CAT Interstellar News

This is a smaller update dealing with the transition from the Mine to the Cave along with some generic bugs like the text box audio not being attenuated. If you’ve already played through the current build, there isn’t much new so I wouldn’t recommend playing through again until the next update.

I’m going to hold off on pushing the rest of the cave system until the next update. It’s really important to me and I want to have it at least to the same detail as the base and surface. Android 42s navigation is working really good. There’s a slight jolt when he switches from walk to run but otherwise coming along nicely. Lastly, we should have a linux version with the next patch (shaders are fixed!!!).


Got rid of the red barrier before the elevator on the surface and replaced it with locked doors (it isn’t as cheesy).

Similarly, the door to the elevator in the base is now locked until you go to the lab to get briefed on the mission. This should help with the story a little bit.

The Mine level now requires you to activate 4 generators before the collapse. The start of the cave system now has sections of the SkyLift hanging down.


If you should have received a key for any of the contests just email me at [email protected]

I tried to friend people and hand out keys that way but sometimes I couldn’t get a response.

I also want to thank everyone for hanging around this long and helping to troubleshoot the game. When I push the level “Signals” things are going to get a little darker. This isn’t a horror game but, they are trying to fundamentally alter a planet and there’s no such thing as a free lunch…

This isn't a huge update but I want to get back in the routine of pushing what we have roughly every other week. There's a lot of little things like grammatical errors and objects in weird places that we fixed but most of the dev time was spent on events, VR, and Android 42's movement.


The Surface level now requires you to complete the SkyLift mission before continuing into the mine. In most playthroughs on youtube (because I literally watch them all) players go straight to the mine. We generally try not to force players to do stuff but seeing the SkyLift on the surface is almost mandatory to connect the opening scene with the one in the mine.

We also improved the transition between the mine and cave. This still has a lot more work to be done but it's better. In the next update you'll meet Android 42 in the mine. His pathfinding is coming along really well.



I wanted to give you a quick update on how this is going. The DLC and branches (everything on the Steam side) is working good. The one problem we're dealing with is the auto resolution opening in full screen mode. Instead of wasting more time tracking this down I'm going to rip the whole thing out for the VR version and hardcode the resolutions in. We obviously won't be participating in the Steam VR sale until this is up and running.


Last update we had a challenge to guess the genetic makeup of our dog Ziggy.



Here's the answer:



Thanks to everyone who played.

For this update I've got another one - Some of you might not know this but there is a cat in this game. Not a "CAT" but a real feline animal that lives in the base. If you can find her post a picture to the in the community screenshots (F12 while in-game) and I'll give you another key. Just comment here when you think you found her.

Hint: "She mainly stick to the air ducts where the O2 concentration is higher".

Thank you for sticking with us while we fixed a few things. Here are the update Notes:

Levels
The Base and Mine environments have been expanded into their own levels. The environments are one of the stronger aspects of CAT Interstellar and the Base and Mine just weren’t up to snuff. We also hated the idea of confining the player to long corridors of dialog. Now the game if much more open and you can explore the world as you please. There are no mandatory quests and only about 30 seconds of mandatory dialog at the very beginning. After that you’re free to play the game and dig into the backstory as much as you like.

HUD
IT WORKS!!! If you’ve been following this game since the start you know this is something we’ve wanted from the beginning and we have finally got it working (Dead Space clone here we come). You now have a 3D HUD for the temp, speed, and boosts left. The importance of the temp gauge will be explained later in the story.

Atmosphere
We added close to a 100 times more dynamic lights and objects. This is something we wanted from the beginning and were finally able to do by breaking the levels up. We also changed the “grab” function to grab vertices and free the rotation. This makes interaction a little more fluid.





Supports custom resolution.
Key rebinding!!!
AutoDetect resolution on start up.
Improved interface and responses.
Added a Dev Tab.

Decreased from ~7.5Gb to ~4.3Gb
We made massive optimizations to the game in terms of file size. This was mainly due to reusing detail normal maps. Every model in the game has a normal map and most items had a detail normal map. Now we’re using the same detail normal for almost everything. We also atlased the textures we use most often. This won’t just effect download size but also decrease the number of draw calls and load times for levels. This should give an across the board boost to frame rates.

Animations
The Androids now actually look like they’re talking. They also walk around the environments with various dialogs. This isn’t Elder Scrolls: Oblivion but it should be a little more immersive. The environments have also been flushed out with a lot more Androids. The new dialog system lets us place and edit Androids a lot faster than before.

Dialog
The voice acting has been replaced by dialog boxes. This is a pretty big change to the original design and I really want to know what you think of it. There are a few reasons we switched to this:

Translations are now possible since we’re dealing with text files.

This works effectively as subtitles for VR - The default UE4 subtitles system does not (and probably will never) support VR.

Since the beginning we always had a little heart burn about the androids "talking" to DOG. We originally just hand-waved this and said DOG's pitch modulator wasn't working so they had to use audio channels. Not that the androids would be incapable of speaking English but they would most likely communicate over radio waves. This dialog system sort of emulates that. Give it a run through and let me know what you think.





The original idea was to allow the player to swap between 2D and VR seamlessly in the game. What we didn’t expect was how poorly this would work with SteamVR. The solution for this is to separate the conventional build and the VR build using DLC. I know we said we wouldn’t have DLC but this is a little bit of a different situation and it will obviously be free. This should be coming this weekend or early next week.


Added DOG’s sensor back into the game.
Added animations for jumping and landing.
Added 3D HUD.
Improved interaction logic.
Added toggle sprint.


