Hey everyone time for another update. This week was a bit slower on the engineering side because I was busy moving into a new apartment. I’ve made some additional progress on the rendering abstraction for the new UI system but not much else of note. Fortunately Flavien was able to finish his new entity/component system with multi-threaded updates and will be resuming work on the remaining pieces of networking code.

Latest WIP of the Bomber exterior geometry

On the art side things continue to move along at a good pace. Dan is wrapping up work on station windows, which contribute greatly to a proper sense of scale, and will soon be starting on final factory geometry. Jan has been putting quite a bit of time into generating and optimizing our Level of Detail (LOD) meshes. These are meshes with lower polycounts that get rendered in place of the fully detailed mesh depending on how far away it is. He’s also wrapping up the final corvette geometry which we should have some new screen shots of soon. Lastly Kristian is in the polish phase with the final bomber geometry which is coming along great as you can see above.

Examples of the different LOD meshes for the NPC hauler

Our attorney got us the revised version of our crowdfunding terms of service today. There’s still some additional review work to be done but we’re trying to get that sorted out as soon as possible so we can release the new pledge upgrade system. Jan has started integrating all of the updated art assets into the game as we begin preparing for our next patch. This patch will primarily be a content update and probably our last of 2016. Most of the team will be out of town traveling at the end of the month for the holiday so we’re working diligently to get the patch and the pledge upgrade system released by then.

Example of a material for one of our ships