Greetings Pioneers!

More insight into the inner workings of content development this week. As developers have mainly been working on stability fixes and profiling we thought we wouldn’t bore you all into the ground with such talk. Instead we have pretty images and information of things in our world that are yet to come.

Here’s what we’ve been upto:

John – Lead Designer

We’re working really hard on designs taken from your feedback and this week we have finally nailed down the “I feel like a cow” problem (basically, you can eat seeds from grass to survive)… In addition to this we have been working through the issues with multiplayer and support for people accessing servers via the server lobby.

This is now finalised and should be going into the game very soon. There are plans for the next major milestone to be focused on Corrupted Bases and how you need to approach raiding them, this also includes making all aspects of combat and AI interactions far more polished.

Lee – Technical Director

This week I have begun work on merging the 4.14 version of the engine into our codebase. Thankfully because we have stuck to a standard for all engine changes we make it hasn’t been too difficult so far. The only drawback has been our destructible mesh assets may need to be recreated due to changes we have made with Apex.

Matt – Art Director

Want to level up your turrets? Soon you will be doing just that. Been working on the models for these different stages of pain to monster delivery systems. Each upgrade level will bring noticeable increases in performance, and overall badassery.

Ricky – Senior Developer

Added a lot of very useful logging information to shipping server builds, so now we can rejoice the server log window doesn’t sit there with it’s lonely group of 6 rows, not much of a party really was it. Unfortunately we don’t have this logging out to a file just yet but at least the window is print screenable or copy pastable.

Joe – Environment Artist

This week we got the Comms Window and Activity Log designs signed off so we should be able to start implementation soon! As a quick overview, the Comms Window is the chat window you already know and love but with a ton more notifications, server announcements and proper chat filtering.

The Activity log is a whole new beast,  providing you with a real-time information on player and structure deaths, base attack alerts and most other hostile actions. You’ll also be able to access a “Historical Log” to see all of this information in full detail. Finally you’ll be able to see who or what raided you while you were offline! (and how they managed it…)

Also, lots more UI and Design work. I wrote up designs for the new death screen, designed a new server admin interface and started on the new Map Screen that will tie all the log information in a handy strategic view!  

Tom – Character Artist

Working on the new heads for the female and male characters! Coming along nicely, I’ll have something to show next week.

Lauren – Animator

This week I have been making hit-reaction animations and planning a final pass of character locomotion and responsiveness in general in preparation for the possibility of a third person mode.

Simone – Concept Artist

I have been working with the team to create and undersuit for the Pioneer. So far we are finalising the first pass on the female undersuit and this will be translated into a male version as well. Once the design has been finalised a colour pass will be made over the concept.

Andy – Lead QA

This week I have been talking loads with members of the community in order to get to the bottom of a few of the issues they have been having and then relaying that info to team so we can get fixes in. I’ve also been reviewing quality of life designs which once implemented should make the game much more user friendly.

I’ve also been organising another test session with the great guys over at Staff university which will involve more people so we will be able to catch those tricky bug that appear when there are a large number of players on a server. So I need to give a huge shout out to Staffs Uni and their Games Society for all the help getting this up and running and volunteering their time to help us out.   

As always, you can keep upto date on our current progress here.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix

Greetings Pioneers!

This week along with fixing up bugs for the hotfix yesterday, we have been finalising the final pass of our shiny new UI designs for the menus across the board. We want them to work well for both controller and keyboard and mouse input so they have been getting some much needed TLC.

This includes the Main Menu, Game Selection, Multiplayer Menus, Pause Menu and Options Menu. Next steps will be to transfer these layouts from designs into the game!

Different looking levels of Eden Kit have been getting rigged and animated ready for implementation as well, but before these are release we’ll be doing another balancing pass over the materials required to build them.

Here’s what we’ve all been upto:

John – Lead Designer

Managed to nail down a final design pass for raw food items and processed food types, which will give players a more expansive selection of food types with varying statistics. I’ve touched based with the art team enabling them to do a final character pass which is beginning properly next week! Simone, Matt and Tom are developing this taking into account a first level plan for pre-game customisation.

Lastly the user interface feedback for our design phase has gone down well, meaning we’re close to starting implementation for our final front end visuals.

Matt – Art Director

Implemented the five different Eden Kit level meshes and animations for one of our future updates and fixed up a bug with decorator holograms!.

Mainly worked with Joe on finishing our UI final pass which will include a whole bunch of new options, including planned character customisation and click and go game presets. Custom games where you can still modify all the small details will be one of these presets 🙂

Also managed to complete a revamp design for our main menus, which will incorporate a transitional background environment as you move from page to page.

