From The Depths News

Hi everyone.
Nick here, the lead developer of From the Depths. I am writing this on the day of FTD’s exit from early access. This is a special moment for me (made only slightly less special by working 20-hour days and being slightly deranged with exhaustion).

FTD has been in development for 8 years. It started out as (to cut a long story short) a one man indie dev project but to call it that now is entirely inappropriate given the monumental amount of work put into the game by the team, community contributors and the community themselves.

I’d like to give special thanks to my team. Jeff Madole (Majyst) who has been looking after the game’s planet/faction content for years now, which is a monumental job made even harder by the frequent rebalancing of the game and introduction of numerous new mechanics.

Draba (János Blaskó) whose dedication to getting the game mechanics balanced and streamlined has been indefatigable even in the face of the frequent pushback that changes inevitably create. Without these two the game would be nowhere near as enjoyable and polished as it is today.

Many thanks also to Joris Wingelaar (HerpeDerpeDerp) who has spent the last year at the coal face of strategic AI (and many other things) and produced a campaign that is significantly more interesting to play.
Huge thanks to Arnaud Lewden (Gladyon) who has been coding on FTD for many years now and contributed an enormous amount to so many different areas.

Thanks to Haoyu Weng (WengH) for putting in the undo-redo mechanic for building, amongst many other epic things.

Further thanks to my business manager Sean Darling (Beastman) and community manager Jonathan Bacon (BaconsTV) who have allowed me to focus on what I love to do best, which is coding. You both work tirelessly to bring the community feedback to the team (whatever the timezone). It’s fantastic to know I can rely on you guys to keep things going smoothly.

Thanks to Peter ♥♥♥♥♥ (Khaz) for creating the visual aesthetic of the game and doing a bunch of coding as well. Peter worked for years alongside Jeff and me and together we brought the game a long way forward.

Thanks to Mattia Pizzaia (Mangmod) for all his work on the trailer, UI buttons, sounds, artwork and many other things.

Thanks to Rhea for your modelling contributions, and Joan Palacios (Strivvy) for yours, and thanks to the more recent members of the art team as well such as Mira Dzhantova for the new box art branding and trading cards and Claire Monoghan (Claire) for new block models and textures.

Thanks to Ben Reeve (BlueNexus) for his work getting the game localised ready for translation. This was a monumental job.

Thanks to Charlotte Nguyen (Hikari), Scarlet Devil and Karim Ben Ghorbal (Karbengo) for your significant contributions to the game’s content and community management.

Thanks to Mike Haynes (ABYAY) for coming to Scotland and working on the content, the tutorials, the build guides and much more.

Thanks to Lukaz Guzman for Rambot character art and loads of the original models and textures.

Thanks to the dozens of translators working on getting our translations of the game ready.

Thanks to Tor Johan (OwO) for testing.


Thanks to everyone I’ve forgotten (I’m sure I’ll remember once I get some sleep).

Thanks to our moderators, wiki editors, bug reporters, feature suggesters, donators and players. Special thanks to our dozens (hundreds?) of “Keepers of the Lore (KOTL)” for helping our content team create the blueprints of the factions Neter, AOTE and Glao. And thanks to all the youtubers and streamers who have adopted FTD and stuck with it. Without you the game would not have reached the audience it and development would have run out of funding a long time ago. Thanks to my wife, Laura, for putting up with this ♥♥♥♥.

So with the important part done I’d like to talk about what FTD means to me. It’s become my life now. When I started the project, I had hardly any coding experience, no 3D modelling or texturing experience, no unity experience, no UI experience (shocking, right?) and had never run a business. With the support of you all I’ve been able to make game development my life and am now recognised officially, in many player reviews as “one of the worst UI coders in the world". It has been a really great experience working with such talented people and making a product so many people are passionate about. I know FTD is very special to a lot of you as well and seeing you all enjoying it so much has been the driving force for me for this whole time.

