Hey guys, so Alpha 4 is finally out of the beta and onto the default branch! There shouldn't be any more bugs related to this new version, but you never know.
You can read more about what this version has to offer in this announcement:
As said before, Alpha 3 save files aren't compatible with the newer version, so if you want to continue playing on your old files, you can switch to the old version by going to the 'Betas' tab of the game on Steam and choosing your preferred version there.
Work on Alpha 5 will begin sometime this week.
Upcoming Alpha 5 changes
Hey guys, so a quick update about Alpha 4. It's planned for release in about 2 weeks. Most reported bugs have been fixed, including some of the ones mentioned in last week's announcement. There'll will be another beta patch next week to make all these fixes live.
Now about Alpha 5. Now that Alpha 4 is almost done with, it's time we move on to Alpha 5! Alpha 5 won't be be such a big update in terms of new content, rather it will be a Quality of Life (QoL) patch. Below you'll find a list of ALL the things that we want to do for Alpha 5. These points were gathered from reviews, discord, community hub and other places ever since the game was released. So we think it's time we act on all that feedback we got! If you've got any more feedback about the current state of the game or if you want to add something onto the list, feel free to post it on the community hub. Just remember that we won't be adding any big content, only improve existing content. So please don't go around suggesting stuff like time control.
Anyway, here's a planned list of all the changes coming for Alpha 5. We'll try to achieve at least 90% of all the points listed below. These include all the bugs that we are aware of at the moment. We'll probably discover more, so this list will be updated. So again, if you think we missed anything such as bugs or other QoL improvements, let us know!
QUALITY OF LIFE IMPROVEMENTS
* Add sound effects for the Mech
* Add a gamma slider
* Add a slider for longitude and one for lattitude
* Add beacon to rover and mech
* Make Astral say something about the ‘Unfinished Deal’ popup
* Add an option to turn on/off damage hits and health bars
* Reduce buying prices of items to encourage trading
* Should be able to select a ship turret with a single click, not just drag
* AI should ignore alien flora and just walk through it
* One should be able to split stacks in inventories
* Need a confirmation screen when user wants to delete or overwrite a save file
* Need to add side bars to every menu that’s scrollable
* When placing any building, the next building you place down should keep the same rotation. This would be extremely useful when placing down defensive walls
* Need different shaped and sized defensive walls
* Need to involve Astral into the game some more. Make her talk about ancient technology, help out the player, announce stuff like ‘your base is running low on energy’. Should also involve her in the tutorial to make it more immersive and helpful.
* Need to add firefighting into the game based on Dev Blog #5 ideas
* Need to have an option to change the scale of the UI
* Make Astral give off a warning when the player constructs a ship assembler so that the player knows that something extremely dangerous is about to happen if they keep going
* When dragging an item with a huge stack into the players inventory and it doesn’t have enough space for the stack, make it so that it fills the inventory with as much as it can fit instead of refusing to move the stack altogether
* Cabinets should be stackable on top of each other
* Add a clone chamber, life support pod or bed so that the player can choose where to respawn in non ironman games
* Impose some kind of limit to prevent the player from stealing too much from traders.
* Add some buildable sources of light that can be placed on the ground
* Make it rain and thunder more often. Currently you can play dozens of hours without a single rain drop, which is too bad given how cool the weather system is
* Improve the tutorial. In general, make it more scripted and less random. Some people get killed while doing it because the game still functions as if there’s no tutorial going on and this can be overwhelming for a new player
* Improve game creation and loading times. This is harder than it sounds
* Add a compass
* Make it clearer that an anomaly will still be there even after it disappears from the screen.
* Make it a necessity to have the main assembler built at all times
* Add support for multiple stories
* Make the minigun placeable on floor panels
* Add some kind of usage for empty bottles
* Change rover consumption from 30 to 20 and hydrazine stack size from 100 to 200
VISUAL BUGS
* Turret playing firing animation while it’s reloading
* Camera can clip inside the player’s body, especially when resting
* When creatures flee from damage from the player's weapon the damage indicators are reversed for any hits that occur while the creature is fleeing
* Dying underwater removes the underwater special effects during the death screen.
