It’s February, 2014. If you remember correctly, we said Planet Explorers would be out by now back on Kickstarter (if you don’t remember, go straight to paragraph two!). Obviously, it’s not. We do apologize for that. We were a little too optimistic with our schedule and personnel acquirement (and frankly, making a RPG is harder than we expected). The game also expanded in scope by quite a bit. So in the end, we have to revise our schedule. We aim to have the game in final form before the end of 2014. This is a lot more realistic and much more attainable. The Kickstarter items will be sent out when that happens. But, hopefully, after following this game for over half a year now, you will have seen enough to trust in us to not only finish this game but make it worth your time.

Which brings us to the next point: Steam. We’re currently selling the preorder for Planet Explorers on our site, it’s doing decently in sales, but we’re not close to breaking even each month. Thus, we’re always very conservative with our budget and it’s been working out for us so far. But, our cash reserve is decreasing, and if we want to make Planet Explorers into a great game, we need to hire a few more developers (from 28 to ~35). For that, we will need the revenue that being on Steam Early Access can bring.

We plan to release our first Steam Early Access build when Alpha 0.75 comes out, probably in the last week of February. What does this mean for you? Anyone with a key already will get a corresponding Steam key. Anyone who doesn’t want to play on Steam can still use our standalone program and we will continuously update the download versions on our own site as well. The first version of Steam of course won’t be perfect in integrating all the Steam functions, but we will try to take advantage of Steam features such as the Workshop and voice chat in game in the future.

For our release schedule, it’ll mean shorter duration and less new content in each new build. We won’t be doing the 4 months that it took to get a0.7 out the door anymore, even though some people actually liked that. From Steam on, it’ll be about 1 to 1.5 months inbetween each build during the rest of alpha.

Well, the old a0.53 build was getting pretty old and different from what we have currently, so we wanted to bring the demo up to date. Now that we have a fairly bug free version in a0.72, we decided it was time. The demo features the story mode up to the fire bear nest, so about 2-3 hours of straight through gameplay. It also contains the build mode for people to try out building things in the Creations Editor. Most importantly, we now have Mac and Linux demos, so you can try out the game before you preorder!

PC Demo
Mac Demo
Linux Demo

Now that we have new demos out, we need you, the players, to help spread the word a bit and let people know about it. Post it everywhere! 🙂

I’ll talk about Steam Early Access in a post next week, we’re almost there.

We really thought we left a0.7 behind with a0.71, but alas, there were a couple of serious bugs there that we had to do a a0.72 release to fix them. These are optional downloads though, so you really don’t need to update if you don’t want to.

PC Torrent: http://www.pathea.net/a072pc.torrent
PC Direct: Mediafire

Mac Torrent: http://www.pathea.net/a072mac.torrent
Mac Direct: Mediafire

Linux Torrent: http://www.pathea.net/a072linux.torrent
Linux Direct: Mediafire

Changelist for a0.72

– fixed not being able to place anything in Build Mode
– fixed the launcher UI layout so people should be easily able to click the opencl options
– fixed music level resetting
– fixed all mobile turrets in single player, no more shooting at the sky
– added zinc to adventure mode
– toughened up the robot boss in adventure multiplayer
– added new ways to get around keynotfound exception (still need field testing)
– campfire now stays on always (for now)

For users without opencl compatible graphics cards due to whatever reason (outdated driver, unsupportive manufacturer, incompatible setup, etc.), please go to options in the launcher and change to cpu under opencl calculation, then launch the game. If your game hangs at 100% or fails to load, it’s most likely due to opencl.

Now we can all move on to a0.75. The key features we’re aiming for a0.75 are voxel water (dynamic will probably be a0.8), new water shader, decals for the creation editor, lod for the building blocks, new story segments, rainforest biome, new ai spawning based on seeds in Adventure Mode, and able to export vehicles in multiplayer. We’re aiming to release this build in late February.

Also, check out this new website for some cool ISOs made by Planet Explorers players around the world.

Torrents

PC – http://www.pathea.net/a071pc.torrent

MAC – http://www.pathea.net/a071mac.torrent

LINUX – http://www.pathea.net/a071linux.torrent

Mediafire direct links pending.

We’ve been working through a lot of bugs during the last couple of weeks since a0.7 came out. There have been a lot of feedback from players during that time regarding a0.7 on our board and through email. Thanks to all who provided them!

