While most of us are working on the upcoming six new islands, we are of course still keeping an eye on what's happening on Nia. Based on your feedback and our own ideas we assembled a list of a few small but rather important changes, which we intend to implement in smaller patches before and around the world expansion patch.

Listed in no particular order, have a look around in our candy shop:

Global storage listing

Or as you call it on the forums: asset list. Probably one of the most requested features, this will allow you to browse all your items and belongings not only locally in a terminal, but also for remote terminals. Of course you will be able to do this also while you're outside on the terrain, all shown in a nice tree structure.

Removing NPC orders for kernels

Currently kernels are one of the two main sources of NIC income in the game (the other one being assignments). The problem is, kernels are also used in technology research. At first this seemed like a good idea, but due to how the economy developed so far, players quickly found themselves in front of a dilemma: "should I research those kernels and have no funds to manufacture the acquired technology, or sell them and fall more and more behind in the production race?". There is of course more to it, and I wouldn't want to go into details here, but you are welcome to discuss the issue in the comments or the forums.

To remedy this economic pitfall, we plan to introduce a new loot type which all NPCs will drop, and the Syndicate will buy them for a fixed amount. In line with this we will remove all NPC buy orders for kernels, so the kernel market will be completely controlled by players and their research needs.

Geoscanner folders

Yes, the current geoscanner result system is not very convenient, to say the least. You scan a tile, get a result item, upload it to your map, and in 99% of the cases you destroy the result items because they are not good for anything. We want to change this, so you will directly upload the results to your map, and you can create an item from there if you really need it.

We will also introduce folders for the result list, so you will be able to organize your results by mineral types, island locations or anything else you can think of.

Market rates graph

That abomination that you see on the rates tab of the market is probably one the oldest pieces in the game that we didn't get around to yet. The wait is over, the next patch will include the new and upgraded graphs, complete with daily high&low bands, traded amounts and global averages.

Event notification system

Another age-old fossil in the game is the so-called event log, that you can sometimes bring up if you click the little money icon in the lower right, only to never see it again. Originally this was intended to notify the player when something happened, received money, finished a manufacturing, and so on but sadly it has always been that poor little stepchild.

But soon it will receive some much needed love, since we intend to implement a notification system which most of you are probably familiar with. Small non-intrusive popups will notify you of everything important that may be of interest: friends coming online, market and production events, news and corporation bulletins and so on. Of course you will be able to individually set which events you want to be notified of.

CT trading

Direct trading of calibration templates (CTs) was disabled so far, because the system was not able to show the parameters of remote items, so you couldn't have checked the efficiency values of the CT you were about to buy from Mr. Scammer Guy. Now the system has been upgraded, so trading will be enabled again soon.

Market order modification

Price modification of your own market orders. I guess this doesn't need more explanation, coming soon to a rightclick menu near you.

Trophies/Losses details

Trophies and losses will get a details window, where all involved parties will be listed together with individual damages. This will be in a simple copy/paste-able text format, so those of you who would like to start some killboards will probably find this a useful addition.

Explosion damage

Robots exploding upon their destruction will deal area-of-effect damage to all other surrounding robots within a certain radius. Only on beta islands though, no cookie for griefers.

Spark teleport

The rules for this are far from final yet, but we plan to give you an option to teleport your spark (yourself that is, without any robots or items) to alpha terminals. You will probably need to pay a fee for this, but we believe this will be a useful logistics tool.

Performance-based assignment rewards

Why the fuss to shoot 10 Grunts when you can just hop in your trusty Arkhe, do some transport assignments, and get pretty much the same money in less time and with less risk? Over and over and over again? Can I have a "boooooring"?

Yep, the current missioning system is in dire need of a revamp. We'll introduce dynamic rewards based on average completion times, and also bonuses if you're faster than the average. Risk and distance covered will be much more rewarded than they are now.

Last but not least, check out our new feature site which launched just now in line with our free trials campaign! And of course, state your likes or disapprovals in the comments below.

Here we go with another update on the status of recent and upcoming changes. We're quite pleased to report that the latest patch resulted in a big increase in the stability of the server backend, and the random problems people have been experiencing prior to the patch will not be happening again.

Free trial

The biggest update coming with the weekend patch will be the official introduction of a 15 day free trial with each newly created account. Let's face it, the sun is setting for the obsolete trial codes. There is one less hurdle in the dash to the finish line, which is the starting grid of the Perpetuum adventure.

In order to shield the economy and the equal playing field from possible exploits caused by people creating large amounts of trial accounts, feature access will be limited in some forms. Trial players will not be able to trade items or NIC with other players and will not be able to join player corporations.

Please note, that along with the old trial codes, the recruit codes you may have received will also become invalid. If you have a recruit code lying around, time to blow the dust off it and get your BFF an early Christmas, while collecting your own 15 days of free game time.

Hotfix

We are working on hotfixes for the current problems (most notable of which are the chat issues) and we'll be rolling out the next patch sometime over the weekend.

Incoming new areas

We will effectively double the size of the game world with a patch planned for about a month from now. There will be six new islands, three safe and three free-for-all ones. At first the new areas will contain infrastructure, npcs and materials, with missions soon to follow. Intrusion events for the new bases on unsafe islands will be available immediately.

For the end, here's an image of a work in progress new plant:

Let us know what you think of the changes in the comments!

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.