* Dying under water makes Amanda fall to the ground, no matter what height she died at
* If you press Escape while in the death screen and then press it again, Amanda shows as revived for a split second
* Decals on trade pods were turned off due to massive lag spike
* When the trade ship leaves, the entry point effects need to be turned off
* The trade pod beacon needs to be raised
GAMEPLAY BUGS
* Dying makes Amanda immune to radiation while nox event is active
* Can fly through vertical obstacles. Can also fly through ceilings or cave ceilings.
* Flying into a slightly sloped obstacle automatically stops the flying action
* Some resources, even jenu, can spawn inside trees
* Need to add localization for loading screen and for all the Alpha 4 related stuff
* Something wrong when trying to pick up the MKI turrets from the ground as dropped items
* Ai get teleported around when spawned and usually takes ~ 5 seconds to start acting normally. This is bad now that there are vehicles in game
* The game is poorly optimized when building very large bases, even when these bases are off screen.
* When inside the rover or mech, you can move the camera around so that the menu that should only appear when you're not inside the vehicle appears. If you interact with that menu while inside the vehicle, lots of bugs happen
* When under attack by a raid, if you decide to go out there and engage the bad guys, they will keep charging the base even if fired at instead of rerouting towards the player
* Most buildable objects need to have their normal textures set to the original ones after being constructed instead of keeping the 'assembling' effect. Will help with visuals and performance
* There are still some small issues when placing down foundation items. These are mostly collider problems
* Bumping into the rover after being built but before entering it causes it to act like a non kinematic physics object, meaning it can be tossed around like a ball.
* There is still a rare issue with the camera angle when entering/exiting the rover while juggling with the FPS and TP views.
* Cabinets sometimes refuse to be placed side by side
* Player can get melee damaged when flying above melee AI
* Climbing onto a rock while underwater causes a weird bug
*F Some resources have their physics enabled when they shouldn't
* Ancient Assembler piece #2 seems to be respawning
* Cull objects based on their size instead of having a one size fits all solution
* Sink doesn’t align with wall.
* Toilet doesn’t align with wall.
* When jumping out of water; character getting stuck in jumping animation. Sometimes also gets stuck in other animations when doing crazy things near water.
That's it. We have a lot of boring, technical work ahead of us for Alpha 5. No doubt there'll be even more stuff added to this list as we go through it. We'll still write dev blogs about it though, even if it might not be a very interesting read.
Alpha-4.0.0 on the Beta branch is now LIVE!
Hey guys, so Alpha 4 is finally here, bringing out the Ancient Mech, Ancient ruins and the Rover. You can find the full patch notes down below. The patch is live on the Beta branch on Steam only for now. It will stay there for about 2-3 weeks before going live in the main game so we can have enough time to hunt and kill bugs and do some balancing. If you want to play this new version before it comes out, make sure you enroll in the Beta. Be aware though, the new version is most likely not very balanced yet and might have some bugs. There is also a list of known issues at the bottom of this announcement, which will be fixed in the next few weeks.
Please note that any save file from Alpha 3 is not compatible with this version.
Patch notes:
* Rover is now available to build at the misc assembler. Check the past few dev blogs for more details.
* Added a highly customizable Ancient Mech. Check the past few dev blogs for details.
* Ancient ruins have been added into the game. They can contain Ancient blueprints, high end resources and even Ancient defense systems that are still functional. Caution is advised.
* Added a rare, mega Ancient ruined city. This one has a 50% chance of spawning every time you start a new game. For those of you who'd like to see it without travelling across the whole map in search for it, you can check the log file. If you see the message 'Bad luck, skipping spawn.', it means the city hasn't spawned so you should start another game.
* Added blueprints in the game. These can be found in the decryption tree.
