Raise shields! – Interstellar Rift Development Update 035


Death, destruction and all of that good stuff. Ship destruction hits Interstellar Rift in patch 0.1.2!

As of today, asteroid mining has become a whole lot more dangerous. Asteroids impacting your ship will now cause damage and if you’re not careful it will destroy your ship and everything and everyone on it. But don’t worry too much, we do have some new defensive technology ready to help protect you.

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Introducing the Sentinel Security Systems Shield Generators. These new shield generators will allow you to protect your ship from incoming damage. When an object impacts your shield bubble, it will decrease its strength for a moment and deflect whatever object hit you. Then it will quickly regenerate back up to full strength. Shields require a constant power supply in order to remain operational. Therefore we recommend that you do not run your shields at full strength when you are not near an asteroid field or not playing a destruction derby with another ship.

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If the shield strength falls to zero, it will take a while before the shields regenerate enough again to form a bubble. When your shields are down and an object impacts your ship you will start to take hull damage, hull damage does not regenerate. The only way to repair your ship for the time being, will be to salvage it and rebuild it.

With this patch, we will also be introducing particles. The only particle effect we are shipping in this patch will be the explosions when ships receive fatal damage. In the future we will be adding more particle effects in both interior as well as exterior to make the game feel a whole lot more spectacular.

The introduction of the new power system in the previous patch was missing a device, a proper battery. So we are adding these as well. The battery works in such a way that it’s actually a battery and it discharges its power slowly rather than all at once which is what the power cells did before. This means you can leave your ship to charge its power cells for a while and you’ll be able to fly it for a while until the power cells are empty. So in theory solar powered ships should once again be somewhat viable.

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We hope you enjoy this Interstellar Rift patch and if you want to know more feel free to drop by our Steam Forums our own Forums or follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Electrifying – Interstellar Rift Development Update 034


Today we are releasing the much coveted powergrid revamp. This is a major change as to how ships are powered and how devices behave under low power conditions.

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For example, your ship produces 1500 power but your consumption is at 1700. That means that devices will function at a lower efficiency. Engines will not produce their maximum thrust output unless they are fully powered. The amount of thrust will be relative to the amount of power they receive. In a future patch we will be adding proper power management features such as the ability to divert power from one system to another.

This new power system has many benefits. One of the main advantages is that it is far more efficient, meaning the server should be able to handle far more ships and ships and stations with lots and lots of devices. Players in the past have made gigantic space stations that were almost completely powered by solar panels. When spawned, these stations would lag the entire server. The new power grid should alleviate this problem substantially. Keep in mind though, that solar panels are meant as a supplement to your generators, not a replacement. Be prepared to put a lot of solar panels on your ship or station if you want to go green.

Power cells have also been updated and are now required to help keep your ship at a more stable power level. For example when a teleporter is used, it instantly takes a big bite out of your available power, usually more than generators and solar panels can generate. Charged power cells act as a buffer between the device and your generators which handle large power spikes like this accordingly.

Another very notable effect of the new power system is that devices don’t need to charge anymore. Before today’s update, every device had its own power buffer which needed to be charged before the device would operate. This caused devices to appear underpowered where in fact they were waiting for other devices to be charged. The new power system only powers devices when they are used and divides its power equally over all those devices.

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The new power system makes it a lot more predictable compared to its predecessor. This allows us to put some information in the ship editor indicating how much power a ship generates, how much it drains and how big your spikes can possibly get. This should give you an idea on how your ship is going to perform. In the G.R.I.P. and on terminals you should now find some graphs which can be used to find out how much power is drained when certain devices are being used.

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We’ve also done a balance pass on the power consumption of several devices. So dont be surprised to find that your ships go faster or slower than you’re used to. Additionally, we have added some new control functions like mouse sensitivity and mouse Y-axis inversion.

We’ve also fixed most of the performance problems that were plaguing the map. When you activate the regular or cargo teleporter your performance should no longer be affected as much by the loading the map.

We hope you’ll enjoy this update, and as always, if you want to know more feel free to ask us anything on our Forums, the Steam forums or follow us on Facebook and twitter.