Planetes
Hotfix to bypass our broken master server.
Update Alpha 0.021 New parts and Fixes!
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This patch adds new parts to diversify building options, and brings a full batch of new fixes and improvements.
Additions:
- Added 7 new parts which should help make ship designs more interesting. These are all structure parts.
- Added the option to have your character move relative to the direction your character is facing rather than relative to the screen. Toggle this with Z key.
Changes:
- When mining resources will now be placed in your backpack by default, and will only be placed on your hotbar if your backpack is full.
- Reduced backpack slot count.
- Lowered the amount of oxygen available in an ice node.
- Updated backend server code. (This should fix a lot of issues we were having with servers going offline.)
- Improved the maglocks locking distance and smoothness of operation.
- Slightly lowered the flame width on a small chemical thruster.
- Backpack visuals and sized changed to improve readability.
- Inventory tiles now update based on container size.
Fixes:
- Stopped inventory item quantity values from displaying long decimal values.
- Fixed issue with resolutions other than 16:9 not scaling the UI properly. UI should function on most resolutions now.
- Fixed an error that was caused by an active thruster being destroyed.
- Fixed an error which occurred when parts with roofs were destroyed in some situations.
Help find bugs! Please click the report bug button in the top left of the screen if you encounter any issues or bugs. You can also use this feature to request new additions to the game, or if you just want to send a friendly note to the devs!
Update Alpha 0.020 Major Fixes/Stability Improvements
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This patch addresses many outstanding bugs and issues and should improve overall stability.
Additions:
- Printsettings command added for console, which reads out all server settings.
Changes:
- Players are no longer removed from the game when their owner leaves the game. (Be sure to protect your character!)
- Adjustments to loot table.
- Redone code for loot table logic.
- Updated Discord plugin on for Linux OS.
- Updated network code.
- Removed holiday themed items.
- Changed game settings to block odd screen resolutions.
- Added timestamps for player logs.
- Maglock connections are now saved and remade when the server saves or loads.
Fixes:
- Fixed an issue with loading saved games where:
- Players and items would have a velocity of 0 when loaded from a save game.
- Physics objects would be loaded and activated in series rather than simultaneously causing a spaghettification of positions across all objects.
- Players and items would have a velocity of 0 when loaded from a save game.
- Fixed an issue where planet gravity would fail if an object within the sphere of influence was marked as not being simulated.
- Fixed an issue where players could move their character or open the map when using certain menus.
- Fixed bug where player could take Gee force damage when loading into game or teleporting.
- Fixed an issue where planet 3 had it's visuals in a separate location than it's physics.
- Fix for camera panning not freezing while using menus.
- Fixed a bug where the game would tell the player "resource storage full" on parts that did not have a resource storage.
- Fixed a bug where the game did not inform the player what resources they were transferring and the quantities, while filling a resource storage.
- General fixes for Discord plugin.
- Fix for keeping health bars at the correct length regardless of max health value.
Help find bugs! Please click the report bug button in the top left of the screen if you encounter any issues or bugs. You can also use this feature to request new additions to the game, or if you just want to send a friendly note to the devs!
Direction of Development Overview.
We are now well into the new year and this is an exciting time, hopefully, with many updates and changes soon to come for Planetes.
While we released in 2018 (Early Access), we expect 2019 to be an even bigger year for Planetes. We knowingly released the game early, many might say too early, but as a small development team it can be difficult to find enough people to play and test the game. Releasing when we did allowed us to get a much larger amount of feedback about the game as well as to discover a lot of bugs and issues. So, thanks to everyone who has been here with us through the difficult times!
What can be expected moving forward? Each of the categories below will be addressed in-depth in a later blog write up, but we have outlined them here.
- Improved server stability and performance.
- Player hosted and community hosted dedicated servers.
- Crafting implemented.
- Revised ship building system. (This is a big one!)
- More unique ship parts with varied footprints.
- Internal ship management.
- AI.
Server Stability: While the server performance has been OK when there are a handful of players on at a time, it certainly has issues when we start getting anywhere near the 24 players per server limit. This is not how we want the game to be and we will not stop working on this until the per server limit is much higher (above 50 concurrent users).
Community Servers: This has long been requested by the community, and it is currently being worked on. We had hoped to get this in back in November, but we had a lot of other things that we were stuck working on at the time. While we could release this now, it would not be as feature complete or user friendly as we want it to be. Ideally, this should be as easy to set up as starting an offline game.
