Hello starchasers! No, this isn't the talky patch I've talked about, but there is news and a new opportunity for those willing to try it out. You want cat photos first? Alright, fine.

Okay, got your fill? Onto more important matters!

Beta Branch

I spoke briefly on establishing a pre-update beta branch for the game, which is now available! This beta branch updates more frequently with far more unstable updates, and is mostly intended for testers and myself. That being said, because there's no real harm in it I've opened the beta testing branch up for everyone to experience.

To download this branch, you need to open up your game's properties -> betas -> and then opt into the new testing beta branch under beta participation.

The subsequent download may be sort of big, as a bunch of internal stuff changed (read on to find out what I'm talking about.)

Engine Update

The big news with this beta branch is that our game engine (Unity, if you couldn't tell from the godawful performance) has been updated to a much much later edition and away from the extremely dated version we've been stuck on since for years. With the help of some professional devs from another studio, we were finally able to update it to something much more modern. This brings with it a whooooole host of internal changes. Right now, those opted into the beta branch should notice across the board performance improvements, the end of flickering shadows and improved shadow fidelity, and a few other smaller graphical changes.

Going forward this engine update will allow us to take advantage of a lot of features that were previously out of reach, including enhanced mod support (which will be far less hacky), even more performance and memory improvements, etc, etc. I aim for semi-weekly pushes to this beta branch in between major public facing updates, so if you want to see the latest stuff being worked on, I recommend opting into the beta branch. Just be aware that it IS a beta branch, so issues are to be expected.

And that's all for now! Just wanted to make people aware of exciting new things.