New test client released news - Wayward Terran Frontier

So what's new?

Nearly everything is the answer. First of all, this is using the rendering engine that the current development branch runs on, so all of the fancy graphics are in. That means all the animations, backdrops, shaders, weapon effects and ships are new. In addition, there are new control schemes, new screens (character inventory for instance) and new world objects and the list goes on and on...seriously just go play with it.

Ship profiles have a slightly new format with the inclusion of normal, specular and emission maps for each ship which you can edit outside the game. Of course your old ship profiles will still load and render, but if they don't have the extra texture maps the game will render them with the old 2d shaders and no light.

The ship editor is the main purpose of this release, and so I spent a bit of time improving it before releasing. Here is a list of the improvements from last time you may have tried it:

• More sub-categories - less stuff in 1 list
• Rotating modules - press Q + E or arrow left/right keys to rotate the currently selected module instead of endlessly scrolling through a list
• Drawing conduits - select the base conduit from the list and simply click and drag to draw nice conduit paths
• Mirrored rotations - even rotated modules can be mirrored properly now with the editor selecting the correct rotation for the opposite mod...this works on almost all of the new modules
• Mirrored conduits - drawing conduits now works with mirroring
• Structure as the default tile - no more forgetting to add structure until your design is already complete, now you remove structure every time you place a module
• Shift right-click delete - remove every module that would block placement of the module you are trying to place.

Here are some improvements to the debugging commands you can use for testing your creations:

• bracket keys [ & ] slow and hasten the passage of time for cinematic explosion watching in slow motion
• P takes a screen shot
• Delete allows you to spawn any of your created ships as an enemy, or if you created the ship with zero crew as an empty ship
• You can now detach the camera from your ship with the V key
• Tons of new ships to spawn with the F# keys and number keys

Also included are lots of improvements to general stability and useability. Borderless windowed mode anyone?

But wait? Just a ship editor? That's not a game!

You're right! Singleplayer is far from being ready, and when it is I plan to keep them separate. The idea is to have 2 branches:

• Zero Falls the commercial single player exploration-RPG accessed through our store or by stealing it on the pirate bay and...
• Wayward Terran Frontier ship editor and testing client which is meant to give modders and curious gamers a chance to play with the engine, try out crazy ship designs, import their art into the engine and generally just play around with an editor/debugging environment.

So if you feel like playing around with the game engine, trying your hand at designing a ship, or just blowing some stuff up in slow motion, that's what you can do now.