As we near the end of February, it’s time for another experimental update!
In this update, we add automatic weapons, and some improvements to the underlying systems of Interstellar Rift.
First up, the long awaited, and much requested automatic weapons have finally arrived! These are upgraded versions of the autocannon and laser weapons, which track and and return fire to anything that fires upon your ship or station. These weapons should make defending your ships a little easier when you’re a solo pilot, or just not near the cockpit!.
We’ve also upgraded the weapon’s CPU screen. You can now activate your weapons, and even switch them to other weapon groups using the CPU screen. This means you no longer have to run to the cockpit to activate the weapons. And this also means stations do not need to have a cockpit when you are using automated weapons. We’ve also added a switch to enable or disable line-of-sight checking for the automated weapons.
Most of this patch’s work, however, has gone into the back-end of things. We’ve improved memory usage, garbage collection and asteroid spawning. We’ve also fixed some issues found with the multi-threading introduced in the last patch.
Additionally, we’ve started pre-loading some of the assets at the start of the game. This means that textures are now loaded up-front, so that there are no longer little lag spikes when first encountering a non-loaded texture.
To enable the experimental branch, right click on Interstellar Rift in Steam, go to the beta tab, and select the "experimental IR beta patches" option
Please note that galaxy files opened in the experimental build, may turn out to be broken when going back to the regular build. It is recommended to start a new save file when trying the experimental build.