No update YET but we're working hard on it still. We're aiming in the next month or two to get it out. It's been tricky deciding where the line is on what to include in the update and what not to, but I am very eager to get back into pushing smaller updates to the game versus this larger update.
There's a lot we've been doing, many things under the surface to get better performance and to allow for future features and content that we want to include. But aside from those lower-level improvements, we've been making some pretty drastic improvements to elements of the game. I'll need to go and update our store page and early-access questions to reflect some of these changes when we push the new update. The update will also include more content, some new vehicles and new, changed or swapped areas. But for now, I'll go into a bit of detail on a few of the exciting things we've recently been working on.
{ Multiple Vehicles }
The update will make the game support multiple vehicles simultaneously spawned. There's some more work to do on the HUD and optimization of unused vehicles, but now most areas allow for 2-3 vehicles to be spawned at once. This is fantastic for things like recovery or versatility while you work through an area. You still are a single driver, but you manage more than one consistent vehicle in an area. You strategically decide which vehicles to bring into an area through a "Vehicle Yard" and use those vehicles to complete the area.
{ Telepads -> Recovery Pads }
We've replaced "telepads" with recovery pads. In a given area, you'll have some number of persistent vehicles which will be recoverable to recovery pads. These recovery pads unlock, or power up, like telepads did, when you drive near enough to them. Once activated, they let you move your vehicles and/or driver to them. They're now accessible from the overview map as well as via a terminal in the world.
{ Persistence, Credits & Difficulty Options }
With more persistent vehicles in an area, and recovery pads to support them, we've introduced credits that must be used to recover your vehicles. You can teleport your driver around freely to Recover Pads but vehicles cost credits to recover. This lets you easily handle driving multiple vehicles around as a single person, but still creates a cost for when a vehicle is stuck or totaled.
Credits are dealt per area, so when you start a new area you get a certain amount of starting credits. They don't transfer between areas, so each area feels like a singular mission with a set of resources to use. Things like unlocking new vehicles and parts or increasing your starting credits are what you can improve and bring between areas.
This feels very good to me and a lot more consistent with how the dynamic terrain and objectives work. You're going into a new area, figuring out what you need to accomplish, bringing in specific vehicles to do it, making trails in the terrain that are persistent, managing those trails as you use them, using vehicles that are persistent, and working on objectives that are persistent all while managing a consistent credits amount. If you need or want to, you can reset a whole area's progress.
In the update, the first difficulty available will be one that uses the credits and recovery mechanics. But we will be adding both a more relaxed difficulty mode that lets you play areas with essentially infinite credits, letting you worry less about any kind of management of resources and focus entirely on just figuring out how to accomplish the objectives of an area -- as well as a more hardcore mode that forces you to not use recovery pads at all to recover vehicles, aiming to give a very demanding play style where recovery must be done with other vehicles, small mistakes can have drastic consequences and you can easily be forced to reset an area if you die or get into a situation that is unrecoverable.
{ Saving/Loading State }
Because vehicles, building and objectives are all more persistent, we wanted to make sure that saving/loading of areas didn't punish players for leaving the game when they needed to due to real life reasons. We understand that people are used to maybe having to pause a game or finish a certain segment or their progress will be lost, but with some buildings in the game taking 2+ hours to finish, we decided it would be worth making it so you could save and quit, then return and your vehicles, supplies, buildings, etc would all be in the same places and situations.
This existed to a degree before, with objectives and terrain always saving, but now vehicles, the driver, trailers, loose supplies (or ones in the back of your vehicle), and in-progress buildings all save and load their precise state. The quality of life improvement for players, especially on the harder difficulty, is large and we thought very worth it.
{ Optimizations }
Not terribly exciting in specifics but exciting in the effect - we are hoping for improvements to many people's performance while playing. Unifying a standard for the game's objects (LODs, polycount, shaders) has made the options for detail much higher impact, so aside from a baseline improvement in performance, we see an improvement in impact of the detail settings. It will be important to test the lowest graphics settings to make sure everything still appears reasonably. We aim to always continue to
improve performance as we move through early access.
I also recently have spent time on vehicles, and still have some more to do, to optimize the calculations occurring on their physics and on their interactions with the ground.
For example, the suspension has been improved to produce less calculations per axle while actually increasing the ability for us to better control things like an axle's articulation range/strength. A small performance increase per spawned vehicle, better flexing of the suspension on vehicles that it makes sense for, while also allowing for future support for things like sway bars or even togglable sway bar control.
This also ends up being very important for high speed vehicles, like the Dune Hopper (which will be in the update!), to maintain their stability at high speeds.
Thanks for reading! We appreciate your interest and we hope the changes we're making are as exciting to you as they are to us. I'm going to allocate more time than I have been to updating people and talking about what I'm working on, sometimes I forget that people care about the game and I get lost in just working on it... So I appreciate those of you who have reminded me :)
