Age of the Free Agents is progressing in a Spectacular Way, and recently reached Feature Complete. After having quite a few people playtest whats new in this game in a more vivid (and more importantly, more performant universe), it is time to adress the changes and the upcoming Launch of the Game.
We have got a story!
Age of the Free Agents will get free Episodic Content with a fully voice acted storyline. Most of "Episode Zero: Return of The Crimson" is already recorded and on its way to be implemented. Follow your own path or help your faction uncovering the mystery behind a new signal source from beyond the gate network.
More stuff to do!
With the still raging faction conflct, you will be able to influence Ownership of the sector until you leave that system. An actual Live counter will show the distribution of forces in the Systems Clashing Fates and Irreversible Thought, and BRIAN, your Ship AI will inform you of new roaming hostile forces. Taking claim of a system might allow you to... upgrade your ship and get certain perks.
Upgrades to die for!
With the Market out of the Question and New Ships tied to your Faction Rank, you're probably asking yourself: But Dex, how can I progress? This is an Easy Solution: Upgrades! You can find them hidden away in containers, as Faction Reward or even from shady figures along the campaign. This might include more Shields and Armor, Faster Repair Times, better Scanning or countless other things.
Get out there and Explore.
Release Plan
Due to the Story being added on top, The release is postponed to about Feb 7th, to give the story just the right amount of polish and record a proper trailer, without which you cannot release on Steam.
Feel free to sign up so you get notified on release.
The Launch Key Replacement Campaign
Small reminder that this is still up. The responses have so far been good and I thank everyone of you who cooperated and even those who just wanted to apologize buying from a third party.
If you Bought Sirius Online at full price (4,99$ or up) via Steam, you will be egligible for a free Upgrade. I will offer a limited set of replacement keys:
The Procedure used will be the following:
You send a proof of Purchase to sirius-upgrade @ worldofdex.de
The mail must contain your Steam Username
You will get an Autoresponder Mail.
I will personally check if you're egligible for the upgrade
If yes, you will get the new game as well.
I hope I can make you excited about the game as much as I am with the recent story development,
Regards,
Dex
Age of the Free Agents Update and the free Upgrade 01/19
Hello folks!
Age of the Free Agents slowly nears its release with more and more features fully working and a proper Team slowly assembling. This means its is Time to detail things to you.
The Shop Page should go live in a few days, and, even if some believe so, I have not forgotten my "Free Update" promise. If you have bought SIrius Online at full price via Steam, you will be egligible for a free Upgrade. I will offer a limited set of replacement keys, beginning NOW.
The Procedure used will be the following:
You send a proof of Purchase to sirius-upgrade @ worldofdex.de
The mail must contain your Steam Username
You will get an Autoresponder Mail.
I will personally check if you're egligible for the upgrade
If yes, you will get the new game as well.
The reason for doing this is that Age of the Free Agents deserves a long time Support. Sirius Itself has saturated its market share and cannot support the development, even with an update of this size. There are still over 135.000 black market keys for that game in the wild which I cannot revoke.The Choice is easy:
Quickly put together Update and never do anything again?
or
Write a new Game around the same setting, with a storyline, long term support and updates, while having it support the development through sales?
The Choice has been quite Obvious, as it has been influenced by quite a lot of people who have reached out to me and told me about the latter as an option.
To more pleasant things:
The game is now 95% feature complete and currently had the Combat Client Update released to backers and testers. A lot of technical improvements as well as a few days worth of complete code refactoring happened, removing obsolete code, refreshing definitions, simplifying functions, beefing up the graphics.
This being said, the RAM Footprint of the game is now down to 1GB instead of almost 3GB and the performance in general went up by 70%. NPC AI System T.O.A.St. reached V9.1, the Interface went much more pleasant and the minimap now displays way more details.
If you yearn for more info, follow the games official Twitter Account
https://twitter.com/AgeAgents
Don't wait and send out your emails today!
Dex
Status Update - Sirius: Age of the Free Agents [6th Dec 2018]
Hello, dear Players, it is time for more communication.
Let me preface all of this with a small announcement. Thae Name of the upcoming project is "Sirius: Age of the Free Agents" and will be a standalone project.
There is significant work going on to create new systems, new environments and new mechanics, updating the NPCs, making a new interface and much much more (Storyline anyone?). This means, to continue working on this project, there is funding necessary after release - and as you hopefully understand, this can only happen when it gets to be a brand new game.
Performance Improcements
Age of the Free Agents was able to run over 48 hours on max graphics settings without even remotely slowing down. This is a massive improvement compared to Sirius Online, but I do have to see on full Feature complete status how its working out.
