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.

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:

• 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.

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:

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.

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.

For those who didn’t know, the good news is that the package will hit the live server this Friday, the 24th of July (together with a few fixes, as usual).

Next up in line is the package of Beta 1 islands, but more on this below.

And as a bonus, we have some nice pictures for you. For a few weeks now you have been all around Alpha 1 islands thanks to the new mission system. We're happy to present you with some heatmaps of where exactly the new system took you. It's a pretty visual proof that the new system indeed works as intended.

Coming up

Beta 1-2 island reworks

As I mentioned above, with Alpha 2 islands done, we’re immediately moving on to Beta 1 and then Beta 2. There are a few things to consider when doing Beta islands: teleport placement, teleport connections, and highways can have considerable effects on PvP and outpost warfare, so we need to have a clear concept before making any changes there.

We already have some discussion going on about this here, so if you have good insight on Beta warfare, you’re more than welcome to share your thoughts.

Spark teleport removal

Once we’re done with all the islands, we will remove the spark teleportation mechanic from the game. Spark teleports have been introduced in the past as a band-aid for long walk times, but now with the teleport and highway network improvements, their negative effects (instant power projection) will ultimately outweigh their benefits.

Token shop updates

The Syndicate Supplies shop will receive some long awaited additions:

• The new requisition slips, discussed in this blog post
• Direct purchase options for T2+ and T4+ items
• Industrial distress beacons
• A new feature that will limit the purchase of selected items to a minimum faction relation

An important note here: most of you probably know that the old assignment system allowed a few easy shortcuts to gather a lot of faction tokens over a relatively short time. We didn’t want to remove these from players cause they haven’t been exactly exploits, but we still need to get the token economy to a healthy status before we introduce new items.

In order to achieve this, we will increase both the token prices in the shop and the token amounts given as assignment rewards by a factor of 10. So in simple terms, this means an artificial, one-time inflation.

This will happen in about a month from now (we will post additional notifications once we’re close), so we advise everyone to spend their stored faction tokens on currently available items before that.

Roadmap blog incoming

On Tuesday we had a long internal discussion about where we want to go from here. It is clear that we need to make a switch from our very long development phases lasting over multiple months to more frequent updates with relatively small but significant features and improvements.

So we have assembled a list of over 30 items, including new features, actual new content, and various improvements and balancing changes. Expect a long blog post in a few days.

This is a continuation of the previous blog, so if you haven’t read that, I recommend to do so before you go on.

New assignment categories

Currently we have 3 main assignment categories: combat, industrial, and transport. (Plus training and “special” assignments, but those are not really common.)

A lot of you have voiced your frustration about sometimes having to shoot in industrial assignments, or searching for artifacts in transport assignments. We’d like to clean this up, so when you request an assignment from a category, you will know exactly what kind of tasks you can expect and what objectives will most certainly not show up. Furthermore, we want you to be able to stay out on the field and complete assignment after assignment, and reduce the time spent on logistics and refitting. To this end, we’re splitting up these categories into a few more specific ones.

Thus far we couldn’t really do this, because most of the time we would have been left with 1 or 2 assignments in a category, and that can’t really make up a random pool. But now with the new template system we don’t need to worry about that anymore, since even with only one template in a category we should have enough randomness.

So below you’ll find the new list of categories and what they can contain. I have also included the type of robot that the assignment category is meant for, and the method on how the category will scale through the difficulty levels.

Combat

Straight-out killing, sometimes combined with looting specific items and their delivery. Nothing else, no artifacting or toying with distress beacons.

• Recommended robot: combat bots
• Level scaling: We have created a point-based system for ranking all our NPCs based on difficulty. We’ll use it to spawn the appropriate type and number of enemies that you should encounter for the requested assignment level.

Mining, Harvesting

Mining and harvesting will be two separate categories. Although the new field terminals let you refit your robot, it’s unrealistic to expect that you’ll always have the needed modules in them (or in your cargo), if they would be in the same category and a harvesting assignment would come up after a mining one.

Another important thing to note here is that we'll give up the assignment-specialized mineral variants - they cause confusion for a lot of players anyway. So assignments will ask you to gather normal minerals, but now you'll have to deliver those too instead of keeping them.

