Tabula Rasa – Interstellar rift development update 52

Since we started development of Interstellar rift we have had a bit of a problem with the game’s first impression. We spawn you on an unknown station and then we left you to your fate in the hopes that you’d figure out what you were supposed to do. With patch 0.1.19 we hope to start to remedy that. Today when you join a server or start a game, you will be asked what you would like your starting role to be.

We have given you 4 options that we feel would best represent what you will be doing. When picking one of these roles you will be given access to starting resources and the option of purchasing a starting ship at the Store-o-Tron.

The first of these options is to ally yourself with the galactic trade network. You have likely seen the trade kiosks on stations in the past. This organization prides itself on commerce. The acquisition of goods and commodities to trade and sell on one of the many galactic trade hubs. When joining the galactic trade network you will be given access to some resources and a cargo hauling vessel with which you can start on your mercantile journeys. Your journey will begin on a GT trade hub

The second option is to join the ranks of the Hurles co. miners. Hurles co is massive conglomerate whose many endeavours can’t have escaped your notice in the world of Interstellar Rift. By joining Hurles co. you will gain access to a small mining vessel as well as some starting resources and money. Your journey will begin on a Hurles co. Industrial complex.

The third option is to join the proud and mighty ranks of the Sentinel Security Systems Corporation. This weapons manufacturer and private military force provides security and local law enforcement in the vast reaches of space. By joining Sentinel Security Systems you will gain access to a small fighter some money and starting resources. Your journey will begin onboard Fort Bragg

And last but not least the fourth option is that of the Drifters. This lawless faction is not so much a faction as it is a collection of free spirited individuals that would rather do as they please than to be locked to a single role. Choosing this faction will give you a set of resources and access to a ship construction terminal. Your journey will begin onboard the Black Pit station.

In addition to the new starting locations we also made some changes to the ship movement system. We have completely overhauled the way we do ship movement in preparation for our upcoming ship AI. However that said we need your input. Because our new system is extremely physics driven there are going to be several iterations to get it to a point where the flight model feels enjoyable so please let us know what you think of this new ship movement and feel free to share any suggestions that you feel would improve the way ships handle.

An added bonus of this new system is that we can now display how fast a ship will go in the editor, as well as its turn rate. Allowing you greater control over fine tuning your ship designs.

Another feature we’ve added that has been a long time coming is the ability to respawn on nearby friendly ships and stations. Before you were only able to respawn on your own ship or the starter station. Now if you have friends nearby like someone in your crew or fleet you will be given the option to spawn there as well. Ofcourse these ships do need to have a molecular printer onboard in order to allow you to respawn.
Well that’s it for this week, we hope you enjoy this new update and as always please let us know what you think on our forums facebook or twitter. And we will be back in two weeks with another Interstellar Rift update. We’ve got some big things in the pipeline so stay tuned!

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Hack your way through – Interstellar Rift development Update 051

Time for another Interstellar Rift update, This time we’ve included a highly requested feature, shared vaults. For a long time you guys have been requesting more co-op features when it comes to the collection of resources. Well from now on you will be able to share a vault inventory with your fleet and crew mates. You’ll notice a new button on the vault screen called “personal” If you’re in a fleet or crew you will be able to click this button and switch to the fleet/crew vault. Storing resources or items in here will make them available to everyone in your crew/fleet that has vault permissions. Vault permissions can be given by any member of the fleet which has the appropriate permissions to do so. With this functionality we also updated the ship construction terminal, on the top screen in the upper right you can now find a button that allows switching between which vault you want to construct your ship from.

But wait there’s more, as mentioned above we’ve also added in the ability to form crews. These small crew groups will allow you to form a short co-op group with other players. You will also have access to the crew vault so you can easily gather resources together to build a ship.

In addition to the shared vaults we have also added in a new cyber warfare mechanic. In the ship editor you’ll find the new cyber warfare suite. This device is the centre of both your ship’s defensive and offensive capabilities.

Using specialised chipsets which you will be able to find and craft you can assault ships and stations by reducing their engine output. Unlocking their teleporters and more. However you will also be able to sacrifice offensive capabilities to bolster your own firewall. This will make it more difficult for attackers to gain access to your ship’s systems and reduce or disable their effectiveness. However using these hacking chipsets will slowly consume them, and once the cartridge break you will no longer be able to use it.

We have also reworked a lot of the permission mechanics, you now need appropriate diplomatic standing with several factions to use their stations and facilities. This works within a station as well, where certain areas are no longer accessible unless you have a good reputation.

Teleporters now by default only grant access to the owner of a ship. If you want to give other people access to your ship you can either give them permission individually or have them join your crew or fleet for easy access. Onboard systems still require special permission to use however.   

Additionally, we have reworked some of the GUI’s concerning power usage. You can now track the power usage of your ship in real time.

