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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