• Recommended robot: miners or harvesters, respectively
• Level scaling: similarly to NPCs, the system also ranks minerals based on their availability on the island. So low assignment levels will ask you for a few units of an abundant mineral, and high levels may require lots of rare ones.

Transport

Pick up stuff and drop it off, simple.

• Recommended robot: haulers
• Level scaling: Higher levels may require larger volumes to carry, which requires robots with large cargohold, or multiple delivery rounds.

Prospecting

Includes scanning for minerals and non-combat artifacts, so the only thing you need here is a geoscanner and multiple types of ammo for it.

• Recommended robot: anything that’s fast
• Level scaling: In the case of minerals it’s the same as with mining, and for artifacts we’ll play with the “pop range”.

Hazardous exploration

This means searching for guarded artifacts or artifacts that will spawn enemies. In either case, you’ll need weapons and a geoscanner for this one.

• Recommended robot: combat bot
• Level scaling: NPC difficulty and artifact pop range, as explained above

Production

Transport objectives combined with reverse engineering or mass production. Only available in main terminals and outposts.

• Recommended robot: haulers
• Level scaling: item volumes

Complex production

A complete industrial process, which may include everything from raw material gathering to the final mass production and delivery, with transporting the intermediate products in between.

• Recommended robot: miners and haulers
• Level scaling: raw material rarity and item volumes

Reward calculation

Due to the randomness of assignments, the old method of simply giving a NIC value to the templates wouldn’t work. There are a lot of factors that would make some assignments not worth doing and others overly lucrative if we did that.

So in the new system we’re assigning the base rewards to individual objectives, and apply a few situational multipliers to them. And this is where the system really comes together, since we have a lot of variables that we can work with: NPC rankings, mineral rarity, quantities, item volumes - we can even calculate the distance between objectives and assign a reward to that. In the end all these will be summed and result in the final assignment reward.

This calculation method also allows us to show you where you stand with the rewards while you’re doing the assignment, and update it in real time - this should give a nice additional feeling of progress.

Island reworks

You already got a little taste of the island rework process in the last patch, where we included a search function for the world map - and trust me, you'll need it.

Since we’ll need to place a lot of field terminals and new objective buildings on the islands, we’ll use this opportunity to do the promised teleport and highway network revamp, and be done with all the island changes in one go.

The governing ideas behind the reconfiguration are as follows:

• Make traveling between islands and terminals as painless as possible, but not instantaneous - traveling should be fast, but you should still have the feeling that you went to another part of the world.
• Try to give the currently deserted outposts more exposure by leading the main transport routes through them.

Below is a reconfiguration concept for the island of New Virginia. Exact teleport positions could still change, but I hope the general idea is apparent:

A final note here: once the rework is done, we’ll consider reverting the speed boost change for robots, or at least slow them down a bit - we’re open to your feedback.

Current status

The programming part is more or less complete, we have a working field terminal which gives us a random assignment, and we can complete it. What’s still left is the configuration/content work where we need to create the various templates and fill up the islands with field terminals and objectives, and assign a reward value to everything.

In order to bring you the new features as fast as possible we are planning a staggered release of the reworked islands, starting with Alphas. This means that once we’re done with filling up Alpha 1 islands with the new assignment templates, random objectives, field terminals, and reconfigured teleports, we’ll deploy them to the test server and shortly after that to the live server. Fortunately the islands are (mostly) isolated regarding all the changes, and the random templates can also work alongside the old assignments, so it shouldn’t be a problem to have “new content islands” and “old content islands” coexist for a while.

When that will happen mostly depends on how fast we can fill up the islands with content, but we hope to release the first batch towards the end of February. Of course once we’re done with the first islands it will be easier to predict how long the next ones will take.

Closing

We know that quite a few of you are still having connectivity issues. While there isn’t really any news on this at this time, know that we are handling this issue as a priority, and we’re considering all possibilities to resolve it - after all, any new feature is useless if you just can’t play at all.

This brings me to the main announcement of this blog. As outlined in the previous status report, once we’re looking at a stable gamma system, we’re ending our Early Access phase on Steam.

