# UE Beta 0.31 (2024-08-09)
- Fixed a bug that sometimes made the game crash after exiting the level "The Long Drop"
- Fixed the UI: The "Start" button was missplaced due to the Beta 0.29 update
- Added a warning that you need to play in "default" difficulty to be able to write to the leaderboard
- Tweaked the way the game communicates with Steam, improving the performance when loading ghosts / leaderboards
- Thought about ways to make leaderboards accessible for other difficulty modes... without result, yet!
# UE Beta 0.30 (2024-08-06)
- Did something wrong while compiling. No functions added since 0.29, just a fresh build.
# UE Beta 0.29 (2024-08-06)
- Implemented the basic functionality for unlocking Steam achievements
- Implemented SteamUserStats to make it possible to create a bit more sophisticated achievement rules
- Experimented with achievement localization (which does in fact work a bit different than in Unreal Engine)
- Added the first few Steam achievements. More to come.
- Had a delicious breakfast
- Implemented the basic concept of portals to teleport the spaceship. Pretty cool, but still experimental
- Found and fixed two (yes, TWO) additional reasons why in some cases the race ghost is not loaded properly
- Learned the hard way that there is in fact a difference how "CallBack" and "CallResult" is handled by the SteamAPI
- Slightly adjusted the UI to make it look more consistent when switching between mission and race selector
- Fixed the UFO in Basic Flight Training 04, which was flying a bit to low so it crashed into the cargo chest
- Enjoyed playing Gravity Force instead of coding, trying to convince myself that playtesting IS important
# UE Beta 0.28 (2024-08-01)
- Implemented the loading and saving of LIDAR scans (aka MiniMap)
- Implemented the integration of the MiniMap as some kind of preview into the mission and race selector screens
- Made the LIDAR scanner detect different types of obstacles, encoded as different colors in the MiniMap
- Cursed a lot!
- Added tooltips to some buttons
- Added a button to delete the current MiniMap
-
# UE Beta 0.27 (2024-07-31) The MiniMap Update
- Ported the Mineshaft level "Claustrophobia I"
- Ported the Mineshaft level "Balance"
- Fixed some issues with loading the ghosts from Steam
- Experienced a lot of game engine crashes due to "dangling pointers", which could have been avoided if only I were a bit less dumb
- Learned a lot about materials and shaders that I wish I knew before
- Learned that there is still way more to learn about materials and shaders and \ in Unreal Engine
- Tinkered around with shader stuff to avoid working on the lidar scanner / minimap
- Built a post processing shader to simulate some old CRT-TV, just for fun
- Procrastinated even more
- Implemented a preview of the selected ghosts path in the race selector
- Implemented the lidar scanner
- Implemented the minimap (still a lot work to do, but the fundamental concepts are working)
# UE Beta 0.26 (2024-07-25) The Relaxed Mode Update
If you try to manipulate objects before they are spawned into existence, you usually get a null pointer exception. But not this time. It just... behaved strangely.
- Added a custom task bar icon instead of the Unreal logo
- Added Japaneese localisation (as good as possible)
- Added Chineese localisation (at least simplified Han-Chineese)
- Added a first attempt of showing race ghost trails in the preview map. Still pretty raw, but has potential!
- Implemented different difficulty modes to choose between a bit more relaxed or challenging (default) gameplay.
- Found the reason why the spider web and the lidar scanner (for the minimap) refused to work. Same cause for both things.
- Fixed gas particles sticking around after reloading / changing levels
- Fixed some spelling errors
- Fixed a bug that on some computers landing on the homebase was not detected reliably. Don't ask.
- Broke the toolchain. Again! Leaving me with several hours of trying to figure out what went wrong
- Repaired the toolchain without really understanding why it broke in the first place
- Did a lot of clean-up regarding in preparation for the code optimization
- Made excessively use of material instances to reduce the number of used materials
- Updated the "ghost" so that its landing gear looks like the new landing gear of the ship
- Implemented the fundamental concept for tentacles / tendrils
- Reworked the way the preferences dialogue is handled by the game
- Rebuilt the whole settings dialogue and the load/save config routines from scratch. Once again.
