By Cayle on Nov 26, 2023
We're very excited about some of the new features!
In Particular:
ExtendedMaterial/ForwardIO -- allows easy integration with the existing bevy_pbr shader features like lighting/shadows. We've been eagerly waiting on this one since 0.10. We'll be able to get new specialized shaders out into the game much faster now
Asset PreProcessing -- This seems to be everyone's favorite, we're excited to experiment with a .blend -> Bevy Scene pipeline which should really speed up our content pipeline.
MaterialUI -- Custom materials for the UI! This is my personal favorite as it will enable a lot of very fancy looking UI, I expect someone will make an equivalent to bevy_vector_shapes for the UI soon which we're very excited to have
We reworked the mining laser. Instead of a scrolling texture it's now fully procedural, and we think it looks a lot more interesting
The new laser is formed by two main components, scrolling simplex noise and a solid beam. When combined with HDR/Bloom it gives a much more dynamic looking effect
One thing that's bothered me for a long time time is the lack of actual light output from the laser, while I was under the hood I went ahead and made a
new StringLight component that spawns a series of pointlights along a line segment.
Adding some range/intensity jitter with time gives us a nice flicker effect, perhaps a touch strong.
As a final tweak we worked on the ore spawning effect.
When you harvested the asteroid before, the ore would spawn from the center of the mesh and disperse radially outward.
In the latest iteration the ore spawns at the laser's point of impact and is dispersed in a cone toward the harvester.
When combined with the lighting the effect is a little intense. We're planning going to give the ore a custom material pretty soon that'll let us tune this better and seriously improve the look of the large ore-fields.
We added the ability to control the power output for the mining/harvesting lasers with mousewheel/controller triggers!
Throttle Controls the amount of heat the mining laser puts into it's target, watch for the arrows on the mining widget near your ship to know when you're in the zone
We've introduced a phase mechanic to the harvesting laser, if you're able to keep the throttle in the correct 'phase' you'll be able to pull additional ore out of an asteroid! This is handy for getting rare resources such as metal in the ice biome. Watch/Listen for the laser to brighten and the sound to pitch up to know when you're in the zone. We'll likely do another pass on this to highlight the additional ore nodules with increased luminance or a similar effect.
Each laser (and later, other tools) have their own specific critical zones, or 'critspots'. We've implemented critical zones for the mining lasers, and we're primed to add it for the other tools such as the railgun and scanner.
You can tell you're in the 'CritZone' by how many arrows are rendered on the laser widget in front of your ship. At a later date we'll add particle effects that emanate from the asteroid as a visual indicator.
Imparts up to 25% more heat to the targeted entity, useful for getting to the higher mining zones like uranium quickly
Pulls ore out up to 25% faster
After all, we need to have something to spend our hard-won ore on.
Enter Exodus Mode
Exodus mode is the 'story' of the Persephone, humanity's last colony ship. Currently we've got our colony ship prototype loaded into the Scene and you can launch missions from the warplink which will then return you to the colony ship scene.
Upon this rock we'll build two other core pillars of the game: Fleet Building and Survival
Your fleet will have maintenance, life support, fuel, and power needs that you need to meet before you're able to travel to a new destination.
If you don't give your fleet the resources it needs, each ship's functionality will begin to degrade over time, becoming less effective until it's repaired
Colonist's need to eat and breathe, and live in a habitable temperature -- you'll have to keep a ready supply of all three resources to keep them alive
Your fleet will need to have at minimum, enough fuel to accelerate and decelerate to get to it's destination before it can embark on it's journey
There's no free lunch, everything your ships do requires electricity
After the Bevy Jam we'll be back at work with the following:
If you want to support us, please wishlist Roids on Steam or back our Patreon! to receive Sol Dispatch one week early, and get Roids stickers or a T-Shirts!
Along the way we'll post incremental updates, sneak peeks and dev-dives to our Social Media! Follow/Subscribe to get the latest and greatest as we make Roids!
