Hey everyone, it’s time for your weekly update! As promised this has been an exciting week. We released our new weapons patch last Sunday. You can read the full patch notes on our forums but to give a brief overview: We have new weapons, you can now create weapon groups, new explosion effects, new HUD icons, turret improvements, final destroyer geometry, different damage types, better warp, and numerous bug fixes. One of our community members, Playbenni, created a video showing off some of the new patch features. Needless to say, our goal of having “massive space battles” is starting to be realized.

Updated cruiser geometry is included in the patch

In other, less exciting news we’ve also rolled out some backend improvements and CDN support. This backend patch should solve issues with slow downloads for people who are living outside of the U.S. as well as problems that prevented Chinese players from being able to download. We’re delighted to announce that our next Alpha backer weekend will start next week on Friday, March 9th at around 9am EST. In the interim we’ll be releasing one or two additional patches to make additional improvements based on feedback we’ve gathered from the latest patch.

Incoming missile…

Looking toward the future, after the Alpha backer weekend, we’ll be focusing on finishing up capital ship weapons, including anti-missile systems, and then shifting focus to the core game loop. The core game loop includes radar/sensors, the resource system, win/lose conditions, and re-arming/repair. Basically, once the core game loop is finished we’ll be entering the home stretch for our full Alpha release. This is going to take a couple of months but I think we’re still on track for release sometime in the first half of this year. During this process we will, of course, be releasing incremental patches as new features are implemented. That’s all for this week, we’ll send out reminders next week for the Alpha backer weekend.