Greetings Pioneers!

We hope you’re enjoying the new inventory, thank you to all the feedback and bugs you’ve been reporting. This week we have been working on a hotfix for a few of the issues left over or found since the last release.

We’re also releasing a couple of new shapes of stairs for the primitives category. You can now build L and U shaped stair pieces to reach higher places without taking up as much space horizontally! We’ve also been cracking on with the next sprint, scroll down to find out what we’ve been up to.

Important: If you are running a server from the previous version you will need to update it to the latest one to run with v0.1.9 .

Changelist –

• Added L shaped and U shaped staircase Primitives.

• Ikas and Ika Vipers now also drop Plasmafire on death, so it’s not only the Splintermites that are valuable to kill. We are still considering what kind of reward to give for interacting with other creatures. If you have interesting ideas, we’d love to hear them!
• In your Inventory UI, we made the items you have equipped (in the Loadout Column on the bottom of the UI) not also appear as duplicates in the Inventory Column.
• Removed the Materialise Module and Baton from being a craftable Schematics in the Armoury, you always start with them anyway.
• Removed the approximate aim at structures to access them in the menu, now you must have direct line of sight and be looking straight at any point on the Item from with a certain range. This is cheaper and less error prone.
• Roughly doubled the number of neutral creatures and random flora that spawn in the world. In addition, Vogel and Sac Plants now spawn in barren areas.
• Added sound effects to the Armoury while Crafting is in progress.
• Upgrade Column in the UI will switch Upgrade Tree’s when you select a new item in the Inventory
• Slightly darkened the UI backing to be less transparent
• Modified weapon spread and moving weapon spread to go with new weapon spread fixes

• Fixed large memory leak in the game to do with Ikas
• Fixed issue where upgraded Eden Kits returned to level 0 upon reloading.
• Fixed issue where upgraded Eden Kits do not update the power level.
• Fixed AI spawning issue in multiplayer.
• Fixed Enemy Arrows remaining on screen permanently when you die
• Fixed a bug where you could drag an item in the UI, then while holding the mouse button close the UI. This would leave the item being dragged on screen and leave you unable to use your Weapons
• Fixed the UI not refreshing when equipping/unequipping items sometimes in multiplayer
• Fixed the UI menu amount of Items in your Inventory not updating when Activating upgrades or crafting Schematics.
• Fixed the Description Column (right of the UI Menu) not refreshing your held Item amounts after Crafting
• Fixed UI bug for Activated upgrades not displaying their green highlights when first opening the Upgrade Menu.
• Fixed Upgrade Menu not displaying the correct amount of dots.
• Fixed a few bugs to do with equipping/unequipping in the UI by dragging directly out of your Loadout/equipped items column
• Fixed an issue causing one of the two Lockboxes build in the same grid cell to be inaccessible.
• Fixed when mining at a distance, pfx would appear at the end of the mine range even though it hits nothing
• Fixed an issue preventing placing walls on the sides of the Armoury.
• Fixed a small audio bug with the exploding Sac, that was causing it to cut off when it got destroyed.
• Fixed HUD indicator for minerals gathered not showing in multiplayer.
• Fixed HUD amounts gathered variable value displaying double.
• Fixed single player starting inventory to include the Pistol.
• Fixed weird jitter bug when walking backwards.
• Fixed another jitter bug (yes that song’s now in your head), when crafting several items at once, the background progress spinner would sometimes misbehave by either flickering, remaining full permanently or resetting to 0 depending on the configuration.
• Fixed the build menu radial wheel not remembering your last selected item correctly.
• Fix for when dropping a bag, you could add more items to it than the Dropbag can hold.
• Fixed Revert all Keybindings button not reverting the UI Menu key to I, but to Tab instead
• Fixed in the UI that Lockboxes and Dropbags bith were named “Lockbox” in the column tabs
• Fixed UI close buttons not working anytime after the first time you open the menu within a session
• Fixed closing the menu while having a popup open left the ui onscreen during gameplay
• Fixed handbob not working correctly on some weapons, and it’s readded to reticles on the Tool
• Fixed logic for weapon spread on all the weapons
• Fixed issue where weapon spread was not increasing while moving
• Fixed issue with gauss gun upgrade making weapon spread non existent
• Fixed being able to melee hit really fast
• Fixed issue with being able to deal double melee damage when pressing two melee buttons

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

John – Lead Designer

If you have been following our Twitter feed :: @EdenStarGame you will have seen that I attended SXSW festival :: http://www.sxsw.com/interactive/awards/gaming as Eden Star had been nominated for the Best Single Player game award.

