No gravity is quite an interesting topic to look at...new mechanic in game

So far until now, all the game was modeled around having gravity always, but not anymore, I wanted to add more realism and now lack gravity also affects your ship and when visiting other places, this means a lot of changes in the game, one was the addition of inertia and acceleration inside ships that affects your crew, previously shown for objects, now it also affects crew members, but your ship may also lack gravity controls and that will affect how your crew navigate inside ships, so the next update will show up how your crew move in 0g and other items that may help your crew move inside ships better like magnetic boots.

More forces at work!

Something that bothered me for quite long time is the fact that not many forces are factored inside space ships, in games or movies. Let's think about acceleration or rotating your ship, that do not really affect things inside, I haven't seen any single game handling this at all, so your crew should be affected by many different forces.

Well in the next few days I will add momemtum and centripetal forces, so accelerating or turning your ship will cause many things. For example if your crew is floating without gravity inside your ship and you decide to turn around very fast, your crew will hit walls and get hurt, also if you leave unsecured stuff on the floor while you accelerate or turn around your items maybe get destroyed by the impact or fly around, so storing everything properly will be very important. There won't be a magic wand that will let things stick on the floor.

Accelerate your ship very fast and things may get ugly inside, you can add as many thrusters in your ship but the faster you turn or accelerate the more cautious you will have to be with your crew and stuff inside, better keep your crew sit and your stuff stored in secure places. This is a new dynamic being added to the game.

Here is a small sample, some stuff left on the floor while accelerating my ship and rotating at the same time.

Lots of updates

Development the in the last few months went pretty well, but haven't updated the blog that much, you can see what happened in the daily log to have an idea what's coming up to the game.

For now, hope you can enjoy a small comic strip about several things I have in my mind around the game, at least once a month you will see one.

Party time! alcohol consumption

Nothing can be better than having a few drinks with your fellow crew members and have fun in space! well excesive consumption of alcohol can be a dangerous too...

After a long afternoon drinking my crew members passed out and are sleeping on the floor, quite bad I would say, but you can see them there with a hangover headache already

and still wake up for more beer a few hours later...

Alcohol consumption will help to improve mood for some crew members, some may not drink depending on their traits but in general a moderate consumption of alcohol is fine. Sometimes you may find alcoholic crew members and that may be a problem, having them drunk during service may be a problem if a pirate just started to attack your ship! not being able to wake up your crew at a proper time may be another problem too.

But for now, let them sleep peacefully and wake up with a headache, traveling through space with not much to do may be boring sometimes and having different things in your ship to pass the time will help. Having a good amount of alcohol stored will help too, besides food of course!

You can brew alcoholic beverages too! more to come soon.

Some crew members may be stronger than others to alcohol... let her finish her beer...

Crew hygiene

No spaceship should go out in space with proper ways to clean your crew, after long work days and a lot of effort a shower will be needed to refresh your crew , or as needed.

So a new system was added into the game, hygiene. Some activities will decrease it more than others, like jogging around or doing heavy work, while others will do little to lower it.

What's the implication of not being properly clean? well if your crew is injured and have blood loss that may turn into an easy infection. Also it may cause disconfort between crew members, a smelly crew member may affect another one and the other may even refuse to be around because of the bad smell, this will cause stress between your crew members, also crew members that enjoy being clean will be highly stressed if not being able to take baths regularly.

The easy way to keep them clean is to give them enough free time during the day, so your crew will do things like joy activities, baths, eating , sleeping and other things, working is important as well as free time for them.

Farming

Farming is a new activity you can do in your ship, since trips may take many months it will be necessary to either buy a lot of packed food or grow yours in your ship, you will be able to select a vegetables to grow so your crew can fill up an empty stomach without much trouble.

Some crew members may hate the standard space ration and even get unhappy while eating that for a long period of time, so growing some vegetables may help them feel refreshed during a long trip.

Time on planets, time in your ship, time everywhere

Recently I got stuck thinking about time, this is a thing that has not been addressed in any other game the way I am looking at it. On earth you have 24 hours day and you can have a similar time scale while traveling in your space ship, so time can be managed easily and assign duties to your crew and create day/night shifts as needed, no issues, but now, what if you go to a planet that has a very long day/night cycle? how will the natives will behave?

I haven't seen any game in which time is a game factor in that sense, most games will just default to a 24 hour cycle and NPCs will just go to their beds and sleep and come back to work the next day, but if a planet has 100 hours per day, how will the NPCs behave? time to sleep every 18 hours for example? so all the planet will be adjusted into a 24 hour cycle with a 100 hour day? if that happens then there will be days in which what is supposed to be early morning will be a complete darkness because it just happened to be in the middle of the planet's night. And what will happen if the planet has a 5 hour day/night cycle? or worst case scenario 200 years of light/night?

After doing more and more research, I figure out that there is no simple answer to this question yet, human will eventually leave earth to other planets but we haven't figure out yet how we, as a human race, will manage time in other planets, and this is becoming an issue with the game, since I can't really seem to find an easy solution to something that looks trivial, how to measure time and divide it properly.

So the first solution that came to my mind seems to be to divide the planet's time as close as a multiple of 24 and adjust the internal people clock to that multiple, so if a planet's day/night cycle is 12 hours, the NPCs will live in one day with day/night cycle plus 4 hours to get a full day in which they are awake because the total is 16 hours, and the rest 8 hours will be time to sleep, that will give us a night of sleep with light and darkness. But now if the planet has a day of 100 years the local time will be divided in 24 hours as usual and let people sleep as usual even in plain light or darkness, most probably same as the people that live in the poles.

Another solution that came to my mind is to make seconds faster or slower, so it will be still 24 hours but each second will be faster or slower than we normally perceive, so for a 100 year day/night cycle each second will be very long, and for planets with a day/night cycle of few hours each second will be a lot faster, problem will be that trying to stay awake for 8 hours in some planets will be impossible.

The other solution is to let the time run in the planet, so if a 50 hour day happens let native people live and sleep in cycles as needed without any schedule , just live and do what they can in any cycle so no single person in the planet will run under the same clock and just live, this is the easiest way but not very nice. What's the implication about this solution? since shops will run by NPC, if the NPC goes to sleep and the player goes to the shop and it is closed, how will you know when is the shop going to open? and what will happen if you have many shops you want to visit but all of them are open at different times? this doesn't looks good from business point of view, but the easiest to implement, if a NPC close a shop to go to sleep, then it will post the time it will open again and this will solve the issue. So until a more elegant solution is found I will stick with this one for the time being, now it is time to implement this solution.