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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