Finally, we’ve also added a new weapon to our arsenal in the ongoing war on bugs. We now have the ability to log bugs and crashes automatically. This will allow us to track when there are crashes and it will hopefully make it easier for us to find their cause. This data is gathered anonymously but if you do not wish to be tracked you can turn this function off in the options menu.

We hope you enjoy this new patch and as always, if you would like to know more or would like sneak previews of upcoming features and patches please follow us on Twitter, Facebook and our own and Steam forums.

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Your reputation precedes you – Interstellar Rift development Update 050

This week we have added combat mode to the game, this means that you can now turn your weapon systems on and off in the cockpit. You can also do this with “H” default. When out of combat mode the ship weapons will not use any power. But while they are active they will use a lot more power than usual. This will lead to more diverse gameplay and decision making with creating ships.

Combat mode is also partially added to avoid unnecessary conflict after an accidental weapon discharge. Because this update brings part two of our reputation, factions and fleet mechanics:

You can now gain reputation with factions, there are currently 5 factions in the game:

• Hurles Co.
• HydroPEX
• LogiCorp
• Sentinel Security Systems
• VaulTron
  

Attacking these factions will decrease your reputation with them, lowered reputation will give you trading penalties and have the faction be hostile towards you. But attacking a faction might give you reputation with a rival faction. Hurles Co. has a rivalry with Sentinel Security Systems. Attacking Hurles Co. will make Sentinel Security Systems friendly with you and Hurles Co. themselves unfriendly. When you are unfriendly or worse with a faction you can pay a bounty or wait for your reputation to slowly get restored to 0. Only negative reputation will decay back to 0.

In future updates, there will be more ways to gain and lose reputation in the form of missions, combat scenarios and more.

Cartridges have been rebalanced, they will now only give one negative and one positive buff to your ship’s stats. The positive buff has been greatly increased to be more useful as a counter to this cartridges now have a lifespan between 2 to 4 hours. When the cartridge is not in use it does not decay. We felt this was a necessary change to make the use of cartridges more viable. For example in a combat scenario you can now temporarily boost your weapons and shields with a substantial amount, instead of having a constant bonus that was almost neglectable.  

We hope you enjoy this new patch and as always, if you would like to know more or would like sneak previews of upcoming features and patches please follow us on Twitter, Facebook and our own and Steam forums.

Message for you Sire! – Interstellar Rift development Update 049

With this update we are introducing the first parts of our fleet mechanics. For now this only means that you can set up your own fleet and invite people to join your fleet through the new message system.

As we expand on the features of the fleet mechanics we will allow you to set a capital ship, have shared vaults for fleet members, set automatic permissions for ranks in your fleet, and more.

We changed the GRIP around to incorporate these new features, the new message system allows you to send messages to other players in an email like fashion, and will tie into a lot of the fleet managing systems we are implementing.

The engineers at Sentinel Security Systems have been improving their targeting software since the weapon systems were released some time ago, This past week they finally found the time to fix some of the issues which were plaguing the manned turret and their forward mounted counterparts.The weapon systems now converge towards the ship’s centre crosshair. Also thanks to a breakthrough in momentum prediction technology the helm’s now displays a lead indicator on all targeted ships to better assist you in your combat activities.

Additional new advances in smart weapons have progressed to the point where weapons can now automatically aim for targets if the crosshair is close enough. This new “auto aim” feature is still being tested and would greatly benefit from your feedback.

The ship editor has also received some improvements, One of the most requested features since the start of Interstellar Rift’s development has been implemented. Click & drag to build rooms is now available in the editor. Simply hold left mouse button while in room mode and drag across the screen to create a new room. The maximum room size you can make in a single drag is 10×10 tiles.  

There are some other small improvements to the ship editor:

• When the right mouse button is pressed outside of your ship you will deselect the currently selected prop/system and allow you to create new rooms.
• The camera can now be rotated by holding the left alt and moving the mouse.
• You can now use the + and – buttons to zoom in or out while in the editor.
• You can now scroll in the editor content browser.

We have rebalanced the large hydrogen tank to make it cheaper in resource cost and weight, this means that the large hydrogen tank will be more efficient in weight and resource cost than the small hydrogen tanks. Additionally the jukebox now costs resources.

The trade stands in the game will now have a friendly robot to serve you, he is the vendor at the stand. The small teleporter has a new sound when charging.

We hope you enjoy this new patch and as always, if you would like to know more or would like sneak previews of upcoming features and patches please follow us on twitter, facebook and our own and steam forums.

