I wanted to give some updates on the next patch for those of you who are not following the github.
This will be one of our biggest updates with quite a few changes for you the players and even bigger changes behind the scene.
Killing voxels:
Starship Evo started its life as a voxel building game like many other building games. Over time it has morphed to a hybrid tech with voxels and the rescalable bricks that you all love and that gives some much freedom.
Since the latest physics improvements and refactors we are now able to completely unplug the voxel layer and embrace the true nature of the game building system.
It bring the following features and changes to the game:
Optimizations: getting rid of voxel massively reduces memory usage, especially for large builds. The only impact now is how many bricks a given blueprint has, no longer its size. A 10km wide death star made of 10.000 bricks will weigh as much as a 10.000 hyper detailed fighter.
To get an idea, Dolan's mighty H-106 Kodashi, absolute beast of more than 200.000 bricks (a 10.000 bricks ship is a ship with a lot of detail already...) is weighing around 10mb in GPU memory, and around the double CPU side...
It is also improving fps, depending on the scene the gains can be substantial.
Loading times are also massively improved.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2303258817
Dynamic Grid: I introduced a new grid-scaling mode. Many blocks can now be rescaled to 0.125m, 0.25m, 0.5m, 1m, up to 32m by x2 increments with a toggle key. Hull, weapons, systems, mechanism and many more that came in 1m and 0.25m versions one are now merged into the same block. For convenience each grid-scale will snap to its own grid like the 1m and 0.25m used.
Of course you can use blocks of different scales in the same build, and on top of that you can still drag to stretch the block to non-uniform scale like before.
=> those two features mean one thing: mega builds are gonna be possible! This allow us to spawn larger NPC stations, and even use the brick tech to redo the space habitat.
Custom color: This change makes the technical integration a lot simpler, so custom colors are making a comeback! There is no limit on how many custom colors a ship can have.
Material and Armor type: This update will also introduce various materials. You can replace a hull with another material like with paint. Each material will have various armor / weight properties.
Better light: The light tech has to be also reworked, the new tech will be much lighter in memory requirement and allow for dynamic light control and true specular lighting.
Massive reduction in code simplicity: While it took (more) time to complete, these changes are massively reducing the code complexity, which will allow more features in the future.
New border look: While they added a bit of pop on the hull block they were a bit unpopular for smaller bricks. Now they are removed as it was a feature using the voxel layer.
New Armor and damage system. As it was also using voxel it had to be reworked, the new system working by bricks. It will actually be simpler for newcomers as there is no longer any difference between hull block / smaller bricks, everything is a hull block now!
Voxel Paints are gone: Last to the chapter of things that had to go: voxel paint. I liked them, a lot of builders didnt (those who like to build big). Now you will have to use decals for finer details.
That's it! We are still working on bug fixes, migration issues and a few more finishing touches. This update will be released in Experimental first, I will have a few back and forth with the community to get a hold on the new dynamic grid beast.
I cant wait to see what you can do with the new tech!
Francois