Hello!

We are happy to release Fleet Battles Beta #2 today.  We have new ships and weapons for you as well as the ability to customize your arena battle options.  Read below for details.  

Custom Matches

Choose "Custom matches" to enable the following customization options

• Enabled custom ships in multiplayer
• Create a private, password protected lobby for multiplayer
• Set the arena size
• Adjust the number of asteroids, wormholes, and ion storms
• Adjust the Fleet max size
• Choose from three different Arena maps.
• "Invite" friends to join your multiplayer matches

Gameplay

• New ships
• Lexite Interceptor: Dual Shot, Shield
• Mu'Kay Grasper: Harpoon, Ink Blob
• Greegrox Swarm: Microbolt shot, Heal
• New weapon components
• Heal -- restores crew
• Death Ray. The name explains itself
• Dual Shot -- fires a fast double shot
• Ink Blob -- drops an inky blob that drains energy and crew.
• Shield -- hold down to be invincible until you run out of energy
• Note: Harpoon and Microbolt are not available for custom ships.
• Full balance pass on all of the ships and their components
• Custom hull sizes have been modified for better balance.
• Changed the planet in the "Super Melee" map (the original one) to be Mars.
• Updated names of many of the ships and their components.

Graphics / UI

• Many of the ships now have custom animations for their pilots. Animations for additional factions will be added over time.  Pilot animations change based on the state of their ship.
• Improved font appearance, especially on higher resolution displays.
• Updated UI to work better at high scaling factor.
• Improved appearance and framing of custom ship thumbnails.
• Adds tooltips to mounts in ship editor.
• Players are now set to "Great" graphics quality settings by default.
• Increased the length of "Ship Design Description" text field.
• Better looking 'Flak Cannon' explosion
• Ship death explosion and Scryve Flak cannons VFX are now less likely to crush your frame rate.
• Significant reduction in memory usage.
• Updated credits with help from the community.
• Updating gradient swatches for Tywom-style ship parts so the parts don't look so dull.

Bugs

• Fix for rogue gravity fields persisting between matches which were causing the universe to collapse to a singularity.
• Fixed a race condition crash in the animation system.
• Fixed a random graphics crash.  Die "swap-chain" crash die!! Good.  It's dead now.
• Ships with invalid components are now disabled on the fleet picker or crafting screen.
• Killing another player in multiplayer with your secondary weapon no longer has a chance of crashing the game.
• Entering and exiting the ship designer more than 8 times no longer crashes.