Hey everyone it’s time for your weekly update! This week’s major milestone was getting the whole team playing the game with the new networking code. These internal playtests went smoothly as expected and, while there are still some finishing touches to be made later, the new networking code provided a solid experience. To push things a little further we then spawned 200 simple bots that just fly around shooting like crazy. At 4k resolution with Extreme detail enabled on a computer with a GTX 1080, an Intel 6700k, and 32gb of RAM the game was averaging about 30fps. Overall this is encouraging, even though planets weren’t enabled in the test, because we still have a tremendous amount of optimization work left to do. The game scaled gracefully by decreasing resolution and/or level of detail such that each machine we tested with was also averaging roughly 30fps with 200+ “players”.
On the art side Kristian has finished the land base. He’s now working on putting together different land base layouts to create a palette from which land base configurations will be selected during the beginning of a match. Jan is nearly done with the bulk of the work on the space station materials however decals and fine details will still need to be added later. Dan continues his work on the destroyer and work on the remaining capital ships should be getting started within a few weeks.
With everything looking good from our playtests last week the only remaining blocker, as we’ve mentioned before, is the server-side planetary collision detection. We still don’t have a good estimate for how long that could take but we’re hoping within a few weeks. Aside from all of that we also upgraded our forums and rolled out some minor updates to the website. That’s it for this week, until next time!
With all these tests with bots, it’s starting to look quite exciting! We’re starting to see a game, not just a tech demo
I am very aware that, in previous years, things have often ground to a halt through the end of the year due to holidays. It would be really great if the collision detection could be finished before 2017 is finished! I hope there aren’t too many blockers and you can make this happen, giving us all a nice Christmas (or whatever) present!
Excellent. Everything seems to be ramping up. Beam weapons and capital ship weapon placements are looking fine… Those salvos look like broadsides. Nice work.
Yeah just disable bots and enable planets again, or just keep it like this. We want an update badly.
Last patch was some time ago and dev backers should be fed regularly with dev stuff IMO.
I’m working on putting the planets back in at the moment and I have hopes it won’t take too long ( ie. not another month ). If for some reason the collision stuff is more challenging and takes more time than expected we’ll do an intermediary new build within a week or two.
Even though I appreciate the planned “intermediate” patch with conditions this would be a great time to let us test it out. Why not ditch this condition?
I wouldn’t mind no planets or phasing trough planets …
The last patch has been months ago. Yes there wasn’t anything to test out but there always is this reluctance to just throw stuff at us dev backers.
I don’t know how much work it is to put out a patch and its nice and all that there is a working version, that may break if patched, but I didn’t expect dev access to be stable at all … a bigger patch will have even more possibility for bugs to surface.
Either way. All the best with further development.
That’s no relunctance. I rewrote the game from scratch due to networking and changing the model from being client sided to server sided. And working with ECS (entity-component-system). So until 2 weeks ago, there was nothing to play with, really. And until a few days ago, the server was crashing every 5 minutes.
But now you have a build that we can play with, releasing it would be a good thing. I think Lomsor’s main point was that we would have been fine with constant crashes, after all we are in the dev-backer tier.
The client sided ones, maybe, but the server ones were unacceptable. Sometimes it even crashed as soon as somebody logged in, aka. you could not even play at all. Needless to say, it was stable in my local build so it was quite a surprise ( but it’s been fixed now ).
I understand you were uncomfortable then, but now is now and you have an opportunity to release a somewhat stable build to backers that pledged with the understanding. There is no need to focus on the past, right now you can have a dozen or two players on the server as soon as you release the build, maybe there is something that you overlooked or needs some testing in the wild that might save you the fixing time a bit down the line.
Also I have a feeling that you want to release what you are comfortable with and doing so without planets might attract negative comments and opinions, but the dev-backer tier is designed for precisely that, early development testing, there is nothing to be afraid of. If you did a good job with networking which is the focus of the build, I suspect praise.
Hmm i wonder would you mind uploading texture template files for the ships ?
You know so if its not too over-complicatedly wrapped around the model we could submit some skins perhaps ?
Not possible right now. Ships aren’t textured yet. Texturing will come at a much later stage, probably between alpha and beta, once we’ve validated hardpoints placement / layouts. Reworking geometry is relatively easy, but when you modify geometry it invalidates all the UV maps, so you’d have to redo texturing every time. Which is why we’re delaying texturing after testing gameplay.
My wife and I are going traveling for 3 months leaving at the beginning of December, so I’m hoping for a new build by early November to sustain me through the winter.