* Added 3 new types of ammo: flamethrower ammo, shotgun shell and laser ammo
* The misc assembler now requires 4 copper, 4 crysoprase and 2 bubbleroots instead of 2 copper bars, 2 crysoprase bars and 2 gold
* Hydrazine now requires 2 corn, 1 bubble root and 1 glowtube instead of 6 chilli and 1 globosa and is crafted 100 at a time. Its stack limit is also 100 now
* Hydrazine containers now have more inventory space
* M23 ammo now uses crysoprase instead of bloodstone.
* Bloodstone, gold and diamond now spawn up to 3x times farther than before
* All ores and alien flora spawn by about 10-30% less depending on the resource, except for globosa, spiky fruits and raw onyx.
* Corn spawn rates are 3x times higher
* There will now be only 1 rock formation force spawned near the player spawn instead of 2.
* Fixed an issue with the cabinet not displaying tool tips properly
* Fixed an issue with the mouse pointer disappearing if you pressed on Escape many times very fast
* Removed the warning that came up when you activate test mode
* Added 2 new stats that can be added to any item: speed and armor. Both are modifiers that impact the speed and armor respectively of an object if it has such stats. Only the Mech and Rover have a non default speed and armor modifier for now. All items with HP (mostly buildings) have their armor set to 1 by default. An armor modifier of 2 will reduce all damage by 50% while a modifier of 3 will reduce damage by 66%.
* Burnt ground texture has been removed. Now we use a decal system to paint the terrain, which is much more performant and offers many more possibilities.
* Fixed the character from getting stuck when walking into colliders. It should now smoothly slide along them.
* Fixed the autosave bug that used to corrupt your save files. Sadly, the whole autosave process is now back how it was before when it used to cause small lag spikes. A message now appears every time the game autosaves though.
* The way you interact with items has changed. You now need to use the key 'E' to interact with almost anything instead of the left mouse button.
Known issues:
* The mech lacks any sound effects
* All new text lacks German, French and Italian localization
* The new vehicles are probably unbalanced
* Need to add an indicator for the rover telling the player it needs hydrazine to work
* Sometimes, you might see an error pop up when starting a new game. It mentions something about tension. You can safely ignore it
Dev Blog #5 Fire and Water
UPDATE: The firefighting system has been postponed for Alpha 5.
Today's blog is going to be a bit smaller than the previous ones due to the fact that a lot of this past week's work has been focused around boring, technical stuff that nobody really wants to read about. The technical stuff concerns the Mech and bug fixes that will be revealed in the patch notes.
As you can see in the pic above, the fire system has been fully adjusted to work with sources other than fire tornadoes. The mech flamethrower can now shoot flames up to 30 meters away. You can now start a fire when you aim at the top of a building or a tree for example and it will spawn the fire at that point and then spread in every direction on the object. It's also been greatly optimized and there are still a few more optimizations left to do.
The flamethrower is one of the best weapons you can get on the Mech, as fire is extremely good in certain situations, but not all. For example, you can take it with you when you explore and lay waste to the environment and any animals or monsters that will catch fire will spread it on their own. But we wouldn't recommend it when defending your own base as the fire will easily spread to your own buildings and if you build them particularly close to one another, then it will spread even more easily because just as water has to flow, so does fire has to spread. Within reason of course.
So when you shoot some flames at the ground, a grid of 3 by 3 flames will spawn, spreading outward from the middle cell to the outer cells. The fire tornado will now spawn 5 by 5 grids instead of the current 3 by 3 to maintain relevancy.
All this fire can easily get out of control, so we need a way to combat it. There's currently no way of fighting fire in game, apart from running to a building and trying to repair it as it's burning, therefore risking becoming bbq yourself.
Originally we wanted to just put in some kind of scifi fire extinguisher that the player holds in their hands. But that's too bland, boring and also ineffective due to the amount of fire that can spawn. So instead we decided to make something cooler. We want players to build a firefighting station that has an area of effect of let's say 250 meters. The station will have a certain number of flying drones available, say 4 of them. If the station detects any fire within that area of effect, it will dispatch an available drone to deal with it. The drone will fly towards the fire, pour some water on it, go back to the station to get more water and rinse and repeat for other burning buildings or fire cells. These stations would hold a certain amount of water that gets pumped from the ground at a certain rate. If they're built near water, then that rate would increase.
