Today's the day for BETA 2.

We've tried to incorporate as much of your feedback as possible in the past couple weeks.

This post will go over some of the highlights:

Start of game introduction

The biggest amount of feedback we got was the general abruptness of the start of the game.  Beta 2 begins the process of addressing this by adding two new screens after the story intro.

For Beta 3 (due in August) after you hit continue you'll get a second mini-cut scene that shows your shuttle making a pass by the UES Vindicator (ala Star Trek: The Motion Picture) and then you will meet the commander.

Another addition has been more dialog to help you learn how the ship works.

Planet Scan Changes

We are midway through the re-design of this screen so hang in there.  For this build, you will need to hit the ENTER key or the landing zone (1) in order to get the landing zone selected.  We are a few hours away from making it so that  you can left-click anywhere on the planet for the landing zone to be selected (you won't be able to land anywhere, the computer will simply pick the most optimal landing pathway).

The weather now controls how your lander will be injected to land on the planet.

The angling will, we hope, make it clear how hard it is to land on some of these planets without better tech.

The Training Fascility

We added Ceres to the mix and a Training facility. This helps new players get used to how combat will work.

Here you can select a few test combat scenarios to get used to it.

Planet Changes

You don't get jump anymore right away.  Now, if you're new to the game, this won't be a big deal. But if you're used to just ignoring obstacles, it's a pretty big deal.   You can buy jump but you don't get it for free.  

Planets now look quite a bit better thanks to real-time shadows and a new LOD system that lets us have much higher quality visuals.

We are hoping that players will immediate appreciate the upgrading system since jumping is pretty cool.

Dialog changes

Some UI and custom fonts are now in.  Also, you can choose an option by selecting its number.

Options

You can change difficulty in the options now.  We are resisting having it something you do at the start of the game (you can change difficulty any time you'd like).

We also added a lower quality mode called "Bleh".  We awnt this game to be able to run on really really low end computers.

There are other elements outside the adventure mode that are strictly works in progress and in fact, some may get removed before release in order to have more time for balancing later and be able to release as a free DLC.