The MMO Flight & Space Simulator game Rise is back in active development and can be accessed and played for Free via rise.unistellar.com. The following announcement was submitted to F2PG by Jason, the lead developer at Unistellar Industries LLC.
Rise is a tycoon sandbox MMO where you start with a car (that you don’t yet own) on the surface of an exomoon (in the middle of nowhere) and work your way up to trucks, aircraft, and eventually aerospace vehicles capable of reaching orbit (and therefore any point on the moon within 30 minutes).
Those who seem to get the most out of Rise have come from EVE, No Man’s Sky, Kerbal Space Program, Second Life, and a variety of flight simulation games. Winning is subjective – is it based on how much money you can bank? Is it based on your fleet size or property owned? Or is it based on your influence on the economy? Only you can decide!
I am the sole developer with a dedicated QA resource and a part-time artist (plus contracted artists and product development).
We started back on a new game server in February 2017. I updated the programming language, migrated to a relational database, added new vehicle types (successor to the E-10 Saint and C-2 Dasher), added air traffic controller, and colonist attributes.
We contracted a real cartographer to translate and validate our 100 million square kilometer terrain map so that we could add brand new ground and water maps to quadruple the resolution. Data now exists for underwater exploration, natural disasters (tectonics and earthquakes), and locations for future cities.
We made the decision to move from a “modular” design of network client, sound application, and view application to a single client application complete with signed installer. Once the integration and testing were completed on that abandoned project we focused efforts on the internal vehicle displays (including customization and portability), upgraded some interior textures, and enhanced some old animations and effects.
Many old bugs have been discovered and fixed including ground interaction with vehicles (thereby allowing cars to legitimately drift and aircraft to smoothly touchdown). Colony management lets you reliably move commodities between adjacent plots. The telemetry packets now distinguish between exterior accelerative forces (like from air resistance, and impacts) and forces that are under the vehicle’s control (i.e. thrust) so that the effect on the player is more realistic.
The Yonmaran Sentinal newspaper got a facelift! http://rise.reskin.us/news
Support for multiple concurrent sound devices were added as well as multiple game controllers with extensive configuration and customization.
Currently, we have an eye on the new player experience, increase realism on flight dynamics and physiology. Feedback in this area is certainly welcomed, as well as feedback on the progression tree. The car that you start with (C-2A) is a completely reimagined version of the original C-2 Dasher. The apartment you start in now faces east for a better view of the airport environment (and on a good day you can see the shoreline).
On the horizon, we hope to add Steam integration, VR support, automation of vehicles, contracts, a player portal, and over 200 more tracked enhancements.
We hope to resurrect and rebuild the amazing community of players that we had circa 2006!
Category: F2P NEWS
Tags: Announcement, PC, sandbox, Sci-fi, simulation, space, space colonization, spaceship, Windows