That's how helicopters deal with forest fires in real life and we think having that in a scifi setting would be pretty cool. I can think of only one other game that has this and that's City Skylines and that's where the idea came from. Of course, implementing this system would be quite a bit more time consuming than just a single fire extinguisher but it should be worth it.
Due to having this autonomous fire fighting technique, we might have to scale fire spread as the game advances. In Rimworld, fire spreads until it either burns out the entire map or until it rains assuming there's no player interaction. It's hard coded to start raining to prevent fires from erasing more than a quarter of the map at a time. So we might do something similar, but instead of forcing rainy weather, we'll kick in the semi infinite fire spread once you build a firefighting station or after a certain amount of gameplay time so that you have a chance of dealing with it by building multiple stations for example. We say semi infinite because we don't want to literally burn out the entire map either, so we'll just raise the fire grid cells from low single digits to low double digits. If we want to have this much fire on this grand a scale in a 3D environment, then we'll have to optimize our fire and water particles as much as possible while still maintaining the current visuals.
This whole firefighting system is currently theoretical as nothing has been implemented yet. We'll be working on the firefighting system next week and we'll see if we have to adjust our expectations or not! What do you guys think?
Dev Blog #4 Ancient Ruins/Tech
Today we'll be talking a bit about the new Mech parts coming out with the vehicle package!
As mentioned in previous dev blogs, you'll be able to assemble mechs by parts:
1. Heavy, medium and light Legs and Body
2. Backpack
3. Mech flamethrower
4. Mech laser
5. Mech plasma cannon
6. Mech minigun
7. Mech shotgun
You can combine the above pieces in any way you want and build as many mechs as you want! You can see in the above picture the Heavy, Medium and Light versions of the mechs plus an assortment of weapons attached. You can even combine Heavy legs with a Light body if you'd like to mix it up even more. And what's cooler (and useless) is that you can even climb into the Mech and actually use it without any arms! Anyway, every version will have its own advantages and disadvantages.
The Heavy mech is slow but heavily armored, intended to be used during base defense. You can strap up a flamethrower and a shotgun to deal with ground units and build another with a plasma cannon and minigun to deal with attacking spaceships. Its strength is supposed to be equivalent to that of an Ironhammer class ship without the shields and with only 2 weapons.
The Light version is fast but has much less armor. Its intent is to be used as an extension of your own body when you decide to go exploring and gathering resources, with the addition of some really powerful weapons attached.
The Medium version is basically a mix of the Heavy and Light versions. Every mech will be immune to fire, so you can safely spread that flame wherever you want!
To build a mech piece, you'll have to first do some exploration. Every piece will require 3 pieces of 'Ancient Blueprints' much like in Subnautica. You'll be able to find these ancient blueprints inside ancient ruins, scattered across the map. Once all the blueprints of a certain piece have been found, you'll then be able to craft it at the Ancient Assembler. As a side note, with the introduction of ancient ruins, the ancient assembler pieces will now be spawned inside these ruins as well.
In addition to having small, ancient ruins sites, there will also be a CHANCE of spawning a Mega Ancient Ruined City per map... This is to encourage replayability and to reinforce that feeling of discovering something truly rare as you won't be seeing this city every map you play. Each site will have a chance of spawning some extra goodies, such as gold bars or microcontrollers or even something undesired... The bigger the site is, the higher the chance at spawning some extra 'goodies' (Quotations marks because these goodies might not be so good for you after all).
This patch takes a bit longer to implement because there's a lot of extra stuff coming in with the vehicles. It's not just about the vehicles themselves, but it's also about this whole new system of blueprints, new points of interest such as the ancient ruins and new weapon systems such as the flamethrower among many other things.
