Greetings Pioneers!

Our experimental branch with all the new content was opened up to everyone yesterday, if you missed it, check out our previous news post here:
http://steamcommunity.com/games/EdenStar/announcements/detail/972040066614913182

Opt-in to the experimental branch at your own risk, although you can always move back into the main branch if you are experiencing issues, or would like to get back to playing in the current multiplayer build.

We have been working hard to try and resolve the inconsistent crash a few individuals have been reporting on beginning a new game although we had some issues reproducing this crash in-house.

It appears the crash we fixed for the last release was actually a different one! We have fixed a different rare crash today and put in a potential fix for the one some of you have been experiencing when starting a new game. We think this may have been related to a missing or unpackaged font so we’ve just removed text from the loading screen until further notice. This should help resolve the issue for now.

There is also a known issue with dropping items where all items in your inventory no matter what has been selected will be added to your dropbag.

Bug fixes and changes since the last experimental release:

• Crash fixes
• Added more Ceramic to Water Biomes
• New Comm Station base
• Fixed a rare crash with Hive Spawning
• Fixed Teslinium Clusters not producing any crystals

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

John – Lead Designer

We now have all of the values for the new materials that can be found here.

These will be added over the next week and then released in experimental as soon as possible. I am currently working on balancing for weapons and so PLEASE share your feedback in this thread here: http://steamcommunity.com/app/259570/discussions/0/350542683197286152/

List each weapon that you would like to see a difference in including, more or less recoil, spread, faster/slower time between shots, damage etc.

I have also been working on high-level behaviour changes for preparing the AI’s next development pass, looking at how we want the AI to approach, spawn and attack the player when roaming around the world.

Matt – Art Director

Expanding on the crafting items, I’ve been developing materials and concoctions for additional updates on the lead up to Christmas. Work has also been started on our brand new introduction to the game which will mark the start of pushing our story and lore of the island and give rise to the questions of why you are there in the first place.

More specifically the drop pod is now under development, not as a single intact asset, but made of many component parts that can be salvaged as scrap to assist players in the beginning of the game.

Lee – Technical Director

This week I have been working on trying to help pinpoint a few crashes we have been getting with the new map. I’ve also been adding new functionality to our Octree to take care of the new flying creatures we have planned for a later release.

Tristan – Senior Developer

This week I have been working on implementing a new power system into the game. The previous one was quite costly in terms of replication to client machines which is something we are trying to cut down. It also had a lot of functionality that never actually got used in the game so the new one is intended to be much simpler. I have also been helping out on some crashes we have had with regards to our new loading screens which seem to cause us many woes.

Ricky – Developer

I’ve been working on the HUD scanner revamp followed by light holidaying and now helping look into some of the crashes reported on steam experimental branch.

Yves – Senior Developer

About 30% done with the rework of structure replication, we now can place primitives with the new replication system. Manually handling actors replication comes with its own set of challenges and benefits. To reduce CPU hit on the client we aren’t destroying actors immediately when they leave a sector’s relevancy range, we keep them around for a small period then stagger their destruction, if the player comes back into the area then we do not need to respawn these blocks.

Marcin – Designer

The majority of the week I’ve spent working with John and Matt on a brand new pass of the tech tree, including new materials, items, and buildings. Our main goal is to enhance the crafting and building aspects of the game by shifting the time involvement from grinding for minerals into crafting.

The rest of the time, I was fixing minor bugs left over from the last release, such as the Teslinium Clusters not giving any Teslinium, Stomp attack not always finding its target, or water surface visuals disappearing on random loads of the game. The last one is still very elusive, but I’ve made steps to prevent it from happening.

Joe – Environment Artist

More tweaking and fixing to start the week off, before finishing off the road placement in the level, which you can now check out in our Experimental branch! 🙂 Speaking of, I made a few tweaks to this week, including removing Eden Kits in some bases so you can more easily capture them, as well as reworking some of the loot placement based on initial feedback.

Just before our public Experimental release I managed to sneak in a new base (Landing Pad) and today I’ve just added another new base which will be in our next release – Comm Station!

Tom – Character Artist

Preparing to start more water based creatures as well as the female Pioneer model!

Lauren – Animator

This week I have been mainly focusing on audio and animation tweaks, implementing new placeholder audio where we had none before and refining others to sound a bit better. I have been tweaking the Cerberus (Wolf) movement animations a little and helping out with debugging and AI fixes.

Simone – Concept Artist

This week I’ve been working on the first draft of storyboards with the team for a new sequence, with fire and explosions and…rainbows – okay maybe not all of that but I will get rainbows into the game somewhere! I have also been making some changes to other concepts from feedback that has been given.

Andy – Lead QA

So this week has been an interesting one. After the release of our experimental branch last Friday I have been bugging up and addressing the many suggestions and issues you guys have let us know about. From there we made many fixes and tweaks and opened up the experimental branch to the general public which lead to more suggestions and issues which needed addressing before we can roll out another update.   

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix

Greetings Pioneers!

Thanks to all of you that have been giving feedback for the experimental branch so far, we have found and (hopefully) fixed a number of issues. We feel it is now stable enough to be opened for anyone who wants to give it a try!

Bug fixes and changes since the last experimental release:

• Fixed issue with the loading screen that was causing a crash for about 30% of players
• You can now repair your suit armour
• Abandoned bases have been tweaked slightly, some have had the Eden Kits within them removed so that players can claim them easier
• Vast amount of AI fixes

Please note:

It’s singleplayer only in the current experimental branch build of Eden Star (for now)

We are optimising multiplayer and implementing the introduction components for the game before we do a full release into our main branch. Our release date for this is TBA.

