InfraSpace News

Hello everyone,

work on finishing the environment update is progressing. This week, I have 3 major pieces of news:

First, Ben finished implementing the save / load system for the new map in a way that is also compatible with the new laser that you can use to remove those objects. Next week we'll merge a bunch of this code together so it's all in the main code branch.

Sepehr has done the first steps for the cargo gondolas. If you don't know: Since we have volcanoes, highlands, and the dried river with sometimes inaccessible height differences, we need a way to get cargo from A to B. This is going to be accomplished by the new cargo gondola system where you place a 2 stations which then ship good over uneven terrain. We have finished part of the building logic. The remaining tasks for the gondolas are spawning the poles and wires between the stations (pics next week) and hooking it up to the traffic system.

Finally, there are some nice little art updates. Lasse has been using this time to create a burning effect for the plants that are destroyed by the laser, replacing explosions. And further he's created some more habitat variations to improve the look of the city. Pics below:





Happy playing and thanks for your patience for the update! I'm keeping up the news posts to keep you informed on the progress :)

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!