Greetings Pioneers!

The first taste of experimental Multiplayer has arrived – You can now play with your friends by hosting your own servers!

If you already own Eden Star you should have access to the experimental branch as of now. This is an optional branch that you must physically opt-in to, meaning the previous stable build (v0.0.13) will remain in the main branch as default and you can choose whether to try the experimental builds. You may return to the main branch if you find the experimental branch too unstable and wish to go back. The experimental branch will contain the latest updates, but also the latest bugs, crashes and more. After hotfixes, the main branch will be updated when we feel it is stable enough.

Important information: Please read all of the below before you choose to opt-in!

If you wish to access the Experimental branch you need to do the following:

1. Open Steam and go to your games Library.
2. Right click on Eden Star in your list of games and select “Properties”.
3. Navigate to the “Betas” tab and select “Experimental” from the dropdown menu.
4. Close the properties window and your game will begin to update!
5. Done 🙂

If you wish to start a server for Eden Star, you can view our setup guide here

Please note single player saves from v0.0.13 and below will not work in the Experimental v0.1.0 branch!

If you think you may wish to return to the default branch, we recommend you backup your save files prior to switching.

(Found in: C:\Users\YourUsername\AppData\Local\EdenGame\Saved\SaveGames)

Currently there is a cap of 8 players for the number per server but we are looking to increase this in the future as we optimise the game further. As we continue over the next few weeks we will be hosting several development servers that you can join, please note that these will be wiped and updated regularly over the next month so don’t get too attached to your structures! Once we feel we’re ready to move things over into the main branch and have tested the build thoroughly and added a few new features.

We have made a guide for those of you wishing to host your own server that you can find here (please let us know your feedback!).

 

We must emphasise that this is a very early release of multiplayer!

• There will be intermittent crashes! please help us with these by posting anything you get with a screenshot of any crash dialog (white boxes with text in them) here to our bugs forum
• When mining rocks they will visually remain intact, but will still drop minerals.
• Rejoining a game and/or walking into an area where rocks were previously mined will result in those rocks seemingly being impervious to mining. Waiting 15 minutes should allow them to be mined again.
• There are no loading screens before you spawn in. You will see buildings load in around you and in rare instances this process can take several minutes, especially if the server has a substantial amount of structures already built on it. If you experience this it is best to either A: close the game and try rejoining fresh B: Move somewhere in the open and stand still in an area until everything appears to of loaded in around you.

We’re working to fix these major issues as a priority but for the most part we feel there is enough stability for people to start enjoying the multiplayer 🙂

There are still plenty of bugs to be found. Our latest Known Issues list has been updated for this release, please let us know if you find any not listed so we can look at fixing them for the next hotfix. 

We are really excited to be pushing this release out to you today and have been plowing some serious hours into getting it ready! We all feel that over the next week there should be a full backbone to allow us to FINALLY branch out into supporting the breadth of content that we want in Eden Star.

Patch Notes – v0.1.0 Experimental Branch

• Multiplayer!
• Added periodic drops of lootable Eden Kits from the sky.
• Added a new Deployment menu and multiple new spawn points to the map. Added new Post-Process visuals.
• Added new non-destructible procedural foliage/pebbles

• Enemy spawning logic rework – They now scale their attacks with your base defences, the presence of nearby hives and the number of players on a server.
• Turrets and Generators can no longer be placed on walls or ceilings.
• Added a Charge attack to the Swamp Walker
• Options Menu converted to UMG.
• Grass is now part of the Instanced Foliage System, which makes it more efficient.
• Changes to Material distribution system. Each source of materials now offers more variety of shards, in order to provide more choices when you get around to placing your blocks.
• Full balancing pass on Structure health.
• Removed Cubes to aid balancing of the game, let us know if you miss them!
• Added friendly fire on Utility blocks.
• Improved PFX for Auto Turrets. Also doubled rate of fire and halved damage.
• Much improved Skybox visuals (sky, clouds, planets, monoliths…). This also includes a pass over lighting, atmosphere and the Day/Night cycle.
• Refactored Foliage shader, including two-sided lighting, new opacity system and optimisations.
• Removed confirm dialogue for getting upgrades when you have enough materials.
• Modules/weapons auto-equip once constructed.
• Weapons and ammo can no longer be constructed outside the Eden Kit Bubble.
• Optimised water shader and fixed fog interaction for increased view distance.
• Improved Sac Plant interaction visuals.
• You can now grab the Cirrus Spore to immobilise it.

• Fixed being able to grab enemies after they’ve died or you moved out of range.
• Fixed the bottom part of foundations becoming invisible on Load.
• Fixed enemies still heading towards your base after sunrise.
• Fixed attacking a hive from a distance won’t always aggravate the enemies.
• Fixed rocks sometimes flickering during mining.
• Fixed players being able to push around some items in the world.
• Fixed a rare issue where the player’s mouse movement would get stuck.
• Fixed not being able to mantle onto doors

If you missed it in last week’s blog, these are some of the major features we will add as soon as possible for multiplayer:

Basic Character Customisation – At present all players will look exactly the same, besides the odd Splintermite shard if you’re unlucky 😉

Clans/Teams – In the first release we have angled the game towards co-op play. You will be able to snap-build to each other’s structures as well as sell other player’s structures. Friendly fire is however enabled and so currently players can kill each other and damage each other’s bases either accidentally or on purpose! We have already implemented a huge amount of the Colony system but have not yet activated it.

