Name | Frontier | ||
Developer | Lacuna Corporation | ||
Publisher | Lacuna Corporation | ||
Tags | |||
Release | 2016-03-04 | ||
Steam | 12,99€ 9,99£ 12,99$ / 0 % | ||
News | |||
Controls | Keyboard Mouse | ||
Players online |  0  | ||
Steam Rating | Mostly Negative | ||
Steam store | |||
SteamSpy | |||
Peak CCU Yesterday |
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Owners |  0 .. 20,000 +/-   | ||
Players - Since release |   +/- | ||
Players - Last 2 weeks |   +/- | ||
Average playtime (forever) | 0 | ||
Average playtime (last 2 weeks) | 0 | ||
Median playtime (forever) | 0 | ||
Median playtime (last 2 weeks) | 0 | ||
Public Linux depots | Frontier For Linux [1.36 G] |
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Time for some news! |
While we're all working on new features, we have a quick preview of the upgraded animation system to share with everyone. It features all-new clips, blending techniques, IK (headlook, foot placement) and a robust combat system. |
Long time no see, huh?
Things are moving along nicely and while we still have a lot to do, the boring parts are out of the way and we have a good base ready to build on. There are a handful of things left to sort out with the framework but that will take a couple more days at most, after which we will begin on the new animation system and start to build the systems from there (mining, hunting, etc.). The animations are by far the most time-consuming area; coding the systems will take no time at all. But for now, let's take a closer look at what's going on. Multiplayer Our plans for multiplayer are to eventually allow you to rent a dedicated server which is online 24/7, but for now we are limiting the system to self-hosted games. This means that you need to be playing for your friends to join your server, but it's free. We hope that this is a relatively short-term setup, for now though it's simply not viable for us to do this with dedicated servers. Our goal is to use the Amazon EC2 cloud to host servers, eventually. As of now, I think our system is pretty neat. When someone joins your server, their PC talks with yours to find out info about the game. They first ask if they have a save file (when somebody saves their game the file is sent to the host and stored on their PC), and if they do then all their data is sent over and they can play. If not, they are sent to character creation. This prevents cheating by players, but the host is free to change save data, which is something we did on purpose. Save files are managed by your SteamID, which is unique, so there can be players with the same display names without any save conflicts. Our code has been planned to keep bandwidth as low as possible so you don't need a great connection to play without any lag. The data which has to be synced will increase when we add in new systems, but we're confident that multiplayer performance will always be good, even on self-hosted servers. The chat system is finished and lets players talk with each other at any time. It can easily be hidden or brought back up with keyboard shortcuts so it doesn't get in the way. Other players can easily be identified by their "marker", which appears above nearby players. This shows their name, class, and rank. We haven't fully built the player class system but the idea is that players can unlock new class types as they progress. Each class has 3 levels (subject to change) which you can use to show off your achievements. For example, as you rack up hunting kills you will progress in the hunter branch and earn new designations. And if you have huge trading profits, you can unlock new trader classes to show on your marker. There is already a large variety of classes written into the system, but they won't be functional until we've built all the supporting systems so you can actually unlock them. Graphical Update We've mentioned PBR a few times in the past, but for those of you who don't know what it's all about, here's a brief summary. In short, PBR (physically based rendering) uses a combination of textures to push graphics to the most realistic limits. We use real-world material data to make objects shine (literally, sometimes); it's all about lighting. Wood reflects light differently to leather, and this is all taken into account to create the most realistic effects possible. The colour and intensity of light sources affect surfaces, as shown below. Shown above is the character creation scene at 4 different times of the day. As you can see, every object changes based on the lighting, just as they do in the real world. This even applies to the plants scattered across Frontier's landscape. Speaking of which, I worked on some new techniques to create hand-drawn plants for the game, which are very performance-friendly but look complex. We'll be building a library of trees, grasses, flowers and bushes to populate the new map with. Character Creation Character creation has undergone a major overhaul, with tons of new options added. This is all done with PBR, too. We've also brought in stubble for the face and head as new hair options, which weren't in the first system. Eye colour can now be changed along with skin colour, which were bugged previously. I came up with some scary-looking