Posted by Klonan on 2017-04-07

Hello, the sunny spring weather seems to have taken a break these last few days after Denis' arrival to the office. His work continues on the belts optimization, as the rest of the team has been playtesting 0.15, as well as closing off remaining minor features on our Trello board.

Progress report

Internal playtesting kicked off early this week, and it seems we're either doing something right or wrong, as it doesn't seem we are finding many major bugs. Of the ones we've found, most have been fairly easy to solve after initial diagnosis, which is greatly simplified by playing on our internal 'Fast debug' build.

Kovarex has polished up the 'zoom to map' feature mentioned previously, with a card of community suggestions to checkout in the future. There was some choice to make on whether to allow building from the map zoomed in or not, and in the end we decided that building ghosts/blueprints from the map is an amazing feature. Posila and I finished our first implementation of the mini-tutorials, which are accessed in-game through a simple (for now) Gui:

We also have a new addition to our GFX department, so please everyone give welcome to Ernestas, a talented artist from Lithuania, who has been getting acquainted with us all here in the office. Albert has been digging deeply with Cube into terrain generation fixes, while his work continues on the nuclear reactor model.

Nightvision update

We received a lot of community feedback about our proposal for how the nightvision could look. So now after several weeks to think upon the problem, Posila has implemented a new look, with the first use of shaders in the game:

No doubt the art department will still want to apply some finishing touches, but we are happy with how it turned out. We hope the use of shaders could start to add some extra dimension to the way the game looks, and since their processing is done on the GPU, it should have very little impact on performance.

There are still a hundred minor features I could talk about in these FFF posts, but this close to release, I would rather not spoil the surprise. As always, if you have any comments or otherwise, please let us know on our forums.