Hello Opulencians,

Today we have deployed a new Patch in-game, and as promised there is a first round of Balancing in it! Were the infamous Zekes reworked? Is the supremacy of the Headshot specialization soon to be over?

Patch Notes

A first round of Balancing has been done to the Creatures. This first round concerns Elite Creatures:

• Jimbo’s damage curve was reworked on all levels
  
• Pete Poundmore’s attack “Floor Punch” now deals more damage on Tiers 4/5/6
  
• Countess Bloodbathory now has more Resistance to Damage on all levels
  
  And…
  
  
• Zeke’s attack “Headshot” now deals 10% less damage. The arrow speed has been slightly reduced, and Crits were removed on all levels
  
• Zeke’s attack “Spread Eagle” now deals more damage, with a cooldown between arrows reduced by 0.5s on all levels

Please keep in mind that this is only the first round of Balancing we are implementing in the game. More will follow with the next Patch, and with a next one, and so on. Your feedback will, as always, be critical to us, so please keep commenting in the forums!

Known Issues

Here is a recap of the known issue and their current status.


As stated in the previous Development Update, the Authentication Error has been fixed for 95% of our players.

If you keep encountering this error, please create a ticket!


We keep on working toward optimizing the game so that it runs on as many configurations as possible.

We would like to remind our players that the “Minimum Requirement Error” message is not arbitrary: if you are encountering it, your current configuration simply cannot run the game. The game would crash if we were to let you bypass that message.

The good news is, 95% of you guys have a good enough configuration to actually run the game! The only issue is the following: you absolutely need to have updated drivers.

Please check your Video Card manufacturer’s website to check if your drivers are up-to-date - it will solve the issue for the immense majority of you!

If you keep encountering Minimum Requirements errors after you have updated your drivers, please create a ticket.


Some of our users have encountered issues in our Tutorial. Here are the three behaviours we have identified:

• During the Mines placement, you have moved a Room and rendered your Castle invalid without being able to fix it
  
• By purchasing too many Castle Heart upgrades or Creatures, you have emptied your Life Force chests and cannot purchase more Creatures/Traps
  
• During Creature placement, you have maxed your Castle’s Defense Points and are unable to put down the Trap Generator

If you happen to be in one of these situations, please create a ticket. We will unlock your account manually while we fix the root cause.

Some users have also stated that they were locked in the Tutorial because they didn’t have any clear objectives to attain anymore. It is simply because you need to level up to level 4 to kill Count Snottingham to get to the next step!

If you encounter any other issue with the Tutorial, please let us know in the forums!


Some of our users have found an exploit to keep their Castle from being attackable. We have found the issue and started solving it manually with existing users. It will be fixed definitely in one of our next Patches.


Some of our users have difficulties equipping/removing certain pieces of Gear, such as the 2nd Ring. Tooltips also sometime fail to appear while hovering the mouse over an item. This is being tackled as we speak and will be fixed in our next patch.

Some of our users are also experiencing UI lags after playing for a certain amount of time, or after following a set of steps in the game. This is a rather large issue that we will keep working on in the future. Fixes will regularly come to enhance the situation, and everything will be fixed once we ultimately integrate a new User Interface system in the game.

Next week’s Patch will actually fix a memory leak issue that could generate lag when watching a lot of replays.

That’s all for now!

Please leave a comment if you think we have forgotten something important. We will try to update you all as regularly as possible on all of the topics covered today.

More to come very soon!

Changes:
- robertlee: easier to kick onboard players to water

Fixes:
- disabled automatic switch to new picked up gun
- coachgun can't reload properly sometimes
- fall death induced by kick doesn't count as player kill
- a sound missing, a shader not working on linux

Weapon balance:
- dynamite: range increased +20%
- axe: miss animation plays slightly slower

Content

• Added 25 New Male Pirate Voices!
  
• Added 7 New Passive Items: Baby Oil, Sugar Cube, Love Letter, Boar Hearth, Bread, Talisman of Hate and White Flag
  
• Added 4 New Ultimate Abilities: Falcon Dance, Ace, Shadow Cloak, Headshot
  
• Added 3 New Weapons: Double Axe, Combat Fishing Rod and Scissors!
  

Features

• Camera movement experience improved!
  
• You can now rename any pirate that is in your crew! Simply click pirate name at the summary!
  
• Chests improved! They now can drop ultimate abilities, there is 9 ultimate abilities so far!
  

Thank you! Expect to see 0.5.0.3 tomorrow!

Content

• Added 25 New Male Pirate Voices!
  
