Desura
At the time of writing, we have sold 100 copies of the games on Desura, which is pretty good given the fact that the platform is relatively small and the game is still in alpha stage.
Greenlight
We have now more than 6666(!) votes “Yes” on Greenlight, thanks you to everyone for your support. In one week, we’ve got more votes than during the previous month thanks, among other things, to the articles on us from several websites (one of which being our second appearance on RPS!).
We still don’t understand shit to the computing process, especially one of the indicator: the curves of our performance compared to other submitted projects. Indeed, they continually change, several times a day. For example, look at yesterday’s variation:
We ca see on the first couple of captures that we a above the Top 100 curve, nonetheless the percentage indicator still give us : 83% of the way to get into the Top 100.
If anyone has a clue on this, please tell us.
First patch
Quickly following the public release, several problems has been encountered by the early players. We have done our best to fix them as quickly as possible and a patch is already pending Desura staff validation.
This patch will fix the following problems:
Crashes fix
In some of the missions, a succession of special events could lead to a crash. This was due to a major change in the scripting system (linked to the cockpit work), all should be fixed by this patch. I know, the conditional tense may not be very reassuring, but I know by experience that even with intensive testing of a game, we cannot be sure all the bugs are gone.
Sound improvements
There was (and I hope there isn’t anymore) a quite annoying sound related bug that would randomly make the engine sounds muffled. This seems to be an OpenAL issue (even I am not 100% sure) and a workaround hack had been done.
In addition, sound mixing inside the cockpit view has been improved.
By the way, OpenAL has been the worst technical choice I have made on this project, mainly since Creative doesn’t seem to support it anymore. As an alternative, we had to switch over to OpenAL Soft, a fork of OpenAL (currently in development), without a lot of harm luckily.
Anti-aliasing
There was no much interesting things last week, technically wise, besides the improvement of anti-aliasing. Due to a file handling error, the anti-aliasing labeled as FXAA (Fast approXimate Anti Aliasing) wasn’t bound to the right shader. So I have fixed this problem and the used method was renamed SSAA (Screen Space Anti Aliasing). FXAA method requires more computing power than SSAA, but offers a far better visual quality. Let’s see:
Furthermore, until now anti-aliasing effect wasn’t used in the cockpit. It’s fixed!