Lee – Technical Director

So this week I have been helping out with the server issues we had from the previous release, which was finally fixed and released yesterday. I’ve also been planning a new pipeline solution to enable our artists and designers to implement new AI without much need for a programmer. Hopefully I can get this implemented soon.

Tristan – Senior Developer

This week I have been fixing up bugs to do with the new foliage destruction replication optimisations so hopefully we should now have improved server performance and still actually be able to destroy foliage. Hope you enjoy.

Ricky – Developer

The start of this week I was gleefully skipping along solving the annoying issue which arose from Friday’s temporary update.

After solving that I’ve been looking over designs for new tasks and beginning implementation of some server logging information which I think will be very helpful for us all.

I plan to include things like; when the server has started and finished loading and is joinable, when players join and leave, and possibly extra things like when players die or some actions they do like claiming bases or get killed by vogels (I’d have to implement that one sometime of course, but it would be most shameful way to die in such a manner)

Joe – Environment Artist

Crazy week this week for UI and Design. I came up with a new Death Screen which apparently made our Art Director “want to die”. I hope that’s a good thing?

I also went over the Pause Menu, server info pop-up and reworked all the other Menu screens from the previous few weeks with updated style guides so we can hopefully get a streamlined, useful and most importantly cool-looking frontend user experience.

The last couple of days I’ve also been designing the “Comms Window” and “Activity Log”. See if you can guess what they are 🙂

Also we fixed being able to infinitely stack Laser Posts. Sorry guys.

Tom – Character Artist

Working with Matt and Simone on our pass for customisable male and female heads!

Lauren – Animator

This week I have been discussing story design, delivery and implementation. We want there to be a meaningful reason for you being on Pharus 7 as well as driving exploration and a gameplay ‘end goal’. Following the story will be an optional exercise but offers opportunities to collect clues and items that can assist you in your quests… I have also been planning how to improve player deaths and ‘ragdolls’ so they blend better and look a little less silly.

Simone – Concept Artist

About to begin working with Matt and Tom on a final revamp of the player models base suits 😀

Andy – Lead QA

This week I have been working closely with Rick regarding implementing a fix to the bug that caused us to revert last weeks release. We were able to get that issue fixed along with a few others.

We hope you enjoy yesterdays update. See you in the fray!

-Team Flix

Greetings Pioneers!

Thank you for your patience, we regretfully had to revert our last update because of a game breaking issue launching servers. Alas this has been resolved properly and with some extra testing we’re now happy to roll out the latest update.

This includes some additional changes ontop! Included in our updated changelist below.

As you may of noticed, we’re focusing on game stability issues as a priority over new features lately. This is to ensure the game is enjoyable for you to play in the mean time while we begin to implement new content and systems in a responsible way.

As always you can keep a track of progress on the new features and feedback here.

Full changelist:

• Added ‘Initialising’ label for server screen when a server has not fully loaded
  

• Moved hive spawner out of C21 Base location
• Increased player inventory slot limit from 78 > 100

• Crash fixes.
• Fix for decorator holograms that intersect with other objects displaying as blue when they should be red.
• Fixed an infinite loop which would cause games to hang/crash or the server to hang/crash when building outside of A.I. navigation areas.
• Fix for Ability to dupe items with the transfer all button.
• Fix for ‘unknown error’ pop up sometimes appearing when crafting in a utility.
• Fix for being unable to click the Craft button multiple times without selecting a new item first
• Fix for Eden Kit placement not always claiming all blocks under the shield.
• Fixed Deployment UI unusable with > around 10 Replication Units, as the list would disappear offscreen.
• Fix for durability factor applying health incorrectly to blocks when changed.
• Fix for when damaging abandoned colony bases caused them to heal instead.
• Player character optimisations.
• Cleaned up duplicate foliage actors which were causing needless amounts of traffic on the server.
• Optimised foliage replication logic to improve server performance
• Cleaned up asset collisions to improve navigation.
• Removed unneeded AI volumes from outside playable area (should reduce load times slightly).
• Multiple multiplayer optimisations (this will be ongoing).
• Possible fix for sometimes walking on water (Jesus bug)
• Fix for being able to build underwater (it was a bug that you could).
• Fix for energy blade audio remaining on sometimes.
• Potential fix for persistent laser turret PFX.
• Fix for VR apps launching with the game when they shouldn’t.
• Fixed several bugs incorrect actor collisions and placements in the level.
• Fixed several places the player could get stuck.
• Fixed a bug where you could place Laser Posts on top of each other indefinitely
• UI memory optimisations for Dropbag UI in the UI Menu

See you in the fray!

– Team Flix