Your reputation precedes you – Interstellar Rift development Update 050

This week we have added combat mode to the game, this means that you can now turn your weapon systems on and off in the cockpit. You can also do this with “H” default. When out of combat mode the ship weapons will not use any power. But while they are active they will use a lot more power than usual. This will lead to more diverse gameplay and decision making with creating ships.

Combat mode is also partially added to avoid unnecessary conflict after an accidental weapon discharge. Because this update brings part two of our reputation, factions and fleet mechanics:

You can now gain reputation with factions, there are currently 5 factions in the game:

• Hurles Co.
• HydroPEX
• LogiCorp
• Sentinel Security Systems
• VaulTron
  

Attacking these factions will decrease your reputation with them, lowered reputation will give you trading penalties and have the faction be hostile towards you. But attacking a faction might give you reputation with a rival faction. Hurles Co. has a rivalry with Sentinel Security Systems. Attacking Hurles Co. will make Sentinel Security Systems friendly with you and Hurles Co. themselves unfriendly. When you are unfriendly or worse with a faction you can pay a bounty or wait for your reputation to slowly get restored to 0. Only negative reputation will decay back to 0.

In future updates, there will be more ways to gain and lose reputation in the form of missions, combat scenarios and more.

Cartridges have been rebalanced, they will now only give one negative and one positive buff to your ship’s stats. The positive buff has been greatly increased to be more useful as a counter to this cartridges now have a lifespan between 2 to 4 hours. When the cartridge is not in use it does not decay. We felt this was a necessary change to make the use of cartridges more viable. For example in a combat scenario you can now temporarily boost your weapons and shields with a substantial amount, instead of having a constant bonus that was almost neglectable.  

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.

Message for you Sire! – Interstellar Rift development Update 049

With this update we are introducing the first parts of our fleet mechanics. For now this only means that you can set up your own fleet and invite people to join your fleet through the new message system.

As we expand on the features of the fleet mechanics we will allow you to set a capital ship, have shared vaults for fleet members, set automatic permissions for ranks in your fleet, and more.

We changed the GRIP around to incorporate these new features, the new message system allows you to send messages to other players in an email like fashion, and will tie into a lot of the fleet managing systems we are implementing.

The engineers at Sentinel Security Systems have been improving their targeting software since the weapon systems were released some time ago, This past week they finally found the time to fix some of the issues which were plaguing the manned turret and their forward mounted counterparts.The weapon systems now converge towards the ship’s centre crosshair. Also thanks to a breakthrough in momentum prediction technology the helm’s now displays a lead indicator on all targeted ships to better assist you in your combat activities.

Additional new advances in smart weapons have progressed to the point where weapons can now automatically aim for targets if the crosshair is close enough. This new “auto aim” feature is still being tested and would greatly benefit from your feedback.

The ship editor has also received some improvements, One of the most requested features since the start of Interstellar Rift’s development has been implemented. Click & drag to build rooms is now available in the editor. Simply hold left mouse button while in room mode and drag across the screen to create a new room. The maximum room size you can make in a single drag is 10×10 tiles.  

There are some other small improvements to the ship editor:

• When the right mouse button is pressed outside of your ship you will deselect the currently selected prop/system and allow you to create new rooms.
• The camera can now be rotated by holding the left alt and moving the mouse.
• You can now use the + and – buttons to zoom in or out while in the editor.
• You can now scroll in the editor content browser.

We have rebalanced the large hydrogen tank to make it cheaper in resource cost and weight, this means that the large hydrogen tank will be more efficient in weight and resource cost than the small hydrogen tanks. Additionally the jukebox now costs resources.

The trade stands in the game will now have a friendly robot to serve you, he is the vendor at the stand. The small teleporter has a new sound when charging.

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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