The obvious elephant in the room is how long it took us to push an update. If you haven’t read our previous announcement about what went wrong, you can find it here. I understand that even with a single developer working on the game this is simply unacceptable. We’ve implemented source control and switched from Trello to a similar in-engine note system. These things wouldn’t have prevented the bug that shut us down but they will most certainly prevent delays in the future. With this new build I hope to be able to push updates as frequent as I have been on the beta branch (average 3.5 days since June 5th). The Dev tab will also make it easier to get more information about bugs in the future.


Lastly, and at the risk of ending up on Reddit as the most unprofessional indie dev ever, I thought we could play a game. We obviously make a lot of cat and dog references and I just got the DNA test back for our dog Ziggy. Here’s the pie chart of the breeds that came together to make him.



If you can correctly guess atleast 3 of the 6 I’ll give you a free copy of the game. Just post a comment of what 3 breeds you think he has and I’ll message you with a key if you’re right. Here is a few more pictures to help you out.

Hint: He doesn't have a drop of German Shepard.

At this point it doesn’t look like we are going to get the update out in May or the full release in June. Instead of a vague delay notice I wanted to try to explain where we are in development and what problems we are facing.

There were 3 major upgrades decided and 2 major problems because of them:

Upgrade DOG animations and provide an informational 3D HUD – Complete.
Break up the levels and stream them – Complete but caused April’s update to be delayed.
Upgrade Androids animations and AI – Complete but has a bug straight out of hell.


The original idea was for these monitors to carry a lot of the backstory:



The problem with this is a lot of the concepts just can’t be explained on a 2D flipboard monitor. One of the big ones was the purpose of the skylift. It isn’t just an elevator but a generator. When it is night (farthest side from the sun) the skylift payload has the gravity from both the planet and the sun so it “falls”. When you swing back around the gravity from the sun pulls the weight back out into space. They are essentially harvesting energy from the rotation of the planet. They then use the energy from this skylift (and 1000s of others on Mars) in an attempt to reignite the planets core. This is why they are having all the earth quakes. Explaining how the stutter assembler collapses wave functions on a quantum level is another big one.

Because of this we decided it would be best to revamp the environments as well as the android animations With more freedom to edit the environments we were able to make that information a lot more optional. You won’t be confined to long hallways of dialog anymore but instead you’ll have the option to go check out the communications room or Laboratory and see what the androids are working on.



The levels are now broken into much smaller chunks that are streamed as you play. This allows us to create much more complex scenes because it decreases the time it takes to build the lighting. To give you an idea the first level in the current build contains the base, surface, and mine. Building lighting for the map alone takes about 16 hours. Lighting has to build if any static mesh is moved or edited. The current version splits it into 3 levels with the base taking 6 minutes to build lighting, the surface taking 6 hours, and the mine taking 3 minutes. The load times to start the game are also drastically decreased.

Problem with Environments
The original idea was to release an update each month regardless of how much or little progress was made. Splitting the levels completely broke this because they all needed to be stitched back together.


To do this we added almost 100 additional animations to the androids and completely redesigned the animation blueprint used. This allows for much more diverse actions and movements that are a lot more fluid. Whether working at a station or pointing out an area of interest the Androids should be a lot more immersive.

Problem with animations
You’ll notice the android model is not that same. Mid-April we started consolidating these animations and producing a blueprint to handle all of them. Those assets were then migrated into the main project thus creating the saga of a very elusive bug.

We haven’t been able to nail down exactly what is causing it mainly because of the nature of these animations. They aren’t compiled so the debugger is useless. The “Android_C” (the character you know as Android) compiles without any errors, warnings, or indications. On top of that the errors don’t present themselves in the editor or in a stand-alone build of the game but only the published version. That’s why we didn’t catch it until recently.


Because of this we are going to push the release date into August. It is still possible we’ll be able to get this latest update out this month and I’ll update this post once we get the kinks worked out. I know that Steam Early Access games don’t have the best track record for completion. Because of that I wanted to try to explain exactly what the situation is both out of respect for your support but also because it’s very hard that we haven’t been able to share our progress with you. I believed in this project from day 1 and I still do. Rest assured that even if there are hiccups in development we are still 100% committed.

Lastly (and as always), we love to get your feedback in the comments regardless of whether it’s good or bad but if you want a response please start a thread in the forums. It gets very messy very quickly to try to respond inside the announcement.

Thank you again for the support and feedback,
ːionizedgamesː


The project has been successfully purged of all the contaminated assets. The Android has been completely rebuilt and is working perfectly. Next step is to carefully bring the animation assets back in and rebuild the animation blueprint.


Rebuilding materials for Android so his face flashes when he talks. We've tried to "tie" it to the amplitude of the audio file so it's timed up correctly with his speech. Unfortunately we've yet to find a way to reference .wav files for amplitude. More to come.

As always, I want to start by saying how awesome this community is. When I started developing CAT Interstellar I had no idea how many people would be interested in a Science Fiction story where the aliens aren't hulking monsters trying to kill you. I've been very lucky to have the opportunity to meet a lot of like minded people interested in some of the finer details about humanities ascent to the heavens.

On that note, if you're interested in space dust, rocket nozzles, or hydrazine check out the podcasts over at Magnificent Cosmonauts. They were kind enough to invite me over for an interview and it was a blast. Assuming I didn't blow it we should have another one around the release date that dives into the story.



Bad news is that there won't be an update this month. I'm getting married in 4 days and simply ran out of time. The nature of the next couple updates are essentially all or nothing.

The good news is that this is not a delay for the project as a whole and I'm still very confident in a June 1st release. I've been very protective of the story up to this point but since there's another update delay I at least wanted to give you a teaser of what you might find in the caves.