Planetary landing progress

It has been quite a while since the last update, planetary landing is the next big module in the game and it took a lot of trials to make it look good enough and it is getting better by each day. Just to illustrate the progress made in the past few weeks here are a few screenshots with some brief details.

This is a brief summary in weeks...

And here are the details

1- First a tile map for easy terrain management similar to space ships but it didn't look so well. It means a lot of tiles to be made manually and the work will take years to complete if I wanted to incorporate all the biomes planned, and it looked flat

2- Next step was to make soft transitions on the terrain so those ugly blocks will go away. A little bit better but not by much, still flat looking and the tile was really visible. It was not at the level I wanted it to be.

3-So the next logical step was to unblock the map and make it look more organic, after a week of playing with shaders and a little bit more of work the map became a lot better like below, but still looked a little bit flat.

4- This week changed the logic again and added lights to modify the terrain, the result can be seen below.

Terrain is becoming better each day, so some more biomes will be shown later once all the parametric values are automated, each map terrain belongs to a part in the planet and all are procedurally generated, so the variety will be vast. After plain and simple terrains are finished, cities will added so you can roam around any city, any place in a planet to accomplish your mission.

Procedural planets!

A few weeks ago during the holidays decided to add procedural planets in 3d to the game, I was looking at flat textures of planets and gas giants and I didn't feel confortable with that, so I just added terran type planets and now working on gas giants. Here you can see below a few examples.

And a first gas giant produced today.

There will be many more planet types and moons to explore, you will need to have shuttles in your main ship to land on those places and explore them! since all data is procedurally generated the terrain will be also based on the planet information already created.

A better version of another gas giant.

Happy holidays and Merry Christmas!

This year has been a very interesting one with lots of new ideas put in game and a lot of game mechanics that were not initially thought in the scope of the game, but it is giving it a lot of fun and allowing me to build the game that I want to play.

Enjoy the holidays and wish you Merry Christmas!

My crew is also celebrating and looking forward for the alpha release next year! see you soon!

Food!, restaurants, cantinas and others

As mentioned before, food rations were available for long trips, but are boring to dead to eat and after long time your crew mood will deteriorate, so it will be very important to visit space outposts to resuply and visit fine restaurants, fast food restaurants or maybe cantinas, here is a sneak peak of a fast food restaurant where you can order your food and then sit down on any table, and if lucky you can event talk to other people, maybe get jobs or negotiate sneaky deals.

Different food items can improve mood over time and bring joy by eating the food they like the most, different restaurants serve different food plates and different prices! the people you may find on each kind of restaurant will vary too, so if you want to meet smugglers you may want to go to a cantina for example, so you can sell also illegal goods if you are in that business.

And finally, nothing better than having my crew enjoying lunch together.

Warp, battery and power distribution updates

Power generators provide the electricity around your ship, different components can be added to your power generator as seen below, also a power button was added to all systems so you can decide at any time which systems to turn off if you need extra power for something else like life support or weapons.

Also a battery system was added this week, so excess power is stored for emergencies.

And finally, a more accurate traveling calculations and warp control, now you can decide the warp speed to travel and know ahead of time what will be the estimated time for arrival (ETA) on screen

You can choose to go at 100% of your maximum warp speed or if needed you can push it over a little bit more up to 10% more but that will consume more energy/resources and will degrade your warp components faster or even destroy them if the maximum warp speeed is overclocked over long periods of time. For example, the image below shows the warp core system panel, and if warp speed is pushed up for too long components like the warp coil seen below will degrade from 100% to 0% over time, at 0% it will get destroyed and you will need to get replacement parts, when a components gets destroyed like the warp coil, the maxium warp speed will also drop according to missing parts.

When boarding enemy ships you may also get some replacement parts from their panels or even steal them if you like, anything can happen, even pirates can steal some of your components if they are able to break through your security.

That's all for this week!.

Electronic system panels and automated tasks

Inventory items were added recently into the game, now you can equip crew members with different kind of armor types, boots and guns. Food will be also displayed in the inventory as well as medical kits and many other things. One new addition on top of that is electronic components, now each system in the ship has a control panel where components can be arranged to make the system work as seen below.

Different components will be needed to make sure that the system will work properly, you can still use low grade components and get lower than expected results in the performance of those systems, you will find that for example a turret will show up 4 lanes of components and if some portion of it is broken the performance of the turret will degrade or you can utilize enhanced components or researched ones to improve efficiency. Since all the system modules in the ship can be modded it seems that there will be a lot of micro-management and a lot of work to make sure that all systems are working, but that's not the case, crew members if assigned to fixing tasks will actually go and fix those panels for you , for example an engineer will make sure that all the components are in place or at least make sure that is patched with the parts you have in your ship, they will go and pickup the parts from lockers or other places and install them as needed, but you can also manually do different configurations to suit your needs and the repairing team will still fix those panels if something gets broken if you have the electronic parts needed.

Whenever a crew member is tired or hungry, they will try to find the best place to get their need fulfill, hungry? then go to the proper food source, if you assign a bunk to a crew member they will go there to sleep when tired, but there may be situations in which you really need those crew members working regardless if they are hungry or sleepy, so raising the status to red alert will put everyone who is capable of performing a duty to do so, so you can make sure you have your pilot, gunners and others ready for combat even if they need to sleep, eat, get medical attention or any other task. Crew members will also make sure your ship stuff is properly stored, for example you can drop guns on the floor and other stuff, but that is very dangeous in space with so many bad things to happen, so free crew members will store those items in proper locations if there is empty space, the last thing you want to have is guns on the floor and get a hull breach and lose all those guns into space, or get your food spoiled if not properly stored in the food refrigeration system.

So in summary, there is a lot of new AI written to automate tasks, you are the captain of your ship so you shouldn't be micro-managing everything to survive, you have to use your crew to get to your goal but if you really are the micro-manager type you can still do that as needed, the main purpose is for you to set orders and expect your crew to follow them the best way they can under the circunstances, but don't expect a baddly injured crew member without legs to stand up and walk, there are physical limitations being put, but instead of walking they may float in space if gravity is disabled. Gravity and inertia control in ship will be the next major update, more details later.

Inventory!

Added inventory!, each character will have an inventory, the use of the inventory will allow for example a doctor to carry many medical kits, and medical kits do have a consumption level depending on the use, food also use space so be wise to choose your equipment when going outside , more weapons, armor, or other things to choose from.

Recently I had my crew feed prisoners but found that they were actually picking only one food ration at a time so it was taking a lot of travel time spent when I had many prisoners, so an inventory allows them now to carry multiple rations and distribute them properly.