Hello everyone.

I just wanted to make a formal post about the ENDGAME Update as I haven't updated everyone about the update in quite a while. I have been slowly working on the update, mainly some small tweaks here and there as depicted by this changelog (as of 9/20/2019)


I haven't really been in much of a mood to continue working on the update besides these small tweaks. I've been dealing with some things and I'm trying to get back in the mood of updating.

I promise you all that this update will be out by the end of 2020.

The Foreverlands - a prologue to Tenderfoot Tactics meant to introduce the world and showcase a slice of the still-in-development gameplay - will be releasing for free on itch.io this Monday, the 23rd of September. Keep your eyes peeled!

Hello Builders!

This is the very first update as to progress, showcases, and any other general updates!

Progress

Question, how do you make a ship more squishy or sponge more damage? SHIELDS!!

This week I have introduced shields to the game with a temporary model. How do they work? Well it's simple, shields work on a generated charge. Players are able to toggle their ships shields, however, the charge is reset to zero each time a player turns off their shields and require to be recharged back to full health. Also if a shield is damaged to zero, the shield will have a 30 second cool down before recharging again.

Showcase

As I continue to add more weapons and parts to the game, I will often write showcases about new or revamped weapons.

This week I will be showcasing the tier 1 missile system. While this name is generic, I do intend to rename weapons to sound more systematic and interesting.



How do the missiles work? Well it's quite simple, when a player targets an enemy ship and the missile system can see the ship, the missile system will fire a full salvo of tracking missiles. Currently I am still balancing the missile turning, speed and damage but different missile systems will serve different specialties.

To The Community

While this game is small, I am working on this game on a regular basis with constant updates and bug fixes. What would really help me is community feedback and for players who might be interested in this game, to wish list it or follow it or better yet, share the existence of this game to people who would be interested.

Happy building,
Crazyyivan97

Another week of glorious bug fixes. The list is still pretty long, but I made a dent in it.

Over the past few weeks, I've been watching the server-wide arcs rise and fall. More recently, the arcs have been getting shorter and shorter. The arc currently ends when there's only one family left, and families have been dying out very quickly.

For example, here's the family population graph of a recent arc:



Total server population is on the Y axis, and each family's portion of that total is represented by how thick their color band is. For example, the forest-green band represents the Kelderman family, which got thin after about an hour and a half, and then made a bit of a comeback after that before finally dying out. But what actually happened to the Keldermans? To help us answer this, let's take a look at Wondible's amazing family tree visualizer:

https://wondible.com/ohol-family-trees/#server_id=17&epoch=2&playerid=2076067

Some of their fate was player-driven, and that's fine. In fact, that's partially the point of an arc end condition: to put the fate of the server into the hands of the players. But we can also see a lot of rectangles at the end of their family tree. Rectangles are boys that cannot have babies themselves. Thus, it's possible for a family to die out simply due to a random fluke of genetics.

While this may be true in real life too, and is somewhat interesting, over the long haul, this particular fate is likely to befall every family eventually. When an assortment of families is what's keep the arc from ending, this kind of randomized attrition doesn't feel right, because it's completely outside the realm of player control.

So, among loads of fixes and improvements this week, I adjusted the gender distribution algorithm to force girl babies if a given family has less that three potentially fertile females left alive. With this change in place, we'll see how long the arcs last, and what the family population graphs look like, over the next week.

You can see the full list of server-side code fixes in the change log here:

https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/blob/master/documentation/changeLog.txt

This week's content fixes can be viewed here:

https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLifeData7/commits/master

This patch fixes a crash, strength bonus being applied more than once in many cases, several level generation issues, and a bunch of smaller issues.

1.003 change list:

• fixed a crash in Combat::applyStatusEffect
  
• fixed strength being applied twice for many attacks
  
• fixed lightning blade getting strength applied an extra time (on top of already getting it an extra time)
  
• decreased most monsters health some to compensate for strength fix
  
• fixed a couple town generation issues that didn't guarantee a path from door to level exit (Notorious)
  
• fixed incorrect open edge settings in forestDL4.ara, forestDL3.ara, forestDL6.ara, grasslandDL4.ara, graveyard4.ara, and tropicsDL2.ara - these errors can make it generate non-connected levels (Espr)
  
• fixed another way bridges could be placed without their corresponding other blocks
  
• fixed duel levels not generating properly sometimes (davidb11)
  
• fixed another way that entities could get placed in invalid areas (Notorious)
  
• fixed Viedonna's blessing having a per level health percent restored when not meant to (AvaLanCS)
  
• made small amorph, tiny amorph, imps, zombie imps, plaguebringer larva, and zombie parasite easier to click on
  
• fixed not being able to hit neutral NPCs that you choose to fight with projectiles
  
• fixed passive skills that can proc on items not working correctly (Kori)
  
• using a vial (to fill it with something) now gets rid of the equipment UI since it is probably in the way (beatsh4ck)
  
• no longer show item better or can't use item icons on non-vendor NPCs (Notorious)
  
• toned down yellow mold spread some
  
• fixed ModificatioDamageOverTimePrefix typo that was preventing translation from working (chesse20)
  
• fixed missing DefendingStunningBlow translation
  
• fixed temple ruins not having monster rarity set correctly

Hop in! Mane6 @ Twitch

Todays build 0.990.38.1730 is released in the beta branch. Changelog is below, more info and screenshots can be found in our blog.

• New Titan textures by retro-visor
  
• Gamma correction for planet textures: parameter in catalog scripts and slider in the editor
  
• Adjusted gamma of Jupiter and Io textures
  
• Adjusted photometric properties of Jupiter and the Galilean satellites for increased accuracy
  
• New music by Lokijar
  
• Fixed bug with selection of wrong screenshot file format at startup
  
• Fixed displaying of incorrect axis tilt for procedural planets
  
• Fixed generation of too many extremely tilted procedural planets (pending for for 0.991)
  
• Updated localizations
  
• Updated exoplanet catalog (September 10, 2019)
  
• Added comet C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) and other minor bodies
  
• Added names for 5 recently named satellites of Jupiter
  
• Added ability to specify a threshold for the bloom effect
  
• Solar system browser: fixed empty (globe) previews in the very long list of satellites
  
• Fixed model of the galaxy ESO 510-G13
  
• Fixed bug with displacement and flickering of star lens flares in fish eye/cylindrical/cube modes what happened in distant galaxies
  
• Fixed bug with displacement of autoexposure metering zone

Ahoy, matey! Lest ye be fergettin'... Gunpowder Mary be holdin' yer 2019 Talk Like a Pirate Day collection. Gear up before we hoist the sail and embark on a perilous journey to the ninja-infested Yokai Isle!

Read the full news w/ screenshots at...
https://aq3d.com/news/talk_like_a_pirate_day_2019/

Also, be sure to check out this weekend's #Screenshot'like-a-pirate'Saturday
https://aq3d.com/news/screenshot_saturday_tlapd_2019/

Hi All,

Since acquiring Lacuna Passage we’ve been planning out and building our new direction for the game. Today we’d like to share this direction with you and show some of our development progress. The current version of Lacuna Passage (on Steam) captures a glimpse of what it’s like to be an Astronaut on Mars. Our development goal is to build on Tyler’s original concept, while revitalizing and greatly expanding the gameplay possibilities. To accomplish this we are making some big foundational changes.

Unreal Engine
Future versions of Lacuna Passage will be built in Unreal Engine. Switching over to Unreal was something we thought long and hard about. We’re not starting from scratch, in fact we already have a lot built out. While this decision does increase the amount of development work needed, it opens up a lot of great gameplay possibilities. The first of which is the ability to greatly increase the scale of the world.

Large Landscapes
Unreal enables us to create large seamless terrain with a high-level of detail on the ground. This will allow for much more exploration within the map, either on foot or in a Martian Rover. These new landscapes can represent an area of up to 64 square KM, meaning there will be much more area to explore in both sandbox or story missions.



Real Locations
Our custom tools allow us to process data from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and create detailed landscapes within the game. All maps will now represent real locations on Mars, accurate to within a few meters! You’ll see real landmarks in the distance and you’ll be able to plot any Latitude-Longitude coordinate from the game on to a map of Mars.




The Martian Sky
We’ve built a brand new Martian sky with weather patterns, seasons, and atmospheric colors. This adds striking blue sunrises and sunsets to the martian days, wispy clouds and drifting martian dust. Depending on the time of year, and your surface lat-lon coordinates you will never catch the same sunrise or sunset twice. The weather and dust will also play in to your survival decisions, more details on this in future updates.



Celestial Objects
We’re now simulating celestial objects in the Solar system. This means if you're in the right place at the right time you’ll be able to watch Phobos or Demios eclipse the Sun, or marvel at the marble-like Jupiter or if you’re feeling sentimental even catch a glimpse of Earth and the Moon in orbit. The position of these objects in the sky will be physically accurate to the game time and your position on the Martian surface. It’s an astronomy nerd’s dream and it really conveys your place in the Solar System.



In Orbit
An additional benefit of our celestial system is that we’re now simulating things around the planet. This view from Mars orbit is physically accurate and has the ability to annotate moons, planetary bodies and constellations. We have some fun ideas for new gameplay based on the orbit simulation but more on that as it develops.



The Game Plan
Our development plan is to first build a richer survival Sandbox with the Unreal build of Lacuna Passage and then add a Story Campaign mode. For now we’ll post a dev update every 2 months. Thank you for being patient as we build out Mars. We have a lot of new things to share in our next update include new habs, locations and gameplay! Here’s a hint - the new hab will have some see-through windows.




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Footnotes
Our custom map creation tools allow us to consider almost any location on Mars for conversion to a game map. If you send us lat-lon coordinates we can take a look at the NASA data available and consider it for the game.

Hi Arizonians,

Continuous efforts for the increase in performance and optimizations for lower-end rigs continues, and the latest hotfix addressing the following:

• Listening to the feedback's of the players, Main Menu scene was dramatically optimized, shaders, lighting, overall modeling was redone last few weeks and this hotfix updating it. The result is increased FPS 30-50% (or even more, depending on overall settings);
  
• Default graphical settings were before set to the maximum, now they've changed to some lower values, without antialiasing;

Hotfix 0.91.5b-1 - default graphic settings, for users that run game for the first time much lower, along with large FPS improvements in the Main Menu will give smoother experience.
(update 22/9): Default graphic settings are:



Hotfix 0.91.5b-2: Adding of the basic graphical settings, with default presets for low, medium, high and max settings:

and detailed graphical settings:


The menu is polished and improved with background blur, as long a few other menu's in the game, so the experience is better.
Currently, the focus is on more optimizations and polishings of the player's feedback and overall menu's to be improved like this (blur around and other visual improvements).

With saving graphic's settings will be prevented further changing of custom graphics parameters, after every running of the game, or after the patch update, which was the case before and that's why some people thought the game is unoptimized.

Happy Offroads!
Mike