So shortly after setting up our roadmap for the remainder of this year, we dived right into its development. Well, right after figuring out what to do first (with your help), putting out some server fires (not literally, don’t worry) and trying to not die in the summer heatwave (managed). Anyway, here’s what we have in store for you in our upcoming patch.

Beta 1 reworks

After the rework of Alpha 2 islands, Beta 1s are next in line to receive the teleport and highway network treatment, and of course the new assignments and field terminals. Those of you who follow the relevant testing topic have already seen the new network proposals, and provided some useful feedback too (thanks!).

So here are the before/after maps for Hokkogaros, Domhalarn, and Norhoop. These will soon hit the test server (with a few smaller changes based on your feedback) and be part of our next patch.

Hokkogaros teleport/highway reworks
Domhalarn teleport/highway reworks
Norhoop teleport/highway reworks

Distress beacon changes

In the last patch we have temporarily disabled the deployment of distress beacons, in order to allow us to finally remove some much hated mechanics that have been implemented a long time ago to battle the unwanted tricks players could do with beacons.

Distress beacons will be re-enabled in our upcoming patch, although with some significant changes:

Teleport anomaly
  • New teleport anomalies will start spawning on all zones, which are a side effect of enemy teleport activity. You will only be able to deploy distress beacons in the close vicinity of these, which will basically “hijack” enemy teleport jumps and pull them out at your location.
  • Once a beacon is activated, the anomaly will despawn and enemy NPCs will start spawning like before. So one anomaly, one beacon.
  • Teleport anomalies will have 3 levels, which will limit the type of beacons that you can use with them. Level 1 beacons can be used anywhere, level 2 only on beta and gamma, and level 3 will be gamma only.
  • Levels are the equivalent of stripes that we’ve had so far too on the icons. Beacon names and icons have been already updated to be more straightforward, so you don’t have to wonder anymore whether “platoon” or “commando” is the higher one.
  • Teleport anomalies will also emit significant interference (on beta and gamma), so it will also affect PvP a bit. They are destroyable though.
  • The multiple activators requirement will be removed, all beacons can be activated solo.
  • The volume of distress beacons will be reduced from 1 to 0.1 U.
Updated distress beacons

Reworked artifact scanning

Another mechanic that we wanted to give priority to is artifact scanning, mostly due to the relatively high amount of help requests and reports about players getting stuck with it or not really understanding how it worked.

The new artifact scanning breaks away from the triangulation method, and is much more similar to directional geoscanning:

New artifact scanning

As you can see on the screenshot, the scanner provides a list of the artifacts in range like before, but additionally to the range it also gives you a bearing indicator which will guide you to the scanned location. Note that I wrote “scanned location”, since the results can have a significant deviation, depending on your distance from the actual artifact and the accuracy rating of your equipment.

In practice this mechanic still requires multiple scans to narrow down the exact location (unless the random gods really love you), but it should be much more straightforward and intuitive than the old one.

Both the new distress beacon mechanic and the new artifact scanning method will hit the test server in a few days, so you'll be able to get a feel for them soon.

Terminal facility balancing

This is also coming in our next patch, involving some number juggling around terminal and outpost facility efficiency points. Currently there is not enough difference between Alpha and Beta facilities to warrant serious Beta-based facility usage in light of the much higher risk, so we’d like to balance this out a bit. (relevant forum discussion can be found here)

Here is how the new facility points will look like:

Alpha 1 main terminals:

  • All 0 (no change)

Alpha 1 outposts:

  • Current: 0 / 50 (higher on selected facilities)
  • New: 0 / 25

Alpha 2 main terminals:

  • Current: All 50
  • New: 25 / 50

Beta main terminals:

  • Current: All 50
  • New: 50 / 100

Beta outposts:

As you know the facilities here can be manually upgraded 3 times each, using a maximum of 10 points at the highest stability (1 point per 10 stability).

  • Currently the levels are: 0 - 50 - 100 - 125
  • This would be changed to: 50 - 100 - 125 - 150

(Meaning even if you don't spend any upgrade points, all the outpost facilities are at 50)

We’re also working on a facility downgrade option for Beta outposts, so you won’t have to destabilize your own outpost if you want to change around your facility points.

And last but not least, we’ll boost the relation factor in facility efficiencies. With the rebalanced relation progression in assignments, its current influence feels like not enough gain for all the fuss, so we’ll more or less bring it in line with the facility and extension factors.

Closing

So all the above mentioned stuff is coming in our new patch, which is currently slated for around early/mid October.

