Hello Pioneers,
We know things have been quiet for a while but we are getting close to testing the next major update that we’ve been working on for the past 3 months. We’ve spent time going through all of your feedback, both negative and positive, and addressing as much as we can in the new update. We’ve fixed a lot of bugs but the major ones have resulted in us doing a major technical re-write of the underlying parts of the game which should result in no crashing. Feedback on over thousands of hours’ worth of gameplay testing has been reviewed to get the balancing of fun and challenge just right.
Internally we have had concerns about promising a release date to the community and then not hitting it but we fully understand the frustrations of not knowing what’s going on with the games development. We are committed to getting this update out as soon as possible but if the game is not ready then we will hold off until all of the bugs have been squashed.
Once the new build is in our QA branch we will start posting further updates / screenshots on the new game features and give you all a better idea about when the release will leave QA.
For now, we can give a brief over view of the more notable changes we’ve made recently:
- Removing vast amounts of existing code and implementing newer cleaner versions for the game. This has been done for:
- Resources
- Crafting table
- Inventory Items.
- Inventory interactions for the buildings and their respective UI displays.
- Player and vehicle scanning; displaying objects in the HUD compass, and objects responding to the scanning.
- Hazards
- All Suits and Vehicles and their interactions within the world.
- Buildings; connecting them via the HAB Unit, new assets and animation.
- Improving resource pools. We are refining the resource pools and implementing a “dig anywhere” mechanic. With this, although certain areas will be marked as resources specific players can still dig as they please and will be given resource materials.
- Improving vehicle controls, and interaction.
- Implemented new data for the Suits, Vehicles and Buildings - mostly for balancing and to facilitate with the new syntax.
- New structures and classes relating to how Hazards are implemented and will execute in the game.
- Added new Dust Storm assets, particle effects and logic.
- General optimisations - We’ve made a huge leap in performance with a faster frame-rate and lower loading times.
We’ve also been working on new UI as part of a new journal system.
And new areas for you to explore.
Thanks for all your patience.