Oct 19, 2023

Icarus Week Ninety Eight Update | New powerful ‘Tusker’ Mount to tame

ICARUS - Shamm

Week Ninety Eight brings our newest and most powerful mount to Icarus, the Tusker.

Found exclusively in the arctic regions of Styx for the time being, the Tusker has the highest health, regeneration, and carry capacity stats of any of our mounts so far, but trades its speed for these, making it slower but more durable.

We’ve also got an update on the next part of Hypatia which will see Olympus get Operations, and some fixes for bugs that arose in last week's update.

Jump in and have a read.

Notable Improvements

Fixed all stockpile missions as they would request another stockpile pod each new session and players would lose progress
Fixed WETWORK Olympus mission from being unclickable and thus unable to be started after the Olympus mission layout change last week
Fixed Bear Armor blocking some views in first-person
Adjustments to quest spawning and supply pod spawning to fix some issues with placement occurring on dedicated servers

This Week: The Tusker

This week brings our newest Mount to Icarus - the Tusker. This will be unique to the Arctic regions of Styx for now, so you’ll need to take some risk to come across one and tame it.

The Tusker is larger, with more health, more resistance, and stronger stamina regeneration. It also has a higher carry capacity but is slightly slower than its closest competitor, the Buffalo.

Being slower than the Buffalo does make it the slowest mount, but its survivability is by far the strongest with higher base stats.

The Tusker brings our number of mounts to four, and in the future we’ll be working on a system to be able to move mounts between different prospects so you don’t have to tame mounts on each individual one.

Coming Soon: Hypatia Part II: OLYMPUS OPERATIONS

As we mentioned last week, we’re working through testing and refining Open World Operations on the Olympus map. This includes cleaning up the VFX and trigger conditions for the Open World exotic respawning and playing with the balance to ensure this works correctly and doesn’t cause any game-flow disruptions.

There was one major bug that arose as a result of our work on Olympus Operations last week which you can see in the notable fixes above. We’ve fixed this and will keep working on ironing these out as we make these changes and hopefully bring you Olympus Operations in Hypatia Part II very soon.

So far we have added and tested Operations to our two DLC expansions, New Frontiers and Styx, but when we add Operations to Olympus they will part of the free Hypatia update for everyone with the Icarus base game.

Next Week: Bestiary Balance & Creature Trophies

Next week's update will focus on the Bestiary, as we’re adding a lot more creature trophies and a unique harvestable part of each animal that can be collected with the taxidermy knife.

We’ll also be granting more points per activity (i.e. kill, skin, crafted trophy, etc) so you can research creatures and unlock the perks faster.

Support our Project

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author
If you like what we’re doing with Icarus, and want to support our continued development, consider purchasing one of our DLCs for a few dollars, it would mean a lot to us.

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/35727/Icarus_Complete_the_Set/

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/34141/Icarus_Outposts_Bundle/

Changelog v2.1.1.117032

New Content
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Adjusting Tusker Stats so it can carry more weight, take more damage and regen its stamina and health faster when compared to that of the buffalo
Adding Tusker Spawns to STYX arctic areas
Fixed Tusker Mount variant being spawned in hard arctic zones