- Discovered that reworking / rebuilding of the preferences dialogoue was totally unnecessary, as the suspected error was caused by something totally unrelated
- Finally found the time to replace the Unreal logo with the Gravity Force logo as taskbar and window icon
# UE Beta 0.25 (2024-06-17) The Coming Soon Update
The "coming soon" announcement is published on Steam. You now officially see Gravity Force in the Steam shop. Tell. Your. Friends!
- Added the new race level "Highspeed 2"
- Ported the Mineshaft mission "Confined Space" as the first level of the "Mineshaft" series.
- Ported the Mineshaft mission "Tectonics"
- Ported the Mineshaft mission "The Long Drop"
- Fixed a bug that led to corruption of (own) leaderboard entries by rapidly spamming the retry key while writíng to the leaderboard
- Celebrated the first incoming wishlist entries on Steam!
- Encountered a strange bug when importing levels larger than 128 x 127 (yes, 7!) pixels. Not fixed yet, but there is a workaround.
- Tried to implement a realtime minimap - and failed.
- Added some credits screen
# UE Beta 0.24 (2024-06-11)
- Fixed an issue with a memory leak only appearing in the built game, but not in development build. Yes, that was as tedious as it sounds
- Fixed an issue that made ghosts from previous race levels appear within a new race.
- Added some more integrity checking to the ghost recorder. Sadly hat to invalidate all recorded ghosts prior to Beta 0.24
- Added a "please wait" notification when ghosts are being downloaded.
- Added a timeout / abbort functionality if the download of a ghostfile fails to avoid stalling the game
- Tweaked the UI for the race selector
- Added even more music to the game!
- Fiddled with the settings dialogue. Still not working as intended, but heading into the right direction
- Moved the spawning position of the spaceship back down onto the homebase's landing pad to reduce the initial drop-and-bounce
- Bloated the game's disk size even more by just trying to get things to work instead of thinking about optimization. Another item on the to do list
- Daydreamt about selling millions of copies of the game :)
Implemented a button to delete own leaderboard entries (not fully functional, yet)
Made the red info bar on top of the UI hidden. Might come back soon.
# UE Beta 0.23 (2024-06-01) The Before Dawn Update
- Fixed a bug that when out of fuel the engine exhaust still emitted particles and the fuel gauge displayed negative numbers
- Made the race ghost loadable via the "Load Ghost" button! It still uses some polling (YUK!), but it works
- Fixed some issues with particles passing through the cave blocks. A problem introduced while optimizing collisions Beta 0.22
- Ignored the fact that cargo cubes and the blue UFOs don't behave like they did before Beta 0.22. That's a problem for future me.
- Some UI cleanup in the mission and race selector dialogues as a preparation for some upcomming features
- As uusually introduced a lot of new bugs while trying to make things better
- Experimented even more with music. There is a lot to come!
# UE Beta 0.22 (2024-05-29)
- Brought back the menu music. Just experimenting
- Fixed the landing gear a bit more than in Beta 0.21, iteratively getting to what it ought to be
- Added some fade effect to blend the music tracks into each other more smoothly
- Spilled some more coffee
- Fixed a bug which made parts of the new landing gear be affected by gravity within the zero-gravity-levels
- Optimized the collider of the cargo crates to make them behave like cubes and not like... things that tend to stand on their own edges
- Removed tons of unnecessary* overlap events (literally thousands per frame), which should give quite some performance gain
- Added the "join us on Discord" button (actually it was added in Beta 0.20, but forgotten to be mentioned here)
*) I whish I would get a nickle every time I have to look up that word to see where to put the double consonants
-
# UE Beta 0.21 (2024-05-28)
Doing things late at night is not always the best way to avoid programming mistakes that have to be fixed the next morning.
-- me
- Fixed the landing gear, at least a little bit
- Modified the physics material of the landing feet to be able to set the friction
- Added lighting channels to avoid weird shadows to be casted
# UE Beta 0.20 (2024-05-28)
- Added a logo/splashscreen at startup
- Fixed some typos
- Added some missing translation
- Wrestled with the game engine to disallow the new landing gear glitching Cyberpunk style. Not successful, yet.
- Added some ingame music (just to see how it turns out, may not be final)
- Changed the particles of the frozen gas emitter to be a bit more gas like
- Replaced the landing gear by a more dynamic one...
A word to the landing gear: Oh dear!
