Welcome to our 48th newsletter on Star Atlas! This is a weekly newsletter, published by Aephia Industries, that is focused entirely on Star Atlas. Here we try to aggregate all the newsworthy tidbits that were dropped by the team throughout the past week.
The major news this week: *The pre-alpha release (R1) of the ****Volant Studio Showroom is here; ****you can download it on the *Epic Games Store! The team announced its release during their second #426Live event on Twitch this past Thursday. There were of course more reveals and insights shared during that event, so read on!
426Live
On Thursday, September 29th, exactly 10 weeks after the first such events, the ATMTA team hosted another 426Live! This one was titled “Now You Know” (NYK), an apparent tongue-in-cheek reference to the title of the previous one: “If You Know, You Know” (IYKYK).
The show contained several segments, stitched together by Ash (Metaverse Media Host) & Santi (Community Director), which are broken down below!
Introduction
Michael (Co-founder & CEO) looked back at the Rebirth campaign and recited a few of his favourite quotes, before going over the program for the event.
Path to Decentralisation
Dan Park (legal council) came on first and presented a brief overview of how the team envisioned creating a sustainable governance model. To that end, he went over the various elements that make up the framework and that should prove to make all of this both sustainable and fun.
You can read more about this topic in the article the team shared and/or download the Sustainable Governance Whitepaper that was released during the event!
ATLAS Locker
Next up was Michael Wagner himself, introducing the ATLAS Locker to us and also spending some time going over their reasoning for the introduction of marketplace fees.
You can read more about this release in the team’s article and visit the ATLAS Locker yourself on the governance section of the website.
Graphic Novel - CORE
Tim McBurnie (author/illustrator/lead artist) introduced us to the setting of CORE, the Star Atlas comic that will be released later this year. The storyline is set before the Convergence war, so more than 100 years before the current timeline.
The comic will be distributed both via NFTs (available on both Magic Eden & the Galactic Marketplace) and via traditional, non-web3 comic readers, so everybody will have easy access to them!
You can subscribe to a dedicated newsletter about the comic, after which you will get access to issue #0 which serves as a short teaser and introduction.
F-Kit (aka Foundation Kit)
Jim Carter (Principle Engineer) came on afterwards, to talk about their release of F-Kit for Unreal Engine 5 developers. He discussed their reasoning for going with their own wallet solution for the game and went into how it could be used by other developers out there, both from the community and other projects.
The team is hoping that the community and other entities will work on their own worlds (/planets) that in the future could be linked up to Star Atlas to really create an interconnected metaverse.
More information can be found in the team’s dedicated article on this, or you can dive right away into the code at GitHub.
Star Atlas Fleet Viewer
Then Mo Yazdani (Product Manager) appeared for a special announcement and surprise release. The ship-viewer that will be used in SCREAM (the upcoming web-browser based, group strategy mini-game) had been spun out into its own product (for now), allowing everybody to view their fleet on the web, without needing to delist from Faction Fleet, and with support for Ledgers!
You can find the Hangar Module on the renewed website!
Volant Studio Showroom
Last, but not least, Danny Floyd (Co-founder & CPO) ran us through a demo of the Showroom, highlighting a lot of the consideration that went into creating it, while heaping praise on the 5th iteration of the Unreal Engine for being so smooth to work with and rendering such amazing detail.
You can download the game here (see below for more info).
One more thing
After the six segments were over, Ash and Santi returned with Michael. Then he made the next big announcement of the day: ATMTA made a deal with Epic to get their game into the Epic Games Store!
Before wrapping up the event, he went over the distribution of access keys, for which the team planned something special.
More on this and the showroom can be found below!
Conclusion
For those who kept up, the event did not contain many surprises, except of course the release of the SCREAM Fleet Viewer. But of course, surprises were also not what the event was about. The launch of the first ever Unreal Engine 5 game module marks a huge milestone in the development of Star Atlas!
