Hi all,
This is the last update and Sector's Edge will shut down on December 17th. This update contains everything we've been working on over the past 10 months. Scroll down to read about new features like forcefields, Rush game mode, new destruction system, engine breakthroughs and much more.
Why is Sector's Edge Shutting Down?
Simon and I started this game 6 years ago with the intention of making an awesome online multiplayer FPS. It's clear to us now that we bit off more than we could chew.
In hindsight creating an online FPS was a massive task and not the best choice for our first game. I am proud of what we created together and the skills we honed along the way, but we can't run this game on hopes and dreams forever. It's time we moved on to new projects.
Thank you for playing and supporting Sector's Edge. I know of communities and friendships that were built around this game and we are honoured that Sector's Edge became a part of your lives.
We want to say a special thank you to:
- The Beta Testing crew who have been helping test this update for the past 10 months
- Fora for his expertise and help with servers, databases, security and automation
- Punch Deck for music and recently SFX composition too
- Vhauss, Blade and Box Shards for their community maps
- Dusk for his marketing services and all-round good advice
- The mod team for keeping this place under control
- Our in-game and Patreon supporters for buying us spaghetti
Will Sector's Edge Return?
This isn't the end of Sector's Edge. We will revisit it one day and overhaul the style and gameplay as there are parts of the game we are not happy with.
In the meantime we have exciting ideas for strategy and survival games that we will work on first.
What Comes Next?
We love creating games and will continue to do so. One of our goals with Sector's Edge was to learn about game development, and we ended up learning far more than we anticipated.
We are launching an email newsletter to keep you updated on our latest project and to share everything we learned from creating Sector's Edge, including:
- our harshest lessons (marketing, failures, game design)
- our engine (innovation, multithreading, rendering, networking)
- our creative process (Blender, Photoshop, Terragen, Inkscape)
- our infrastructure (servers, databases, automation)
Click below to subscribe for free.
Thank you all for playing Sector's Edge, in total the game received 680,000 downloads (lucky we're not using Unity) and we have countless fun memories playing with you. We'll see you in game soon and hope you enjoy your final moments with Sector's Edge over the next three months.
- Mitch and Simon
What's new in the Final Update?
Since the last public update released in December, we have delivered 39 updates to the betabeta branch, which contains:
- 481 fixes
- 77 changes
- 46 additions
- 42 optimisations
- 132 balancing changes
- 28 new features
Lets dive into the new features:
New Destruction System
The velocity and weight of falling structures now increases the damage dealt. Damage is distributed outwards from the impact site (similar to a crater from a meteor) and can penetrate through multiple layers. In the gif below the crane damages multiple layers of the building, rather than creating a shallow dent on top.
Raytraced Audio and Deaf Mode
Raytraced audio has been improved in several aspects. Reverb is now calculated dynamically based on the size of the room and the amount of returning sound energy, meaning environments sound more realistic. You can hear sharp echoes in small metal rooms, or the delayed gunfire in a city.
If you are hearing impaired, you can use the brand new spatialised audio visualisation setting Deaf Mode, which paints sound on the surfaces around you.
Structure Editor
The structure slots have been removed from your ship and replaced with a dedicated structure editor. This new editor allows you to control the type and health of every block in your structure, as well as undo and redo for easier editing:
You can also press R to flip your structure vertically, for even more building possibilities:
If you're like Blade you can use your structures for art instead:
Forcefields
Two new block types have been introduced: friendly and enemy forcefields. Friendly players and bullets can pass through friendly forcefields, but enemies can't. You also can no longer place structures around players.
With more detail in each structure, the build highlight is now textured and shows cooldown time:
Dig highlights are also now recoloured based on the armour of the block, where blue means easy to damage and orange represents high armour.
Reconstructors
Going along with the theme of base building, this update also reworks the Reinforcer utility into the Reconstructor. When placed, a snapshot of the 7x7x7 area around the Reconstructor is taken and will be automatically rebuilt when destroyed. When paired with forcefields this is a great defensive tool!
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Singleplayer
All game modes and maps are now available to play offline with bots. They still aren't the smartest and jump off Lab at every chance, but are great fun in Control Shift on most maps.
Engine Breakthroughs
This update brings massive optimisations in voxel rendering. With 2x faster meshing, 3x less VRAM, stutter-free map updates and 3x faster rendering, Sector's Edge feels smoother to play than ever.
I feel like I damaged my GPU testing this but I managed to hit 2500 FPS in bare minimum, up from my previous limit of 700:
I also created my own texture format that uses 3x less VRAM (1GB less for high-res textures, 256MB less on medium-res and 64MB less on low-res). This reduces the minimum specs required to run Sector's Edge and means all textures are now loaded onto the GPU at startup - no need to load textures on each new map!
The game also uses only 724mb of disk spaces and starts up much faster.
Faster Server Connection Times
Networking has received further optimisations and - when paired with the texture optimisations above - connecting to servers is now lightning fast regardless of your ping.
Previously joining Frankfurt from my Sydney PC took up to 10 seconds. Now it takes 2 seconds:
Rush Game Mode
With new base building features, we need a game mode that fully utilises them! Introducing Rush, a game mode where defenders must prevent the attackers from arming two highly explosive objectives.
Have the defenders fortified the objective on top of a building? Chop the entire building down to destroy the objective instead!
This update also brings back some old game modes: Static, FFA, TDM, Gun Game and Head Hunter.