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There be gold in dem roids! – Interstellar Rift development Update 048

LogiCorp has once again developed a new piece of hardware, this new device is a 3D printer that will let you create your own cartridges, these are the cartridges that will go into the data cores that were introduced with the last update. The 3d printer will use newly introduced rare resources such as gold, silver and more. The crack team of LogiCorp engineers have also made modifications to your ship’s sensors as well as the extractor, to allow you to find and mine these new minerals.
Different resources create different cartridges, you will have to find out what resource is needed for which Upgrade and how to make the best cartridge you need! Gold and silicon are needed to make a default cartridge.

The 3D printer will come into play a lot more in upcoming updates. Right now it is only able to make ship upgrade cartridges but this machine will be used for more players items such as weapons and tools in the future.

 

Additionally, we have also added some brand new effects to the main menu and loading screens.

This update we have also been hard at work on improving performance and fixing bugs. Players might have noticed that we were extensively testing on the Split Polygon server and we are sorry for any inconvenience this might have caused over the past week. However, it did help us improve the game’s quality. The game should now run smoother in general and we have removed some of the lag spikes and memory leaks that were present. However like any game in alpha stage this is an ongoing process. Therefore we would like to ask the players to keep posting about any issues and they encounter on the forum. We run into quite a few ourselves but it’s impossible to account for every hardware combination and settings so any feedback in this regard that you are willing to provide will help us make a much more stable and enjoyable game.

We hope you enjoy this new patch and as always, if you would like to know more or would like sneak previews of upcoming features and patches please follow us on Twitter, Facebook and our own and Steam forums.

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Getting an upgrade! – Interstellar Rift development Update 047

A happy new year to all of the longtime players and the new players that have come in during the holiday sale!

During the christmas and new year holidays the employees of Logicorp have been working hard on some new hardware that will improve your ship’s performance in many different ways. These new systems are the data core terminals and data core expansion bays. These systems will need data cartridges to work, which you can find randomly on stations, these cartridges hold the upgrades to your ship, you can add a cartridge to your data core terminal to make them active. Each data core terminal starts with 2 open slots, you can increase this to a maximum of 8 by building data core expansion bays, each bay will allow for 1 more cartridge in the data core terminal when assigned to a data core terminal.

Upgrades can vary from faster refine speeds, to engine upgrades or faster shield regeneration. Upgrades stack with each other and can completely turn the performance of your ship around.

The cockpit software has also received another update, the cockpit will now alert you when you are on a crash course. When you are sitting in the cockpit the crash course alert will occur 5 seconds before impact, when you are not sitting in the cockpit the crash course alert will occur 30 seconds before impact. We have also greatly improved the shields, as we found with the addition of point defense drones, shields did far too little to stop the incoming projectiles. Both shields have received a very substantial buff. See the patch notes for more details.

We have added a new feature where cargo will now add mass to your ship, this means that when you are hauling a lot of cargo your speed calculation will be different and make your ship slower and harder to turn around.

Lastly, You can now turn more systems on or off using your GRIP tool, such as power batteries and power cells. This gives players more control over the in and out-flow of electricity between systems.

We hope you enjoy this new patch and as always, if you would like to know more or would like sneak previews of upcoming features and patches please follow us on twitter, facebook and our own and steam forums.

 

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Santa’s Workshop – Interstellar Rift development Update 046

Workshop support was on a lot of wish lists as a requested feature for Interstellar Rift, and today the shipyard will open to allow ship and station sharing!

You can access the Steam Workshop from the store page, ships that you subscribe to are downloaded right away and available ingame in seconds! Ships will automatically show up in the load menu of the ship editor and in your available ships in the ship editor terminal. To delete ships simply unsubscribe from them on the workshop page.

In the options menu of the ship editor you can now find a new menu that will open up the Steam Workshop exporter. Here you are able to set several options for your files and add tags, descriptions and a default screenshot.

Also in this patch, the software engineers at SenCorp have upgraded your cockpit software. In this new update you can target your enemies or any point of interest. You can do this by pressing “T” (default key), doing this will select the closest point of interest it can find, when the targeting button is pressed again the targeting system will continue on to the point of interest that is closest after the first one. The maximum range of targeting any point or object of interest is 4 kilometres.

When you’ve found the right enemy to target and are done annihilating the enemy ship, the wreckage will now leave scrap behind to salvage, that is if you have a salvager!

However, not all ships will give the same resources, for example, a ship that was created without silicon and does not have silicon on board will not give any scrap that can be salvaged into silicon. With your salvaging system you will receive scrap from a certain resource, this scrap can be refined into the resource in the refinery. using the salvager you will also be able to reclaim crates that have been ejected from other ships as well as beacons.

Our friends at HydroPEX have designed a new type of station. The refueling station, this is a station that you can randomly encounter in space and will allow you to buy vast amounts of hydrogen, these stations will also allow you to repair your ship while on your travels!