Universe Improvements
So fa, the Universe, instead of being one large simulated chunk, is divided into many system (7 at launch, more maybe later, if wanted).
Enemy Improvements
I'm working on this one at the moment, updating the Inhouse AI called T.O.A.St (Tactical Oriented Artificial STupidity) to version 9.0 to recognize laser weapons, faction war and simulate more around the system with a brand new Spot-Detect system, causing NPC traders to use Gates and new Trade zones, or go mining.
Market and UI Updates
This is a bigger chunk to finish. The Items that are collectible and mineable will be massively reduced, and laser and Ship menu will be revamped as well. all of it will also be moved to the center and the access buttons will be unified to fit to the map instead of an unsavoury row to the left.
Finishing words
There has been more work than expected to finish this thing but so far, both project as my own twitch API library have been growing steadily.
As this is going to be a standalone project, I have determined a price point as well, and it is the same as Sirius Online currently has. There will be NO bundles on 3rd party sites, and to that extend only very few reviewer key have been handed out.
I hope you do understand this decision and look forward to further progress.
The State and Future of Sirius Online.
Hey, it's Dex here
This is a hard thing to write, but Digital Dawn Studios so far is no more. We ended the Online Services in February due to lacking funds. We effectively ended Development in April due to both mental and physical health concerns.
I have been asked several times to provide conclusion to our absence. These are the facts:
We have decided to:
shut down Sirius Online Servers.
shut down digitaldawnstudios.com
halt all effective development on all projects.
actually start keeping up with our personal needs.
Sirius Online always was a taxing experience. I personally had 10-12hr Days, 7 Days a week on this game, neglecting things like healthy eating and activities. My personal 2018 Goal was to tackle this, and due to this, Sirius fell off the short end of the list.
From April to November 2018 I did nothing on Sirius at all. The Last released build was from August 2017. I tried over and over again to fix things but simply could not concentrate at all. All Build after that wouldn't start at all or would completely freak out and break then. There also was that pretty infuriating performance bug after 5 minutes of playing, which bogged down the game.
I spent 17 years making Sirius, by the End of November, it actually turns 18, and I have to admit there have been a few mistakes. I am, right now, working on Sirius 1.3: Enemies of the Gods and there will be a few changes coming towards you.
First of all. Sirius Online is now SIrius, minus the Online part. It was kind of premature scaling, and it was a massive feat of engineering. To save both processing power and money, as well as client load, all online Functions have been removed with 1.3.
Sirius also was ... simply said... TOO BIG. It was both taxing to the engine and to the gameplay, because you had to fly way too much to find content. Thus, I have revised my star system Idea. Tradelanes will still exist, but the Universe is now divided into 7 systems, interconnected by Hyper-Accelerators, which cause a loading screen and the transfer to a new system.
Another thing that had to go was projectile based weapons. As cool and spacey as they looked like, a single battle caused between 5.000 to 60.000 Bullets to be calculated, and that, combined with a constant garbage collection on a single thread might have been a bit overkill. Each Shot had 12 Polygons, so we're talking about 60.000 and, at worst, 720.000 Polygons to be rendered JUST for fights. That is way too much for a DX7 Engine. So, up next: Beam Lasers and accordingly colored Focal Crystals. There will be 4 Focal Crystals: UV/440nm (Weak, Long Range), Teal/525nm (Med Damage, med Range), Scorch/610nm (Strong Damage, short range) and IR/660nm (shortest range, insane damage). Also weapons now use your ships energy, the same you use for thrust, the higher the frequency, the more energy you use. With this change we go from up to 60k projectiles to just about 50.
Now comes the exciting part. Twitch integration. This actually brought my interest back in working on my projects at all, so all hail twitch.tv! If you're streaming or watching someone stream one of our games with the Twitch integration, you will soon be able to see commands to spawn items, enemies or even start events like a crimson invasion!
I will not disclose any release date for Enemies of the Gods, because, you know, pressure and such, but I will however disclose the following: Once the approval is given, SIrius will only cost half of it's original price. Forever.
Other people have asked me why, If I'd make Sirius not Online again, why I'm not making it a new separate game. It is, because a lot of you paid for it. It would be unethical to just clone my game code to a new game. You got the game, and you will get at least a final update to give it proper playability.
For occasional Trashtalk and Update Pictures, feel free to follow me on
Today we are announcing that all future updates for Sirius Online are now on hiatus while the game is move to Unreal Engine. There are many reasons for this as Dex will explain below, but we are confident that changing to Unreal Engine will make Sirius Online even better than ever!
