Hey Astro Colonists!

It's time for massive performance update!
I decided to finally finish work that I started 3 years ago.

I was afraid that not everything would work or look as it should. The change required modifying the way rendering works. Every single object is now rendered with a position offset.
Many necessary engine changes were required in order to have it work.

Some of the text below is technical, but I hope you will like it:

I've been thinking about this technique even before the game's release.
As you can see, early prototypes with cameras and some objects were very promising!
Early tests allowed me to evaluate the technique and find out about visual glitches.

Tricky task when the game is using more than 300 different materials.
This required changing many of them and adding a shader offset.

Every interactive station actor had to be accessed and modified when station is moving.
In addition, all interactions with cameras had to be updated, where the camera offset also changed.

The game engine is constructed to reduce the rendered objects on the screen as much as possible.
If objects are outside the camera's view, they won't be rendered.
Without increasing the boundaries of the object based on velocity this wouldn't be possible.

Many materials, based on position, can randomize its look.
Turns out that many position based materials like shaking trees, wheat, water, ground or voxel terrain, started to scroll and had to be adjusted accordingly.

Many in-game actors required special care due to their unique roles in the game.
Almost every system with interactions had to be adjusted to the new modified positions of objects and shifted cameras. Here are just some improved elements:

• rover with its complex suspension system
  
• spacecraft with thrusters and calculations for thrust
  
• bot with its animated mesh, camera, projection cone particles and text
  
• all other characters visible in multiplayer
  
• every interactive system like asteroid catchers with new "catch"
  
• sky and nebulas

Thanks to reducing the physical location updates of all stations from 60 to just one a second, it greatly improves performance. As you can see in the example, the gain is enormous.
Moving station before couldn't keep 10 fps, right now it's running at 80 fps.

In addition to many CPU improvements, some GPU improvements were made.
A new culling system for objects is in place, which disables updates and makes them invisible when they are far away. In addition, voxels are using LODs, so far-away planets are not affecting GPU.

Please be patient and let me know about every issue encountered.
I believe this is actually the biggest and the most technical update, so it's impossible to avoid some bugs. I hope to fix all of them this week. The most urgent issues will be fixed in the hotfix tomorrow.

Thanks guys so much for support!
Tefel (Terad Games)

Hey Astro Colonists!

The game just received a big update with plenty of improvements!
Movement system was completely reworked, docking stations can now transfer utilities (electricity, water and gas), decals and snap elements are now correctly rotated and pasted with a new rotation. In addition, there are many fixes and optimization improvements!

Please check the list below:
The movement system was redone to make it smoother and remove glitches in low framerate scenarios.
In high-velocity situations, character could be pushed back, diagonal movement could be a little bit shaky. With new improvements, the movement is more reliable and has fewer network updates, which is good for network traffic.

There are also small changes like:

• Character is moving a little bit faster (max move velocity 1400, before 1100)
  
• Booster max speed is capped to 11000 matching previous
  
• Ctrl key is now slowing down the character, useful with gravity boots, harpoon or when station elements needs to be precisely placed

Please let me know if any corrections need to be made!

Many new players coming to the game tried to drag elements from one docked station to another.
This resulted in missing functionality, since conveyor belts belonged to two different stations.
Right now, each time the system detects constructed elements near another station object or planet terrain, it will show a warning symbol (arrow).

This should help players to understand that the docking station needs to be used to transfer resources (conveyor belts), electricity, water, and gas.

To ensure that player knows where object belongs, it is showing station name for all looked at objects.

Each docking station got new functionality to transfer utilities:

• Harpoon connector - can now configure electricity transferred (max 20)
  
• Docking station - can transfer electricity (max 100), water (max 100)
  
• Adv. docking station - can transfer electricity (max (max 1000), water (max 100), gas (max 100)

Transferring is configurable, so it allows transferring the required amount easily from one station to another. For example, all water can be pumped from one station to another and then to a third.

Before the update, only snap elements could be rotated via the menu.
Picked elements did not paste rotation, but only size.

Right now, decals are fully supporting rotation.
Both decals and snap elements can be rotated 90 deg using R key.
Pasted objects are keeping original rotation.
Preview of pasted rotation is also showing correct construction result.
The constructed decal is now shown with a decal preview.

• Finally fixed crash related to Apex Destruction when too many debris are spawned.
  
• Fixed crash related to copying player data from single player savegame to dedicated server
  
• Fixed parallel dimension issues not showing visuals - ex. oxygen barrier
  
• Fixed recent localization issues
  
• Joining server is now showing a prompt
  
• Fixed issue where gas tank would reset quantity when player joins
  
• Fixed issue where gas pipe would not update when gas tank is created nearby
  
• Fixed issue of an invalid space station reference when docked
  
• Fixed multiplayer issue with duplicating lights ...
  
• Fixed changing size of replicated snap objects like lights
  
• Animations of animals are now not in sync
  
• Fixed arithmetic block to support multiplayer
  
• Fixed timer pusher causing crash when the space station was removed and timer pusher had active cooldown

It was a very busy week, so I hope you will like the changes.
Please let me know if you encounter any issues on Discord: https://discord.com/invite/EFzAA3w


Thanks guys so much for support!
Tefel (Terad Games)