So what does leaving early access mean for us. I know a lot of you are celebrating this achievement with us, but I know a lot of you are worried for one reason or another. Don’t be. Leaving early access just means that I think that we’ve got a sufficient breadth of features that are now in a stable state. This means I am proud to put it on general sale, rather than a limited sale to enthusiastic early accessors. This absolutely isn’t the end of development for us, it just means that our existing engines, weapons, armour, game modes, etc are now pretty much in place and won’t be changing every month.

So for people coming back to FTD to see what the release version looks like… here are some highlights for you… depending on how long you’ve been gone there will be too many to mention...
Universal Production Music UK have provided us with an epic sound track of 90 songs that you can listen to in game.
You can now add camouflage textures to your alloy, metal, heavy armour and wing materials
You can get back into the game more easily with voice acted build guides and interactive tutorials, and new manual pages
You’ll find a new and improved steam engine system to play with. That’s fresh out today….
The campaign’s 8 enemy nations have improved strategic AI making the campaign more interesting to play
The story mission arcs have been recreated and contain an interesting story for DWG, and some fun combat for Steel Striders
The multiplayer is now much more stable, and you can play adventure mode multiplayer now (as well as campaign co-op and many standalone multiplayer maps)
Achievements and leaderboards have been added
Visuals for jets, ion thrusters, torpedos and missiles have been refined.

To those of you coming to FTD for the first time, I really look forward to meeting you on the Steam discussion forums, the Reddit or the official FTD Discord.
I hope you all enjoy the release, and thanks again for all your support over the years.
Nick Smart,
Lead developer and Director
Brilliant Skies

And here's a wonderful video Jon put together for the release

https://youtu.be/QLfN7F91O6o

Join Ohm is Futile as he plays From the Depths!

You can find his main channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXjzJXurqJJWQB9fNll2W_w

The final version of steam engines is finally here! So let’s go over the changes!

The difference between main power sources

• Fuel engines: versatile and the components are very cheap. If they aren’t consistently used at their maximum output they will cool down, and their efficiency will be above what’s shown on the stat screens. Good for backups and craft with erratic power usage.
  
• Custom jet generators: efficient, but the components are very expensive to buy and have strict placement rules if you want to use their full potential. Very attractive if you already have a working jet engine, and just have to pay for the generator and some extra combusters/compressors. Cost-inefficient if they are consistently taking damage.
  
• Steam engines: very cheap components and they are much more compact than fuel engines with the same efficiency. No placement restrictions, but their efficiency drops sharply when they aren’t running at their maximum output. Good as the main power source of craft with consistent power usage.
  

Important QoL changes

• All components save the steam and kinetic energy they have when the craft is saved or pulled from play. On loading, everything is instantly restored to that point
  
• Boilers do not burn materials when they reached maximum pressure now, out of play resource usage is similar to the in-play one
  
• Crankshafts and multipurpose shafts are not separate anymore. If it’s a rod and it rotates it can connect to axis shift gears, propellers and drills.
  
• Reduction gears do not need to be and can’t be stacked anymore. They were renamed to transmissions, see their pros and cons below
  
• The changes above hopefully emphasize the different pros/cons of steam and take away the focus from some usability problems
  

Pressure differential, kinetic energy

• Pistons and turbines have a fixed maximum steam throughput. How much steam can actually pass through them depends on the difference between input and output pressure (output pressure for turbines is 0)
  
• Pistons convert 40% of the steam passing through them to kinetic energy on the crankshaft, pass the remainder to their output
  
• Small turbines get 2 turbine blades for each body, large ones 1 blade for each body. How much steam they convert to kinetic energy depends on the input pressure, divided by the blade count. Lower pressure drop/blade = higher efficiency
  
• Piston and turbine output scales with the kinetic energy of the crankshaft or the turbine’s rotating assembly
  

kinetics loss

• Crankshafts and turbines both slowly lose a portion of their kinetic energy over time. This loss is proportional to rotation speed (so more significant at lower outputs), could be thought of as a combination of friction/inefficiency from lubricants gunking up at lower temperatures
  
• Each gearbox, crank, piston, crank generator, flywheel and turbine blade increases maximum kinetic energy loss
  