After countless hours of trying to make it behave like a propper game object (which means: not glitching around like things in Cyberpunkt tend to do), I finally managed to get to this point. But now the physics constraints are somewhat weak. The landing gear feels kind of squishy. You may find it hard to land without damaging the ship. I'm working on this, but for now you'll have to fly around with this... thing.
# UE Beta 0.19 (2024-05-17) The R**-Key-Update
- Fixed a bug in the level creator that sometimes made the development quit ungracefully
- Additional key mapping: A,D, right Alt for steering, Q: drop one, E: drop all. Currently hard coded
- Added some ambience music to the main menu. Just playing around. Might change in the future.
- Temporarily removed the Test-Levels (as the are kind of... broken)
-
# UE Beta 0.18 (2024-05-14)
"If a developer fixes a memory leak, the fix itself inevitably creates at least one new memory leak."
-- Platon, ca. 350 BC (I think it was him. Not really sure.)
- Removed the Atiiwan Protocol, as it is no longer needed
- Prepared the ingame music manager (coming soon)
- Prepared post-processing shader
- Struggled more than expected to make the main menu remember the users last choices*
- Finally made the main menu remember the users last choices when returning from a mission/race
- Fixed the memory leak created by... fixing a memory leak in UE Beta 0.16
- Fixed some internal stuff regarding the way objects are spawned
- Fixed a lot of issues with th ghost recorder / leaderboard**
\*) There are still problemes with levelnames containing blanks.
\*\*) Automatically loading the ghost still not working
# UE Beta 0.17 (2024-05-06)
Never underestimate the value of time to test software before releasing it.
UE Beta 0.16 was full with bugs.
- Added some of the translations missing in UE Beta 0.16
- Fixed the text formatting of the DevBlog in UE Beta 0.16
- Fixed a bug that caused the corruption of some leaderboard entries. Sorry Atiiwan.
- Implemented "The Atiiwan Protocol", allowing temporarily to restore one of the corrupted leaderboard entries
- Implemented a "please wait" message to be displayed during asynchronous Steam operations
- Implemented an engine exhaust particle effect for the ghost, too.
- Fixed a (quite nasty) memory leak that prevented the unloading of objects when returning to the main menu
- Tought the game how to download a recorded ghost from Steam. Regarding this the game was kind of stubbon
- Implemented the buttons to select the desired ghost as opponent for a race (still not working 100 %)
- Did a lot of background work regarding artwork, steam presentation and music. You will see during the following weeks
- Implemented "please wait" banners. Not well designed, but they do work
- Worked on the new landing gear. Still not part of the game yet as it tends to... break... the physics
- Tipped over the coffee mug. Why? Because I can
# UE Beta 0.16 (2024-04-30)
- Ported the race levels "Figure Eight" and "Tapeworm"
- Ported the highspeed race level "Highspeed"
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when rapidly pressing the retry key ("T")
- Added some explanatory text to the settings dialogue. To be removed when custom controls are implemented
- Added some explanatory text to the HUD (some keyboard bindings explained in the red bar at the top)
- Made the particles emitted by the checkpoints collide with the spaceship, and be rendered a bit bigger
- Removed the easter eggs. If you haven't found all 9 of them, may be you should try harder next time
- Implemented the ghost recorder / ghost playback for the race mode (not available in this version, yet!)
- Tought the game how to upload a recorded ghost to Steam
- Failed to teach the game how to download a recorded ghost from Steam. For now. Coming soon. Pinky swear.
- Tweaked the main menu a bit to make room for the ghost selector in race mode
- Put a lot of exciting stuff into the pipeline, hoping to get at least half of it done in time
# UE Beta 0.15 (2024-04-12) The Racemode Update
- The Escape-key now destroyes the ship instead of getting you directly back to the main menu
- Added a keyboard shortcut to immediately restart the level. Currently hardcorded to "T"
- Reduced the distance the spaceship starts above the homebase, avoiding the initial drop-start
- The leaderboard now remembers the country of the record, allowing for more competition an statistic
- Improved the layout of the mission leaderboard - at least a little bit
- The current player's mission leaderboard entry is now highlighted
- Dynamic background now working (already since beta 0.13), but forgotten to be mentioned in the DevLog
- Implemented the basis game mechanics for the race mode, including checkpoints 'n stuff
- Results of the races are now written to the global leaderboard
- Ported the race level "Race 01"
- Fixed a bug that caused to resume the calculation of mission score after finishing a mission
- Played around with some some GUI-stuff
- If the sensors are destroyed, you now lose visual information about the environment. Shortly: Embrace darkness
About the darkness: Disabling the sensors right at the start notches up the difficulty and gives a way more claustrophobic look and feel. Also it feels a bit more like exploring the caves. Press "6" anytime during gameplay if you'd like to try it for yourself.
