It has been an interesting 5 months. We went from building ships with the first release, to walking inside those ships and now we’re ready to release our biggest update to Interstellar Rift as of yet!
Two weeks ago we teased you with the prospect of multiplayer, this week we are ready to deliver! As of today the host game and find game buttons have become active. From now on you will be able to start your own multiplayer servers and join others from the server browser.
for the time being, all the multiplayer characters will be female as we are still slaving away on the male version.
You’ll be able to walk around onboard the starter station and spawn ships! Ships that you’ve built will be available at the ship construction terminal. Simply spawn them as you did before and wait a few seconds for the ship to spawn. Once it has appeared outside the station it will appear in the teleport list and everyone on the server will be able to teleport aboard.
But wait! there’s more! once you’re all aboard, go to the helm. (you will have to replace the helm on previously built ships, and power it) you’ll notice that you can now activate the helm. and yes, that is exactly what it means! hold on to your butts as space flight is now enabled in single and multiplayer! If you’ve connected your helm to a power source you’ll be able to fly your ship through the space environment we’ve created for you. Using the Tab key you’ll be able to switch between free flight and mouse flight, as well as third and first person viewpoint.
Now, this is a very early version of space flight, and many things will require iteration and tweaking over the coming months. At the moment, all ships handle the same away and travel at the same speed, regardless of their size shape and number of engines. This will be changing over time as space flight will incorporate ship mass, engine power, and thrust power into the flight model.
We are at a crucial moment where your feedback can help shape the future of Interstellar Rift, Please take a moment and let us know what you think of the ship controls and the current multiplayer incarnation.
Thank you and we hope to see you online!
Please add some graphical options like texture quality and player model quality, I like the game, it feels great, but I have an Nvidia Geforce 8 Series 8400 GS and I can only run the game at about 5-10 fps. please please, add more graphical options soon, maybe as a hotfix? <3
Rest assured that all the features you're looking for are coming. However I am unable to give you an eta since at the moment there are more pressing concerns such as getting the core features working as intended. We will optimize as much as we can in the meantime however. But for the moment graphical options are low on the priority list as a large portion of the game itself is not yet working as intended.
looking forward to this. I will test when I can. Any chance you plan on brining in a symmetry mode to make building a tad easier?
Yes it is on the list of features we are going to add. however i am unable to give you an ETA at this time as we are currently focusing on ironing out the bugs and kinks in the multiplayer and spaceflight features.
Nice. I like what I have seen so far. Also how do you plan on dealing with battle damage? Will sections blow off. Will there be deformable blocks?
due to the way we have had to code our engine. the breaking apart of ships won't be possible. this was the trade-off to having lag and twitch free walking on board ships as they are moving. so no breaking apart and deforming blocks but there will be battle damage and the likes. though think more along the lines of star trek battle damage. systems failing, corridors and rooms being lit on fire. loss off oxygen due to decompression. that sort of thing.
Nice. Yeah I have seen first hand how lag can really effect things in Space Engineers. I really enjoy how focused you can get in working on the internal layout of the ships of your game. So far I and two other guys from The Crows play. Now that Its MP I can probably get more. I do hope you eventually charge for the game.
We intend the keep the pre-alpha free so you guys can help us test. But eventually when enter the alpha stage of production we will start charging a small fee. No ETA on that either :P