It’s been a little while since we last updated Lost Wing, and as such we’re bringing a much bigger update to you than we’d originally planned (Winner!). Here’s a brief summary of the updates:
Visual updates to the existing Industrial environment.
The Forest environment is now fully unlocked and playable. The leaderboards are open for competition.
The Forest boss is fully implemented too, but we’re still working on the balancing and attack timing for it. Your feedback on the boss will be very much appreciated.
This update also includes more performance and graphical improvements. You should find the game performs very even on modest system specs.
One of the reasons we’ve taken a while with this update is that we’re already a considerable way through the next planned major update - the Canyon environment. This environment is available for preview in this build too, albeit with many placeholder obstacles, no boss included and the leaderboard locked.
Thanks for being with us during Early Access - we hope you enjoy the update :)
The v0.2 update for Lost Wing is imminent!
We’ve been quiet recently, but fear not, we’ve simply been busy getting the next phase of Lost Wing ready to release. The next update includes quite a lot updates, including the full release of the Forest section.
The following will be available soon:
All Forest zones, sections and obstacles Zones 1, 2 and 3 are all feature complete with regards to their sections and obstacles. There’s some neat stuff in there, and plenty of obstacles that are quite different in nature to the Industrial track. SPIDERS.
Forest boss The full implementation of the boss for the Forest zone is in this update. This includes all its attack phases, animations and general mechanics.
What is not complete for the boss is the balancing of health/damage values and the timing of the times when the boss is vulnerable to incoming damage. We’ll be eliciting feedback from players about changes to make to this over time.
More performance and graphical improvements. A fairly large change has been made to how the track itself is pieced together at runtime in a (successful) effort to avoid some floating point issues we were experiencing.
When a player managed to survive for extended periods of time without crashing, the issue would become somewhat apparent visually. The further you travelled the more likely the environment and ship would start to flicker and look a bit “wobbly”. This was a result of the floating point math used for storing the positions of objects (and thus their vertices) for rendering purposes not being precise enough .
For those of you of a less-technical persuasion, here’s a little bit of clarification (massively simplified for the sake of brevity - these aren’t “real” number examples!).
Floating point numbers are used in computing to store “non-whole” numbers, i.e. something with numbers after the decimal point. They can store very small numbers (near 0, for example 0.0001) quite well, but their precision becomes much less when dealing with large numbers (so what you intend to be 21496.73321 ends up being 21496.73). In most games this isn’t a problem that causes much annoyance, but for Lost Wing where you travel at a high speed, in the same direction, for a lengthy amount of time, these issues become really exaggerated after a while.
Now how did we fix this? This is where we turn to... Futurama... for inspiration. Their ship, the Planet Express, doesn’t travel anywhere at all, rather, it moves the entire universe around it.
The track in Lost Wing is laid down like a train track, each new section bolting on the end of the last, somewhere in the distance. As your ship moves forward, the track behind you is removed, and new track sections are placed up ahead.
What we do with our updated system is much the same, with one important addition, the entire environment gets shifted backwards the same amount that the ship moves forwards. The side effect of this is that from the player’s perspective, everything looks the same as before (as the camera is also moving with the ship and environment) but, crucially, the immediate environment around the ship is really close to 0 (the “origin” of the world) in terms of object positions etc, so the position of everything you see is super accurate even after seemingly travelling a really long distance.
The result? No more wibbly-wobbly-melty objects!
Screenshot time
What would a teaser update be if it didn’t include screenshots of new stuff too? Here we go!
Version v0.122 is now live!
Hot off the back of our last update, we bring you some general quality of life improvements in the v0.122 update.
The following changes have been made:
Features:
The In-Game User Interface on the walls has been simplified - we’ve removed the distance text and made changes to the layout of the UI elements. The whole UI colour now responds to the charge level you currently have (it was just the “trim” that changed colour before).
The progress bar at the bottom of the screen now shows you your current score in relation to your best score, and the world best score. Your deaths from your current run are also shown with an X above the score on the bar that you had at the time of your death.
A description of what caused your crash is shown on the game over screen.
Performance:
Minor improvements to Industrial track.
Fixes:
Minor tweaks to Forest track Zone 1 and 2.
v0.122 Update Soon
The v0.122 update for Lost Wing is almost ready.
This update brings more quality of life improvements on top of what came out in the last update. Notably, the following UI changes:
Tweaked in-game wall UI (simplified, and generally easier to read).
The progress bar at the bottom of the screen now shows your current score in relation to your best score, and the global best score for the the current track and difficulty.
We anticipate this update being released early next week. Here's a screen grab of the tweaked wall UI.
Version v0.121 is now live!
The following changes have been made.
Features:
You can now toggle Vertical Sync on and off via the Options menu.
