I want to push the button! – Interstellar Rift development update 017


In our first development blog we showed you how we intend to make the terminal screens work. Then a few weeks later we released the initial version of the game without those features. Now more than 7 months later we’re re-introducing it. After today you’ll be able to operate certain machines and system by activating the monitor and simply clicking on functions on the screen.

TeleporterInterface

Not everything is functional yet because we are still designing some of the interfaces. But expect more of these screens to pop up all over your ships. This however means that some of the old devices and systems have to be redesigned to incorporate screens and the like. The prime example for this patch being the teleporter. Which has been moved to the props category and will have to be placed again in all your ships. This is just the first iteration of these new interfaces and we will be working on improving their performance and ease of use.

DualMonitors

Aside from the new direct control monitors we’ve also been working on our upcoming account system which will allow you guys to actually own ships and have servers store your characters data. Such as where you logged out, what items you had in your inventory, you ships permissions and more.

In the coming weeks we are going to roll out our new registration system. and allow you to create your new Interstellar Rift accounts. These accounts will determine your in-game username and your forum accounts.

We will be posting more info about user accounts and registration when we get closer to implementing them. For now please enjoy this new update and as always, your feedback comments and just general discussion is more than welcome on our forums, Twitter or Facebook.

Over the rainbow! – Interstellar Rift development update 016


Tired of the old, grey paint scheme for your mobile home among the stars? Worry no longer! for today we’re introducing paint schemes for ship interiors!

That’s right folks, as of today we are going to let you colour your ship interiors by choosing from a variety of colour palettes. In the ship editor, a new paint button has appeared on the right hand side of the screen. When placing new blocks, they will automatically be coloured in the currently selected colour scheme. But you are also able to change the colour of existing blocks by clicking on them while the paint mode is active. You are able to give each individual block a different colour scheme. We’ve had some fun testing this new feature and we cannot wait to see what you guys come up with!

IR 2014-10-14 18-27-44-10

I can already hear you asking: “But what about ship hulls?”. Well, those are coming in the very near future. But in this patch, we had to focus on interiors to make sure the tech was working as intended. Now that we know it does, we can start to focus on ship hull paint in an upcoming patch.

IR 2014-10-14 18-26-50-71

But thats not all, we are also introducing the first stage of targeting. For the moment that means that the space station and every player ship will have target marker. This is to make it easier for players to find each other and to make it back to starter station. Eventually, we intend to allow players to highlight ships and other objects in space.

In addition to the new features we have also implemented a few bugfixes, chief among them are bugs that crashed servers after a while. we have tested it and servers should once again be functional. of course if you are hosting a server and have found the server still crashes after this patch we’d like to hear from you.

We hope you enjoy this new update, and if you have any more suggestions for colour palettes and other features we’d love to hear from you on our forums, Twitter or Facebook, whichever you prefer.