Kitefin.
  • From 0.2.0: download it once from the download page and replace the old app or folder.

Platforms

Package For
SpaceCorps2027-macos-universal.dmg macOS 12 Monterey or later, Apple silicon and Intel
SpaceCorps2027-windows-x86_64.zip Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit
SpaceCorps2027-linux-x86_64.AppImage Linux x86_64, glibc 2.35 or newer (Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12, Fedora 36 and later), Vulkan
SpaceCorps2027-linux-x86_64.tar.gz the same Linux build, as a folder to unpack

Graphics need Metal (macOS), DirectX 12 or Vulkan (Windows), or Vulkan (Linux, Mesa 22 or a vendor driver). The game needs 4 GB of RAM (8 GB recommended) and 400 MB of free disk space. On computers with 8 GB, Medium or Low uses noticeably less memory than High.

First launch

The builds are not signed by Apple or Microsoft yet, so on a first install your system asks once before it opens the game. Updates the game installs itself don't ask again.

  • macOS: open the dmg and drag SpaceCorps 2027 onto Applications.
    • macOS 15 and newer: open the app once and click Done. Then go to System Settings › Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway next to "SpaceCorps 2027 was blocked".
    • macOS 12 to 14: right-click (Control-click) the app, choose Open, then Open again.
  • Windows: right-click the zip, choose Extract All, and start spacecorps2027.exe from the SpaceCorps 2027 folder: the whole game is in that one file. If SmartScreen says it "protected your PC", click More info, then Run anyway.
  • Linux: run chmod +x SpaceCorps2027-linux-x86_64.AppImage, then start it. Or unpack the tar.gz and start SpaceCorps2027/spacecorps2027.

Known issues

  • The builds are unsigned, so macOS Gatekeeper and Windows SmartScreen warn on a first install (see above).
  • On older or integrated graphics, High and Ultra can lower the frame rate. Pick Auto or Medium if flying feels less smooth than before. The same goes for fights with many big aliens on screen.
  • On Low graphics and in small windows the Skylab page opens on the card list. Switch to Station at the top right to see the 3D station.
  • The new texts in the ten other languages, and the Hungarian translation, were not yet checked by native speakers. Please report anything that reads wrong.
  • There is one public game server with limited capacity. It may restart for updates, and your ship is saved when it does.

Report problems at https://github.com/SpaceCorps/play/issues or on Discord.

Verify your download

SHA256SUMS lists every package's SHA-256 and is signed with the SpaceCorps release key
(SHA256SUMS.minisig, minisign). With both files next to
the package:

minisign -Vm SHA256SUMS -P RWRhY8TTCr07i1iOS7MT45OHD3LFJJnWXWCF19fy7hjV1RD8cwWlVKF1
shasum -a 256 -c SHA256SUMS --ignore-missing   # Linux: sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS --ignore-missing

Checksums

Package SHA-256
SpaceCorps2027-macos-universal.dmg b28a9b972c4f78027aa0f84659394584f5942dbe8f8463289d6c2bfb10fb0532
SpaceCorps2027-windows-x86_64.zip 2d7c11de7031d91678f46c9066b1e511c6b1de4b0a2a861f4cfb50f947d746cd
SpaceCorps2027-linux-x86_64.AppImage b72c675fef0aae7c294e8b2f804ce6dddf7d76f0475055d4cfa97bfc10267844
SpaceCorps2027-linux-x86_64.tar.gz 43f0a73625fcf3e989b154682d4522b9a60d66319334c7a5f074a62177a3af57
Assets 8
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