Hey everybody, Flavien here, taking stead of Keith for the weekly update as he’s busy with the arrival of his first child.

As you know, we’ve been busy working on the next major patch for quite a while now. I’m happy to report that progress has been going pretty smoothly recently and that we’re seeing light at the end of the tunnel. This new version has taken a lot of development time, but includes some pretty heavy and fundamental architectural changes, especially in terms of networking, which will allow us to scale up to these hundreds-of-ships-at-once battles. In terms of gameplay it’s still pretty bare-bones, but we should be in a good state to iterate quickly towards an alpha release at the end of the year.

Battle test in atmosphere

For now, ETA for this new patch for dev-tier / stellar+ level backers is some time around next week. Planetary physics collisions is almost resolved ( I still need to implement some server-side code and do some stress test, but the algorithm is already functional ) but we’ll need a few additional days to implement some missing features and do a polish / bug fixes pass ( for instance I need to rework atmospheric flight mechanics and add back some thruster sound effects ). Keith has also recently been upgrading the website and installer dependencies.

External view can now be rotated around the ship

The art team has also started to gear up for the next patch, that will include a first basic version of capital ships ( with placeholder art and control scheme ). Some assets that have been in the works in the past months are being integrated into the project, including the new space station, factory and military base pieces.

Flying a Destroyer around a planet

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for more information about the new patch next week. I’ll probably do a streaming session as soon as it’s out, assuming the server is stable. See you !

-Flavien