- Reconnaissance drone camera offset, configured to show equal space around your ship even if your heads-up display is taking over the lower segment - is bound now to the Eagle Prospector HUD and not the ship. Retrofitting another HUD will reset the offset making the Eagle display on the centre of your screen.
- Turning on the hardware mouse pointer will not interfere with gamepad controls anymore.
- When you select a different language but cancel the changes, the selection box will revert to the currently used language.
- Your geologist will not display multiple readings for a single ore chunk in case of an onboard computer reboot.
- Titan Heavy Industries Cargo Containers captured inside Elon Interstellar Model E cargo hold won’t show up on top of its cargo bay anymore.
- Ships won’t wiggle on the docking arm at Enceladus.
- Changed location of cradle mounts on Eagle Prospector for Titan Heavy Industries Cargo Containers and Nakamura-Titan Mining Companions. Cradles are now located in the front, out of the way of thruster fire. This allows mining with companions still attached and makes gimbaled thrusters able to decelerate your ship without overheating drone reactors.
- Fixed a bug that caused multiple notifications with the same name and face to appear when you received multiple notifications regarding your crew simultaneously.
- You can’t turn in the same ship or lifepod for a bounty multiple times by flying away and returning to drop point.
- Added video ram conservation mode for graphics cards whose drivers incorrectly report VRAM usage to the game engine. Using more VRAM than your card has caused the framerate to drop significantly. You can now force removal of unused textures, conserving memory at cost of additional loading times. The default, the automatic setting will attempt to detect if you need VRAM conservation by checking your framerate and will apply the setting automatically.
- General VRAM optimization decreases video ram usage across all systems.
- Articulated mass drivers mounted on Eagle Prospector will now aim slightly outwards and are mounted further away, preventing them from hitting the Prospector’s nose when tracing passing targets.
- Some large asteroids were immune to being targeted by the autopilot after you bumped into them with your cargo bay open.
- Changed the way the initial cutscene computes the velocity of your ship, making your ring entry point much more consistent. This prevents some light, high thrust ship builds from stopping before even entering the rings and makes heavy, slow ships stop sooner.
- Faces in the comms screen will now appear for dialogues that were received when the OMS screen was hidden.
- Adjusted ship initialization routines to repress physics computation until all the ship systems are fully loaded into the engine, which prevents some ships from spinning and moving directly after spawning. This fixes a number of glitches related to astrogation and the equipment preview screen, which could be with some ship configurations.
- The Ganymedean Anarchy station won’t greet you with trading dialogue if you dock without agreeing to trade.
- When following a pirate to his base, you won’t encounter two stations anymore.
- Disabling a pirate ship and staying near it no longer counts as following it to its base.
Rings of Saturn
0.439.3 - The Bughunt Encounter
0.436.5 - The Elder Library
- Improved compatibility with older Linux systems, which could not launch the game due to having too old libc version installed.
0.436.4 - Effect of Mass
- Game engine update to 3.4.2, with extra physics performance, new collision detection code, improved stability and graphics performance improvements.
- All thrusters and torches now have mass, making the equipment swaps more meaningful.
- Habitats will now talk to you when you dock to them, making it possible to continue quest conversations if you discussed trade on initial contact.
- Support for Portugal (Brazil) language.
- Fixed a bug that caused a temporary point of interest to persist on your astrogation map after you visited it.
- Hitting a ship with microwaves will not trigger an emergency reactor shutdown unless you hit the reactor directly. This makes retrieving some items easier, prevents microwave-equipped opponents from stun-locking you easily, with a drawback that it makes microwaves less efficient for self-defence.
- Performance improvements.
Xmas comes early at Enceladus
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1211880/V_Rings_of_Saturn__Tales_from_the_Rings/
Gifts from Enceladus
You can download a Free DLC "Tales from the Rings" with supplemental material set in the universe of ΔV: Rings of Saturn, including:
- Free E-book "Howling at the Stars".
- A digital artbook.
- Desktop wallpapers.
- Avatar images.
- ★ Cellphone wallpapers and ringtones.
- ★ Creator asset pack: ship 3d models and full-resolution crew portraits you can use in your own fan arts.
- ★ Ship paint templates you can use to customize your ships.
0.432.10 - Terminate Hostilities
- Some NPC ships now have a military-grade point defence systems capable of targeting weak spots like reactors, making some optional encounters more challenging but also making them more helpful as allies.
