It's time for our biggest update ever! Three massive features, AND a polish pass for every single thing in the game. We've tried to summary this patch for you, but there's no chance we've caught everything.
Combat
Combat is the flagship feature of this patch. An ancient evil watches you from the Night, and when the sun goes down he's definitely gonna try some murder. If you anger him during the day (ie. looting a Foul Coffer) then you can be sure he'll remember it - and try murder you even harder.
Combat means more than fighting though. Our item system has had a full rework to support complex weapons, you'll see what we mean now and in updates to come. Supporting systems in damage, death, and revival all now exist too. Plus, flamethrower turrets!
Savegames
You'd think an entire combat system would be enough but, no. Savegames make their debut, meaning you no longer have to choose between playing Planetation and going to work. Just come back later!
The most useful bit of savegames isn't even the saving of the games, it's that we can now dynamic unload->load chunks of the world as you explore it! Performance for large worlds has improved by a factor of infinity.
Note: Things are changing very fast, and we cannot guarantee savegame compatibility between updates. At least for now.
Multiplayer Expanded
Multiplayer technically went in the previous patch, but wasn't stable enough for our liking. Some of that was due to the dodgy movement system(s) built in to Unreal Engine, which we have since stripped out and "rolled our own" (see Behind The Scenes for specifics), but the biggest problem was a lack of network prediction for clients. Now, all the important stuff (movement, shooting, resource management, and interacting with your inventory) is fully predicted client side. Multiplayer stability and performance have also seen huge improvements.
The Other Stuff
There's so much more.
Crash Site
No more landing your own Drop Pod at the start of the game. You now start already-crashed, and get a little taste of combat before the sun rises. There's plenty of a new and very important material, Scrap Metal, strewn around where you crashed, so be sure to pick it up!
Tooltips
We already mentioned the item system rework, and that wouldn't be complete without powerful new tooltips. Mouse over any item to get a ridiculous amount of information about it!
Thunderbugs
We won't say much about this one, other than they got a new slap of paint. Go find out for yourself.
Abandoned Harmsteads
Abandoned Harmsteads got a lot of love this patch. Not only are turrets fully functional (and deadly), but loot got a polish pass and the bunker opening sequence is real flashy now.
Nailgun
You can now repair stuff! Just gotta craft some Nails.
Behind The Scenes
Horde
We took some time to improve our internal build pipeline, by moving everything to Perforce+Horde. Our test builds are SO much faster now and deploying to Steam takes a single button press. TLDR; we're faster behind the scenes so we can be faster in front of them, too.
Unreal Engine 5.5
We're now on UE5.5. This upgrade was mostly for the Voxel Plugin, but got us a bunch of bonus engine features which we can now incorporate into Planetation.
Custom Movement System
For truly smooth movement on network clients, you need client authoritative movement. This is a step further than client predictive movement, because you can't get rolled back if you predict wrongly. We aren't CS:GO or any other competitive game - we don't care if you cheat, you're only playing with your friends.
Unfortunately, none of the myriad movement systems in Unreal Engine support such authority, and after loads of frustration we just rolled our own. This is a big feature that you won't notice unless you know it's there, but if you appreciate how smooth the movement is then we hope this explains why.
Where To Now
Steam Playtest
The new way to contribute to Planetation is to join the Steam Playtest, right from the store page. And of course, the best place to give us feedback is directly on our Discord.
Minor/Major Updates
We can't dump this much content ever couple weeks, not without a hyperbolic programming chamber. From here we're switching to Major patches (think a Farming rework) every 1-2 months, with Minor patches (individual small features, starting with Exposure) much more regularly than that.
Roadmap
Stay tuned for our Roadmap, coming this Wednesday the 15th.
DevLog 002
We'll be back this Sunday the 19th with our next DevLog, showing off the upcoming Exposure minor patch. Thanks for tuning in!
