Fourth patch delivered since PTU Alpha 2.0 release, game still crashing every few minutes on average. It will take a while until they get it into good shape but I've already anticipated that. Actually expected Alpha 2.0 on PTU at the end of this week, not last. But they pushed it out anyone to gain some tractions on those ship sales (thank you based whales for pumping thousands of dollars into this game, making my 24 euro contribution worth more than I originally anticipated). In case it sinks (which it probably won't at this point), I still got more out of those 24 euros than fun I've had paying same amount of cash for E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy (no one ripped me off better than those guys)Predicted full month of PTU testing until going live, so far it seems on track. Last time I've seen game pushed out in su. ch state to people it was X Rebirth. At least this time around we're talking about closed testing of alpha version so not really final release.
They've put some neat things into this alpha build. Apart from planetary and station rotation (and possible rudimentary gravitational effects planets have on ships but that will come much later in development) there is also new damage system for bigger ships (currently only observable on Constellation). First iteration of their damage model was ships falling apart into few chunks of game geometry which was very expensive (performance and modeling hours wise). Second iteration was shader based damage of hull on fighters and ability to physically tear parts from the ship (much better optimized system which doesn't use original high polygon mesh). Because bullet holes are shader based, when you hit hull it gets warped into something like wireframe hull with pipes and stuff. You can see through it (alpha channel I believe) but it isn't physical in nature. Not sure what they did this time in technical terms but there are actual holes in hull of Constellation. Doesn't look like fighter based damage model, holes are of irregular shape and there are no pipes and metallic frame visible.
Still no gameplay effect. That should come later but there will be issues with it. To make movement in ships possible they've split universe in physical grids (I bet most of the server crashes have to do with that system which is probably rushed to meat the sale deadline). Ship interior is one grid and space is another, also station have their own grid. That is very cool idea and works fine (when it works) but I see problem how will those separate physics instances communicate and affect each other. Currently they are completely separated, you can enter Quantum travel with cargo bay being open and nothing will happen to you. To make it possible for air to get out of ship into space and people and objects to fly out with it, there must be a way for physics in instance A (ship) and instance B (space vacuum) to have effect on each other. Seems like a very complicated problem to solves and potentially crazy performance hitter if they ever implement something like that.