If you have any questions, please ask them in the comments below and we'll answer as soon as possible. Remember that Dex is the sole developer of Sirius, so development will take time, but will always be the highest quality content and improvements. Thank you all for playing and supporting Sirius Online and we hope that you continue to do so in the future.
Hello Players,
Sirius is currently based on a very old Engine called Blitz3D. We extended and exceeded the lifetime of thin engines by over a decade, with it featuring technically impossible feats, like godrays, glow and gaussian blur. But one can only go so far until you hit a wall. This wall has been reached. Blitz3D only supports up to 2GB memory, with it starting to drop assets and performance beyond the 1.6GB mark. With all the new features that have been coming recently, I had to cut down some other assets from the game (like taking down 33% of the AI Chatter) and severely crippling a few textures. DirectX 7 is way past its predicted Lifetime and it is time to acknowledge that, even for an oldtimer like me.
The Engine behaviour is neither satisfying nor futureproof and so I faced the decision of "making it work somehow" and cancelling 1.3 and get to learn another Engine. For me, any other modern Engine is a brand new way of writing and assembling code and assets. So I need some time to work myself through the tutorials, make some smaller games to get accustomed to the Engine and learn the ins and outs of it. This obviously may take longer than expected, so I will try to keep you up to date with progress reports once a month and maybe some screenshots.
What this not means is that Sirius will End now, but much rather get a larger hiatus in terms of content updates. I will supply bugfixes and QoL updates to the Blitz3D Version until the new Engine powered Version is ready to take over, but for now, the update frequency will drop further down. If you feel like supporting the Porting, consider adding some of your hard earned income to the pool in the Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/vDex. This might even enable me to hire additional coders to get the port done faster. This, however, is entirely optional.
Sirius Online 1.2.1a - Hotfix deployed
Hello fellow Freelancers!
We have deployed an emergency hotfix for some issues discovered by users! Thank you for reporting bugs, again!
The following issues have been resolved:
- Asset Flicker after some Play Time
- Memory and Artwork Cleanup
- Less RAM Footprint
Also, a new Feature joins the game:
- New Sound Engine, switching music to combat tracks in fight.
I hope this update resolves the issues reported,
IRX 2017 - And this time, we get one!
IRX / Indie Revolution Expo 2017 is upon us. For the third consecutive time in a row, Sirius is exhibiting on IndieGameRiots amazing IRX Show.
Indie Revolution Expo is a 100% free digital indie game convention presented by Indie Game Riot! The purpose of the expo is to share the spirit of creativity and support that the indie game community is so well known for.
IRX does this by:
Exhibiting games, giving the game developers an additional platform to garner attention for their projects while also gaining feedback from attendees.
Presenting a wide variety of panels. IRX is always on the lookout for panels about gaming culture, game development workshops, entertaining performances and more!
Having a dedication to inclusivity and positivity. IRX wants to make sure that panels and games presented are varied in content while maintaining a safe place for all kinds of panelists, developers and guests alike.
Hosting an event that is accessible to everyone. This is a free event and no one even has to travel since it’s hosted on Twitch.TV! IRX also makes a point to do their best to accommodate disabilities.
Today we are releasing version 1.2.1 to steam. There are a lot of exciting additions that have been added, a full list of additional content, changes and fixes, can be found below. As always, your feedback is very important to us, so please feel free to use the discussion forums!
New Free Content
-New Ship: Revelation
-New Skins for Every Ship
-New Asteroid Belts
-Mysterious Satellites Spotted
-Police Faction [WIP]
Changelog
-Updated Character Creation
-New Skinning System
-Added Colony Window
-New Graphics for Mining Lasers
-Various Performances Fixes
-Mission Guidance System
-Idle Ship Movement
-Balancing Updates
Hope you enjoy!
Welcome to the Summer Sale
Hello and welcome, future Space Travellers to the annual Steam Summer Sale!
Sirius Online will be discounted by 15% during the Sale and there will be updates coming as well. Look forward to new belts, new graphics, a new ship, Mission navigation Systems and a completely new mystery feature!
Join us on the SpaceGameJunkie Podcast, June 6th
We are delighted to say that we have been invited to be on the Space Game Junkie Podcast! We will be talking about the current version of the game and plans we have for the future.
The podcast will be streamed live Thursday, June 6th. 6:00 AM Pacific/2:00 PM BST
You can watch the steam on either Youtuber or Twitch.
