I took the week to change, improve and fix the most glaring issues I found in the latest release. The full changelog is quite large but the most important changes are :
- Missiles look like actual missiles and rotate
- Sectors should look a little nicer
- Nebulas
- Destroyed ships can drop loot !
- Many improvements to the user interface
- Lots of small glitches to big crashes fixed
The new version is available for download here.
For a more in depth look …
So, loot ! 🙂
It sometimes drop from destroyed ships, “scan” it ([x] key or last button on top) to open it. The base chance is currently 50% to drop weapons, shields (10% per weapon installed), and cargo (varies). These values are probably not definitive, and could be tweaked according to faction / ship class. There’s no type of AI to “clean up” the loot drops (they disappear after a long while) yet. That’s a thing I will work on soon, as I am going to work on the pirate side of stuff, and their economy will mostly be loot based.
Regarding the UI, the wasd keys are now used in the default settings to move your ship. You can also “shift” + left click to do the same. Ship selection works the same no matter if you’re in the normal or the sector view, you can lasso select in both. I added the “follow me” and “attack my target” commands ([q] and [f] keys). Menus work better in general and all of them have been integrated in the actual game UI. The universe map has also been somewhat improved but it’s still a place-holder.
So, weapon shots can rotate now, so you get nicer looking missiles. I need also to spend some time writing better weapon delivery and payload systems, It should be fun. Easy effects to implement now are mines (even aiming ones) and shockwave type (growing circle around object), but I guess I can be a bit more creative than that 🙂
Speaking of weapons, I also need to add basic animations for kills, hits and so on. Then, it won’t be a long stretch to allow animations for most objects.
Sector background generation is a bit less ugly, and sectors with a sun have higher potential for energy production factories. Nebulas have been added. They don’t have an ingame effect yet, apart from looking pretty. That will change later on, bigger one will appear too. Here again, I am mostly lacking art assets. I updated the data too, with a few new weapons and ships, I still need more sprites for capital ships (carriers, destroyers and stations builders).
And finally there’s a bunch of fixes, and minor changes. Here is the full changelog:
v0.4.2
- Missiles can rotate
- Added and modified lot of ships and weapons
- Ships can be bought at shipyard (random loadout only so far)
- Added Follow Me order and keyboard shortcut
- Added Attack Target order and keyboard shortcut
- Better looking sectors
- Added nebulas
- Added [shift]+Click to move playership
- Made “declare war” and “make peace” buttons functional (basic)
- Selection and lasso now works the same way in both views
- added HP bars to selected ships
- Added text output to some orders
- Misc UI changes
- Added “Loot” object, disappear after a while
- Added Loot window
- Input thread rewritten
- Added input thread to thread monitor
- Misc small code changes
- Fixed: Mainform buttons not enabled/disabled correcty
- Fixed: Possible crash when closing game window
- Fixed: Possible crash when no player ship is selected
- Fixed: Not all windows aligned properly
- Fixed: can’t disable FPS counter
- Fixed: Escort ships refusing to go into hostile sectors
- Fixed: Input thread crash when changing sector
- Fixed: Physics not always applied correctly
- Fixed: playership not answering to sector view commands
- Fixed: Some unrelated potential crashes
- Fixed: Ship selections and boxing issues