Our initial implementation of Open World has been well received and we are excited to follow this up with the addition of dynamic missions to Open World sessions together with some performance improvements.
These Open World Missions allow us to bring a richer experience directly into our persistent world experience. Inside an Open World session, you can now launch special Missions from a Short Range Radio in your base. Eight mission types and variations depending on your biome and difficulty give you over 50 different versions to play.
Performance improvements to reduce the impact of Unreal Engine RVT tech have been implemented that can improve performance significantly for many players.
We’ve also introduced a new bug reporting feature, which will help provide more detailed debug info to help us solve more challenging bugs such as disappearing deployables and voxels upon reload.
Finally, we talk a bit more about our upcoming Decentralization, and why it’s so important after an outage we experienced earlier this week.
Open World Missions
Establishing the Open World mode has allowed us to expand the game into a more persistent experience, but we wanted to bring our mission experience into this. This week we're bringing a variety of dynamic missions into Open World mode. Missions with varying objectives and challenges can be launched from your Open World session, with variations based on your map location, biome and selected difficulty.
The new Short Range Radio can be made at the Crafting Bench (after unlocking in the Blueprint Tree) and requires ten wood, eight ropes and fifteen iron. Once crafted and deployed, engaging with it will provide two contracts to choose between, with any you select being repeatable in the future.
The eight types of mission available are:
- Hunt: Kill a quota of wild animals that spawn in the current biome
- Grow: Grow a quota of vegetables and deliver
- Mine: Collect a quota of a requested ore and deliver
- Collect: Search for downed prospectors and collect and deliver their IDs
- Scan: Scan a location with the scanner provided, defend the scanner
- Cache: Collect a cache from a previous prospector
- Boss: Kill a wandering boss animal
- Tools: Craft and deliver 3 tools of varying tech levels
Completion of your assigned mission will result in a Reward Pod descending to your location, where you can choose between one of three offered rewards and be granted XP for your efforts.
These Missions differ from those in the Missions game mode, so don’t forget to still play them especially if you want to unlock Boss enemy items or find exotics. In future, we’re looking at more ways to integrate the rich mission experience of the base game with Open World mode, while still having some unique stand-alone Missions.
We have experienced three months of back to back growth in player numbers, revenue, and playtime - much of which driven by Open World mode. As such, it's clear that players enjoy this and our community and many content creators have provided excellent advice for us about how to focus the experience. As such we will be expanding and developing Open World mode based on your feedback. Please continue to let us know your thoughts and ideas on how to develop this further.
Performance
We’re implementing the performance improvement we talked about last week, with early indications from our experimental testers suggesting positive improvements for mid to low-spec players.
To explain the change, Icarus previously utilized Unreal Engine’s Runtime-Virtual-Texture (RVT) technology to provide terrain texture details and environmental blending for our rocks and cliffs. We found that our heavy use of this tech had led to a GPU bottleneck. We have substantially eased the strain caused by this bottleneck, improving performance and specifically, FPS.
We released this improvement to our experimental branch testers earlier in the week, and have received feedback ranging from no change to significant improvement with one user reported seeing frame improvements from 14fps to 50fps on Epic settings, and another from 40-70fps averages to 60-80fps averages (with DLSS on). Some other encouraging feedback included players now being able to spot creatures at greater distances, and having landscape load far quicker and more seamlessly. This will, of course, depend on your individual hardware spec, settings, world complexity etc. as unfortunately players with high-spec machines already experiencing high frame-rates report less improvement from this change.
At times it can be frustrating as a player to see an update that doesn't improve performance, with comments coming up like "why aren't they fixing performance first?". Performance is an ongoing task and clear focus for our team since launch. With ICARUS we pushed the boundaries of the engine, even working directly with Nvidia on new functionality. This means the development and systems are quite complex, and it can take a log of time to bring performance improvements. We have dedicated team members looking at the game, profiling it, and developing fixes. This area is one of the most complicated to schedule, so sometimes weeks can go by without major fixes being deployed.
Bug Tracking
We wanted to address one of the larger bugs impacting the community currently which, due to its unique circumstances, make it difficult for us to fix.
