As explained previously, some devlog are going to be shorter than usual, this is one of them.
I spent some time fleshing out the pirates a bit. Pirate bases can spawn in territory owned by other factions. I added a “Kill this pirate base” mission type, available at trading stations and military bases that have such a base in a 2 sector radius. Pirate raiders can use their jumpdrive to escape trouble, they will also repair at a nearby base when needed. There’s still much work to do but it’s a start. I also began improving the sector map a bit. Selecting ships/docks will display their health and name the same way the normal view does. The aspect ratio issue of background object has been resolved too. There’s quite a few changes, fixes and improvements to the user interface as well.
There’s also a few bug-fixes. The only one that’s left is the performance issue when Window’s Themes service is disabled. As suspected it’s a limitation of the graphical library I am using. I think I can fix it nonetheless, but It will take some experimenting.
The rest of the article will list the changes in a bullet point format. Hopefully, next update post will be more fleshed out.
- Pirates Bases randomly put into non pirate owned sectors at game start
- Added “Kill this pirate base” missions
- Prevent invasion fleets from exiting gathering sector if there’s enemy ships already there
- Removed “faction is targeting X sector” galactic news spam due to new invasion system
- Cached sector related Menace and Threat military values
- Pirate raiders should be able to Jump and flee to safety when in danger
- Pirate raiders should be able to seek repairs when needed
- Reduced Jump prep from 10 to 8 seconds
- Added Quick save/load keyboard shortcuts and support
- Added additional texts to describe recently implemented orders
- Added Flee and Jump Away order to ships
- Made titles in all menus the same size
- Small redesign of Ship Setup menu to match the style used in other menus
- Added health/shield/name overlay on sector map
- Unified overlay color scheme in normal view and sector map
- Display destination when issuing attack-move / move orders to a different sector
- Display if orders are given to fleets or to individual ships
- Fixed: Can buy infinite amount of stuff from docks despite them being empty
- Fixed: Incorrect aspect ratio of background objects in sector view
- Fixed: Player’s ships / control groups ignoring move orders if dest sector is empty
- Fixed: not checking “auto send fleets against target sector” in empire menu would prevent to manually invade a sector
- Fixed: It was possible that more swarms than intended would be spawned
- Fixed: Empire Manager auto refresh cancel mission selection
- Fixed: Military and pirate bases don’t send fighters properly when under direct attack
I am also trying to release the current version, but it’s taking a bit more time than it usually does. It should be up during this week, though.