Hi All, We have spent the last month continuing our preparations for the 1.0 release. The month was all about removing those last few hard to find bugs and doing a bit of deeper optimization that was not possible while the codebase was in flux. We have also begun to work on the Mac and Linux builds in the hopes that they will be ready before for the Windows 1.0 release. So lets delve into what's been going on....

Bug Fixes/Changes:

Some of these last bugs have been on our list for over a year, but we finally got the time to fix them. It feels great to clear them off the list.

• Fixed hang when retreating from battle after destroying a starbase.
• Fixed case where is was possible for loading an autosave to force you into a battle instead of being on the starmap.
• Fixed rare case where bandit's demand surrender menu would appear at the start of battles.
• Removed Scrap and Loose Scrap text from the bandit hive attack menu since it was just confusing. Look at the values of the Rez,Goons,Scrap to see what the raid potential is. Bigger is better.
• Fixed scavenge node coloring updating when the owner is changed.
• Fixed scavenge nodes losing player ownership when a new node lands on top of it.
• Added code to detect and skip loading of corrupted settings/save files.
• Fixed case where XP rewards often returned 50 when late game when the player was much much higher threat than other enemies. Now XP rewards will continue to scale down appropriately even once the player is uber strong.
• Added Custom Order Parts Max Stars to the Sandbox options. Allows setting how good the custom order parts can be. Can also turn off custom order parts entirely with the slider.
• Motherships higher prioritize fighting other motherships in battle, about twice as much as before.
• Starbases much higher prioritize targeting other motherships in battle, about 3x as much as before. This is to prevent them wasting missiles and bombs on strike craft. Their local beam defenses will still target any strike craft that stray too close.
• Starbases are now priority targets in combat as well for motherships. Targeting weighting 2x higher than before.
• Added nice fade out to loading savegames, instead of a frozen screen.
• Fixed Kill Captain side objective to only count captains, not bandits or transports.
• Fixed special hot swap case when switching medium sized parts left to right sometimes the swap would fail.
• B button can now back out of the Tactics Panel in controller mode.
• If in escape pod on the starmap, territories are now discovered as you travel.
• Spelling fixed across all languages
• Bloom now has 4 intensity settings

Optimizations:

These optimizations may not seem like much, 8% here 4% there, but for lower end machines these will be pretty substantial. Whenever the game starts running too slowly, the physics needs to update multiple times per frame, making performance worse and worse. This train wreck feeds on itself when it happens. So what we have essentially done is made the train wreck a LOT less likely for people both in battle and on the starmap.

• Major starmap optimization, prevents rolling movement lag in large galaxy. Smooths out the map a lot. This will be a huge improvement on slower machines in big galaxies.
• Weapon mounts now cache their battle wagon targeting for 100ms instead of constantly re-thinking. This bought back about 8% cpu in battles.
• Weapons now don't rethink targeting while they are reloading, saves about 4% cpu in battles.
• Major fighter optimization at lower frame rates. When train wrecks happened, fighters were particularly impacted... Not anymore.

VR Stuff:

VR is really stable now and pretty much final. Reviews indicate that the vast majority of people are really enjoying SPAZ 2 in 3D, and they are surprised that a VR game can work so well in 3rd person. So were we :) Now the challenge will be to get VR players to know we exist.

• In VR mode, the physics update was automatically being set super high by the SteamVR Vive plugin. This caused major slowdown in physics intensive battles. Now the VR updates at the same rate as the flat screen/Rift so big battles are nice and smooth. This will be a HUGE performance improvement on the Vive.
• Added display menu for VR to size the output window.

Mac and Linux Build Progress Update:

The Mac version is in a 95% working state, including the Xbox controller functionality. We are using six year old Mac Books to test it (the same ones we used to test SPAZ 1), and the game still runs quite well. Expect to see an experimental version available soon. The Linux build has been a bit of a challenge so far, mostly because of our inexperience working with the platform. This doesn't mean the Linux build is going poorly, but it's a slow process while we learn something new to us. Expect to hear an update on this front soon.

Going Forward:

So as of September 1, our two year project has hit year number five. We still cringe at being on the most anticipated titles of 2014 list... In the end though, what we ended up with was well worth the extra time, and we love how the game evolved during Early Access. Our bugs lists are now pretty much empty for the windows build. We still have a set of smaller tasks that are not new feature related that we would like to complete such as adding more achievements, and adding new arena ships to showcase the new weapons added months ago in the super strike craft update. This all all icing on the cake stuff though. For all intents and purposes the windows build is ready. Code is in hard lockdown now in prep for 1.0 and also to help with the Mac and Linux porting, the Early Access goals are complete, and the bug lists are empty. It feels good... really good! We are also starting to look at ways of getting exposure for the 1.0 release. This will involve talking to PR agencies, contacting Let's Players, somehow advertising etc. This will take a bit of time, but really is the last step before we release. We need to build a bit of buzz for release and any help with that would be appreciated! As with SPAZ 1, please tell your friends. Special Note: We are trying to put together a final sale before v1.0 releases to help build awareness. We're giving a hint here to hold off for a couple weeks if you don't own the game yet but want to jump on before Early Access closes to get a better than release price. It sucks to buy a game shortly before a sale, so we wanted to give a heads up. Thanks very much for your continued support! Andrew (Blorf) and Richard (Narlak)

Hi All, We have spent the last month continuing our preparations for the 1.0 release. The month was all about removing those last few hard to find bugs and doing a bit of deeper optimization that was not possible while the codebase was in flux. We have also begun to work on the Mac and Linux builds in the hopes that they will be ready before for the Windows 1.0 release. So lets delve into what's been going on....

