Installing new hardware in your ship

You can buy new hardware to improve or add functionality to your ship, but buying is not the only thing that matters, your crew will have to install the hardware and the time until the hardware is ready for use will depend on the technical expertise of your crew members, some items will require weeks until fully active, while others a few minutes.

You will be able to see the progress on the brown boxes containing the new shiny upgrade of your ship and see as well who is working on that equipment, also the crew member working on it will gain some experience over time and the more time your crew spent installing or fixing the more proficient will be on those tasks.

You will be also be able to select what to install first or assign specific crew member to install hardware as desired.

So the next time you purchase something, think first if your crew is capable of installing it at a reasonable time otherwise the wait can be very long.

Planetary landing continues

It took a little bit of time to get this working properly, but now very big maps are created on the fly and the player will be able to explore large areas, part of the game will take place on land where away teams will have to explore.

Here is a better screenshot of a desert biome with some rocks and plants. Planets will be different in many ways, like the day/night cycle depending on the rotation speed of the planet, gravity will affect how fast/slow your crew will be able to walk, weather will also be part of the game and will affect your crew, in the screenshot below the desert will affect how confortable your crew will be since the hot and dry environment may cause a lot of stress for some crew members.

A closer look of your character in desert.

There will be a wide variety of biomes to explore, more to come soon.

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!.