Santa’s Workshop – Interstellar Rift development Update 046

Workshop support was on a lot of wish lists as a requested feature for Interstellar Rift, and today the shipyard will open to allow ship and station sharing!

You can access the Steam Workshop from the store page, ships that you subscribe to are downloaded right away and available ingame in seconds! Ships will automatically show up in the load menu of the ship editor and in your available ships in the ship editor terminal. To delete ships simply unsubscribe from them on the workshop page.

In the options menu of the ship editor you can now find a new menu that will open up the Steam Workshop exporter. Here you are able to set several options for your files and add tags, descriptions and a default screenshot.

Also in this patch, the software engineers at SenCorp have upgraded your cockpit software. In this new update you can target your enemies or any point of interest. You can do this by pressing “T” (default key), doing this will select the closest point of interest it can find, when the targeting button is pressed again the targeting system will continue on to the point of interest that is closest after the first one. The maximum range of targeting any point or object of interest is 4 kilometres.

When you’ve found the right enemy to target and are done annihilating the enemy ship, the wreckage will now leave scrap behind to salvage, that is if you have a salvager!

However, not all ships will give the same resources, for example, a ship that was created without silicon and does not have silicon on board will not give any scrap that can be salvaged into silicon. With your salvaging system you will receive scrap from a certain resource, this scrap can be refined into the resource in the refinery. using the salvager you will also be able to reclaim crates that have been ejected from other ships as well as beacons.

Our friends at HydroPEX have designed a new type of station. The refueling station, this is a station that you can randomly encounter in space and will allow you to buy vast amounts of hydrogen, these stations will also allow you to repair your ship while on your travels!

We hope you enjoy this new patch and as always, if you would like to know more or would like sneak previews of upcoming features and patches please follow us on twitter, facebook and our own and Steam forums.

 

From all of us at Split Polygon, happy holidays and we look forward to bringing a lot of new content to Interstellar Rift in the new year!

P.S. The next patch will be in three weeks instead of two, due to a holiday break!

Scanning for enemies – Interstellar Rift development Update 045

Today, we introduce the basics of PvE in Interstellar Rift. From now on, when you explore the galaxy and stumble upon an asteroid field, you might find that it will be defended by drones. The further one gets from the spawning area, the higher this chance will be. So raise your shields and stock up on ammo, they will be packing a punch.

If your ship happens to get damaged, you are now able to repair your ship at your nearest Store-o-Tron terminal for a fee.

Additionally, you will now be able to scan the universe for resources. If your ship is equipped with sensors (these can be built in the exterior part of the ship editor), you can set it to find resources from the main terminal on your cockpit. Each scanner you add to your ship will give your ship more scanning strength. Scanning strength will reduce static on your scanners and let you scan further away from your ship. You can set which resources you want to scan for, or just look for all of them at the same time!

To make your travels easier, the company supplying the ship construction terminal and the refinery has improved their design and reworked their looks. There’s no need to worry you don’t need to do a thing, as soon as you log on again they have already been replaced by the Hurles co. engineers, yes they even went into your own ships and replaced them there, creepy! These engineers have also installed new software on all systems that show resources, with resource icons to create more symmetry across all GUI’s.

We have also added a new tutorial button to the main menu. When clicked, you will enter a preliminary version of the tutorial. We are listening to player feedback for this tutorial to find out how to make the game easier to understand for new players.

Finally, we’ve added a couple of little things. For instance, server owners can now set a welcome message on their servers, scrolling through your inventory should no longer skip items, and brand new mining station.

We hope you enjoy this new patch and as always, if you would like to know more or would like sneak previews of upcoming features and patches please follow us on twitter, facebook and our own and steam forums.

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Colourful profits! – Interstellar Rift development Update 044

This week’s update will introduce the basis of trading and an ingame economy. The first part of this, which is introduced in this patch, is PVE trading. You will now be able to trade resources for U-nits with trade stands. These trade stands can be found on randomly spawned stations around the galaxy, and you can buy and sell a variety of resources at these stands. Resources will be taken from either your inventory or one of your ships, and the trade stand also teleports your purchases aboard a selected ship as part of the deal. Just walk up to any trade stand on a trade station and start selling.

We are going to add extra features to this system in upcoming updates, such as player vs player trading and selling ships to other players.

