0.2.0 is now available for you to download through Steam. However, the campfire and container system has not been added in just yet- we were integrating it to work with the existing code but after testing all week, we've realised that the inventory system is going to have to be rebuilt again for everything to work seamlessly.
The good news is that we're only expecting this to take 4 or 5 days, so the campfire and container features should be available by the weekend (possibly mid-week, if we're fast).
For now, the full survival system has been added and you can eat the (raw) meat you collect while hunting. 0.2.2 will let you cook meat over a campfire, store your items in certain items of furniture and will also bring some new plants and food items for you to eat.
Another new feature has been brought in with 0.2.0. This wasn't planned, but I thought we needed something more interesting for the thirst system than just wells (which are also available), so you can now build "cactus taps". These are wooden bowls with hollow spikes which you can hammer to cacti- they will drain water from the cactus and accumulate over time. You can refill your hip flask with fresh water by selecting the flask and interacting with the water.
Along with various bugfixes, improvements and optimisations, some random structures have been placed on the map to make things more interesting. The new map is well underway and the whole terrain will soon be replaced with an enormous plains biome.
0.2.0 Changelog:
Full survival system with temperature-affected hunger and thirst
Earn XP for almost everything you do, rank up and build your character
Upgrade your stats (health, stamina, max hunger and max thirst)
Unlock perks to help you tame the wilderness
Navigate the frontier with your new built-in HUD compass
Discover new locations and earn more XP for finding the most secretive spots
Wells placed around the map- refill your hip flask at these
Cactus Taps added- use these to drain water from cacti
GUI overhauled- almost all of the UI elements have been retextured from scratch and are now optimised for multiresolution scaling without any quality loss
Terrain shader upgraded to include random perlin noise generation, heightmap blending and more realistic light handling
Player notification system to keep you informed of your status.
Various optimisations and bugfixes
As always, we're available on the forums to answer your questions and respond to your feedback. Thanks again for the continued support! We'll do our best to get 0.2.2 out ASAP.
0.2.0 Announcement- Coming Soon
Time for another update from our team- we've all been hard at work getting the next update ready but there have been a few unexpected bugs. We expect to have them ironed out, along with finishing off the remaining new features which are coming in 0.2.0, by Friday. We are confident for a release this weekend.
0.2.0 Overview
Full survival system with temperature-affected hunger and thirst
Use a campfire to cook any meat you harvest
Store your items in furniture with storage capacity
Earn XP for almost everything you do, rank up and build your character
Upgrade your stats (health, stamina, max hunger and max thirst)
Unlock perks to help you tame the wilderness
Navigate the frontier with your new built-in HUD compass
Discover new locations and earn more XP for finding the most secretive spots
GUI overhauled- almost all of the UI elements have been retextured from scratch and are optimised for multiresolution scaling without any quality loss
Terrain shader upgraded to include random perlin noise generation, heightmap blending and more realistic light handling
Various optimisations and bugfixes
If all goes according to plan, 0.2.0 will be out for download this weekend.
Progress Update
We've been quiet for the past week or so but work is continuing- the next update is well underway now. Hunger, thirst, campfire cooking, XP and levelling are coming soon. We've aimed to make the survival system as realistic as possible- thirst will deplete depending on how hot you are, healing is based on how much food you've eaten (so if you're starving, you won't heal and will die unless you eat something pretty quickly), and all consumables have different properties. The properties allow us to link the systems together, so roasted meat may fill a lot of hunger but will make you more thirsty, while a berry might restore a little of both. You will earn XP points for all sorts of activities, and ranking up will allow you to upgrade your vitals and unlock perks. This system will be expanded on heavily in the future.
We are always optimising the game, and certain parts of the code have been streamlined further to make things more smooth. This comes along with a few minor bugfixes.
We will post more detailed news closer to release!
0.1.4 Released- Destructible Glass, Craftable Furnaces And Bugfixes
We've made a few changes today and have some news on the Mac front. If you're having issues on Mac, please try the instructions outlined at the end of this post.