- NPC ships that belong to a faction that was friendly towards you could not become entirely hostile even under heavy fire.
- You can now lock your mouse pointer to the game window in settings. Enabling this option will also enable hardware mouse pointer due to engine limitations.
- Added custom sprite for the hardware mouse pointer.
- Added a notification popup when your crew was taken off the active rooster by decreased crew capacity of your ship.
- When you spun your ship fast while having a 30 FPS framerate limit enabled, your cradled equipment (mining companions, cargo containers) stretched out their cradles which could make them forcibly detach or explode.
- Crew portrait will not flash for a moment before the animation when hiring a new crew.
- Your crew will not ask for free days if you have already agreed to them.
- Fixed lighting glitches inside The Space Bar.
- Docking arms inside The Space Bar will now hold your ship and orient it correctly.
- New achievement.
- Updated translations.
The retrograde perspective
Roadmaps of an uncharted land
I found that the roadmaps didn’t work out for me. Looking back at them, that should not be a surprise. While I know where I am, and I certainly know where I want to end up, the land between us is a mystery. You can’t map roads you don’t know, and to get to know them, you need to walk them.
I tried to write roadmaps in the past - detailing what I want to do next - but most of them failed to predict what happened. It’s not about bugs I found and fixed along the way - these are just slowing down the progress, but not turning the direction of development all that much - but it’s about the very nature of Early Access.
I have a tight feedback loop with you - my dear players - which is excellent for making the best possible game but not so great for meeting deadlines. I am no stranger to the dreaded feature creep, and I usually keep the guy in check, but some of your ideas were just too good to pass up, and often we took an unexpected detour.
And I needed to pay for each of these detours with extra development time.
I was delayed
Game development is not difficult but complex. There rarely is a single difficult challenge along the way. Still, you have thousands of small tasks, each of them requiring a couple of hours to complete, and tiny delays along the way will eventually add up to something significant. In 2021, I finished 1076 of the tasks planned, and there are just 21 to go until the 1.0 release. This number sounds far more optimistic because the same statistics that tell me I finish 3.3 tasks per day tells me there are, on average, 2.9 new tasks popping up.
Sometimes these will be bugs, which I unconditionally fix before moving to anything else, but sometimes these are features or tweaks that you suggest just make so much sense I just need to have them in the 1.0 version. And sometimes, they get backlogged for post-1.0 work.
The paradox here is that I get most of the feedback and ideas from players already having the Early Access version, so you don’t mind much when the 1.0 release gets delayed. But some players want a clear cut 1.0 version - this is why we have a clear goal when I can call the complete game experience - the point where I press the big “Launch” button.
But that won’t be the end of the road. I initially planned to expand ΔV for at least a year after the 1.0 release, and now looking at all the ideas you submitted that I backlogged as post-1.0, it seems like I have at least five years worth of ideas to work on. But that is a story for another tale.
The huge obstacles
Although most of the work done on ΔV was rather typical, with individual tasks taking no more than a few hours to finish, there were three that took way longer than anticipated, delaying our development by over three months in total.
Our first colossal task was implementing a new ship - the Elon Interstellar Model E. Between unique fusion drives and fusion power supply, new mechanics, unusual split-cargo-bay design. It took almost a month to add this bag of quirks into the game. Compare that to three days that took me to make Cothon-212.
A second significant obstacle was the introduction of the Articulated Recovery Manipulator. While the initial implementation was relatively swift, adding the option to pick up not just ships but also ore, ringroids and other objects complicated it a lot and introduced multiple bugs, which took almost six weeks to hunt out.
The third monstrosity along the way was the hardware glitches. It turns out that the support of OpenGL ES 3 that my engine uses is a bit underwhelming on some graphics cards, with problems ranging from poor performance, extravagant video RAM consumption to plain out graphics not displaying at all.
Since I can’t possibly have access to all the hardware configurations out there, fixing all of these relied on reports from you, my dear players. It would not be possible without some of you spending up to a couple of days testing with me subsequent patches I pushed out to you, for which I am most grateful.
Unexpected sights
Along the way, we had detours that were not bugs but rather things that I found just too good to pass on.
The crew faces overhaul was an unexpected side-effect of an Aprils Fools’ joke. It turned out that the AI that I used to generate a bunch of funny furry pilots is impressive in making a natural human face, and in a couple of days, we climbed off the uncanny valley of Enceladus.
