Welcome to Cosmic Rift. This is an open beta test. During the next few weeks, we will be rapidly adding new features and content as well as balancing gameplay and fixing bugs. We appreciate all the player input in helping us make the game better. As you can see from the changes that we have already made, we do listen to player ideas and use our best judgement in prioritizing and implementing them.
Those who have been around before in the early stages of the games we have developed will know that this is the most exciting time to be around the game. Everyday you login you will find things getting better and will often see your own complaints being addressed. When we make balance changes that effect all zones, we will put information about those changes in either the release notes (for code/engine changes) or in this file for settings changes. Each zone also has its own news file where changes effecting only that zone are explained.
If you are having problems, we often have moderators online who can help you out. Type ?help to request assistance. Abusing ?help will result in a warning; further abuse will result in banning.
~B~4Wednesday, August 8, 2001~2~B
- increased the penalty for point blank bombing. It used to be set to 50% of the the damage you cause to yourself is reduced from the damage you cause to the enemy. Now it is set at 100%.
- put up the Seek & Destroy zone for a while. This is an older zone that we took down due to lack of players. I am hoping there are enough players now to make this game style viable, if not we will take it down and wait some more.
~B~4Friday, July 13, 2001~2~B
- Version 1.25 released today, mostly updates for some future zones we are working on, but there are a few other changes, see release notes for details.
- Reduced the bullet-damage of the Kragath slightly and made them slightly more expensive to fire. We felt the ship's bullets were a touch overpowered.
~B~4Saturday, July 7, 2001~2~B
We added a new Advanced Option (from the zone-selection screen) that allows you to turn off flipping on the vertical blanking interval. Turning this option off seems to improve performance significantly on some video cards (particularly GeForce cards), other cards it will totally mess up, I recommend you try it and see if it helps or hurts.
~B~4Saturday, June 30, 2001~2~B
We have added a new 4-man Grazi capital ship to the game. It's almost impossible to balance these things without actually putting it in-game with a lot of players, so odds are it is way out of whack, but we will fix it up as necessary. There is only 1 per Arena.
~B~4Wednesday, June 27, 2001~2~B
The new scoring system is finally here. Under the 'Charts...' menu you will find several new options that will guide you through accessing the new scoring features. For all the details of the new system, see the Release Notes (under F1 help)
Basically, the new scoring system tracks a players performance on daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, and lifetime basis. Players can view the historical data in various ways.
As far as score resets go, we wanted to make sure all the new features are working and tracking properly before we reset everything and start with a clean slate. We will let you know in advance when we plan on resetting everything.
Finally, if you are having problems with your game-controller, you need to:
1) install DirectX 8.0 (you can download it free from www.microsoft.com/directx)
2) go to the Movement Configuration menu from the zone-selection screen and configure your controller (or mouse) appropriately
3) go to the Keyboard/Button Configuration menu and make sure all your controller buttons are setup as desired.
~B~4Monday, June 25, 2001~2~B
We will be shutting down the game tomorrow morning from 9:00 a.m. until Noon (Pacific Time) while we make some changes to the database structure. We may have the game operating in stand-alone mode during that time, or we may shut it down completely (we will see).
When the game comes back live there will be a new version released. The scores WILL NOT be wiped at that time. In fact, from the users perspective nothing will have changed. For the curious though, internally it will be tracking scores very differently. The reason we are rolling out the new scoring system in two phases is so we can test the backend (server-side) stuff for bugs and load-handling before we put further stress on it by having users querying the new functionality. This will also allow us to fully develop the front-end interface to the new features against real data before we release it live. The net effect should be that your scores won't be wiped until we are 100% sure everything is working.
Once we are sure that everything is working, we will be wiping the scores clean and doing another version that contains the full client-side functionality of the new scoring system. Assuming the load-testing goes ok, this will likely happen Thursday or Friday.
~B~4Saturday, June 23, 2001~2~B
We will most likely be resetting all scores for all zones the middle of next week. This will coincide with the next release which will be implementing a slightly modified scoring system (early testing shows the system should work).
We will be giving more details on the scoring system at the time of the release, but the new system should prevent the need from us having to reset the scores again, and yet will provide newer players that come into established zone the opportunity to set themselves apart from the pack.
There are a couple implications of the score wipe that you should be aware of. First off, you since your squad-membership and banners are kept in the score-chart with your score on a per-zone basis, that information will be lost.
