Here is some of the contents I got from an email from the Miner Wars team. As of late there hasn't been too many changes to the alpha demo build of Miner Wars. But they say an update is coming soon and listed below are a list of the possible features that could be available.
As of yet, we’re still unable to give an exact date, but keep one’s nose plucked for early July (hint, hint).
However here are some details for those of you who are disinclined to pluck noses, prick-up ears and peel eyes.
Introducing some of the upcoming features:
- The in-game editor - build your own space ship, space station, any sort of space-like edifice you can think of. These structures will be made from prefab modules, and in the future we’re looking to feature ‘total destructibility’ for these objects.
A next generation renderer, featuring:
- Image Space LOD (Level of Detail) – seamless LOD with no popping artifacts
- Deferred rendering, unlimited light sources!
- Tons of optimizations!
- Screen space ambient occlusion
- Dynamic shadows
- Upgraded shaders, looking even more gorgeous
- New render quality setting - EXTREME – designed for newer hardware
- New render quality setting - LOW – designed for older hardware
- Backward compatibility with older hardware - Pixel Shader 2.0
- Converted to XNA 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010
- New installer and auto-updater / launcher with P2P optimizations
Is this too do with the online game and have they mention anything about the single player game. ❓
I should probably move the forum up to the SP/MP area for now because right now Miner Wars 2081 is the SP/MP game Keen Software House is working on and the MMO will come after (probably depending on the success of the SP game). Imho, I think there will be a delay past the Q1 2012 estimate they are putting out for release date. I haven't seen too much improvement in the alpha game engine in months and in the current state it is in it definitely is not ready just because of the game world is not really populated and not alive. The physics and mining aspects do seem solid.