Hello Colonists,
It’s been a while since our last post and we have a lot to share with you. Today we’ll talk about the work we’ve done over the past month and what you can expect in the next Hellion update.
Development
Let’s start with the important news first, migration to Unity 2017 version. Our developers have successfully resolved all the conflicts that are simply inevitable when updating the game engine. Now our team is fully focused on stability and optimization, which remain our main task.
Apart from the general gameplay and code optimization we are also working on optimizing the modules which will result in higher frame rates. This will also eliminate a lot of problems many players have been experiencing, since framerate drop is one of the major sources of most known bugs. Improvements to collision models, geometry and light setup are all part of this process. We have also put a lot of effort into the net code optimization in order to improve server-client communication which is expected to reduce or eliminate many of the desync issues.
There is a large list of resolved bugs. One of the most annoying, the “Elevator bug” was successfully sorted out, so no more “stuck in the middle of your ship”.
Most of these improvements will find their way into the next update which is expected to see the light of Hellion before the end of February. Those that are not included will require some additional testing time and will be implemented shortly after.
New Update
What to expect? First of all, a plethora of bug fixes and game improvements. We won’t go into details here, since they will all be listed in the patch notes.
We continue importing community made images for in-game customization. If you want to see your artwork in game, do not hesitate and send your art to [email protected].
Since we’ve decided to focus on optimization, we had to slightly adjust our roadmap. In terms of new gameplay mechanics, we had made a decision to push Heat and Radiation further back in favor of a mechanic that many of you wanted from day one - crafting.
Define what you need for your station improvement, get in your ship and go on a salvage run. Find scrap materials and turn them into something useful. We are very excited about this one and expect crafting to become one of the backbone features in the future.
Next on the list are the improvements to the Life Support system. These changes are in line with the Power Supply rework and should round up base building and maintenance aspects of gameplay where you upgrade individual systems in order to improve the performance and functionality of your base as a whole.
This is just an overview of our latest activity which we wanted to share with you. If you are interested in more details, visit our roadmap and check the latest changes. During the following weeks we’ll go into details about all of the new game mechanics you can expect in the next update.
Until then, fly safe,
Zero Gravity team