So what has been accomplished so far? Well, the rover is over (Rhyming skills right there)! Most Mech mechanics have been implemented as well. For the Mech, we still need to implement stats as now all 3 versions are basically the same. All weapons systems have been implemented, including the laser. But the fire mechanic needs quite a bit of adjustment as it was never meant to be used from a flamethrower. In addition to working on the fire itself, we also need to adjust the way fire spreads. We also need to rethink a bit the way we change the texture on the terrain to burnt grass. We'll try and use decals instead, which should also make it more efficient but it's not as easy as it sounds due to the way Unity works with their terrain system. However, once we do successfully implement decals for the terrain, we will be able to add puddles of water and other cool stuff to it. This new Alpha will also bring a way to extinguish fires so there's that to work on too.
Then there are these ruins that have been integrated into the game, but they lack the 'goodies' part mentioned earlier in the blog. So we reckon it will be another 2-3 weeks of development before Alpha 4 can actually go live! We'll end this blog with these ominous looking structures in the distance...
Dev blog #3. Rover, Mech
Third blog is here! Today we'll be talking a bit more about the rover as well as the mech.
We're glad to announce that the rover has finally been implemented in the game! Last time, we talked about some of issues we were facing by introducing vehicles in the game. So how did we solve them?
Well first, we now have hydrazine as an all around fuel. Until now, it's been used for the Tempest so it was an end game kind of item. But now, it's more easily craftable so that it can be used even when starting a new game. The rover will be a craftable item not requiring any type of decoding and it will only need basic, early game resources to build. As such, it's not a very strong vehicle so after about a dozen collisions, it will have a hard time accelerating and you'll need to repair it. It also uses lots of hydrazine. Currently, using a full stack of hydrazine will get you about 750m of driving. But that's okay because hydrazine doesn't require globosa and chilli to craft anymore. It needs only 2 corn, 1 bubble root and 1 glowtube to craft a full stack of hydrazine. Be careful though, hydrazine is used even when the vehicle is not moving, albeit at a slower rate. That's because the engine turns on as soon as you enter it, but once you exit, it will stop using it. In theory, we could have a button to turn on or off the engine, but there are many key bindings already and we don't want to overcomplicate things, at least not at this stage.
In the last blog, we also said we'll need some UI to represent 'vehicle stats' without specifying what those are exactly. We decided not to do that anymore and only implement a new meter representing the vehicle's health. It's best not to clog the screen with UI stuff, as the player stats already take a lot of real estate. A little bit off topic, but we'll also need to find a better solution to show the player stats at some point in the future as the UI box takes up way too much space.
Serialization and every other technical aspect has been implemented as well.
Now, since we have this fast vehicle in game, we decided to change a few aspects. The player's speed has been lowered from 0.8 to 0.7 units because Amanda was like an olympic runner before to be honest. Travelling 130m in the rover takes 11 seconds while running on foot takes 18 seconds, so it's almost twice as fast as running. I think we'll need to increase the speed of the rover to make it at least twice as fast as running on foot. But for now we'll see how it works with these values.
Many resources have also been changed. A lot of them are now a bit rarer and some are much farther from the spawn point than before. For example, the Ancient Assembler pieces spawn in a 800m radius around the player, but after this patch, it will spawn in a 4'000m radius from the spawn point. Gold, diamond and other resources are also similarly affected.
So that's about it for the rover. In no way are all these numbers finalized, we'll have to see how you guys react and adjust based on your feedback!
Now for the Mech. We said in the first dev blog that we'd need 2 or 3 weeks to get it working so there's not much to say about it now. It's still very early to show off anything, except for one thing!
There we have a beautiful looking Ancient mech shooting a laser from the right hand and flames from his left hand. Next dev blog will go into detail about what the mech is, or should be. Right now, we're still not sure about how the mech should look like, if it should be part of the Ancient tech you can discover across the map or if it should be something that you can decode. We're strongly leaning towards the Ancient tech path right now.
Happy gaming and enjoy the summer sale!
Dev blog #2. Rover, Trading cards?
Welcome to second dev blog! This week we're going to talk about the rover and some of the new mechanics that have been introduced in game. Before we get to that though, here are some good news!
