To boldly go… Interstellar Rift Development Update 010

Jul 22, 2014

It has been an interesting 5 months. We went from building ships with the first release, to walking inside those ships and now we’re ready to release our biggest update to Interstellar Rift as of yet!

Two weeks ago we teased you with the prospect of multiplayer, this week we are ready to deliver! As of today the host game and find game buttons have become active. From now on you will be able to start your own multiplayer servers and join others from the server browser.
for the time being, all the multiplayer characters will be female as we are still slaving away on the male version.

You’ll be able to walk around onboard the starter station and spawn ships! Ships that you’ve built will be available at the ship construction terminal. Simply spawn them as you did before and wait a few seconds for the ship to spawn. Once it has appeared outside the station it will appear in the teleport list and everyone on the server will be able to teleport aboard.

But wait! there’s more! once you’re all aboard, go to the helm. (you will have to replace the helm on previously built ships, and power it) you’ll notice that you can now activate the helm. and yes, that is exactly what it means! hold on to your butts as space flight is now enabled in single and multiplayer! If you’ve connected your helm to a power source you’ll be able to fly your ship through the space environment we’ve created for you. Using the Tab key you’ll be able to switch between free flight and mouse flight, as well as third and first person viewpoint.

Now, this is a very early version of space flight, and many things will require iteration and tweaking over the coming months. At the moment, all ships handle the same way and travel at the same speed, regardless of their size shape and number of engines. This will be changing over time as space flight will incorporate ship mass, engine power, and thrust power into the flight model.

We are at a crucial moment where your feedback can help shape the future of Interstellar Rift, Please take a moment and let us know what you think of the ship controls and the current multiplayer incarnation.

Thank you and we hope to see you online!

“Good things come in small packages” Interstellar Rift Development Update 009

Jul 07, 2014

Yes, it’s that time again. This week’s patch is on the modest side. We’re adding some new sounds, some old objects now have animations and we’ve added a brand new storage locker. In the future this locker can hold any number of items, from weapons and ammo to medkits and oxygen tanks. You’ll find it among the storage items in the Interstellar Rift Ship Editor.

We also bring some good news for those of you who have been unable to play the pre-alpha thus far because of an outdated graphics card. We’ve added in backwards compatibility for OpenGL 3.2 and higher (instead of 4.0 and higher), if you have an older graphics card that supports this version of OpenGL you’ll now be able to play around with the Interstellar Rift ship builder and virtual tour mode. This has been the biggest source of game crashes in the past and with this new update we hope to enable you with older hardware to enjoy our game.

If you’re still have any trouble with this, feel free to drop us a message on the forums, and we’ll get back to you ASAP.

As a new feature, we are adding 3d location based sounds to the game. Currently this only works in stereo, But we are working to add support for full 3d surround sound at a later date.

And now for a brief look into the future, as those familiar with our vision for Interstellar Rift know, this game will be heavily focused on multiplayer. And our biggest hurdle to get features implemented into the game has been this “multiplayer integration”. Every single device on your ship will need to communicate with the server and all new additions to the game will have to be integrated into our networking code. Sadly that also means progress is slow for seemingly small features right now.

And now for some good news, we’re close to getting the player character functionality ready for multiplayer testing. And that means very soon we’re going to let you invite your friends aboard your ship. note that in the beginning, this will only consist of running around and jumping but you’ll be running around and jumping with your friends inside your ship. We’re very close to having this ready for you guys but for now you’re going to have to make do with this silhouette of our test character.

If you’d like to know more, we pretty much have an AMA policy on our forums so please feel free to drop by, let us know what you think and what you’d like to see in the future.