Jun 30, 2023

Patch Merging Part 3, new building, new armor modification system, new items.

Penkura - LionsArt

Dev-Com

Hello, world!

In this merging patch, we are introducing a brand-new system, armor modification!
From now on, players are able to attach MODs directly to their armor/suit, improving oxygen tanks, fall damage resistance, oxygen intake, and backpacks.

With the new system, a lot of other changes had to be made, most of them aimed directly at the "Character View" window. From now on, players will be able to set their "Athand" weapon/tool with their stats conveniently displayed on the Character View window. The player will also, see their DNA modification, and implemented mods.

Another addition to the game is the new building, Enhance-Atmo-Growbed.
Thanks to this growbed, players will be able to speed up their plants' growth, and because of our new plant growth requirement system, it will help to satisfy at least some of the plants' needs.

From now on, plants, and mushrooms, will have their requirements, that will affect their growth speed, those requirements are hydration, sun intensity (or lack their off), and of course, time. In the near future, growbed slot size will also have its importance when we will introduce bigger plant life for players to interact with.

The player movement will also see some changes, camera movement, walking, running, and jumping should feel smoother, we redesigned some of the math operations that are happening in the background to improve player movement, to be more precise, how the game calculates player velocity, the gravity of the environment, and mouse-player control. First-person mode, is a big part of the game we want to make sure that the game "feels" as good as possible to play.

We also started to work on in-game tutorials, providing players with necessary data that will help them understand the game, while not bombarding them with information is always a tricky matter, but thanks to the players' feedback we are slowly introducing changes, the biggest of which will come on the next big patch.

Before we will move to information on the next big patch, we want to apologize for the lack of one of the buildings that were supposed to be introduced in this patch, unfortunatly our testers found a major problem with it, that requires changes in the code. The building will be added with a small patch planned to be released this Tuesday.

Now about the current work and the next big patch.
The next big patch will be the last update before 0.2.0, some of you may notice that we are introducing content that was supposed to be released with 0.2.0 but because we don't want to force the players to start the game from the beginning, we are moving some of the system and save modification to this version.

The upcoming patch will introduce many changes to the in-game missions, which will smooth out the journey for starting players, a new building and system connected to it (the research system), and lastly but also a very important part of the game, a much-improved voice acting. Not only we will improve our lovely Sara, but we plan to add a few more voices to the game, to make the lore intake more pleasant.

And as always, for more information regarding the latest technical support, patches, and updates please join our Discord Community.

LINK ----> https://discord.gg/2ukYHQm

Till the next Dev-Com over and out.

Penkura Main Branch Adjustment
---------------------
⊞ Bugs/Errors ⊞
---------------------

◈ Fixed Terrain in Gemini Base.

◈ Someone discovered the "Snowball" changed its location to a more hidden location. ːsteamthumbsupː

◈ Improved collisions around the elevator in the Gemini Base, which could be used to kill the player before reaching the next base.

◈ On reentering RTS mode, the buttons of previously selected building types are duplicated until reselected.

◈ If the player stands near the Ore Extractor when it finishes building, the screen won't refresh until the player won't go out and back in its detection range.

◈ Time calculation changed if the game was played on a 60+ frame rate, increasing day/night cycle length.

-------------------------------------------------
⊞ Improvements / changes / additions ⊞
-------------------------------------------------

◈ Added new buildings:
- Enhance-Atmo-Growbed.

◈ Added new items to the game:
- (MOD) Improved Filter Cleansing
- (MOD) Backpack Object Segregation System
- (MOD) Legs Supporting Micro Springs
- (MOD) High Compression Oxygen Tank

◈ Added new items to the MMC blueprint list:
- (MOD) Backpack Object Segregation System
- (MOD) Legs Supporting Micro Springs
- (MOD) High Compression Oxygen Tank

◈ Added Armor/Suit MOD installation system.

◈ Added "Armor" slot to the character view window.

◈ Added "At Hand" slot to the character view window.

◈ Added new buildings to the construction list:
- Enhance-Atmo-Growbed

◈ Added Neurocore statistic to the character view.

◈ Improved quick-use icons.

◈ Added "DNA" overview to the character view window.