For squads, you will simply need to rejoin your squad, so make sure you know the squad password (which will be the same as before, as will the owner of the squad). For banners, you should go to the banner edit screen and export your banner to a local file, then you will be able to re-import it after the score-wipe has occurred.
Your aliases will all remain in tact, as will any squads that have been created (you will just need to rejoin them). Your total usage will remain the same. In zones that track experience, skills, cash, and inventory, those will likely be reset as well (not decided yet, but starting clean seems like a good idea).
If you are interested in keeping a long term record of the current high-score charts, I recommend you export a copy of them sometime soon as we will not be keeping the data. As next week rolls around, I will give more details of precisely when the wipe will occur, so you can grab the latest charts just before the wipe.
When we do wipe, we will likely have to shut down the servers for a little while (up to an hour perhaps). We will take care to schedule this downtime in the morning hours, and warn people the night before.
Finally, please quit bugging us and the mods about when the wipe will occur, as soon as we have everything in place and know when the wipe will be, we will post it to the zone news.
Some people will think the new scoring system is a lot of fuss about nothing, others will think it is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I am very excited about the new score system if for no other reason than it will help new players to the game get incorporated into the community more quickly.
Thanks for playing our game, we will continue to try and make it better
- The Infantry/Cosmic-Rift Development Team
~B~4Monday, June 11, 2001~2~B
- version 1.21 released today.
- We are planning on making some more major changes to the way scores are tracked in the next week. These changes will likely require that we reset the scores for all zones, just giving you a heads up.
~B~4Thursday, June 7, 2001~2~B
- Some re-balancing of ships and weapons as follows:
- Asp bomb changed such that it does not substantially delay the firing of other weapons
- Rakkir bomb proximity radius reduced (meaning you have to get more of a direct-hit to make enemy trigger the bomb, actual damage remains the same)
- Ravager replaced its gun with a faster-firing mini-bomb. This is completely untested and will likely need some balancing
- Tarthist bomb changed to bounce twice instead of only once
- All limited use weapons now fire without any energy cost.
- The Warp Field Generator no longer causes any damage.
- Bio Burst shrapnel speed increased.
- Cluster Bomb and Cluster Burst have been tweaked in several small ways. (no longer random distribution)
~B~4Monday, May 14, 2001~2~B
- Version 1.19 released today. See release notes for full details.
~B~4Tuesday, May 1, 2001~2~B
- Chaos zone has had a multi-man ship added. You will find this ship (the Daggir) sitting around the level. This is a two-man ship, with a driver and a turret position.
- You press space-bar to enter the first available position on the ship. Press shift-space to exit the ship.
- The Daggir provides 20% armor, but cannot be destroyed itself; only it's occupants can be killed. When occupants are killed anybody else is free to take the ship.
- Your repel and utility-devices are useable while in The Daggir; all other weapons are disabled, except the ones that come built-into the ship itself.
- The Daggir is a temporary feature of Chaos zone that we are using to test it. We will be adding more multi-man ships in the future.
- version 1.17 released (see release notes for full details)
~B~4Friday, April 27, 2001~2~B
- switched all zones over to new smaller ships.
- final version 1.16 released (see release notes for details)
~B~4Thursday, April 26, 2001~2~B
- Look for a new testing zone to be opened up shortly that will be showing off the new smaller-ships. When we get all ships finished tomorrow, we will convert all zones over to the smaller ships.
- Read release notes for all the code changes, biggest new feature is the in-game keyboard configuration
- We are now awarding assist-points if you are involved in helping a teammate kill somebody.
- We sped up the packetting rate slightly to try and make for a less laggy gameplay experience.
~B~4Wednesday, April 25, 2001~2~B
- Lots of fixes, read the release-notes for details by pressing F1 and selecting Release-Notes.
~B~4Monday, April 23, 2001~2~B
- Added a death use-delay timer to the Warp-Team item. You will now not be allowed to use the Warp-Team inventory item (F7) after you come back to life for 20 seconds. There will a small countdown timer next to the item to indicate when it can be used.
- Added the ability to make your message area transparent. If you are running at low resolutions this can make a huge difference in the amount of area you can see. The easiest way to turn this feature on is simply by right-clicking inside the message area. You can also turn it on under Message Options.
- In the flagging zones, you will no longer be allowed to join the winning team once the victory-timer has started.
- We have taken Chaos Zone down for the time being. The map was too large for the size of player-base we currently have. As the player base grows over the next few weeks, we will reintroduce this zone.