As part of the introduction of a currency we have rebalanced some resources to get a more normalized view on the trade stands. This means that water, oxygen and hydrogen crates now have 10 times less capacity. To account for this we rebalanced every device in the game that used these resources, to effectively balance it out to the same ratios as before.

The second major mechanic we have added is exterior painting, you can now personalize your ship even more by adding colour to the exterior. There are 32 colours to choose from and every individual piece can be painted separately. So start colouring and don’t hesitate to show us your new designs!

We hope you enjoy this new patch and as always, if you would like to know more or would like sneak previews of upcoming features and patches please follow us on Twitter, Facebook and our own and Steam forums.

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Don’t get cocky kid! – Interstellar Rift development Update 043

Multiple people manning a single ship is one the main features of Interstellar Rift, and this week we are adding turrets that you can place on your ship that can be manned by your crew.

These turrets have been in the works for a while, and some of you might have caught a glimpse of them as we released an early version of them by accident last week.

Manned turrets can be added to the sides of your vessel and can used by everyone on your ship. Turrets work mostly the same as mounted weapons but have no weapon group. You have to connect them to an ammo loader aboard the ship, and it will fire ammo from this chamber. Multiple ammo loaders will increase the amount of bullets you can fire before reloading the turret.

In feature updates we will allow you to create different weapon types that can be fitted to these turrets.

We also added a whole bunch of new signs to the editor to choose from. Multiline wall and prop signs that can display up to four lines of text. And direction signs that can be placed in the middle of rooms instead of on walls.

We also have a list of other small features that we brought to the game, such as; new shield impact effects, new sound effects for weapons, showing exterior parts of devices in the editor and signs on cargo pads. These signs will list what is on your cargo pads on displays at the front and back of the pads.

We have also been working on improving game stability a lot over the last couple weeks. Teleporting from ship to ship should be way less if not completely free of crashes, and we have done a lot to make better use of our memory. This means you can build bigger ships in the editor. We are working on a 64bit version of the game to allow you guys to build even bigger, but this will take a couple more months.

We hope you enjoy this new patch and as always, if you would like to know more or would like sneak previews of upcoming features and patches please follow us on twitter, facebook and our own and steam forums.

 

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Creepy Features and Spooky Ads – Interstellar Rift Development Update 042

This week’s update contains a number of quality of life improvements while we work on some bigger features, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a bunch of new stuff to share.

We have updated the ship editor to have an extra mode called “device edit mode.” This mode will allow you to set up your devices before you construct a ship in the game world. What this means, is that you can click on devices and set stuff like permissions, shield levels and more, and the game will transfer these settings to your ship when you actually built it. This will also allow you to set up your signage around the ship once, instead of having to do this again every time you construct your ship.

We have also added strobe lights that you can place on the outside of your ship, these blinky lights will make you more visible against the dark backdrop of space!

There are currently six different colours to choose from, just note that they don’t show up in the editor yet, only in the game world. There are more lights though, the ammo loader that got introduced last update will now have working sound and indicator lights. These lights will indicate the status of your ammo storage, and alert you if you’re running low. You might also find some new stations in space, as we have added a couple extra which have functionalities that were lacking in the stations already available. A new apparition next to the starting station is something you will see more of as we fill space, ads. No real ads, but ads for ingame companies. These will update with coming updates to show you, for example, new devices added to the game, or special features that might be introduced.

We also got multiple requests to add in more admin options, and although they are far from finished, we have added a couple more. Admins now have the option to teleport to any ship, any player, and teleport any player to them. They can also toggle ships to be invulnerable to damage.

It will be Halloween soon and even space becomes extra scary around this time of the earthly year. Watch out for some spooky pumpkins that you can find in the universe, maybe you’ll find some on the various stations, or is there a pumpkin stuck in your extractor? No one knows for sure! These pumpkins will be in the game for a short time only, but hold on to them if you come across some.

Like always thank you for playing Interstellar Rift, and we hope you enjoy these new features. As always if you’d like to keep up to date with the latest Interstellar Rift news and previews of upcoming updates please follow us on Twitter, Facebook or drop by our Steam forums.

and happy halloween!

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Blow em up! – Interstellar rift development update 041

Welcome to patch 0.1.8, The first incarnation of combat is introduced today!