◈ Plants will now have their own requirements, which will affect their growth speed.

◈ Improved the way the Weather system, Cloud system, Day/Night cycle, and Atmospheric Changes system, calculate time in the game. (minor performance boost).

◈ Visual changes to character view.
- Improved visibility of positive and negative effects.
- Moved all stats into a single window.
- If we take control over a bot, Health will change its name to Integrity, and Health Icon, to Integrity Icon.

◈ Incress melee combat range by 20% (fists).

◈ From now on, Equipped or Athand items, don't take up Backpack Space.

◈ Improved all fist-fighting animations.

◈ Improved and optimized tree textures, and normal maps.

◈ Changed the name of the Administration Location Switch Unit to "Snowball" ːsteamthumbsupː

◈ Improved Holographic Shaders for Buildings Ghosting, Positive Construction Placement, Negative Construction Placement, Priority, and Construction Pause.

◈ Drastic optimization of Atmo-Growbed (lowering its GPU requirement by around 90%).

◈ Incress Player jump height by 12%.

◈ Improved jump inertia.

◈ Improved turn rate while running and walking.

◈ Improved mouse control.

◈ Toxic resistance name changed to Biohazard.

◈ Improved jump animation.

◈ Improved the last level of details of nearly all flora.

◈ Added Sprite LOD rendering to rocks, boulders, trees, and bushes. (lowering average last LOD polygon count by 98% improving speed).

◈ Optimized all textures and normals of most rocks, and all trees, last distance LOD, lowering their memory consumption by 60%.

◈ Improved fall animation, added two types of fall animation, soft, and hard fall animation (hard animation takes health from the player).

◈ Improved textures of all Seed Containers.

◈ Redesigned personal computers.

◈ Improved visual look of all Seed Containers icons.

◈ Optimized icon textures to take less memory.

May 16, 2023

Patch Merging Part 2, remastered UI, new TAA, bug fixes, and new systems.

Penkura - LionsArt

Dev-Com

Hello, world!

Today we are updating Penkura, with the second part of the merging process.

In this patch, we manage to fix all the major issues with the project, completely remastered nearly the entire UI in the game, a new Feedback system, and some great new features.

One of the main changes in this patch is the User Interface, nearly every single UI in the game was cleaned up, to make it as easy to read, and as sharp on the screen as possible while still keeping the overall world aesthetic.
The main UI that we focused on in this patch (besides dozens of changes to the player character view, inventory, item inspection, main menu, and RTS mode) was:

The MMC UI (a place where the player is able to create his items).

Ore Refinery

CCC

Bot Control part of the CCC

and lastly Growbed.

Because a lot of users used the Bug Report system to provide feedback anonymously, we also added a new window specifically for it, from now on players are able to send us emails directly from the game (of course fully anonymously).

Another part of the game we improved is the weapon system, more precisely our long-range weapons in preparation for the upcoming new weapons. We added physics-based weapon recoil (the more powerful shot the stronger the recoil), an accuracy system (which changes based on player movement), a bullet heat trail, and heat dispersion from the shot.
All those changes should provide that known UMPF to the weapons, making them feel a little bit better than before.

Another change to the game is the new Humidity system, from now on game is able to calculate the Humidity of the air, by gathering data from fog, clouds, sun, and many more. Humidity will affect all flowers, mushrooms, grow beds, and atmospheric evaporators.

The higher the humidity the faster plants will grow, while taking less resources from the growbed.
Atmospheric Evaporators will also provide more hydrogel the higher the air humidity and of course less when the humidity drops below the minimum amount.

Also from now on, fog will affect Solar Panels' effectiveness ( this feature most likely will require some fine-tuning to make sure that the game won't be too hard at the start of the player's journey).

In the title, we also mention TAA improvements, as some of you know, we are using our own custom TAA to remove ghosting and improve the sharpness of the image, the problem was that it was quite heavy and did consume a lot of GPU power. After a lot of work, we were able to iron out our Custom TAA and improve its performance by nearly 80%.

Before we continue with our patch notes, we want to thank Jrok for providing us with a few ideas related to the inventory system, from now on when the player selects an item category in the inventory, Store All button will change from "Everything" to that specific category. Example below.

