Greetings Pioneers!

After months of work and the immense patience that has been bestowed upon us by all, it has arrived! the latest hotfix release. The update is inbound imminently and your client should update soon!

All the work you’ve been currently seeing through our weekly blogs is on it’s way as well so make sure to keep those hawk eyes on us for more updates.

In this release you can enjoy the new upgradeable turret system in Multiplayer, and a vastly improved (and less difficult) beginning to the Singleplayer game. Amongst many other fixes and optimisations which we’ve included below.

Another big change is the games load times, which have been reduced drastically. So now there’s no need to put the kettle on for a hot drink before diving in.. unless you really Love a good tea of coffee. (we actually think it’s essential to the survival experience).

Important: THIS IS A HOT FIX UPDATE – ALL OFFICIAL SERVERS WILL BE WIPED, Please be sure to update your personal servers!

Full change list is as follows:

• Upgradable Turrets! – The Laser Turret, Auto Turret and Missile Turret can now be levelled up similarly to the Eden Kit, improving their stats and visuals!
• Upgrading the Eden Kit now changes the Eden Kit model.
• New explosions and sound effects for structure destruction. Different utilities explode in different ways depending on their purpose.
• New surface impact effects for every combination of surface type and weapon!
• New fracture/destruction effects for each type of mineable rock.

• Tweaks to standard Intro sequence wave difficulty. Removed C21 waves if you arrive after dawn. Please note the intro sequence is heavily work-in-progress and will change considerably in future builds!
• Updated all mineable rocks – larger rocks should perform better in Multiplayer.
• Improved PFX for all turrets. Turrets should also look more epic as they’re levelled up!
• Removed Candy Cane from loot drops! (Yep, it’s not Christmas anymore)
• Reduced IKA viper rate of fire.
• Balanced base turret level stats to do more damage.
• Temporarily disabled several of the smaller Colony bases to improve load times whilst we work on speeding up the loading of buildings.
• Optimisations to structure load times (there is more to do here but it’s a good start)

• Fixed several places in the level the player could get stuck (thanks for reporting them guys, keep ‘em coming!).
• Fixed an area of the map where you could build outside of the playable space, potentially causing a crash.
• Fixed a variety of level visual inconsistencies and collision problems.
• Fixed Eden Kit levels not resetting their health when upgraded
• Fixed an issue where the kinetic laser didn’t consume energy when fired.
• Deployment UI now correctly selects the first Replication Unit properly, instead of just highlighting it orange which caused you to still spawn in a random Region instead.
• Armour now saves its Integrity value and loads it correctly again
• Closing the dropbag UI column refreshes the inventory so you can once again see items you were about to drop straight away
• After promoting a Colony member, fixed a bug where you got multiple popups, and would be unable to move
• Pressing enter in the Server password popup enters the text
• Eden kit now lets you upgrade it to level 5 after a savegame
• Fixed spelling errors on some item descriptions
• Fixed long Multiplayer names so they don’t cut off
• Fixed a major server crash to do with engine garbage collection and replication of certain information to clients

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix

 

Greetings Pioneers!

Bam! We’ve got something more special for you to dig your eyes into – we’ve landing a couple of video features showcasing some of the new gameplay we have been focusing on in the early game stages.

We’ve focused heavily on making interactive pick up items that you can now find throughout the level, placing ambient sounds, refining meshes, setting up AI to spawn and distributing cool loot for you to find, it’s really coming together!

You can find a walkthrough preview here –

And an actual in game preview here –

We hope you enjoy!

Here’s what we’ve been up to:

John – Lead Designer

Well, call me Mr flexible, all over the shop today.. I’ve been filling in doing a bit of testing as well as organising task progress and where people should be spending their time to be most effective. It’s really ashame I don’t have 5 arms, or something, which sounds like it might make things easier.. but probably would just freak everyone out instead.

Matt – Art Director

Well, you can now see items for what they are in the world as it stands. This means lots of epic loot will be coming to the world, mainly useful stuff, but also expect to see some easter egg items hidden around… Been focusing on a lot of in world meshes and setup for their use as items. Also – check out the surprise preview videos we’ve included, as a bonus you get to listen to my lovely voice.

Lee – Technical Director

Ok I won’t lie, stressed up to the eyeballs with the issues we’ve had lately. Mainly due to updated engine build merges as everyone following will know. But the light at the end of the tunnel is showing as we’re gradually eradicating a lot of the issues slowly through some rigorous testing. Big thankyou to Epic for the feedback keeping us moving forward to a stable release with some huge changes.

Tristan – Senior Developer

This week i have been continuing on helping out with the crashes in multiplayer. After fixing the last load it appears they multiplied so we are trying to track them all down and fix them. Some of them are quite difficult to reproduce which is always fun 😀

Yves – Senior Developer

Working through some bugs, mainly to do with with the Axe and our new melee, currently it’s been doing very little damage to certain object types and enemies so this has needed a bit of work to get working right.

Ricky – Senior Developer

Implemented crafting on player basic functionality so we can see where this stuff can take us and what changes we might want to make before doing a more full pass on it.

I’ve also helped all over the shop looking into bugs and tweaks of mine and others. The E to interact is misbehaving occasionally and will get the second most sternest talking to, but it’s not yet at the stage of an angry e-letter or ringing it’s parents so we can rejoice at that at least.

