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Offroad: Dead Planet

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Offroad: Dead Planet

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Offroad: Dead Planet is an offroading adventure game. Play as a young driver, journeying to Earth and unwilling to abandon the old planet to ruin. Experience complex vehicle physics, dynamic terrain, soft tires, a reactive driver, trash to pick up and robots, all while carving your own path.

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Most popular community and official content for the past week. (?)

The seventeenth update: Optimization, Upgrading and Refinement

Feb 22

First -- thank you to all the encouraging people out there & in our discord who are enjoying the game where it's at and encouraging us to bring it to its potential. It's been a little bit since we've pushed an update to the game and that's because we made some bold choices to get the game where it needs to be. Taking in people's experiences and looking at what we need to do to bring it to completion, we landed on a few aspects that need extra focus. Some of which are optimization, stability and performance.

So, we tore out some insides which makes almost everything not work until we get it back together. Horrifying? Yes, but very worth it. Now we're in the process of upgrading a few key aspects like the terrain, how we handle detail levels of objects and surfaces and technical aspects of the vehicles' structure. These should make a high impact. I'll go into a little detail on some of these below for those interested.

Our next goal on the horizon is to get the upgraded version into a stable update for the game - the next post I do, as soon as it's ready, will detail what we've upgraded exactly. It will be posted along with a game update that includes most of the below changes & optimizations, once they're done.

While we aren't expecting insane miracles in terms of performance increases, initial results are very promising. We're taking a deep look at what optimizations we can make without sacrificing key gameplay and executing what is reasonable, prioritizing non-loss optimization. From this, we determined a few areas that could get the largest optimizations: Terrain, object rendering detail and vehicle structuring.

{ Terrain Rendering }

We redid the rendering system for the terrain, giving us more control as well as more speed in rendering. This cut a major base cost of performance and while we're having to rebuild certain aspects of the terrain's rendering system, the performance benefits were significant. We unified the terrain's visuals with object and plant visuals, which has a performance benefit to rendering and strain on the graphics card but it also let us put things like wind, wetness, dust, snow all into the same system of rendering. Which opened up much easier paths to implementing things like rain, snow, dust storms, etc.

{ Soft Terrain }

We've improved how vehicles interact with non-solid parts of the terrain, like mud, sand or snow. We have deeper control of the physics of the soft tires interaction with "soft" parts of the terrain - this will directly improve the experiences of getting stuck (or not) in mud or sliding in deep sand. It's possible further performance benefits can be gained from the dynamic terrain system, we'll see.

{ Object Rendering and Collision }

We have gone through about 75% of the objects in the game, optimizing them individually to meet a new unified standard we designed to allow for a spread of graphics quality options as well as optimized rendering across all options levels. Improvements to them include unifying their texture rendering method, swapping low quality/needlessly heavy models for more reasonable ones, making sure every object is uniformly setup with various levels of detail to help with lower end graphics settings as well as distant objects not needlessly rendering detail and lastly, making a system to determine the needed collision detail level of objects in the areas based on their size to keep the collision on objects like rocks precise everywhere that it is needed and looser where it's not.

{ Vehicles }

Lastly, we found ways to structure the vehicles that will allow them to save possibly over 50% of their base performance cost per active vehicle. This is huge for optimization but also in terms of multiple vehicle support, it makes it more likely we'll be able to have multiple vehicles be a part of gameplay instead of restricting to one active vehicle at a time. We'll see how it comes together but either way, I'm happy with the way vehicle optimizations are shaping up.

---

Thanks for reading! We're excited about the optimizations and solidification of systems we're using for the game. It feels like a drastic refinement - we didn't exactly expect to need to do it but.. once we identified it as required and started in on it, it's proving to be the correct choice.

[discord.gg]

Offroad: Dead Planet

Demo impressions

I discovered the demo today, so gave it a quick try. Overall, I kind of like it! It's my type of gameplay, coming from games like BeamNG, Pure Rock Crawling, Spintires & MudRunner. This one seems to have an element of survival & terra forming thrown in as well. Good concept. Here's a few things I would suggest for improvement: * Graphics need more optimizing and more graphics options would be useful. I have found some decent medium with the sliders. I assume the full game will have more options. * ...

Unster

Jun 26, 2023 @ 10:43am

General Discussions

The sixteenth update: Updated with new area, two new vehicles and more!

Dec 16, 2023

{ Status }

This is a heavy update which includes many, many fixes and improvements as well as a substantial new level and two new vehicles - a pickup and a big heavy 6 wheel truck for hauling.

We're so thrilled with the people playing the game and the feedback we're getting, particularly those of you in our discord. We really appreciate all the support.

We were planning on doing updates every 2-4 weeks but as we go, I think we're leaning more towards more frequent updates that are smaller. We work on this game every day and we work hard. We want the people who are enjoying playing the game to be able to feel that as much as possible.

Check out our changelog below.

