A teleportation conundrum – Interstellar Rift development update – 031

Today we are implementing teleporters in a way they were originally intended. The regular teleporters that have been in the game since we first launched the pre-alpha over a year ago now have a range of 500 meters. This means you will no longer be able to teleport from the starter station to the mining station using these teleporters. Instead, we are adding the long range teleporter. This new device has required us to slightly redesign the concourse of the starter station and the arrival bay on the mining station to accommodate for this new teleporter. The long range teleporter has a range of 12.5 kilometers and requires more power and also a new resource, silicon to build. When activating the console it will also display how much power is needed to teleport to that location.

In addition to teleporter ranges, we are also changing how teleporters work. Over the past year many of you have asked us why the control console is on the outside of the teleporter. The answer is, because the teleporter was not working the way we intended. Now, once you have chosen a destination, you have 5 seconds to step onto the teleporter pad and then it teleports anybody present on the pad at the same time. The long range teleporter works in a similar manner.

We are also adding additional asteroid fields, and these new fields are where you can find silicon and asteroids with higher yields of the other resources. The contents and position of these asteroid fields are randomised, so every new galaxy you start will be different. In the future we plan to expand this system when we implement the procedural galaxy to include more resources, and different types of asteroids, amongst other things to explore.

Another feature we are rolling out this patch is a new set of hand animations in first person which will display what item you currently have selected. We hope this will make it clearer when you are holding something and when you can and cannot place something in a device or on a cargo pad.

In March 2013 we first unveiled and released the pre-alpha build for Interstellar Rift to the public. Then last March you helped us get through Steam Greenlight by voting for us and launching us into the top 100 in just eight days. And now we are ready to announce the next step in Interstellar Rift’s development. Steam Early Access! We are ready to bring Interstellar Rift out of pre-alpha and into proper alpha stage in late June. This is a big step for both the game and us as a studio. We thank you for your support in helping us get this far and we hope you will keep supporting us in the future.

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Prepare for Ramming speed! – Interstellar Rift Development Update 030

At last! Today marks the biggest update in terms of code since the day we first introduced multi-player to Interstellar Rift. Today we implement double precision, which will fix the bug which has become known as the glitch lands. No longer will your ships hull begin twitching when you get more than 10 kilometres away from the starter station. From now on you will be able to fly for a grand total of 0.28 light years from the starter station before that bug rears it’s ugly head again. This will allow us to start filling up space with stuff for players to interact with.

Our second major feature, and this is a big one, is space physics. As of today you will no longer be able to fly straight through objects. While it’s implementation is not 100% done yet, our revolutionary implementation will allow for thousands of moving asteroids, players and other space objects to interact with each other on a single server. These new features were the last major roadblocks standing in the way of real ship to ship interaction, and were necessary for things like space combat, large star systems, warp, space anomalies and much more.

for the time being, all space objects will have a simple box or sphere collision shape. In future patches these will change to more accurately represent the shape of the object. But at least for now you won’t be able to move through objects anymore. Your ship won’t take damage yet though, that’s also coming in a future patch, but for now these new systems open the doors to many new features.

As a result of our new space physics systems, space ship controls are now physics driven. In practice you won’t notice much of this yet apart from your old ships being faster or slower depending on their mass. Also their handling will be slightly different as ships will now drift accordingly based on their thruster power and mass. Ships will still automatically stop themselves. The new ship controls will be more refined in future patches.

For us this is a major milestone and are very pleased with what these new features now enable us to do. As always please enjoy this patch, and let us know what you think. You can do so by following us on Twitter, Liking us on Facebook or visiting our Forums.

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