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Fixed
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HOMESTEAD: Update quest objective to mention Decoration Bench instead of Rustic Cosmetic Bench to avoid confusion
Allowed T3 and T4 C0NT4CT upgrade to upgrade C0NT4CT devices using left click
Added effectiveness of modifier explicitly to modifier descriptions
Enabled animation when upgrading building tiers using the hammer
Fixed typo in IRONCLAD mission description
Fixed dynamic mission rewards granting old crop plots, rather than updated versions
Fixed a bug that allowed deployables that can rotate to be placed ignoring steepness check
Updated and Modified two lava prefab caves, LC_SML_006 and LC_MED_006, Prometheus
Make selection of cargo drop pod landing points a volumetric sweep, rather than single ray. Add an additional final fallback if no drop point can be found
Add a require hit to transport pod EQS to work around potential DS streaming issues where there is a nav mesh present, but no meshes are loaded for a given tile
Fixed Bear armour fur sometimes being visible in first-person perspective
Fixed fur for third-person arms still being visible in first-person perspective
Fixed collision on most buildable beam assets, making it capsule collision instead of box
Fixing 'WET WORK' mission on Olympus from being unclickable
Fixing Styx Open World Selection to include Operations Icon
Fixed Outpost Selection to include SMPL3 Missions Icons
Fixing Claybrick Half Pitches variations where the images and BP's shown where not correct, all pieces are now accessible
Fixes for all stockpile missions, the underlying logic was changed meaning every time a player entered the area each session a new ship would drop down with its information trampled, this has been fixed now, should fix exisitng missions but in some cases where players have entered the area multiple times there will be lots of ships stacked which may mean the mission is uncompleteable, abandoning the missions will cause all ships to leave the map so they are not stuck on anyones open worlds

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Future Content
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Undid UnrealGameSync change on Trunk
Updating seed pouch open audio
Adding cave bat bestiary audio event and data entry
Adding cavebat explode event and vocalisations
Adding a light on the bats to make them stand out a bit more flying around in caves
Adding a bit more intensity to bat attacks, replaced audio and added explode and death vocal into BP. Minor volume adjustments
WIP commit for '9 of Diamonds' tower shield variant (SK_ITM_Shield_Titanium_9Diamonds)
Adding aggro state BP behavior for bats. Aggro when flying. Chill when chilling
Added new caves to map and sculpted landscape for blending, Ice Sheet Yellow Quad on Prometheus
Landscape Sculpting Pass and Cliff Pass, Red Quad, Prometheus
Save/load,client replication and VFX event hooks for meteor showers
Texture revision #2 for '9 of Diamonds' tower shield variant (SK_ITM_Shield_Titanium_9Diamonds)
Texture revisions for '9 of Diamonds' tower shield variant (SK_ITM_Shield_Titanium_9Diamonds)
Updates to cave bat audio state data. Simplified setup to be Idle on event begin play and attacking when flying. No other states are used currently. Adjustments to vocal attack volume and notify
Adding in Basalt Valley in prometheus which replaces the right side of the previous lava flows area
Adding in Abyss, Ice Sheet, Ashlands and Lava Pool new biomes on the Prometheus map, area's currently inacessible
Adding Ice building tier to lookup table
Updated all _NoFoilage caves, Volumes, Void & Entrance
Adjusting Itempopup to show the effect of the ConsumedModifierEffectiveness & ConsumedModifierDuration stats on the consumed modifier
Implementation of Ice Building Tier items, no recipe or talent currently setup
Resaved datatable to resolve build error
Fixed Ice RoofPeak Cap material assignment
Fixed Cave Entrance, Moved hand placed cave volumes, Added Serac meshes to Ice Sheet, Yellow Quad on Prometheus
Landscape Sculpting Pass and Cliff Pass, Red Quad, Prometheus
Added DCO_DeskLamp_Brutalist
adding ore hermit crab sk mesh, material and textures
Add basic UI for meteor shower, wire to 3 hour check for replenish timer, replenish is config locked and off (ExoticReplenishEnabled)
Fixed Olympus Open World Hard difficulty having double the spawn rate change and no creature health modification
Adding ice bld deploy and ice bld destroy events and data table entry
Landscape Sculpting Pass and Cliff Pass, Red Quad and Purple Quad, Prometheus
Created new small lava prefab cave, CAVE_LC_SML_006, Prometheus
Added new currency icons
Added ITM_SeedBag
Fix Prospect datatable validation, pure whitespace change (internal dev only)
Bump the number of meta deposits to 10 for OLY, STYX, PRO PIE (internal dev only)
Added DCO_WallShelf_Brutalist_Var1, as well as fixed UV's on DCO_DeskLamp_Brutalist
Titanium Tower Shield - removed decal on back to differentiate base version from '9 of diamonds' version
T1 Water purifier - added meshes, textures, materials (DEP_WaterPurifier_T1A)
Landscape Sculpting Pass and Cliff Pass, Red Quad and Purple Quad, Prometheus
Creating unique events for arctic bats idle and aggro for different spacial settings
Optimised developer cheats menu as the amount of content added over time has slowed it down considerably
Adding repair ice buildable sounds and adjustments to ice buildable volume and debris layers
Ice building reskin - fixed some material entries in D_BuildingSkins
Landscape Sculpting Pass and Cliff Pass, Red Quad, Prometheus
Ice BLD reskin - added material slot to SMs for stone roof pieces (main roof, half pitch, peak, corners) and added ice material override into D_BuildingSkins to fix incorrect fracture material
Reduced all buildable mask textures by half, from 2K to 1K, by setting them all to the medium texture group. Also increased the the brick tier kit textures to 4K from 2K
Small adjustment to cave bat wing volume and fixed small adsr issue with wall torch
Landscape Sculpting Pass and Cliff Pass, Red Quad and Purple Quad, Prometheus
Added Cliffs & Landscape Sculpting Pass, Ice Sheet - Yellow Quad on Prometheus
Ice Building Tier: Fixed lower half pitch wall material assignment in blueprint
Ice Building Tier: Removed destroyed at 0 from durable setup, as currently this instantly destroys buildings bypassing destruction effects
Added first pass art assets for the black wolf revolver living weapon
Adding events to the correct routing in FMOD
Fixing data table error due to file move
Adding arctic version of bat BP ready for nest BP to spawn instead of cave bat
More in progress developer assets for Exotic infused creatures
In progress developer assets for Exotic Infused Creatures
Added meteor event HUD
Preparing BP_Meteor for VFX pass, removing collision from Meteor asset
Added DCO_CandleHolder_Brutalist_A, DCO_CandleHolder_Brutalist_B, and DCO_CandleHolder_Brutalist_C
Added Caves, Cliffs & Landscape Sculpting Pass, Ice Sheet - Yellow Quad on Prometheus
Landscape Sculpting Pass and Cliff Pass, Red Quad and Purple Quad, Prometheus
Adding Arctic version of the bat to use with the arctic nest, tweaked attack behavior and chances, gave chance to roll a second attack immediately after the first one, tweaked spawning VFX on the nest

