Greetings Wardens

In this week’s update, we’d like to share with you some of the latest with regards to some of the Art Assets, Paints, progress with FMOD integration and some Multiplayer Updates!

Enjoy!

Completed Fighter Shipyard Art Asset

We have now completed the art asset for the Fighter Shipyard and are no longer using the Whitebox model for it.

As you might have seen in the previous update, we are including these cranes. These cranes will animate moving back and forth as if the ship was being 3D printed in the Shipyard. This now final model also includes station lights that will also show if the bay is open (green) for any new ships to be built or busy (red) when the Shipyard is in service.

Paints

While working with the textures for the Shipyard and fine tuning the diffuse colours, we discovered something interesting with the materials. First, we figured out that when tuning the colours on the surface, rather than mucking with the Artist’s diffuse colouring on the texture in specific places, we decided to try tweaking it via an Alpha overlay on the Shipyard.

This allowed us to use this Alpha as a colour mask for us to white wash the diffuse and then apply a colour overlay diffuse input.

We then applied this onto the Shipyard for a proof of concept, and it worked!!

With this in mind, we thought it would be a good idea to see if we could apply the same technique to a ship to quickly prove the tech of this cheap and easy custom painter to ships.

Check out our quick results with the Tempest with these custom paints.

Original

Blue

Red

Gun Metal

Stealth

This easy customization will allow you to now (when we implement it into the hangars) set a custom colouring on your vessels. We plan to also include pattern overlays as well so players may have fun applying different “camo” patterns as well to the ships to give a more unique style if they want to customize their fleets in such a way.

Please note that Unique Skins for ships (like via Kickstarter and Brightlocker) will not be available unless those packages have been unlocked.

EDIT: We have now included a new special GOLDEN SHIP SKIN for select ships on Brightlocker for $500 each! Get them while supplies last!!!!

EDIT 2: This is only a joke, we would never stoop to such a low. Please disregard the above. Again this is only a joke….. or is it?

FMOD Integration progress

Our resident sound designer has been loving the new FMOD integration into the engine. Now being able to live update the sounds, turn around for Sound balancing has been amazing. Such changes include;

– Change to Engine Loops so that afterburner effect is more pronounced
– Volume Balances across the board
– Integrations with FMOD distance parameters for better cross fading (including looping gunshot cut offs)

Multiplayer Updates

We are now in the works with doing an overhaul with regards to the old hacky networking. We didn’t want to release this in the demo in it’s current state as the networking didn’t hold up to our standard. With that said, we have been in talks with a Programmer that is lining up to help us out with reworking the Ship movements to be Acceleration based rather than Velocity based. Going forward, this will help us a lot with additive forces (such as explosion impulses, or tractor beams or anything that may apply direct force). The feel of the flight shouldn’t change at all, but rather since atm we have less of a simulated flight mechanic, we wanted to go more in that direction, especially when it comes to predictability across the network. Still allowing for the flight controls to be Client driven, we will now have the Server look at validating the simulated movement that the Client is making and then apply that movement to the rest of the multiplayer match. This will ease alot of the previous jittering we encountered with our previous MP testing and have something to present (perhaps in the Alpha) sooner than we thought to be possible!

We thank you all for checking out our weekly update. Have a good weekend everyone and we’ll see you next Friday!

Best of luck out there Warden!

– Polar Zenith