Hi everybody, Flavien here. I’m doing the news update as Keith is out from town for a few days. This week we’ve been working on bug fixes for the I-Novae installer & launcher ( for those of you dev-tier backers that have access to the game ). Some problems with third-party dependencies have been addressed and better logging / messages has been added for the future. Unfortunately we ran out of time to test the new build before Keith had to leave, so our plan is to push that new build when he’s back in around a week.

Military base Layout A

We’ve also been working on the new game patch including factories and military land bases. We’ve developped those assets to be modular, so that we can easily create entire new layouts & variations. Keep in mind that the final solar system in which the game will take place will have at least a dozen planets ( only 4 are currently included in the pre-alpha ), and on each of these planets there might be 3-4 factories and bases. With enough layout variations, we are hoping that every base will be slightly different ( some bases will have more defenses, others will have weak points such as an energy reactor you can damage ) however since they’re created from a set of common modules it allows us to minimize the amount of work & cost required per asset.

Military base Layout B

At the moment all those assets are placeholders for design purposes. The final assets will have around x4 more geometry and details. Dan has already started to work on the detailed modelling phase for the space station modules and has produced around 20 of them ( out of 50 ) in the past weeks. While we’re testing the placeholders we’re also generated level-of-details for them which allows us to tune performance and keep the average polycount in check, and test the limits ( in terms of complexity ) of what we can achieve for “huge” military bases, factories or stations.

Huge factory - extreme layout test + LODs

Jan and Kristian have been working on finalizing the hauler, including ambient occlusion maps, detail textures/materials and placing dozens of small lights to make it come alive. We are hoping to include the hauler ( at least as a static object, since we don’t have any A.I. yet ) in the game by the next patch so that testers can have a look and provide feedback for it.

And that is all for now, see you next week !