Oops, I haven’t updated the website as much as I should, sorry about that, I am helping relatives moving house. And to be honest most of the improvements I am currently making are under the hood or bug fixing. Anyway, here’s what has been achieved last week.
Enjoy ! 🙂
So, as I said, these last days have been spent removing bugs. The game had several hard to catch (and reproduce) bugs causing various crashes and unwanted behaviors. While it’s usually possible to continue developing with such issues, I dislike having a long to-do list regarding bugs. So most of those issues are now fixed. It’s not 100% bug free but it is as close as I can manage in that time frame. And nothing that’s left is game breaking.
But, not everything I did was bug fixing. I highly improved the way factions fight one another. Before the update, during invasions, they were sending military ships directly to the targeted sectors, usually causing ships to arrive one by one and be destroyed. Now, ships will gather in a nearby sector before attacking to the targeted one simultaneously. As a result, invasions are much more deadly. I have yet to decide what to do with the leftover stations once the invasion is done. I guess it will be faction dependent (converting, taxing, or destroying factories).
I also added the ability for factions to determine what level of threat (incoming enemy fleet, pirates…) each sector is facing. So far, they use this information to build military bases but coupled with other functions I added, they should very soon be able to use their military fleet to react accordingly to each attack they are facing.
Regarding economics, trading ships now take current wars into account when traveling, and will avoid, if possible, enemy sectors. They will also detect if the station they are planning on buying from still has the ware they need, and if not, they will change target dynamically. All in all, it makes the economic system work. It’s not perfect yet, but that’s already a massive improvement over X3 and X2. I also improved how/when/where factions decide to build stations and, here again, they will avoid building into war zones.
I made also several improvements to the display engine, and general performances. Very larges battles were causing slight slowdowns (even when they happen in sectors you’re not in). It has been fixed, without having to rely on abstracting the said battles, which is a good thing. I also fixed some issues with the camera when your ship is near a sector’s border, improved rotations of ships and probably a few more things I am forgetting about right now.
I added a basic News System / BBS / GalNews. So far it only shows war declarations and peace treaties, but the ground work being done, adding more events is kind of a trivial task.
I think that’s all for this week. Hopefully, next week should feature more interesting stuff now that I am not busy squashing bugs (at least for a while).
Cheers,
SK.