Mars 2030
Teleporting and Fast Travel Updates
We've got a few good updates for you all this evening.
1.Fixed issue with the teleport system and smoothened transitions when fast travelling.
2.Solved a rare bug where players would fall off of the world after fast travelling.
3.Fix for a bug where users are teleported back to the habitat teleport.
Stay tuned for more updates and announcements!
Rover Driving Update
Due to popular demand, we've added a simplified way to drive the rover. The original joystick method will still work but you will now also be able to use the pads on the HTC Vive or Oculus Rift.
There have also been a few minor visual changes in order to improve performance.
Stay tuned for more updates!
Mars 2030 v1.1: Major Performance Update
After a full rework of our Mars landscape and countless hours by our devs, we’ve made a breakthrough on Mars 2030 performance across the board. Mars 2030 1.1 addresses most of the issues raised related to poor framerate in VR on our target required and recommended specs. The build is now live.
We’re eager to hear your thoughts on this update. We will be tweaking auto graphics scalability settings in the coming days so feel free to send us your favorite customizations with your hardware so we can evaluate.
Thanks for bearing with us and all of the feedback you’ve sent our way. As we’ve said before, we want to continue to build on and update Mars 2030 along with you all to make the experience the best it can be and have you form part of this incredible journey that it’s been to make this project come to life.
Thanks,
Julian
8/14 Update: AMD GPU Patch and Rover Tutorial
We've just uploaded a fix for Mars 2030 crashing on AMD machines after landing on the surface. Thank you all for your help in getting to the root of the problem and appreciate the patience. The issue should be fixed now. Let us know if you encounter any other issue related to this crash.
As well as this, we've introduced a fairly simple tutorial for driving the rover at the beginning of the experience which visualizes the necessary movements required for HTC Vive and Oculus Touch controllers. We aimed to make the rover drive just like the real one at Johnson Space Center by having the Vive controller become a joystick. The real one also uses a 6-axis system to drive in order to avoid any obstacles meaning turning is done with yaw rotation and driving sideways requires you to tilt the controller. The trick is keeping the controller upright while driving. We've seen some people having a hard time with this and with that we propose this question:
Would you like to see the rover drive with the D-pad and thumbsticks as and Easy mode? What about integrating a choice between using the left and right controller?
Behind the scenes we're still working on making performance optimizations on the project and have made significant progress. We should have another update just around the corner.
We also have some exciting things planned in the near future that we will be announcing in the coming weeks. In the meantime, what else would you like to see integrated into Mars 2030? Would love to hear your feedback on this.
All the best,
Julian
8/8/17 Patch: Performance Optimization and Bugfixing
We've just put out a quick update addressing some performance issues and bugs we've hit so far. More to come in the next few days.
Here's what's in the latest update.
1. We've addressed an UnrealEngine bug where changing graphics settings while in-game causes the application to run at a low framerate. Switching between Auto, Epic, Medium, or Low would cause framerate to dip on the Martian surface and make the game unplayable.
2.Performance optimizations for Mars foliage system, which has improved performance.
3.New MMSEV performance improvements and overall optimization of rover textures to run better while in-game.
Please note that we've found that the following changes might help improve performance when running Mars 2030 on Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.
For Oculus: run C:\Program Files\Oculus\Support\oculus-diagnostics\OculusDebugTool.exe, and make sure Asynchronous Spacewarp is set to "auto"
For Vive: In the SteamVR settings, under performance, make sure "Allow asynchronous reprojection" is enabled.
We are also aware of an AMD bug that causes Mars 2030 to crash right after landing on the Martian surface. Thanks to your feedback we know what's causing it. We will upload a fix for as soon as possible.
We're a small team but are working around the clock to make sure the experience is smooth for all users. Stay tuned for more updates in the coming days. Thank you for all of of your feedback so far, it has been incredibly helpful.
Julian Reyes
First Communication from Earthcom
This is also our first public announcement!
Thank you for purchasing Mars 2030! We're all very excited about our v1.0 release to the public. This project has been a blast to work on and we hope you're enjoying your stay and exploration of the Red Planet so far. We want to let you know right off the bat that is an ongoing endeavor for us and we are very excited about what's coming in the near future. We want to engage with your ideas and build on this new home for humans on Mars.
We've been reading your initial feedback and are hard at work at addressing all known issues you've encountered. We want to make sure your experience with the project is as smooth as possible and we will not stop working until it is. On Tuesday 8/1 we uploaded our first update which enabled Nvidia Single Pass Stereo on Geforce 10 series cards. This will improve framerate performance in VR. Today's 8/3 update includes clear instructions for driving the rover and recentering your camera on in VR as well as going Full screen using the Alt-Enter keys. If you are experience framerate issues with your machine, try running Mars 2030 using Auto in the graphics settings. That might help. If problems persist and youre running a recommended system please reach out and let us know.
We are around reading your feedback. Stay tuned and enjoy the Martian sunsets!
We want to see screenshots of your exploration! Upload them to the page and share with everyone.
Thank you,
Julian Reyes