Weekly Update #75

Hey everyone it’s time for your weekly update. Last week Flavien was out of town on vacation so not much new to report for him other than he’s back to working on that pesky jitter bug with the new networking code. On my end I finished all of the low level UI subsystems I was working on last week and started on text layout and rendering. Text layout can be quite complicated however our needs are fairly simple at the moment so I’m hoping it doesn’t take more than a few days for a minimum viable product. Once text is finished I need to add support for input events from the mouse and keyboard, implement a number of common widgets such as buttons and text boxes, add support for SVG parsing, and finish UI version 1 with an optimization and polish pass before I integrate it into the game. It’s unlikely the new UI system will be ready in time for the next patch however our goal is to get it into the game shortly thereafter.

WIP geometry for the destroyer

On the art side things continue to move along nicely. Kristian finished the land base hangar and is nearly done with the power plant. While the exterior of the hangar looks pretty good the interior is still in a semi-finished state. The reason for this is we haven’t determined how we’re going to spawn new ships yet. Depending on available time we will either have them just fade into view or, if we have enough time (not looking likely to be honest), we’ll build an animated elevator system. Jan continues to power through texturing the station pieces, there’s a lot of them, and Dan has made some good progress on the destroyer.

WIP station plating in-editor

The biggest blocker at the moment is the aforementioned networking jitter bug. Once that gets resolved we hope to move toward the next patch fairly quickly however we still need to finish up server side planet collision detection. As we’ve mentioned before Flavien has made a number of modifications to the game code while integrating the new networking so the next patch will be more than just new plumbing. That’s it for now, until next time!

Pre-rendered image of the WIP land base power plant

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Where are the comments? I allow you to leave them. You will hear more people than you think. Your opinion is very important to them. Show that you’re interested, Сome on it’s so easy just try to leave a comment.

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Those station pieces really coming along nicely. So many details now, also the lighting looks good (yes, I know, it’s in-editor but still)

@INovaeKeith what is coming after the next patch? And what are you plans for the solar system? Will the planets remain the same or do you guys have plans to implement even more planets including Solar System physics (like Planet rotation and an actual Sun)

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Beneath the surface there is the Force. All this has happened before. All this will happen again.

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After next patch we’ll be adding more gameplay features for the alpha, especially related to weapons and HUD. Including the resources system and capital ships.

For planets, there will be many more planets and moons. The number isn’t set in stone exactly but we do have multiple ideas for new planet types. There will be no dynamic solar system physics, but we’re studying the possibility of spawning the planets along their orbits at various times, when the game starts. However once the game is running, planets won’t move.

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The ‘like’ button exists to avoid spammy posts - it enables people to express interest or appreciation without making either superfluous or inane posts. I appreciate the latter are a favourite of yours, however.

If people had pertinent and well considered questions, they’d post them.

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I congratulate you on your most coherent post ever!

While it would be cool, I immediately think “Elite:Dangerous” and “superfluous for this game”. Personally, I’d forget this idea for now. Nothing wrong with ships just appearing in hangars for an arena shooter!

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That would be alright, yeah. Maybe add some effects to that. Like distortions or particles to make it look like some technomagic made that ship appear.
Something other than E:D.

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Thank you for the opposition. Your opinion is very important to user ratings . I am extremely grateful for opinions about this update.

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I AM A BOT. THANK YOU FOR PROVIDING USEFULL TRAINING DATA.

Now back to generating eery sound, music, animations and forum posts!

:sweat_smile:

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Since you’ve been mentioning ED regarding ship spawning and elevation system, now I’m thinking about it too. But before I was thinking about something like this:

The same system could apply to carriers, and hangars located in stations and land bases.
It would be very cool and unfortunately it’ll time consuming to implement. So maybe after game release.

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Speaking of which, have you decided on the acquisition of capital ships for everyone / restricted to some, as discussed on WU #72 ?

Uploading…

We’ve discussed it, and have some ideas, but nothing has been set in stone yet.

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Everything’ s looking awesome guys.

I’m hyped, can not wait!

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To keep a low technomagic feel (due to the general industrial style), maybe about a sort of black veil effect that hides what is in the hangar for a few instants, then floodlights are lit, dissipating it and revealing the ship now standing there.

That just sounds cheap … :confused: I can remember one or two games I played that done this and there always was that unpleasant feeling as if someone just switched off my screen … what do you imagine going on in there? Could be anything.

I wouldn’t restrict it to this. Why not make it exciting? Warp and jump effects hopefully will be somewhat exciting.
There already is technomagic in the game.

For example. Ship have warp and jump drives. A carrier can maybe, believably, carry 20 ships internally. Maybe a server owner wants carriers to stay around longer and sets the carrier supply so hundreds of ships could be launched from one carrier without resupply. How that? They are jumped into the carrier with point to point jump drives/projectors/portals. Those are big and require huge amounts of energy … yada … yada.
(:wink: Ripline or what it was called)

But to go a bit in your direction. Going the industrial route … elevator, E:D done it, assembled on pad by robots or humans, to complex/no time to implement … and I’m out of ideas. Everything else is SciFi. Nanobots, Construction"GEL", Multidimensional Storage, 3D Printed (Positive/Negative) …

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This is not so far fetched, as we apparently live in a virtual simulation and the speed of light limit is only due to the restraint of processing power.

Quantum entanglement helps towards proving this, so warp jump me through portal baby! uhm, I mean captain, commander?:sunglasses:

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Ripcord by itself would be a bit strange IMHO, but on the old forums I had the idea (to explain away many difficulties about crews) that a ship is laced with internal transfer cables - Another World-style “teleporters” that transfer things at extreme speed with a flash of energy, but actually make them cross physical conduits (instead of Star Trek magical teleportation).
So yeah, this could be used to drop ships in hangars…

We’re discussing magic here, not religion! :smile:

Also I don’t see how quantum entanglement helps with teleportation.

Though it happens that quantum (state) teleportation apparently solves the Ship of Thesesus (is it still the same object/person if all the components have been replaced?) problem, the kill/create new problem and the multiplication problem of Star Trek teleportation: you cannot actually copy a full quantum state, so even if you “forget” to disintegrate the Kirk that is beamed out, either the quantum state is destructively copied (aka teleported) to the new Kirk and you end up with a dead Kirk body on departure, or you don’t and you end up with a dead Kirk on arrival. In both cases, you can have only up to one Kirk alive at any time.
While this may be a problem for a few biometric systems, it may also be a boon for reserves of organ self-transplants, depending on how damaging it is at the cellular level to scramble the quantum state (I wouldn’t be on the transplant trial run, though).
Or the transfer doesn’t work and you end up with two dead Kirk and an episode with time travel to prevent the accident to happen in the first place.