Approaching Infinity News

[h2]The first big shipwreck update is here![/h2]

I'm really excited to show off all the changes made to the interiors of my favorite environment. I've spent 3 weeks laying the groundwork for a huge upgrade to all your shipwreck-exploring adventures, and it's finally ready for beta testing...

What you'll see now is that ships are divided into rooms, and the rooms have themes. The ships themselves are even designed around a "role", such as "survey vessel" or "ambush predator". I'm looking forward to hearing what you have to say about it.



What you'll find is almost 150 new pieces of "furniture" that can be activated or deactivated, destroyed by various methods, sometimes repaired, sometimes opened, or interacted with in other ways. This list of items and uses will continue to grow as this phase of development progresses.


This is the first step, but it's a big one. And now that the foundation is built, rapid development and weekly releases can resume! Here are some of the features you can expect to see in the near future:

• "Hull integrity", air pressure, repairing walls, and explosive decompression.
  
• Introduction of "gadgets" and using them to fix ship systems.
  
• Shipwreck scanning to reveal type of ship, number of decks, former inhabitants, cargo, etc.
  
• Picking up, using, and interacting with new items, repairing more systems.
  
• Shipwreck stories: find out what happened on this ship, in the crew's own words.
  
• 3 kinds of shipwreck salvage: destroy it for parts, repair it and sell it, repair it and USE IT!
  

Other Changes:

• I continue to eliminate ways of destroying transit tubes!
  
• Many other kinds of loot can now be destroyed (even lockers can be damaged).
  
• ...the usual little fixes and tweaks...
  
• Every type of away team weapon now has its own image and shot sound (thanks David!).
  

This update is in the "Beta" branch only, which is free and available to anyone. It also won't break your saves, so if you're interested, give it a try today!

I've been hard at work on the shipwreck overhaul for a long time now, and it's really coming together. But there's no public release yet, I haven't even streamed it.


The first place you can see it in action will be
[h2]The Space Game Junkie Podcast[/h2]
streaming to multiple platforms on Wednesday Nov. 10th at 10am PST / 1pm EST:

• Youtube
  
• Twitch
  
• Facebook
  
• Official Website
  

I've been talking for weeks about "rooms" and "furniture", so here's what it's looking like in my build:



All these changes really make shipwrecks feel more alive, more interesting and purposeful, and I'm excited to show it off. I believe this can make it into beta soon. For now, though, join us on the SGJ podcast!


A truly observant player might notice something in that image... "The most important device in the universe". It will be a key component in shipwreck repair...

This week is just a small update, with a few bugfixes and background preparations for upcoming changes.

Before I get into anything else, I'd like to mention that Approaching Infinity will be featured on the Space Game Junkie podcast November 10th, at 10am PST.

The improvements to crafting were a big hit, and players have asked for more! For example, when crafting ship weapons, do you want to focus on long range, high damage, fast rate of fire, or maybe even low supply usage? I think these are great possibilities and you can expect to see them in the future.


That's the major focus of development right now, and it's going well. I've written a lot about the process on Reddit (like this one, or the one from today), but in general, the idea is to divide shipwrecks up into rooms, and then fill those rooms with *stuff* according to what kind of room it is supposed to be. There's a level of design above that, which answers the question "what is the purpose of this ship, anyway?".

Here's an example of placing the "bridge" area, and the ship's "major systems" (things like propulsion, energy field control, life support, etc.)



And here are some randomly "furniture-ized" shipwrecks (this only uses a small portion of the available images and room types that will exist).




All these ship systems open up a lot of future possibilities... But none of this is actually playable right now. I hope to have a new version in the beta branch by next weekend.

• Fixed a bug where picking up and installing an away team weapon would clone one of your old weapons, and then really weird things would happen...
  
• Fixed a bug where uniform pickups would appear as a wall image!
  
• Fixed a display issue where items on top of undiscovered mines would give a hint of the mine's existence.
  
• Fixed an annoyance where the grenade target would always default to the mouse's position, even if you weren't using the mouse.
  
• I may have fixed an issue where, in a 2-monitor setup, the game would always appear on monitor 1. Maybe. I can't test it, and I said I couldn't do anything about it, but hey, let me know!
  
• Nano-swarm now decreases twice as fast on corrosive planets.
  
• Lockers may now spawn on upper and lower decks on shipwrecks.
  

[h3]Get out there and explore![/h3]

It was recently brought to my attention, both here and on AI's Discord, that achievements are currently broken. SORRY! This update fixes them.

I wasn't going to release this yet, but I can't stand idly by while your kills and uniforms and victories aren't being tracked.

But this doesn't sound like a "power", so what's the deal?



"Cyber-Gel", the stuff that keeps your cool-down skills "cool", can now be used as much as you like.



Please note the flip-side of this, which is Gel is no longer automatically used! That means that your cooldowns will start out twice as long. But if you're in a safe situation and you don't *need* that skill again for a while, you get to hang on to your precious gel.


