Patchnotes – April 2013

Hi Space Pilots,

We are aware that we post a lot of announcements about features and events and that you cannot always see what we are doing to improve the game. This is precisely why we publish these monthly patchnotes.

We implemented the following features, events, etc. in April:

New features

Hades Gate

The Hades Gate is a Galaxy Gate made of 45 gate parts. Players must play this challenging gate featuring epic boss battles in a group. The Hades Gate has been modified so that it can only be played with other players who are members of your group. For this reason, the group size has been enlarged to a maximum of eight players.

Events (global and local)

Spring Fight 2013

The event which started in March was continued in the first weeks of April.

Cosmonauts Day 2013 (RU)

The event took place on April 12, 2013 on all Russian servers and had the following features:

Event games (Sector Control, Level Invasion Gate), special bonus boxes with Russian flag design on them and standard free base repairs.

Open Beta Test – Hades Gate

We opened the test servers again to the public to give them a taste of the new Hades Gate, and let the community play and test it.

Bug-fixes

• The friendly Kill Penalty Count is no longer exploitable if you refresh the game client, log into the game client again, or carry out a map jump right after killing a friendly player.
• Spring Fight 2013
• The title “Spring Superstar” has been credited to the accounts of VRU players who did not have it.
• The problem, which prevented SAR-02 ammo, Slowdown Mines, P.E.T. fuel and Repair Vouchers from being dropped, has been corrected.
• Hall of Fame: We fixed the problem that stopped a kill from being counted in the rankings if a player is at war with another player of the same company affiliation.
• Epsilon Gate: Epsilon Gate rewards were replaced with Birthday Gate rewards and credited to player accounts. This problem was fixed and players were compensated.
• Independence Goliath Design (US specific): The design was missing on American Global instances but is now available.

Client

P.E.T.: The enemy locator, which was not working as intended, was fixed.

The lasers do not stop shooting “Icys” anymore.

Group System

If a group member logs out and logs in again, the game will show that he/she is online again.
Group members will no longer get more honor when another group member is doing the quest “An offer you can’t refuse”.

Bonus Boxes

The amount of extra energy users get out of bonus boxes on battle maps has been corrected for users with multiple bonuses (e.g. bonus box doubler and/or bonuses from the Skill Tree).

Bonus boxes contained too much Jackpot currency. This bug was turned into a one-day event to promote the Jackpot Arena and was fixed afterwards.

Quest Giver

Players will no longer be able to hide under Nyx’s target area to avoid getting clicked by other players.

The NAZ of the quest giver ships now work exactly like the jump gate NAZ. It only provides NAZ to players of the faction to which the map belongs and no longer interrupts ongoing attacks.

If a player switches to RSB-75 during a fight, there is no longer a delay until the attack continues.


Website

• Shop: The Flax drone does not have an elite icon in the shop anymore.
• Clan: The company details will be displayed again in the Clan section of the website.
• Messaging system: The in-game message limitation per day now works as intended.
• Achievements: The recording of the progress of some achievements (e.g. Transcendent,
• Alien exterminator, etc.) is now shown correctly on the website.
• Skylab: CBS Module upgrades now deduct the correct price which is displayed (e.g. before it showed 600 Uridium, but only 350 Uridium was subtracted).
• EPPP: The restrictions for the visibility of the EPPP are now correct again.
• Pilot Profile: It will no longer be possible to check multiple options of one category on the “Edit Profile” layer.
• Galaxy Gates: The Alpha, Beta and Gamma Gates are “connected” again and the spins now generate parts for all these gates again.

• Hall of Fame

The user context menu in the Jackpot Arena rankings now correctly displays rankings and usernames.

The context menu for clans with special characters in their clan names is now available again in the Mozilla Firefox browser.

• Hades Gate: The log entry in the Uridium Balance for killing the NPCs in the Hades Gate is now correctly displayed and no longer states that the player has collected a bonus box.

Improvements

• Laser attack refactoring
• The goal of this refactoring was to generalize the handling of attacks and damage in the DarkOrbit server. It involved mainly reworking the code. The work happened behind the scenes, meaning that players could not see what was happening. For the DO team, these changes will bring a lot of benefits. The code is consistent for all attacks, it can be much easily used for a multitude of things in the future, and it is much easier to read.
  
• Forum link visibility
• Just a minor improvement but the link to the forum is now also visible. You will find it in the website’s footer after you have logged into your account.

Furthermore, we carried out quite a few additional bug-fixes, text corrections and other improvements.

Regards,

Your DarkOrbit team

Thank you to Energy for their assistance with this thread.

Originally posted 23.05.13