Giant space marbles and floating balls of fire! – Interstellar Rift Development Update 059

Today the final frontier expands with a nicer background. We are adding realistic distances within star systems as well as stars and planets. These new planets will now serve as points of interest where stations and more will spawn.

In addition to planets we are also taking the training wheels off the warp drive and allow you to accelerate up to 1.5 AU per second at warp factor 9. These new warp factors will be required in order to make your way around the new star systems. That said the faster you travel the more power you will require. As your power consumption in warp is now dependant on your ship’s mass as well as the warp factor at which you are traveling. We realise that these high speeds will make it easy to overshoot your targets. To help combat this, ships will automatically shift back to a lower warp factor the closer you get to a planet. That said you will be able to override this by simply accelerating again. But be warned, your ships are not rated for atmospheric flight, traveling straight into a planet or a star will damage and eventually destroy your ship.

For the time being we only have gas giants and stars as celestial bodies in Interstellar Rift, but we are looking to expand this to include rocky planets and moons as well as different types of stars.

But wait there’s more, we’ve also added several new server stability fixes, and updated the cockpit interface so it displays in which system you currently are and more!
As with most of the systems we implement these are not the final versions, and your feedback is much appreciated. So please feel free to let us know what you think of warp and planets so that we may improve upon them. For this very purpose we have made a patch 0.1.27 feedback thread on the steam forum where you can leave all your thoughts. Alternatively, please feel free to share your thoughts on our forums, Facebook or Twitter!

I’m giving her all she’s got! – Interstellar Rift Development Update – 059

Warp! the long awaited means of travel within a star system is finally here!

We’ve enabled all ships to travel at warp factor 1. This first implementation will allow players to travel at 50 kilometers per second. This will allow you to get around the current star systems more than easily. However it is not quite yet faster than light. The way the warp system is going to work is by granting you access to a total of 9 warp factors. Only the first of which will be available in this patch. In the following patch we will be enabling the rest of the warp factors when we implement real world scales and solar systems!

You can activate warp by clicking on the warp button in the helm after which the ship will start charging the warp drive. Once charged you will have 3 seconds before warp activates. Acceleration is instant and the speed is constant. In the next patch we hope to also implement a more smooth visual transition into warp. But the mechanic works as intended right now. Of Course we will greatly appreciate your thoughts on how you feel about our warp mechanic and we encourage you to post about it on the forums so that we may improve warp to best serve the game.

Take note that the power needed for warp (currently a mere 100 per tick or 2000 per second), will be drained from your helm, so make sure that it has an ample supply.

In addition to warp we have also revamped the teleporter gui’s they now display more ship names in the list. And the cargo teleporter also shows you how full your fuel tanks are when teleporting hydrogen directly into them. We hope that this new teleporter gui will make it easier to find your ship in crowded ports as well as make it easier to refuel your ships.

We’ve also made it possible for ship owners to give permission to crew and fleet members to manage the systems on your vessels. This means that you can now give your co-pilot access to enable and disable engines for example.

These past few weeks you may have noticed that servers have been crashing more than usual. We profusely apologize for this inconvenience. Sadly the problem that was causing this was not an easy fix. And it has taken us until now to get it under control. This patch should bring major stability improvements for servers! Although we admit that there might still be other issues and we appreciate it if you can report any of these issues on the forums so we can fix them ASAP.

We hope you enjoy this latest iteration of Interstellar Rift and please do let us know what you think about warp and its components. Feel free to share your thoughts on Facebook, Twitter and the forums!

– The Split Polygon team