Underspace News

Welcome to May! Sure it’s spring but that infernal goblin-man, Mr. Worldwide Pandemic, has crept its ugly fingers into our lives. Juggling development of a game and its assets alongside the constant looming threat of viral death tends to slow things down. Rest assured, we’re safe and sound and have plenty of toilet paper and… I don’t know, facial cream? Are people buying a bunch of facial cream? It feels like they would. Well whatever they’re running out of we have plenty of, don’t worry.
The main point I’m trying to make is that things have slowed up a bit as we all struggle to adjust to this new normal. Not as much progress on… anything really, has been made as I’d like it to have been made.
The current goal right now is of course, demo 1.7, which involves the first initial bits of character modeling and the campaign. The initial and essential resources for that have just arrived, but it’ll be some time before they’re set up and ready. I’d like to give a tentative release date of “Summer” for 1.7, but given how this year is going I’d fully expect a meteor to strike Earth before that time.
Onto less morbid topics, let’s see what’s been done this month. As always, this is a paraphrasing of the full devlog, which you can read here.



Last month I talked about adding racial elements for the Ballden and Macrovari. This month the final main race, the Ijuni, get their own racialized treatment, in the form of massive space cliffs, glowing cacti, and of course the ever-popular space windmills.


And of course a detailing pass means going back over existing skyboxes and redoing those to an appropriate state, to be more readable or match the lighting or theme of that system.


And finally, lots and lots of vignettes. Want battles frozen in time? We got em. Want four-dimensional spacemines? We got em. Want space cathedrals. Well dude, guess what?



Players who have played a playthrough of demo 1.6 will notice that our options and save menu was lacking the same flair as the rest of the UI. We’ve fixed that, and added some new functionality to menus, like more detailed save information and the ability to sort by date or name. We’ve also added some missing keybinds, and split it up by category.

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In terms of unrelated UI stuff, we redid the server browser’s UI and added better support for non-widescreen and ultra-wide resolutions, you won’t experience the server browser in the demo at any point (the demo will never have multiplayer), but our multi-monitor users will definitely appreciate bigger monitor support.


Lots of little bits of progress done over the month as well! Some of these were requested features, like a navmap search function, others were things that annoyed me that I wanted to change.
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For example, I’ve redone a bit of the UI for ship-trades to make it clear if you’re going to lose money or not, while also fixing station prices and some bugs with trading.


I’ve been doing a lot of salvaging lately, which made me realize that bullets should curve towards wrecks (similar to how they’re handled for mineable asteroids), and that cargo boxes should have indicators on them, similar to ships.
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Leading pips now show up on ANY hostile ship, not just ships you’re in a committed relationship with!


Speaking of relationships, if you form up with convoys now, you’ll be able to dock with the lanes and gates they dock with. Spiffy.
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And of course, a programmer’s work is never done. We’ve fixed plenty of dialogue bugs, issues where freighters couldn’t be customized, some asteroid issues, and much much more.


And finally, lot and lots of assets. We got capital ships, we got wrecked ships, we got rusty wrecked capitalships from the days of old, and we got fixed textures on our stations! We also have the first bits of animation for our character models, take a look!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
That’s all for this month, ideally next month we’ll have some more content and the first bits of the campaign to show off!

Ahhh April. Spring is here, the perfect time to go outside and enjoy nature and maintain your social obligations. Of course you’re responsible and don’t do that because that would be really really really REALLY stupid when there’s that whole pandemic thing going on. Me on the other hand? Well I never leave my house in the first place so it’s not like anything has changed. I’d say it’s the perfect time to bunker down and make tons of progress, but tons of progress is always getting made.

So let’s take a look at all of that, shall we?

As always this is just a paraphrasing of the Kickstarter update, which you can read here.


Probably the majority of this month was spent on content! A game can have a good base sure, but what’s the point if there’s nothing in that game to do? This month most of my efforts were focused on adding in content to the game, be it in the form of racial elements or new vignette stuff.

Two of the remaining three main races had their racial details put in. These mostly serve as set dressing, to make each region feel more unique (beyond just colors and factions).

The Macrovari have great powerline systems that pump ambient energy throughout their territories and help power their many, many work projects.