• At maximum output, this loss is low enough for steam to handily beat fuel engines, but gets more significant when power needed drops. You can combat it by shutting off by cutting steam from the rotating components, but you’ll still lose their stored kinetic energy over time and have to respin them when they are needed
  

Reusing steam from pistons

• Single-stage pistons and turbines now have decent stats, very high power density but low efficiency (still much higher efficiency than before)
  
• Feeding the piston outputs into another set of pistons or turbines adds another processing step and increases efficiency. Also reduces the pressure difference in the pistons whose output is reused, so total volume-efficiency goes down
  
• When you resuse piston steam you also add parts increasing kinetic loss, so how many steps are worth it depends on you crank size, layout and use-case. More stages mean noticeably higher kinetic loss: total output ratios
  
• This means your choice is between a dense+inefficient engine, or efficient+high volume one. The dense engine also has lower total mass and a lower portion of its output is kinetic loss, so tolerates changing demand better.
  

Crank sizes

• Small crank lines are the most power-dense, all efficiency-improvements are dropped in favour of being compact so they also have the highest relative kinetic loss
  
• Medium cranks have similar raw output to small ones, but their relative kinetic loss is much lower.
  
• They are slightly less dense and more efficient and lose less at lower output. Also, have higher relative crank mass so their response times are slower
  
• Huge cranks are very efficient and have a low relative kinetic loss. Volume-efficiency is slightly lower but still very good to compensate for the awkward form-factor
  

Shape and volume considerations

• Each individual piston and crank adds the same base kinetic loss, so sharing cranks between multiple pistons means that loss is slightly lower relative to the total output. Can also make the crank lines harder to place, especially for large-huge pistons
  
• Turbines can be very conveniently fit anywhere, so their base stats are slightly lower than something like 12 huge pistons sharing 4 cranks
  

Propellers and transmissions

• Transmissions are single blocks that can take a fixed amount of kinetic energy/s from their input shaft and add it to their output. Their output shaft has a minor kinetic loss
  
• Transmission braking takes away kinetic energy at the same rate, wastes the kinetic energy taken from the output shaft
  
• Steam propeller thrust scales with their rotation speed
  
• Steam propellers can now be used directly on the crankshaft, reducing volume and removing the minor kinetic loss. Also means their rotation speed can’t be directly controlled
  
• Transmission’s max output: input shaft rotation speed ratio can be set on the transmission. Twice the output rotation speed for propellers means twice the thrust, but also 4 times the kinetic energy stored (responds slower and wastes more energy when braking)
  

The previous system had very narrow and specific rules, had to break some of the designs using engines made under those rules to open steam up and add some variety. We are sorry about that, but it had to be done to make the game better in the long run.

With the release and steam being done the big breaking changes and reworks are out of the way.



[h2]Addition[/h2]
[h3]BLOCKS[/h3]

• The material gatherer and oil drill get 5 seconds of effective 100% power after spawning to ensure they can jump-start a gathering unit with 0 materials. Just a quality of life thing, really.
  

[h3]CAMPAIGN[/h3]

• Vehicle engine statistics used for out of play simulation are no longer updated when the vehicle is damaged since the effect of damage is applied out of play are applied anyway. Engine stats will be recalculated when the vehicle is fully repaired (and back in play).
  

[h3]EFFECTS[/h3]

• You can now stop the jet engines and custom jet engines smoke from being emitted by setting the custom colour to (0 ; 0 ; 0) (before it made it invisible, now it’s not emitted anymore)
  

[h2]Change[/h2]
[h3]GAME[/h3]

• Splash screen pictures and icon updated with new art
  

[h2]Fix[/h2]
[h3]SOUNDS[/h3]

• Fixed the steam engine sound and the CJE sound which have been broken for a while
  

[h3]UI[/h3]

• Fixed some QoL issues with the selection/deselection of fleets and forces in the map
  

Join Borderwise as he plays From the Depths!

You can find his main channel here: https://www.youtube.com/user/BorderWise12

Join Ohm is Futile as he plays From the Depths!

You can find his main channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXjzJXurqJJWQB9fNll2W_w