Homeworld: Unbound 0.14 — your fleet answers you again

Polish, after the two launch faults 0.13 fixed. None of it is urgent, and the first item is the sort of thing you feel rather than notice.

An order with nothing to confirm it

Give a move order and nothing happened. No chime, no pilot acknowledging on the radio. Assign a hotkey group and it was silent too.

On a monitor you would at least see the ships turn. In a headset the destination is often behind you or across the room, so that callback was frequently the only sign the order had been taken at all — and giving orders into silence is a different experience from giving them to a fleet.

The cause is a deliberate choice with a cost nobody had noticed paying. The VR controls talk to the engine directly rather than pretending to be key presses, because a key the player has unbound would otherwise make a command vanish without a word. But the mouse-and-keyboard path had been picking things up along the way, and the acknowledgements were among them.

So moves get the pilots answering, recalling a hotkey group clicks and names it, assigning one calls it out, and kamikaze clicks. Halt stays silent, because it is silent on a PC too.

The move line points at your ships

The line drawn from your fleet to a move destination started wherever the ships had been when you began giving the order. For a fleet already under way that is a point in empty space they flew past long ago, with the line stretching back to nothing in particular. It follows them now.

The controls card had the sensor view backwards

It said “Click stick — open Sensors”, which was true and told you nothing. Everything else on that card is a screen you dismiss before playing, so that is how the line read — and it is exactly the wrong way round for a view you give orders from.

It now says what the colours mean, that pointing at a sphere picks it out, that every order still works while you are inside it, that the zoom comes in on what you have selected rather than the middle of the map, and that leaving takes you to whatever you were looking at.