Originally the EA phase was meant to be quite short, basically to make sure that our new servers work as they should and our integration with Steam is flawless. But because of the removal/revamp of gamma islands the game has lost a large chunk of its content, we decided to extend EA until it’s finished. Of course we could still wait until we’re done with the mission system revamp, and with new PvE content, and the new engine, and and and… but that would be a vicious cycle and we’d be stuck in there forever. With the new changes of the Steam UI it has also become even less desirable to stay in Early Access for longer than absolutely necessary, simply from a visibility standpoint.

So with that said, we’re officially launching on Steam this Friday, the 17th of October. And as it is the case with all newly launching games, Perpetuum will be -10% off for a week.

Of course this won’t really change much from a development perspective, we’re continuing on the road we have laid out and keep improving the game.

New mineral system

We’re also planning a small patch for this Thursday (version 3.5.2), with a few bug fixes, and something that we wanted to do for a while now. This is a reworked mineral spawning system, which won’t mean too much difference in gameplay at first, but it makes our lives easier and it’s also more optimal for the server and the database.

To get a bit more technical, mineral fields so far have been generated and stored in raw bitmaps, and “fields” as a concept did not actually exist. Minerals in ground tiles had no connection to each other, and we couldn’t tell whether two tiles belonged to the same mineral field or not. This made it practically impossible to create rules and mechanics that would affect a whole mineral field.

With the new system, fields are node-based and are stored hierarchically in the database, which makes it very easy to let a whole field despawn without any residue after a certain time for example.

The system is very different compared to the current one, which will result in all the mineral fields being reset, so please be aware of this.

From a balancing standpoint we’ll also take this opportunity and make the faction-specific mineral difference even more significant, going from a 1:1.5 ratio of non-faction:faction minerals on an island to a 1:2 ratio.

Intrusion and gamma changes

Two relatively small but very significant changes will happen here, based on forum feedback and our observations, which will be deployed in the patch after the next one (3.5.3).

The change related to gamma islands is that we’ll be lifting the limit of 3 terminals per island. We have anticipated this change and mentioned before gammas were opened that we’re playing it safe but this might happen, but now we’re sure it has to go. The remaining terminal-to-terminal range limit and the red no-build areas should be enough to provide a soft limit for the number of terminals on an island.

The change to intrusions will bring an end to the automatic stability increase of beta outposts, and will require the owner corporation to complete their own SAP events as well. This will be the only way to increase the stability of outposts; if an event happens without any interaction then the stability will remain unchanged. Attacking corporations completing SAP events will of course still reduce stability, like they do now. As a result of this change, intrusion events should be more fast-paced and straightforward as defenders won’t have to stand around for two hours waiting for someone to come, but it will also require more effort to keep an outpost stable.

Robot balancing

We’re preparing a larger balancing patch that affects pretty much every robot in the game. The general aim is to boost light and assault class robots, and to stimulate or rather make room for a larger variance in weapon and module choices for all robots.

Listing all the changes specifically would be too much for this blog, but here are the main points:

• Light and assault bots get additional head and/or leg slots.
• They also get a slight CPU and reactor boost...
• ...and a 25% mass increase, so equipped modules don’t affect their speed that much.
• The current faction-specific weapon damage bonus of all combat robots will be changed to a combination of a larger general weapon damage bonus plus a smaller faction-specific weapon damage bonus. This means that your robot will be less “crippled” when using weapons other than its faction-specific ones.
• Weapon-specific bonuses of assaults and mechs will be size-independent, so assaults will receive bonuses for medium weapons, and mechs for light weapons too.
• All robots will receive an extra bonus that is either connected to their intended role or their faction.
• We’d like to emphasize the scout role of light combats, so they receive a detection bonus.
• Combat assaults receive an optimal range bonus in order to take on longer-ranged mechs more easily.
• Light EWs get a small bonus to their faction-specific weapon cycle times to increase their combat capabilities a bit.
• Combat mechs should be as agile as possible on the battlefield, so they receive a bonus to demobilizer resistance.
• EW mechs’ main role is to disrupt from the distance, this means an EW module optimal range bonus for them.
• Combat heavy mechs, being the slow fortresses they are, receive a small survivability boost with the help of armor resistance bonuses.
• Industrial light robots get an accumulator capacity bonus giving them more working stability or even survivability, depending on their loadout.
• Industrial mechs will be pushed more towards a combat support role with remote support module and sensor strength bonuses, while still retaining their primary mining and harvesting bonuses.
• We’re also making indy heavy mechs a bit more sturdy with a bonus to their armor amount.
• It’s not all that bright of course, so don’t be surprised if there will be also nerfs to some robots’ specific bonuses.