Conlido RVM Cothon-212 was a Friday wildcard - a side project that I do on my day off, an attempt to design a more realistic spaceship, adhering to conservative radiator placements, exposed internals and a shadow shield. It turned out to be nice enough to push it into the main game. We were supposed to have three playable ships for the 1.0 release, and now, with Cothon, we have five.
Community Contributions
Besides the indirect contributions, like bug reports and idea suggestions, most of the ΔV’s translations were made by players. With our development velocity, with new versions of the game coming out daily, this is the only way to ensure that most of the game is translated. Than you! Here is a list of our current language support status:
Trial by fire
ΔV is an independent, self-published title. When I started developing it, it was unclear if this was a viable career choice, and thus ΔV began as a side-project, something that I do in my spare time. A journey of an independent game developer is similar to the road a writer takes - we have our day jobs, we are creating something we dreamt about, and we have a team of people that helps us. The Early Access title is like the first book in a trilogy for a new author - some will buy it, others will wait until the trilogy completes, or there are enough positive reviews.
The risks are also the same - will this creation be able to support me, or will it be a one-time blip on my financial radar? There is no other way to know for sure than to publish something and see for yourself.
And ΔV is delivering. The Early Access sales now are enough to support the development, and all the feedback and contributions are honing it to be the best game it can be. In my eyes, it has already succeeded - it is stable, polished, and has all the features I have planned. I’m still adding more content, and some parts were not in the plan, but I now feel it should have them before being called complete. Due to the structure of event-based storytelling we have, I can expand on the game as you play along. New storylines, upgrades, ships and crew quests will integrate seamlessly with your experience, and I hope that due to my fix-bugs-first policy, you’ll get as polished experience now as you’ll get in a 1.0 release.
But don’t take my word for it. Check the demo. It has the same content as a complete game, I release updates at the same time, the saves are fully compatible, and you can see it for yourself with a single click:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/949730/
TL;DR: Significant Changes in 2021
New Ships
- Elon Interstellar Model E.
- Conlido RVM Cothon-212.
New Hardware
- THI cargo container.
- Nakamura-Titan Mining Companion.
- New propulsion systems.
- B8 Claim beacons.
- Articulated Recovery Manipulator.
- Articulated mass drivers and lasers.
- New Heads Up Displays.
- Gungnir particle accelerator.
Story
- New crew quests.
- The Bounty hunter vs Anarchists main storyline significantly expanded.
- Your crew now can know people flying other ships.
Other Improvements
- Firing solutions for NDCI autopilot.
- Expanded tutorial.
- Performance detail settings.
- Performance improvements.
- Improved textures, images and shaders.
- New crew portraits.
- Expanded demo.
- New ore density maps, including veins you can follow.
- Astrogator and Geologist have separate panels with their own settings.
- Steam Leaderboards support.
- Translations to various languages.
0.431.13 - Unseen Imagery
- Mining companions cannot be mounted now on the right low-stress point of the Bald Eagle.
- Fixed corrupted textures that caused some of the images not to display on some systems.
- Additional texture formats improve performance on systems that can use them.
- Fixed some dialogue trees.
The demo used to have almost everything in it, but now I’m changing that.
0.431.8 - Freefall
Custom craft approved for mining equipment
This week several custom-build kitcrafts were approved by the Enceladian Safety Committee to install standard-issue mining hardware, most notably the popular in “Bald Eagle” racing modification of Eagle Prospector. While limited cargo bay of modified craft makes using it for mining questionable, the racing crews are excited by an option to cushion lithobraking manoeuvres.
Unrest in the industrial ring
The recent discovery of unusually high residual radiation in the Industrial Ring of the Enceladus Prime station led to protests blocking out the transfer pillars. The residents of the Industrial Ring blame Enceladus Corp for obscuring the buildup of radiation. At the same time, the Enceladus representatives quote that the industrial section of the station was never approved for habitation. As of 2273, over 21,000 residents currently occupy the low-gravity environment of the Industrial Ring, making up over 12% of the station population.
Nakamura Dynamics Recall
Popular nuclear thermal propulsion manufacturer issued a free recall on its Pulsed Nuclear Thermal Rocket. Service includes refurbishing vectored thrust chamber and new propellant pumps, lowering the power requirements of the torch. Nakamura’s PNTR won "Torch of the Year 2251" and remained a common propulsion choice thanks to its cheap maintenance costs and impressive durability.