While the Ballden construct giant aqueducts and archways, which have both religious significance to them, but also let them show off their megaconstruction skills.


Lots of other content was also added, from vastly improved space forests, mobile blackholes, strange ruins made of scrap, planets caught in time loops, giant ice crystals, as well as color and texture passes on skyboxes and nebula.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]



With lots of people playing the demo, ourselves included, we’ve had a lot of feedback on lots of things that needed fixing or changing. While the obvious bugfixes and such are there, I’ve also been adding a lot of little quality of life features to make things easier or clearer or generally have life be less of a hassle for folks.

Probably the biggest and the one I’m most proud of is ship optimizations. You may have noticed that NPCs caused a massive slowdown when spawned, due to how Unity handles physics. We’ve corrected that and some areas have seen a 30 FPS gain, especially in heavy traffic areas.



And of course lots of other quality of life stuff. Nebula clearings have shell models, the UI will show available services on stations, the garage UI has been redone, you can cancel active missions and see active factions during those missions, there’s a transfer-all button when trading in your ship, and the navmap now has a toggelable grid.

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And finally as always, we’ve lots and lots of assets in the pipeline, from character models to capital ships to weapons.


And that’s all for this month. There’s quite a lot more new things upcoming in the next month, so keep an eye out then. We’ll hopefully have some news about demo 1.7 by that point too!

March! The best month, as it was the month that I decided to grace the world with my existence, moreover it’s also the month where Father Winter’s cold probing digitalia finally recede back into his gaping frosthole, and springs spews forth a helping of bugs and allergies. Of course, I’m not being besieged by boxelder bugs or drowning in my own snot, because I have an air purifier and an automated low-power laser defense system in my house, so hey perfect time to sit down and do things with stuff, and that stuff is progress!
As always this is just a paraphrasing of the Kickstarter, you can read the full devlog here.

First, our nice and biggest announcement: Demo 1.6 is now available for everyone everywhere forever!


It’s been a few months since the last demo, so obviously a massive amount of work has gone into this and that massive amount of work will bring in a lot of changes. Everyone should see clear graphical and performance improvements across the board to just about every part of the game and a fair amount of polish and bugfixing. Even if you’re on a higher-end computer, your basic day-to-day spacey stuff should all run soooooo much smoother and look soooooo much better.

Now, this past month was mostly spent working on the demo for MDev 2020. We had a great turnout, and a lot of positive feedback, but because that demo took most of my time, this month’s log is going to be a bit shorter than usual. With that in mind, let’s go see what else is new in the galaxy!

[h2]Multiplayer[/h2]
Our multiplayer rework is going as smooth as butter (but not the spray-on kind that you shouldn’t cook grilled cheese with. It makes it taste like a happy meal toy). Players can fly around, shoot each other, login and create accounts and connect to servers, and the whole system works a heck of a lot smoother than it used to. We’ll be focusing mainly on getting the player experience smooth before starting on anything involving NPCs and that level of world-state synchronization though.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h2]Polishing[/h2]
The MDev demo and a few subsequent five hour playthroughs revealed to me a heck of a lot of little quality of life issues and bugs that needed addressing, and around over 50 of those issues have been thoroughly knocked out. Camera rolling is better, indicators better, NPCs taunt properly, and much much more.
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[h2]Detailing[/h2]
Outside of things like quests and vignettes, a big portion of the game’s content comes from just detail work. Fishing ships, lighthouses where they need to be, and what we call “racial elements”, specific regional statics like windmills, power lines, space lampposts, and more. And of course, billboards!
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Only one region has been really completed with this so far, but more are soon to follow!


[h2]Asset Work[/h2]
This past month also saw plenty of new freighter models, all of which are in-game and flyable now, plus new models for dropped loot and equipment, some billion-year-old whaling ships, and and the last few guns and hardware getting proper, textured models.



That’s all for this month’s devlog (like I said it was kind of a short one) tune in next time for all the fun things we’ve got coming down the pipeline.

Mother Nature’s icy cold grip has relaxed upon this Midwestern world ever so-slightly. Which means it’s snowing constantly but at least it’s 20 out instead of -4 farenheit. But ah, what is weather to a man with cheap central heating? Basically nothing. Which means there’s plenty of time to bunker down and get some work done.
But first, some announcements!
If you’re near, in, or want to be near or in the Madison, Wisconsin area, we’ll be exhibiting at this year’s M+Dev Conference! Some of our team will be there, along with a playable arena demo, plus all the other nice stuff you find at conferences, like people giving talks on things!



