New Space Stations test map
I am really axcited to let you play what I have been working on last 6 months.
The new map includes 2 bigger stations, one smaller station and two tiny stations.
3 new ships , 2 jobs to make money, shops to spend them. Side Quest to get your own ship, another Side quest with some small story.
New Features:
- Mop cleaning, cargo container manipulation in Zero G, shopping , (I don't want to tell more about it so you can report how intuitive it is, thanks.) Keys, locks, keycards. Lock Works the same as keypad, but you need an item instead of memorized code.
- Utility shaft doors, hidden doors, floor utility doors, (these non motororized doors can be unlocked/locked/open without lock or button part attached to it)
- Reworked Character system and model that now supports females, and muscles/fat/nice curves on both genders. For now there are just few presets no customization yet, .
- Some Stealth and thief features are implemented, NPCs will spam the chat to let you know that they know, or start following you but nothing else. They dislike your trespassing, or when you grab their items, or put them in your inventory.
- Metal parts can have rusty look, with various rust level.
- Icons in the corner popup to notify you about crouching, trespassing, Gravity
- Better third person ship controls thanks to the ability to lock/unlock the ship with contextual button, or info about state of the switches, so for example you know if your dock magnet is active or not.
New Items:
- 5 directinal small thruster. Two of them on opposite sides can make it possible for the ship go any direction, good for small ships, so they can be simple and still functional.
- Steel Wall parts have new variations, with wall side removed, so the structure inside is exposed, making more detailed and industrial look.)
- Shaft Doors and Trapdoors added. Used for accesing shafts/vents if you want to play stealthy, or when you need an access to a shaft, for a legitimate reasons. (are operated by hand, no electricity or buttons)
- Cloths added, few pants, labor overalls, formal shoes,
- Lot of decorative objects for walls were added, but there no means for player to craft them or use them now, they are only on my default builds.
- Gravity generator, I made it in the way that it works only on an object that has floor below and ceiling above. so it cannot cause trouble when you are near the station outside. When you under its influence Icon pops up in the corner,
- Locks, Keys, Keycards, keycard locks. There is also special kind of lock that requires the key to stay inside to stay unlocked.
Changes:
- You can nurse back to health people in coma, If you keep their health, hunger, thirst and energy up, their coma is gonna go away slowly until they wake up.
- It turned out to be desirible to be able to crouch in zero g, so its possible now, but it needed its own key since ctrl is used to go down. Cable mode now uses X key, and by tradition, Crouch is switched by C key.
- Doors that have lock/keypad attached, but no button, are opened/closed when key is entered,
Improvements:
Path finding system can now work with custom abilities of each character thats searching path. If chacracter for whatever reason cannot open doors,
door path is blocked unless the door is currently open.
Doors turned out to by tricky in my game, because you might or might not have buttons or keypads on door, and even each side of the door can be diferent.
So the path finder has to check if character has means to open it from desired side of the door, and also knowledge, like needed pass codes.
I have rewrittent pathfinding to C++ long time ago, but now I also rewrote environment scanning to C++, which builds pathfinding network,
it no longer kills performance, but it still has impact (if the game runs 60 fps where CPU is the bottleneck, it runs above 54 fps when scanning is active. This new scanning creates way less connections than before, only necessary ones, so the pahfinding is faster too, )
I had to make my own path finder because the default one in Unreal Engine is good for static flat worlds, but i need pathfinder that can have floor on any direction, or on moving ship.
I have made lot optimizations to Characters. Decorations and cables dissapear with distance
Please tell me about your framerate on the new map.
Missing features that will be totally there hopefully soon:
There is a station designed to work as a ship repair station, but no auto repairs for money yet, however there is a workshop, where you can do minor repairs manually by yourself.
No tutorials for anything yet, let the contextual messages guid you. There will be basic electronics course and ship pilot school, similar to whta is in the Science Camp
Next updates will most likely make your progress on the new map obsolete, but I will try to make a way to transfer money
Thank you very much for recent suggestions, If you have any ideas I'll be glad to hear it
Known Issues: 1/3 of characters have wrong hair or other features