Marcin – Designer

Wish Marcin a happy Birthday! He’s taking some time off to celebrate his coming of age. Happy Birthday Marcin <3 We love your face, and your (presumably) large logical brain.

Joe – Environment Artist

Mainly working on creating meshes for the new locations this week and planning ahead for nailing that new-player-experience! Can’t wait to show off all the awesome stuff the guys have been working on!

Tom L – Character Artist

I’m back! Working through bakes for the characters, so we can get them into the big new exciting changes that are going into the game.

Tom W – Designer

This week I’ve been having a bash at the AI encounters, starting by creating a nice way for us to place and script encounters, allowing for them to change based on the various decisions the player makes approaching these combat areas. As usual, I’ve also been working on sprucing up the Dam’s interior, squashing any bugs I can find and generally livening the place up a bit.

Alex – Designer

Still hard at work on the transmitter area, I’ve been tweaking AI spawns and types, setting loot locations, and just overall making sure it plays well. On top of that, making updates to the big relay piece, creating secret paths to cool locations and testing them out too. It’s all coming up to a pretty playable piece of game now. So then we just need to make it pretty.

Lauren – Animator

Early this week I have been working more on the opening sequence to the game with Matt, more recently I have been putting together some audio cues for placement in the new areas and with interactive objects.

Andy – Lead QA

Off on the old Jolies! It’s a rare thing that I take breaks of longer than 2 days, it’s also rare that my grammar is spot on. That’s why it’s not actually Andy writing this. Love you all, Andy will be back to harass you with details about his daily happenings very soon.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix

 

Greetings Pioneers!

Breakthrough! We think we have just witnessed the banishing of the dreaded server crash back to the depths of digital hell, this may be jumping the gun but we just had a ‘GO TEAM’ moment, amateurish high fives were flying around the room, the hand to hand connections were less than powerful, but we’re still quite excited.

Aside from some minor client side bug clean up things are promising, and more so our latest development work is very promising as we’ve begun locking down any revisions to the layouts starting our placement of magical loot which utilises the new interaction systems.

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

John – Lead Designer

Out of office this week doing very important business stuff <3, but that doesn’t stop me from making development things happen, been calling in several times a day to check up on progress with everyone. No rest for the boss man!

Matt – Art Director

Majority of my time has been creating optimised drop items for placement in world. This is exciting because it makes loot discovery more intuitive for Pioneers, actually seeing a new item as opposed to it being an entire mystery at a glance. We’ll be making a push to get all this new content for discovery into the encounter areas asap.

Lee – Technical Director

Another frustrating week of tracking down crashes with multiplayer, just when you think you have nailed them all. On a positive note though the new areas the art team have created are looking awesome.

Tristan – Senior Developer

This week i have been helping out with bug fixing crashes. Still trying to iron out hopefully the last one.

Alex – Designer

Although having contracted the plague this week, I’ve been slogging away making cool art assets this week, it will be one of many landmarks you first see upon starting your adventure, and I’ve also been sculpting terrain, and placing rocks so that you guys can actually get to it.

Yves – Senior Developer

I’ve been working on what is being referred to the “Stability Component”, it’s what decides on the appropriate reaction an AI performs when being impacted (Staggering, ragdoll, flinching).

Ricky – Senior Developer

Pickups off le floor is le finished, pending QA at least, this also included use and interaction system updates to work better with drop bags, and being able to drop individual items on the floor instead of them always being drop bags. There’s also now a distinction with use vs hold to use items, drop bags in particular find this useful because they can be accessed via the inventory via tap or just picked up in one go via hold.

And I’ve made good headway to get crafting on the player to welcome the introduction of makeshift items aiding nicely to the progressional flow-angular direction of especially the early game. You’ll surely see more about this in updates.

Tom W – Designer

Working through a terminal interface hero asset for the main Dam rooms and refining/adding to creature placement for the encounters in those areas.

Marcin – Designer

There’s been a lot of bits and bobs I’ve been working on this week. Ricky and I have been putting together the “Interact to Pick Up” mechanic for in-world objects, including minerals, weapons, armour, but also buttons and doors.

With Yves, we’ve been working on the force reaction mechanics, which will allow the AI to flinch and stagger before they “ragdoll”. And last, but not least, Lauren and i have been looking into animation systems for the 3rd person view of the player. There’s still a lot to do but we’re making progress.

Joe – Environment Artist

Fighting off illness like a boss, and although my doctor tells me even a stiff breeze could be enough to finish me off I completed the new entrance/vehicle bay for the Dam location and found a little more time to work on the laboratory tileset!

 

 

Lauren – Animator

This week I have been continuing with the axe animations and and have started doing more exciting things. Namely involving climbing out of the cryo-chambers inside the all new drop-pod you may have seen some shiny previews of last week…

Andy – Lead QA

So it’s been another stressful week of testing multiplayer only to find various crashes. We have made progress though and Im confident that we will have a build ready for release very soon.

We’ve also had young Jamie in house this week helping me with some of the testing and although his times keeping was a little sketchy and he didnt get the salted peanuts Lee requested, he was a good addition to the team.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix