Dawn Apart News

[h3]Hey Prospectors,[/h3][p]Today we want to share a broad update on what to expect in the months leading up to Dawn Apart’s 1.0 release.[/p][p]Since launching into Early Access three months ago, we’ve been focused on delivering a stability update, a major Quality of Life patch, and showcasing Dawn Apart at Gamescom and Tokyo Game Show. That left little time for content updates - until now.[/p][p]
The first of a total of four planned major updates will arrive before the end of the year and will focus on a complete overhaul of the trade system. We noticed that trade missions could feel a bit too linear, with players repeating the same resource deals. To shake things up, we’re introducing randomized trades that adapt to your stockpile inventory. These will offer lucrative deals for excess materials or items you don’t currently need.[/p][p]Here’s a simple example: too many conveyor belts in storage? Trade them for three industrial drills! The goal is to make interstellar mining more dynamic, giving you unique choices in every playthrough.[/p][p][/p][p]This update will also include:[/p]

• [p]A much-requested Recycler that returns a percentage of resources when dismantling machines[/p]
• [p]An enhanced audio soundscape for a crisper atmosphere[/p]
• [p]And a, let’s say, explosive new feature that will make terraforming much faster:)[/p]

[p]We’ll share a detailed breakdown when the update launches in the coming weeks.[/p][p]As for what’s ahead, while we have an internal roadmap, we’ve decided not to announce specific dates. Future updates will expand colony life, food and power production, add extensive customization for buildings and workers, and a finished combat system with improved enemy waves.[/p][p]Since development timelines can shift and playtests often reveal surprises, we’ll announce each major update once it’s ready. In the meantime, you can join the legion of playtesters in our Discord community to try new features early, share feedback, and even join our weekly dev meetings.[/p][p]See you soon on Sirius B-3,
The IT&W Team[/p][p]
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[h3]Hey Prospectors,[/h3][p]We're thrilled that Dawn Apart has joined the Ada Lovelace Day Sale on Steam![/p][p][/p][p]Hosted by our friends from Luden.io and named in honor of Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), an English mathematician and writer widely regarded as the world’s first computer programmer, the sales page features games that are all about deep systems, coding, and automation. [/p][p]Make sure to check out a ton of awesome discounts and demos of titles that are in the same genre bucket as Dawn Apart. And if you haven't tried the Early Access version of Dawn Apart now's a great time because we just added big Performance and Quality of Life Updates to the game which make managing and optimizing your interstellar mining operation much smoother!

Happy Ada L Day everyone![/p]

[h3]こんにちは Prospectors,[/h3][p]
Fresh off our massive Quality of Life Update, half of our team traveled to Japan to showcase Dawn Apart at Tokyo Game Show! If you happen to attend the expo, you can find our booth in the Indie Game Area in Sector E in Hall 11 (Booth 11-E85). Feel free to stop by, say hi and play the latest build![/p][p][/p][p]And to celebrate our trip to the home of ramen, dango, and okonomiyaki we slapped a 15% discount on Dawn Apart for the duration of the show (ends September 28). We're also part of the adjacent digital Steam sale, so please make sure to check out other great titles, discounts and demos featured in TGS!
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See you soon!

The IT&W Team[/p]

[h3]Hey Prospectors,
[/h3][p]We're back with a big Quality of Life Update! That's right, between Gamescom and Tokyo Game Show (if you happen to be around, please stop by booth 11-E85 in the Indie Area and say hi!) we managed to squeeze in a nice UI overhaul to make the harsh colony life on Sirius B 3 a little more comfortable.
[/p][p]The biggest addition in this update is the new Prospector modal. It now displays the upper bodies of all your colonists at the top of the screen at all times. This not only gets you up close and personal with your workers but also gives you a better overview of who is doing what and where they are located on the map. At least until they have a workplace incident or fall victim to an It'ak raid—then they'll be marked as deceased and eventually removed.

We also added a ton of small but significant improvements to other parts of the UI. Just to name a few: Detail views now open at the bottom center of the screen instead of in the right corner. The stockpile modal avatar now actually shows what is stored inside and features a context menu for stockpile instructions. Windows are now draggable, all buttons are bigger, and tooltips overall are smarter.

If you want to take a deep dive into all changes, let our developer Francisco give you the tour:[/p][p][dynamiclink][/dynamiclink]Last but not least, we have good news for players in Japan. Just in time for Tokyo Game Show, along with English, German, Korean, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish and French, Dawn Apart is now fully localized into Japanese![/p][p]Here is the full list of patch notes—thank you to our community testers on Discord for giving it a spin and sharing your valuable feedback![/p][p][/p][h3]Changes: [/h3]

• [p]Added Japanese localized strings to the game[/p]
• [p]Added Japanese to available languages[/p]
• [p]Updated various missing strings in non-english languages[/p]
• [p]Added prospector faces to the game hud along with their name and current action[/p]
• [p]Faces can be clicked to select a prospector[/p]
• [p]Moved detail views to the center of screen[/p]
• [p]Added logic to hide bottom controls when a detail view is open[/p]
• [p]Updated Close button icon in detail views[/p]
• [p]Fixed controls in StockpileDetailView not following scroll[/p]
• [p]Added logic to select blueprints for placement directly from a stockpile item[/p]
• [p]Added stockpile detail view building avatar[/p]
• [p]Added logic to drag the stockpile detail view[/p]
• [p]Added various options to the stockpile item context menu (Empty, Reserver, Reserve All, Reset)[/p]
• [p]Added Reset All button to stockpile detail view[/p]
• [p]Fixed modal maximize/minimize not working when paused[/p]
• [p]Adjusted Building Avatar position[/p]
• [p]Added tooltip description text wrap[/p]
• [p]Increased Schedule modal max window height[/p]
• [p]Increased size of item icons in blueprint menu and item selection UIs[/p]
• [p]Tweaked Spaceport detail view size and layout[/p]
• [p]Fixed the dimensions of buttons not being uniform across detail views[/p]
• [p]Added pioneer inventory background icons[/p]
• [p]Updated programmable feeder to allow any item[/p]
• [p]Fixed debris being seen as attackable[/p]

[p]- The IT&W Team[/p]

[h2]Hey Prospectors,[/h2][p]While one half of our team was in Cologne for Gamescom showcasing Dawn Apart to potentially over 300,000 gamers from 128 countries (huge thanks to everyone who visited our booth!), our core devs were back at work focusing on performance and stability.[/p][p][/p][p]We’ve heard your feedback on Discord and the Steam forum: expanding your factory, especially in the late game or on older machines, could get pretty laggy. So we made performance our top priority, working hard to boost frame rates and squash as many crash issues as possible.[/p][p]Our original plan was to focus on quality-of-life improvements (like refining the UX) and adding new content, especially around combat and factory defense. But your input convinced us that Dawn Apart first needed a serious performance upgrade.[/p][p][/p][p]We’ll continue working on optimizations over the course of development, but for now here’s how we achieved noticeably faster FPS and improved stability:[/p][p]Optimizing just about always starts in the profiler which gives us a view into what is taking the most time during the frames. Wherever we see systems taking suspicious amounts of time we target them for a deep dive. Usually there are easy ways to boost performance, but sometimes it requires larger refactoring to use different algorithms and structures. Since our project uses Unity DOTS one of the easiest ways we can boost performance, essentially for free, is to Burst Compile our game logic. The trade off is our data needs to be in a very specific format with no managed memory to be able to be Bursted which usually means wacky workarounds with lots of “boilerplate” code. We went through and updated just about every system we have to use Bursted Jobs and updated their update ordering to avoid sync points which force all Jobs running on Worker Threads to complete their work before doing anything else.[/p][p]We also updated various UI Controllers which were doing slightly inefficient stuff which normally isn’t a big deal, but once the game simulation starts to get fairly complex any performance we can squeeze out makes a big difference. We have plans for another large optimization pass for the physics aspects of the game which is currently the next biggest item in the profiler.[/p][p]On average we managed to shave off 10ms per frame in the mid to late game. That means if the game ran for you at a measly 40 FPS it would now run with more than 60 FPS![/p][p][/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p][/p][p]As this lays a foundation, we can turn our attention back to gameplay improvements and new content. However, we will revisit performance as a topic from time to time. Expect a more detailed Early Access roadmap in the coming weeks.[/p][p]In the meantime, check out the updated build - and if you haven’t yet, please consider leaving us an honest review on Steam.[/p][p][/p][h3]Changes: [/h3]

• [p]Added basic delete functionality to the save/load menu[/p]
• [p]Fixed agents trying to craft something they cant craft after finishing or dequeuing an item[/p]
• [p]Updated sensor logic to make agents respond quicker to workstation queue updates[/p]
• [p]Fixed agents not properly clearing their craft interactions[/p]
• [p]Fixed empty stock interaction not properly being deregistered from stockpile groups[/p]
• [p]Fixed crash if an invalid smart object is used during EmptyStockAction[/p]
• [p]Added logic to disable view modes when pressing their respective button if they are the currently selected mode[/p]
• [p]Added various new translations to the settings menu[/p]
• [p]Fixed alphabet signs being almost completely dark[/p]
• [p]Fixed base-concrete-ramps broken TargetVoxelObject and add some safety checks[/p]
• [p]Fixed connection buffer lookup being marked as readonly in the PlaceBlueprintSystem[/p]
• [p]Fixed small english quest text capitalization issues[/p]
• [p]Fixed agents taking items from feeders[/p]
• [p]Updated jungle tiles to be lighter[/p]
• [p]Updated all ItemConversionSystem to be bursted[/p]
• [p]Added new recipe and converter data tables for un-managed data access[/p]
• [p]Updated various prototypes to use burst friendly types[/p]
• [p]Updated WorkstationRecipeSatisfactionSensorJob to be bursted[/p]
• [p]Updated feeder want item update system to use non-managed data objects to allow the job to be bursted[/p]
• [p]Moved around RequestSystemGroup and FixedBlueprintSystemGroup to avoid premature physics job completions[/p]
• [p]Updated various controllers to use a cached main cam transform[/p]
• [p]Disabled TVE as it's not being used[/p]
• [p]Updated PathValidationSystem to be a bursted parallel job[/p]
• [p]Disabled colliders on building supports[/p]
• [p]Added ItemFacade component to avoid performing certain tasks on visual only items (EX: stockpile stack items)[/p]
• [p]Fixed tooltip manager causing an error on exit[/p]
• [p]Fixed moonlight tower spotlight updating shadow map every frame[/p]
• [p]Updated various goap actions to use RecipeDataTable directly instead of prototypes[/p]
• [p]Updated ConverterFeedingSensorJob to be bursted[/p]
• [p]Updated various system update ordering to group sync points better[/p]
• [p]Slightly optimized transformation of an aabb if it has an identity rotation[/p]
• [p]Slightly optimized the updating of the global stockpile[/p]
• [p]Fixed tooltip still running position update logic in certain cases when it was hidden[/p]
• [p]Fixed object speech bubbles needing to force rebuild layout on update[/p]
• [p]Disabled autoscroll text in extended buttons by default[/p]
• [p]Added GetItem interaction to chopped wood and mined resources
  [/p]

[h3]See you soon on Sirius B 3,[/h3][p]The IT&W Team[/p][p]
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