Void Horizon dev blog

Playtesting co-op over Tailscale

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Co-op runs over a direct connection on UDP port 37711, and Tailscale carries it, so nobody needs to forward ports. The host installs Tailscale, starts Void Horizon, opens Co-op and picks Host. The first time, Windows asks to allow the game; allow it on private networks. Friends install Tailscale, join the same tailnet, pick Join and type the host's Tailscale address (the 100.x.y.z number shown in the Tailscale tray), leaving the port at 37711. If joining fails, run tailscale ping with the host's name: if that works but the game does not connect, the host's firewall is blocking UDP 37711. Rejoining a campaign after a disconnect is still being tested, so try that last and send a bug report if it misbehaves.

Overnight Oct 25 to 26: the prologue returns, real maps, swimming, and an Evil Eye curse

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

The Ark-fall prologue is back as an optional start: every new campaign asks whether you begin at the Ark's fall or wake in Cryo Bay Seven, you can skip it any time, and your choices in it become your character's backstory. The map now has real system, planet and location charts with a clear label at every zoom level. Hallyu Sanctuary got a painted horizon instead of grey haze and a pool you can swim in, with a breath gauge. Evil Eye is now an area curse: a violet gaze wave that makes enemies deal less damage and take more. Dialogue portraits now show the actual character you are talking to, ten quests were rewritten to say plainly who wants what and why, and every em dash is gone from the game's text. We also fixed the shed-the-flesh hang (16 seconds down to a tenth of a second), arm swing while running with a weapon, followers running backwards, missing-tangent log spam, quest targets you could not reach, and unreadable enemy starship fire.

Overnight Oct 24–25: weapons with their own voice, a forged Council cockpit, faster builds

Sun, 25 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Every one of the 39 weapons now sounds and looks like itself when it fires, and reloading hands sit properly on the gun. Warp Control opens a small rift whose whips grab enemies; Energy Control builds up, fires a soft beam and releases a shockwave with glowing floor cracks and textured debris. The Council starship cockpit was rebuilt from six newly forged parts — screens set in a gold-trimmed console, solid side walls and a clear forward view — and the always-on controls box is gone: a small card appears when you sit down or take control, fades away, and H brings it back. Power attribute bonuses now all grow at +1 per 2 power levels (Matter Creation adds Thought), shown on the sheet as base (effective). We also fixed a crash when ship models streamed in, and sped up our own pipeline: merge to playable is about 4–8 minutes and the Rust test build is nearly twice as fast.

Oct 23–24: weapons with real fire modes, stealth, every quest checked, and releases without the bake

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Guns now fire differently: semi, burst, full-auto, charge and beam modes, generous magazines balanced per quality tier (pistols hold 30), quick reloads you can move through, and full stats with a comparison against what you carry in every buy, inventory and crafting window. A new stealth stance lets a skilled infiltrator walk past unaware guards that would spot a novice on the same approach. Pilot now sharpens handling and adds up to 30% hull damage reduction for vehicles, walkers and ships, and Life Creation and Warp Control gained ship roles. Every subpower grows with its level, skill lists show your trained and bonus ranks, and Choose Your Body shows all 301 portraits with the body you pick being the one you play. All 184 quests now pass a live sweep of their routes, rewards, journal and saves, and that sweep gates every release. Behind the scenes, releases no longer run the 3–4 hour scene bake: collision now comes from cheap per-asset boxes built at load, so a fix can go from merge to a playable build in about 25 minutes.

Oct 22–23: two weapon sets, ships you can lose, safer saves

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

You now carry two weapon sets, ranged and melee, both on the character sheet. Q cycles ranged, melee and power, and in power mode the mouse casts your power: tap for the quick attack, hold for the heavy. F draws your stowed blade. Losing your ship in space is now dangerous: the blast either destroys your body and leaves you a ghost, or throws you clear in an ejection, and holding Eject gets you out before the end. From ghost form you can reform as a different build, or leave your body on purpose. Life Creation gains a radiating heal on hold that washes over allies, while a tap still summons. Dodge is Shift plus a direction and keeps chaining while your stamina lasts. Conjuring an item with Matter Creation now starts a cooldown and costs stamina, so it is no longer infinite money. Saves ask before they delete or replace anything, and deleting the save you are playing never touches the live game. Every power specialty now states its effect in numbers when you advance it.

Overnight: ghosts that travel, gear you go back for, third person again

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Ghost Form now follows the rulebook. When your body is destroyed you drift as a ghost, and the new body forms wherever your ghost is, not back where you fell. Ghosts fly slowly (Space and Ctrl to rise and sink) and can travel the chart as normal, but a ghost cannot pilot a ship. Dying now costs something: everything you carried drops into a pale-blue gear case where you fell, marked on the deck map. Walk back and recover it, or let a friend grab it for you in co-op (G). The game starts in third person again: the first-person view needs more work and hides too much while you move. You still wake in the cryo tank in first person, then the view hands off to third. Also overnight: Rhea Calloway's knotted elbow is fixed, and a freed NavComp heals like any immortal.

