Hello,

This weeks update has been focused on engine bug fixes. The upcoming week will focus on our station creator that is forming a common core for the rest of our upcoming feature announcements.

Expect a bigger update next week as we finish past-due issues and move onto new features!

Here is our update list for 23/08

3D

Over the past 2 weeks I have been focusing on adding more tiles to the station editor. So far I have added new geometry for 2 wall types: support walls and 2 tile wide windows. I have also created more floor and ceiling textures. All of these are based around Nick’s Station Interior concept art. With the addition of a door the station creator is getting enough assets to build a decent little station. I have also been working on an asteroid miner ; keep in mind that these things may get tweaked or changed in the coming weeks. -- John

I’ve made a new version of the in-game helmet, this time with less than 10% of the 30,000 triangles on the first one, and it now supports an HUD, a nameplate and custom colours. this is a preliminary render, the sketchfab version is here. I’ve also worked on a placeholder for a CO2 scrubber here and modeled a mass spectrometer here, ready for a texture design pass by Nick before we finish up. On from that, I’ve been working with Paul on porting the start of the station creator code into the game’s engine, as before it was a completely separate binary running on bare OpenGL, functioning only has a prototype. Unfortunately I don’t have much to show for it, but the base is there for us to build on! -- Jack

Art Direction

Two weeks ago we had a dev meeting where we hammered out several important story elements. I'm not going to give everything away, but the game is set around a scorched, lifeless Earth, some time after 1983, in which mankind has fled to space. As a result, much of the games artwork will be a tribute to 70s/80s retro style and culture. In the last update we showed you some of the games fictional corporations. Over the last week I've also been working on some generic signage for some the industrial/engineering areas in the game, including these warning signs. -- Nick

Changelog

Fixed AO on AMD - AMD cards miscomputed findMSB, so I switched them to explicitly use logarithms.

Fixed map_Ke not being multipled by Ke during OBJ import

Added requireBinaryAlpha argument to renderDepthOnly - This allows primary visibility to require 100% opacity while shadow maps can permit stochastic transparency or alpha thresholding.

Surface::canChange - This allows building static data structures over Surfaces that may have NULL entities. This allows for static shadowmaps.

UniversalMaterial serialization has been replaced to allow for in-memory material modification.

UniversalSurface::renderDepthOnlyHomogeneous batching - now batches together non-alpha surfaces where possible into a multi-draw calls. "Where possible" means the surfaces have the same underlying index buffer, are either both twoSided or both not, either both have bones or not, and all have the same object coordinate frame. We may eventually relax the last requirement, but this change required no rewriting of our shading code.

SPI card is now called Hardware Interface Card and has been implemented in-engine - https://github.com/paultech/TC-Specs/blob/master/KaiComm-HIC.md

Update patch-builder has been ported from Windows to our cross-platform toolkit to allow in-game patching.

LEM1802 texture rendering now functions in deferred shading pass with IOT.

Asteroid generation is at first iteration - http://i.imgur.com/nZhtkIL.png

Premade pack saving routines have been modified to follow a standard serialization v pass.

Particle Emitters have been moved to Component structure.

Light component editor added to allow modification of run-time lights.

Landing screen login for authentication of users.

Protype of new UI system - http://www.noesisengine.com/noesis_gui_features.htm

Central Earth Planet UV/Normal/Vertex/Index generation.

Multiplayer code being updated to function after drastic changes to underlying game structure.