In the editor you will find a new category in exterior mode called weapons. Here you will find the first projectile based weapon in Interstellar Rift. In order to fire it you will require an ammo loader onboard as well as ammo crates.

With the Introduction of combat we are also adding the ability to build ammo, and it marks the first multi-stage tech tree in Interstellar Rift. In order to create ammunition you will need to go out into the universe and explore to find new raw materials like zinc and nitrogen. These new resources together with some of the ones already found in the game will allow you to create ammo.  You will need to combine oxygen and nitrogen to create nitrous oxide. Combine zinc and copper to create brass, combine brass and Iron to create shells in the assembler and then combine nitrous oxide and shells to create ammunition. In the future we will be adding different kinds of ammo which behave differently from these standard rounds.

When in the editor, you also have the option to create weapon groups. These groups can contain multiple weapons and ammo loaders. You can switch between the first 10 weapon groups by pressing the number keys whilst sitting in a cockpit. In this update we can only allow you to make changes to these groups in the ship editor. But in the near future you will be able to do this on the fly when piloting a ship.

Now that you’ve built ammo, there is one more step which is needed for your ship to be combat ready. In order to use your ammo you will need to put it in the new ammo loader which you can find in the editor under prop edit mode. When you’ve added your ammo loader to your ship you can continue to the exterior editor and put the mounted turret on your ship. This is the first weapon available and it only fires in the direction it was placed in. Gimbaled and manned turrets are coming in future updates, together with missiles and energy weapons.

We have also made several new additions to the cockpits to allow for a more expanded combat UI. As with combat itself expect to see many more additions to these GUI’s in the coming weeks and months.

This is the first iteration of combat that we are ready to show to you guys but this is by no means finished. We need your feedback and suggestions as we attempt to balance weapons while maintaining your creative freedom in the construction of your ships.

We are already looking at new weapons and weapon convergence as well as turrets. But every bit of feedback is welcome. We have our own ideas on how to improve, but ultimately we answer to you guys. So please don’t hesitate to let us know what you think of the new changes.

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It’s a Sign! – Interstellar Rift Development Update 040

Today Interstellar Rift will allow you, the players, to communicate better in game through the ancient but highly efficient use of signs.

Above every door you will now find a sign stating what room lies beyond that door. Each door will do this automatically based on the name that you assign to the room inside the ship editor. This also means that for the time being these signs cannot be changed unless you rename the room inside of the editor and salvage and rebuild your ship ingame.

But that’s not all. We’re also adding several new wall building blocks to the interior editor. Including a new wall section with a screen embedded in it. This screen will allow you to write a small piece of text and add arrows to either side. You can also customise the text color to one of 8 different colors. This sign is primarily added as a way to give directions aboard ships. More signs will be added in upcoming updates which will allow more text.

In addition to the new sign system, we have also been working on adding more effects to the game. Every engine now has a visible beam of particles coming out of it, and thrusters will emit little jets every time you turn your ship.

Most of our efforts have been concentrated on getting the multiplayer into a much more stable state than it has been over the last month. Last patch you might have noticed a significant improvement to the overall stability of servers and much fewer desynchronization events such as bumping into invisible asteroids and the like. With this patch, most of these issues have been resolved. This allows us to proceed with some major features again such as combat.

We sincerely thank you, our fans, for your patience over the past month while we worked on fixing these issues. We now have the proper tools that will allow us to quickly identify and squash these bugs as soon as they show their ugly faces.

On another note we would like to make everyone aware that Split Polygon is offering internships for tools, gameplay and engine programmers, if you’re interested please visit: http://www.interstellarrift.com/jobs/ for more Information.

We hope you enjoy this new patch and as always, if you would like to know more or would like sneak previews of upcoming features and patches please follow us on Twitter, Facebook and our own and Steam forums.

 

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Information warfare – Interstellar Rift Development Update 039

We’ve spent the last few weeks mostly working on fixing bugs with the multi-player. This time we feel that we’ve made a lot of progress in getting multi-player back on track.

However, the work on fixing bugs is not done yet, and we will continue getting to the bottom of any issue that may present itself. We believe that this patch will significantly improve the the viability of the multiplayer, and we sincerely apologize for the major issues we’ve had these past few weeks. In addition to fixing a lot of problems we have also improved performance across the board.

