So, it's definitely time for some news from us. I feel like I've repeated myself with this many times over so to summarise (please don't take this as any sort of a rant- I'm just outlining what's going on to try and better explain why everything is taking so long): At this point, we're still not ready, but the rebuild is coming together now. We are still very much here, and working 7 days a week as we have been for several months now, and will continue to do so until the game is ready. All of our future plans are still on the table, and will be relatively easy to put into place once the framework is finished. All I can say now is that it's going well, and will take as long as it takes, and I personally guarantee that work will continue at this rate until the first true beta is out for you guys to explore. The first full release will be followed by intense change cycles- back to daily-or-so updates as we first provided (the reason we're unable to do this right now is that due to the amount of work involved, we have to finish the full rebuild before we can release the base version, but then we can get back to intense update cycles as we had initially, with constant improvements- only on a solid base this time around). Once we have all of the feedback in and polishes made, we'll move onto new features and begin the real Early Access cycle. We've been hearing a few comments about us not understanding the resources required, and even points about us not knowing what we're doing based on an unfinished product, which I believe is down to the fact that we're yet to publish our first true build. At the same time, we appreciate this of course, because we can see that we still have a very interested community which wants to see the project completed! I'm still glad with our decision to go down the EA route so early, as it's allowed us to gather a lot of feedback with the initial builds and take these thoughts into consideration with the rebuild. The main time constraint right now is multiplayer, which I'm building in response to lots of requests for online gameplay, which is going extremely well. There is an enormous amount of work involved with every system due to security, because cheating has to be prevented for all features. In short, each system means that I have to consider offline gameplay, online gameplay (i.e. how things sync up, how people could try to exploit the system, and how things can be handled and compressed to cut down on bandwidth usage), and then of course we have to finish it off with all of the artwork. To try and better explain this, take something as simple as picking fruit from a cactus. In singleplayer, it's pretty simple- add the fruit to the player's inventory, hide the fruit on the cactus model, and tell the framework to keep an eye on the cactus and regrow it's fruit over time. With multiplayer, it's a lot more complicated. If somebody wants to pick the fruit, they need to tell the server what they want to do, and simulate all of this locally with temporary data (Frontier's lag compensation system, so you don't notice any delay between asking the server and waiting for it to reply, which is included with every single networked system). The server then needs to check that the data they sent is valid, whether the cactus is ready for harvesting or not, and also that the player is close enough to be able to pick that fruit. If it's allowed, the server needs to reply to the player with their temporary data and the real data to replace it with, and also tell everybody else that the cactus was harvested. If any of the checks fail, then we know that the player was cheating, and the server then kicks them automatically. Likewise, when the cactus regrows, everybody needs to be notified that it's once again ready to be harvested, and they need to update their local knowledge of that cactus. This is all done with a heuristic LOD system, which basically means that updates are calculated based on time, and objects are only processed when players are nearby. That's for something as simple as harvesting a plant- you can imagine how complicated things get when for systems such as framework security, identity verification, item syncing, etc. It will all be worth it in the end, allowing us to build a secure and efficient multiplayer environment to expand on. Now, with all that out of the way, let's take a look at what's been going on!

Map Integration

The full 64km² terrain is now integrated, complete with ultra-HD rendering, PBR materials and a lightning-fast LOD system (in both single and multiplayer). All games are randomised to add some variation. Plants, including grass, trees and cacti, and certain structures such as mines, are generated randomly at the beginning of every new game to allow us to stick with a high-quality base map while bringing exciting semi-procedural generation, to add some extra depth to each playthrough.

Mining

Karsten has built an awesome mine kit for us to use, which is now finished up and integrated. As touched on earlier, mine interiors are randomly generated at the beginning of every game, giving you different layouts to explore.
Mines contain respawning veins for ore collection.

Smelting

The mining system also encompasses a full smelting setup, which will fully come into play when ingame economies (with imports and exports) are added. For now, ingots are very useful crafting resources, which are made by smelting ore in a furnace, fuelled with wood, coal or even charcoal.
The are currently 5 metal resource types in game; iron, copper, lead, silver and gold (though coal and sulphur can also be found in mines). Basic iron, copper and lead ingots can be made for crafting, but silver and gold can be smelted into bars of masses 50oz, 100oz, 200oz and 400oz. This is geared toward trade at a future date, to build the foundation of an economy- more on this later!

Customisation Profiles

During a graphics overhaul, I added in a pretty unique feature- graphics profiles. The system allows you to easily customise exactly which graphics tech your game uses, which can seem a little technical in some areas, but is very straightforward to use. This includes the basics such as antialiasing, bloom and motion blur, all the way to ambient occlusion, chromatic aberration and advanced colour grading. Profiles are saved to a custom file format, making it easy to grab and share between machines. We may kick off Workshop support with these, to make stylised graphics profiles readily available to everyone.

HAARP

Our brand new weather simulation and control system, dubbed HAARP, is now fully integrated. We've done away with rain and storms for the time being to keep a consistent dry, scorched theme, and I have instead put more time into the core. This is shown throughout the screenshots, but to note the hidden features, there is full mist, atmospheric scattering, a 30-phase HD lunar cycle, dynamic star simulation and it's all fully deterministic, allowing it to be synced in multiplayer by simply grabbing a few bytes of data when a player joins.
Next, I'll be finalising the major systems. We're still waiting on some animation work, but I'll get to work on completing the tree chopping and mining systems as soon as I have the files. This will complete all the basic gameplay features. From there, I have a lot of minor tweaks to make, before doing a deploy test for multiplayer, at which point we will do final testing and then release the rebuild. A huge thank you goes out to everyone for sticking around with us. I never wanted to spend half the time we already have doing this, but it's unfortunately a necessary evil. Please stay positive, and don't lose hope- we are still here, 100%, and the next time you see a post about the game being dead, please remember that we're right here, in the background. We'll try to keep you all as up-to-date as possible via Twitter, but we don't always have enough new content to grab screenshots constantly since most of the new features are all in code. On the whole though, things are going very well, if slowly, and we're approaching wrapping the base up!

[ 2017-04-23 21:06:22 CET ] [ Original post ]