Control Shift Changes
The Control Shift zone mechanic has changed to prevent stalemates. The zone starts in a neutral state and a team must contest it for 10 seconds to capture it.
Once captured, it will always move towards the defender's spawn. This prevents situations where the zone stays in one part of the map for the majority of the match.
To change the direction of the zone, the defenders must recapture it by contesting it for 10 seconds.
New Loadout + Preset System
Common feedback we received was that when a preset is re-used across multiple loadouts, you couldn't edit one loadout without affecting another. This is because presets were linked to loadouts. Now presets are applied to loadouts, meaning you can make further changes to the gun in your loadout without changing the saved preset.
The loadout UI also has a new longer, thinner design, making it easier to change attachments, skins and sights on each gun.
New Skin + Sight Editor
The opposite change was made to sights and skins. You can now create one weapon skin and link it to multiple weapons. Changing the saved skin will apply changes to all guns you've equipped it to, meaning you can re-use the same skin for as many guns as you like.
To support this logic change, skins are now unlocked globally rather than per-weapon. The Proton cost of skins has therefore increased and you will receive a refund for skins you've unlocked on multiple guns.
The same change has been applied to sights, where you can create a sight and link it to multiple weapons that support that sight type, e.g. no red dot scopes on Rail Guns.
Proton and Level Changes
Everyone's Proton balance has been divided by 100 and the cost of skins and characters has also been divided by 100. An item that previously cost 5000 Protons now costs 50 Protons. To me, smaller numbers are easier to comprehend and feel more meaningful to earn.
The XP required for each level up has also changed to a new exponential formula. This was part of a larger progression and tutorial overhaul that would reward players with attachment points, protons, new features as they level up, which did not make the cut for this update.
Rather than recalculating everyone's levels based on this new XP formula (which would have reduced everyone's levels by 80%) I have set everyone's levels back to 1 for these last 3 months of playtime. You will all have a new SE 2023 - Level (X) title which reflects your level before the reset. All other stats will persist.
This progression system also involved a huge UI and UX revamp, which may be re-used in the future when Sector's Edge returns:
New Home Screen
The last UI change was the home screen, which combines social features, news, license editing and large art for singleplayer/multiplayer:
Infastructure Upgrades
As Sector's Edge tracks a large amount of gameplay stats per-player, we needed to optimise our database and servers to keep it quick.
We're now using new API servers written in C# (old servers used NodeJS) and a newly engineered database storage format that uses 45% less data. The main benefit for you is faster server connection times, and it also improves backend server performance and keeps things running smoothly.
New Music
Punch Deck composed 5 new tracks that you'll hear on Aegis, Corahk, Devoid and Soltec-themed maps. Here's a preview of each:
New Gun: Minigun
The minigun used to be exclusive to the Arena, but you can now equip it in your loadout for the low cost of 15 Loadout Points. With high fire rate and high ammo, its downsides are high spread and a misfiring overheat mechanic.
Weapon, Attachment and TTK Changes
Weapon damage and fire rates were adjusted to keep TTK constant across different ammo types, as well as reduce chip damage and slightly reduce TTK across the board.
Weapons now have slight horizontal recoil to make them harder to use outside their intended damage ranges. To compensate, every attachment now has a weight value that reduces recoil, increases ADS time and increases holster time.
Attachment buffs are also ~2x stronger and attachment nerfs are ~1.5x harsher, making attachments more meaningful to equip.
Light and Heavy ammo types also have new sound effects, created by Punch Deck:
New Equipment Attachments
Disruptors, Extractors and C4 have new attachment categories that change their shape and effect:
- C4 explosion shapes: Spherical for large destruction vs Tunnel for breaching thick walls
- Extractor shapes: 3x3x20 for Tunneling vs 9x9x1 for Slicing
- Disruptor shapes: 4x1x1 Single Beam vs 3x3x2 Quad Beam
- Disruptor effects: Damage, Scan and Slow
New Model Lighting
With two extra lines of shader code, weapons in bare minimum look much better!
New Ship
The ship has been expanded and is now destructible, which makes it easier to test structures and attack Crash from a distance.
Ping Rework and Doritos
Pinging locations is now simplified into one keybind, which pings enemies by showing an orange triangle (Dorito) above their head, or places a marker on the block you're looking at. You can have two markers active at once, and there is no cooldown on enemy pings.
Enemies will also automatically have an orange triangle above their head when they take damage. Triangles above enemy heads are not visible through the map.
Custom Voice Chat Server
Previously the game used Epic's voice chat servers, which turned out to have a 16 player limit. This meant 8 players in each match were unable to appreciate the beauty of raytraced proximity voice chat.
We've ditched Epic's VC and wrote our own, which accommodates everyone in the server.
Mapping Update
The limit of 63 unique block types has been increased to 255 and all reserved indices have been removed. You can now freely create maps without worrying about technical constraints. Unfortunately custom lobbies have been removed as we don't have enough servers to go around, so you can only play your maps in singleplayer.
The JSON format for textures is also simplified, check out our Mapping Discord for full details.
Grass
And lastly, this update adds grass that you can hide in! You'll find grass on Arena maps, Ancient Crossing, Base Omicron and Shrine
Newsletter
If you've made it this far through the post we think you'll enjoy our email newsletter, where we share dev updates and announce new games:
Full Changelog
I've reached the character limit. The changelog will be in the comments!
Changed files in this update