Hey everybody, Flavien here, taking stead of Keith for the weekly update as he’s busy with the arrival of his first child.
As you know, we’ve been busy working on the next major patch for quite a while now. I’m happy to report that progress has been going pretty smoothly recently and that we’re seeing light at the end of the tunnel. This new version has taken a lot of development time, but includes some pretty heavy and fundamental architectural changes, especially in terms of networking, which will allow us to scale up to these hundreds-of-ships-at-once battles. In terms of gameplay it’s still pretty bare-bones, but we should be in a good state to iterate quickly towards an alpha release at the end of the year.
Battle test in atmosphere
For now, ETA for this new patch for dev-tier / stellar+ level backers is some time around next week. Planetary physics collisions is almost resolved ( I still need to implement some server-side code and do some stress test, but the algorithm is already functional ) but we’ll need a few additional days to implement some missing features and do a polish / bug fixes pass ( for instance I need to rework atmospheric flight mechanics and add back some thruster sound effects ). Keith has also recently been upgrading the website and installer dependencies.
External view can now be rotated around the ship
The art team has also started to gear up for the next patch, that will include a first basic version of capital ships ( with placeholder art and control scheme ). Some assets that have been in the works in the past months are being integrated into the project, including the new space station, factory and military base pieces.
Flying a Destroyer around a planet
That’s all for now. Stay tuned for more information about the new patch next week. I’ll probably do a streaming session as soon as it’s out, assuming the server is stable. See you !
-Flavien
Hey everyone it’s time for your weekly update. It’s been another busy week here at I-Novae Studios. We had another playtest this last weekend, this time with planets reintegrated for the first time in months. Overall everything went smoothly and Flavien believes he may have already come up with a viable solution for server-side planetary collision detection. We found a couple of new bugs but nothing we can’t fix within a few days. In fact, the test went so well we’re pleased to announce that, as long as we don’t run into any last-minute blockers, we’ll be releasing the next patch this Saturday, the 21st of October.
A massive space battle over a planet!
Needless to say – this patch is a significant update – it contains months of work from both the art and the engineering teams. To summarize some of the changes: we’ve rewritten nearly our entire networking stack, added mockups for all of the capital ships, applied materials to most of the smaller ships and installations (still WIP), improved multi-threaded performance, added scorekeeping, implemented a basic in-game UI mockup, improved the flight model, implemented a basic damage model, added placeholders for simple voice commands, mocked up cockpit bobbleheads (no physics simulation yet), tested massive space battles, etc.
Staying close to my wingman as he fires at the enemy
Assuming everything goes smoothly this weekend with the patch we’ll announce our next Alpha backer “free play” weekend within a week or 2. We’re looking forward to stress testing the new networking code with Developer Access and then Alpha backers. This patch has been a long time coming, we greatly appreciate everyone’s patience, and after the next Alpha “free play” weekend we’ll be pivoting in a big way towards releasing the Alpha as soon as we can!
Catching some sun while flying around a planet
I wish all the best on further development!