Disappearing buildings, deployables and deep ore veins when reloading a game has been plaguing many players for some time. We have difficulty being able to reproduce the bug internally, making it hard to identify the root cause of the issue. When it does happen locally, or players send us their ‘prospect files’, a save has already occurred and overwritten the reload state we needed to see what happened.
We have added a new Report Bug button in the game, that allows you to anonymously send bug tickets to our devs which will include any errors/warnings that have occurred in the logs.
If you lose any buildings or deployables, please hit Escape and use the Report an Issue button.
Feature Upvote is also still active, and is the best place for sharing suggestions, improvements, thoughts and concerns.
Data Decentralization
As we’ve mentioned before, for the past few months we’ve been working on how to remove the game's online requirement and our dependence on our back-end server architecture for many reasons including resiliency, cost and reducing complexity.
Games as a Service (GaaS) is a popular term in development, referring to online titles that monetize through the games live and run as a live service. Piracy is difficult because of the games "online service" nature. Initially, ICARUS has been very much like this. We have been prioritizing a move away from this, to decentralizing the game and pushing as much as possible to the community. While this means a reduction in some functionality, it dramatically increases redundancy and the ability for players to play the game how they would like. Decentralizing the games architecture allows our community to run the game how they see fit, and ensures the game a long life independent of the studio running it. This has been a conscious decision at our studio, across all of our products including unreleased ones, so that we can focus on making good games with excellent tools. By focusing on the games, and providing the tools to run them, we believe this maximizes both the lifetime and the creativity of the games themselves. - Dean Hall, CEO
Earlier this week we had a significant outage with players unable to connect and had us even considering bringing this change forward, but we are making good progress and want to make sure we’ve tested and addressed any issues migrating data from our servers onto users PCs. We still have a few connection issues when first joining a dedicated server which we are actively looking into but we are happy with progress.
We have been working with server providers who have been testing the dedicated server and are providing useful feedback. If anyone is interested in trying the branch, we update throughout the week and talk about bugs and issues in our Discord in the #data-decentralization-branch channel. Click here to join.
This work really will open up doors to us to add a lot of things to the game, including significantly expanding the number of players who can play in a session at once. Our currently testing has been with eight players in a session at one time, for example.
DLC Status Update and Monetization Stance
ICARUS is the first major title the studio has produced and it would be fair to say our launch was rocky. With the launch we undertook a review of how we were working and made adjustments, as well as some key decisions. One commitment we made was to work on the quality of the base game, and customer satisfaction, before we looked at monetization. We originally had plans for more additional monetization, such as DLC including more expansions - but have moral objections to monetizing the project while reception was deservedly mixed. Instead of this, we committed to weekly updates even through holiday periods to build customer and player confidence, to allow us time to develop the experience. As such, we're still not at a point where we feel comfortable releasing paid DLC, as we feel there is still some work to be done getting the base game to an experience players are satisfied with. To ease our production processes we publish our changelogs verbatim, so keen eyes will have noticed we have been doing a lot of work on future DLC content for some time and we are mostly there in a number of aspects, but I will continue to delay the launch of the DLC until we are satisfied the base game is broadly representative of what our players want and expect. Even when we do launch future DLC, we will continue to prioritize development of the base game and have DLC being supporting content. Additionally the studio is committed to ensuring DLC does not divide the community such as when playing with friends. There is no specific targeted date for the launch of paid DLC and content. We will continue to listen to your comments and discuss it with you, here and on Discord. - Dean Hall, CEO
Like our work? Please consider supporting our other games!