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Oct 19, 2023

Short-Term Roadmap

How To Hack In? - redbuffalo

Hello!
It's been already over a month since the early access release and I want to express my gratitude to all of you for your support, feedback and ideas during that time.
I am trying to keep updating game often, release updates and fixes to have the game constantly improving. I will continue doing that.
I hope that you enjoy how the game changed so far!

On that occassion, I'd like to show you the short-term roadmap of some of the content I plan to release.
By short-term I mean that I plan to deliver below items by the end of February 2024 :) It is a challenging, ambitious but possible to achieve goal. They will be coming frequently, in iterations, week by week.

The below list is not in particular order, however in general you could expect that items at the beginning of the list would be delivered before the items at the end of the list.
Also this list includes only big items and while I also want to deliver other changes, I think it would make the list very unreadable if I included everything here.

Social Engineering

There are already some prerequisites completed for social engineering, but more needs to be done. It is because I don't want it to behave like any other tool, and be more like a process with (sometimes) unexpected outcomes and pitfalls. NPCs have to react dynamically, based on your information on them, and their statistics.

More balancing changes, immersive "tutorial"

The goal is to remove the current tutorial and replace it with more immersive missions that are part of the game. Also different tools versions with more dynamic help system (like tooltips or better suggestions for commands) that will allow to tailor the level of hints for yourself.

Shops and hacker groups

New shops systems, better use of tor regarding the market and shops, as well as different hacker groups with unique benefits, that you can join.

Quality of Life

More quality of life changes, like: terminal improved copy&paste, better prompts for metaexploits and sudo su (which I know sometimes are confusing and misleading), webpages overhaul, saving the commands output to the files, better commands autocompletion, UI scaling, and more.

