At long last, here is the new version of Unending Galaxy. This is, by far, the biggest and largest update to date with tons of improvements, features and bug fixes. While it’s still an early alpha, it’s a good starting point for people who want to get a quick overview of the game.
As usual, the full article will explain changes into details, but here’s the most important bits:
- Fullscreen support that should handle any resolution
- Dynamic economy with prices varying according to supply and demand
- Shiny new galactic map you can give orders from
- Mining ships, bounty hunters and pirate raiders
- Improved faction AI, diplomacy and war handling
- Much nicer user interface
Download the demo – Updated Documentation – Full Changelog
User Interface
The user interface has been massively improved. The most important part is probably the new galactic map that is now fully integrated into the main display instead of being in a separate window. From this map you can see detailed info about each sector and switch to the sector view or even order your selected ships to move around in a few clicks.
Also, as you can see in the screenshots above, lots of details have been added to the diplomatic, trading and galactic news screens. A small fleet panel has also been added in the top left of the screen, it automatically expand when hovering your mouse on it. It’s used to keep track the various fleets / control-groups under your control.
Unending Galaxy is now supporting fullscreen display too. It should handle any resolution your monitor / graphic card can throw at it, so be sure to visit the video settings before launching a game. There’s still a slight issue, as background images (planets and suns) aren’t resized accordingly yet, but it’s quite a minor problem and there’s no real point in changing that right now as we are going to rewrite this part quite soon anyway.
Economy
The price of trading wares is now dynamic (in trading stations only so far) according to supply and demand. It’s far from perfect, but it is now possible to buy and sell wares for a profit (or at a loss), adding a new way to earn credits. Also, to boost trading a bit, the game spawn a few more factories at the start and all stations get a semi random amount of the wares they trade in.
At the faction AI level, they are now really using money to buy and sell wares, they can collect taxes from miners and bounty hunters. While they are not yet using said money to build new ships and stations or using it diplomatically, the foundations have been laid for implementing these features in the next alpha of the game.
Individual ship AI
To bring more life into the universe, new ship behaviors have been added with the new asteroid miners, the bounty hunters and the pirate raiders. Contrary to other ships, their AI isn’t directly tied to the faction AI layer or to an home-base, they behave independently and have their own money account they will use to hire escort ships. Of course, more of such AI modules will be added over time and existing ones will be improved (bounty hunters and pirate raiders are a bit “suicidal” right now).
Also, in general, ship behaviors have been improved and made more logical.
Faction AI
This is an another part that has been improved massively. Factions need to have bad relations before declaring war on each other. To that effect, a new negative diplomatic flag has been added “we want your sector” that grows over time. Later on, options will be given to the factions to deal peacefully with this flag. A war weariness setting has also been added, it increases during wars slowly and when a faction looses military assets and sectors to an enemy, and it decreases when at peace. A faction with high war weariness won’t declare war against another one and is more likely to sue for peace when this setting is higher than a threshold that varies from one to another (siraks are more warlike than humans for example). Later on, this setting will have an influence on morale, ship and ware production too.
With those new features implemented, we removed the limit causing wars to last for only one sector takeover. Wars should happen less often, but on the other hand they will last much longer, usually until the war weariness of one of the participant reach the threshold or until its military fleet gets utterly outclassed.
Also, military ships used to invade sectors are now coordinated and act as a fleet instead of individual ships. They won’t enter an enemy sector one by one to be crushed anymore.
Weaponry & Equipment
Ships can now have different slot sizes for their shields and weapons, as an example, most transport ships have small-class weapons and medium-class shields. While the ships are not yet balanced, it will add a nice variety to our selection later on.
Damage types are now taken into account, lasers are strong versus shield but inefficient versus hull, missiles are the opposite, and plasma is balanced. There’s also the new mining lasers that are very bad at anything but mining asteroids.
On a more technical note, weapon and shield systems can basically be put on any game object (and the weapon system is much better at targeting too), so you can expect weapon platforms and armed military bases in future versions.
Performances and Bug Fixes
There’s way too many things to list, but this version should be quite stable as most of the crashes you could experience in the previous build have been fixed (around 50 bugs have been removed). The full changelog is available on the forum. In general, the game is able to handle larger battles and should have much better performances across the board on all machines.
There’s probably a few things that have not been taken into account yet, and there’s a few “super powers” like the ability to interact with anything from any distance and see everything everywhere that have not been removed on purpose, but 0.5.5 is likely to be a good build to test the various features of the game.
Cheers,
SK.