Bug Fixes/Changes:

Some of these last bugs have been on our list for over a year, but we finally got the time to fix them. It feels great to clear them off the list.

• Fixed hang when retreating from battle after destroying a starbase.
• Fixed case where is was possible for loading an autosave to force you into a battle instead of being on the starmap.
• Fixed rare case where bandit's demand surrender menu would appear at the start of battles.
• Removed Scrap and Loose Scrap text from the bandit hive attack menu since it was just confusing. Look at the values of the Rez,Goons,Scrap to see what the raid potential is. Bigger is better.
• Fixed scavenge node coloring updating when the owner is changed.
• Fixed scavenge nodes losing player ownership when a new node lands on top of it.
• Added code to detect and skip loading of corrupted settings/save files.
• Fixed case where XP rewards often returned 50 when late game when the player was much much higher threat than other enemies. Now XP rewards will continue to scale down appropriately even once the player is uber strong.
• Added Custom Order Parts Max Stars to the Sandbox options. Allows setting how good the custom order parts can be. Can also turn off custom order parts entirely with the slider.
• Motherships higher prioritize fighting other motherships in battle, about twice as much as before.
• Starbases much higher prioritize targeting other motherships in battle, about 3x as much as before. This is to prevent them wasting missiles and bombs on strike craft. Their local beam defenses will still target any strike craft that stray too close.
• Starbases are now priority targets in combat as well for motherships. Targeting weighting 2x higher than before.
• Added nice fade out to loading savegames, instead of a frozen screen.
• Fixed Kill Captain side objective to only count captains, not bandits or transports.
• Fixed special hot swap case when switching medium sized parts left to right sometimes the swap would fail.
• B button can now back out of the Tactics Panel in controller mode.
• If in escape pod on the starmap, territories are now discovered as you travel.
• Spelling fixed across all languages
• Bloom now has 4 intensity settings

Optimizations:

These optimizations may not seem like much, 8% here 4% there, but for lower end machines these will be pretty substantial. Whenever the game starts running too slowly, the physics needs to update multiple times per frame, making performance worse and worse. This train wreck feeds on itself when it happens. So what we have essentially done is made the train wreck a LOT less likely for people both in battle and on the starmap.

• Major starmap optimization, prevents rolling movement lag in large galaxy. Smooths out the map a lot. This will be a huge improvement on slower machines in big galaxies.
• Weapon mounts now cache their battle wagon targeting for 100ms instead of constantly re-thinking. This bought back about 8% cpu in battles.
• Weapons now don't rethink targeting while they are reloading, saves about 4% cpu in battles.
• Major fighter optimization at lower frame rates. When train wrecks happened, fighters were particularly impacted... Not anymore.

VR Stuff:

VR is really stable now and pretty much final. Reviews indicate that the vast majority of people are really enjoying SPAZ 2 in 3D, and they are surprised that a VR game can work so well in 3rd person. So were we :) Now the challenge will be to get VR players to know we exist.

• In VR mode, the physics update was automatically being set super high by the SteamVR Vive plugin. This caused major slowdown in physics intensive battles. Now the VR updates at the same rate as the flat screen/Rift so big battles are nice and smooth. This will be a HUGE performance improvement on the Vive.
• Added display menu for VR to size the output window.

Mac and Linux Build Progress Update:

The Mac version is in a 95% working state, including the Xbox controller functionality. We are using six year old Mac Books to test it (the same ones we used to test SPAZ 1), and the game still runs quite well. Expect to see an experimental version available soon. The Linux build has been a bit of a challenge so far, mostly because of our inexperience working with the platform. This doesn't mean the Linux build is going poorly, but it's a slow process while we learn something new to us. Expect to hear an update on this front soon.

Going Forward:

So as of September 1, our two year project has hit year number five. We still cringe at being on the most anticipated titles of 2014 list... In the end though, what we ended up with was well worth the extra time, and we love how the game evolved during Early Access. Our bugs lists are now pretty much empty for the windows build. We still have a set of smaller tasks that are not new feature related that we would like to complete such as adding more achievements, and adding new arena ships to showcase the new weapons added months ago in the super strike craft update. This all all icing on the cake stuff though. For all intents and purposes the windows build is ready. Code is in hard lockdown now in prep for 1.0 and also to help with the Mac and Linux porting, the Early Access goals are complete, and the bug lists are empty. It feels good... really good! We are also starting to look at ways of getting exposure for the 1.0 release. This will involve talking to PR agencies, contacting Let's Players, somehow advertising etc. This will take a bit of time, but really is the last step before we release. We need to build a bit of buzz for release and any help with that would be appreciated! As with SPAZ 1, please tell your friends. Thanks very much for your continued support! Andrew (Blorf) and Richard (Narlak)