Greetings Overseers!
We'd like to take a moment to discuss our plans for the next two weeks, and to relay a change in the way we're going to be rolling out patches.
Short Term Goals
This week, we're doing some major passes on structures, with an emphasis on server performance. This should greatly improve multiplayer experience when raiding large bases, or inhabiting large bases. It will also hopefully improve turret acquisition times, and generally help with rubberbanding, AI responsiveness, and more. This will not be our one and only optimization pass but it will be a big one with the key goal of improving performance on heavily populated servers.
We will also be implementing a few new structure types in preparation for some major new upcoming features
1) AOE Repair and Healing structures
2) 15m wide by 10 m tall large shielded bay doors
3) Base-wide Shielding structure
4) 5x5x5m solid block structure
5) Vehicle pads :)
6) Large resource pipelines (not yet functional for purposes of automation)
In addition, we'll be making several important fixes and improvements to existing structural issues, UI issues, and usability concerns with structures.
Medium Term Goals
Our push over next week and the following will be to implement the PvP Lite game mode, finish our voice chat implementation, continue work on resource pipelines/automation, improve the combat experience, and focus on the beginnings of our vehicles and special/utility item prototyping.
Cataclysm System and Server Wipes
We also want to implement a new Cataclysm system by which our PvP servers will wipe periodically. Throughout the rest of Early Access, each PvP server will wipe on either a 2 week or 4 week timer.
The wipe will take place as a large event in the last hour of the server, during which the Volcano will undergo an epic eruption, killing every bot, animal, and structure on the server. Gaiya is not pleased with your presence, and she wants you to know it!
Before the beginning of the Cataclysm, the Corporation with the highest total networth on the server will earn their Victory of that cycle, and their names will be placed in the server name for the duration of the following cycle. We hope this will incentivize players to really compete for that top slot on a server! This system will roll out within the following 2 weeks targeting the next wipe cycle at the end of August.
PvE servers will be unaffected by this system, but they may still be subject to wipe throughout EA, which will be timed to coincide with the normal cycle schedules of the PvP servers.
New Patch Process
Finally, we'd like to announce some changes to the way our patching process will work. From now on, we will roll out our major patches into a new publically accessible Beta server. In order to access this, you'll need to select the "Beta" branch from your library->OutpostZero->properties->betas tab. We will be pushing Beta branch builds on Thursdays and hopefully, rolling those betas into live servers on Tuesdays late in the night. We hope this will result in more stable patches that don't require multiple hotfixes.
We will add a new discord channel for reporting beta server bugs, and will be very reliant on our community to help find any bugs.
Thanks for your continued support!
- The Dev Team