Hey, it's Dex here
This is a hard thing to write, but Digital Dawn Studios so far is no more. We ended the Online Services in February due to lacking funds. We effectively ended Development in April due to both mental and physical health concerns.
I have been asked several times to provide conclusion to our absence. These are the facts:
We have decided to:
- shut down Sirius Online Servers.
- shut down digitaldawnstudios.com
- halt all effective development on all projects.
- actually start keeping up with our personal needs.
Sirius Online always was a taxing experience. I personally had 10-12hr Days, 7 Days a week on this game, neglecting things like healthy eating and activities. My personal 2018 Goal was to tackle this, and due to this, Sirius fell off the short end of the list.
From April to November 2018 I did nothing on Sirius at all. The Last released build was from August 2017. I tried over and over again to fix things but simply could not concentrate at all. All Build after that wouldn't start at all or would completely freak out and break then. There also was that pretty infuriating performance bug after 5 minutes of playing, which bogged down the game.
I spent 17 years making Sirius, by the End of November, it actually turns 18, and I have to admit there have been a few mistakes. I am, right now, working on Sirius 1.3: Enemies of the Gods and there will be a few changes coming towards you.
First of all. Sirius Online is now SIrius, minus the Online part. It was kind of premature scaling, and it was a massive feat of engineering. To save both processing power and money, as well as client load, all online Functions have been removed with 1.3.
Sirius also was ... simply said... TOO BIG. It was both taxing to the engine and to the gameplay, because you had to fly way too much to find content. Thus, I have revised my star system Idea. Tradelanes will still exist, but the Universe is now divided into 7 systems, interconnected by Hyper-Accelerators, which cause a loading screen and the transfer to a new system.
Another thing that had to go was projectile based weapons. As cool and spacey as they looked like, a single battle caused between 5.000 to 60.000 Bullets to be calculated, and that, combined with a constant garbage collection on a single thread might have been a bit overkill. Each Shot had 12 Polygons, so we're talking about 60.000 and, at worst, 720.000 Polygons to be rendered JUST for fights. That is way too much for a DX7 Engine. So, up next: Beam Lasers and accordingly colored Focal Crystals. There will be 4 Focal Crystals: UV/440nm (Weak, Long Range), Teal/525nm (Med Damage, med Range), Scorch/610nm (Strong Damage, short range) and IR/660nm (shortest range, insane damage). Also weapons now use your ships energy, the same you use for thrust, the higher the frequency, the more energy you use. With this change we go from up to 60k projectiles to just about 50.
Now comes the exciting part. Twitch integration. This actually brought my interest back in working on my projects at all, so all hail twitch.tv! If you're streaming or watching someone stream one of our games with the Twitch integration, you will soon be able to see commands to spawn items, enemies or even start events like a crimson invasion!
I will not disclose any release date for Enemies of the Gods, because, you know, pressure and such, but I will however disclose the following: Once the approval is given, SIrius will only cost half of it's original price. Forever.
Other people have asked me why, If I'd make Sirius not Online again, why I'm not making it a new separate game. It is, because a lot of you paid for it. It would be unethical to just clone my game code to a new game. You got the game, and you will get at least a final update to give it proper playability.
For occasional Trashtalk and Update Pictures, feel free to follow me on
Twitter:
Twitter (@vektordex)
Twitch:
Twitch.tv/vektorDex
or join my personal community discord (mostly german, Sirius Channel is English though)
Discord.gg
Regards,
Dex.