I had an amazing time meeting people and playing the latest release of Eden Star, plus a whole host of other amazing indie games and a few bands (looking at you – StarBomb! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdeZgmg0wTE ). I also had the privilege to be asked to talk on multiple stages including joining the guys from Twitch to reveal some of the guys latest work on the Juggernaut Class enemy type!

So this week have been working with the guys to organise the next big leap forward which will be our next Milestone which will encompass many things including the Survival Mechanics, additional Neutral Fauna (and drops from the Fauna), and our first steps towards how we will drive game tutorials and Objectives…

Matt – Art Director

Many LOD models were created this day, infact over the last several days. Polygons were sacrificed for the greater good of framerate, and the optimisation gods are now smiling.. Below this image gives you a rough idea of how many pieces I’ve had to make for one of our build sets, and each piece required at least one, sometimes two LOD models. *Wipes sweat from brow* IT IS DONE.

Lee – Technical Director

Lee’s A.I. has outgrown it’s original parameters and developed the desire to abduct him and subject him to the repetitive logic that governs their livelihood. His last recorded whereabouts are unknown…

Tristan – Senior Developer

This week I have been working on bugs of all shapes and sizes. Namely in the new inventory system, melee and the weapons spread. I have also been fixing up some major memory leaks that we finally managed to track down to the Ikas. Darn AI. Can’t trust them as far as you can throw em 😉

Yves – Senior Developer

All types of bug fixes, but looking forward to working on some new features next week.

Ricky – Developer

Checking over all the bugs from Steam, Trello and elsewhere and fixing the funk out of them. Alot of little annoying bugs made it into the last release so they got a good look at. Now we can move on and look forward to planning the next stream of lovely new features based on your feedback and our own opinions of the important next steps. It will be interesting to see, dattebayo!

Marcin – Designer

The intensity of work on the Juggernaut is now over 9000. I’ve been on it pretty much constantly since last week, if there was nothing to fix for the v0.1.8 or 9, of course, and we are making good progress. The destructible armour is in, the ability to grab and smash its legs is too. Weak spots are getting there and I am just ironing out the technical foundations for climbing on the Juggernaut’s back.

There is still plenty to do, however. All the attacks need proper implementations and visuals and we need tweaks to the behaviours and animations. This is easily the most complex thing I have so far worked on and I can’t wait until it’s fully playable.

Joe – Environment Artist

After our last release I went back to the ‘Elephant’ neutral creature to get the mesh, textures and visuals done and ready for animation! Once he was polished up I worked on a few other left over bits and pieces with the Cybermancer armour pieces, minor UI fixes and some tweaks to the numbers of Flora/Fauna in the world. You should see the latter in the coming hotfix 🙂

I’ve now moved back onto our new map, looking over what still needs doing before we unleash it upon you all…

Tom – Character Artist

I’m scheming up plans for the near future! I will also be starting on some smaller neutral creatures very soon! Stay tuned!

Lauren – Animator

This week I have been mostly helping out with testing the latest releases and fixing some minor bugs. I have also been rigging up the new weapon part meshes from the modelling machine that is Matt Clark. Next task will be to rig up the ‘elephant’ beasty ready for animation.

Simone – Concept Artist

Hi Everyone! This week I’ve been working on concepts for a fuel cell that will be used to power different objects within the game, as well as a water tank for housing your water supply.

Andy – Lead QA

Our main focus this week was the hotfix. Tidying up as many issues as we could which meant my week was spent talking to you guys on the Steam forums and writing up the issues you found as well as any additional ones that myself or the guys in the studio found. From then I spent the week testing the fixes the guys had put in.

See you in the fray!

-Team Flix