# UE Beta 0.14 (2024-04-05) HOTFIX
Hotfix for a really, really nasty bug introduced by tampering with the physics engine (see release note to UE Beta 0.13)
A missing conditional check caused the game to ungracefully crash in several levels.
This is fixed now. Let's hope not to see something like that again.
# UE Beta 0.13 (2024-03-04)
- Fixed a bug in level "Under Pressure" (trigger for barrier not working). Thank you, A.B.
- Fixed some typos (as predicted in release notes for UE Beta 0.11)
- Fixed some "micro oscillations" that caused the ship to not realize it has landed on magnets. Stupid ship!
- Changed the hydraulic fluid in the landing gear dampers
- Reduced the delay for showing the failure panel to 2 seconds on behalf of a special request
- Addet modifiers for custom gravity
- Realized that UE doesn't support custom gravity vectors - which are essential for the upcomming planetoid levels
- Replaced UE's gravity simulation with own physics code. What a fun thing to do!
- Explored many, many ways to screw things up by messing with the physics engine
- Nearly broke the universe. Never tamper with the universal gravity constant! Just. Do. Not.
- Tried to port the asteroids level "Agoraphobie" - and stumbled accross a strange bug in the level importer
- Ported the asteroids levels "Asteroid Field", "Scattered" and "Heavy Traffic"
- Realized that some translations are missing - postponed that to the next release
- Got the dynamic background working! (You have to enable it in the settings)
-
# UE Beta 0.12 (2024-03-30): Eastereggs
"If you have to hide eastereggs in software, at least do it the fun way."
-- Sun Tzu
Just a quick update enabling the hunt for eastereggs. Find them all, and have fun.
No real new features added, no bugs removed since yesterdays 0.11-update.
# UE Beta 0.11 (2024-03-29)
- Ported the cave level "A Bit Lost"
- Fixed some typos and translation errors. Some. Not all. By far
- Fixed the weight of the cargo crates so they can again trigger pressure plates ("Think Twice" now working)
- Made the magnets at least pretend to obey to the laws of physics
- Created a more metal like material for the magnets
- Fixed a bug breaking some physics constraints when packaging the game
- Fixed a bug that sometimes required the player to do a mouseclick to make the spaceship react to keybord input
- Implemented some parts of the settings dialogue. A lot of settings are not fully functional yet.
- Made the settings dialogue available during active missions
- Moved the language selection into the settings dialogue
- Made the success panel now preset the "submitt to leaderboard" checkbox with your settings
- Implemented some sort of FPS cap (still acts a bit weird, working on that)
- Added an option to enable/disable the dynamically created background mesh
- Remodeled the audio system to make the audio volume controlable through the settings dialogue
- Enabled the leaderboard to cope with different game versions and branches
- Unified (pun intended) the version number systematic. Starting to count from "0", as if UNITY never happened
- Transfered a ton of code from Blueprint to C++
- Did first steps toward reducing packaged file size. The game is still ridiculously large. Nearly 1 GB? Must be kidding!
- Wasted many hours by gazing at not working code without seeing the error hidden in plain sight
- Surely introduced a lot more new currently unknown bugs waiting to be fixed in future releases
# UE Beta 0.10 (2024-03-17)
The Four Horsemen Of Wasting Precious Time:
1.) Use OnlineSubsystemSteam, they say.
2.) Wait! OnlineSubsysemSteam is deprecated, use OnlineServices, they say.
3.) By the way: OnlineServices is still beta, and may be changed in the future, they say.
4.) Oh, and it lacks some important features - but that you have to find out for yourself.
Today the Unreal port will become the main branch, taking the UNITY version offline. Get lost, Greedy John.