Mk2 robots have special bonuses and those will stay as they are, but basically Mk2s (and other special variants like prototypes) will get the same treatment as their normal counterparts.

These can still change as we will still go through all of these modifications again in the coming week. It will also hit the public test server first since we’re of course curious about your feedback too, so we don’t have an exact schedule for this other than “soon”.

Closing

Although this report is mainly about the impending and shortly upcoming changes, don’t forget that the larger updates outlined in the September and May status reports are still in effect. So the next blog post should tell you more about the incoming second stage of our mission system revamp. Or maybe another one inbetween about the teleport and highway network revamp?

The good news is that the wait is finally over soon: the reworked gamma islands patch will hit the live server next Wednesday, the 17th of September.

Now, since this will be a big patch that includes a lot of changes and fixes outside of gamma mechanics too, we’ll take a bit of precaution. When we deploy the patch on the 17th, gamma islands will be there, but the teleports leading to them will be initially disabled. We’ll use the next two days to gather any issues that might come up during general gameplay, and if all goes well, we’ll deploy the fixes and open up gammas on Friday the 19th. (Update: we'd still like to take a few days to make sure everything is right and check out a few remaining bugs, so gammas will open next week.)

There are still a few kinks to iron out until then, but these are mainly just small bugs and balancing issues. Testing on the PTS will still go on too (you're welcome to join!), and here we would like to thank everyone who helped us with feedback, ideas, or bug reports!

What you need to know about the new gammas

The new gamma mechanics include a few big changes and a lot of small ones. For simplicity’s sake I’ll only talk about the important ones here, and those who are interested in the details can do so in the “Gamma revamp testing” forum topic, which is fairly comprehensive.

New islands, new layout

Initially we’ll start off with 6 gamma islands - 3 old, and 3 brand new ones. For the new islands we tried to make things interesting instead of following the “big chunk of land”-style, so we have some split landmasses and archipelago-style zones too. Additional islands will be introduced when we see that the demand arises, and we’ll also try to keep them varied and interesting. And although the teleport network for these 6 islands seems fairly symmetrical for now, this won’t be the case as we expand with additional ones, so don’t build strategies around this.

Reworked terraforming

Sky-high “terrain walls” were one of the big problems of old gammas. Although it was nice to see people getting creative, apart from the aesthetic issues it also allowed for near-impenetrable fortresses, which caused a lot of headaches for us and for you as well. No-bounds terraforming was a big issue, so we’re changing this now.

Terraforming has now a limit of how steep you can make the terrain. This limit is set between the slope capability of assault and mech class robots, which means that you can’t ever terraform anything where a light or assault bot wouldn’t be able to pass. Unfortunately we have to say goodbye to beacon-terraforming, however much you guys liked it, because we simply couldn’t make it work together with the slope limit (for now at least). So instead we made module terraforming more user friendly, by making terrain tile locking instant, and merging all the different types of terraforming charges into one charge, where you select the type of terraforming method from the new terraforming panel.

Network bandwidth limit

The second big issue that came up was that we didn’t impose any limits on the number of structures you can build. This not only caused balancing problems (numbers always win), but server and client performance issues too. To remedy this, all buildings connected to the network have a certain bandwidth usage and main terminals received a bandwidth cap.

Energy management changes

Like some of you, we have also made the observation that gamma colonies are too self-sufficient. Since reactors generated energy out of thin air, you could practically leave your base alone and it worked for an indefinite time, unless someone destroyed it.

A big change here is that reactors won’t be generating energy on their own anymore. We’re introducing a new underground resource, which is not so much a mineral, but actually an energy field (that’s what we’re on Nia for, after all). These fields cannot be exploited by regular means; you need to place energy wells on them (a new building type), which will send the raw energy over your network into the reactors, which in turn will convert it to energy usable by all the buildings.

Like normal minerals, energy fields also deplete and respawn at random places all the time, so colony managers will need to check on them every few days and look for new energy sources to keep the colony powered.

Gamma highways

This has been requested for quite a long time now, and now they are here: buildable highway nodes, which will create a strip of speed boosting effect between them.