{ Major Content Additions }

- Boghill Island ... a challenging area that requires trail building, pumping water to reduce flood levels, a lot of hauling, rock crawling to get suppliers to the island and a big 100+ supply desalination facility to build
- a very heavy, large 6-wheeler truck
- a light pickup truck

{ Changelog }

- add suspension spring rate (stiffness) and smoothness (damper) to vehicle customization panel on vehicle select
- added waterway sector on earth
- options menu updated with more options and now has tabs
- object and terrain visual improvements as well as large rendering optimizations
- expanded terrain options for better control
- add water reflections option to graphics options
- add bush shadows toggle option
- add space sector to map
- add engine water flooded indicator gauge and warning light
- add tide indicator to time-of-day panel in areas with tides that change over the day
- add map highlighter icons for some core objectives that were missing them
- improve trash smog visuals to be more prominent as well as make collection effect better
- add vehicle select images for truck and ataire pickup truck
- fix LOD object blending on some rocks that were causing flickering on them
- add Talos character
- fix jittering of vehicle parts that have broken off your vehicle
- fix unique namer internal tool to correctly update object indicies
- wheels and wheel hubs, along with other vehicle parts, correctly update torque path when they're broken off (wheels no longer get torque if they've fallen off)
- steer bar now breaks off when axle breaks
- add and improve character dialog in several areas
- add more character portraits
- add pilot core objective to Village Water area (helping him unlocks the new area)
- make sector buttons on the map show if they have a new area in them (or reachable through them)
- improve teleport glow effect to have a disintegration visual + able to apply to all objects easily so no more supplies that dont glow
- improve map visual material
- add portrait of character you'll be playing as on the deploy button of areas on the map
- add sector unlocking mechanics
- gravel bags added as a supply (in boghill) and can be used to dump gravel on the ground to repair trails or muddy areas
- supply spawners now display supply's weight and total weight that's on your vehicle
- fix to supply remaining notification when constructing large buildings
- camp/sleep hint information doesnt try to show on title screen when night happens on the main menu
- objectives badge on map fixed to show correctly when on a locked level in the map
- supply preview objects improved to not show context hint and some other functionality
- system options added to title screen, as well as system-wide options now save differently than individual an save game's options
- credits added to title screen
- added traveler 2000 series differentials that are not controllable via the dashboard but keep their set state (open or locked)
- add new transfer cases that are also not modifiable by the driver via the dashboard, allowing vehicles to have limited options in relation to 2 or 4 wheel drive
- tooltips added to vehicle customization options
- improved mouse over tooltip UI visuals and readability
- add new terrain type for rocky islands/earth
- add new transmission for pickup, the bluecat reg1
- make nav towers that must have a navigation beacon supply installed in order to get a supplier to the area
- in progress build zones can now save their progress if you save/exit near enough to a telepad allowing for taking breaks during large constructions (we'll eventually make the game fully save state at any time but this is a good inbetween until we add that full save state ability)
- add support for different characters to be playable in certain areas
- exit and save panel improved with more feedback and information
- acceleration on vehicles is no longer applied when auto-braking while trying to change directions (so your engine won't rev anymore when first braking)
- axles now can have variable width to support different vehicle parts (this will later be added as a tunable option on certain axles)
- improve crawl and full accel buttons to apply minimum gas pedal to move or floored regardless of speed (default bindings ctrl/shift --- this will eventually get hints and game options to allow different precision of gas pedal control)
- fix issue where brakes wouldn't apply when driving at higher speeds in lower gears
- minor fixes to mowers chassis alignment
- automatic gear speed control on vehicles works for forward gears as well (this will later get an option to set how it behaves, particularly when we add support for pedals/controllers/wheels/shifters)
- bushes no longer collide incorrectly with certain parts of vehicles (which caused high damage sometimes in a way that didnt make sense when pushing through bushes)
- improve failcase for physics when calculations take too long
- allow mouse buttons to be bound to controls in bindings options
- fix a memory leak when rebinding a control is cancelled
- update text on stuck detector to be more direct
- drill part in village water area correctly behaves after mission is completed (also fixes some other objects that are reset when you reprint)
- large optimization in how rocks are rendered in areas
- fix to how tires generate foam when in water
- add new transmission and engine for large truck(s)
- fix dashboard state to carry over correctly when reprinting a vehicle
- improvements to how exhaust from an engine is calculated, needs more improvement
- fix auto reversing issue where you shift back into the last forward gear quickly, creating a jerking around effect when trying to reverse sometimes, particularly in mud
- hitch auto-respawner fixed to not lock your vehicle in place
- fix player animation state change issue when trying to stand in water that would sometimes cause very chaotic behavior
- improve performance of data accessing, helping several places where the game would jump
- fix headlight state bug when reprinting where the state of your headlamp/headlights didnt work correctly
- improve construction laser visuals
- fixed/optimized many meshes of objects that do not move, like rocks that may have appeared distorted or low detail incorrectly
- add new log supplies for some very long logs

------

Thanks for reading! Next up is adding more areas for Maya to continue her journey to building a vehicle, getting picking up objects and some recovery tools + listening, improving, expanding.

[discord.gg]

Offroad: Dead Planet

Now Available in Early Access!

