Catching up:
As you know from the Patch 8 Status update a little bit ago, we ended up in a bit of a mess trying to upgrade. This has now been resolved, and things are rolling smoothly now with a hopefully more stable version.
I re-rigged, re-built, and just plain re-did several of the models, though I do still have a few to go. Getting the rest of the animations set up will take a while, but it's something we can accomplish. Kyle and Hour have some audio in the can, and my job is to get more scripts out to them as fast as I can afford their recording time.
The Hardware Update:
2025 saw the death of the third laptop on the Smugglers of Cygnus project. It averages about one every 18 months or so. When my 3060-based Omen joined the pile of burned out "gaming" machines sacrificed to the Cygnus galaxy, I was in a real bind. Hardware costs have exploded as you all know, and I'm just a broke dev dealing with rent that is 4x what it was in 2020 and food 3x what it was in even 2024.
It took me until January to find a replacement I could afford, in the shape of a refurbished mac mini. My only other dev machine is a 9 year old machine with an old radeon pro, and that put quite a crimp on my ability to work on the content for patch 8. Hard to tune handling or add animations when you average < 10 FPS! The new (to me) mini is able to pull 40-60FPS while developing, and seems to be handling it just fine. For now. This means the return of wallpapers, the return of adding graphical content, and hopefully more actual work done.
So please, test out the new patch, update us on the forum as always, and if anyone has a mac... give that build a shot too!
Fixes and improvements in this patch :
- Upgraded to Godot 4.5.2 with double precision - likely the final engine update.
- All new exhaust shader, much more like the one from Unreal. Custom made by Normalized for us, hopefully soon to be available to other devs.
- All new rigging system, a whole host of new animations imported.
- A new species is on the station, though they don't have much to say yet.
- Loads of work is being done to get the intro cleaned improved, tutorial WIP.
- First Apple binary up on Itch, looking for some people who can test that.
- Performance enhancements.
Known Bugs:
- There are some visual bugs in the ship chooser.
- Collision is still a bit off for the brand new ship.
- Handling for the new ship is a little too twitchy.
- No dev account for Apple, so the binary may complain.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blog.longplay.games/alpha-1-patch-8