Valve has now decided that Gaia is worthy of Steam Trading Cards! That includes the cards, badges, emoticons and profile backgrounds, We will be introducing these at some point in the near future, but first we wanted some feedback from you guys. Would you like to have these implemented? Got any suggestions? Let us know in the comments, community hub or discord! I'm personally looking forward for the emoticons.
Right, now onto the dev blog. Last time, we talked about the upcoming Vehicle package and we mentioned the rover (Rompo for scale):
Most technical work has been completed. The rover is fully integrated within the game. Here's list of what has been accomplished during this past week:
1. A new vehicle controller has been introduced into the game. Although it's only applied to the rover, it could be applied to other vehicles with wheels as well. The controller has support for driving (duh), honking, fuel, damage, hand and normal brakes and x wheel drive. There's also a whole bunch of physics related stuff, such as torque, max speed, suspension, gear, aerodynamics such as air drag and air rotation, tire slips and other tire factors, RPM, anti roll force, ground friction, water friction and more. On the FX side, the controller has support for a whole bunch of different sounds such as ground sounds depending on the terrain texture under the tires, engine sound, impact sound, braking sound, wind sound in case you go really fast, skid sound and horn sound. For visual effects, we have particles for dirt caused by wheels, skid marks that depend on the wheel size and the terrain texture under the wheel, smoke for when the vehicle gets damaged too much and lights at different locations on the rover.
2. Some stats about the rover (Some of these will change, but here's the big picture for you car lovers out there):
Max speed: 60kmh
Torque: 1.25 on a scale from 0 to 10.
RPM: min 850, max 7000
Wheels: 6 wheels, 4 wheel drive. Front wheels receive the hand brake and accept turn
Right now, the vehicle has all these cool, high end capabilities, but they're filled with placeholders. For example, the sound the engine makes sounds like a race car and braking sounds like braking on asphalt. Dying just makes the rover go poof, like most other buildings (indeed, the rover is considered a building as it uses the same mechanics to be built and serialized.) As was said before, right now we're focusing on introducing mechanics. Assets will come later!
3. Physics, physics everywhere! The base code has changed quite a bit to allow many things to respond to physics. Most objects in the world were static up until now. They still are... unless you get onto your rover and start ramming onto them. Certain objects will now have physics enabled if you're inside the rover and close to them so they can respond to collision. These objects include all flora and ancient items. Sorry guys, trees are still as strong as the universe.
4. Speaking of physics, all ground AI now has ragdoll physics. Again, these would only be enabled if you were to ram into them with a rover. Otherwise they'll play good old fashioned death animations when killed with anything else. As you've seen on the pic above, the rompo is smaller than the height of the rover cabin, so don't be surprised if you run over it and it doesn't die. If you want to hit the rompo, you gotta ram into him with the wheels! So yeah, physics are quite accurate in this regard.
Here are some weevils after an encounter with the front bumper of the rover:
5. You can even use the rover underwater as it's watertight. So you can be cruising on the currently empty ocean floor if you'd like, but you'll be running out of oxygen.
If you remember from the last blog, we said we hoped we'd be done with implementing the rover by the end of this week so we can move on to the mech. Well, sadly we're not done yet. There's still a bit left to do, but what exactly?
Well, obviously there's still this whole issue of placeholder sounds, particle effects and lack of animations (entering the vehicle happens instantly, whereas we would like to have an animation for that since the vehicle has an interior and its doors can be animated). This will come in a later alpha that will be dedicated SOLELY to polishing as many aspects of the game as possible. Then there is the 'balancing' factor. As you guys know, every game has to be balanced, especially the vanilla version. Can't just bump into every AI you see and collect free food while the only cost to you is repairing the vehicle at literally no cost.
Therefore, we'll need 2 new mechanics: a fuel mechanic so as to not make it possible to drive endlessly that works with the mech as well and some sort of disadvantage for ramming into things.
The first one is easy. The vehicle controller already supports fuel and there is 'Hydrazine' in the game, so we'll be using hydrazine to power up the rover. We'll just need to create some new UI to show this and other vehicle stats.
