A chilling prospect – Interstellar Rift development update 020

In the cold abyss of space, ice asteroids have formed! Mining these asteroids with a resource extractor will grant you supplies of hydrogen. This means that for the first time in Interstellar Rift fuel will be consumed by ships when you fly around.

In this update we are starting to roll out energy consumption for all devices in Interstellar Rift, starting with engines. This means that unlike before when devices only required a set amount of electricity to operate they now constantly consume fuel and electricity (Ion engines would fill their buffers with electricity, but not actually consume any of it).

This system will be expanded in the future as we ready more devices. For this update only the ion engines will consume electricity, all other devices will still work indefinitely as soon as their buffer has been filled.

In order to construct ships, players now need to mine ice asteroids as ships require the tanks to be filled before you can spawn them. This to prevent players from spawning a ship that has no power (doors and other devices will not work without power). Tanks can be filled up and emptied by inserting or extracting fuel tanks from them. We are planning on introducing battery packs for players in upcoming updates, to make sure that players can always charge and use devices that have no power.

As mentioned in our previous update the ship helms will now start using ingame monitors as we continue to work on updating every device with our new ingame screens. The old space flight interface remains for now in the exterior camera. These monitors will be tweaked over the coming updates to improve ease of use and readability.

We also fixed some issues with helms that caused them to get locked up if multiple players tried to access them at the same time. Among the bugfixes are also server stability updates as we continue to find and eliminate bugs that cause unstable servers.

Due to the upcoming holidays, this will be the last update of Interstellar Rift for 2014, updates will continue in the new year.

As always, you can reach us through our forums, by following us on Facebook or Twitter or by simply sending us an e-mail. All your feedback is welcome and only serves to help make Interstellar Rift a better game for you!

Happy holidays from everyone at Split Polygon!

Hide away your valuables! Interstellar Rift development update 019

Are you tired of losing all your resources every time you leave the server? Are you sick of constantly having to mine all those resources again and again just to build a small ship? Well have we got the update for you!

This week we’re introducing the first parts of persistent server saving, starting with the vault. Vaults are star system wide banks where players can safely store their belongings. These vaults can be found on NPC stations, players can deposit and withdraw their items at any vault within the same star system. If you construct a ship from a station with a vault, the resources within the vault can be used to construct that ship in addition to the resources in that stations cargo bay.

What this means is, that once a player has managed to get his valuable resources to a vault, those resources are safe from other players, they cannot be destroyed or stolen from that point on. We are using the vault as the first step to persistent world saving, meaning they will still be available to you when you leave and rejoin the server, or when the server is taken down for whatever reason.

We have also changed the way we save ships to prepare for world saving. This means they are now saved in a database. Although this doesn’t have many direct effects for the player, it does have some side effects:

• Ships load much faster in game.

• .ship files can no longer be loaded, to still allow you access to your old ships, we’ve added an import function to the editor load menu. By using this feature you can update your old ships so they will once again be available in the build menu.

• Servers should be more stable. We continue to monitor server stability, although this is an iterative process, a completely stable server is one of our main goals at this point.

Over the coming weeks we will be adding more features to persistent server saving. Such as ship ownership, ship positions, player positions and many others.

Another long overdue feature we’ve added is proper first person cockpit view. Players can now walk up to a pilot seat and sit down. The camera will automatically switch to first person mode, from which players can now control the ship. Later down the line, all of the monitors in the cockpit will become active and can be used to manipulate different systems aboard the ship. Also some of the existing cockpits will be redesigned to better accommodate these new screen features when they go live.

To get this working, helms are the first prop that feature some functionality you can look forward to in future updates for other props, namely we can now select specific elements of props rather than the whole model (such as a single chair in a cockpit).

Finally, we have also added a couple of new props to the game. Among these are a disposal unit to cleanly dispose of your unwanted crates, an all new small helm, and a couple of new industrial exterior blocks.

We hope you’ll enjoy this new update and as always you can reach us through our forums, by following us on Facebook or Twitter or by simply sending us an e-mail. All your feedback is welcome and only serves to help make Interstellar Rift a better game for you!

If you want to support us further, you can vote for Interstellar Rift in the IndieDB Indie of the year awards by clicking the button below!

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