We have a separate team who very passionately work on Stationeers. We've been working hard on major refactors of the game, and are increasingly proud of where the project is at. We're getting even closer to releasing a major multiplayer update that will make it easier than ever to play multiplayer together. Please check it out, and wishlist it or buy to support our work.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/544550/Stationeers/
Changelog v1.2.25.104293
New Content
- Adding Dynamic Quests for Growing & Mining, Updating Kill Dynamic Quest
- Adding Dynamic Quests for Scanning and Dead Prospector Retrieval
- Tweaked Mission EQS to better work with quest distances
- Adding Dynamic Quests for Hunt and Cache
- Added Anchored Behaviour to Wolves by default that can be enabled via spawner
- Adding New EQS for Close AI Quest Spawning
- Unlocking 'SMPL' interface for triggering dynamic missions
- Fixing Dynamis Mission 'Hunt' as it wasn't counting the creatures killed correctly
- Adding Dynamic Quest Table and ability to trigger quests from in session
- Update Exotic Delivery Interface to have its own widget and not use the Mission Communicator BP
- Adding new Strings for SMPL interface
- Adding Rudimentry Flare to Reward Pod which fires into the air upon landing
- Fixing up mission communicator text and adding a shift to the base dynamic mission spawn location
- Adding FName as a possible generic actor record on the save game
- Adding a new UI for Dynamic Quest Reward Selection
- Fixing some typos in the Dynamic Quest Descriptions
- Submitting missed Dynamic Quest Reward Structure File
- Adding cheat to Skip Quest Steps
- Updating Enviroment Queries to Query based on Mission Board Or Actor instead of Pawn
- Updating Dynamic Kill quest to have different bosses per atmosphere type
- Adding functions to call to clean up quest objects when a quest is complete
- Updating Scan Dynamic quest to clean its mission objects up after mission complete
- Fixing up Quest UI so it works with missions being cleaned up after they have finished
- Reworked Dynamic Quest Rewards so there is a lot more variety
- Fixed Dynamic Quest reward options now have an interactable tooltip
- Resaving DynamicQuestRewardsDatatable
- Added first iteration of Dynamic Quest Reward Items
- Added first iteration of Dynamic Quest Reward sets, pre-lore
- Add basic audio cues for dynamic quest UI and item setup
- Adding ability to select from 2 dynamic missions when interacting with the Short Range Radio
- Adding fallback cases to mission selection location
- Adding DynamicQuestSeed to GameState & GameModeRecorder so missions are set until completed reguardless of Short Range Radio
- Adding new UI for Short Range Radio Mission Selection
- Adding Weighting to Dynamic Quest Selection for Generation
- Setting Dynamic Quest Reward Item Selection Weighting to 100 by default instead of 1
- Updating Short Range Radio to Propertly Roll Dynamic Quests based on Weight
- Removing unused UI asset for dynamic quests
- Fixing default values for various quest weightings
- Updating Dynamic Quests to include Difficulty Reward Modifier
- Updating Dynamic Quest Distance Spawning logic, so it slightly futher away
- Updating Grow Missions to only include things the player can grow on Olympus & Styx
- Updating Hunt Quest to include extra spawning of creatures specific to the mission
- Updating Mine Quests to include different ores based on session difficulty
- Updating Quest reward UI to show the scaled rewards based on session difficulty
- Couple of UI audio tweaks for dynamic missions
- Added additional dynamic quest reward items and sets.
- Added lore to all dynamic quest rewards
- More tweaks to dynamic mission audio:
- Fix phys mat on T2 communication device
- Add charge sound to transport pod ascent sequence
- Replace mission confirm UI audio on dynamic quest option widget
- Adding new Tools Dynamic quest, scales on both selected difficutly and asks the player to craft & delivery 1 out of a possibly 7 sets of items per difficulty
- Unlocking Short Range Radio Talent to be unlocked on the T2 Tech Tree
- Resized Reward Pod Inventory as it was not required to be as big as it was (60->24)
- Fix flare assets to be configurable for color
- Tweak flare logic for Transport Pod
- Increasing Dynamic Quest Spawn Location and Updating EQS
- Updating Cache Dynamic Quest Spawn Location
- Fixing Tools Dynamic Quest Completion condition, so it actually completes
- Scaled cache reward options to be similar in level to dynamic quest rewards
- Increased minimum cache rewards
- Remove debug setup for Transport Pod
