Frontiers Reach News

This weeks update sees more artwork updates and several fixes for lighting and shadow issues. Of the artwork changes made the Heliosiren has finally been optimized to infinity and beyond giving us back some more FPS as we continue to reduce draw calls across the experience. We’ve also taken some time to get some new engine art into the game as a preview of the coming module system update. Still much to do before it is ready but this is a taste. This week also marks the first of the month so we’ve also updated the demo.


- Numerous additions and tweaks to Heliosiren artwork.

- Numerous changes to lighting on the Heliosiren.

- Tweaks to cockpit glass refraction to avoid refraction blow out in some instances.

- More performance oriented art changes to Heliosiren.

- Added camera cuts when in paint mode.

- Added thrust vectoring animations.

- Fixed blown out portrait on main menu.

- Fixed an issue with missile sounds continuing to play when they weren't

- Added the Action Camera as a selectable camera mode when pressing down on the left joystick or hitting F5

- Slight performance fixes on a few levels.

This weeks patch notes are small. Mostly because there was a lot of focus put towards getting some artwork squared away for a major back end update coming in the months ahead. The biggest portion of this update is part one of a major overhaul of the artwork for the Heliosiren and it’s interior. This overhaul will continue into next week and possibly into the following week as there are a lot of changes going on in the back end to accommodate a much more robust scenario management architecture and level design tools. These tools will be vital on the road ahead and must be thoroughly fleshed out before we can really start to scale up.

- Part one of the Heliosiren artwork overhaul.

- Fixed an issue that caused missiles to continue playing their sound effect for thrusters even after they had exploded.

- Various tweaks to shader parameters to effect over all rendering.

- There is now a pilot posed in the cockpit of each fighter. This pilot is not currently animated but it is planned that there will be an IK rig integrated with arms and legs responding to player input accordingly.

- Fixed bomb reticle.

- Added currently selected cannon name to label text.

- Added currently selected starfighter name to label text.

- Updated starfighter cannon names to include slightly more information.