Time for an update!
Please excuse the long radio silence, but there was a lot of stuff to take care of after the launch and the first fixes. Two weeks ago we went to GDC in San Francisco for a week, which is a once-a-year opportunity to meet other professionals from the games industry which I just couldn't let slip. It's one of the biggest game developer conferences in the world and I learned a lot from the talks and conversations with other devs.
When we came back after this week at GDC we were busy moving into our office. Until then I had been developing the game from my personal home, which is not just unhealthy but also not as professional as I'd like to be. We got it done surprisingly quickly, it only took us a little more than a week, with internet, building all the new equipment like workstations, new build server(s), countless trips for buying furniture and all the other equipment we need for development.
Development Progress
During this time we couldn't work on Avorion sadly, but now that everything is in place in the new office we're back to work. We'll release a new update this week (first on the beta branch, then, after 1 or 2 days we'll push it to stable if it performs well).
This is what we've been working on over the last month (minus the 2,5 weeks where we had to get the other stuff done). Some of it is already in the beta branch for testing.
- Groups. Players will be able to invite other players into a group, so they can see each other in the sector and on the map in real time.
- Server stability. We're working on improving the "Connection Closed" and "Server Unreachable" errors, especially on startup.
- Server improvements, steam server browser.
- Gyros, inertia dampeners, directional thrusters and flight mechanics. We're reworking the "pancake thrusters" since that's an exploit that should never have been a thing. More details on that in the final patch notes.
- Lots of QoL improvements that you've been suggesting, for example pro- and retrograde markers.
- Improved repairing of ships. You'll be able to repair ships block by block or discard any blocks that would need repairing.
- Lots of fixes for bugs and/or exploits reported by you, for example the black shields issue that has been hitting intel users hard. Thanks and keep it up!
Final Note
This is not the Alliance update! We're working on this one as well, but so far there aren't that many new features that you don't already know about. We're looking into a release on Alliances in about 4 weeks after the groups update I mentioned here.
The reason why I haven't been posting more on the steam and official forum is simple: I've been busy running the company and working on the code. I know people get suspicious when Early Access devs stop giving life signs (and sometimes you should) but these kinds of updates and reading and replying on the forums cost me a lot of time, and I prefer spending my time on the game. I hope you understand. Also, we have cepheni, thedamngod and JECJoker (Shoutout to those guys!), who have been a great help and who have been and still are working closely with me.
That's all for now, have fun!