A minute inside Void Horizon

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Recorded in-engine at 1080p60. The second cut gives space shots a starfield, planet and nebula, and avoids the cryo hall’s misplaced light strips. The player has native controls, starts muted and offers MP4 and WebM versions.

Overnight: a rebuilt Muster Deck, a real gBay market, a cleaner menu and windows you can see out of

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Merged #559–#580: seed solver v3 so releases bake again (#559); server authority slice C, integration and the real-scene session (#560, #562, #571); concept-art sets for 55 scenes and a fairer review rule (#561, #566, #570, #574, #576); forged cryo tank and pods only in stasis facilities (#563); contract rewards rebalanced (#564); KTX2 colour fix for A01 and the battlewagon (#565, #567); snap-together component building design (#568, #578, #580); Muster Deck hall and lighting (#569, #573); new start menu (#572); cockpit glass (#575); gBay market (#577); floating light slabs removed from the Ark cryo hall (#579).

Power concepts: casts, attacks and transformations

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Browse 52 casting panels and 57 new attack, special, transformation, form-driver and weapon studies in the <a href="experiments.html#power-concepts">Power concepts gallery</a>. These are visual concepts, including some abilities still planned for gameplay.

Oct 14: loading drops from minutes to seconds, pets join the fight, and new sandbox modes

Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Zero-load work ran across the whole game, using the same idea as open-world games like Palworld: load what's near you in the background instead of stopping the game. Ship models for launch and docking now load ahead of time (a 860 ms stall became 4 ms), cockpits load while you walk to the ship so the hatch opens straight into a ready interior, and crowds, sounds and enemy groups all load off the main thread.\n\nLife Creation now summons a creature and Matter Creation an android. Each follows you, fights alongside you, and can be dismissed or recalled, and enemies now target them too. Electrokinesis can overload vehicles and starships, briefly knocking out their weapons; a high-level immortal can take down a Dreadnought.\n\nThe Combat Sandbox has two new modes: pick a vehicle or starship and your foes, then fight in a dedicated arena and restart instantly.\n\nThe world looks and moves better too. Ground surfaces are now real materials (sand ripples, rock, deck plating) instead of the old contour pattern, waterfalls move, feet plant on slopes and steps instead of floating, and the game draws 3–7× fewer triangles with no visible loss. Under the hood, Linux and Windows now produce identical fights tick for tick, and background loading is thread-safe.

Oct 13: a streaming launcher, co-op that fights together, and difficulty you control

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

The new Windows launcher installs the full game from our asset server with resume, verification, pause and rollback. Checking an up-to-date install now takes under a second, and installs take about the game's own size on disk instead of double.

Co-op got deeper: melee (light and heavy), power casts and parries now run in lockstep on every seat, verified in real two- and four-player network sessions, and the same fight now plays out identically on Linux and Windows, tick for tick.

You can take a campaign character into the Combat Sandbox and bring the XP back. A new Difficulty tab offers Story, Normal, Hard and Brutal presets plus sliders for player and enemy health and damage, saved with each scenario — in co-op, the host's settings apply.

Also landing: crafting costs (Matter Creation is free below Cronium quality; benches charge half), ghost form is now truly untargetable, electrokinesis overloads vehicles and starships, every build ships its full set of sound effects, and the crash-report prompt is a proper dialog.

Bodies that flop, bodies that tear

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

How it works: the game decides at the killing blow whether a body flops or tears (about 10%, rising to 35% for energy, blast and overkill hits), and the hit location picks the cut: neck, elbow or knee. The body's triangles are split by bone, the severed part gets its own skeleton and colliders, and both cut faces get a dark-red cap that follows the edge. We never stretch skin across a gap: a part is either attached or fully separate.\n\nIn the release build on an RTX 5090, frame times match the previous build in sandbox, firefight and the 100-unit battle, with tears firing live in all three.\n\nWhat's next: smoother neck caps, more enemy bodies that can tear safely, and a fix for the arm and shoulder skin on the whole cast. Today's investigation traced it to how body weights are copied onto each character, and also found that our animation clips never used the forearm twist bones. Both fixes are in progress.