- Updating Dynamic Quest EQS & Dropship Landing EQS to use the correct QueryContext
- Updated Cache quest so it can be completed after a reload & allowing some items a percent chance to spawn
- Dynamic missions now generate a mission difficulty, which is saved in the QuestManager and Recorded as needed
- Updating all dynamic quests to use the dynamic mission difficulty rather than the prospect difficulty for scaling
- Fixing Short Range Radio's itemable and durabable data, it will now have a proper name, icon, description and health
- Add an autodetect GPU button to Graphics Settings
- Add an Auto Detect button to Graphics Settings
- Performs GPU and RAM detection and applies settings based on what is found
- This means users have a 'make it go faster' shortcut button
- Add an autodetect for GPU button to Graphics Settings
- Add an Auto Detect button to Graphics Settings
- Performs GPU and RAM detection and applies settings based on what is found
- This means users have an opt-in 'make it go faster' shortcut button
- Updating Transport Pod Inventory Length
- Rescaled quest rewards, notably reducing boss crafting materials and increasing their fully crafted counterparts
- Fixing Short Range Radio not having a meshable entry
- Add an autodetect GPU button to Graphics Settings
- Add an Auto Detect button to Graphics Settings
- Performs GPU and RAM detection and applies settings based on what is found
- This means users have a 'make it go faster' shortcut button
- Made changes to DynamicQuestReward and Mission_Communicator_T2. Still needs to be adjusted
- Added new option in escape menu to 'Report an Issue' that can be used to directly report a bug report to our bug tracker along with useful game state information. Added UE4 Sentry plugin to give better integration/control over what is reported back
- Adjusted Short Range Radio UI to match concepts
- Adjusted Dynamic Mission Reward UI to match concepts
- Limited Short Range Radio to only work in Open World Mode
- Final touches on Dynamic Missions widget clean up
- Dynamic Quests no longer provide the 2 experience events
- Swapping Experience granted from Dynamic Quests to use the dynamic mission difficutly variable for scaling
- Collect Dynamic Quests now spawns additional enemies
- Kill Dynamic Quests now spawns additional enemies
- Collection Dynamic Missions Clean Up Correctly Now
- Dynamic Mission Locations now increase based on the selected dynamic mission difficulty
- Added Settings module to Icarus build.cs, removed WITH_EDITOR flags around SentryModule ISettingsModule
- Added Settings module to Sentry.Build.cs
- Fixing Short Range Radio not having the correct talent requirement - fixes blueprint talent display
- Adding additional Text to Login Screen for Connection Status
- Removing ws from socket header
- Rebalanced dynamic mission rewards to offer higher tier rewards more often and more basic materials when they appear. - Increased dynamic cache mission rewards. - Fixed dynamic tools mission Antibiotics step. - Quest rewards now correctly show the unscaled value if the value does not scale (eg if you get 1 tool)
- Fixing issues with Collect Dynamic Quest where items were not spawning in the collection bodies as intended
- Adding redundance case for collection quest bodies item spawning
- Dynamic Mission EQSs now avoid generating points on water
- Adding ability to cancel dynamic quests, if a quest is cancelled there is a 10minute delay before another quest can be undertaken
- Adding Replication for the Dynamic Quest Seed
- Adding a new gameplay config option for DynamicQuestCancelDelay
- Modifying Exotic Delivery ship Spawning to use the new Dynamic quest pod logic
- Updating Dynamic mission range to be slightly larger
- Removing Red light on the Short Range Radio
- Adding new EQS for quest spawning
- Updating Cache Quest to include new cache eqs
- Updating Dynamic Quest Weightings
- Fixed dynamic mission scaling for Mine mission when selecting difficulty, and removed chance to require titanium as a handin
- Fixing issue if clients and the server interacted with the reward pod on quick sucess and selected a reward that both rewards could be given
- Fixing the reward pod flare & smoke not showing on the derived classes
- Tweaked dynamic mission rewards, making long term quarantine reward and hunting supplies rarer. Increased bone drop from hunting rewards
- Added new Test to Dynamic Mission EQSs to prevent picking points next to existing IcarusActors
Fixed
- 'Max' Crafting UI button now works as expected for items that require Fillable inputs (water, fuel, etc)