- Fixed the position of the pressure plate within "Let It Go"
- Implemented the logic required for pressure plates to be able to trigger multiple different objects
- Ported the cave levels "Explore" and "Claustrophobia II"
- Added some UFOs to the level "Explore", to increase the difficulty a little bit
- Implemented an opt-in button to allow or deny the leaderboard entries
- Implemented localization for level names. Not quite sure why
- Began implementing the spider web (now I'm literally a web developer). Still behaves... weird
- Fixed a bug that caused the score being calculated without consideration of the ships damage status
- Made the damage dealt by impacting frozen gas chunks depending on their kinetic energy
- Implemented some kind of "entropy cube" - to be used in upcoming levels
- Discovered and utilized another easily accessible way to permanently corrupt the project files
- Learned that there is no such thing as too thoroughly tested backup scripts
- Dodged a bullet by restoring the project files from backup, loosing nearly no progress
- Spent way too much time trying to use OnlineSubsystemSteam
- Spent way too much time trying to user OnlineServices, instead
- Finally implemented the leaderboard using the SteamworksAPI directly. Should have done that from the start
- Removed the debug key that instantly grabbed the nearest cargo crate
- A ton of under the hood stuff
- Cake. For obvious reason
# UE Beta 0.9 (2024-02-21)
- Fixed a bug in the packaging process that made UE Beta 1.8 unplayable
- Fixed a bug in level "Downside Up" that caused the system to apply a force on a static object
- Implemented the logical connection between pressure plates an barriers
- Made the level "Under Pressure" playable
- Ported the levels "Think Twice" and "Let It Go"
- Implemented engine shutdown when out of fuel (or worse)
- Started implementing a more detailed set of landing legs
- Gave the coffee cup some landing legs, for obvious reason
- Narrowed down the weird lighting issues to incorrectly calculated surface normals within the generated background mesh
# UE Beta 0.8 (2024-02-16)
- Added barriers (those force field like thingies with a sensor area to make them one way passages)
- Ported the level "Strange Technology"
- Portet the level "Under Pressure" (not yet fully playable)
- Implemented "on the fly level generation" to reduce the shipping build size
- Converted most of the meshes to static meshes to increase performance
- Optimized collider channels to increase performance
- Removed unnecessary physics calculation to... guess what... improve performance
- Experimented with dynamic mesh generation
- Implemented dynamically generated background meshes to give some sense of depth
- Fooled around with volumetric lighting and raytracing to implement fog, shadows and god rays
- Totally messed up the lighting by fooling around with volumetric lighting and raytracing
- Totally messed up the performance by fooling around with volumetric lighting and raytracing
- Prepared the minimap (still some work to be done)
- Removed a bug that caused the accumulation of geometry data over playtime
# UE Beta 0.7 (2024-02-05)
- Added a debug info bar at the top of the HUD, displaying the current FPS
- Added some information about known issues to the main menu
- Added a selector for rendering quality level to the (still not fully functional) settings dialogue
- Added panels for mission success and - you might have guessed it - mission failure
- Added a functionality to restart the current level. This took much more time than expected
- Fixed the movement of the UFO thingies in level "Basic Flight Training 04"
- Broke the internal state machine - again
- Removed the debug lines showing the next UFO waypoint
- Fixed the colliders for the frozen gas ejector thingies. You are no longer able to simply pass through them
- Tried to convince the localization system not to display korean numerals as arabic numbers - without success
- Made the magnets behave less linear and a bit more... magnet like
- Tried to port the levels "Despair" and "Anomaly" - and encountered a huge bug in the level loader
- Drank way too much coffee
- Fixed the huge bug in the level loader
- Successfully ported the levels "Despair" and "Anomaly". Finaly.
