It’s time once again, brave space explorers to update all of our Osiris astronauts on the current development of Osiris: New Dawn. We’ve had a crazy busy few weeks, especially with our participation at both GDC and PAX East 2017 and, for me personally, it was an awesome experience to meet with game industry vets, curious media members, enthusiastic content creators, and of course, a lot of our fans. It was especially satisfying to talk to face-to-face with fans who’ve been onboard since Early Access launch. There’s been a lot of progress and excitement with upcoming new features we are working to implement very soon. And as is the nature of game development, it’s often not a smooth sailing voyage.
One of the bigger problems that popped up earlier this year is that we were having major memory issues; with our high detail visuals, we were really pushing the limits on memory. We could have simplified our textures, but I think that would have taken away a lot of the immersion from our game; thankfully, after a considerable amount of R&D time, we found a solution that reduced our memory usage to 80% without loss in visual quality! And after speaking to fans at PAX East who’ve been with us since Early Access, I was convinced this was the right choice as having hand-crafted landscapes with high-level to graphic detail was MUCH preferred to anything procedurally generated. It took a few weeks to get this right, but moving forward, players will see improved visual performance even on lower-end machines.
Time is a precious resource and our dev team quickly discovered the reality of this last month with both GDC and PAX East conventions. We had great opportunities to showcase Osiris at these venues and I definitely felt we could not miss out – the obvious downside is prepping for these conventions took a lot of time out from our game development roadmap. We learned a lot on how to be more efficient in these situations and we’ll definitely be more prepared when these conventions take place so that they’re less of a “hiccup” to game development time.
And then, there’s hacking – I mentioned last month that because of the activities of cheaters and hackers, we’ve been spending more time solving and preventing such malicious activities. None have been worse than the most recent one, which we have not-so-affectionately dubbed the “263087 hack”. This hack has affected nearly everyone, taking resources and utilities and changing their ownership. We’ve basically figured out how the problem has been caused but to demonstrate how invasive and time-consuming this hack was – we had to sift through close to 600,000 lines (no, that’s not a typo) of code just to triangulate the issue. That’s a lot of man hours wasted but we feel we’ve gotten it under control now – we’ll be conducting a server wipe today and we will be adding improved anti-cheat/anti-hacking measures that will hopefully make it much more troublesome to hackers and cheaters. We have definitely elevated our awareness of cheaters and hackers and we’ll be looking into putting in more features to prevent future malevolent activity.
So all of these things I mentioned certainly add up to a fairly difficulty month, and right now, we’re prepping a hot-fix that should be implemented in the next few days. If things are running without any hitches, that’s when we can start prepping our major content update. It’s not the ideal situation, but it’s the best we can do right now – and rather leaving you guys in the dark and not saying anything about it, we want you to understand where we are at with the game development. I’ve always felt the need to be transparent to our supportive players – so bear with us as we get through this rough patch. There’s a lot of amazing stuff we’ve been chomping at the bit to unleash to you real soon. I know it’s cliché to say “All good things to those who wait” so… I’ll just say “all GREAT things to those who wait.”
McRae Out