Oct 11: every power casts, characters explain the puzzles, and frame-time hunting

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

A big overnight push. All twelve immortal powers now run through one shared charge, release and impact system, each with its own colour and silhouette; Gravity Control gets a distortion dome you can read from ten metres, and Influence and Shapeshift took new palettes so no two powers share a colour. Quest hints now come from characters: in Cryo Bay Seven, Warden Auren explains the relay puzzle in plain language, every hint is saved as a note under its quest, and the quest log can hold several active story chains at once. Cryo Bay Seven and the Forgotten District got brighter, more on-concept lighting, then real geometry: armoured, occupied cryo capsules lining the aisles, and the district's arched gate, carved facade and cannon wreckage. Starships now mount faction weapons and can strafe and bombard. On performance, four passes halved scene primitives, added body LODs and removed 50 to 130 ms hitches on first hits; the 120 fps target in the 50-enemy firefight is still ahead of us, and a scene bake pipeline (occlusion, lightmaps, impostors, merged cells) is in progress to make scenes richer and cheaper at once. Animation fixes for climbing (bowed knees, hands through the face) are rolling out across the cast.

Cockpits, a vaulted Ark and 182 quests checked

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Ships: every faction has a pocket bridge, and in flight F6 switches from the chase camera to a cockpit with a canopy view, live radar and targeting screens and status lights. Quick placeholder shells, built to be replaced by full interiors later.

Scenes: a shared scene kit of CC0 pieces now dresses the campaign. Real walls and rocks around the Combat Sandbox, animated brazier flames and mounted strip lights, and an architecture pass of arches, vault ribs, bulkheads and pillars for the Ark, Cryo Bay Seven and the Forgotten District. Pieces are instanced and budgeted per triangle and material.

Quests: an automated sweep walks every branch of all 182 campaign quests through the real quest runtime. It checks that every step is reachable, nothing softlocks, rewards pay exactly once and a save made mid-quest resumes correctly. It found and fixed broken gates, misplaced quest givers and quests offered before their prerequisites.

Also fixed: the asset graph no longer pulls 43 unrelated reference images into release builds.

Checking fresh startup caches against Main

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

The corrected-context cold candidate and independent Main control have identical 2748 model transforms, 19 hull payloads and 1158 stored placement results. The earlier bare-location bake produced a different ground input, so its seeds replayed only 2 placements through the player route. Matching the scenario fixes that input closure without relaxing cache keys. Every original native tank, drain, hatch, walk-out and camera assertion passes. Three additional story placements and one 193.832 ms hull cook remain. These are headless/Dummy-audio source measurements; physical audio, visible GPU playtesting, all 284 locations, packaged inclusion and published-installer verification remain pending. Both cold controls retain the same two dummy-renderer material errors. The command-bridge straight-walk fixture still fails. No live web/game deployment or whole-game smoothness is claimed.

Sharing hand data across weapon changes

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

This caches immutable weighted hand inputs. Each evaluation still reads the current skeleton pose, and each weapon retains its own grip calculation. The actual equipment sequence and capture invalidation checks pass without lowering contact-search quality or extending stale reuse. The CPU result does not establish an overall frame-rate gain. Blade contact checks pass. The original two pistol capsule failures and three rifle shoulder-stock failures produce byte-identical baseline and candidate logs and remain open. Full motion and global smoothness still need their own acceptance.

Settings returns to the same world

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Settings now pauses the existing world instead of rebuilding it. A monitored native test verified Back and Escape with physical movement afterward; separate production-method tests checked live NPC positions and world instance identities. Targeted music checks verified unchanged streams, deterministic changed-score samples, queued updates and safe cancellation.

The graphics and world test used an explicitly selected Dummy audio driver because the host had no active audio output endpoint. Physical audio output and full-length music suites remain unverified. All window sizes, existing Compatibility rendering grain, faded cryo text and the long initial RISE load remain outside this correction. This note describes tested source, not a newly published game build.

Bounded release validation

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

The launcher and menu-label corrections are merged source changes. The guard keeps its whole owned process tree under observation until it finishes, while a timeout applies only to that job. Real game export, installation and boot verification remain pending. Main still needs the separately validated cache-seed consumer, baker and export inclusion before the next game build can be published.

Remote play follows the published build

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Source fixtures cover clean consumer hosts without a publisher key, a dry run with no downloads or launches, and installer failures. Native Windows PowerShell also verifies literal options, streamed output and exact failure propagation. The launcher source correction merged in PR 250. A new game build still needs publication, a real installer test and a passing boot check before it becomes live.

Distinct labels for the two character tools

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

The duplicate-label regression fails on the previous menu and passes with the corrected names. Native menu input dispatches each label to its original scene. This focused correction merged in PR 249; wider gameplay performance and character-motion work remain in development.

Combat arena tests, on video

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

These were recorded in the game on a desktop GPU at 1080p60, with today's fixes in: corpses that stay whole, no two characters overlapping, a camera that sees past cover, snappier hit reactions, feet that stay on slopes, and enemies that wind up before a melee blow.

