September 30th Update

This is the first update in quite a while and it's a BIG one.

TLDR; rebalanced block P costs, lots of new weapon types for modders, significant optimizations for better frame rate and a smoother ride.

General Improvements:

• Block P costs have been re-balanced
• Significant performance, precision, and stability updates when editing very large structures.
• 'x' now properly stops the player ship from rotating when in key rotation mode
• tooltips are now properly updated after scaling a block
• World streaming and generation is now smoother. Improve performance when copying clusters and when allocating new clusters using a new port connection copying algorithm and pooled allocator for cluster structures.
• Use a different, more accurate method for sleeping between frames and update steps (smoother animations).
• Improve targeting for cannons and rockets, particularly when the velocity difference between the firing ship and target is significant.
• update Chinese translation (Thanks to community members Uiharu, Fgdfgfthgr, tang hao, liilili, Magnus siiftun1857 Frankline, and others). Improve Chinese and Japanese text wrapping.
• Significantly reduce the memory used by each game block by moving constant fields into a central, shared location. This also makes it easier to add new block fields in the future.
• Significant physics engine cpu and memory optimizations.
• Graphics transformation optimizations. Particle effect spawning optimization
• Significant healing laser optimizations
• New block sleeping optimization reduces CPU usage of inert blocks.
• OPTIMIZATIONS
• Fix several rare editor related crashes
• Weapon ranges are now displayed in the binding screen
• Lots of random crash fixes

Tournament:

• The AI now ignores weapons bound as either "point defense" or "auto-fire" when determining what range to engage at. Players can bind auxiliary weapons to either of these two binding slots to prevent them from interfering with AI positioning.
• AI will now use the fire mode ("fire all" or "ripple fire") from the primary weapon binding for its weapons.
• Weapons bindings are now easier to edit in sandbox mode. Just press 'b' without closing the console.
• AI now properly considers weapon boosters when calculating weapon range/damage in several places.

Modders:

• New "fragment" cannon field allows recursively defined projectiles that split into more projectiles.
• New cannon field "pattern" can be set to "random" (default), "spiral", "wave", or "constant" to change the way projectiles are distributed through the "spread" angle.
• New cannon/laser field "barrelTaper" allows modifying turret barrel aesthetics.
• New cvar kSensorRangeMultiplier allows modders to increase the sensor range of all ships (default is 2200 units). Particularly useful for mods that also increase kLiveRadius.
• audio.lua mods can now load sounds from the base game directory without having to copy the sound file into their mod
• Hold down "control" to display the prettier construction mode tooltip when in the sandbox (instead of the more verbose sandbox tooltip)
• level_save command now requires a -f switch to overwrite and existing level file. Add level_remove command.
• Allow setting block "health" and "mass" directly instead of setting "durability" and "density"
• Add new cvar kWriteJSON which causes the game to export ships and write other data files in easily parsable JSON format instead of the default lua-esq format. The game can now import ships and other data files in JSON format.
• Fix issue where multiple glsl shader #includes were sometimes garbled
• Add ability to glue several translation strings together in lua files. For example, blurb=_("foo") _("bar") will translate "foo" and "bar" separately and then glue the results together.
• Add new features ALWAYSFIRE and NEVERFIRE which cause weapons to either always fire or never fire (ignored even by AI). Useful for cosmetic lasers, etc.
• Extend the ONEUSE flag to work with SHIELD, LAUNCHER, and FACTORY/SELFFACTORY.
• Add PALETTE feature to allow placing blocks in the faction palette even if they are not in a ship (see also NOPALETTE).
• Add turretLimit block field to allow turrets that only partially rotate
• Increase maximum custom block scale from 10 to 32. Increase maximum number of vertices per shape from 16 to 32.
• Allow new kCVar += N syntax which helps mods conflict less
• Add new triangle based (instead of point based) particle rendering mode which is slower but works better with very large particles. To enable set kParticleTris=1.
• Add new feature LAUNCHER_BARRAGE which can be added to LAUNCHER to cause all missiles to fire at once.
• Add cvar kMainMenuBattleFactions and friends to allow controlling the contents of the main menu battle