Lars Simkins posted his long awaited progress update for Frontiers.
More information.Beta Progress
I'm still not announcing a release date, but I can give you a tangible sign of progress: I've started sending the beta out to more individual testers, mostly people who were on the dev team at some point. They're helping me to decide what I need to polish up before sending the beta out to backers. They're also helping me weed out any massive game-stopper bugs that would make a large-scale distribution a waste of time. (So far we've found several...)
Ryan is also helping me clean up the story elements and get the first two acts in working shape. At this point I don't really care if the rest of the game is twitchy for the beta - that's what the beta is for, right? The same isn't true of the story elements. Those have to work the first time out.
Snazzy!
Overall progress is... fine. Boring word, but the most appropriate. Not amazing, not horrible, just... fine. Stuff's getting done. Slowly. But not horribly slowly. Just... fine-slowly. OK moving on.
Oculus - The Good, Bad & Ugly
I've been running into issues with the Oculus and I wanted to share them with you. Stretch goal features are under the microscope more than others and I don't want any surprises.
First, the GOOD: overall VR in FRONTIERS is fun, if not always as playable as it is in 2D. There are still some scale issues and the interface remains an unsolved puzzle in places but there's undeniable glee in mining Luminite in a dark cave.
The BAD: After working with the Oculus for a while now I've come to the conclusion that games like FRONTIERS - open world with lots of freedom of movement - aren't very well-suited for VR. Games where you're confined to a small space and have a minimal interface are far more appropriate and immersive. Who knew? But that's a stylistic issue, not a technical issue, so I will continue to implement Oculus support as best I can. I still think it's enjoyable even if it's not ideal. (The beta will have Oculus support in case you were wondering.)
The UGLY bit that's spoiling this fun is dropped frames. FRONTIERS runs a lot better than it did in the alpha, which lurched along as 30fps on a decent machine. Now it's 60+fps in most areas, with dips to as low as 50fps to 45fps in some areas at max quality. I think I'll be able to bring those areas up to 60fps at max settings by release, which is good because you absolutely cannot use the Oculus with less than 60fps.
So I'm walking around, looking at things, and suddenly a chunk has to load, and I drop from 60fps to 5fps for a moment while I stream chunk data into the terrain system. Just a hitch when you're playing 2D, but when you've got the Oculus on? *HUURRK* Instant motion sickness. I had to rip it off my head once it was so bad.
The obvious solution is to make chunk loading faster but that's... difficult. It's tied closely to the Unity terrain system which is unfortunately a bit of a black box. So the only workable option right now is to make the screen entirely black while chunks load (perhaps with a centered logo so it doesn't feel like you're floating in space?) and there's no way to do that without annoying the hell out of players.
But then again - who knows? The chunk loading code (the non-terrain part, anyway) will be open so maybe one of you will be able to suggest better method during the beta. Anything is possible.
