Starship EVO News

Hotfix build with some improvements to the fuel experience and some physics perf improvements.

Improvements

• A new fuel tank format is introduced, with a more conventional sizing
  
• Bounds will show when placing the tank, allowing for a more precise placement
  
• Pipe flow rate is multiplied by 4. Now a 0.25 pipe can fuel 16x 1m reactor at full power.
  
• Physics optimization for rebuilding BVH Trees: it can leads to massive saving for entity with plenty of children entity.
  

Hotfixes:

• #4717 #4702 VFX shows on player after source is unloaded
  
• #4700 Paint effect still showing when tool is unselected.
  
• #4692 Deleted mechanism sfx still playing.
  
• #4675 Pipe see-through view not working
  
• #4688 Exit to title and loading back can cause issues.
  
• #4723 Control assignment issues.
  
• #4720 Flickering on handheld weapons.
  
• #4719 Handheld bugs
  
• #4699 #4726 Decals dont show metals.
  
• Repair and fuel see-through view are fixed.
  
• Plenty of fixes regarding Damage decals.
  
• Leak in physics BVH tree construction fixed.
  

Thanks for playing!

Various improvements have been made to the terrain technology.

• The mesh creation algorithm has been changed from Marching Cube to Dual Contouring.
  This allows better and smoother contour, minimizing some artifacts. Furthermore it will allows to create better hard surface sculpting or terrain shape in the future.
  
• Border gaps between LODs have been fixed.
  
• Terrain modification is now saved! Beware though before starting a big project: the save format is likely to be update it the future, so it is highly probable you will loose any mining done.
  
• Mining has been improved to give smoother and wider results.
  
• Some large rocks are now spawned on the terrain.
  
• Shadow flickering is fixed.
  

Please report any issues, I would now like to push that branch to Default!

Thanks for playing!

Mining makes its debut!
It is still very much work in progress, this update focused mainly on ore spawned while mining.

This update is released is experimental branch for now, as a few people reported some trouble on the previous terrain/asteroid refactor update. You can switch from/to experimental without corrupting blueprint format, but please be aware that the system was reduced in size in the terrain update so your build will appear further from the sun.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Features:

• Iron, Gold, Silver and Cobalt ore veins are present on asteroids.
  
• Mining beam added (model, vfx and texture are placeholder). Mining beam will deal less hull DPS but are more efficient to mine terrain.
  
• Ore vein and rock will spawn an ore / rock. Sand wont spawn anything.
  
• Spawned rock/ore will be "sucked" toward the player ship. They will disappear once close to the ship.
  
• Spawned rock/ore are integrated to the rendering and physics tech.
  

There is still quite some things left to do:

• More mining tool
  
• mined terrain will reset when higher LOD are loaded
  
• mined terrain is not yet saved
  
• rate of drop to be tweaked
  
• Still a few issues like hole in terrain to be fixed.
  
• Collector brick will be necessary to collect ore.
  
• item management (container and conveyor) to pick up ore
  
• and of course do stuff with the mined ore!
  
• more optimization will be needed on the physics side to deal will big quantity of floating ore mined.
  

Finally a question for you: what mining tool you would like to see in the game?
I think having beam is necessary as it is the most seamless to use but I open to add drill or else as people might like them too.

Hotfixes:
#4715 #4696 Cant paint decals

A follow-up on the terrain build.
Both performance and look have been greatly improved.

New Features:

• Terrain computation is much faster (from 30ms jobs to 3-4 ms)
  
• Job scheduling is also smarter. It will be noticeable when flying near terrain.
  
• Terrain loading is also optimized, for reduced FPS impact when moving near terrain.
  
• New textures added for rock, ground and ore.
  
• The new shader uses separate color gradient to prepare for a wider range of asteroids look / biome (for upcoming planet)
  
• Terrain will tesselate up close: the terrain will loom much higher resolution. It helps massively especially for rocks.
  
• Iron ore vein are being spawned.
  
• Terrain shadow added
  

Known issues:

• A lot of shadow artifact when new LOD are being loaded.
  
• A few issues with the border between different LOD. The current tech is not working well with tesselation, so it will be changed.
  

Thanks for playing!

The asteroid technology has been completely overhauled thanks a brand new planetary terrain technology.
This terrain tech will be extended to Space Habitat and planets in upcoming updates.

It is a massive update as so many tech behind the scene has to be implemented or improved to deal with the amount of asteroids drawn.
Beside the new features the new terrain/asteroids use a different approach: it is way more generic and also leverage fully on other tech instead of being completely bespoke.
It was quite tricky to pull off as it stresses and push to the limit so many area of the game technology which had to be improved.
In the end it is a great thing as this will benefit other sections of the game beside terrain!

=> Please note that the system size has been reduced, so any player entities will unfortunately have to be repositioned if necessary.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

New Terrain Technology:

• Feature LOD: as you move closer finer detailed terrain patches will fade-in.
  
• Terrain deformation: You can deform the terrain with weapons (for now, a proper mining feature will be introduced later)
  
• Fully integrated with the existing brick entity rendering technology, which means GPU culling and minimum CPU impact.
  
• Fully integrated with the existing physics technology, can be multi-thread for minimum CPU impact.
  
• Texture and terrain shape are very much wip and will be improved in a later update.
  
• Still a bit laggy if you zoom in fast onto terrain. It was already heavily optimized but still needs more work.
  

Asteroid Technology:

• Asteroids are now visible from much further away, the transition between sprite and actual geometry being much smoother and believable.
  
• Flying close the asteroid impact FPS much less compared to before (computations are multi-threaded)
  
• A few much larger asteroid are being spawned (several km wide)
  
• Generic asteroids (the smaller one, which are from a set of precomputed) also have a two levels LOD (on top of the builtin terrain LODs)
  
• Current asteroid are gray rock but will be more varied in the future, and the icy ones will also come back.
  

Other Improvements:

• Culling data was optimized, resulting in less memory allocated on the GPU (saving 100mb ++) and less hiccup
  
• Culling data transfer to GPU improved, resulting in less hiccup during ship loading or warping.
  
• Transform data transfer to GPU was optimized, with expensive TRS matrix computations done on a Compute Shader, which reduce CPU load
  
• World physics query was also improved, which reduce CPU load when many entity are scattered through the world.
  
• Particle Data CPU cost improved.
  

Next up, proper mining!