The universe has been saved – Interstellar Rift Development Update 027

We’ve been Greenlit! Last thursday Valve has smiled upon Interstellar Rift and allowed us to pass through the gates of the promised land of Steam. And we couldn’t have done it without all of you who voted, and helped spread the word! Thanks to you, Interstellar Rift made it through Steam Greenlight in just 8 days!

To address some of the concerns we’ve received from several of our community members;

Now that we’ve been Greenlit it does not mean you’ll have to start paying for IR just yet. As we’ve stated in the past while Interstellar Rift is not intended to be a free to play game and we will not charge you for playing the pre-alpha. Nor will we move the game to Steam until we feel that the game is in a state where we feel charging money for it is justified. So until that happens enjoy the game!

Now that the celebrations are over with. We have a new patch for you today, and as the title suggests, we’re introducing universe saving! This will be the last time you’ll have to kiss your ships goodbye when a server goes down. All servers will periodically save the game state to your user database. And you can now load these server saves from your host game menu and solo game menu.

Next we’ve added proper physics meshes to all the doors. and as well proper locking indicators.
so doors will now block you from moving through until the door has properly slid out of the way. Also when a door is locked or has low power the screens on all these doors now indicate their current status. So no more wondering why a door isn’t opening for you.

Once again we’d like to thank all of you for your support during our greenlight campaign and for your continued support of Interstellar Rift. We hope you’ll enjoy the latest patch and if you’d like to stay up to date with all the latest Interstellar Rift news you can follow us on Facebook, Twitter and by leaving message on our Forums.

Thank you from everyone at Split polygon.

It’s not easy being green – Interstellar Rift Development Update 026

The time has come for us to test the waters and submit Interstellar Rift to Steam Greenlight!

We would like to thank everyone for all the support we have received so far, your input has already had a great effect on the game, and guides us as we implement more content and features. On to Greenlight!

We felt that the time was right for us to start counting votes. So if you’d like to see Interstellar Rift on Steam in the future, visit our Greenlight page, and vote for us!

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Unauthorised Access Detected. – Interstellar Rift Development update 025

Lock your doors! Hide your cargo!
The G.R.I.P. Omnitool will allow you to do just that. As of today, your mandatory Patented Sencorp G.R.I.P Omnitool has been updated with ship access functionality!

Thats right folks, ship permissions are here! You will be able to assign players to groups with different levels of access. While the G.R.I.P. will come with several basic permission levels you’ll be able to completely customize your groups and assign specific system access to each.

At the moment the default permissions sets are:

Guest Access – Everyone who teleports aboard a ship will automatically have guest access. By default this allows them to do everything but pilot a ship, until they are put in a different group, which removes the guest access.

Basic Access – Basic Access is similar to guest access, as it allows players access to doors but also to lifts.

Ship Systems – Ship systems will allow players access to everything but the helm controls.

Flight Control – As the name implies, this permission set will allow you access to the ships flight controls. Without this access level players will not be able take control of the helm.

These are all basic permission sets but players can create their own sets and assign individual devices to each permission group. Permissions are saved to a specific ship, and will only work on that ship. The owner of a ship automatically has full access and cannot transfer or disable their own permission settings.

The only exemption from the permissions system is the teleporter. For the moment players will still be able to teleport to and from ships without having been assigned to an access group. however if you truly want to block players from accessing and exploring your ship. You can turn off guest access on the door(s) to your teleporter room.

Aside from permissions we’ve also added the actual G.R.I.P device to the players right arm and added a number of interface updates. See the patch notes for details on bugfixes.

This is a major and much requested feature for Interstellar Rift but like all features this is only the first iteration. We’re going to need your help and feedback in order to improve it. So try it out and let us know what you think. You can reach us through Facebook, Twitter and by leaving message on our Forums.

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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Special Delivery! – Interstellar Rift development update 022

So after the holidays we’re back on our regular 2 week schedule and this time we’re adding a new cargo teleporter. We’re also returning the ability to export and share ships with other players outside of the game.

The new cargo teleporter allows players to teleport up to eight cargo crates at a time to any cargo pad, fuel tank or other cargo teleporter. Simply place your cargo crates onto the teleport pad then select where you want them to go from the interface. If you have hydrogen containers on the teleport pad you’ll also have the ability to teleport them straight into a hydrogen tank and thus refuel that ship. Like all teleporters there are currently no restrictions on which ships you can teleport your cargo to. Eventually a system will be put in place where you’ll need to be granted permission in order to teleport to ships which you do not own.

We’ve also taken this opportunity to enhance the teleportation effects. Although since our particle system is not yet operational the effects are somewhat limited but they should communicate what just happened a little more clearly.

Another feature we’ve re-added is the ability to export a ship you’ve designed to a file. This file will be saved on your hard drive and can be sent, downloaded and/or traded to anyone you want. To do this, simply open the ship editor, load a ship then go to the save menu and click export.

To import, go to the load menu in the ship editor and click the import button. Open the file you wish to import and save it like a regular ship afterwards.

Fuel tanks will no longer require hydrogen to construct. However this also means that they will now spawn empty. To fuel your ship you will need to teleport fuel onboard using a cargo teleporter or have fuel containers in your inventory which you can dump into the fuel tank manually. We recommend to have a few solar panels installed on your ship just in case.

We hope you enjoy this new update and let us know what you think on Twitter, Facebook or on our Forums.

New Construction Options – Interstellar Rift development update 021

We hope everyone has had a wonderful christmas and a fun and safe new year’s eve. Now that the holidays are behind us, It’s time to get back to our regular bi-weekly update schedule.

starting today we’re adding the second part of the ship production pipeline. As of today asteroids will no longer contain iron or hydrogen etc. They will instead contain iron ore, copper ore and water. These base resources now need to be fed into the new refinery and converted into building materials. You can insert the raw material into the refineries hopper in a similar manner to storing the resources in the vault. Once resources are placed in the hopper, the middle screen of the refinery will now display what materials you can refine with whatever is in the hopper. When you’ve selected what you want to refine, the refinery will start producing that material until the input hopper is empty or the output conveyor belt is full. When the resource you refined is done simply grab it off the conveyor belt and you can store it on a cargo pad or in the vault.

Also you may notice that the back of the refinery has five ports. These are meant for future refinery upgrade modules that can be attached to it. The current plan is to allow players to choose either more refinery slots or to refine more advanced materials. Expect to see more info about this when we get closer to implementing it.

In order to let players get familiar with the process, a set of public use refineries have been placed on the mining station.

Expect many more resources and build materials to be added to the game in the coming weeks and months.

Our second big feature of 2015 is the redesign of the ship connection editor. Over the past few months we’ve noticed that many people built ships and simply forgot or didn’t understand how to connect the power systems. So in order to make the system more easy to use we’ve changed it so power is now distributed through groups. When you first build your ship every device is connected under a single power group this ensures that even if you don’t want to use the power connection editor your ship systems will still receive power if you have a power source and a fuel tank onboard. Later down the line when we implement combat, players can create multiple groups so that when power cores are knocked out other systems that are grouped under different power groups will still remain operational.

We hope you’ll enjoy the new crafting system and let us know what you think. If you want to follow us for more info check out our Facebook, Twitter or engage with us on the Forums.

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