And a Merry Christmas to you, here’s a gift!

PE Alpha 0.7 PC Torrent: http://www.pathea.net/a07pc.torrent
PE Alpha 0.7 Mac Torrent: http://www.pathea.net/a07mac.torrent
PE Alpha 0.7 Linux Torrent: http://www.pathea.net/a07linux.torrent

Speed will be faster once we get more stuff uploaded to some seeds.

Direct Links forthcoming.

Alright, after working on this for almost 5 months, we’ve finally finished the initial version of alpha 0.7. Now, it’s not completely bug free, that’s for sure, so we will be putting out a a0.71 version for sure. In fact, some last minute multiplayer syncing bugs almost kicked this build to next year (we fixed them in the eleventh hour). We actually tried to do a little too much for a0.7, and some of the experiments failed. We tried to do realtime cubemap based ambient lighting. It worked, but the frame rate took a dive to around 15fps even on the HD7970. So it went out the window. We also wanted to write a sound program that runs outside Unity in parallel for all the sounds of the game so you don’t get a hiccup when Unity does garbage collection (Unity’s Mono is really old, so garbage collection takes longer than it should, and doesn’t seem to work all too well anyway). We were waiting to see if Unity will upgrade their Mono with Unity 4.3, they didn’t, and by the time we knew that, there wasn’t enough time to add this feature. So you’ll still get awkward skips in sound and music in this build.

We also had some last minute bugs/issues that knocked out:

AI detection based on visual and sound
Took out 4 followers for now because it’s causing balance issues (making things a little too easy)
Cannot trade items in multiplayer yet (first thing we’re working on for a0.71)
Took out 64bit client because there’s a collision issue with Unity that’s causing random crashes
Monster beacon in multiplayer, it broke a lot of things

One of the biggest improvements to be added to a0.7 is that now players can use their CPU to render voxels if they choose to, this opens up the game for players with integrated cards.

A0.7 Changelist

Recreated Creation Editor, allowing many more features including custom textures, rotating templates
Iso Converter to convert old Isos to the new system
New grass system
New tree types and models
New redstone canyon biome
New desert biome
New set environments
New storyline extensions and missions
New NPC characters
Glider
Jetpack
Grappling gun
Parachute
10+ New land animals
New fish types
New enemy types
New mineral layout
Mineralogical scanner
Tweaked terrain textures
NPC characters can now sleep, eat, work, defend, and communicatewith each other
Followers can follow in formation
Followers job system
Followers can throw grenade
Grenade can damage terrain
Chen can now shoot (yay)
New NPC display UI
Drone folower for a NPC
New building system with 0.5 meter blocks and angles with 24+ types of blocks
Ability to save new building system blocks
New texture types for building system
Colony buildings now use block system
Colony buildings are now defined by objects within and not the entire building from the Creation Editor
Fertilizer sprayer
Ability to plant crops
Ability to get seeds and fruits from some plants
Crops have growth cycle
CPU voxel based rendering option (in options)
Fixed various story bugs
Random towns in Adventure Mode
NPCs in Adventure Mode
Missions in Adventure Mode
Adventure mode starts with basic items
Redid animal spawn code
New player attack animations
New player inertia based animation
Versus mode in Multiplayer
Better administration abilities in multiplayer (ban, delete, clean, block, etc.)
Max ocean view distance is now set to terrain distance
New alien animations
New player and NPC idle animations
Changed world map to 3D vector map
NPC behavior system in colony
Shorter day/night cycles in multiplayer
Sleep and food influences hp
Added world map to Adventure Mode and Multiplayer
Giant robot enemy in Adventure Mode
New second moon in the sky
New third moon in the sky
Invert mouse in gun mode
Invert mouse in FP mode
Can run into alien troops in the wild
Salt
Sugar
Able to get water
Solar power generator
Able to recharge batteries
Added Factory building prefabs, the enhancement machine, the recycle machine, and the repair machine
Enchancement machine can enhance weapons and shields
Recycle machine can break apart objects into the original resources
Repair machine can repair vehicles
Vehicle weapons now uses energy from fuel cells
New furnitures
New valuable item drops from animals
New food items
Place-able lights and plants
New rocket sentry type (sentry type 02)
Options to turn on/off IK, water reflection, depth blur, and more
Changed item make up for lots of replications

And that’s that. There’s a slight change in price, now the preorder is $22 due to all the things we added. Also, regarding Steam Early Access, we’ll put the game there in early 2014. The precise time will be announced after we examine where we sit after a0.71 comes out. It’s been a hectic month for us, we’ll sit back and relax a few days before getting back to work on a0.71. Hope you enjoy! And be sure to report all bugs to our board at http://board.pathea.net.

For people wanting to host servers for multiplayer, please read up on port forwarding in this thread, there have been a slight addition for a0.7 settings: http://board.pathea.net/index.php?topic=2264.0

For Mac users using Mavericks, for some reason, the new Apple opencl driver 1.2 is actually causing problems for the game. You’ll need to switch to CPU opencl for now until we figure out the problem. For everyone else on Mac, opencl graphics cards should still work fine.