abominations while testing: Hair has been thought out in a new way to let it work properly with hats. Each type of hair now has two versions; full, and clipped, which is where the top half is sliced away so it all fits under your hat. The game works out if a player is wearing a hat and then displays the correct type of hair. Terrain We can't show anything just yet but Karsten is hard at work on the new terrain. This will replace the map everyone is used to seeing so far. This is the first sketch of the design, which is mostly accurate though the coastline has been changed slightly. There will be distant mountains visible in the background and certain exists which are blocked by rocks and other obstacles. When we add new map zones in the future, they will be connected to these exists and the obstacles removed, so you can walk from one zone to the other without us having to build everything in one go. We'll post more updates on the map with early screenshots as Karsten progresses over the coming weeks. +++--------------------------------+++ We hate to keep everyone waiting, and we know that there's certainly been a lot of it, but we all agree that this is in everybody's best interests. Our reasoning is that through multiplayer there will be a whole new angle to the game, and player interaction will make the entire experience much more enjoyable. With multiplayer, we should be able to make enough sales to expand the team without the need for outside investment, and we can progress from there. So, when is this all coming? Soon™ It all depends on the animation more than anything, and if it goes especially smoothly we can maybe think about a release around Christmas time. This is not guaranteed in any way, and it will probably take us longer, but development has been stepped up significantly. Frontier is my full-time job, and Karsten and Dazalius are spending every possible minute to ensure that we can complete our plans. We all want to say one more enormous thank you to those of you who have stuck around through the uncertainty over the past couple of months. We've heard some concerns, and rightly so, about the devs being quiet on the forums, and as a result I will resolve to check the forums daily to keep on top of your posts. Feel free to drop a comment below with your thoughts on the new plans, or leave a message over on the forums! |
Hi all, |
Hi guys, |
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Hey guys, |
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Evening everyone,
As always, we're available on the forums to answer your questions and respond to your feedback. Thanks again for the continued support! We'll do our best to get 0.2.2 out ASAP. |
Time for another update from our team- we've all been hard at work getting the next update ready but there have been a few unexpected bugs. We expect to have them ironed out, along with finishing off the remaining new features which are coming in 0.2.0, by Friday. We are confident for a release this weekend.
If all goes according to plan, 0.2.0 will be out for download this weekend. |
We've been quiet for the past week or so but work is continuing- the next update is well underway now. Hunger, thirst, campfire cooking, XP and levelling are coming soon. We've aimed to make the survival system as realistic as possible- thirst will deplete depending on how hot you are, healing is based on how much food you've eaten (so if you're starving, you won't heal and will die unless you eat something pretty quickly), and all consumables have different properties. The properties allow us to link the systems together, so roasted meat may fill a lot of hunger but will make you more thirsty, while a berry might restore a little of both. You will earn XP points for all sorts of activities, and ranking up will allow you to upgrade your vitals and unlock perks. This system will be expanded on heavily in the future. |
We've made a few changes today and have some news on the Mac front. If you're having issues on Mac, please try the instructions outlined at the end of this post.
We aren't sure if this will fix it but our team does not have access to a Mac for another couple of days, so if somebody could let us know if our suspicions are correct that would really help us out. If this works, we will simply automate this process so when you download the game it automatically has the correct permissions. Marked for fixing in the next patch are some minor but annoying bugs, such as firing while in a menu. This will be out before too long. |
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Hello again! |
Hello everyone, |
Evening, all,
We will be focusing all our attention on fixing the Mac and Linux builds before we continue working on the game, but we've already got plans laid out for the next update. As always, we'd love to hear your feedback and read your bug reports, so give us a shout on the forums if you're having any trouble with the new version! We're expecting to hear a few minor bug reports over the next couple of days, and if that's the case then we'll release a patch sometime this week, hopefully also fixing the Mac and Linux standalones. Enjoy! -The Lacuna Team. |
Time for another update on where things are at!