Nov 16, 2023

{ Status }

The game is NOW available in Early Access!

We hope you have a blast & let us know what you think! We'll be updating regularly during Early Access with new content, features, fixes and improvements. We're really looking forward to people playing the game and to seeing people experience all the work we've put in :]

We also want to say that we're very grateful to those of you who have been following along, whether you've been talking with us in discord, commenting on steam or vigilantly lurking - we see you and we appreciate your support. We're a tiny team, we love what we're making and we're putting everything we have into it so we really appreciate you.

Despite this being a release, we love changelogs so here are the changes for this most recent update and release.

{ Changelog }

- add the first early access only area, "Neighborhood Water"
- add completion feedback popups for 100%ing and core objective completing
- add volume sliders to options
- make options (graphics, sound, bindings etc) save per system and independent of save slots
- fix powerpack so that it has a cool laser and shows up on your back correctly (only when entering a level with no powered telepads)
- add a lot of character images and dialog
- improve performance of some ways we are accessing our game data, removing frame drops and/or jumps in certain scenarios by two orders of magnitude
- add initial visual representations of drive shafts
- fix progress and completion counting to only reflect areas currently available in early access (this makes it so your progress in the pause menu reflects the % of CURRENTLY available content you've done. so checking back after an update, this progress will drop again to show you how much more there is to do)
- fix to how we control the context interaction selector (no more talking to people from farther away than is possible :] )
- driver's food/nutrition level will always set to 50% if it is below that when you fully reprint the driver, keeping food only a dire need when performing LONG tasks that require no reprinting
- food and starvation indicator stays on screen when you're in any starvation state that might cause fainting or movement/consciousness effects to the driver
- drill part extraction fixed (and resetting of certain key objects on reprinting works correctly now, including on the machine seekers until you disable them)
- visual moving indicator on map for areas you haven't ever entered, helping guide toward new content (should help getting your bearings again during the process of early access as areas are being added)
- map shown after new and continued games have a quiet radio off to the side
- trees and bushes correctly saving their positions and state so they forever stay altered from your trails
- axles bend based on the axles total health % with more severe bending when they're heavily damaged already + impact intensity still players a role in the amount of bend
- add an area validator tool for us to better check and make sure everything is as it should be before we upload a build (this is very important because we're our own testers)
- terrain and plant data has better version control so we can wipe progress on them easily if we make significant updates to an area during early access, though we'll try to avoid doing this
- construction objectives now hide correctly so that if they're represented more specifically as another objective, they won't show up anymore as a construction objective (ex: "building the bridge" as an objective won't also show up as "0 of 1 constructions built")
- scannable vehicle parts in an area now have a unique icon to show their location
- fix map zooming when scrolling in the pause menu, however we are aware this accidently made it so the map doesnt zoom when you're mousing over an icon...
- add debug controls for hiding all hud elements for nicer screenshots (this may become something a player can do in options too)
- updates to sector map art to give it a little more detail
- bring down the brightness of supply spawner lights when you're selecting and placing supplies into your vehicle
- fix a small error with some wires that would cause some weird behavior when they got power through them
- a fix to supply spawners that made them activate right away when you continue your game (looked like randomly zooming the camera when you first spawn)
- improve collisions on certain rocks that needed it
- hide the time trial hud automatically again after a time trial is successfully completed

------

Thanks for reading! Next up is listening, improving, expanding. >:]

[discord.gg]

Offroad: Dead Planet

Updated Demo Impressions

Seeing that the game is out, I tried the updated demo. I can't say it's any more optimized than the earlier demo. Even on lowest settings I can't hit 60 fps. It's in the 50's. On higher settings, I get 30's. The game seems to be GPU-bound because I tried your test of pausing the game and the fps isn't any better. It briefly gets even worse as the camera zooms out. Hitting 60 fps shouldn't be a problem with these graphics as they are rather basic, and as I said the last time, I have no problem gettin...

Unster

Nov 17, 2023 @ 8:25pm

General Discussions

Interesting Game.....

So I only just today came across this game while browsing for something new to play and noticed this had a demo so I was curious and gave it a try , After playing for a bit Its actually a pretty cool little game what draws me in the most is the physics of the vehicles they actually feel pretty good especially the tractor you start with , I also really like the obstacle type terrain you have to navigate, The frogs were weird and unexpected but still interesting/helpful/and different and pretty cool as well....

SmarOneNine

Mar 24 @ 6:51am

General Discussions

My game crashes

I cannot get past the loading screen after selection a mission, it crashes everytime. I tried to play this demo few weeks ago and uninstalled after my game kept crashing. Then yesterday i saw this game again featured in some Steam fest and decided to give it another try but it's the same again. As an offroad games fan this game looks very appealing to me and wish i could play this and give some feedback...

Titumir

Jul 9, 2023 @ 4:12pm

General Discussions

Unplayable

game is very unplayable and lags badly , please optemise performance to play on lower end gpus realy would love to test the game out but not able due to bad lag please

ZeNN

Sep 28, 2023 @ 4:54am

General Discussions

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