Impact Damage

Ship's masses change so much, it was getting pretty difficult to have a statistic on projectiles that appropriately communicated impact - the force of a projectile hitting your ship. Simply adding a force wasn't enough - small ships would reach ridiculous speeds while large ones would quickly not receive any. I also wanted stats to be as separated from looks as possible.

So now impact damage is reduced based on your ship's category. This means larger ship categories might be completely immune to the impact of small weapons. Impact also decreases global control of your ship which slowly comes back - reducing your turn rate and drag control. Ships receive the force, start moving and will have a bit of trouble controlling themselves after an impact.

Since categories are so important now (they determine basic movement capabilities), there's a little helper bar to show you how far you are from reaching the next category.

Finals are over, too!

Writing on your ship

Unity's new UI is fantastic for creating interfaces, but it turns out it's also very useful for general text in 3D space. It only took a few hours but I have surface text on blocks, so you can write the name of your ship or anything really anywhere on a block.

Writing the name of the ship

It even supports rich text so you can change the color!

Just another fun little feature for personalizing your ship. It supports regular rectangular blocks and normal slopes (so no corners).

Finals are almost over, so these little bits and a lot of tweaking are the most I can do at the moment.

Asteroid fields and ship wrecks

Some battles are heavier than others - they will leave wreckage that a player can salvage. Of course, you have to get there before any other scavenger. Ship wrecks are based on the ships made by players.

I also made some improvements to the asteroid layouts - asteroids close together will have smaller asteroids in between them. Basically there's more asteroids and they're placed in a more artistic way in the sector.

Other upgrades this week are to ship damage effects - not done yet, but with Unity 5.3 I can do some more interesting effects on ships and other meshes.

New Shield Effect and World Map

Decided to put some time into a real shield impact effect, and here's the result.

Also made the world map a bit more pleasant to use. Definitely feels at least a little prettier too.

When in local sector mode...

... and when in world map mode.

General Update - Graphics, Bugfixes, Tutorial

This is a busy time, with lots of university projects and exams coming up followed by a move to California in January, so there are my excuses for updates.

That said, I did finally make the switch to Unity's deffered rendering - it allows me to use HDR and get some proper post-processing effects. It also means I simplified all the layers and simplified the whole process. I get fancy distortion effects in return as well.

I also took a lot more time than usual to playtest the game and managed to fix a lot of bugs, including a whole rewrite of the music system. I still need a major sound pass (something I know very little about) to make it all more satisfying.

The new lighting in action, along with a much easier to follow tutorial.

Ship physics have been slightly reworked so that ramming is a more effective tactic and "grinding" damage has been reduced. You'll need to really charge your enemy to attack them, and you'll probably need to disable their engine core to slow them down and do it. Ship speed is also detached from the number of engines you have, so your ship's visual design is no longer tied to stats. It makes movement more predictable.

Station - Visiting Actions

Made a new main menu background

Of course, there should be a reason to come back home and at least visit your station. As of right now you can add a shipyard to your station, allowing you to edit your ship while in your base but also order the construction of ships to add to your fleet. They're automatically stored in your base and unmanned and cost as much as building the ship yourself. If you ever find yourself with too many credits and not enough ships, that's one way to spend them. Keep in mind salvaging ships is not 100% effective!

Build-a-ship menu, much like the ship loading in the editor

You can now also send crew home from anywhere - boarding craft will undock from your main ship and warp to your home sector or dock with your station if you're already there. Taking out crew, however, is reserved for when the player is home.

Boarding craft going from your ship to your home station

I'm also still adding upgrades and encounters to the game, optimising and bugfixing. A lot of the goals I had for stations are complete, only a few features left to implement!

Station - Away Actions

When you're not near your station you can still do most of the actions - managing ships, calling them in for backup, starting research missions or exploration missions, sending crew home or just emergency warping your fleet home. The interface is all there and the features are almost all complete.

Station Management while away from home

Starting a research project

Managing missions and ships

Research projects simply take one ship and use it to research modules and upgrades. Larger ships speed up research since you can place more crew towards the project. So far the rewards are random, but you are guaranteed an item you haven't unlocked yet.

Exploration missions are a different beast, you essentially send a fleet to do what the player does. They might come back with additional crew, might lose or gain some ships, discover new technology, etc... It's essentially like simulating a second coop player. The risk is real but the rewards are much higher than the relatively safe research projects.