Patch When? #1 - Dev Diary - Cloaks

Art by @Kauket

Hello! This and more upcoming Patch When posts are intended as a sort of preview for the new patch features, hopefully dropping the number of posts asking stuff questions like "Why is my cloak randomly going off?", "Why are my Jump Drive coordinates from 2015 not working?" or "Why did my BC randomly die while still at 20% HP?"

Well, today we are going over the first thing on the menu:

Spoiler

The cloaks by their very nature are intended to make other players unable to interact with the cloaked player. While this still holds true in their newer version, it is very much not as drastic as it used to be. This cloak rework involves quite a number of changes aimed at making them less about butt-cloaking (you know who you are) and annoying people with that annoying bleep that you can't get rid of without a piece of specialised equipment. They now involve some decision making and (limited) counterplay.

Requirements simplification:

Cloaks will no longer use storage space to determine if a ship is capable of using it, leading to some weird outliers. They will be simply be hard-locked to specific ship classes:

Cloak Mk1 - Fighters, Bombers, Freighters
Cloak Mk2 - Gunboats, Cruisers
Cloak Mk3 - Battlecruisers, Battleships
Cloak Mk4 - Transports

Means of Detection:

Easily one of the most impactful changes: Cloaks now go offline if a non-grouped player gets within a certain radius of you. The radius of the detection is currently as follows for human cloaks (obviously subject to change):

Cloak Mk1 - 1500m
Cloak Mk2 - 3000m
Cloak Mk3 - 4500m
Cloak Mk4 - 3000m

Here we can see a sneaky Outcast being detected by a random Zoner passing by. This does mean that the very concept of butt-cloaking is going away for good, as while you CAN get into a superior position using cloaks, you can't just unload your cerbs/siege guns on an enemy that just so happened not to have a Cloak Disruptor on them.

"But wait, didn't you say 'non-grouped players'? What about them?" - Excellent question! The answer is that they receive a sound notification very similar to the cloak alert that currently graces our ears. Except we just use the cloak sounds instead.

Yes, now we can cancel that otolaryngologist appointment! Moving on, we have:

Fuel Usage:

Now we get to the second big change: Cloaks no longer have a static lifespan upon activation. Instead, they work similarly to how invisibility cloak worked in Crysis games: Standing still lets you conserve your batteries for a LONG time, roughly an hour, whereas running (cruising) drains your reserves drastically, and using a TL drops the cloak lifespan to single-digit seconds. The way it works behind the scenes is we're using a quadratic formula, where X is the ship's speed:

fuelUsage = ax^2 + bx + c

Most cloaks are set in a way where standing still on a full bank lasts you 60 minutes, impulse(+thruster for mk1) lasts you 20-25, and cruising lasts you below 10 minutes. That way you have to decide if you want to traverse a larger distance, but moving at a lower speed, or if you want to sprint, but compromise your ability to maintain the cloak for longer.

The Bugfixes:

Sadly, the Fun Police also found out about the changes being made and demanded a fix for the semi-transparency bug, so it had to go. Goodnight, sweet prince. The bugfix for missiles tracking cloaked ships is also coming back after being reverted shortly after deploying a few months back.

Some of you may have noticed how I only talked about human cloaks. Alien cloaks have separate 'stats' to them, but you'll have to wait until the patch to see for yourself what quirks hey might have!

Hope you enjoyed this first instalment in the series! Next one on the list is Docking Bays, coming Very Soon™!
* Sooner than the patch, I swear