We hope you enjoy this new patch and as always, if you would like to know more or would like sneak previews of upcoming features and patches please follow us on twitter, facebook and our own and Steam forums.

 

From all of us at Split Polygon, happy holidays and we look forward to bringing a lot of new content to Interstellar Rift in the new year!

P.S. The next patch will be in three weeks instead of two, due to a holiday break!

Scanning for enemies – Interstellar Rift development Update 045

Today, we introduce the basics of PvE in Interstellar Rift. From now on, when you explore the galaxy and stumble upon an asteroid field, you might find that it will be defended by drones. The further one gets from the spawning area, the higher this chance will be. So raise your shields and stock up on ammo, they will be packing a punch.

If your ship happens to get damaged, you are now able to repair your ship at your nearest Store-o-Tron terminal for a fee.

Additionally, you will now be able to scan the universe for resources. If your ship is equipped with sensors (these can be built in the exterior part of the ship editor), you can set it to find resources from the main terminal on your cockpit. Each scanner you add to your ship will give your ship more scanning strength. Scanning strength will reduce static on your scanners and let you scan further away from your ship. You can set which resources you want to scan for, or just look for all of them at the same time!

To make your travels easier, the company supplying the ship construction terminal and the refinery has improved their design and reworked their looks. There’s no need to worry you don’t need to do a thing, as soon as you log on again they have already been replaced by the Hurles co. engineers, yes they even went into your own ships and replaced them there, creepy! These engineers have also installed new software on all systems that show resources, with resource icons to create more symmetry across all GUI’s.

We have also added a new tutorial button to the main menu. When clicked, you will enter a preliminary version of the tutorial. We are listening to player feedback for this tutorial to find out how to make the game easier to understand for new players.

Finally, we’ve added a couple of little things. For instance, server owners can now set a welcome message on their servers, scrolling through your inventory should no longer skip items, and brand new mining station.

We hope you enjoy this new patch and as always, if you would like to know more or would like sneak previews of upcoming features and patches please follow us on twitter, facebook and our own and steam forums.

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Colourful profits! – Interstellar Rift development Update 044

This week’s update will introduce the basis of trading and an ingame economy. The first part of this, which is introduced in this patch, is PVE trading. You will now be able to trade resources for U-nits with trade stands. These trade stands can be found on randomly spawned stations around the galaxy, and you can buy and sell a variety of resources at these stands. Resources will be taken from either your inventory or one of your ships, and the trade stand also teleports your purchases aboard a selected ship as part of the deal. Just walk up to any trade stand on a trade station and start selling.

We are going to add extra features to this system in upcoming updates, such as player vs player trading and selling ships to other players.

As part of the introduction of a currency we have rebalanced some resources to get a more normalized view on the trade stands. This means that water, oxygen and hydrogen crates now have 10 times less capacity. To account for this we rebalanced every device in the game that used these resources, to effectively balance it out to the same ratios as before.

The second major mechanic we have added is exterior painting, you can now personalize your ship even more by adding colour to the exterior. There are 32 colours to choose from and every individual piece can be painted separately. So start colouring and don’t hesitate to show us your new designs!

We hope you enjoy this new patch and as always, if you would like to know more or would like sneak previews of upcoming features and patches please follow us on Twitter, Facebook and our own and Steam forums.

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Don’t get cocky kid! – Interstellar Rift development Update 043

Multiple people manning a single ship is one the main features of Interstellar Rift, and this week we are adding turrets that you can place on your ship that can be manned by your crew.

These turrets have been in the works for a while, and some of you might have caught a glimpse of them as we released an early version of them by accident last week.

Manned turrets can be added to the sides of your vessel and can used by everyone on your ship. Turrets work mostly the same as mounted weapons but have no weapon group. You have to connect them to an ammo loader aboard the ship, and it will fire ammo from this chamber. Multiple ammo loaders will increase the amount of bullets you can fire before reloading the turret.

In feature updates we will allow you to create different weapon types that can be fitted to these turrets.

We also added a whole bunch of new signs to the editor to choose from. Multiline wall and prop signs that can display up to four lines of text. And direction signs that can be placed in the middle of rooms instead of on walls.

We also have a list of other small features that we brought to the game, such as; new shield impact effects, new sound effects for weapons, showing exterior parts of devices in the editor and signs on cargo pads. These signs will list what is on your cargo pads on displays at the front and back of the pads.

We have also been working on improving game stability a lot over the last couple weeks. Teleporting from ship to ship should be way less if not completely free of crashes, and we have done a lot to make better use of our memory. This means you can build bigger ships in the editor. We are working on a 64bit version of the game to allow you guys to build even bigger, but this will take a couple more months.

We hope you enjoy this new patch and as always, if you would like to know more or would like sneak previews of upcoming features and patches please follow us on twitter, facebook and our own and steam forums.

 

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