Crafting: This is a feature that should have been in the game from the beginning, but again is one of those features that connects into so many other areas of the game that it can be difficult to get working if the other linked features are not as complete as they should be. The crafting system will use designs or blueprints that can can either be unlocked from a skill tree or found as loot depending on the design and its rarity. Each design will require a number of resources to craft and the appropriate crafting station. Through crafting, players will also be able to craft ship parts, which will be able to be placed by putting the part on your hotbar, selecting it, and then placing it like you would with the current building system. This is important because the current building system will be changing.
Revised Ship Building: Our current ship building system works, but there is nothing special about it. It’s nothing great or unique. It is also very performance intensive when large ships with many parts are built onto a ship. We are going through the process of redesigning this system to be more performance intensive and unique to Planetes. Our new direction will be sacrificing some of the freedom players had to build any design they wanted, but hopefully the benefits will outweigh this!
New Ship Parts: The majority of our current parts fill out a unit square or can be combined to fill out a unit square. We don’t actually have a reason for this aside from it making building a bit simpler for the player. Our engine can support any parts of any shape so, moving forward, we will take advantage of this to let players truly build some unique ships within the revised building system.
Ship Management: This has been a feature that was always meant to be a big part of Planetes, but has yet to be included in the game even on a small scale. This system will be how ammunition, power, and fuel are delivered to the various parts of the ship. It will include the UI that allows the player to choose which weapons to fire. It will also include the the ship radar system, which will not just be informational, but will also be how the player controls various weapons and drones at range.
AI: Having AI in Planetes has always been planned, and by AI we do not just mean ships that fly around waiting for a player to stumble on them. We wanted NPCS, and creatures as well, so for a while we avoided this area since we knew it would be a pretty big undertaking and we wanted to be sure we had the resources to do it right. This has now been moved up on our priorities list because we feel that, until Planetes becomes a more widely played game, it will suffer from feeling empty. While some players enjoy this, because it provides a sort of creative mode, the majority of players have indicated they would like a more engaging experience. So, until we have active servers, adding AI will be necessary to breath a bit of life into the game.
Short Term: Moving forward we will be putting out a small update within the next week that addresses some major outstanding bugs and issues. For several weeks following this update, we will only be putting out a couple of small patches for other small bugs and issues. This is because our attention is going to be refocused on some of the redesign work we need to complete for us to start putting in the above mentioned features and systems.
We plan to first work on the redesigned ship building system since it is such a core element of the game and the new system will be a defining element of Planetes.
From our very small development team, thanks again for all the support, encouragement, and feedback over the last months!
Issue with Mac & Linux builds
We're currently working on a fix!
Update Alpha 0.019 Star System Overhaul Patch!
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Star System Overhaul Patch, We have gone through and updated all of the planets to use the new rendering tool. They should all be much more interesting to explore and build on.
Additions:
- Added parts: Light armor plating in 3 sizes and Medium armor plating in 3 sizes.
- Added Christmas Tree room part (functions as a small storage and looks cozy).
- Added Christmas Tree Loot Crate.
- Added new roof panel art.
- Added new part: HGas Fuel Tank 3X6.
- Added panning camera for ships.
- Added four modes to the camera (Cycle through camera modes with C).
- Added loot spawns. (Crates (currently disguised as christmas trees) will spawn in certain areas on planets, open them using F to get a surprise!)
Changes:
- Lowered pan distance and max zoom of player camera.
- Gave the panning camera distance based smoothing.
- Made the camera freeze it’s panning if you open menus.
- Made the camera pan relative to zoom.
- Improved the look of raised terrain.
- Changed how explosion force is calculated.
- Rebuilt part explosion method.
- Improved orbit calculations so trajectory lines are much more stable.
- Improved how thrusters reverse thrust and thruster damage are calculated.
Fixes:
- Fixed roofs having invalid transforms to check visibility against.
- Fixed weapons being able to shoot through raised terrain.
- Fixed map trajectories sometimes turning dark grey.
- Fixed issue where parts would explode when deconstructed.
- Fixed issue where explosions could sometimes pull you inwards.
- Fixed some minor issues with gravity calculations.
- Fixed issue where atmospheric drag was not being properly applied to objects.