Health matters: at 25% the player falls after about 18 seconds with four kills, while at 50% and above the arena is cleared in about 31 seconds. Players will level up before fights this size.

The arena itself is still a blockout of plain pillars and blocks; detailed walls and boundaries are planned. Every model on screen comes from a verified clean source, and each video ships with a provenance record of everything the recording loaded.

Bodies that fall right, characters that keep their space

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

We filmed long battles with every immortal power and studied each death frame by frame. Bodies were freezing upright, blowing apart when they touched another corpse's floor, or stretching across the screen. Each corpse now falls onto its own ground, starts still, and is caught early if its physics runs away. Across 266 filmed kills, no body part strayed more than 0.75 body heights from the hips.

Characters now keep their own space: the player, enemies, summoned allies and crowd NPCs never stand inside one another, and it stays in sync in co-op. Ghost form can no longer be targeted or hit. The chase camera now sees past pillars, and in first person your own body no longer blocks the view.

Next up: the visual effects for several immortal powers, enemy wind-up tells, and grounded footwork on slopes.

Chasing 144 fps in a 50-fighter battle

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Our performance target is a busy city full of people, traffic and starships overhead while your immortal party fights a gang, running at 120–144 fps at the highest quality on a current high-end GPU.

This round: enemy figures survive roster changes instead of being rebuilt, spawns stream in rather than stopping the frame, damage checks share one query, and corpses no longer copy their meshes when they fall. The worst frame in our 50-fighter benchmark went from 1,486 ms to 75 ms. A new test runs that battle on a real GPU and fails if frame times slip, so headless tests can't hide a slowdown again.

Also: a renderer choice in Settings (Vulkan / Direct3D 12 or OpenGL), cheaper high-quality shadows, and playtest builds that update after every change with small delta downloads on Windows, WSL and Linux.

Co-op servers, combat feel and older-GPU presets

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Co-op: you can now browse dedicated servers from the main menu and join with a password. Hosts can run a headless server with an admin console. In co-op, quest beats move the whole party, every seat earns quest XP, and the party votes on story choices. Encounters, crowds and kits come from each scenario's data.

Combat feel: layered impact audio with kill confirms and a music duck, gamepad rumble, hit/crit/kill markers, recoil that springs home, perfect parry, recovery cancels and hold-to-charge heavy attacks. Impact comes from sound, visuals and animation, with no freeze frames or camera shake.

Hardware: quality presets auto-detect older GPUs and Steam Deck, with lighter texture tiers and shadows scaled per preset. Held weapons now sit in measured grips, and several menu bugs are fixed (pause states, the character picker, the crash prompt).

Refining machined starship components

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

The updated test part separates a satin graphite housing from brighter metal collars. Geometry, attachment points and texture mapping remain intact through export. Close-up review still found uneven rims and insufficient surface craft, so this part has not entered the reusable library or the game.

The investigation also identified two precision assumptions in our normal checks that did not match Blender. Their failures are preserved, with separate checks against the actual storage and export transforms. Better technical checks help diagnose the asset; visual quality remains the acceptance gate.

Keeping published model links in sync

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

The upload check covers the character roster, its initial viewer, the showcase and the motion and golden-body catalogues. Missing selections or stale model links stop deployment until the pages are refreshed. Historical experiments keep their original versions. We also confirmed that the 274 previously retired web copies remain unreferenced; canonical source assets are preserved. Character pose and deformation repairs still require visual acceptance before their replacements go live.

Isolating starship component shading defects

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Four matched renders separated baked normal-map waviness from broader collar faceting that persists with the normal map disabled. Disabling the map improved the collar rims but left the broader bands visible. The next correction can target the normal basis without changing the component silhouette or mounting points. No new ship component has passed final acceptance or been published.

Visible backpack selection after drag and drop

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

After moving equipment onto a character slot, the remaining selected backpack item stays in view. Returning from the equipped column with Right or Tab also reveals the selected item. Direct doll-slot clicks and ordinary equip or unequip actions use the same consistent refresh.

Following your inventory selection

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Moving through a long bag scrolls the selected item into view. Changing categories and equipping an item keep the remaining selection visible after the grid rearranges. Navigation and successful equip also dismiss stale hover descriptions. This fixes selection visibility; broader equipment and character-model quality work continues.

Keeping inventory controls on screen

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

The doll preview uses a little less vertical space without reducing button targets or text. Regression checks now account for clipping by parent panels and click Close directly, without scrolling it into view first. They also check a larger backpack and preserve the complete item profile through resizing and closing. Broader controller access and character-model quality remain in progress.