Keyboard players can press (see what I did there?) to use gel. This key is not currently re-bindable, but it's not a default key, either. But if YOU use "U" for something, it will immediately switch to [Control+U] for you to control it ;)

Depending on how many skills are on cooldown, you may be asked a series of questions to use the right gel. Or you can just use the mouse to click the skill in the info-window and the proper gel for that skill will be used:


Why?

[h3]Player agency. [/h3]

Before, "gel" was just a limiting factor. But it wasn't even a complete limit, because you could still use skills, just with longer cooldowns. Now it's up to you. If you want to spend 5 gels to cool down a skill immediately, go ahead! If you just need to do a quick repair on a shipwreck and don't need that skill again, why waste your precious gel on it? You make the call!

But take note: you can only use one gel of each color per turn. So even with unlimited gel, it will take a few turns before you can use those skills again (I was able to teleport again after 8 turns).




I've added a new "sprite layer" to the visual display, above "terrain" and below "monsters": a dedicated space for items and furniture. Items and monsters used to share a layer, which meant that if there was an item and a monster on the same tile, you'd only see the monster. (This was a result of 2006 principles being used in a 2013 design that is beyond outdated in 2021!)

This is more of an internal thing, but it ends up with several tangible benefits:

For one thing, if you occupy the same tile as an item you can't pick up, a bench, or more importantly a transit tube, you can now actually *see it*. Another exciting result is that you can now remember previously-seen items even when they're out of line-of-sight!

So commodities, asteroids, and area-transitions will now remain visible once discovered! Note that when you get back, they might not be there (you don't have current knowledge, only "memory").




A long-time AI player recently said something like this to me: "Oops, I accidentally built a chainsaw", referring to how sometimes you never know what you're going to get when you're crafting. That really spoke volumes to me, so I've made the first change to crafting (there will be more at a later time, allowing you to add specific powers to weapons, among other things.)



For away team ranged and melee weapons, you can now choose exactly what you want. In the future there may be more limitations (for example, you might need to dismantle a cloudgun or eviscerator to know how to build them), but for now, go ahead and build yourself that launcher you've always wanted.




The main focus of the first part of version 1.7 is the Shipwreck Overhaul (you may have heard me mention that before). None of the planned changes are live right now, and they won't be for a long time, because the entire *thing* has to be done before it will work... it can't come out a piece at a time.

So if you want to know more about what's going on with that, you can check out this blog post I wrote last week: "Post-Generation Algorithmic Room Assignment (LOL)"

I did more theoretical work this week (outlined in this Reddit post), and I have plans for a future article in this series, tentatively titled "Teaching Furniture How To Arrange Itself".

This won't mean anything to most people, and it'll sound silly to everyone, but I recently did a batch replace to fix a potential dangling pointer hiding somewhere in 105,000 lines of code (I actually added it all up today, wow, I had no idea!).

Which accidentally affected daily code generation. Someone posted a code with spaces in it, and that's when I knew it was messed up. So the currently posted batch of daily codes probably won't work for now, but once you upgrade to version 1.7a5, any *new* codes generated will work fine.

I also took the opportunity to remove certain problematic characters (like lowercase "L" which looks a lot like capital "i"). Might as well get that taken care of all at once.

There are 6 days of rescue, item, and device codes at the bottom of this announcement to help get you through. I hadn't intended to release an update this soon, but it does give me a chance to show off the last few days of work:





Each cool-down skill now has it's own icon! They're displayed in the skill window (pictured above), and also that's how you'll find them on away missions most of the time now. This feature isn't complete yet, but it's a nice visual addition.




No explanation necessary...







This is the final full day of the "Price Increase Sale", your last chance to get AI for yourself or a friend at this low price. The new price of 12.99 USD is scheduled to take effect later this week.





As promised, here are daily codes for the next few days:

October 5th:

• Rescue Code: zRmZOe&z
  
• Item Code: %#mF*65m (cloaking device)
  
• Device Code: 5YmDBV6g (plasma lance)
  

October 6th:

• Rescue Code: o#cZRqi7
  
• Item Code: 9YK4qrj4 (heavy ship weapon)
  
• Device Code: u#cwmZ@R (hull shears)
  

October 7th:

• Rescue Code: r@hf&3iC
  
• Item Code: ^#OjSBR5 (melee weapon)
  
• Device Code: a#ODQGd% (hand scanners)
  

October 8th:

• Rescue Code: ^De3!Pzn
  
• Item Code: b#eJOr*E (sensors)
  
• Device Code: VRuBZWiN (SAVIOR BEACON!)
  

October 9th:

• Rescue Code: u#ai4qAc
  
• Item Code: B@aFNpqe (ship weapon)
  
• Device Code: &#GBc7@Q (credit karma)
  

October 10th:

• Rescue Code: QYEfppoJ
  
• Item Code: i#RjPBWs (engines)
  
• Device Code: N#RBuqnF (self-sealing suits)
  

I'll be posting these in the "Codes" sharing thread here on Steam, as well as in our Discord. Remember, you can only use one code per day per run.



So, sorry I screwed it up, but hopefully those massive weapons, savior beacons, and self sealing suits will make up for it ;)

[h3]Enjoy![/h3]