Icarus Week 195 Update | Cable and Pipe Quality Of Life Improvements

Week 195 brings new ‘straight spline’ building options when using any of the electrical cable or water pipe systems, to give players more aesthetic control over how their bases look.

This can now be done by holding down R to switch the tool from curvy to straight lines.

Next week, we’re adding more player control over auto-saving and the regularity this occurs at.

Notable Improvements:

• Limit the maximum length of Prospect names so that elements of the UI can no longer break
• Improved visuals during Rain weather events, including rain droplets running down the HUD
• Optimized the Lava River lights draw distance on the lower Effects Quality setting to increase performance

This Week: Cable and Pipe Placement Improvements

We have added the ability to place electrical cables and water pipes in completely straight sections. Holding R can now switch the tool mode from curvy to straight. We’ve also improved the feedback when using the tool, and now the hologram should change color to tell you what's going on.

Many survival games only have straight wire segments, which adds a rigid feeling to endgame bases. Icarus chose to utilise ‘splines’ for interior cable and pipe placement so that they would feel less artificial when draped around a base. ‘Splines’ are a way of representing a multipoint line. Icarus uses spline points with tangent data influenced by the distance and direction from the previous point to give the cable a feeling of ‘momentum’.

However, players have often asked for straight splines. Sometimes, when building a large grid-aligned farm or big factory-style room, straight sections and drop-downs look the best. However, splines have had very little iteration since Icarus launched, and large core sections of the game depended on them working, so we didn't want to risk breaking anything for a relatively minor aesthetic change.

Since we had to do a deep dive into the splines for a game-breaking issue, we took a chance at trying out straight splines. Luckily, wrapping a few sections of the code in a mode toggle and then slightly changing how we save, send, and use the spline data in multiplayer allowed us to add this feature without reworking any underlying systems. So now you can switch your spline tool’s mode and alternate between traditional curvy and straight splines while wiring up your base.

Next Week: Auto-save customization

Next week we’re adding new options for being able to define the time between auto-saves when playing Icarus. More work is going on behind the scenes to try and improve the hitches that occur during the auto-save process, but in the meantime we’re adding a new layer of control for players in determining how often the game will automatically perform them.

This will allow players to reduce the auto-save frequency to reduce these ‘stutter’ events while we keep working on the hitches themselves.

We will also be adding a matching config variable for dedicated server owners to tweak.

Your support makes these updates possible.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3315290/Icarus_Great_Hunts_Campaigns/

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/35727/Icarus_Complete_the_Set/

Changelog v2.3.6.141490

New Content

Fixed

Future Content