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
