InfraSpace News

Hello everyone,

I hope you had some happy holidays around halloween. This week it's going to be another quick update because most team members had 2 holidays and also one of our programmers got sick unfortunately.

What we did manage to do in the remaining time:

• Andreas did a bunch of playtesting with the new terrain and found some bugs that are now on our list
  
• After Ben has finished making the new maps playable, he's now working on making save/load work
  
• We redesigned the save implementation for rocks and environment object to integrate the new terrain generation with the new laser feature
  
• We have gone over the laser code and found some improvements we'd like to do before we release it in the update. Shouldn't take long.
  
• While the programmers are working on the update itself, our artist Lasse has taken to improving the game look in general. He has started with more building variations for the habitats, so residential districts don't look as repetitive. Work in progress screenshot below
  

I'm hoping we can do more substantial progress for the update in the next week without holidays, but stuff like the save/load system just takes time even and there are no cool screenshots to show, that's just how it is :)

Happy playing!

Hello everyone,

last week we asked you if we should split the environment update so we can get new bigger map with biomes out the door and released early. The overwhelming majority was for splitting the update, so we're focusing on finishing the new map features.



The most important piece of work was making the game actually playble in the new map. For now, we have been doing a lot of world generation work, but to make the game playable, we needed to look at lot of integration work: The new terrain shader needed to work with the decals and the visualizations, we needed to adapt the road + car rendering system, the game scene load order had to change a little, the space scene needed to be fixed, and so on. Basically many of the small features that use the map in some way needed to be made to work.

Our programmer Sepehr on the other hand was caught up in handling visa documents, but saving/loading is probably almost done for the laser feature.



Finally we ran into some grass rendering issues: It was difficult to achieve the density we wanted without making the grass huge in comparison to the buildings.

We tried a couple of differnet approaches, like making grass with horizontal planes:



This approach yielded very dense grass and was good for performance, but didn't look as good. Since players can control grass performance anyway, we opted for a different technique, seen here:





(The difference to grass screenshots in previous posts: The previous ones were art tests, here we make sure they also work with many of the technical requirements.)

Happy playing

Hello everyone,

the environment update is taking quite some time, so I thought I'd provide you with a detailed roadmap of where we are at:



Also, it's quite a big update already, so I was thinking we could push the actual terraforming into the next update and focus this update on the new terrain with the 4x bigger map and new biomes first. (Also mod support, cargo gondolas, laser). Let us know what you think about that!





The river is now generated with proper walls.



The crater generation is done, only the grass is missing in this screenshot.



The desert already has some grass here and there next to its rocks and resources.



Previously I only showed you the art concepts for the big laser from space, now the implementation is done and you can see it working in action!



That's it for this week. I'll update the todo-list progress next Friday and thanks for the patience!
Happy playing!

Hello everyone,

this weekly update is going to be quick, since we're almost completely focused on finishing the core features for the next update and are not creating art concepts for new stuff. The details:

• Our artists Andreas and Lasse are working with the new procedural generation tools to make the generated world look like their art concept
  
• Our programmer Ben figured out the issue with terrain painting and has also finished the grass system for pre-made terrain building blocks (there is some other grass in the crater and highland biomes that is generated instead of artist-placed, but that's easier)
  
• Our programmer Sepehr has taken over the laser task. Marking rocks and destroying them already works, but need to hook up the visuals.
  

While the core team is finishing the main update features, our concept artist Adriana has time to work on additional materials to be used in the game and in marketing. Without giving away too much information check out this piece:



I realize you're all waiting for the big update to drop and wanted to thank you for the patience. Happy playing!

Hello everyone,

let's start with the cool pictures this week: Check out the new laser that's coming from your spaceship to help you clear map space!





You will be able to unlock the laser cannon by repairing it on the spaceship Antares:



Now that the Founders' Fortune update is completely out and most bugs are fixed, our programmer Sepehr is taking over and is making all of the art for the map clearing laser actually work in game.



There are 2 main news on world generation:

We were not satisfied with the terrain painting method, so Andreas and Ben are working together to improve it. It's a small hiccup, but I think it's good to spend some time now because getting the terrain colors right first is important because it influences the look of all the other assets later down the line.
Terrain painting in the procedural version works slightly different than in the art concept, that's why we have a programmer working on it.

The second news is that we have done quite some work on grass engineering. Sounds simple but we need to make sure performance is fine outside of an art concept and we need to make it part of the procedural generation. With other assets, we simply put them into a prefab and use the prefab building blocks to construct a full world out of it, but foliage works a little different, because it's part of the terrain system.

Finally our concept artist Adriana is working on some special extras, but those are not part of the terraforming update and will stay secret for now :)

Happy playing!