It took some time but here they finally are, automatic weapons. Especially useful for those of you who build ships so large that you get lost on the way to the cockpit. While automatic weapons are the hot topic of this update, most of the work has gone on under the hood of the game.
We’ve been hard at work to reduce our memory footprint. While work on this is still ongoing, this patch does contain part of our effort. On larger servers a lot of the lag spikes encountered while the game saves is due to the amount of data we have to store. To reduce the amount of data we save, we’ve been optimizing various parts of the game, such as ships, drones and other entities that we’d need to package and write to disk.
As always with these patches we’ve also been working on fixing bugs, many of which are reported by people in the community, which we’d like to thank for doing so.
Now, automatic weapons. In the editor you can now find two types of automated weapons. The Light Automated Pulse Laser, and the Light Automated Auto Cannon. These devices are Tier I devices, as they require silicon in their construction recipes.
Automated weapons need to be in an active weapon group in order to work. Just like the normal weapons they need to be in a weapon group with a loaded ammo loader, and they need to be powered. They will automatically fire upon Skrill, but will only return fire on ships, drones and other defenses.
To enable automatic weapons, simply activate the weapon group they are in. We’ve updated the weapon CPU terminal, and you can now use it to toggle weapon groups on/off, move weapons between weapon groups, and to toggle line of sight detection. Line of sight detection, when active, will not fire when there are objects between the target and the weapons.
In case you missed our announcement from yesterday, here’s a link. As you might know if you did see it, the automatic weapons will be the last feature update for a while as we work on larger new features for the first release of Interstellar Rift. Of course we will still be releasing smaller patches to address any issues that might pop up, or to apply new stability and performance patches.
As always, thank you all for playing and we’ll see you starside!
-The Split Polygon Team