This a very large update to the last version with many new features, gameplay improvements, bug fixes and changes. Of course it’s still a work-in-progress. The full article will explain things in details, but here are the main points:

• Warpgates for fast travel between star systems
• Bounty system, hunt ships for money
• New improved shipyard menu allowing ship customization
• Pirate bases and new behaviors for the pirates
• Player empire and diplomacy

Download the demo here – Updated documentation here

Warpgates

Factions can now build warpgates in their main sectors. Warpgates, as explained in greater details here, are used as a fast travel method. It is also possible for the player to use those warpgates by using the new Jump button (or keyboard shortcut), the world map will appear, and all sectors where a warpgate has been build will be highlighted in green.

Bounty System

When a ship get destroyed by another one, its faction may decide to put a bounty on the head of the offender. You can see ships that have a bounty when you have them selected. If you open a comm. channel with them, you will see the total bounty on their head. If you manage to kill said ship, you’ll be awarded with the bounty. One exception to this rule is that factions you are at war with won’t pay you anything. Value of the bounty depends on the amount and class of ship killed, also multiple factions can put a bounty on the same ship. You can see how much you’ve received when you scored a kill in your journal (Empire Manager → Journal).

While there’s no bounty hunters (yet!) handled by the game, notice that AI factions can put a bounty on your head too (or any of your ship). In future versions if your bounty goes over a certain threshold, police ships will attack you on sight and you may be hunted across sectors, however you will be asked to pay up before being attacked.

Pirate Bases

Pirates don’t act as other races anymore as explained in this development log. While most of the new behaviors are still yet to be implemented, some changes can be easily observed. Pirate bases that are now built in replacement to military bases and trading stations act independently, there’s no overarching AI like the other factions. They buy ships and defenses with the money they get from raiding transport ships from other factions.

This is a feature that will be heavily improved upon in the next versions.

Shipyard

The shipyard menu has been finalized, I hope it’s easy enough to use, comments are welcome. You can customize the equipment via drag and drop, look at the stats, buy ships in batches, save and load equipment presets for later use.

This menu will probably reused for customizing and equipping the ships you already have too in future versions.

Player Empire

It is now possible to start the game with a starting empire. So far everything is automated apart from the diplomatic part which you will manage. You still can take control of any of your ships and order them around. Here again, this is a glimpse of the final product, not a completed feature, more information is available in the related documentation.

Other changes and additions

Listing everything here would be too long, the full changelog is available on the forum.

Still, the graphic engine has been heavily improved. I also implemented a parallax scrolling, so background stars and planets look much farther away than what’s on the same level as your ship. Finally I added an experimental setting to enable shaders, this for testing purpose only. The user interface has also been improved with new windows, new keyboard shortcuts.

Bug Fixes

Many bugs have been fixed (40 of them) and the memory usage decreased by a fair amount. It’s not to say that the game is bug free, far from it, and it’s likely to hang after many hours of continuous play, but nothing as bad as before.