The second one is a bit harder. Right now, when you bump into something, the vehicle loses a certain amount of HP based on the force with which you collide. The lower the HP is, the less torque the vehicle has so you won't even be able to accelerate at some point anymore, especially on a slope. This is all nice and dandy, but nothing prevents the player from colliding a few times, getting out and repairing and rinse and repeat. This can easily be abused for infinite ramming of AI. One possible solution to this is to introduce some sort of cost to repairing things. Our current design choice is to introduce a new item that can be wielded, called 'Repair tool'. Much like Subnautica, it would need batteries to function. However this goes beyond the scope of this alpha, so until we get to the 'Equipment package' alpha, we'll be stuck with infinite free repairing.
We also need to re-balance the game a bit. Since we now have the possibility to explore the whole map, we need to make some rare resources spawn much farther and be more widespread than where they are right now. That includes diamonds, gold and ancient items. We also need to work on a few more technical aspects, such as serialization.
All in all, it looks like we'll be spending another week on working on the rover mechanics before moving on to the mech.
See you next week and don't forget to let us know your opinions about trading cards!
Alpha-3.1.1 now live!
Hey guys! Alpha 3 brings character customization, now live on the default branch. There is now a button where you can choose and customize various aspects of your character, such as gender, hair, ears, nose, lips and facial expression among other things. If you choose not to customize your character, the game will start with good ol' Amanda.
This patch doesn't affect anything gameplay wise, it's mostly a cosmetic patch. I would normally leave cosmetic stuff towards much later alphas, but many people requested the ability to play as a male. So instead of just shoving in a male model temporarily until I have time to implement the character package, I decided to implement it now.
Patch notes:
* Character customization
- 9 different hair styles
- Hair color
- Skin color
- 17 facial expression morphs
- 4 body morphs
- 4 brows morphs
- 10 ear morphs
- 11 nose morphs
- 12 mouth morphs
- 12 special morphs. Special morphs are predefined combinations of many other individual morphs to give a distinct look to your character, such as a bat face or a vampire face.
There are literally hundreds more morphs you COULD customize the character with, so if the game ever becomes popular enough to be modded, modders would only have to add those options to the UI screen and it should mostly work. I say mostly because some morphs can affect the height of the character, which does cause some issues with the current implementation of other mechanics. But other morphs that should work out of the box when modded in include individual muscle morphs, chest area morphs, eyes morphs, feet morph and more. For a vanilla version, the current options are enough I think.
* Italian translation! Big thanks to Argonauth
* Fixed some bugs
* Fixed some texts not being localized
Hope you guys will like it! Next Alpha will be all about new vehicles and laying down some groundwork for new weapon systems!
Dev blog #1
Hey guys, thought I would create a dev blog so everyone who's interested in how the game progresses behind the scenes can stay updated! I think I'll be posting one every week or 2 weeks, depending on the amount of stuff I get done.
For our first dev blog, we'll be talking a bit about vehicles. One of the big problems in Gaia right now is the huge 8 by 8km maps offer no ways of getting from point A to point B in a timely manner. In the current version, all you can do is walk/run or fly with the late game hermes set, which is barely any faster than running. So you can potentially spend a ton of time just waltzin around searching for resources.
A temporary solution to this problem has been to concentrate almost all resources close to the player spawn. All ores are nearby when you spawn and gold and diamond are at 500m+ and 800m+ from the spawn point respectively. Flora is a bit all over the place, except for globosa, gel pouches and spiky fruits. You could be spawning kilometers away from any one of those 3 and you'd have a hard time finding them, especially as a new player.
There are 70-80 rock formations spawned on the map, but a normal survivalist player won't need more than 10 to finish a game. Out of those 10, some of them can be more than 1 kilometer away while every other formation is surely much farther than that. Players who like to play for the sake of building without leaving the planet have to travel a tremendous amount to get resources late game.
Alright, so what can we conclude? We have a problem of logistics here. We need to speed up getting from point A to point B both in early and late game. Ideally, the solution would scale up. So early game you wouldn't be able to just discover the whole map with a basic vehicle.