- Fixed issue where a player or ship could get stuck on the edge of a planet and would not be able to move.
Help find bugs! Please click the report bug button in the top left of the screen if you encounter any issues or bugs. You can also use this feature to request new additions to the game, or if you just want to send a friendly note to the devs!
Holiday Sale! And Upcoming patch.
Hello Everyone!
We hope everyone is having an enjoyable holiday season, and with that we would like to offer Planetes at 20% off during this year's Steam winter sale!
There will be an overall price increase shortly after the new year, so get the game now while it's at it's cheapest!
Additionally we will be patching shortly (hopefully tomorrow the 21st).
Some things you can expect to see in this patch:
- Holiday cheer! Various items have been added or re-skinned to make Planetes more festive during the holidays.
- New Armor panels. The old one block panel was not sufficient and had issues. We have now added six new armor panel parts. Three sizes of each armor level with both light armor and medium armor. Also the armor parts have been improved so they can now fit closely together. Previously it was not possible to place two armor panels on an inside corner.
- Redone starting star system. All the old planets have been replaced with new ones using our updated mesh for planets. This allows us to build much more dynamic and interesting planets, also much larger!
- Loot box spawning. We now have a system in-place that will spawn loot crates semi randomly in preset areas on asteroids and planets. These crates can contain anything from resources to weapons and items.
- These are just a few things you can expect in the upcoming patch, which will also include plenty of smaller additions and many fixes and changes.
Thanks for reading, and Happy Holidays!
Update Alpha 0.018 Additions to server persistence and new camera setup.
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Additional settings added to server persistence and new Camera panning.
Additions:
- Added to server persistence: Derelict Spawn rate, spawned ship part limit, client can spawn ship, cargo destroy on container break percentage, auto save frequency, velocity soft cap, ship part limit, resources set as infinite.
- Added map icon for current controlled ship, (indicates direction ship is pointing).
Changes:
- Lowered the stars overall gravity and increased the radius of the star's gravity well. (objects can now hold a stable orbit around the star).
- Improvements to weapon carry poses.
Fixes:
- Fix for null ref error on status bars when parts are destroyed.
- Fixed issue allowing ships to move through raised terrain.
Help find bugs! Please click the report bug button in the top left of the screen if you encounter any issues or bugs. You can also use this feature to request new additions to the game, or if you just want to send a friendly note to the devs!
Update Alpha 0.0175 Bug Fixes and other small additions.
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Small patch fixing major issue with ship spawning.
Additions:
- New Utility suit art added (being used temporarily as the default suit).
Changes:
- Modified Planet3 (newest planet) by adding cliff structure prototypes.
- Slightly improved cloud rendering.performance happy.
- Increased overall star brightness.
Fixes:
- Fix for junk collector removing constructs before they had properly spawned in.
- Fix trajectories not being displayed when playing online.
- Fix for thrusters pushing too strongly against projectiles, items and players.
- Fix for null ref occurring when a construct was removed from game while player is in adminmode.
Help find bugs! Please click the report bug button in the top left of the screen if you encounter any issues or bugs. You can also use this feature to request new additions to the game, or if you just want to send a friendly note to the devs!
Update Alpha 0.017 Quality of Life Improvements and New Planet.
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This Update wipes the servers!
Spooky Halloween event cosmetics removed.
Additions:
- Added derelict ships that will randomly spawn and move in towards the star system.
- Added thruster burn area indicators visible when building.
- Added missing thrusters (both the physics and the visuals) on Large 6X6 Chemical Thruster, they can be used as turning thrusters.
- Added console command for admins to allow clients to spawn in whole ships.
- Added console command to enable server wide infinite building resources.
- Added console command to edit derelict spawn interval.
- Added trajectory prediction indicator to map view.
- Added gravity well and atmosphere limit visual indicators to map view.
- Added a new planet which uses new tech that will eventually be used for all the planets.
Changes:
- Adjusted map zoom limits.
- Refactored planetary gravity code to be more stable, accurate and performance happy.
- Map will automatically close if open while leaving a seat.
- Improved resolution of orbit rings.
Fixes:
- Fix for discord connection errors on headless server.
- Fix for map opening when leaving a seat.
Help find bugs! Please click the report bug button in the top left of the screen if you encounter any issues or bugs. You can also use this feature to request new additions to the game, or if you just want to send a friendly note to the devs!