We've released a new version for Helium Rain. Every station currently in the game has been remade, and a number of issues were fixed - mostly to the AI and economy models in the game. Some rendering details were also improved.

New stations

Stations are now twice larger at least (solar power plants are especially large) and feature a billboard system to show off which company they belong to, or to show advertisement for other companies. The player stations will always proudly show off your might ! Adding this much content required balancing against performance - we drastically reduced the triangle count of many station components, usually by a factor of more than two. The game should actually perform slightly better now. As a result of the new stations, we have to warn that ships flying close to a station and not docked at it when the patch is applied could be damaged. Ships docked to a station will be unharmed. We generally have a policy of never breaking game saves during and after Early Access; we hope that this exceptional disregard for safety will not harm you.

Economy fixes

While this update is mostly about stations, we also fixed around 20 issues. Most issues were tied to our extremely complex economy model. If you want to read up on how complex it really is, take a look at this economy primer by Niavok, our gameplay programmer. We know some issues are still outstanding - little variation on pricing, complicated end-game situations, expensive stations - and will be working on fixing that will future updates. We've also made a decision on the topic of manual docking. This divisive feature had some players refund the game, and some others praise us for it. We had to make a compromise and decided to keep manual docking in the game, but to make the unlock of the auto-docking technology free as soon as the game starts. Players who elect not to use the auto-docking can get another technology for free instead.

State of Linux support

Finally, we are aware that many Linux users with AMD hardware are still suffering from issues with the game. This is a very serious problem for us, one we have little solutions for. We will release a beta version of the game in the upcoming days, built with an updated Unreal Engine 4. We hope that this will start resolving some of the issues. The beta will also be available for Windows users who want to try an untested version that might bring more performance, at the cost of possible issues. The full changelog is available here as usual, for those of you who want to know what we've really been up to. We thank all the players who offered their feedback. Please keep doing so, and have a great time with Helium Rain !

[ 2017-09-03 16:44:54 CET ] [ Original post ]