Maintenance Logs
- Bald Eagle now can mount mining hardware on its low-stress hardpoints. Cradled equipment is not available.
- The geologist tab in the OMS now features a cargo hold display, including processed cargo storage and cargo estimations.
- I extended the demo. You can now load saves as long as less than 30 days have passed in the game.
- ND-PNTR torch rebalance. It's now capable of vectored thrust, making it much more helpful for ships that lack serious RCS rotational thrust.
- Default Cothon-212 configuration adjusted to feature Nakamura autopilot required to make good use of the vectored thrust of its stock PNTR torch.
- ER42 racing autopilot now has Fly-By-Wire capability.
- Added a short-range propellant tank, taking 15,000kg of propellant, dedicated to shuttles and large drones.
- When your comms screen was already full with dialogue, when a new ship approached you, the window sometimes did not scroll to reveal all reply options, showing only the first one. While you could still scroll down with a mouse, keyboard or gamepad to display the remaining replies, some players missed that.
- It's now easier to pay off your entire bounty if you accumulate one.
- Vilcy sometimes called you with combat dialogue when there was a bounty on you, requesting your support instead of asking to pay up.
- Rescuing a stranded friendly ship or a friendly lifepod now counts as a friendly action and will improve your faction standing.
- Abducting a pirate ship or turning a pirate lifepod for bounty will make pirates dislike you.
- Stealing drones not owned by you and selling them at Enceladus is considered a hostile act now.
- Removed lag when selling a lot of ores at once.
- Fixed a bug in the individual disposition system that caused individual ships never to be genuinely hostile towards you.
- Fixed missing Elon Interstellar Model E cabin lights.
- Grinders of Eagle Prospector and Mining Companions are now visible inside caves.
- The Space Bar will not offer you drinks before you dock.
- Hostile actions against a faction have diminishing returns now, so you won't turn everyone in a given faction against you when you get into combat with one of their members.
- It will take a bit longer to build up faction confidence when assisting them in combat.
- The shortcut key display in the Equipment menu is visible again.
- When you agree to meet someone in a week, the event won't trigger if you go there immediately.
- Improved visuals of PNTR torch. It's now easier to spot the warmup stage and direction of the thrust.
- When your crew talks to you about derelicts and you don't respond, they will get impatient and ask again.
- Miners will now return the money they owe you faster and stop bugging you after they do.
- Tampered drones are not considered prisoners anymore.
- Radiators of fission ships about to breach containment will radiate brightly as they desperately attempt to eject heat.
- Improved performance for Elon Interstellar Model E HUD.
- Ships equipped with EI1337 autopilots could override commands given in dialogue. That resulted in some recovered derelicts mining the rings instead of returning to Enceladus immediately.
- THI Cargo Containers that the player does not own will not initiate docking comms.
- The new texture compression format included game binaries aimed at GPUs and drivers that cannot properly process our previous format, decreasing video RAM requirements on some cards.
- Autonomic systems and weapons now have hard-coded targeting directives and will always engage pirate ships while never fighting legitimately-owned vessels.
- Fixed a bug that caused drone and claim beacon dialogue to glitch out if you stayed 100m or closer to the beacon, causing a claim drone to automatically cancel your claim even if you choose an option and pay.
- Derelict ships are now marked as independent, and shooting at them will not cause other derelicts to be mad at you.
- Updated translations.
0.428.6 - Nuclear Leak
- Fixed a bug that caused crashes on startup on some systems.
- Re-balanced reactor leak damage. Reactors are now less likely to leak seriously, but the leak is more extensive when they finally do.
- Adjusted physics collision detection settings to prevent dead bodies from entering reactors without proper shielding.
- Fixed a race condition in a microseismic drone, affecting your cargo scanner, which sometimes caused readings to disappear.
- Bullets shot from a ship that moves quickly sidewise won't hit its hull anymore.
- Added mipmapping to icons that were missing it.
- Added delay between messages from different ships and entities, so you don't get a new conversation just as you are finishing your current one, as that could cause you to overlook a new message while you hang up.
- Elon Interstellar Model E cargo bay doors are much less likely to damage themselves on front-mounted weapons during hard burns.
- Nuclear Activated Nanoparticle Incinerator is now much more resistant to being misaligned - but if you manage to misalign it, it's more significant.
- Crew quests and agendas for inactive crew members are stored in a save file, enabling other persons to have the same story at a different stage.
- Updated translations.