New missions and new missions types

New content for missions, also change with how the missions work: introduction of dialogues, missions will not come in automatically, and will not complete automatically, as it is for some of them now. Different channels to get the missions and interact with npcs - like dedicated websites, IRC, and so on.

In-game programming

I know some of you are awaiting this and eventually it will come - ability to create your own scripts and automation in-game. I have multiple options and ideas to test before I decide details, but in high level I want to build two scripting systems: with writing a code, and visual programming with blocks. You could use one or another, depending on your preference, or both, or not use it at all. At this moment my stance is that game will not require programming to progress and it will be optional activity.

Better networks system

Introduction of subnets, and less linear progress over the network computers, honeypots and traps for player. In short, more realistic way how the networks are built.

Introduction of disk sizes, file sizes, tools use change and different OS, new tools

Currently you can use your tools on all computers. I want to change it so the tools are normal in-game files and are required to be uploaded to the host before you can use them there. This will introduce new depth of the gameplay, so called "living off the land" attacks, reverse shells, better privileges escalation and more.
With different OS, not all tools can be executed on any OS, so you will have to adjust your tactics.
Disk size would be expandable (similarly as CPU and RAM).

Introduction of 3D world

As you can see on the general roadmap, there's an "open world" gameplay planned. This item is a first step towards it. It's going to introduce a new level of gameplay complexity and tactics that you could use. With that, some of the existing systems have to change: hardware delivery, police and game over system etc.

I will try my best to allow most of those changes to work with the existing save files, although I don't think it's possible with all of these. I will let you know in advance when the upcoming update will require new game and I will enforce it with the update.

Thank you for reading and for playing the game. As always, I encourage you to reach out to me (Steam Discussions or Discord) if you have any questions, concerns, issues or ideas.

Oct 19, 2023

Wall and Ceiling Techs + Shiny Costumes for Kickstarter Backers

Smack Studio - alecdutch99

This update adds wall and ceiling techs! (no new animations are used for these actions, so you don't need to update any existing characters.) To perform a tech, press the shield button right when you collide with a wall after being launched.

This build also reduces the size of the project by nearly half to give faster download speeds and take up less space, and we've fixed a huge number of bugs- see the full list below!

For folks with Nvidia RTX 3080+ graphics cards, the flickering bug we've seen in the past is almost completely fixed (for most of your characters, flickering will not be visible. We're still working on the final remaining issues.)

And last but not least, we've added the shiny costume promised for $100+ Kickstarter backers, usable on any character! Thank you again for your support! 🙏🏻

Behold the elusive shiny Granite:

Other changes:

Battle bug fixes:

Grab hitboxes can interact with projectiles
Healing players can go below 0%
Raised top killzone on Dash City
Platform disappears while standing on it in The Editor -> grab doesn't end, and players fall to their death (hilarious, but not good)
Effect layers are visible when respawning, leading to weird visual issues

Character editor bug fixes:

Scale setting didn't save in the sprite window
Shift doesn't work as the run/walk key for keyboard users in the editor
Crash: create multiple views in the animation rig details pane, don't bind the first view, then open the 3D Settings tab
Single click import can remove a pixel on the right side in some cases this happens when the sprite is an odd width, not even)
Avoid snapping incorrectly to back side of each view when using the "Auto" setting in the Rig Layer Configuration tab
Rebinding sprite can override previous bind rotation (if you had rotated the bone to a specific angle when binding, but then changed the rotation afterward, the original rotation was lost when rebinding)
Pasting animation rig frame into non-animation rig timeline creates a new timeline (max should be 1)
Pressing Default Depth button can cause a crash
Animation rig sprites looked slightly darker in the editor due to a material property (although there is no actual change in the color data when exporting)

General improvements:

Changed animation names in editor to make sense to more players (for example, "Running A" is now listed as "Dash Attack")
Fixed visual issues with overlapping player pawns (z ordering)
Lowered volume on some standard hit sounds that were overpowering compared to other sounds