- New colony building models, including several LOD models implemented
- Colony sight range greatly increased at large colonies
- Memory usage at colonies greatly reduced, which should reduce the crashing some people are experiencing
Ascent: The Space Game
1.3107 Has many new colony building models, less memory usage
1.3106 fixes bugs, adds computer commands to dump and clear soil samples
- Many bugs fixed
- Slight performance tweak for large Colonies
- Added computer command to dump soil sample data to a text file
- Added computer command to clear soil samples - don't use it unless you're CERTAIN you have all the data you need dumped, there's no way to get it back after clearing.
1.31 lets you get out of your ship at colonies, brings NPCs you can text chat to, and even hire to fly your ships!
We are at last live with the first iteration of our NPC AI and adds the "Full disembark" feature to colonies. Now you can travel around the Transport Grid network of your colony, meet your own colonists at an Entertainment Centre, and even hire them as crew or to fly ships for you.
The NPC AI and text chat libraries will be extended over the coming months to support our upcoming features - smuggling, crime and punishment, assassination and bounty hunting. Today's release is an exciting step along the path.
<*>Updated to a new version of the Unity Game Engine
<*>Fixed numerous bugs with NPCs and NPC traders/pilots
<*>Fixed some stock market bugs
<*>Fixed several small disembark, landing bay bugs
<*>Fixed annoying OSB/Colony warehouse page bug
<*>Added Outer Star Base (OSB) Stock Markets
<*>Added autopilot button for current user colonies and osbs only
<*>Added disembark to landing bays (and anything in future we tag as a landing bay :))
<*>Added return to ship to disembark buttons
<*>Added transport grid navigation while fully disembarked at colonies
<*>Added full disembark building interaction on colonies, including interiors
<*>Added Non Pilot Citizen generation at colonies and OSB's
<*>Added NPC physical presence
<*>Added NPC chat, very basic AI
<*>Added NPC conversation to hire NPC as pilot - they join your crew initially so you can transport them
<*>Added assign NPC to ships at hangar via ship management menu
<*>Added see NPC pilot ships
<*>Added chat to NPC pilot ships, allowing instructions to be given
<*>Added many new colony building models - more to come
<*>Added many small visual enhancements
<*>Changed LOD system slightly at colonies and OSBs, including scaffold connectors being seen at much greater distances at OSBs
1.3062 adds new "Archon" Class 13 Cruiser, and Landing Bays
This patch also includes a "Landing Bay" blueprint for colonies, and enables larger buildings such as the Landing Bay to be constructed.
The Landing Bay will be a future full disembark point at colonies.
1.306 adds new Seraph model (finally) and some fixes
In addition the past few patches have fixed a few annoying bugs with planetary rotation and parked ships.
Updates, 1.3027 - 1.3039
New stuff
- Clouds - we now have 3D clouds you can fly through and look quite realistic, including different colouring based on the chemnicals they are condensed from on different worlds
- You can now see other players mining, and your client knows when someone else has mined a rock near you, removing most occurences of "unstable asteroid destroyed"
- Colony and OSB data is cached to disk by your client, saving you bandwidth and delays
- Master volume control added to options
- Quit button added to options and main menu. I have no idea why anyone would ever use such a thing but to each their own - we support diversity here at FKS
- Several other minor enhancements
Bugs fixed
- Vanishing asteroid labels and flickering light sources fixed
- Many instances of colony planning or supplying lock-ups fixed (more to do)
- Several bugs with clouds fixed
- Very large colonies no longer sync all of their domes at once, locking the owner out of their own records
- Very large colonies now access the warehouse without touching other buildings, speeding up warehouse access dramatically
- Many other minor bugs
Updates, 1.3027 - 1.3039
New stuff
- Clouds - we now have 3D clouds you can fly through and look quite realistic, including different colouring based on the chemnicals they are condensed from on different worlds
- You can now see other players mining, and your client knows when someone else has mined a rock near you, removing most occurences of "unstable asteroid destroyed"
- Colony and OSB data is cached to disk by your client, saving you bandwidth and delays
- Master volume control added to options
- Quit button added to options and main menu. I have no idea why anyone would ever use such a thing but to each their own - we support diversity here at FKS
- Several other minor enhancements
Bugs fixed
- Vanishing asteroid labels and flickering light sources fixed
- Many instances of colony planning or supplying lock-ups fixed (more to do)
- Several bugs with clouds fixed
- Very large colonies no longer sync all of their domes at once, locking the owner out of their own records
- Very large colonies now access the warehouse without touching other buildings, speeding up warehouse access dramatically
- Many other minor bugs
Updates, 1.3021 - 1.3026
- A great number of bugs have been fixed. Flickering ship instruments, missing UI elements (cancel contracts button is BACK!), strange autopilot race conditions, you name it, it's been fixed. We still have bugs open and some new reports, so expect more patches to come too.