Besides fixing bugs and improving performance we have also spent the past two weeks working on a new Information Kiosk (among other stuff for upcoming updates). Which will display information about devices and resources, and will also allow you to access some tutorials. Many of you have been inquiring about tutorials, and this kiosk is a first step to make the game easier for new players.

This new kiosk can be found on the starter stations and will be updated in the coming months as new features are added. The kiosk can be found under admin models in the editor. It does not require unobtainium, allowing players to place it on their own ships and station. To see admin models in the editor, you will have to enable them in the options menu under editor settings.

We’ve also added new admin commands for server owners. You will be able to assign administrator rights to other players, in addition to the ability to kick and ban players from the server. These new functionalities are located in the admin menu which you can access by pressing F8 while in game.

As always we hope you enjoy this update. And we’d like to ask that if you find any more bugs or if you’d simply like to follow us for more info and previews of upcoming updates please visit our forums, or our Steam forums  or follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

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Push button receive beacon – Interstellar Rift Development Update 038

It has been an interesting two weeks, our addition of the infinite galaxy caused a few problems in multi-player. This week’s patch should address the major visual desync issues which were caused by the last patch, A.K.A the invisible asteroids that were destroying your ships. We have created new tools that will allow us to detect these issues more easily so in the future these problems shouldn’t slip past as easily.

As for new features, we are adding a new Assembling Machine. This device will be used to make smaller devices. Devices such as the new signal beacon.

Similar to the refinery, in order to use the Assembling Machine you will have to put refined resources into the hopper and select which device you wish to have it construct. In the future this machine will be used for similar devices such as repair drones, combat drones and more.

The new signal beacon allows you to mark locations in the galaxy. It can be detected from 150 kilometers away. Using the sensor menu on terminals, you will be able to change the transponder message of the beacon.

To deploy a beacon, simply put it into the disposer and eject it from your ship. It will then unfold into its beacon form and begin transmitting. Using the sensors you can find your beacon and change it’s transponder message. Using the same menu you will also be able to deactivate it. Similar to NPC stations beacons will drift back to their original position.

We’ve also updated the way the cargo manifest works. You can now see what cargo is currently on board your ship, how many cargo spaces you have in total and, how many are occupied.

you can access this screen from the GRIP and the wall terminals. With the sensor list you can also check the cargo holds of other ships.

We hope you enjoy this new patch and as always, if you would like to know more or would like sneak previews of upcoming features and patches please follow us on Twitter, Facebook and our own or Steam forums.

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Distress signal detected! – Interstellar Rift Development Update 037

Exploration has been one of our biggest objectives when we started Interstellar Rift. Today we take the first step to realising that goal. Today we implement the first version of infinite universe generation. Up to this patch there were no asteroid fields beyond 100 kilometers from the starting station. Now the game will start to continuously generate new asteroid fields and stations the further you fly out.

This first iteration will have several space stations, mineable asteroid fields and large asteroids. But now that the system is online we can gradually start to add new things to the universe generator to fill your universes with cool new stuff.

In addition to the universe generator we are also adding a new resource recipe. You will now be able to create steel by combining 2 units of iron and 1 unit of carbon. Steel has been added to the required resources of all tech 2 devices and some of the smaller devices. But don’t worry you wont need stand next to your life support huffing as much oxygen as possible in order to acquire carbon. Since carbon is now abundant in all asteroid fields as it can be found as an additional resource found in most asteroid types.

But wait there’s more. Because you can now spend much more time and fly much further trying to find new stations and resources it may be hard for your friends to find you, therefore we are adding a new ship device, the transponder. The transponder allows you to send out a signal which can be picked up from 150 kilometers away when activated. You can set the transponder to transmit any message you want.

There has also been a revamp to the engine display in the cockpit to make it a little clearer which engines are online, or are functioning at a lower capacity.

Please note that you will have to rebuild your server from the admin menu so that the universe generator will engage. however this means that all of the ships that are stored in the Store-o-Tron will be removed and the resources will be refunded to the individual players

NOTE: to continue with an old galaxy the world has to be rebuild, to do this the Admin can press F8 and hit rebuild world. This might take a couple of minutes.

As always we hope that you enjoy this weeks update and if you would like to know more and  see sneak peeks at upcoming patches please follow us on Facebook, Twitter, our own forums or our Steam forums.