Walls and gates

Also a fairly big change is that now you’ll be able to lock and directly shoot deployable walls and all kinds of plants too.

We have also created a simple forcefield gate that you can place between wall tiles, and can be opened and closed with a simple click (if you have access, of course). Since this is not part of the gamma colony system, but a simple deployable field device, you'll also be able to use these on Beta islands.

The end of Steam Early Access

Our Early Access phase on Steam has been created with the aim to warn new players about possible server and connectivity issues while we were in the process of moving our servers. Meanwhile, the development of gamma took longer than expected, and since such a large system in the game can bring unexpected performance issues, we have chosen to wait with the closure of EA. But with that done, it will have served its intended purpose by a large margin, so it must come to an end.

So after gamma is released and seems stable, we will come out of Early Access and officially launch on Steam.

Of course this doesn’t really change anything - we will still continue development and regularly bring in new features and much needed changes.

What comes next

As laid out in a previous blog, first we’ll be doing a rework of the current highway and teleport networks, to speed up travelling in the game. The gamma patch actually includes a related change already, giving a flat speed increase to all robots.

Meanwhile we’re preparing a larger balance package for robots, with the aim of boosting smaller classes a bit, and changing some bonuses all around to make certain roles more distinct and logical.

Then we’ll move on to the long overdue second stage of the assignment revamp, bringing real variance to the PvE experience in the form of random assignments. NPC spawns have also become a bit of a mess due to all the balancing and mechanics changes over the years, so we are planning a big overhaul for them as well.

Later on we’ll still continue with improving the neglected PvE part of Perpetuum. The introduction of energy fields slowly starts to give sense for the actual backstory, and we have a few solid ideas already to make the collection of raw energy not just a gamma-only feature, but an interesting incentive that all players can participate in, from new to old.

That’s all for now, and I’ll try to make these reports a monthly thing, promised.

Fresh blood

The best news I can tell you is of course that our playerbase received a much needed boost, thanks to our parting with the subscription model, and the huge visibility that Steam provides.

We’ve hit the 600 mark with the online player count on a recent weekend and our average player count is roughly 5 times as before. Of course this is a tiny amount if you compare Perpetuum to other online games, but I have to remind you that we’re still in Early Access so people are wary to join. Also, as we have stated before, we’ve chosen the path of a slow growth instead of spiking it, so it’s all pretty much going according to our plans. We didn’t have any server issues that can be attributed to online player numbers so far either, which is another good sign.

I don’t have the freedom to tell you actual financial data, but it should be enough to say that after months (years?) of worrying about what to put on your plate tomorrow, it’s a liberating feeling to have that off of the list of things to worry about, and being able to just focus on making the game better.

A new home

We have already started to put those financials to good use, so beyond the company-issued Ferraris (by which we mean a second portion of ramen), we have found a brand new hosting location for our game servers.

As you probably know, the Perpetuum server cluster (if you can call 3 machines a cluster) is currently located in Budapest, Hungary. This is of course quite optimal for us, but very sub-optimal for most you, as we are hardly what you could call the center of the interwebs. My support ticket inbox is always full of reimbursement requests related to lag and disconnections, and most of those can be probably attributed to various network and routing issues.

So after doing the necessary research and inquiries, we have decided to move the servers to a prominent datacenter in Amsterdam. Though technically we’re not moving the machines themselves, but rather renting new ones on location, since we’re very fond of the idea of not having to send in Gargaj to switch a faulty HDD in our self-maintained hardware. To Amsterdam.

Without going into too much technical detail for now, compared to the current mixed-role 3-server configuration, the new setup will consist of 5 core machines: 1 server for handling player traffic (logins and zone jumps), 1 dedicated machine for the SQL database, and 3 dedicated machines for hosting the islands, split down between the 3 main factions.

Paperwork and technicalities are still in progress, but if things go as planned, you’ll be able to test the new servers within a month.

The near future

Let’s have a look at the things that we’ll be focusing on in the coming months. Some of these will be done in parallel, but the general order is something like this.

Gamma revamp

With the closing down of gamma islands a huge chunk of the game content has been temporarily removed, so this is our top priority right now of course - we know that you guys are preparing for the mother of all wars when gammas open up again. We are using our public test server to try out all the new mechanics and limitations that we need to implement to make it all work again.

