There's been a lot going on behind the scenes recently, so I figured it would be good to make this Dev Diary more of an overall progress update for the project.
Soundtrack
Our composer Eric (@orchestorm) has now finished both the Main Theme and the In-Game music. He's done a fantastic job, and both tracks will be present in the next build for backers.
Menu/Loading Screen
I've updated the main menu to include the ability to watch the ship being constructed. You'll be able to free-fly around the ship and watch in real-time as all the pieces come together and get welded into place. At the same time, I've also updated the loading screen for the demo sandbox so it looks a little more professional.
Optimisations
Something I've learned about myself while making this game is just how obsessed I am with optimisation. I grew up with systems like the Commodore 64 and Amiga 500, and you'd get these demo discs that crammed incredible (for the time) graphics into less than 1MB of storage. It was a time when optimisation was everything, and I'm definitely finding myself looking back on those days for inspiration.
Take the main stairs for example, which contain no less than 120 blue light strips. Having 120 actual lights casting a blue glow was utter madness, so I've employed some clever mesh volumes instead which look and behave like lights, but aren't actually lights. It's this sort of trickery that enables us to produce both highly performant and great-looking environments, without having to sacrifice visual quality.
NPC Crew
The NPC crew characters have now been updated to use Epic's new MetaHuman platform. They're incredibly realistic, but also very costly to render. It took a lot of tweaking and optimisation (980 active skeletal meshes!), but I'm happy to say we now have 196 MetaHuman characters freely roaming the ship. This was an important stress test and proof of concept, and I can now start giving them actual routines and places of work.
Right now they're all the same guy, but we'll expand that over time. You'll notice though that the shirts are different, and that's because they're using our new procedural clothing system. We'll extend this to the other items of clothing too, in addition to adding the other MetaHuman clothing items. When out of uniform, the crew are going to be rocking some sharp threads! (did I really just say that?) :D
Engineering
We took a poll recently, asking our backers what they'd like to see development focus on next. They chose interactive engineering systems, so that's currently the primary focus of development activity. The reactor and engineering control rooms will need to be fleshed out as part of this process, so I've started roughing out some of the interior wall panels. Essentially from this point though, every system on the ship (even the lights) will depend on the reactor being operational to function.
What's Next?
I found the backer poll actually worked really well, and we'll be using that approach again to drive the next phase of development. So once all the engineering systems are in a good place, we'll turn to the community once more to guide the direction of the project. Aside from addressing critical bugs (which will always be the #1 priority), I love giving the community the power to choose what they think is most important for the game. I'm pretty sure we'll continue that approach long after launch, and I'm actually excited to see what the polls will look like when the entire player base gets involved!