Greetings Pioneers!

This week has been an exciting one as it’s officially one year to date that we have been in early access! We’ve been hard at work developing the new UMG inventory system, polishing off a shiny new build-set with interior lights, developing a modular weapon prototype and finishing up environmental asset placement in the new map. Just to name a few things!

There are a few issues that we need to resolve for the next release, one of which is the exploding Eden Kit bug! Many thanks to the community for finding this one. Once we have resolved this and tested again, we should be pushing out the new build-set and lights.

As you may have seen on the discussions forum, we are looking to do a server stress test to assess the performance and look to see what can be further optimised and improved. If you would like to get involved, see below.

As some of you may know already, one of our community Vanguard, Big Bad Wolf has been helping us to organise a Server Stress Test, see more details here;

http://steamcommunity.com/app/259570/discussions/0/458606248629776834/

The first “Stress Test Server” sessions will take place on the;

4th February 2016 (next Thursday) at 7PM GMT

If you are able to take part, please comment in the thread linked above! Please click the link for more info.

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Here’s what we’ve been working on this week:

John – Lead Designer

I’ve been looking at numbers all week 🙁

Marcin – Designer

This was a very interesting week for me. Firstly I got to work with Matt on the new Light Blocks and new “Interior” Primitives. I can’t speak for everyone, but I love how they look. On top of that, I finally managed to implement the “Shield-merging” mechanic, which allows your friendly Eden Kit shields to form a single shape, instead of the ugly overlap we’ve had so far. This was programmatically impossible until we implemented minimum distance between Eden Kits.

Other prototypes I have worked on include a new hives, which I can’t say much at the moment and a Trajectory Predictor for projectiles with gravity, which will allow us to create indicators, such as, if you are aiming a grenade, where will it land?

Lastly, I’ve looked into the designs for the upcoming survival mechanics. We are going to review them soon, but right now, unfortunately there isn’t much I can say for sure about that.

Tristan – Senior Developer

This week I have been working on a overhaul to the way the foliage destruction gets replicated in a networked game. It’s something we needed for the new level but it should make it much more lightweight and robust overall.

Lee – Technical Director

I’ve been rewriting the way Flora and Fauna get spawned into the world to make it more efficient so it is server friendly. I’ve also managed to get back onto doing some work with a water based snake which will be released when the new map gets released.

Matt – Art Director

Pieced together new icons for our additional structure visuals. I’ve also been assembling and testing these pieces from a visual standpoint with our current system. Not long before they will become available in a future release!

Yves – Senior Developer

Started working on the inventory which hopefully marks our final major refactoring of a key system. A lot of planned game play elements will revolve around our new inventory.

Ricky – Developer

Getting the new UI for the Inventory system ready to be populated

Chris – Designer

This week I have finished painting of our new destructible rocks in the large map. I have also helped Lee with designs for the new Flora and Fauna spawning so it is more efficient in the new map and setup the system regrading for use in both versions of the map,

The rest of the week has been spent saying goodbye to the team as this is sadly my last day working for Flix Interactive. It has been a great experience working here and I am grateful to have been part of such a talented and dedicated team. Im proud of what we achieved from such humble beginnings and wish the team the best of luck on Eden Star and there’s no doubt in my mind that the game will be a hit.

It’s been a pleasure.

Simone – Concept Artist

Working away with Matt to create the grenade Launcher weapon. which utilises a large cylindrical clip for loading different projectile types!

Joe – Environment Artist

This week I’ve started on the second of our new build sets after Matt’s awesome work on the Hi-tech set. This set will focus on strong but simple utilitarian shapes. I’ve started with the exterior/armoured wall section so you can add an extra layer of defense to your buildings!

Tom – Character Artist

I’ve started sculpting another of the neutral creatures! This one is a large and lumbering quadruped with scaly skin. Tune in next week for a full preview!

We don’t have a name for this beast yet, so suggestions from the community are welcome!

Lauren – Animator

This week I have continued work on the modular weapon system prototype and it’s looking pretty good so far! Please bear in mind that this is an early prototype, very much work-in-progress and it may take a while to polish it up to a standard for release. The weapon meshes have been thrown together out of our current (and upcoming) weapons, roughly chopped up and nowhere near the final assets- but it works, woot!

Andy – Lead QA

More buff than the stay puff marshmellow man, absolutely powering through testing the new light utilities for bases. Main focus has been to fix a few critical issues relating to structural performance of buildables on the server, and I’ve been tracking down the crazy self exploding Eden Kit bug which will be resolved in the next release.

 
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Many thanks go to our level designer Chris for being amazing and awesome for the last year helping us to construct our game world from scratch. We wish him the best of luck for the future!

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix

Greetings Pioneers!

Today we have another hotfix out for you with many bug fixes and optimisations. The calculations carried out on the server have been reduced significantly, which should result in less lag overall. There have also been a lot of fixes to the Turret AI, they should behave as they should more consistently now. If you’re waiting for something new, you won’t be waiting long. We are testing the new buildable lights internally today and tomorrow, so you should see them in an update soon!

PLEASE NOTE: If you are running your own server you must update the current server build in order to avoid any conflicts with running the latest Steam Frontend.