We’re taking our time with this because obviously nobody wants another gamma wipe a year from now, and we are grateful to everyone who aids us with valuable feedback and actual testing. More info on the progress of this is coming soon to the relevant testing forum topic.

Quality-of-life improvements

Gargaj is on fire, and we have received an overwhelmingly positive feedback on the small QoL improvements like the autopilot, the storage search, and the many small UI-related changes. We’ll continue on this road, so you can definitely expect more of these.

Assignment system revamp - Stage 2

After Gamma is back up, we’ll jump right into doing some long-awaited PvE love: the revamp of the assignments. It’s been a while since we announced this, but better late than never.

As you might remember, the second stage is about making the assignments themselves random. We’ll be using an assignment template system where we only set what type of objectives you need to do, but the exact enemy you need to kill, or the item you need to acquire, or the mineral you need to mine will be all randomly selected from a pool of nearby locations, so your chances of seeing the exact same assignment twice will be quite low.

Not only that, but we’ll also seed the islands with many small assignment terminals that you’ll be able to use while on the terrain, so you can spare the long walks back and forth to the main terminals just to request or deliver an assignment.

Robot paint system

We have already deployed the foundations of the paint system in a recent patch (you probably noticed because most of the robots received a white color due to a bug).

The coloring system will be definitely not just some “pick a color and be done with it”-thing: we’ll have paint items that you can either gather or manufacture and then mix them together to get the final color for your robot; so basically fully integrate the painting frenzy into the industry and market economy.

Teleport and highway network revamp

The topic of long walks is still one of our most discussed issues, and one of the many reasons behind it is the current haphazard teleport and highway system layout. Although we don’t plan to make groundbreaking changes to the teleport network itself, our basic concept for the change is that you should be able to travel between every teleport and terminal/outpost without stepping off of a highway, ever. If you’ve seen the Virtual Training Island, that should be a good indicator of our general direction with this, but we’ll try to even top that.

Balancing changes

DEV Alf is back from the dead too, so you can expect some balancing changes too. He has already jumped into a hot topic right now: the balance of signal detectors and electronic warfare in general.

Steam trading and market integration

This is something that we still need to do some research on, but I’m putting it here because we plan to do it sooner rather than later. As you probably know, several games have items that can be traded via the Steam economy already. The general idea is that first you would be able to trade ingame items via Steam, for example your Gropho Mk2 for some trading card or another Perpetuum originated item.

The ultimate goal however is that we’ll also hook up Perpetuum to the Steam community market, where you’ll be able to sell and buy ingame items for Steam wallet funds. We’re approaching this very carefully of course - it could be a large boost to the ingame economy, but things could also go wrong with it.

The not-so-near future

We’re quite aware that the graphics of the game are starting to look dated. Unfortunately the current engine architecture has also become dated, so this is not simply a question of putting in higher resolution textures and models. The engine requires a major rewrite for any significant upgrades.

Not to mention the GUI - one of the most frequent complaints we hear is about the small size of the ingame fonts. This is also something that’s very hard to fix currently, since the interface is pretty much hardcoded and not “stretchy”. Text with larger fonts would simply overflow outside of the UI elements, and we’d need to have a completely separate, differently sized interface for that to work - and we’d rather put that effort into a new and advanced interface engine that will work for all display sizes without compromise.

For these reasons we’ve been working on the foundations of a completely new client but as you might guess this is not a simple task. At this time we’re still pretty far from replacing our current client, but work towards this goal has been going on behind the scenes for the last year and a half now.

Our first goal here is to get basic functionality going (glorified chat client woo!), which would work as a proof of concept for the new interface engine. Once that’s satisfying enough, we’ll move on to the 3D engine itself. With the new interface tech we developed, the implementation of a new client should go a lot faster than before. Regarding a timeframe, we hope to have something to show later this year, at the very least a partially functional test of the new interface engine.

Conclusion

This year marks the 10th year of Perpetuum development, and after an admittedly quite awful last year - which no doubt you noticed as well - the Steam launch has been one of the most important things that happened to the game. We’re adamant on riding this wave and focusing on making a better gaming experience for everyone, which is an easy thing to say, and it’s equally easy to be sceptic about it, but here’s the thing: This project is important to us - and we’ll act accordingly.