New engine features
We've been working for on a big update for a while now. This is going to be the 0.9 update which means we are getting close to feature complete. As you can imagine it will be a big one. Here's what we are doing.
Clouds
We are upgrading our sessions to contain a THIRD type of thing! While before they supported two types of things (terrain and stations) now they will support three types of things! (terrain, stations, clouds) Now you might argue that ore is a fourth type of thing, and we are indeed adding ore as well, but we consider ore to be ships so we didn't count ore. If you think we are wrong to classify ore as ships, then good news: we are upgrading our session to support FOUR types of things! Will talk about ore later.
Clouds aren't just aesthetic, they will have meaningful gameplay impacts. Depending on what type of cloud you encounter a simple dust cloud might obstruct vision, making ships inside harder to detect, while a plasma cloud might disabled sensors entirely and zap you periodically. We have a lot of potential cloud types on our drawing board such as radiation clouds which will cause your crew to take constant radiation damage. These hazards are meant to add another layer of interaction to the world map beyond simply avoiding collision with rocks and make the world feel more alive and interesting.
Clouds do come with a bit of an overhaul of our rendering, and if you have been following Jan's twitter you have probably already seen that the results look pretty nice. This will be a visual update which may force us to reconsider some of our system requirements so if this update absolutely melts your video card, well then we may need to have a serious conversation about honestly trying to support your grandfather's laptop from 1998. We already have pretty modest system requirements, and it is 2019, so we are really hoping it won't be an issue, but if it does we are willing to consider adding more things for you to disable in the settings.
Ships and asteroids cast shadows on clouds, and light sources inside the clouds will cause them to glow.
Sensors and vision
Now we can't talk about hiding inside clouds without talking about the new visibility framework, so I will mention it briefly. In the past, a ship was visible if it was within your "vision" radius set by your bridge. This was the same rule as terrain and clouds, and it needed an upgrade for hiding in clouds to work. So we changed how ship visibility worked, but we left terrain and clouds the same.
Ship visibility now works based on a system that attempts to simulate how hard a ship is to see as well as taking into account sensor strength to give ships with real strong sensors a real bonus towards seeing their enemies. Every ship now has a dynamic detection radius, and it will be seen when it is closer than that radius. Also, having lots of sensor strength increases the effective detection radius of all nearby ships.
We designed the system so that anything can be programmed to increase radius, so we might in the future design some modules with interesting trade-offs there. However the main contributing factor to ship visibility that will matter for every ship design is heat radiated. Note that it isn't size, which means big ships can still be stealthy if designed correctly. When your radiators remove energy from a reactor they increase your visibility, and by refraining from producing heat you can reduce it. With capacitors, a variety of reactor types, a variety of radiator types, and some new heat-related modules recently developed, we hope that stealthiness can be a serious factor in future ship designs.
Mining
We sort of already have mining, but we don't like it!
In the beginning, when considering mining, it seemed obvious to us that if the entire gimmick of our game is simulated interiors for everything then clearly mining should take place on the inside of asteroids. Unfortunately, our game is forced to exist in real life where obvious answers are often wrong. By our revised assessment, interior mining is boring and ugly, and it needs to burn in a fire.
It turns out the best part about Wayward Terran Frontier is the ship design and the ship combat NEITHER of which are possible if you are inside an asteroid punching rocks. Also realism is hardly important to us, but we do recognize that real space mining probably wouldn't be done by crew leaving their ships to go inside the asteroid being mined.
So we are reenvisioning mining, and it will look like ore-rich asteroids that you can shoot at with your ship weapons. The best part about mining this way is that we can add mining related turrets and module types which will allow for all sorts of new mining-focused ship designs that we hope will drastically expand the variety of possible ship designs. While regular ore can probably be extracted with a good old fashioned machine gun, there will be new types of specialty ore which will require specialized mining equipment to extract.
We hope that adding ore nodes will make wandering aimlessly more interesting by punctuating your wander with loot pinyatas in the form of periodic low quality ore nodes. We also hope we can accomplish a compelling gameplay loop where people make custom mining ships and go exploring for rare high quality ore.
Resource system
This is the big one, and it is the reason that we are pushing back the release of this patch for longer than we wanted. The idea of the resource system is that ship construction should not be limited by such a simple stat as "capacity" but instead each module should be given a cost in terms of resources needed to construct it, and the ship construction should be the sum total of all those module costs. The idea behind this system is to give the player more reason to interact with the dynamic economy instead of simply towering over it with their ability to print infinite resources, this is meant to be one part of a step towards fixing issues with our core game loop.
Right now, the player is dropped into a sandbox that feels small and empty because of their mechanical removal from that sandbox. While all of the architecture exists for the player to go around manipulating a dynamic economy, mining, fighting, collecting, trading, etc.... the truth is you don't have to do any of that in order to advance your goals. The culprit is that evil "spawn ship" button and its unreasonable ability to violate every conservation law in the universe. What need have you for an asteroid belt, when you can create finished products at home for free? We hope that through the nerfing of that button your character will be reduced down to a creature of the verse. We hope that the tools, the dangers, and the treasures that already exist within our world will be transformed from a monotone backdrop into a world of treasure and adventure.
Or at least we hope you waste more of your precious life playing the game before you get bored.
Either way, we have been discussing doing this for a while and when we made the new mining system we quickly realized that adding a whole lot of new resources via mining kinda forced us to also consider resources. So now both systems have to be completed before the patch can go out. This resource system is big and complex, so we might need a 2nd blog post to fully explain the implications once it is closer to being ready for release. This is also why this patch will be bringing us to version 0.9.0.0
Other stuff
Finally, I should say that we are working on multiple projects simultaneously, and I'm digging into at least one which will warrant its own blog post, so whats listed above isn't comprehensive. Here are some other items that for sure will be added (also fulfilling mandatory bullet points requirement)
- 17 new weapons
- three new hulls
- new mining modules
- implementation of stealth related modules
- new weapon impulse system
- a new faction
Oh, and we redid tooltips!
Now go enjoy Christmas and leave us alone already!