Hey everyone it’s time for your weekly update. It’s been another busy week here at I-Novae Studios. We had another playtest this last weekend, this time with planets reintegrated for the first time in months. Overall everything went smoothly and Flavien believes he may have already come up with a viable solution for server-side planetary collision detection. We found a couple of new bugs but nothing we can’t fix within a few days. In fact, the test went so well we’re pleased to announce that, as long as we don’t run into any last-minute blockers, we’ll be releasing the next patch this Saturday, the 21st of October.

A massive space battle over a planet!

Needless to say – this patch is a significant update – it contains months of work from both the art and the engineering teams. To summarize some of the changes: we’ve rewritten nearly our entire networking stack, added mockups for all of the capital ships, applied materials to most of the smaller ships and installations (still WIP), improved multi-threaded performance, added scorekeeping, implemented a basic in-game UI mockup, improved the flight model, implemented a basic damage model, added placeholders for simple voice commands, mocked up cockpit bobbleheads (no physics simulation yet), tested massive space battles, etc.

Staying close to my wingman as he fires at the enemy

Assuming everything goes smoothly this weekend with the patch we’ll announce our next Alpha backer “free play” weekend within a week or 2. We’re looking forward to stress testing the new networking code with Developer Access and then Alpha backers. This patch has been a long time coming, we greatly appreciate everyone’s patience, and after the next Alpha “free play” weekend we’ll be pivoting in a big way towards releasing the Alpha as soon as we can!

Catching some sun while flying around a planet