Planet Explorers Alpha v0.5 Update

Hey everyone, happy new year! After a short break, we're backing working hard on Planet Explorers. Here's an update on how we're progressing on Alpha 0.5.

- Lots of progress on moving the entire animation system into the new Unity animation system mechanim. This should make a lot of the animations much more efficient and better.

- Vehicle creation is now looking really good, we have controlled mounted turrets, ai turrets, and front mounted turrets. We're even considering putting in vertical launched missiles...haha.

- We're working on mines and grenades.

- Guns now can have multiple muzzles. We're looking at how to make plasma material for lightsa...er, laser swords.

- Trading of creations is already done, so you'll be able to swap whatever you create with other people over the net.

- Added in quiet a few new animal types.

- We're currently working on getting the LOD system to display stuff players build on LOD 1 and beyond, so you'll be able to see that house you made 1km out.

- Rivers and lakes are in and they look pretty nice.

- Currently working on getting more missions into the game for about 4 new main story NPCs.

- We've started working on the town building system...;)

- Working on generators and engines.

- The terrain structure has been improved with valleys and canyons and giant arches and caves and and distant fog and volumetric clouds in some places.

- A couple of other things (hint: things that bring balance to the game against all that firepower mentioned above)

- New turrets are in, along with new materials.

- Working on a few ways to get the efficiency up. We're running into problems in this regard because we don't have access to Unity's source code. The thing that's killing the frame rate the most is real time terrain collision generation, and buying the Unity source code isn't cheap at all.

Still, due to a few problems integrating into the latest Unity version, we're going to be a bit late in pushing this build out. We're now aiming for before the 31st of Jan. Kickstarter for the project will start shortly after this alpha version's out. Thank you for your patients. :)