Features are subject to change and may be improved further before 0.1.0, depending on how much time we have. We are aiming to get this out ASAP, but it's still hard to judge when we will be finished. We're sure it will be worth the wait! As always, we are available on the forums every day- we encourage you to come and have a chat with us about development! Thanks! |
We've been quiet for the past few days so we wanted to quickly let you all know what we're up to. |
Hi everyone,
We are aware of issues a few of our Mac users seem to be experiencing but we have not yet been able to track down the source of the problem. It seems that the game is launching for some users but not for others, so it is most likely a conflict or a missing dependency. We are continuing to look into this issue and apologise for the delays, it's hard to work out what's going on as we are unable to reproduce the issue. We hope this will be resolved soon. In the meantime, if everyone could keep the bug reports and feedback coming we'd really appreciate it! Thanks guys, and don't forget the devs are around on the forums to answer your questions :) -Josh. |
I spent the weekend working on a little smelting system for the game. You can throw your spare ore into a furnace and it will automatically mould it into an ingot for you. Check it out here: |
Evening, everyone,
The first map zone will be arriving not much later. The current map is a very basic demo. We will soon be replacing it with the "plains zone", a 16 square kilometre map which will be just one of several areas you can visit in the final game. We have a lot of things going on right now which are mostly focused on getting the current features working flawlessly, but before too long we will begin to develop exciting new gameplay features. NPCs are going to be a very important part of the game so we want to get started with those as soon as we can. And finally, on behalf of the dev team, I want to say a huge thank you to the community! We have now been on Steam for 6 days and we've read and used tons of player-submitted bug reports already. We've been receiving great feedback so far and people have been very understanding where bugs are concerned, and we're excited that we can now start to really turn Frontier into a memorable experience with input from our players! As always, our door is open so to speak- you can come and have a chat with us on the official Steam group discssion forums about anything game-related. We have been extremely busy lately but we try our best to reply to everyone as fast as we can, so please check back for a reply :) Thanks, -Josh, Lacuna Corp. |
v0.0.3 Alpha is now live! You can download this patch via Steam as soon as you are ready to explore!
If you've been experiencing any severe bugs, we hope this resolves the issues you've been having. If there are still any major problems we may have somehow missed, please give us a shout on the forums so we can get them fixed ASAP. Thanks, -Josh. |
If you've updated to v0.0.2, you've no doubt noticed that the terrain has lost it's colour. None of this is happening on our end- everything looks great until we build the standalone games; the terrain is only corrupt in the compiled game. Which means something is messing up in our shader code when exporting, most likely. I thought this would be a quick fix but we are going to have to spend some more time looking into it. We apologise for the unexpected bug and hope to have it resolved in the coming days! Thanks, |
Frontier v0.0.2 Alpha
The first major update for Frontier is planned for the end of the month. The inventory, crafting system, building system, save system and framework is currently being rebuilt. This will fix the vast majority of issues players are currently experiencing, and will dramatically increase game stability. If we have enough time, we will be bringing the first iteration of crafting mechanics- while it's possible that we won't be able to squeeze all of this into update v0.1.0, we have planned:
As always, the devs are available to speak with everyone on the official Steam group forums/discussions tab. Come and let us know if you find any new bugs and we'll look into them ASAP! We know this hasn't been the smoothest of Early Access launches but the community has been very supportive and we thank you sincerely for that! We've already received a ton of feedback and bug reports, and it's helped us to track down the major issues and patch them pretty quickly. There are still a lot of problems but the first month or so of EA will be dedicated to patching bugs while working on update v0.1.0. We are aiming to make the game much more stable within 2-3 weeks. Thanks guys, -Josh. |
The "Missing Executable" error our Mac and Linux users have been experience should be resolved now. Please redownload Frontier through Steam and let us know how things go on your end! |
First of all, a huge thank you from the developers to everyone who has supported the game so far! We're happy to see all the feedback we're getting, and it's really going to help us out. |