- Some slight changes to the Space Station models let me turn off some of the sketchiest workarounds in the full disembark code. This may or may not result in an end to the "teleport into space when you disembark" bug. I for one will be slightly sad to see it go as it was rather comical.
- Several inner planets have pretty new textures. These look vastly better than the old ones.
- Asteroids have also been bashed with the pretty stick
- SGD and LGD, which are limited terraforming devices from the KickStarter are in. These are exciting for everyone, not just the handful of players who have received one. For one thing, the planets they terraform can be colonized by anyone (planets in this game can be up to the size of Earth... so lots of room for everybody). For another, to get them working the framework for Terraforming itself had to go in - good news for this upcoming feature. Lastly, the people getting them, funded the artwork that got this game on steam and are still paying for the new artwork ongoing - including the new pretty stuff in these patches :)
Many more updates to come. Watch this space!
Update 1.302
- Displaying building construction times and time to completion in a human readable format
- Registration changes your displayed name without a scene change
- Docking turns grav anchor on
- Docking turns thrusters off
- Lag / jitter reduced when in a system with lots of other players
- Memory leak fixed when in a system with lots of other players
- Reduced the occurence of, perhaps even eliminated the "glowing white angel ship" bug
- Tutorial wording changed to more often indicate the autopilot's fantastic usefulness
- Fixed reference to an "orca" in mission text (orcas are now hammerheads)
- More consistent HUD text locations, more often to the bottom of the screen out of the way
- New texture for the Vulcan planet
- Now hiding other player and NPC ship labels in the map view
Release weekend updates
Patches
- 1.3016 made registration a little less headache-prone, in response to your feedback
- 1.3017 killed a lot of client lag people were experiencing
- 1.3018 fixed a few bugs introduced in 1.3017
- 1.3019 fixed the last of the 1.3017 bugs, some pre-existing bugs and introduced some minor new visual enhancements (new shader work)
In addition, over the weekend we identified some upcoming lag as some of our server infrastructure began approaching a performance limit. To prevent this from being an issue, rather than just throwing more hardware/money at the problem, we rewrote the way the server cluster records your position in space and shows it to other players. This was rolled live from the test server in stages without a scheduled outage (we generally don't do those).
A personal note from Jam on our first weekend
I would like to thank everyone who participated in our first weekend on steam. To everyone who bought the game, thank you from the bottom of my heart. You cannot possibly know what it means to me that you've come on board and helped fund further development. Just three days ago I was honestly worried I would have to go and get another job and keep developing Ascent as a hobby. Because of you, I am now just 100% focused on making this game better.
To every existing player and everyone else who helped out teach newbies the ropes, and helping them over their first hurdles, a huge, huge thank you. We keep getting comments about how awesome our playerbase is. That's you!
To everyone who experienced a bug or any form of UI designed by myself, I apologise. If it's any consolation, many of these bugs have already died, and the rest... they are being hunted.
Two years of working alone. All of my life savings. Four hundred and seventeen days in Steam Greenlight. Several horrific months getting our KickStarter together then funded. A few rushed, crazy months with George (our artist) full time and 7 day weeks, 12-18 hour days and nights... and we're finally live on steam! I can't believe it, I am just so happy.
As I remarked to a colleague today - do you know what's awesome, awesome, awesome about this? All of those insane pie in the sky ideas we have for the game... now we get to do them.
And thanks to you, I can stop worrying and focus 100% on that.