Time for another weekly update! This week we’re happy to say we’re done with physics. We’ve primarily been working on bug fixes and preparing our next patch. Previously we had mentioned that our next patch wouldn’t contain any new content. Due to the amount of time that’s passed between now and our previous patch we felt that would be a bit underwhelming so we decided to push it back a little bit so we can include the new factory and space station placeholders. We also wrote all of the backend code for uploading, verifying, and distributing patches through our new installation system. The last step before that’s ready is to finish integration with our launcher - which is getting a major overhaul both in its UI and its internals.

A section of a land base

On the art side the majority of the geometry placeholders are complete. There’s still some work to be done on the land base and once we start iterating on weapons we’ll likely have some additional mockups to create, both for weapon geometry as well as particle effects, but at the moment we think we’re in a pretty good spot with regard to the look and feel of our ships and structures. From this point onward we’re going to begin focusing on getting assets retail ready starting with cockpits and assets with a form that isn’t affected much by gameplay such as the hauler.

The ground view of a land base

Once the patch is released our focus will shift back toward improving the networking layer, particularly our hit detection and latency compensation, which got delayed by the improvements to our physics subsystem. Sometime in July, after the networking improvements are finished, we will pivot back toward iterating heavily on gameplay starting with weapons. Mockups for our HUD and the game UI/menu system will also be produced. We will be focusing all of our energy on getting the major gameplay systems implemented in time for our Alpha release at the end of October.

A small hangar bay in a land base

As far as graphics are concerned we need to make some improvements to our decal and particle system rendering. On our forums we’ve discussed D3D12 and Vulkan quite a bit however it currently looks like it’s unlikely we’ll get to any significant graphics or optimization work until sometime in 2017.