Changelist v0.1.5

• Moved structure testing into a pooled thread, now it only happens when needed.
• Fixed an issue where a Turret would focus on a target that it couldn’t attack without selecting a new target.
• Moved unnecessary tick calculations of hologram placement off of the server, it is now only carried out when the player confirms the placement.
• Fixed an issue with the Turrets where they would sometimes jitter in Singleplayer.
• Fixed it so that Turrets on opposing sides will attack each other correctly.
• Fixed an issue where occasionally new Hives being spawned into the world would appear within the confines of a player’s base.
• Fixed an issue with the Missile Turret where the top would sometimes flip over.
• Fixed issue where the pistol began to function like an auto pistol!
• Fixed an issue where while equipping/unequipping Modules or Weapons… to say the least, would go very very wrong. In some cases you could lose your Build Module and/or be unable to re-equip it. If you still encounter this issue please let us know, as well as what you did to get it to occur if possible.
• Fixed UI issue where you could open the Tab menus while the map was open, and they would overlap.
• Fixed UI issue where activity popups would appear over other menus, but when closing it you’d lose mouse input and couldn’t close them.
• Fixed the Deployment Screen UI not refreshing in realtime to show you if you had Eden Kits to spawn at and how many.
• Fixed Eden Kit markers never disappearing on the Map/Deployment screen or Compass HUD.
• Fixed Map screen remaining open while on Death Screen.
• Fixed a bug where the SMG would be at the players feet in 3rd person

• Tweaked Fade distance for Compass Markers on the HUD.
• Changed some popups to be personal Chat message instead, as they seemed too intrusive to gameplay.
• Tweaked colours of Chat, and added a separate PlayerName colour for your own prompts such as those which display when you get a message about clan activity.
• Tweaked Map Markers player icon.

Many thanks to Salaluiz for the screenshot used in this weeks header image!

See you in the fray!
-Team Flix

Greetings Pioneers!

We will hopefully have an update out soon with a bunch of fixes and optimisations which should help further with server performance and the reduction of lag. We have also been working behind the scenes on upcoming new features, making sure we have all the groundwork in place for the next steps, hopefully you won’t be waiting too long!

Here is what we’ve been up to this week:

John – Lead Designer

I’ve mostly been in design discussions with Marcin, Trist and Joe this week in order to make sure that next week’s development is organised and ready to go! I’m excited to be at the end of these design decisions which include how modular weapons work and degrade (or not degrade!), Tool Modules and upgrades will fit with the economy, and how all of this fits with the inventory and progression system… It’s a lot to do, but i’ve also been working with Matt and Marcin to hopefully be able to push out some updates over the next few weeks as we work towards the big inventory overhaul.

Matt – Art Director

Putting the plan for interiors into action this week. This is one ‘type’ of interior build set that we have designed. Now that our mechanics are in place the interiors and exteriors will vary more as we start to bring the visuals up to scratch.

Lee – Technical Director

Having fixed a number of bugs with the Turrets, I’ve been looking at possibly upgrading the Unreal Engine to version 4.10. It’s been a slow process because of the number of changes we have made to the base engine. Today I’ve also started planning some changes to the way Fauna are controlled in the world which should help with our server optimisations.

Tristan – Senior Developer

This week i have been working implementing foliage system and destructibles improvements. I have also been working with the designers on inventory and progression systems so we can get start getting them implemented. Hope you enjoy them when they are out.

Yves – Senior Developer

Adding optimisations on the construction by taking tick calculations off of the server, we’ve clawed back a whopping 2 milliseconds per frame on the server which pushes the FPS up by a few frames. Optimised structure testing so it is no longer carried out in the main thread, avoiding potential slow down when destroying a building. Structure testing only now happens when it is needed rather than being run constantly.

Ricky – Developer

Fixed some lovely bugs sent in by some of you lovely people, I solved them lovelily. I fixed the bug where equipping/unequipping could leave you without a Build Module, and how the map and Deployment Screen wouldn’t show up-to-date info on your friendly Eden Kits for respawning.

Marcin – Designer

I got to work on quite a few exciting feature this weeks. First of all, we are nearing the finished designs for the progression system and we made a lot of decisions that are finally bringing the whole thing together. Another piece of design I was working on was the finishing touches on the inventory system and all the crafting recipes that will come with it. The initial ideas are down, the next stage will be the initial numbers pass. That’s a lot of paperwork, but I managed to get hands on the two of the upcoming features: the lights, which should be available for testing anytime now, and the procedural weapon system prototype, which looks very promising.

Tom – Character Artist

Finished the High resolution sculpt of the Cybermancer armour and apparel set!

Chris – Designer

This week I have together with Trist finished the various performance tests we have been conducting in order to ascertain what is required to reduce the amounts of physics being run on the new 64 square km map to put us in a position for its release.

I have also tweaked various other designs I have been planning including what we want to do with the in-game map and how it affects gameplay.

The rest of the week has been spent painting destructible rocks which due to optimisations has allowed us to include a hell of alot more!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Joe – Environment Artist

I’ve been working on UI textures for the new icons, buttons and inventory graphics, finishing them up this week. I’m planning to revamp the foreground icons for everything you can put into your inventory too! I also got the layouts and concepts for the Inventory, Colony, Crafting, Upgrading and Eden Kit screens finished off for the devs to work from.

Lauren – Animator

This week I have been working with Marcin on a prototype modular weapon system, focusing on getting the animations to work in a modular and procedural way based on the selection of receiver and barrel types.

Simone – Concept Artist

This week I have been finishing up the design for the Multiple Item drop box and working on a Canteen and new weapon for everyone; it will be explosive!

Andy – Lead QA

This week I mostly ate too much, tested loads of the build optimisation implemented by the wonderful Yves and ate more. I also worked on bug fixes and quizzed the team on their movie knowledge.

See you in the fray!
-Team Flix