Hey guys, so a quick update about Alpha 4. It's planned for release in about 2 weeks. Most reported bugs have been fixed, including some of the ones mentioned in last week's announcement. There'll will be another beta patch next week to make all these fixes live.
Now about Alpha 5. Now that Alpha 4 is almost done with, it's time we move on to Alpha 5! Alpha 5 won't be be such a big update in terms of new content, rather it will be a Quality of Life (QoL) patch. Below you'll find a list of ALL the things that we want to do for Alpha 5. These points were gathered from reviews, discord, community hub and other places ever since the game was released. So we think it's time we act on all that feedback we got! If you've got any more feedback about the current state of the game or if you want to add something onto the list, feel free to post it on the community hub. Just remember that we won't be adding any big content, only improve existing content. So please don't go around suggesting stuff like time control.
Anyway, here's a planned list of all the changes coming for Alpha 5. We'll try to achieve at least 90% of all the points listed below. These include all the bugs that we are aware of at the moment. We'll probably discover more, so this list will be updated. So again, if you think we missed anything such as bugs or other QoL improvements, let us know!
QUALITY OF LIFE IMPROVEMENTS
* Add sound effects for the Mech
* Add a gamma slider
* Add a slider for longitude and one for lattitude
* Add beacon to rover and mech
* Make Astral say something about the ‘Unfinished Deal’ popup
* Add an option to turn on/off damage hits and health bars
* Reduce buying prices of items to encourage trading
* Should be able to select a ship turret with a single click, not just drag
* AI should ignore alien flora and just walk through it
* One should be able to split stacks in inventories
* Need a confirmation screen when user wants to delete or overwrite a save file
* Need to add side bars to every menu that’s scrollable
* When placing any building, the next building you place down should keep the same rotation. This would be extremely useful when placing down defensive walls
* Need different shaped and sized defensive walls
* Need to involve Astral into the game some more. Make her talk about ancient technology, help out the player, announce stuff like ‘your base is running low on energy’. Should also involve her in the tutorial to make it more immersive and helpful.
* Need to add firefighting into the game based on Dev Blog #5 ideas
* Need to have an option to change the scale of the UI
* Make Astral give off a warning when the player constructs a ship assembler so that the player knows that something extremely dangerous is about to happen if they keep going
* When dragging an item with a huge stack into the players inventory and it doesn’t have enough space for the stack, make it so that it fills the inventory with as much as it can fit instead of refusing to move the stack altogether
* Cabinets should be stackable on top of each other
* Add a clone chamber, life support pod or bed so that the player can choose where to respawn in non ironman games
* Impose some kind of limit to prevent the player from stealing too much from traders.
* Add some buildable sources of light that can be placed on the ground
* Make it rain and thunder more often. Currently you can play dozens of hours without a single rain drop, which is too bad given how cool the weather system is
* Improve the tutorial. In general, make it more scripted and less random. Some people get killed while doing it because the game still functions as if there’s no tutorial going on and this can be overwhelming for a new player
* Improve game creation and loading times. This is harder than it sounds
* Add a compass
* Make it clearer that an anomaly will still be there even after it disappears from the screen.
* Make it a necessity to have the main assembler built at all times
* Add support for multiple stories
* Make the minigun placeable on floor panels
* Add some kind of usage for empty bottles
* Change rover consumption from 30 to 20 and hydrazine stack size from 100 to 200
VISUAL BUGS
* Turret playing firing animation while it’s reloading
* Camera can clip inside the player’s body, especially when resting
* When creatures flee from damage from the player's weapon the damage indicators are reversed for any hits that occur while the creature is fleeing
* Dying underwater removes the underwater special effects during the death screen.
* Dying under water makes Amanda fall to the ground, no matter what height she died at
* If you press Escape while in the death screen and then press it again, Amanda shows as revived for a split second
* Decals on trade pods were turned off due to massive lag spike
* When the trade ship leaves, the entry point effects need to be turned off
* The trade pod beacon needs to be raised
GAMEPLAY BUGS
* Dying makes Amanda immune to radiation while nox event is active
* Can fly through vertical obstacles. Can also fly through ceilings or cave ceilings.
* Flying into a slightly sloped obstacle automatically stops the flying action
* Some resources, even jenu, can spawn inside trees
* Need to add localization for loading screen and for all the Alpha 4 related stuff
* Something wrong when trying to pick up the MKI turrets from the ground as dropped items
* Ai get teleported around when spawned and usually takes ~ 5 seconds to start acting normally. This is bad now that there are vehicles in game
* The game is poorly optimized when building very large bases, even when these bases are off screen.
* When inside the rover or mech, you can move the camera around so that the menu that should only appear when you're not inside the vehicle appears. If you interact with that menu while inside the vehicle, lots of bugs happen
* When under attack by a raid, if you decide to go out there and engage the bad guys, they will keep charging the base even if fired at instead of rerouting towards the player
* Most buildable objects need to have their normal textures set to the original ones after being constructed instead of keeping the 'assembling' effect. Will help with visuals and performance
* There are still some small issues when placing down foundation items. These are mostly collider problems
* Bumping into the rover after being built but before entering it causes it to act like a non kinematic physics object, meaning it can be tossed around like a ball.
* There is still a rare issue with the camera angle when entering/exiting the rover while juggling with the FPS and TP views.
* Cabinets sometimes refuse to be placed side by side
* Player can get melee damaged when flying above melee AI
* Climbing onto a rock while underwater causes a weird bug
*F Some resources have their physics enabled when they shouldn't
* Ancient Assembler piece #2 seems to be respawning
* Cull objects based on their size instead of having a one size fits all solution
* Sink doesn’t align with wall.
* Toilet doesn’t align with wall.
* When jumping out of water; character getting stuck in jumping animation. Sometimes also gets stuck in other animations when doing crazy things near water.
That's it. We have a lot of boring, technical work ahead of us for Alpha 5. No doubt there'll be even more stuff added to this list as we go through it. We'll still write dev blogs about it though, even if it might not be a very interesting read.