The big voxel removal update is near the corner!
What the community have called the "novox" update is the biggest update of the game so far, please refer to the previous post to learn more about it.
The last two pieces of the puzzle have been added:
New Damage System:
The new damage technology leverage on the current powerful decal tech.
When a block is hit a damage decal is spawned. Each "damage decal" have its own HP, should it be hit again it will look worse and worse.
For now there is three visual stages: damaged, pierced with mesh, and fully pierced. Once full pierced any beam or laser projectile will pierce through the hull and will hit what is behind!
On top of looking cool it is a very important game mechanic, as a stretch hull piece will not provide a stronger armor, just the same as it used to be with the previous voxel tech.
New Light Technology:
On top of that a new light system has been added. The previous tech (single light texture per ship) was a huge memory bottleneck for large ships and was not even compatible with very large ship because of directx texture size limitation.
The new system uses a state of the art technique called tiled rendering, allowing many lights to be drawn for relatively cheap (if you over-use lights it might still lag though!).
Lights are also now physically correct, with a sharper look and with specular reflections. It means that metal will looks like metal! The result will also be in line with the sun lighting.
Before
After
If you did used bare metal interior you might not like the new look though and might have to do a bit of paint work!
Community feedback.
Building Grid:
There was a lot of discussion regarding the building flow of the game. A lot of people where used to the "smart" brick placement (which use the local grid of the targeted brick) and did not like the constrain of the global grid lock. You can now switch between those to mode by pressing the [G] key:
- Global grid lock: each brick locks to the grid defined by the origin (created when the starter block was placed). Similar to the old hull block grid mode.
- Local grid lock: here the local grid of the targeted brick is used, so you can add and carry offset easily Similar to the old brick grid mode.
We might still need a bit of fine tuning and naming / icon change as some people where confused by the name.
Heat Dissipation:
The heat dissipation of hull was removed but will come back due to popular request. I will explain the impact in a subsequent post.
Stay tuned!
Francois