All balancing is a working progress.

To access the Experimental branch:

• Right click on Eden Star in your library and select properties.
• Open the Betas tab.
• Where it says ‘None – Opt out of all beta programs’ click the arrow and select edenstar_experimental.
• The game should start updating, if not you may need to restart Steam.

Release Notes with all the additions:

https://trello.com/c/uGAuueOv

Please share your feedback on the above Trello card or on the forum post below:

http://steamcommunity.com/app/259570/discussions/0/350542683197286152/

Have fun!

See you in the fray

-Team Flix

Greetings Pioneers!

So here it comes! We’re going to start pushing out invites to our experimental branch as of today! Check your friend requests for an add from Flix Interactive and accept it so that we can message you.

Don’t worry if you don’t get an invite from us straight away, we’ll progressively be issuing details on how to access the new builds over the coming week. This is a big step for the game as it begins to expand in size. So for now only single player will be accessible from our experimental build branch.

The stability testing and optimisation that has gone into getting the game running how we want it has been quite the test. Due to the vastness of destruction and physics interactions in Eden Star this process has been more drawn out than we would’ve liked it to be, mainly due to our incessant desire to make sure it’s playable for you wonderful people that support us! 

Thank you all once again for your patience.

Here’s what we’ve been up to this week in preparation for our aforementioned release (some of these fixes and features may not be included in our first experimental branch release)

John – Lead Designer

This week I have been redesigning the materials and crafted items of the game and what you can build from them. We want to introduce more of a real-world feel for the items you see in the world, so that they make more sense as to what they might do at face value. I have also been designing the introduction sequence to the game with Matt so that we can introduce new players to the game systems and set the scene as to initial objectives.

Matt – Art Director

Working towards our experimental branch release, I’ve been adding some old looking worn and trodden track visuals for roads which indicate earth colonies once thrived on the island. These are helpful as guides and pointers to players who wish to search and discover what is left of colony outposts around the area.

The outposts are going to be under progressive development and will be vastly improved in further builds with such features as patrolling creatures that spawn within the buildings and corrupted and worn looking visuals around the outposts to show the islands attempt to consume them over time.

Lee – Technical Director

This week has involved a lot of bug fixes, and a lot of testing. There are still a few minor bugs and some bugs which can’t be fixed due to needing more systems being put in place. Which is what I’ve being doing the latter part of this week, planning features I need implementing to fix some of these issues.

Tristan – Senior Developer

This week I have been fixing up that last load of critical and major issues as well as some minor ones that have been hanging around for a good while like mantling actually animating on clients. I have also been working with John, Marcin and Yves on a system design for how we can make multiplayer building more efficient and still give you the freedom you have now. I think we have finally got a solution 🙂

Joe – Environment Artist

Another good healthy mix of tweaks, fixes and new tasks this week. I’ve created icons for all the new Decorator building blocks and started work on the mammoth task of populating the new level with small bases and their connecting roads and pathways. My goal with placing these roads is to provide consistently enjoyable exploration, drive player choice and give players a starting experience that guides them towards objective gameplay (that will be fleshed out in the future).

Outside of those tasks I’ve made quite a few tweaks and improvements. The distance landscape is now much more detailed, I’ve added new HUD damage visuals for your shield being hit, and I’ve gone over Loot placement in all of the prefab bases.

Yves – Senior Developer

The CPU on the server takes a massive hit when it reaches so many replicated actors, it has to check to the properties of each one to see if anything has changed, as we’ve seen with the Chicago server when our players make massive bases, that can be lots of properties to check. Unfortunately techniques like net dormancy won’t help us in our circumstance.

So I’ve been working on optimizing structure replication. We’re going to take it out of the engine’s hands for the most part and handle it ourselves by clustering areas of blocks and using fast net arrays to broadcast changes.

Lauren – Animator

This week I have mostly been working on bug fixes and tweaks for the AI. I have also been addressing the audio in the level and making note of where we are missing sounds, tweaking volume and attenuation and adding placeholders where I can.

Ricky – Developer

Bugs were trodden upon. I then worked on; the functionality to allow armour repairing, loading screen, deploy ui modular buttonry (like weaponry but 20% more pressing involved), HUD health and shield damage effects, transfer and drop button disability fixes and finishing off the week with some hardcore prototyping of a new design for the HUD scanner, we feel ye old text just wasn’t cutting the mustard anymore and we like our mustard cut right dammit!

Marcin – Designer

Another week, another set of bugs sorted out. Nothing particularly major, I’m afraid, just hundreds of tiny little tweaks and changes – mostly to AI, and buildings. Aside from those I am working on a few designs as well.

There was a very technical design for a new system of replication of buildings over network, as we’ve hitting the point where there is so many buildings, the current system cannot cope quickly enough, as well as designs for future customisation options for personal servers and single-player gamer.

Last but not least, I am looking into designs for populating how we want to populate the infected bases with AI to make them alive and challenging.

Simone – Concept Artist

This week I’ve been just finishing up on the armours so that next week I can start new tasks that are in the pipeline!

Andy – Lead QA

This week we have been gearing up to releasing our new map into the experimental branch so I’ve spent my week pestering the team to get lots of little tweaks and fixes done for me so we can roll this build out to you guys.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix