many of you are probably using the unstable branch but clicking "View News" doesn't help there (we don't have access to the Game Updates tab, VALVe pls). So here are the patch notes for the recent unstable updates, which you can also always find in the dedicated Patch Notes forum.
Please report bugs for the Unstable branch here: http://steamcommunity.com/app/368720/discussions/1/364040166670211632/
Changes
stable -> 1099854:
- Added command line parameter -help.
- Added the ability to force which Graphics Adapter will be used. Command line options: -adapter, -adapter-list.
- Fixed a crash on missing temporary files.
1099854 -> 1100050:
- Fixed being unable to turn your ship until switching ship.
1100050 -> 1100111:
- Fixed Space being white.
1100111 -> 1100571:
- Implemented gaussian blur as softening for GodRays.
- Added seperate frame time readers: Total Frame Time, Render Time, PostProcess Time
- Improved GodRay performance.
1100571 -> 1100594:
- 2nd attempt at pushing changes to Steam.
1100594 -> 1100641:
- Fixed being unable to turn when savedata is missing.
1100641 -> 1100888:
- Added borderless mode to game.
- Added support for SteamCloud for basic game files.
1100888 -> 1102334:
- Fixed "User lib not found" error on launch.
- Added Bloom effect.
- Improved gaussian blur performance.
- Improved Godray performance massively (5ms -> 1ms).
- Improved Godray performance again by throwing away less memory.
- Improved general app performance.
- Added better performance tracking, down to the individual task. (Shift + P)
1102334 -> 1104976
- Hopefully fix flickering of the world.
- User Interface should no longer jump around like a madman.
1104976 -> 1115691
- Reworked PostProcessing, less CPU intensive. (GodRay disabled, Bloom disabled for now)
- Removed dependency on DirectPlay and DirectMovie.
- Update FreeImage and Fmod to hopefully fix some unexplainable crashes and audio glitching.
- Solved weird Planet flickering by loading a higher polygon model?! This can't be right...
1115691 -> 1233989
- Removed Launcher, it will be completely replaced by an ingame Options menu.
- Implemented a new way to store, restore and change settings.
- Fixed Command Line parameters not being recognized.
- Added additional commandline parameters (-w, -h, -fullscreen, -borderless, -windowed)
- Removed the old buggy loadscreen (mostly) in favor of a new one.
- Added better logging system, logs now found at %LOCALAPPDATA%\Sirius Online\Logs.
- Planets no longer flicker in and out of existence.
- Update runtime and libraries.
Known Issues
- Effects (Trails, Dust, Sun Glow, PostProcess, Clouds, Tradelane stuff) don't show up - this is intended for now until we figure out which function causes the massive slowdown on older CPUs.
- Tradelanes are slower when you are steering. (Not sure if it's the other way around.)
Dev Blog: The Old and the New
It’s been a while hasn’t it? A proper, full fledged Dev Blog about the game. And it’s for the currently available client too! I know, it’s insane isn’t it? Grab a drink and some snacks, cause this is gonna be a longer one.
A New Way of Loading
The days of the launcher and old loading screen are gone, here are the days of a proper loading screen which will connect after it has loaded everything. And it supports (partial) threading too! I’ve put a lot of work into implementing this feature into the language about 2 years ago, so I dug up the old code, rewrote and refactored it and included it into Sirius Online. And voila, loading times are one tenth of what they were before!
If I only stumbled onto this sooner, I wouldn’t have attempted anything crazy. But as fate would have it, it had to appear as I was testing a new feature. The bug: Blitz3D is internally failing to keep track of objects it itself creates – memory allocated to certain objects suddenly would no longer be referenced or used – it just vanished. This affected all types of objects in Blitz3D: Texture, Models, Sounds, Music, Fonts, Buffer, Banks, Strings.
If you ask me, I think this comment from the author of the language itself (Mark Sibly) fits best here:
WHAT THE FUCK WAS I ON?!?!?!?
I’ve been working on fixing this – but as you may know, reading another mans code is like riding a bike for the first time. It takes time and at some point you’ll start to understand what happens internally. I managed to get the original code to compile and removed the dependency on DirectPlay, so now on to fix that critical Bug.
Anyway, on to the next thing:
A New Branch Appears
If you paid close attention to our steam depots, you could have noticed that a passworded branch named “unreal” appeared. I’ve been uploading test builds to it that only developers can see for now, but soon I’m going to invite a few people into this branch – you don’t need to do anything right now. The “unreal” branch is far from done, it’s barely playable and I don’t even have the core game elements down completely.
Initially we’ll invite 25 people into the branch for testing. After we’re sure it runs okay enough, we’ll open it up for everyone and it’ll eventually replace the original client. Be prepared, as you might be one of the few we’ll invite!
Parting Words
I’m sure everyone here is waiting on the new updated version, but please be patient. Play the current version, find and report bugs (but don’t duplicate reports, use the search function) so that we don’t end up porting what was a bug into the unreal engine version.
As always, thanks for reading. Until the next time I wake up from code induced coma.
Read on Digital Dawn Studios: http://www.digitaldawnstudios.com/2016/07/16/dev-blog-the-old-and-the-new/
Downtime Explained
Hey guys,
I'm sure you noticed the extended unannounced downtime recently. It started with one of our HDDs going haywire and wildly deleting files, so we had to reinstall the Servers - we have weekly backups, so not much was lost.
During the reinstall I figured that if I'm reinstalling, I might as well do it the right way this time instead of some monster of filesystems. This paid off in boot times (< 2 seconds) and in speed - but had some unexpected side effects.
As you all know, the old Sirius Online code is Windows only so that means getting a Windows VM running or having WINE run the Server. Option A was out of the question, so option B was left - which required either VNC or RDP, both of which refused to run for weeks on end. After much recompiling, swearing, more recompiling and Pokemon GO the Server is back online.
And all I had to do was reboot twice. This entire thing is a perfect example for "did you try turning it off and on again?"...
Tech guy signing out.
1 Year Sirius: A Recap of more things
Hello Players, it's me, Dex.
Sirius turns 1 Year on Steam in nine days, and it is time to recap what was, what is and what's going to come.
But, let me start with a few statistics:
In its first year of operations, Sirius had
808.119 player logins
A total of 191.043 pvp kills
The whopping amount of 8.099.658m³ of Ore Mined
A Cumulative discovery of 17.998 Belts Discovered
167.843.229 Credits Earned
1.112.097 NPCs Killed
1 Tournament Held (GamesAndCoffee won)
95% Server Availability
What was...
Sirius started out as a small fan Project towards Freelancer and X - Beyond the Frontier/X2 - The Threat in 2001. Back then I was an absolute Noob at programming and slowly improved my skillset. The Dream of my Own MMO never left me, even today I'm working on pet peeve projects achieving this.
Sirius had gone through many, many names before Steam, "Black Space", "Neocracy Online" and "Starlancer" just being a few of them. I met Dan a bit more than a year ago, a serious, honest and awesome guy, willing to bring Sirius to Steam, seeing the same potential in it as I saw and am still seeing in it. I was poor, I couldn't afford that greenlight fee, and there it was, my stepping stone into the celebrated circle of Steam Devs.
From that point, we launched Sirius into the Groupees Bundle in a Box IV to get past Greenlight, where I was sure the game would get many views. I was an Optimist. People kept throwing their overdue credit cards at a certain other three-figure-million crowdfunder with a name, and totally disregarded my game.
I made it clear that I'm not going to exploit my own life experiences and downfalls for this game, and just let my work speak for me. But my work, according to the Steam Community, was about what a 4 year old with crayons could do. They didn't grasp the concept of being bottom-level poor. Working with nothing but the measly welfare to keep the lights on. I had no parents to chuck a few thousand into my business, nor relatives (neither known nor unknown) who had anything to spare, also it made me feel uncomfortable, asking for money without providing something in return. I wanted the game to finance itself, to pay for servers, upkeep and its development. Surely that would be possible, right?
Sadly, it wasn't. It was reviewed into oblivion. I fell back into a depression. doing stuff, being nice to the community, trying to fix everything people pointed out to fix. I skipped a few meals to buy better ship models, to get better connection servers, to make stuff happen. People do remember me streaming countless hours working with input directly from twitch chat.
I struck friendships with quite a few people, both here and on youtube, namely GamesAndCoffee, TheHolyApple, 3.14Man and Hatetank. Avid players, incredibly valueable to new players and rewarded with in game ranks and colors for that. I was happy for each and everyone of you that decided to pop online and have a few minutes of fun.
But then, I fudged up. In desperation to fund the game, I tried to dip the Price. The game got Bundled quite a few times and a ton of keys got lost and surfaced on third party sites. Devastation ensued and I actually felt like quitting. Not normal quitting, but Ragequitting, or, as you internet-people call it: "causing drama".
I worked very hard for this. Over 15 Years of Labor went into making Sirius a reality and where we are...
...what is...
...here, in 2016, nearly one year after the initial release. People have liked the game, and I tried to finance it with a Kickstarter. Calculating only Expenses for a year to keep the game developed and running, I asked for a 26.000€ minimum. Only keeping the Servers alive would've been around 2.000€ of that; the rest estimated investing in artists, composers and people alike to refine the game and keep me living in my 20m² appartment with enough food and water to last a year and do my job: making this game work towards your likings.
The Kickstarter tanked. I got insulted by fellow devs that I should've gotten family members to chuck a few thousand into it so it wouldn't look like a total failure. As mentioned before, there is no thousands to chuck at from the family. As of this moment, I wished it would have been a GoFundMe rather than a kickstarter, I could have worked with the 600€ the Kickstarter had in it before it failed.
As side effect, people seemed to see me as greedy, surely the 5€ for the game must be enough to pay game and development, seriously underestimating Steam cuts, taxes and all that. Per sale of the game, I was making aroung 1,85€ in operative budget. Not earnings, but budget to work with. It culminated in a catastrophic month of 60€ income at the end of last month. The general consensus reflected in Reviews.
Slowly, but steadily, Blitz3D, the Engine Sirius uses, nears the end of its life time and we decided to upgrade to a more modern Engine, but step back in development speed, as we were now two and have to get finances straight. Sirius isn't doing Jack for our wallets or itself at all. We went with UE4 and have recently ended the sale for our Game, Sirius Online.
Sirius Online is, as of a few days ago, for an undisclosed time, unavailable to buy. All outstanding (unredeemed) game keys on third party platforms are on its way to get banned from there and I myself am working very closely with one of these sites to make sure this never happens again.
This will mean I take full responsibility for your complaints. You have been buying bundles for the games, not to resell the Steam Keys. In new Versions the Sirius TOS and EULA will explicitely void any kind of support for keys bought/sold on these platforms. I've been way too lenient long enough. Hateful comments, unconstructive criticism and other pure crap is going to be removed and multiple offender will get permanentely banned.
This sounds extremely harsh, but it's time we change. If you're nice and play nice, you will get the exact same treatment than before. We can brawl on the servers, discuss game ideas and so on. If you decide to be a dick to me, Xaymar or any community MVP, I will decide that you're out. Simple as that. No more tolerance.
...whats going to be.
After Successfully attending the German Dev Days in Frankfurt, the plans for the future was clearer than ever before. We are working on Super Space Pug at the moment and two more, soon to be announced games to finance the Development of Sirius and keep the Company alive.
This might sound odd for those who expected an UE4 Client within a week, but it is our only way to survive as a studio - Making Games to sell. Sirius will return soon to Steam with significant changes to its concept and execution, but for now - We gotta stay alive.
I got a lot more things resulting from the Dev Days I hopefully can reveal soon, but for now, I can only say I've gotten into contact with some higher-ups at G2A to resolve the "Sirius for 14ct"-Issues.
This concludes my longest post-mortem, birthday-related post ever. Happy Birthday, Sirius.
I'll see you on the other side of the Tradelane,
Dex, Lead Creative Developer, Sirius Online
Dev Blog: Just where exactly is Sirius Online?
A while back we announced that Sirius Online is on hold while we work on porting it over to a new engine. But how far along are we exactly with the porting process? The answer unfortunately is not far.
We’ve hit some major roadblocks that we had to clear first and wrap our heads around a new box, so that we could both think inside and outside of that box.
World Size Difference
In our old Engine (Blitz3D), we used 32-bit Floating Points to store the Position in the world. That meant our original world had a total size of 7,355,443 units that we could safely represent without flickering / sudden jumps happening. We didn’t apply any tricks, such as local position offset or integer chunk mapping, to this limit. It was what we had to work with.
Unreal Engine 4 uses 64-bit Floating Points which increases that limit to 450,359,962,737,049. That’s our old limit times 612,281,221. This raised the question of how to actually fill the Universe at all and the answer was: Modding.
Modding in Sirius Online
This was planned for a long time, but due to the way our old code worked it needed a lot of work to be done. A lot more than if we just switched to something that already supported loading Mods out of the box, in this case it was Unreal Engine 4.
To make things easy, the game itself will be a mod to the base framework so that it can be unloaded and a complete conversion mod can be realized.
We’ll be using the Steam Workshop for this in the future once we’ve done the necessary work.
Finally
Have a screenshot from how the menu currently looks like!
Link: http://www.digitaldawnstudios.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/UE4Editor_2016-06-15_23-34-37.png
I am back from FRANKfurt with a tale. For me its an extraordinary one - We've been invited to exhibit on the German Dev Days 2016. It was an absolute blast.
playsirius.com has been merged to link to Our Main Page as well now to keep things inline with each other!
Hope to see you soon ingame,
Dex
Engine Time Travel - From 2001 to 2016
Hello Folks, its me, Dex again!
For around fifteen years, we've been using an old Engine called BlitzBasic 3D for Sirius Online. Its horribly outdated, extremely limited and, quite honestly, doesn't serve the needs the game has now anymore. So I'm happy to announce that there won't be any updates in a while for a certain amount of time.
This is due to us switching to a new Engine, porting Sirius Online over to Unreal Engine 4. Now, this is not the end of Sirius, is more like a new start, but as the Engines itself are not compatible with each other, we have to reimagine and rewrite a ton of code.
Sirius (Blitz3D) currently consists of 25.698 Lines of Code. Code thats mostly used to circumvent certain limitations or inject alternative updated renderpaths. 25k Lines that we need to reproduce, replace, reimagine and reinvent. This is a long and tedious task, but one thats worth it.
Blitz3D has served us a long time and it goes like a true hero, achieving far beyond everyone making the original engine had expected, and it stands out with other excellent games like Stranded and SCP Containment Breach.
With our move to the new Unreal Engine we also will be capable of delivering build to Linux and Mac, two gamer communities that we've tried to get to with Blitz3D but ultimately failed, because Blitz3D was unable to deliver what we needed.
Our hiatus in updates won't go all silent though, as we will be posting various Screenshots from the Development, streaming creation of the new game, assembling new stuff and generally doing important stuff. We will keep you updated. In the meanwhile I will be logging in to SiriusB3D quite often to play with you, enjoy a bit of free time and interact with you guys.
For those concerned: The Game you bought is Sirius Online and it will stay the same game. There is no new game to be bought, because all updates to the Engine happen here. For us, as a Team it's time to move into the current age in terms of engine and graphics.
For you: Thank you for sticking along, and we will see each other soon, on the other side of the Engine Barrier!
*waves frenetically*
Dex
Results of the Survey "Where should the game be headed?"
Hey players, future players and non-players!
Today it’s time to discuss the results of the Survey, where we asked you some questions on where you’d like to see the game go. We’ve got a total of 23 responses until we closed the submission on it, so let’s take a look at what we have!
Local Training Mode
A clear yes to this from the survey, which means it is now on the roadmap for the game! I’ve marked it for Version 0.2.0 for now, as there are a few (read as: a lot) of changes that need to be done to enable this.
Let us know on the forums or below on how you’d imagine a local training mode to be, we’ll definitely take some of your suggestions and implement them.
Non-Official Servers
This one was almost edged out by the No votes, but in the end Yes (and keep official Servers running) won by just a little. So now, we’ll be providing a Dedicated Server for Sirius Online soon. This will need some changes on the client, such as a Server List, but it’s definitely doable in the near future.
Content or Optimization first?
I’ll be honest, I didn’t expect this do be that much in favour of Content, but we’ll listen and do exactly that. Optimizing has as such been put as a secondary objective, achieved whenever it is possible and there is enough time.
Graphical Enhancements
Not a single No vote on this, but a clear 50:50 split between people wanting to be able to turn these off and people just wanting these. Needless to say, we’re working on some post-processing effects to implement and in the future will definitely upgrade the quality of the general world – where performance allows of course.
Well, that was all for today. I hope to see you in game sometime. Fly safe and kill some pirates for me!
We want to know: Where do you think the game should be heading?
Hello players and non-players,
we would like to know where you think the game should be heading and that is why today we ask you: What do you want to see in the game?
Please fill out the form or write a comment below! It's really appreciated.