So, what's new?
Today I have been doing some tests with mesh destruction and it went very well. Destructible glass has been added to decanters and fancy glasses- if you shoot them or throw TNT at them, they will dynamically fracture into glass shards with almost no performance cost. This system is ready to be added to other objects- we aren't sure how far we are going to go with the destructible environment but for now it will be limited to glass items. The framework is in place to allow us to fracture large models while taking gravity and structural integrity into account, so if you shot a support out then the material above would collapse. This will likely be added to certain objects already in the world- stone statues and bridges, for example- but not to full player-built structures (or else there would be a serious FPS drop).
There are also multiple bugfixes and changes included in 0.1.4. Here is the full changelog:
Frontier v0.1.4 Alpha Changelog:
-Added destructible glass for decanters and drinking glasses.
-Made furnace craftable.
-Fixed issue with saloon doors not saving.
-Upgraded glass distortion shader.
-Fixed placement issues with certain objects.
-Refined some textures and normal maps.
-Fixed issue causing cursor to be visible when starting a game.
Mac Issues? Try this
We're still working on the Mac and Linux issues and we now believe that it may be a permissions error. If you are on a Mac and are unable to launch, please try the following and let us know if it works:
Open up a terminal
Type "chmod +x" (without the quotation marks)
Find the game executable (your steam apps folder\Frontier.app\Contents\MacOS\Frontier <<< this file) and drag it to the terminal
Hit enter
We aren't sure if this will fix it but our team does not have access to a Mac for another couple of days, so if somebody could let us know if our suspicions are correct that would really help us out. If this works, we will simply automate this process so when you download the game it automatically has the correct permissions.
Marked for fixing in the next patch are some minor but annoying bugs, such as firing while in a menu. This will be out before too long.
0.1.3 Live
Today's update has gone very well. Several bugs have been fixed and I rebuilt the old loading screen into a clean and responsive system. Now the people who have experienced hangs while loading should no longer see this issue. Here's the full changelog:
Frontier v0.1.3 Alpha Changelog:
-New main menu music (licensed by AudioSparx)
-Main menu saloon update
-Added a lightweight loading screen
-Fixed issue preventing interaction with crafting stations
-Fixed issue preventing doors from being opened
-Fixed mounted head collision problems
-Fixed light chunking problems
-Tens of component retrieval calls packed into one line of code for optimisation
-Ambient lighting tweaked to prevent artifacting
-Point light processing tweaked to fix contrast glitch
-Various minor optimisations
0.1.2 Released
Hey everyone,
Today we've got a new update for you all. We've revamped the main menu, fixed a few problems and made some minor tweaks. Here's the full changelog:
Main menu replaced with saloon scene
Changelog added to main menu
Information tab turned into basic help section
Ambient music added to main menu
Fixed issue with saving certain blocks (mounted heads, crafting stations and doors)- reported by Zord
Fixed issue with getting stuck in crafting menus- reported by Zord
Made various tweaks to certain object shaders
Added new normal maps
Upgraded candle flame simulation
0.1.0 Hotfix Live
Hello again!
My apologies for all the announcements- I said earlier today that we'd discovered a bug with the engine which was out of our control. However, I did manage to track down the source of the problem- it's a long and boring story involving multiple monitor settings and how they're handled by the game. We disabled the update calls for them and you can now launch in fullscreen mode, in any resolution, without having button issues. You still have the option to launch into windowed mode (which you can even resize across multiple monitors, just drag the window and it will scale accordingly), and you can toggle between fullscreen and windowed mode in the options menu or by hitting alt+enter.
booglover23 reported a bug with the furnace to our team this morning- we've fixed that in this patch as well. You can now make all the ingots you want!
During testing, I noticed that the inventory icons are not always scaling properly- they might look a bit too small for their slots in some cases. We're aware of this and it will most likely be fixed in the next patch, along with a couple of other minor issues we came across.
