Get some G.R.I.P. – Interstellar Rift Development update 024

Today marks the first time in Interstellar Rift’s history where being trapped aboard a ship without power is no longer an issue!

Introducing the “General Remote Induction Processor” or “G.R.I.P.” Omni-tool! This new marvel of technology will allow players to transfer power from their environmental suit directly into systems and devices and thus allowing them to function temporarily without a central power source. If your suit runs out of power, don’t worry the G.R.I.P. Omni-tool uses your body’s kinetic and thermal energy to charge the internal battery once depleted. or alternatively players can drain energy from Power Storage cells or other active devices.

The G.R.I.P.’s interface is located on the players right arm and can be summoned by simply pressing the “TAB” button. In it’s current incarnation players will only be able to use the power transfer features, but in future updates they will be able to use it for many more tasks. Such as locking doors and have ready access to a map of their ship, to name but a few.

Players are now able to turn systems and devices off via the use of the G.R.I.P., currently, this does not include power generators

At the moment, the player’s arms do not match the third person model but instead follow the design of the new suit. In time we will replace the current character with a male and female variant, that matches this design.

Additionally, we’ve altered the design of the player’s inventory slightly. Instead of being on the left hand side of the screen, we’ve put it up at the top of the screen. The interface now displays the icons for the resources in your inventory rather than the transparent box renders we had before.

As always we hope you’ll enjoy this new patch and we hope you’ll let us know what you think. You can do so via e-mail, our Forums, or Twitter. and Facebook.

Please don’t stop the music! – Interstellar Rift development update 023

We have a fairly small update for you this week, we are working on some bigger stuff but we found time wrap a few new things into a patch.

First up! Exterior blocks and interior props now influence your ship’s mass, instead of just the number of claimed interior tiles. Now, the each interior prop has its own mass, meaning a room filled with devices makes your ship heavier than a big empty room. In addition, exterior tiles now also add to the weight of the ship.

Since this was quite a big change to the balance, we took this opportunity to tweak the game a little better. If we did this right, it should be very difficult to build a fast ship powered by solar panels alone (unless you spend a very large time charging power cells). A couple of hydrogen generators should be enough to power a small ship and T2 generators should be used on the larger ships.

Next we have an all new jukebox so you can put on some nice music on your voyages. The jukebox comes pre loaded with 6 tracks that will liven up your quiet space ship. Simply place the jukebox onboard a ship or station and enjoy.

In order to make it a little more clear what’s inside of crates, we changed the color of each crate to what it contains, meaning iron crates are grey, copper crates are orange and water tanks are blue.

We would also like to thank the community for tracking down some nasty bugs for us! Among others, we managed to tackle a nasty server crash, a visual bug involving underpowered extractors and a bug which made all the asteroids disappear. Keep it up, this really helps us improve the stability and quality of Interstellar Rift!

We hope you enjoy this Interstellar Rift update and stay tuned for some big new things in the coming weeks! make sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook or drop by our forums!

 

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