It’s coming up on Valentine’s Day, but tickets are still on sale, so if you’re interested, check it out!
Of course, a big event means a new demo. Demo 1.6, bringing all kinds of new features, optimizations, new grafics, and all the typically massive amounts of stuff you’ve come to expect from our major demo releases. It won’t be exactly at the same time as M+Dev, as their demos are different beasts, but close to it!
Onto progress! As always, you can read the full article on Kickstarter here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pastaspace/underspace/posts/2749635


Much of the time last month was spent overhauling the rest of the UI (those bits that aren’t the HUD) to make it prettier and in line with the rest of it graphically. We also went through and fixed a great deal of bugs, polished icons, and much much more.


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First person interactions while on stations have much more too! The player can frob objects such as switches, buttons, levers, read books, hack into emails and command terminals, and use keypads. All of this is used to give the world more flavor, as well as puzzles and special interactions during quests.


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At some point we realized that we could either spend a bunch of time trying to make our old, extremely, hyper-suck multiplayer netcode work, or we could take the same amount of time to redo it from the ground up and do it right. Luckily, a fair bit of our old code logic is still usable, and already a good bit of progress is being made.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We’ve also redone the internal code that handles input, mostly to support mouse, keyboard, joystick, and controller mappings and such. We’ll be doing a controller survey closer to release to get a better idea of the average user’s preferred flightstick in that sense.


Jumpholes! Wormholes! Rifts! Singularities! Long before the Union built their great steel gates between the stars, these swirling vortices of potential and nightmare were often the only way to cross great distances. Now, every system that has jumpgates has (with some exception) hidden, far less legal jumpholes that anyone is free to use.


But be wary, jumpholes are unstable, and can fail. And you don’t want that to happen.

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And we’ve got plenty of new assets to show off, from character models, freighter models, ruins, to bosses and shipping container mimics!

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That’s all for this month, the next time we check in, demo 1.6 will ideally be out!

January! January! The year of new beginnings, of missed resolutions and miserable cold without any of the holidays to redeem it. With the previous year in our rear view mirror and the military having safely wrangled Santa Claus back into his prison with only minimum civilian casualties, let’s take a look at the things worked on in the last month.


If you missed it patch 1.52 is out for Underspace’s official demo. This is mostly a bugfixing pass (with special thanks to our fans for catching a lot of these), so if you had any issues with saving or buying ships in 1.5, check this one out. At the same time we are working to get patch 1.6 out fairly soon.

As always, you can read the full devlog on Kickstarter here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pastaspace/underspace/posts/2726199



You may recall in many of these devlogs that we’ve teased redone models for all stations. With a new year ahead of us, I’m happy to say that all the station models have not only been redone, but every station has those redone models now fully implemented.


More than that, we’ve optimized, staggered, and redone rendering for stations, greatly increasing the framerate across pretty much any system. This, after asteroids, is the second biggest optimization pass, and even lower-end computers should benefit greatly from it.




The first parts of December were mostly focused on getting out demo 1.5, which meant finishing the tutorial, which meant creating the technology behind the tutorial. Some of this was simple stuff like advanced tooltips and better background controls, but perhaps the most relevant and interesting new feature is the self-contained level system. For the tutorial, this is used for its simulations, but it has a very wide range of applications such as challenges, missions, dream sequences, memories, and much much more.




Of course, the majority of the month was spent going through various mechanics, playing the game for hours on end, and quashing bugs and tweaking things that didn’t feel quite right. We also introduced new quality-of-life features and elements to help things along, such as more detailed messages, and a new “auto-follow” feature that will let your ship automatically follow waypoints and let you take a break for a while.
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And, as always, there’s a whole bunch of new assets being worked on.This includes the fabulously explosive leviathan, the Disium, parts for space dungeons (dungeons that are in space), and a whole host of capital ships.
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And that’s all for this month. We’ll be trying to get 1.6 to you soon enough, but if you have bugs to submit for demo 1.52, feel free to submit them!