The Colony system will provide the ability to set up your own Colony with different ownership rules of buildings under an Eden Kit Shield. When it comes to built structures, we also have implemented the ability to assign roles to stop both outsiders and certain team members from being able to sell your structures. Anyone not in your Colony will also be targeted by your turrets as an enemy, currently Turrets will only target AI in the first release.

Multiplayer Smash – Only one player at a time will be able to hold an enemy, we are looking to change this in the future as well as add the ability to smash other players.

Trading – We intend to split out all Eden Kit inventories as well as adding further storage containers for players to stockpile and also trade with other players. Currently the player does not spawn an inventory to access, but this will soon be amended allowing players to loot corpses and other players inventories if you want your server set-up in a PvP manner.

Frontend Server Admin – This will be added to enable simple interaction with the server to issue boot commands and fully access any aspects of the server that you wish to change with ease, currently everything goes through a “black-box” interface, external to the game client.

Communication – To begin with there will be no in-game text chat or voice communication, players can use Steam Voice Chat (see this guide) or another external application of their choice to talk to their friends.

To see what we are working on right now, be sure to check out our Public Trello Board.

Thanks for your continued support.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix

 

Greetings Pioneers!

The release of the experimental branch of multiplayer is imminent! Soon you will be able to play with your friends and host your own servers.

The plan for the next week is as follows;

• Release of the Experimental branch via Steam – don’t worry, this will be accessible by everyone who currently has access to Eden Star and we will explain how to access this when launched
• Eden Star will require a dedicated server in order to play in multiplayer and therefore we will immediately enable players to host their own dedicated servers with a complete, step by step guide on how to do so
• Initially, whilst we test external servers, we do not intend to host our own community servers, but once we are happy with performance tests we can look into spinning up community servers for those of you without the capability of hosting their own
• Initially, there will be a cap of 8 players per server but we will be looking to increase this in the future as we optimise the game further
• Beyond multiplayer, the experimental branch will have no major new gameplay features added (yet!). There have been a huge amount of changes behind the scenes to optimise the game and get everything ready for a host of updates, including the new map (not yet released), and a host of new enemies that we have planned.

New features to expect beyond multiplayer;

• There will be a new enemy spawn system that will help us balance the game specific to how large your base, vs. number of players, vs. number of hives etc. Any feedback on this would be great!
• The HP of all buildings has been vastly improved ready for multiplayer

Please note: Saves from v0.0.13 and below will not work when v0.1.0 (Multiplayer) is uploaded to Steam!

These are some of the major features we will add as soon as possible for multiplayer:

Basic Character Customisation – At present all players will look exactly the same, besides the odd Splintermite shard if you’re unlucky 😉

Clans/Teams – In the first release we have angled the game towards co-op play. You will be able to snap-build to each other’s structures as well as sell other player’s structures. Friendly fire is however enabled and so currently players can kill each other and damage each other’s bases either accidentally or on purpose! We have already implemented a huge amount of the Colony system but have not yet activated it.

The Colony system will provide the ability to set up your own Colony with different ownership rules of buildings under an Eden Kit Shield. When it comes to built structures, we also have implemented the ability to assign roles to stop both outsiders and certain team members from being able to sell your structures. Anyone not in your Colony will also be targeted by your turrets as an enemy, currently Turrets will only target AI in the first release.

Multiplayer Smash – Only one player at a time will be able to hold an enemy, we are looking to change this in the future as well as add the ability to smash other players.

Trading – We intend to split out all Eden Kit inventories as well as adding further storage containers for players to stockpile and also trade with other players. Currently the player does not spawn an inventory to access, but this will soon be amended allowing players to loot corpses and other players inventories if you want your server set-up in a PvP manner.

Frontend Server Admin – This will be added to enable simple interaction with the server to issue boot commands and fully access any aspects of the server that you wish to change with ease, currently everything goes through a “black-box” interface, external to the game client.

Communication – To begin with there will be no in-game text chat or voice communication, players can use Steam Voice Chat (see this guide) or another external application of their choice to talk to their friends.

We are still working hard on expanding the player arsenal, with the modular weapon system, including Sniper Rifle, Kinetic Shotgun and various scope attachments etc. In addition to this we have the new 8km map (with mountains, rivers and lakes), and Juggernaut sized enemies that we want to implement as soon as possible in order to start to expand the current game content.

There are many more things planned for future updates; new enemies, new utilities, character customisation, upgrades, combo moves and a full progression system. All of which we hugely value your feedback on, so please check out our Public Trello Board.

Huge thank you to the growing community for all of your support!

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix

Greetings Pioneers!