If you missed the event, we composed a slightly more extensive summary than the above offered. Alternatively, you could check out one of these other sources:
- Full recording
- Recap video (by Metaverse Explorer)
Showroom
The team released their very first Unreal Engine 5 module: The “pre-alpha” (or R1) of the Volant Studio Showroom, and it’s available to download in the Epic Games Store!
Below are a few tidbits we thought are worth sharing:
Connecting Your Wallet
Because the game has its own wallet, you can not simply connect your Phantom wallet (or another wallet) and go. To see your ships within the showroom you’ll need to either:
- insert the seed phrase of your existing hot wallet
- create a new wallet and transfer ships there
If your ships are stored on a Ledger (cold wallet) then you are currently unable to view your ships directly. However, support for Ledger devices is coming sooner, rather than later!
Easter Eggs
The game does not contain any easter eggs that have to do with the Graphic Novel (yet - as was previously suggested), but it does contain a small statue that is hidden somewhere on the map, that allows you to change your skin. It’s not necessarily in the same location as someone else’s, as there appear to be several different locations where it can pop up.
Gated Access
Because this first release of the showroom is the very first iteration, lacking actual gameplay, and because it’s the first time anyone is able to experience the first tidbit of Star Atlas content, the team has decided to gatekeep access to the module. Only those who have enlisted their ships in Faction Fleet (SCORE) for more than a week, will find an access code in their profile that allows them to download the game. If you have enlisted your ships for a much longer period of time, there is a good chance you might have access to multiple such codes, allowing you to open access to friends and family as well. So, while this intentionally favours long-term supporters over newcomers, there will likely be codes available for everyone, at least at this early stage. If you somehow can’t get your hands on one, enlisting a single ship in Faction Fleet for 7 days will solve this problem.
As it’s not super straightforward to retrieve your access key(s), we wrote a short guide to help out.
Floyd Liner
For those visiting the showroom with someone else’s key, there will still be a ship you can summon and marvel at! The Floyd Liner, made famous through its appearance in the cinematic trailer, is available in the Showroom as the default summonable ship. It’s not an NFT asset and it looks like the team is planning to keep it that way (for now).
Articles
The team composed a number of articles to help people on their way:
- How to enter the pre-alpha Star Atlas Pre-Alpha Showroom
- The Showroom - A Journey Through a Handcrafted Metaverse
- Star Atlas Launches Unreal Engine 5-powered Pre-Alpha Showroom on the Epic Games Store
Updated Website
With all these releases the team also saw fit to update the play.staratlas.com website in order to provide easy access to the various sub-sites of Star Atlas. They overhauled the landing page, adding an accordion containing pages for various sections, including one for the Showroom, Fleet Viewer and Governance. From those pages you can then quickly navigate to their respective websites.
SCREAM - Wallet Approval Solution
After the event, there was a special get-together for the press and the presenters, and it was there that Michael revealed -in response to a question- that the team is working on a solution for seamless gameplay in SCREAM.
In the past, Michael has been pretty open about the fact that playing SCREAM with a Ledger (cold storage) would be very tedious. The amount of approvals one needs to go through while playing the game is significant. Even for a hot wallet, it would quickly become annoying, but then at least it’s only one mouse click.
However, since then the team has been working hard on finding a better solution. What they came up with is a flow that allows users to go through a one-time connection that needs to be approved, after which all other transactions are auto-signed during gameplay. The best part here is that your assets never even leave your (hardware) wallet!
State of the Economy
On Friday, September 30th, the team released their second State of the Economy report, covering the third Quarter of 2022.
You can find this report, its appendix and previous reports in the newsroom section of the official website.
Solana Outage
On Friday, on the heels of the 426Live event, the Solana chain, unfortunately, experienced another outage that lasted a little over 6 hours. This time the root cause seemed to have been a validator that was misbehaving by running two instances in parallel and producing two blocks for the same slot. This confused other validators and Solana’s consensus layer halted further execution so the humans could figure stuff out. Interestingly, there should’ve been safeguards in place to prevent something like this from happening, so further investigation will be needed to get to the bottom of this.