Dev Blog 32

Battlestar Galactica Online - Development Blog 32 - "Independence Day"

5 July 2016

Hey pilots, It’s Independence Day in the U.S. and time to also discuss the upcoming BSGO independence from the browser universe. Well, over the last few blogs we have repeated the same topics and we don’t want to make too many new promises as there are still a few things in the pipeline that need to come together first.

But we’ll go into a little more detail about those topics today to give you an update on the situation.

Todays Blog:

Client Update

Last time we showed an early mockup. This time we want to give more concrete details on the release plans. Currently, it looks like we will have an external testable version at the end of July.

What does that mean for the actual release date? To be honest, we don’t know yet. The most important thing is that the client version runs stably and smoothly. As different hardware specifics and also different operating systems might react differently, we want to make sure we identify any potential issue and fix it before we make the client publicly available.

But it also means that there will already be a client version which can be used. So in case of any unseen plans of the browser universe to shut down the NPAPI plugin earlier than expected, we’ll be ready with a solution.

Ammunition Discussion

Recently in the EN forum, ammunition has been discussed quite intensely. We’ve seen this topic showing up every once in a while and also wanted to give players the chance to have an official discussion about it. We’ve also extended the discussion with a poll and three possible solutions:

• The current system (different ammunition types with individual strengths such as accuracy, damage, etc.)
• Former system (only one type with different strength levels (e.g. +10% damage, +20% damage, +30% damage)
• A new system (players had the chance to mention any alternative plan in the comments).

Roughly one third preferred to stick to the current system, while 57.5% asked for the return of the old system. Only a minority voted for a different system.

So in general there is a strong tendency to go back to a simpler system, but there is also a large portion that wants to stick to the current version. The discussion has shown that there is definitely a need for improvements, but we will not immediately act on it.

It’s added to our change list and will be tackled after some other major topics have been dealt with.

Ship Variant Discussion

In thread in the EN forum another thread in the EN forum, we discussed new ship variants as we finally want to give the initial UI in the ship hangar its planned purpose. Well, we’ve received a lot of suggestions and reviewed them in several stages.

We’ve used multiple suggestions to combine them into two ideas we are currently following up on. First of all we want to set up the internal process for creating new player ships. Secondly we will discuss their detailed design with you in the forum again.

The two selected ships are variants for the assault strikes and the command capital ships. We’ll keep you in the loop.

Extended Tutorial/Station Dialogs

With Game Update 53, we released the first new tutorial mission. In order to finalize the efforts on the game entry, the second tutorial mission is also in the process of being reworked. The goal is to further reduce obstacles for new players, so they find their way into open space more easily.

On top of that, we also reviewed the story and the station dialogs. Apart from outdated story lines that sometimes lead into broken features (e.g. friendlist), we also wanted to adjust the dialogs from a quality point of view. Players should really feel that they are talking to the characters known from the series.

Tournaments

In the last blog we mentioned that we are going to split the tournament refactoring into four parts. Part one is about to be finished and will get released quite soon. But you might actually ask what these 4 pieces are about.

So in short they are:

• Overhauled Leaderboards

• Zones

• Redesigning tournament sectors

• The actual Tournaments (including early anti-grouping measures).

In detail – part one is about new leaderboards. Not only did the UI get upgraded to the new style, but also some functionality upgrades and performance improvements have been applied.

In general we divide the new rankings into two views. The basic view will show your ranking results of the current month. Additionally, some rankings will come along with new titles for the best in a month. This should increase competition and also give new players the chance to compete against each other in a dedicated timeframe.

On top of that, the classic all-time view will also still be available. Moreover, we removed and added some ranking stats that haven’t been in there before.

One of the issues of the old Top Gun Battle tournaments was that there were different sectors for players of different level ranges that couldn’t compete on a physical base, but still compete in the same ranking. In order to give the same chance to everyone or actually let everyone decide his own fate, we broke the old concept.

With the new tournaments each level range will fight for their individual ranks and also for individual rewards. The rewards will be level range specific.

The tournament leaderboard page will also be split into level range tabs, so you can easily check the results per level range.

Part two of the tournaments will be a “zone” system. That’s mainly a technical revamp that will help us trigger & set up multiple sectors for a specific purpose. In the long-term this will also include the ability to turn on / off event sectors which we can use for seasonal events.

Part three is actually a graphical redesign of the tournament sectors – as we plan to not just have strike and escort tournaments, we also want to give them some graphical variety.

Part four will actually be the tournaments themselves which will be plugged into the basic tournament system we generate upfront. On top of that we plan to include some metrics to track down grouping behavior which we can act on afterwards.

In general, the entire system will be easily extendable with different tournament modes afterwards.

The redesigns of daily assignments and the wing system are still on the agenda, but we have pushed them back until the topics above have been finished.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this blog update. We’ll keep you up-to-date on the upcoming tests for the client.

Tobias_BP

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