It has been a week of major bug fixing and massive optimisation of both singleplayer and multiplayer experiences. It’s been great to test a new server every day to see the improvements in performance, reduction of lag and more relevant things replicating over the network. There are still many outstanding bugs that we would like to get through before release, but we thank you for your patience, it will be with you as soon as possible!

Here is a breakdown of what the team have been working on this week:

John – Lead Designer

This week we have been reviewing the whole (pretty non-existent) learning curve of the game, i.e. we understand that at the moment the difficulty is far too steep, and then the difficulty plateaus almost immediately for advanced FPS players. Meaning, that we intend to work in a full progression system that could fundamentally change your initial loadout in the game.

This also will affect the ways that enemies spawn and the difficulty of each encounter with a “notoriety” style system, e.g. GTA’s “star” system, meaning that when you attack weaker enemies, you gain notoriety until larger, more lethal enemies appear – this would keep all biomes in the game replayable but open to players of all levels of progression.

Alongside this, we have been reviewing enemy drops/rewards for killing enemies and how these will translate to whether you want to pursue notoriety in order to take on the larger enemies, vs. running away to survive, upgrade and then attempt to encounter them again.

All of this is a huge design task as it also ties into either a “gain XP to achieve a ‘level’, which in-turn unlocks ‘skill points’ to be spent  on schematics/upgrades” style progression system, OR “gain/find/research an ‘item’ and spend the ‘item’ to unlock a schematic/upgrade” style progression system… an exciting but tough fundamental design choice! Feedback and questions are very welcome 🙂

Chris – Designer

I’ve been doing a lot of level cleanup work within our larger world map, mainly consisting of tidying stray assets. I’ve been fixing a lot of view distance and streaming issues with larger rocks and terrain as well as you can see from the image I’ve included, it’s getting there!

Tristan – Senior Developer

This week I have been working on multiplayer bugs, profiling and optimisations for the server to try and get it running as quick as possible. So far so good 🙂 We have tested 6 player servers comfortably on the current minimum spec PC’s (running them as a server), whilst pushing towards 8-16 players as our current stable target.

Yves – Senior Developer

Been squeezing as much performance as I can get out of the server and looking into Steam support to allow players to connect to a server via Steam – this will be my core focus next week as we are possibly looking to host our own dedicated servers via key partners in the experimental alpha phase of multiplayer.

Ricky – Developer

I’ve been working on the higher priority bugs and crashes and keeping up with you on our forums to make sure any issues are looked into. More specifically looking into weapons not firing or equipping correctly. We now have issues with Single Player after certain key optimisations have been implemented and so next week I will be looking to finish off passworded servers (for players who wish to host their own dedicated servers) and some of the single player issues.

Joe – Environment Artist

After finishing the low resolution mesh for distant landscape I finished some test assets for our new hive visuals! I’ve also been creating initial meshes for our Underwater biome (!) as well as smaller jobs such as finalising the ground visuals for the Swamp biome and optimising our non-interactive foliage.

Tom – Character Artist

I’ve been finalizing the jellyfish! Also assisting the lovely concept artists Simone and Gav with many new creature designs and began early sculpting on the stalker!

Lauren – Animator

I have been working on a few different things this week including implementing IKA Viper animations, setting up its blends and states in blueprint. Implementing new enemy sounds, making tweaks to the weapon animations, finishing up the 3rd person Sniper Rifle animations, debugging animation replication problems and testing multiplayer.

Marcin – Designer

Unfortunately I don’t have much exciting news this time around. I’ve spent my week reporting crashes, profiling and optimising the server performance with the development team, as well as looking into improving the navigation system and character progression in the future.

Gav & Simone – Concept Artists

Once again this week we’ve been giving some love to the creatures of the world, working closely with our character artist Tom before approaching John, for a green light for Tom to start modelling. The main influences for the stalker are “Xenomorphs/Tyranid” style creatures, creating something fast moving and lethal which will then mean that we can nurf some of the current creatures in the world and create a more appropriate learning curve to combat.

The ultimate goal of the current concepts are to push towards expanding the amount of Juggernaut size enemies once the first one is released, to allow smaller enemies to compliment the Juggernauts  during enemy base attacks and player attacks on much larger enemy hives.

Matt – Art Director

Back from depths of a Volcano, I’m now working through some new hero assets. Including a stripped down version of the MATA-Tool which will become a basic starting variant in the future, and I’ll be blocking out one of our new armor set designs in the coming week. Really looking forward to the implementation stages in particular, as the armor will also be setup with some colour customisation in mind.

Lee – Technical Director

I’ve been doing some work towards server optimisation this week and testing how many players we can get on a server. I’ve also started work on a new spawning system for the enemy AI at night which will allow us more control of how many get spawned depending on a number of variables in the world.

This will also balance the game as the enemies that spawn to attack you of an evening will specifically be based upon the size and defences of your base, vs. also taking into account the number of players associated with the base and if they are online at the time of attack.

Andy – Lead QA

Andy is in bed with the flu this week, get well soon!

 

See you in the fray!

– Team Flix