From now on we will add nicknames of all the users whose ideas/feature requests were added to the game.

Now about the upcoming patches.

In 3 days we plan to release another patch, that will add a new structure to the game, Manufacture Platform, and with it Industrial M.M.C. We did plan to release it in this patch, but the new MMC will drastically affect balancing in the game, which we need to stabilize.

Next week we plan to release another patch that will add Armor Implants to the game. Implants will increase armor capabilities, and add new features.

After that, we plan to release another structure, the Research Station, and a new feature, research, and development. Allowing players to discover buildings, implants, items, and base improvements.
As you may imagine this will once again drastically affect game balancing, we want to use this moment to change the early game of Penkura.
We want to focus on the early part of our project, to drastically improve the pacing of the game, make it a little bit easier to learn, and make sure that players spend much less item idling.

And as always, for more information regarding the latest technical support, patches, and updates please join our Discord Community.

LINK ----> https://discord.gg/2ukYHQm

Till the next Dev-Com over and out.

Penkura Main Branch Adjustment Part 2
---------------------
⊞ Bugs/Errors ⊞
---------------------

◈ Text for inverting mouse X and Y axis was backward, X should be Y and Y should be X.

◈ Bio-Recycler didn't save its state (On/Off) properly.

◈ Highlight effect gave a big blue box on the left or right if the player gets too close to the object.

◈ Player with a keen eye found a location where he could look underneath the level if crouched (fixed).

◈ Screen with high-resolution 4k+ had problems rendering text in the correct position on the screen.

◈ Fixed footstep sound duplication error.

◈ Fix for the Night sky border line to appear from 0:00 till 0:18.

◈ Fixed Computer interaction in Epsilon Base.

◈ "Its all in the Crystals" mission duplicated its entry each time player loads the game.

◈ Save/Load system triggered clean-up feature if Windows Numerical Format was changed from Default to Custome.

◈ Warrior Metos, didn't correctly remove collision after death.

◈ C.A.T had a chance to permanently loop build sound if the player activates deconstruction while constructing.

◈ Magnetic Wind Turbines, spin extremely fast after being constructed for 10 seconds.

◈ One of the doors in the Archeological Base didn't properly save its state.

◈ On death, the body left by the player, had camera adjusting shaders on hands that led to visual error.

◈ CCC didn't properly delete buildings from the queue unless manually refresh.

◈ Rain was able to pass through very thin collisions.

◈ CCC didn't properly add buildings to the construction queue on load.

◈ Mouse cursor was able to leave the game window in fullscreen mode.

-------------------------------------------------
⊞ Improvements / changes / additions ⊞
-------------------------------------------------

◈ Added Automatic Zoom system to all 3d User Interfaces, which will take FOV, player screen ratio, and screen resolution to make sure that the entire 3d User Interface is visible.

◈ Changed some of the items' production placement.

◈ Visually updated 3d User Interface to make it cleaner and easier to use.
- CCC
- MMC
- Ore Refinery
- Growbed
- P.D.S

◈ Improved Mouse Handling.

◈ Player is now able to move the Materialization Queue slot to the bottom of the list by dragging it below the last queue slot.

◈ Rewritten collision system for rain effect, tripling precision without any performance cost.

◈ Incress rain effect size and power by 40%.

◈ Improved player Flashlight (cone width, range, and strength).

◈ Power system will now not allow buildings to hoard energy for later use, buildings are now ON or OFF.

◈ Power indicators will now show energy stability rather than the percentage of charge.

◈ Upaded Main Menu UI.

◈ Fog now affects Solar Panels' effectiveness.

◈ Added humidity indicator in RTS UI.

◈ Atmospheric Vaporators are now affected by the amount of humidity in the air.

◈ Updated Inventory Storage Widget.

◈ Minor visual improvement to M.M.C

◈ Updated Details Window UI, and added new item information.
- Items will now have information on where they can be created.
- Accuracy of the ranged weapons.

◈ Drasticly improved camera return animation after using 3d UI (computers, CCC, MMC) return animation is now smooth without any hitches even after changing player position to place hands on the computer keyboard.