- Fixed typo in the MK-200 Weaponized Laser (Repaired) item, and updated to US spelling standard
- Water pumps no longer automatically increase the water levels in the water trough
- Fixed a bug where on respawning, the off hand item on the quickbar would still be focused while no item is there
- Fixed issue causing the STRANGE HARVEST mission flower to not have the poison cloud on first spawn
- Grenages dont damage structures or deployables
- Grenades (and sandworm spit) will now damage buildings and deployables
- Grenades (and sandworm spit) will now damage buildings and deployables
- Melee weapons can again damage buildings and deployables (fix for throwables change)
- Corrected Caveworm Icon
- Add an Auto Detect button to Graphics Settings
- Performs GPU and RAM detection and applies settings based on what is found
- This means users have a 'make it go faster' shortcut button
Future Content
- Updated all Brick Tier Floors, Walls and Beams. Also added sockets
- Small adjustments to r.dog movement audio sounds
- Adding Sledgehammer Harvest Context Icon Logic
- Adding Markers onto Prometheus for Prebuild Structure Locations
- Adding Wood Railing Gate audio
- First implementation of RockDog enraged behaviour. Added support for GOAP Controllers to dynamically select custom behaviour trees to inject, instead of relying on static D_GOAPSetup data
- Added extra stats for Enraged GOAP behaviour
- Add audio context component to cave rivers to enable faux audio occlusion based on cave context - still need to set up custom FMOD event and apply parameters once cave volumes have been defined. Move river audio settings to data to facilitate new features and custom audio for different rivers
- Fixing up Redirectors in the quest folder
- Fix missing texture after cleanup
- Added support in Enraged GOAP Motivation for ActivationTime and CooldownTime stats. Fixed Enraged Heavy Slam attack not waiting for montage notify to apply damage. Added new placeholder montage for lava spit attack
- Cleanup Character assets part 3
- Adding in lava scatter audio and low level base biome amb
- DEP_Crate_Sinotai skins variation textures and material
- Created New Volcanic Template Cave and Scoria Placed In Volcanic Biome, Purple Quad, Prometheus
- Add TU Cave SML 001, Add Ice Flow To Frozen Lake & Cleanup on Blue Quad, DLC Map
- Adding new Skins for the 3 different Orbital Transport Pods & Updating their associated map icon colours
- Apply new river audio setup to cave and lava rivers in Purple and Green quads
- Prototype cheaper triplanar material function
- Cleanup creature assets
- Add icon for T2 communication device, fix meshables setups for tiers
- SM_Breakable_Clay combined and matched to the blueprint
- SM_Breakable_Obsidian combined and matched to the blueprint
- SM_Breakable_Scoria combined and matched to the blueprint
- FT_Breakable_Clay_Var1 swapped mesh into combined version
- Adding rumble audio scatter to lava biome event
- Adding batdog specific footstep event and adjusting footstep layers
- Basic audio pass for brick-tier buildings
- Added burnt versions to all 4 variants of the Aspen trees, including all Foliage Types and FLOD descriptions
- Add Ice Tunnel to Ice Maze, Painted Clay in SW & Cleanup on Blue Quad, DLC Map
- Created New Volcanic Template Cave, Set Dressing Volcanic Transition Cave and Placement of Breakable Rocks, Purple Quad, Prometheus
- submitting MoBasePrebuilt_Cave first pass
- submitting Group15Outpost_Volcanic first pass
- Adjustments to predator bird idle call trigger points, spacializer settings and wing pitch randomness and other improvements
- submitting MoBasePrebuilt_Arctic first pass
- Added Sledgehammer node icon and added it to Valid Interact Queries Datatable
- Added Dogtags and Delivery Ship icon and added to D_MapIcons
- Prototype initial RockMaster shader and functions, decreases instructions ~10% and PS by half
- Shield Mechanics. Shield now works on the quickbar rather than the G slot. There are a list of items based on tags to be used with the shield/off hand
- Adding in first swamp scatter cre into FMOD. More to come
- Adjustment to small rock debris scatter to make sure it doesn't spawn too close to the character
- submitting MoBasePrebuilt_Treehouse first pass
- Add appropriate vocalisation states to predator bird
- Add Editor tool to check health value of creatures
- First pass adding swamp ambient and scatter layers in. To be adjusted and fine tuned
- Increased maximum trace distance for SpawnAI cheat script
- Added recipes and item setup for potato and tomato recipes.
- Increased the maximum stamina and health granted by soups.
