Into The Clouds

Hello, Wayfarers!

We’re putting the finishing touches on our next update, tightening the bolts and patching the hull. Our primary mission for the update was to resolve the stability issues that were introduced in a recent update. We’ve identified a number of the problems and cleaned them up. Plus, we’ve got a fresh coat of paint on our gas and water effects, chat bubbles, and some handy quality-of-life tweaks. Beware of low-hanging, heavy fog. Visibility may be diminished… and you never know what could be lurking out there.

Updated Visuals for Gas and Water

We’ve given our fluids a bit of a level up. Gas and liquid rendering are looking sharper than ever thanks to some fresh shader magic.

• Smoother gas and liquid rendering thanks to fixed shader generation. This should result in a noticeable rendering performance increase.
• Added gas stencils for space and planet surfaces.
• We now have underwater rendering! Beams through the water surface, an underwater effect, and so on.
• The volumetric fog system has been replaced with a new fog system based on our custom gas rendering. For now, this new fog is localized and not reactive to the sim, but the plan is that it will be contextual to biomes.
• Clouds with this way now too! Fly up there and check them out!
• Space has simple nebulae now too!

Chat Bubbles: Now with More Personality

Your words deserve to look their best! We’ve given our chat bubbles a complete makeover – fixing wonky textures and ensuring your messages arrive in style.

• Banished word-wrap gremlins, stretched textures, and bubble-spout glitches.
• A fresh pass on the art style of the bubbles. Plus, we added a whole bunch of new ones!
• These bubbles are mapped throughout the moods and say alternates, so you will find that far more of them now display differently.
• Updated fonts for better readability.
• Chat bubbles now intelligently adjust their stay-time based on your message length.

Other Changes, Bug Fixes, and Updates

• Fixed an issue that would cause players to get stuck zoning if they had a Probe Light active
• Added improved logging to help us track crashes and keep things running smoothly.
• You can now ‘Inspect’ fellow Wayfarers to check out their profiles.
• Updated the medical box art in the Crucible firebase.
• Added temporary icons to the skill UI to help with readability.
• Improved the prediction of indirect projectiles

Known Issues

• Gas that is floating on water can be pixelated at times
• Fog may be heavier than intended. Please let us know if you encounter something out of a Stephen King movie… we do want you to be able to see where you’re going.