◈ Texture settings in Options>Video, changed to Shaders.

◈ Added Reset Settings to the Main Menu.

◈ Visually improved Gemini Base.

◈ Improved normal map shader and main material shader lowering their GPU requirement.

◈ Improved Save files data cleanup (lowering their file size).

◈ Optimized power calculation on all bases (minor performance boost).

◈ Optimized 3d assets to lower the RAM requirement.

◈ Minor improvement to player viser, (fixed scaling on ultra-wide screens)

◈ While the sort function is activated in Storage/Inventory, those specific items will be transferred when using Store All/ Take All buttons. (Feature request by Player Jrok)

◈ Store All / Take All buttons will now be affected by the sort function and change their name to indicate what items will be moved.

◈ Incress visibility range of Ore Cluster by 25%.

◈ Improved Anti-Aliasing (performance boost).

◈ Added Feedback system to Menu.

◈ Added bullet trail.

◈ Improved Command Center Collision at the Base of the Building.

◈ Minor visual improvement to Command Center Window.

◈ Changed some of the lore/text/information around the game, shortening them, while still providing the same context.

◈ Added full support for ultra-wide screens and 4k+ screens.

◈ Added On/Off button to Ore Refinery UI.

◈ Improved weapon handling. (smooth out animations, improved sway, trigger times between shots).

◈ Range Weapons will now have different types of accuracy.

◈ P.G.E interface will now showcase range in meters rather than centimeters.

◈ Incress P.G.E detection range by 5 meters.

◈ P.G.E data screen will now change distance color to red indicating that Ore Cluster is too far from extraction range, and will print the message "Out of Range."

◈ Added visual effect to digging out ore using P.G.E.

◈ Added 3 sound effects to P.G.E.

◈ Improved RTS user interface.
- Buildings buttons are now 20% smaller.
- Energy and Hydrogel Windows are now easier to manage (cleaner and none click through)
- Better presentation of item requirements.

◈ Added additional sound effects to on death trigger.

◈ Improved wind effect on all trees.

◈ Incress the range of wind change by the weather.

◈ Added 5 different sound effects to digging out Ore from Ore Cluster.

◈ Added a bit more Metoses (drones) at the start of the game.

◈ Deactivated spawner near the Communication Station is now activated and set to the lowest difficulty setting.

◈ Added additional tutorial triggers.

◈ Balance Changes:
- Crystalized Construction Component now takes 14 seconds to be materialized rather than 20.
- Crystlized Construction Component now requires 1 Metal Bar ( was 2 ) and 8 Noble Metal Bars ( was 3 ) to be made.
- Refined Polan Crystal requires now takes 10 seconds to be materialized rather than 20.
- Refined Xavoc Crystal requires now takes 12 seconds to be materialized rather than 20.
- Basic Electronic Repository now takes 1 Liquid Construction Component ( was 1 Solid Construction Component ) and 6 Noble Metal Bar.
- All melee weapons have a 50% range increase.

Mar 9, 2023

Patch merging, development situation, and upcoming features report.

Penkura - LionsArt

Dev-Com

Hello everybody!

A small report about the current development and situation.

We are happy to say that our merging of the Midway Branch and Main branch went nearly without any problems. Minor bugs here and there were found and reported by our community, mostly by the in-game report system, which were of course fixed as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, while building our project for the next patch, our 11-year-old workstation finally decided that it had enough and died. It took us some time and resources but we were able to buy new parts (fix what was fixable) and improve the state of the workstation to the level which will make working on Penkura much more pleasant.

Just to make sure that nobody will be worried about the project. We lost only about two and a half weeks of work and 90% of it was just object placement, no assets were lost, and everything is safe and sound.

As of 7th March, we are back on track and are working to release the patch as soon as possible. We just need to add back all the assets ( models, sounds, animations, navigation, missions, dialogs, and so on) back where they were before the unfortunate event (Our apologies for the delay).

Also, some good news, when the main workstation was down for maintenance we didn't waste the time and worked on other features that were planned a little bit later for Penkura.