- Added cooked bean recipe and item setup for the campfire
- Added version 2 of the repair bench mesh, textures and destructable mesh
- Resaved datatables to fix build validation
- Fixed the montage not playing on clients and the floating damage numbers no longer double up and the damage number for the shield is now blue
- Added first implementation of BatDog stalking behaviour. Added GetWorld implementation to IcarusGOAPMotivation.h to support function libraries
- Added New Volcanic Template Cave, Added Deep Ore Deposits in LC and SW Biomes and Placed Breakable Rocks In the Swamp , Purple Quad, Prometheus
- Add Deep Ore Deposit, Cleanup Clay in SW & Cleanup on Blue Quad, DLC Map
- Attached select nodes for relevant 'Shield' damage types
- Added eye sprites to BatDog. Increased stalking movement speed
- Adding more scatter swamp layers. Also swapping out footsteps to swamp layer which will reduce in volume - to be fine tuned and balanced
- Cleanup unused assets
- Cleanup unused assets
- Created new master materials for common developer materials and recreated in more structured format then reapplied to use cases
- Updated Brick Tier Roof assets
- Delete actors from unused OP001 map referencing deleted background meshes
- Updated descriptions and flavour text for tomato and potato meals
- Placing New Deep Ore Deposit Spawns In Swamp and Volcanic Biomes, Purple Quad, Prometheus
- Adjustments to swamp scatter, footsteps and base layer
- More swamp scatter additions
- Cleanup Clay Breakable in SW & Cleanup on Blue Quad, DLC Map
- Basic audio implementation for shield - create generic shield static mesh actor and add audio feedback when shield blocks or breaks. Add placeholder audio for wooden shield
- Cleaning up unused assets
- Improvements to subtlety of swamp biome base layer and some scatter adjustments
- Add Deep Ore Deposit to Green & Add Meta Exotic in TU/AC on Blue Quad, DLC Map
- Fix MFs referencing asset textures in master materials, changed to default texture sets and resaved all associated materials to break references
- Added stamina cost to D_Actionable and removed the manual implementation from actionable shield to better use the preexisting functions
- Added hotbar functionality for the shield focusing. Now if the player has two weapons in their hands two different hotbar items will appear focused
- Removed accidental debug logging from tick
- Small adjustments to swamp biome. Added and removed test cre scatter
- Repair Bench - Implementation
- Add new Repair Bench
- Can repair all items previously repaired at Fabricator and Machining Bench
- Requires power to repair T4 and workshop items
- Big cleanup on assets, removing old and still unused content
- Fix up master materials using assets instead of default textures and resaved to clear references
- Fix up numerous redirectors no longer in use
- ITM_Shield_Wooden mesh, material and textures
- Added Brick Angled corner Roof and inverted assets
- Added Brick Roof Lower and Brick Roof Upper
- Small adjustment to swamp biome scatters. Addition of tree rustle in gentle wind
- Add Icarus Meta Exotic Spawns on Blue Quad, DLC Map
- Update transport pod audio, and a couple of other audio tweaks for dynamic quests
- Adjusted cave painting colour, and emission to be more obvious in cave lighting
- Refactor action fail feedback audio from generic melee actionable into an option on the actionable base BP, so that it can also be used on shield actions. Add missing Shield_Hold stamina reference to shield row in D_Actionable to fix shield stamina
- Resaved datatable to resolve build validation
- Adjustments and improvements to swamp scatter and bass layers. Separated various layers out for better variability
- Update pass to tidy up some issues with swamp lake audio actor edge splines and islands
- Update pass to tidy up some issues with swamp lake audio actor edge splines and islands - a couple missing from previous commit
- Add Respawn Dropship Placement & Landscape/Foilage Cleanup on Blue Quad, DLC Map
- Placing New Meta Spawns and Respawn Drop Pods, In Swamp and Volcanic Biomes, Purple Quad, Prometheus
- Disabled RVT on Cliffs, Rocks, Seracs and disabled Snow RVT on Foliage to improve performance
- Submitting all the base assets for the Striker, new fur setup to be applied and AI setup to come
- Swapped the Map Icons for the Transport Pods to the new Transport pod icon
- Fixed ISettingsModule.h not being compiled out correctly in non-editor builds
- Added missing Sentry dlls
- Trying a more sensible approach to using the Settings Developer module in the provided Sentry source code
- Removing dependency to developer module 'Settings' in Icarus.Build.cs
- Reverting last commits
- Added base setup for spider assets to project. Created charater and corpse BP and added to data tables