Resolution Bug Workaround
Hello everyone,
With the launch of 0.1.0 earlier today, we were expecting all of the GUI bugs to have been fixed. However, we're still receiving bug reports of buttons being out of place and panels not being the right size.
We have a temporary workaround so you can still play while we work on a fix. The issue itself is a bug with our engine, and it seems that many developers are having similar issues- unfortunately it's not open-source, so we can't actually fix it ourselves.
This issue only happens in fullscreen mode so if you launch in windowed mode it should work. You can also switch between fullscreen and windowed mode ingame by pausing the game, and selecting the fullscreen button in the options menu (or just hit alt+enter).
We'll keep you all updated. Hopefully we will find a fix for this soon.
0.1.0 Is Now Live!
Evening, all,
We're very happy to announce that 0.1.0 is finally here! We'll go over all the details in just a minute, but before we get started we want to let our Mac and Linux users know that fixing their issues is now our top priority. We've been swamped under with the rebuild for 0.1.0 which put the game in a difficult state for testing- now that it's stable, we'll be able to look further into your issues. We have a couple of leads and will be following them over the coming days. Again, we apologise for the delays- this has been unexpectedly difficult to fix, but we hope to have a patch out soon.
In the meantime, if you're on Windows, you can now download 0.1.0 through Steam! Here's a brief list of what we've been up to:
Inventory code rebuilt from scratch
Crafting system rebuilt from scratch
Building system rebuilt from scratch
Save/load system rebuilt from scratch
Workbench added
Toolbench added
Wooden door added
Saloon doors added
TNT added
New 3D flower and fern models
Heightmaps added to ground textures for a realistic 3D effect
Terrain shader colour handling tweaked
Starting area added
Many bugfixes, stability improvements and optimisations
We will be focusing all our attention on fixing the Mac and Linux builds before we continue working on the game, but we've already got plans laid out for the next update. As always, we'd love to hear your feedback and read your bug reports, so give us a shout on the forums if you're having any trouble with the new version! We're expecting to hear a few minor bug reports over the next couple of days, and if that's the case then we'll release a patch sometime this week, hopefully also fixing the Mac and Linux standalones.
Enjoy!
-The Lacuna Team.
Revamp, TNT, Doors And Wildlife- A Progress Update
Time for another update on where things are at!
Our lead programmer is hours away from finishing the rebuild. The inventory, crafting, saving and building systems have been rebuilt from scratch, fixing bugs and bringing new features to the game. There are now various crafting systems; some things can be built by hand, but for other recipes you'll need a workbench. The building system also allows you to dynamically change floor height, so you can have more control over your creations. Buildings are now grouped, so when you create a structure we can identify it as a building. In future updates, this will be used by NPCs to figure out what you've made. There are too many changes to name in this post but most of them are behind-the-scenes; things which make the game much more stable and bugfree.
Once this is ready, it has to be integrated with the main project. This is the next big task as everything needs to be recreated around the system upgrades, and we are expecting it to take about a week. This is just an estimate and we will not be revealing a release date for 0.1.0; it could take longer, but may take even less time. We'll give you all a surprise update once it's ready!
So, what new features are being added?
While 0.1.0 is focused on bugfixes and improvements, there are some new features too;
Wooden doors- interact to open and close
Saloon doors- these automatically swing open when you push them by walking through, and bounce back into position
TNT- a multi-use tool, perfect for hillbilly-style hunting, easy DIY butchery or even mining. Simply light and throw (and run)
A wildlife update- new, handcrafted 3D flowers, ferns and plants which sway in the wind, bringing a more realistic look to the environment
Features are subject to change and may be improved further before 0.1.0, depending on how much time we have. We are aiming to get this out ASAP, but it's still hard to judge when we will be finished. We're sure it will be worth the wait!
As always, we are available on the forums every day- we encourage you to come and have a chat with us about development!