As of now, I can report, that the Bot programming feature (in-game programming by players) is well into development and should be presented next month.
The research system is also well in development and should be available in the basic form already in the upcoming patch.
We also started translation of our game, and we decided that we will open translation to the community (this is, of course, optional, translation will be made by LionsArt nevertheless but the community may help to speed up the process), more about this in the upcoming patch notes.

One last note, we notice that a lot of users provide feedback or even changes request via the in-game bug report system, usually because they don't want to use Discord, or are too shy to use their main account for communication. Because of that, we will be adding the Feedback and Feature request option in our communication form within the game, which will allow players to fully privately and anonymously send us messages.

Till the next Dev-Com over and out.

Jan 23, 2023

Penkura Main and Midway Branch Merging.

Penkura - LionsArt

Dev-Com

Hello, world! Penkura is moving to the next stage of development, we are merging Midway Branch with the Main Branch.

We are happy to announce that all the required systems created on the Midway Branch are ready to be transferred to the Main Branch. After 50 patches in the Midway Branch, the save system, AI navigation system, level streamable mission system, and all version adjustment systems are ready for the transfer.

With this patch, Main Branch will take over Midway Branch (Until heavy-duty testing is required Midway Branch won't be used anymore).

If everything will go as smoothly as we hope and patch merging won't provide any problems, in a week, we will be releasing another patch which will be 0.2.0.

All saved files made on Midway Branch will adjust themselves to the Main branch, restarting player progression is NOT required. (Old Main Branch saves should also adjust themselves for the new patch version, the player is required to load the save through the legacy system and just create a new save).

With this patch we are also adding a new game feature and item, P.G.E (Portable Geological Extraction) from now on players will be able to not only use Ore Extractors to extract ore or minerals from the underground veins but also find and extract a small ore/mineral clusters usually found in caves, close to ore veins and near rock formations.

This should help balance out the early game and provide a safer way for players to gather minerals without worrying about power consumption.

Although still not fully ready we can already show the Monotrain that will be used by the player to travel between the levels, the train is already in the game but until the release of 0.2.0, it's unusable.

We are also moving our Roadmap, to our main official website, this roadmap will be updated based on the player feedback and content priority, but it will represent what we want to achieve in different stages of Penkura development. Of course, any questions related to the roadmap can be asked here on Steam or in our official Discord Channel (we are always happy to answer any questions related to the future of the project).

Lastly, we want to inform you that with this patch we are introducing the last major improvement to the save system, from now on we the developers will be able to adjust items, NPC, and even structure positions that players already interacted with and saved data in.
In short, we can redesign entire bases and massive content locations without the need for players to start the game from scratch, this is a key feature that will allow us to release patches more frequently without worrying about breaking players' saves.

We want to thank each and every player that helped us find bugs and errors in the Midway Branch. Even though the community is not big, we are happy that it is of the highest quality.

And as always, for more information regarding the latest technical support, patches, and updates please join our Discord Community.

LINK ----> https://discord.gg/2ukYHQm

Till the next Dev-Com over and out.

Penkura Main Branch Adjustment
---------------------
⊞ Bugs/Errors ⊞
---------------------

◈ 50 patches worth of bug and error fixes.

+

◈ Fix for player suit material not changing when taking over the bot.

◈ Doors UI didn't activate their visual effect on use.

◈ Temple Sphere didn't have a proper name.

◈ Player was able to see himself when using interactable objects very close to the screen.

◈ Fixed minor spelling errors.

◈ Player snapped back to the previous position after using the keypad.

-------------------------------------------------
⊞ Improvements / changes / additions ⊞
-------------------------------------------------

◈ 50 patches worth of Improvements changes and additions.

+

◈ When activating Lazarus player will be kicked out of the screen rather than be forced to wait until the animation is finished.

◈ From now on, the player is able to use his keyboard to type on the Keypads.

◈ Added new item to the game (P.G.E)

◈ P.G.E added to blueprint materialization list.

◈ Player is now able to extract ore from caves, rock formations, and some parts of Ore Veins.

◈ Bot will now provide an additional signal when returning to the base or turning off.

◈ Improved camera field of view to minimize glitches related to player eyes seeing through some of the walls.

◈ Ore Clusters added to the game level.

◈ Mineral Clusters added to the game level.