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.

---

There be gold in dem roids! – Interstellar Rift development Update 048

LogiCorp has once again developed a new piece of hardware, this new device is a 3D printer that will let you create your own cartridges, these are the cartridges that will go into the data cores that were introduced with the last update. The 3d printer will use newly introduced rare resources such as gold, silver and more. The crack team of LogiCorp engineers have also made modifications to your ship’s sensors as well as the extractor, to allow you to find and mine these new minerals.
Different resources create different cartridges, you will have to find out what resource is needed for which Upgrade and how to make the best cartridge you need! Gold and silicon are needed to make a default cartridge.

The 3D printer will come into play a lot more in upcoming updates. Right now it is only able to make ship upgrade cartridges but this machine will be used for more players items such as weapons and tools in the future.

 

Additionally, we have also added some brand new effects to the main menu and loading screens.

This update we have also been hard at work on improving performance and fixing bugs. Players might have noticed that we were extensively testing on the Split Polygon server and we are sorry for any inconvenience this might have caused over the past week. However, it did help us improve the game’s quality. The game should now run smoother in general and we have removed some of the lag spikes and memory leaks that were present. However like any game in alpha stage this is an ongoing process. Therefore we would like to ask the players to keep posting about any issues and they encounter on the forum. We run into quite a few ourselves but it’s impossible to account for every hardware combination and settings so any feedback in this regard that you are willing to provide will help us make a much more stable and enjoyable game.

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.

---

Getting an upgrade! – Interstellar Rift development Update 047

A happy new year to all of the longtime players and the new players that have come in during the holiday sale!

During the christmas and new year holidays the employees of Logicorp have been working hard on some new hardware that will improve your ship’s performance in many different ways. These new systems are the data core terminals and data core expansion bays. These systems will need data cartridges to work, which you can find randomly on stations, these cartridges hold the upgrades to your ship, you can add a cartridge to your data core terminal to make them active. Each data core terminal starts with 2 open slots, you can increase this to a maximum of 8 by building data core expansion bays, each bay will allow for 1 more cartridge in the data core terminal when assigned to a data core terminal.

Upgrades can vary from faster refine speeds, to engine upgrades or faster shield regeneration. Upgrades stack with each other and can completely turn the performance of your ship around.

The cockpit software has also received another update, the cockpit will now alert you when you are on a crash course. When you are sitting in the cockpit the crash course alert will occur 5 seconds before impact, when you are not sitting in the cockpit the crash course alert will occur 30 seconds before impact. We have also greatly improved the shields, as we found with the addition of point defense drones, shields did far too little to stop the incoming projectiles. Both shields have received a very substantial buff. See the patch notes for more details.

We have added a new feature where cargo will now add mass to your ship, this means that when you are hauling a lot of cargo your speed calculation will be different and make your ship slower and harder to turn around.

Lastly, You can now turn more systems on or off using your GRIP tool, such as power batteries and power cells. This gives players more control over the in and out-flow of electricity between systems.

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.

 

---