• Added 7 New Passive Items: Baby Oil, Sugar Cube, Love Letter, Boar Hearth, Bread, Talisman of Hate and White Flag
  
• Added 4 New Ultimate Abilities: Falcon Dance, Ace, Shadow Cloak, Headshot
  
• Added 3 New Weapons: Double Axe, Combat Fishing Rod and Scissors!
  

Features

• Camera movement experience improved!
  
• You can now rename any pirate that is in your crew! Simply click pirate name at the summary!
  

Thank you! Expect to see 0.5.0.3 tomorrow!

Hey everybody!

The refactoring is finally coming together, slowly but surely! But, naturally the game really needs to be thoroughly and exhaustively tested before we can even consider releasing it to everyone.

So, we need a new batch of testers who will get the pleasure (pronounced torture) of testing what is certain to be a very broken version of the game. This access will be limited to only a few people, so if you’re interested, please send us an e-mail at testing@saurpopodstudio.com. One thing to note, this isn’t a for fun thing, as this version will likely be broken. We need people not who just want to play a newer version, but who want to help us track down and fix bugs in it. So please, only send us a message if you’re interested in looking for ways to break the game, not only because you want to play a new version.

So, if you are one of those people who wants to help out and doesn’t mind having a disturbingly broken version of the game on your computer, please write us with the following information:

• Brief bio of who you are as a gamer.
  
• Rough rundown of your computer’s specs, including OS, CPU, GPU, and amount of RAM. We’ll collect more detailed information after we’ve narrowed the field a little.
  
• Any previous testing experience.
  

After a few days, we’ll go through all of the applications and select a few people to join the ranks of our testers!

Thanks for your help!

Update 01.021.024: Survival mode is now available in Space Engineers! We have also added new game scenarios (Crashed Red Ship, Lone Survivor, Two Platforms), new music and sounds and and tons of other features related to the Survival mode.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5PgmvtRHZU

Full list of new features and fixes: http://forums.keenswh.com/post?id=6803265

A new extensive interview with Game Designer Andres Bordeu, which reveals more information about Abyss Odyssey, has been featured at Gaming Trend. Follow the link to read all about it!

http://gamingtrend.com/2014/03/13/zeno-clash-dev-talks-abyss-odyssey/

Hello everyone! We want to share some good news with you – our web site aterdux changed its design. It’s now more aligned with our ideas about quality and being up-to-date. The site now has two important areas: a places to buy our game and blog structure where you can find the most recent news about the game. Instead of the old comments system we decided to use the popular platform Disqus, write us and don’t hold anything back. Later we will take care of the design of our forums.

Soon we also plan to change all the content structure of the site (descriptions, new parts), the closer we are to the release the more we have to do. We hope you will have more fun reading what we write on our new site.

0.908
As before, our priority is to create new video effects and new interface. These tasks are big and connected to many other game aspects that we can’t really show them without it being done fully.

In parallel we work on game sounds and translation to other languages (German, French). Thank you for sending bug reports and writing in the forums, we use it to fix the bugs in small patches.

In the last hotfix we had a lot of changes that’s why there is a new version 0.908 and so it means we are one step close to the release. In this patch we fixed the following things according to your reports:

• Bugs connected with start of new game through the main menu in situation were extra objects or data were left;
  
• Memory leaks in the engine;
  
• Saving bugs.

Steam Workshop

You probably are asking a question why the Map Editor is not released yet. Here is our answer. As we said in one of our diaries entries, we plan to release the editor right away with integration with Steam Workshop because we are aware that this system is very popular in the gaming community. In the process of studying this system we ran into some issues that we are resolving now.

Unfortunately, Valve practically has no documentation for Steam Workshop. We didn’t work much with modding for other games and their workshop integration so it took us a while to research. In the process we learned that adding new materials depends on the developers efforts. We have to create a utility that allows to add new mods, provide its categorization, descriptions, adding pictures etc. We are almost done with it, we have to write a wrapper over SDK Steam library and hope it won’t take that long. Afterwards we have to test it and then the editor can be released!

Game Developers Conference

You probably heard that in few days Game Developers Conference will start in San Francisco. Alexander is going to present our game at GDC Play, booth PL 203. If you plan to attend, stop by to take a look at the latest game version on our table! This version will include our biggest map in the game – Windfeld and some other surprises might await you!



Русская версия дневников разработчиков #9.

Hi all - we've released an updated version to the address the control issues and a few other minor fixes. Thanks!

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Sales ends March 20th @ 10AM PST