Added “hit pings” (when a weapon hits an object) to tactical and re-did the tactical explosion “pings” (when an object gets destroyed). Quite the improvement, but now I’m on the fence about the “projectile” tracers that appear in tactical when a weapon gets fired. The goal is to show the player that an object is firing on another object – but not portray the exact direction and position of the weapon, so this gets a bit lost I think, I’ll probably leave it in for iter 12, but may remove it in later iterations.

Regarding the “hit pings” they are a neat effect, but because I want to differenciate tactical from ship modes – I don’t want every hit to appear in tactical – while I do want every hit to appear in ship mode. Tactical is the “information/strategy” mode so the point is to show the player that an object is getting hit, but again not portray the exact quantity and points of hit, so what happens is that the pings are limited to one every n number of seconds (currently I believe it is every 0.8 seconds). This is moddable as are the explosion and hit pings.

Some balancing issues: I split the Correa Frigate into two variants – the G and the T – the G variant has the 4 turrets, while the T has 2 turrets and the torpedo tubes. Before the ship had 4 turrets and the 6 tubes, kind of an overkill and the role was a bit muddled. The two “new” ships got a new point defense turret to add some more fun/use to them. Overall this is a neat change – the goal is that the G is the more direct ship, but the T is the more firepower though at a overall longer time and risk – because torpedos take time to reach their target and can be shot down. This will be a bit of a challenge to balance out.

Speaking of balance – right now it is pretty bad – this is because (all of the) frigate ships do too much damage too fast. I am going to tweak the projectiles that the frigate turrets to have a slower velocity – but overall the same range. Hopefully this will allow for many improvements – including making fighters more useful since they are nearly always hit by offensive frigate turrets – which are intended to be used versus large craft and not fighters. Because the projectiles travel so fast they are able to hit fighters with ease. Gotta fix that. Lots of issues remain, but that is the name of the game.