This update was suppose to come out last Friday, but a few multiplayer sync bugs really delayed us (by a week!). Here’s the changelist for a0.71:

You cannot kill the first Puja you meet when you meet up with Tariq anymore
Mobile turrets will stay open once they fire at a target
BG music and combat music will have less mixing time, it used to be 10 sec, now it’s 3
BG ambient sounds are in, and the music will play sporadically
Fixed gun sounds
Fixed footstep sounds after an animal dies
Lobby will auto refresh server list after restart
Changed activation to https server so most people will have no problem activating now
Fixed Gerdy pathfinding
Adisa harddrive mission will complete after 1 hour of game time
Plant fiber drops now up
Robot specs upped
Bury the dead mission NPCs are actually dead now, and burying the ash boxes is working
Up Up Up mission will have the 2 injured NPCs follow easily, not in formation
Placing blocks is now much more accurate
Can pull diagonal in the new building system
One unit of resource will allow you to build 8 0.5m blocks
Stamina and health will no longer drop in build mode
Turrets will no longer fall from blocks
Holes will no longer form when fast travelling
Holes will no longer form in blocks when fast traveling in multiplayer
Fixed some item names
Added a few more fish types
Added a few new animal types in desert biome
Added 1 more mobile turret type (Type 03)
Andheras are again scared of the light
Caves are now a lot darker
CPU voxel option in launcher
Render (OpenGL/DX) option in launcher
Cultivation mission now working
Forest fps problem fixed
Inventory opens when trade ui pops up, always
Able to move and rotate templates in Creations Editor
Shows message when collecting water
Added gold in mineral scanner
Repair is now cheaper
Multiplayer map now marks flags
Multiplayer players now marked as dots on map
Multiplayer players now have a team share inventory besides their own
Multiplayer can now place turrets without crashing
Multiplayer now supports different biome plants and textures
Custom swords, shields, and guns can not be exported in Multiplayer
Multiplayer ai now syncs up and won’t idle
Mineral Scanner now in Adventure mode
Mineral layout now more spread out in Adventure mode
Cutting trees in Adventure mode will not take as long
Able to harvest herbs in Adventure
Fixed grass rendering crash bug
Blocks now generate faster
Blocks now show at a 256m distance
Fixed KeyNotFoundException bug
Fixed several colony bugs
Added colony personnel work animations
Added graphics on the big map to show current alpha invisible wall border

The focus of this build was to get the multiplayer modes more consistent and error free. By adding the shared inventory, players can now share anything with other players on the same team. Also, players can now purchase flags from the shop to place on the map so they can fast travel all over the place.

We’re looking forward to the feedback on the multiplayer.

On Monday, we’ll be releasing a new demo made from the a0.71 build for PC, Mac, and Linux. I’ll also talk about a0.75 then.

Here are 3 save files for people wanting to jump directly to the newest story parts of a0.7:

Save 1 – Meeting Tariq
Save 2 – After Andhera Encounter
Save 3 – Earth Camp

A0.71, which will try to fix most of the bugs people are listing on our board will be out sometimes next week. We will be adding in the option to pick cpu for voxel rendering in the launcher, as well as selecting opengl or directx.

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.

Update: it should be running now. We’re will do some more bug testing on a0.7 on Monday and send it out the door late Monday or early Tuesday. The server will be down for 1-2 hours when it happens, we’ll be moving to newer servers.

We’re testing some stuff for a0.7 on the server right now, so it’ll be down for a bit. We’ll try to finish up the work as soon as possible, within half a day. Sorry for the inconvenience for people trying to activate or play multiplayer.

Hey there, just a quick update on a0.7 before you start throwing things. We have just 3 bugs keeping us from releasing, one of them we just found out on Saturday.

1. A crash bug for the 64bit Windows build caused by Opcode::HybridOBBCollider::Collide + 0x64c, we don’t really know what this is and no one else does either. We’re taking parts of the asset bundle out piece by piece to see if any of the assets have bad collision or something. Scratching our collective heads on this one. If we fix the other two bugs before this, we’ll just go ahead with the 32bit build.

2. This one’s a biggie that was probably due to some communications oversight between the client and netcode programmers. Basically, the client modes and the multiplayer modes are using 2 different systems for items and items gathering, we only figured this out when we merged the code. So now we’re doing a sprint on getting the current client system ported over to the multiplayer. 4 days needed.

3. Fast travel in multiplayer. There are some logic bugs here keeping players from syncing. But we think it’s a must have feature, especially for versus. 2-3 days needed.

Everything else’s pretty much hakuna, still doing bug runs through the story, but those are not serious bugs. So please bear with us, we’re almost there! We will be posting a save file for people wanting to start where the story ended in a0.62, and here’s the preliminary changelist so far.

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)
Up to 4 followers
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

Not much to add other than showing off something new in the desert biome. We’re going to do a lot of optimizing for the a0.7 build next week. Our aim is to get it out by next weekend, but it might get delayed a bit if we run into playability issues such as low frame rates or memory leaks. Fingers crossed for no problems!

Here are some new screens from the Redstone Canyon biome while you wait for a0.7. Right now, we’re finishing up the story part of the Desert biome, you’ll probably see some screens of that by this weekend if everything goes smoothly. After that, we’ll bug test and polish for a few days and send the build out. So yes, what you will see in the build will look better than this. We still need to add grass and have better texture type distribution…and more land features, it’ll be a busy time until the build’s done. 🙂