Once again, plenty of progression in the Forest track.
Removed screen flash when collecting pickups.
Performance:
Industrial track framerate drops have been addressed.
Vastly reduced Obstacle pop-in.
Minor memory usage reduction.
Fixes:
Anti Aliasing setting will persist between game launches.
The mouse is now usable to select language on first load.
Enjoy!
Lunar Sale and v0.121 Update
The Lunar Sale is upon us!
Lost Wing is is 25% off - so give a friend or two a gentle nudge to purchase Lost Wing and help support indie devs ;)
The next update for Lost Wing is imminent too, and brings with it some important fixes.
Firstly, it should help correct a couple of performance issues that were reported to us on the forums a few days ago - notably some frame rate drops in the Industrial track. Alongside this, memory usage is slightly reduced.
We’re also adding some general quality of life enhancements, such as the ability to toggle Vertical Sync on and off via the options menu, and the Anti Aliasing setting will now correctly persist after you close the game.
We hope to have this update with you within a couple of days at the most - we've just got some final testing to do before we give it the ok to push it live.
Version v0.12 is now live!
The following changes have been made.
Features:
Players can now remap all keyboard, mouse and gamepad inputs to whatever controls they please (Currently officially supporting Xbox One, Xbox 360 and PS4 pads - but many others can-and-should work too).
The Forest level has been further developed, with Zone 1 and 2 nearing completion, and now playable. New obstacle types and sections have also been implemented, along with a major enhancements to the visuals. We anticipate bringing this out of preview mode in the next major update to Lost Wing (which will mean your scores from playing this track are reported to the leaderboards).
UI and Visuals:
We have introduced vertical menu options in some places to give additional functionality and improve menu flow.
Difficulty and track selections on the menu now have descriptive captions.
Options:
Users are able to turn Anti-Aliasing on and off via the Options menu.
Turning this option to off will help frame rates on lower-end graphics cards.
Fixes:
Monitor refresh rates of less than 60Hz are now allowed, enabling higher resolutions to be usable on some (typically older) monitors.
Fixed text for resolution and refresh down drops not displaying correctly on lower resolutions.
Some minor cursor visibility issues should now be resolved.
The “Input Update” is coming (very) soon (images!)
We’re currently doing the last bit of testing on the recent development work on Lost Wing before we make the changes public. This update focuses on the input system, but also includes some changes/fixes requested by the community.
One request in our discussions board was for the ability to remap controls. We’re happy to say that we have now implemented a full controls remapping system into the game that will allow players to remap their keyboard, mouse and gamepad inputs. There’s still a few minor snagging issues to resolve here, but the system is by all intents fully functional - we’d rather get this out to the community sooner rather than later so it’s being rolled into an update now.
The Forest track has been updated significantly, A lot of time has been spent improving the visuals, and Zones 1 and 2 are near-complete, featuring many new obstacles which react differently when damaged/destroyed, plus a ramp up in difficulty from Industrial. There is still a lot to implement, including a level specific challenge (like the Industrial Zone’s Spatial Anomaly camera spin), and a boss, but we are hopeful of completing the track in time for the next major update.
The industrial track has had some optimisation, which should improve performance on lower end CPUs.
Also from discussions on the community hub, we have implemented the ability for users to select refresh rates lower than 60Hz (potentially allowing some users to play at higher resolutions than they could before) and we have included the ability to turn Anti-Aliasing on-and-off from the options menu to help performance.
Score reward for reaching a checkpoint added (50k).
Corrected Spin survival score to be 100k.
Combo score calculated differently.
Ship accelerates more rapidly (max speeds remain the same).
UI and Visuals:
Reworked menu flow and introduced menu button design with animation.
Improved ground textures and lighting.
Added pickups information to the controls screen.
Performance:
Introduced a new section loading system to help reduce frame hiccups.
Audio:
Improved sound for when you pass objects closely.
First update coming soon (images)
Here's a sneak peek at some of the menu updates that we're planning to release very soon. This will be the first update since we released Lost Wing last week.
This update will tackle a few areas:
Firstly, there's a minor performance update that will smooth out a portion of the occasional frame hitching some users have experienced. Further to this, we have some additional (and more impactful) updates for this that we're working on that will be in a future release.
Secondly, we've reworked several areas of the menu system to improve the visuals and flow of the menu screens. It's now much more clear where all the options are, and much quicker to select your ship, track and difficulty.
Finally, there are some scoring tweaks, primarily related to points and charge given from combo'ing orb pickups. We expect this to lead to higher scores and expand the variety of tactics players can employ to gain those higher scores (e.g. relying on charge orb combos, or focusing on destroying obstacles and picking up their points drops).
No specific ETA on this release yet, but we anticipate days rather than weeks.
