Hey everyone, it’s time for your weekly update. This week’s focus has been on putting the finishing touches on our next patch – which we expect to release within the next few days. As we’ve mentioned previously this will be a big update with lots of new changes primarily concerning weapons. Once the patch is released we’ll post detailed patch notes but a brief summary is new weapons, creating weapon groups, and new HUD elements to support all of this new functionality. One issue that we may or may not be able to resolve before we release the patch is bandwidth usage by missiles. Currently it’s a bit higher than we want, and if we don’t fix it before the release of the patch it’s unclear what sort of impact it’ll have on our server, however we expect it to be sorted out sometime in the near future.

Backside of the WIP final cruiser geometry

On the art side Dan has finished up the space whale bobblehead final geometry pass, Kristian is making good progress on the final cruiser geometry, and Jan has been playing around with weapon effects. Everyone has also been working on getting last minute asset tweaks into the next patch. We made some optimizations to how certain types of textures get packaged for distribution which has reduced the download size of the game by 1gb – it’s now 2.x gigabytes instead of 3.x gigabytes. That’s all for now, I’m going to keep this update short and sweet as we’ll have much more to discuss next week after the release of the patch.

WIP explosion effect