Our internal robot template editor

I’ll leave you with a picture of our freshly updated internal tool, which we’re using to create robot templates by mixing around their body parts. (You don’t want to know how the old one looked, it didn’t even have a 3D preview.) This is in preparation for the new Syndicate robots mentioned in the roadmap blog, and it really speeds up figuring out the good/useful combinations.

We’d also like to put this this tool into the test client so you can play around with it and show us your ideas, possibly even create a contest around this.

Yay, it's 303 today! (You may disregard this if you don't get the reference.)

Anyhow, I thought it's about time to provide some updates about what we've been doing in the past week or two, because we've certainly been busy enough not to say anything so far. As you may remember we posted earlier about what we're planning to add into the game in the coming weeks, with which we've been progressing steadily, but there were also other developments on other fronts, which might be of interest.

Reaching out to another world

The most apparent update we have is that we've been in cooperation with the wonderful people at CodeWeavers to bring Perpetuum to OSX and Linux, and finally we can present you with official Crossover Games support, which will allow you to enjoy the game on those two platforms just as good as under Windows, and you even get a discount if you purchase through that link! We ourselves have been using the game through this method on a MacBook Pro, and it seemed to work flawless as far as we could see. The gist of this essentially means that we'll keep an eye on possible bugs caused by the emulation, while the Crossover developers will continue to pay attention to your reports for the bugs you find seem to be platform specific. Before you ask, we're not excluding the possibility of a future native client for those platforms, but right now the game itself (as a game, not as a piece of software) needs way too much care internally for us to be able to shed any assets or resources on porting, and especially maintaining it afterwards. Right now, we feel really strong about Crossover as a means to deliver our game to a wider audience, so spread the word if you know someone who remained stranded on the OS-fringes until now!

Arrr, treasure!

Moving over to actual game-features, most of the artifact scanning is implemented (save for the usual minor GUI-related swashbuckling) and has proved itself eyebrow-raisingly fun for such a cynic as myself, probably due to the notable simplicity of the mechanic itself. The whole concept boils down to this: You get a normal geo-scanner, you get some artifact scanning ammo, load it, go out to terrain, scan. If there's something cool within range, you get a distance reading. You move around, scan again, you get another reading, with a delta calculation to show you whether you got closer or not. From this point on, it's an entertaining little game of "hotter / colder", which starts out as relatively simple when the distance is still large and any movement toward the general direction is considered as advancing, and gets gradually more and more tricky once you get closer and smack headfirst into either the "It says it must be here SOMEWHERE!"-run-in-circles-scan-like-a-maniac-syndrome, or the unfortunate occurrence that the artifact is likely to be in the middle of a bunch of angry NPCs. Either way, scanning within a given range of the artifact will finally result in the reward to appear - this can be a container with munchies in it, or a trigger to a variety of other things, depending on the type of that artifact. (This is helpfully specified for you along with the distance, just so you don't go cheerfully dowsing for Pandora's box.) There will be additional factors on how efficient you'll be able to geocache yourself to riches, but I'll leave that up to you to discover once the patch is out. The preliminary estimate for this patch is March 9, 2011, but this is still just what we're aiming for and there's still a lot of testing and balancing to do.

Combustion

We've also initiated the process of adding more zones to the game, a considerable task that's gonna take us quite some time to finish, hence it will probably not appear in the next patch yet. We're finished with the basic layout of the maps themselves, we've already placed the terminals and teleports, what remains is the actual level design: flattening the grounds to walkable paths, painting mineral fields, placing NPCs, placing decoration, stuff like that, as well as coming up with absolutely ludicrous new names for everything, the part of the process we admittedly enjoy the most. The plan is to provide six new zones, literally doubling the area available inside the game: three new safe zones (the ones with only a single terminal on them) for general activity, and three unsecured zones (with two outposts each) for unrestrained territory-knuckling. The teleport network has already been laid out, and though I won't go into detail here, we're hoping to provide easy access to each map from most of the current ones.

Some minor additional bits that have been done: We've changed the datafile handling so the local settings (keyboard, sound, window positions) will be saved separately from the large datablob, so deleting that will never cause your settings to be lost again. (Whoo-hoo!), we also added a free-look button so you can rotate the camera around the robot even when it is moving, we've made tabstrips squishy so now you won't have the problem of channels not fitting on the chat window, and last but not least we're in the final stages of adding direct credit card payment to our store. (About time, really.)

So that's about it for now, and we'll update you with details as soon as we have time to take a larger breath.