Starship EVO News

So I have been busy the latest couple of months working on my biggest update yet: fully explorable planets.
It is so exciting to finally experience some proper planets in the game. It is also a real challenge as I have to tackle hundreds of different problems. A lot of experiments and dead ends were taken, but now the technology starts to converge well to a solid foundation.

This very much work in progress. This is why I will not show some shots of planets from a afar just yet, as I still need to improve and add a few more features. I will do further update showcasing various part of the tech as I progress and get closer to a proper release. Right now I have been focusing on making a biome in the style of the habitat, but I will of course randomize biomes and add a lot more terrain styles! The planet shown is also a small one at 44km radius - some will be 2x or 3x bigger.



Planets are fully deformable and leverage on the terrain refactor introduced for the asteroids. I had to improve plenty of things though: for example in order for terrain to load fast I had to offload the density computation to the GPU using compute shaders. Terrain patches are now loading much much faster!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
A small mountain pass. There is a lot of popping especially on the large boulders, but I should be able to improve this significantly.

Work done:
- Various elevation style with mountain, valley, rolling hills.
- Word prop spawning (rock, foliage). These are fully integrated with the physics engine, so you can collide and take rocks for example.
- Terrain look and shader: I had to improve the base from asteroids. I can now overlay two materials and have a close and distant texture, which is really useful to improve the look of rocks and mountains for example.
- Snow can spawn at high elevation
- Atmospheric shader, I am really happy about that one but I cant show it to you yet as planets are not looking great from space for the moment...
- Cloud and cloud shadow:
- Gravity and ambient lighting.

Still to do:
- Use 2d map to improve the look from space
- Improve the randomization of the generation, so that each planet are unique and interesting!
- Add more terrain material type, including water and lava.
- Add various SFX and VFX
- Clouds are really basic for now, I will add volumetric clouds as I will want to use that tech for gas giants.
- Randomize the appearance of foliage, rocks and grass.
- Add tree and other aliens flora
- Add fauna. This will come much later on, once the survival loop is implemented.

The first release will contains the first 3-4 items. The rest will tackled in smaller updates after that.


Thanks for playing!
Francois

Hotfix build.

Community Suggestion

• #5017 Rounded block improvements
  

Bugfixes:

• #5018 Sliding door and canopy physics
  

Thanks for playing!

The graphic option menu has been revamped using the new UI tech.
It means that from now on it will be easier to add more options to the game.
VSync has been changed, now a third setting exists: custom framerate. This let you choose what target FPS the game will achieve.

New brick:

• Hepta Rounded, which fits nicely with the other rounded bricks
  

Bugfixes:

• Joystick link to yoke incorrect grab animation
  
• Raycast on some shape
  

This build adds a new joystick handle and several new rounded blocks.
It also contains some major tech refactoring on the way shapes are handled behind the scene.
The previous framework required code for each shape while the new approach is much more generic.
It means it will be easier from now on to add more shapes, fix the hitbox of some of the existing ones, and improve the collision technology (player collision especially).



New Joystick handle
Just like the yoke you can control a spaceship/turret/hovercraft if you link it to the computer.
The player will grab the handle with the right or left hand depending on which side it is.
If you want to grab two joystick at the same time simply do a link between them.
You then can enter the control by entering any of the two joystick used.



New blocks:

• Joystick Handle
  
• Rounded Wedge and Rounded Corner
  
• Rounded Arch and Rounded Arch Corner
  
• Transparent Rounded Arch and Rounded Arch Corner
  

Community Suggestion:

• #5005 Disable interactable bricks when flying a ship or hover in 3rd person.
  
• #5007 New message when lightcruise engine is not built in the forward direction.
  
• #5006 Gimbal angle factor in event gate.
  

Hotfixes:

• #5004 Switched Request landing and Autopilot in Spaceship menu.
  
• #5003 Walking in a ship in lightcruise is broken
  
• Player dont grab yoke
  
• Entity collision where not detected in some cases
  

Thanks for playing!

This update adds a dedicated help section to the menu.
This will greatly help newcomers to get an hold on the game basics.
This in turn will allow us to be less dependant on mission based tutorials as they proved to be buggy and hard to implement and test.
Each entry is supposed to be simple and short, relying on easy to digest short videos.
More entries will be added on more advanced topic (turret, event gate, logic, advanced building)

Also some more hotfixes for the road.

Hotfixes:

• #4995 Entity Bounds can be wrong.
  
• #4994 Tank Join not working.
  
• #4993 Fuel Hose flow issue.
  
• #4996 Unspawning docking entity can yield some issue.
  
• Hoverpod VFX not visible.
  

Thanks for playing!