- Ported the levels "Cover Me" and "Downside Up"
- Made the ingame HUD appear a bit more compact
- Implemented a damage model that is based on impact location and impact impulse
- Implemented the score calculation and made it visible in the HUD
- Realized the landing gear is still indestructible
- Withstood the temptation to start yet another side project... for now
- Did some "under the hood" code cleanup
# UE Beta 0.6 (2024-01-22)
- Implemented the gas ejector thingies
- Ported some of the "Cave" levels (Waste, Caves01, Caves02, Choices)
- Fixed a bug causing the font for Korean not being included in the shipping build
- Reduced the ships angular damping to increase level of frustration while trying to fly that piece of junk
- Optimized the physics settings to avoid tons of unnecessary collision checks to save performance costs
- Added some simple crash / damage model. Nothing wild yet
- Unified the (really basic) transistion screens displayed while loading levels
- Added Magnets - still work in progress
- Added the GUI for ship status / damage reporting - still work in progress
- Added the GUI for score reporting - still work in progress
- Added the ability to deliver cargo at the homebase - still work in progress
- Fixed some typos
- Prepared some stuff for steam integration (leaderboards and achievments)
-
# UE Beta 0.5 (2024-01-14)
- Added a debug function to pick up any nearby cargo chest while flying (Press [4])
- Fixed a bug that caused the HUD values not to update
- Added localization support (currently only English and German and partly Korean, more languages to come)
- Realized that Korean doesn't use arabic number literals - thus there is some more work to be done
- Changed the mainly used font to a more readable and localizable font. Not sure about this one
- Implemented the routines for user settings. Sounds more fun than it was
- Received valuable input from the beta testers. Many new cool ideas
- Implemented a (truely primitive) mission selector dialogue
- Implemented functionality to display the mission briefings
- Wasted way too much time figuring out what to implement in Blueprint and what in C++
- Moved some perfectly fine functionality from C++ to Blueprint - without any need to do so
- Realized that moving the functions from C++ to Blueprint wasn't the smartest idea
- Moved the functionality back from Blueprint to C++, only to realize that now both ways don't work anymore
- Wasted even more time to fix the freshly moved functions - then restored the project from yesterdays backup
- Reverted the lighting to a rather dark cave feeling
- Ported the first few "Basic Flight Training" levels
- Messed up the load / save function for the settings dialogue
- Added some blue buttons just for debugging. They will be removed soon
- Discussed some additional gamplay ideas. Neat stuff! Looking forward to implement that.
# UE Beta 0.4
"Of course you can ignore Unreals game framework and use your well known desing pattern approach. But then you'll have a really hard time"
-- some random dude on the internet
"The above statement holds true. If only I had listened to that dude..."
-- me
- Learned many many ways how NOT to build a game in Unreal Engine
- Completely rebuilt the underlying game logic. Several times
- Implemented an internal state machine to support the new game logic
- Implemented dynamic level streaming
- Separated lighting from the levels for more design flexibility
- Played around with volumetric clouds (just for fun)
- Played around with volumetric fog - will be included in a later release
- Added particle effects for thrusters, fire and explosions
- Added sound effects for thrusters, fire and explosion
- Added a basic main menu with a few buttons for test levels
- Added a basic change log
- Added a giant coffee cup for obvious reasons
- Implemented the ingame HUD (at least the bottom row of gauges)
-
Absolutely no optimization towards file size or performance done yet!
Still a long, long way to go. But... hey, as long as everybody has fun...
# UE Beta 0.3
- Refined the spaceships collider to fit its overall shape
- Moved the spaceships center of mass for more realistic flight behaviour
- Tweaked the spaceships thruster and mass settings
- Tweaked the overall physics settings
- Implemented the core functionality of the level creator
- Implemented the cargo crates including to ability to pick them up
- Implemented fuel barrels including the ability to pick them up
- Implemented the waypoint system for UFOs
- Implemented the UFOs and made them follow the waypoints
- Implemented the pressure plate
- Cursed alot due to a broken tool chain causing countless hours of fiddling around
- Slammed the head on the table when finding out it ws caused by a simple typo
- Fixed the tool chain
- Applied a coolpad to the aching forehad
# UE Beta 0.2 - First steps
- Created a simple test level
- Implemented the basic physics
- Implemented simple particle effects for thruster and RCS
- At least tied the spaceships location to two dimensions. Rotation yet to come.
# UE Beta 0.1 - Get lost, Riccitiello
- First steps towards a migration to Unreal Engine. Don't get me wrong: This will be a complete re-write. Thank you, John.
- Implemented a basic scene setup
- Imported most of the 3D-Meshes from the UNITY-Version
- Made the SteamSDK work with Unreals "Online Subsystem Steam Interface"
- Implemented remapable inputs via Unreals "Enhanced Input System"
- Fiddled with the lighting - still a long way to go.