I've thought about what kind of (ground) vehicles would best fit Gaia and I think the best we could have is a Rover and a Mech.
The rover would be an early game vehicle that you could build after you decrypt a blueprint or 2. You would also be able to build one or more containers inside it so you can have more mobile inventory with you. Theoretically, we could even have turrets that we can attach to it. But the rover will be strictly a civilian vehicle, with 0 offensive capabilities, except for running over some AI at a cost. Here's how the model of our rover is going to look like:
Exterior:
Interior:
Since our game is both first person and third person, it is important to be able to climb inside any vehicle and have some kind of pilot seat. Fortunately, both the rover and vehicle have that.
The mech on the other hand would be a more complicated system. Let me begin by showing a picture of what's in the works right now:
Note: The colors are all over the place I know, I'm testing out a few options to see what would be best!
The mech will be extremely customizable as opposed to the rover. As you can see on the left side, each Mech can have light, med or heavy legs or top plus a different assortment of weapons. These include a shotgun, flamethrower and miniguns. You can see a fully assembled mech on the right side as well as the different parts nearby. Of course, you'd also be able to attach a backpack on it for extra inventory.
Each version of the mech (light, med or heavy) will have different stats of course, but they will all be slower than the rover. The purpose of the Mech is to go out there as a tank and destroy everything that opposes you. It could even be used while defending the base.
The Mech comes with extra gadgets, such as metal and energy shields, chainsaws and more. However, using these gadgets would require a form of melee combat system for the player and this is outside the scope of this package. There's already a ton of work to be done for Alpha 4 anyway, such as all these different types of weapons that require new systems. But when we're done with this alpha, we'll have the groundwork done for laser and flamethrowers done making it easier when the time comes to introduce turrets or player weapons that have these characteristics.
How about flying vehicles or water based vehicles? Water vehicles will be implemented with the water package. Flying player controlled vehicles... I'm not sure that's ever going to happen. We're going to have to see how the game progresses.
Anyway, the plan is to make the rover work by the end of next week. The mech will probably take a bit longer. I expect Alpha 4.0 to come out about a month from now.
There's more I have to say but it will have to wait for the next dev blog. As always, happy gaming!
Alpha-3.0.0 Character customization
The first post EA package is here! Quite a few people have requested this one, so here it is.
Normally, a big patch would break your save files, but although this one is pretty big, it’s mostly cosmetic and shouldn’t affect your Alpha 2.x games (if it does, please report it!). I’m putting this version up on the Beta branch today. It will be a week or 2 before the base game gets updated to this version in order to give time for bugs to be found and fixed. I’ll also use this time to implement some wishes by you guys! For example, I was thinking of giving the option of putting in a name for the character, even though the character is never mentioned in game, either in text or by voice. So if you have any ideas concerning this patch, let me know and I’ll look into it!
Here’s the patch:
* Character customization! There’s now a button in the new game panel where you can choose the gender, color, hair style, hair color and customize the face and a few other things. If you don’t wish to customize your character, good ol’ Amanda is going to be used instead.
* Saving while a building which has an inventory (such as generators or cabinets) is assembling used to corrupt your save file and the only way to fix it was to destroy the offending building. Players are now prohibited from saving while a building is assembling until a better fix comes along later
* You used to be able to climb on stuff even when there was an obstacle on top of said stuff. Shouldn’t be happening anymore.
Known issue: Switching gender for the first time after the start of the application will take a good 10 seconds to load. This will be fixed in the next patch most likely.
What next? Well after this alpha gets published on the default branch, I’m going to start work on the Vehicles package. No vote on this one sorry guys! Vehicles are badly needed because the maps have an area of 64km^2 and the only modes of transportation are walking, running and flying in the very late game. If you’ve got any ideas or suggestions concerning vehicles, post away on the community hub or the Discord server! I haven’t given any deep thought to the vehicles package yet, except for what’s on the forums, so your opinions will likely count for a lot.
PS: Sorry for the big patch size. Those hair models take quite a lot of space.
