Patching her up! – Interstellar Rift Development Update 061

Aug 29, 2016

The past weeks we have been working on a new system that will allow a ship’s individual systems to be damaged and destroyed. This will add more depth to combat as well as introduce interesting new scenarios that players can find themselves in. With the exception of ship’s engines every device on a ship can be broken, from a door to a refinery everything can be destroyed. When a device has been damaged it will have decreased performance. And when a device is completely destroyed most of them will stop functioning altogether. Devices can become damaged when your ship takes hull damage. Which of your devices get damaged is dependant on where bullets or other objects impact your ship and the location of the device.

There are currently two ways to repair your devices, the first is by going to a station equipped with a Store-o-Tron or a HydroPEX service kiosk. The second one is by using the Logicorp C51 Repair Tool. This nifty tool allows you to repair broken devices by firing a beam of raw materials and repair nanites at the devices. This tool requires ammo canisters to power the device, both of these can be built in the 3d printer. Additionally the repair tool also has a plasma cutter that allows you to damage devices.

The repair tool has a resource cost of 100 iron, 50 copper and 25 silicon.

The repair tool ammo has a resource cost of 25 copper and 25 iron.

The repair tool also marks the first step into the implementation of our FPS system, currently you will not be able to kill other players with it. But this will allow us to test the underlying item systems and animations. Also you will not be able to see other players hold these repair tools because our current character models do not support these animations yet. However we are currently working on new character models which are nearing completion which will support these new animations so look forward to seeing new female and male character models very soon.

Additionally we have also been doing more work under the hood and you should see a significant improvement with loading times and a reduced number of hiccups when flying around. Note that saving the server will still cause a hiccup. There is also a very small hiccup when dropping out of warp near a large number of ships. Work on server performance will continue to be an ongoing battle which we have no intention of giving up on.

We have also added a significant number of new window types that will let you be more creative with your ships, there are more to come!

A new feedback thread will be up where we hope you’ll let us know your thoughts on the new repair tool and ship damage, please note that device health and gun damage and repair rate are still in heavy need of balancing so feel free to let us know what you think.

Thank you all for playing and if you want to stay up to date with all Interstellar Rift news you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook or you’re free to leave your thoughts on our forums! We hope you’ll enjoy this new update and we’ll see you starside!

– The Split Polygon Team

Updating the editor – Interstellar Rift Development Update 060

Aug 09, 2016

This week we are bringing in a new set of stability fixes, as well as some much needed improvements to some already implemented systems. Beginning with the rift generators. We have implemented a means for you to search for the system you want to travel to. This should make finding your destination star system a bit easier. Note we are still looking at a route planner for the rift generator which will likely come in a later update.

Next, we have a revamp of the Ship editor UI. Since we started on IR, the editor has changed significantly and over the course of the past year we have added in features that the UI simply wasn’t built for and thus they have somewhat been bolted on. And has resulted in a somewhat disjointed editor where some obvious but necessary features were overlooked.

This new editor UI, while still incomplete, will leave room for us to further improve it and add new features without destroying the intended aesthetic. It will also work better on higher resolutions as the UI is fully scaleable.

This is the first step in a series of editor improvements we will be doing over several updates, where we will add new features and further streamline the design and workflow. And as with all our new features your input in this would be greatly appreciated!

In addition we have also made some significant stability fixes to both the client and servers which should result in overall better performance and and fewer crashes. While improving stability and performance is an ongoing process, we hope this update will be a significant step forward in making the game much more enjoyable to play, at least from a performance standpoint.

Also in an effort to better inform you guys we have added in an RSS reader in the menu which will always link to the latest patch notes and significant news about Interstellar Rift

Finally, we have also added some new props to decorate your ships with.

During the last patch we have introduced the use of a centralised feedback thread on the Steam forums to help us condense the feedback about a particular patch in one central location. And we feel that this was successful enough to keep it going. So if you have feedback you wish to convey please do so in the new patch 0.1.28 feedback thread located here:

Steam Forums

– The Split Polygon Team