Did a long review of the display engine. It’s multi-threaded now (that doesn’t mean it will handle SLI), It manages to keep a high FPS even with hundreds of shots and ships at the same location. Ships can rotate now and shields are shown when hit or charging, leading the way to further “special” effects like explosions. I also fixed an annoying and hard to catch bug that was causing the camera to stutter a bit. The game also handle any resolution I can throw at it (was locked in 1:1 aspect ratio before).
In more miscellaneous changes: I added a lot of new settings to weapons (ability to bypass shields, beam colors, pass through ships and so on) and fixed some related bugs. Sectors with trade stations get a few police/patrol fighters and cruisers patrolling around. Attacked ships call local police / military forces to the rescue. It seems to have put a relatively harmless bug to the light, where ships from the same faction may attack each other if one get hit with a missile by accident.
And last but not least I added preliminary code for the Diplomacy system. Factions can determine how much they like / hate each other and the player according to various parameters. Next step is for them to use this system to declare war / alliances. Then it will be the turn of the the military side of things. I hope to achieve most of it before the end of this week.