Hey there !

In a similar fashion to the previous devlog, the last two weeks were mostly spent polishing the game. While it sure isn’t as fun as adding whole new features, it still something that needed to be done at some point. Of course that won’t make for the most exciting devlog in the world, but there are still a couple of improvements that you will like to know about, so I’ll stick to the important bits and leave the rest for the changelog on the forum.

Enjoy ! 🙂

New Trading Menu

As shown in the screenshot, the trading menu has been entirely redesigned. It uses a bit more screen estate and comes with a new font that will likely be extended to the whole game soon. Most sub menus have been slightly altered and improved in a way or another. Listing all those small changes would be fairly pointless.

There’s one important and non cosmetic addition to this menu. The game now tracks how much what you bought was worth, which mean that when you are selling something, the menu will tell you how many credits your are loosing or gaining by making that transaction.

Galactic News

I also merged the Journal and the Galactic News tabs in the empire menu into a single entity, added different filters, changed some of the icons, completed some existing articles and added a few new ones.

I can’t say the galactic news become very useful, but it’s at least a step in the right direction. I know that fading popups on the side of the screen like in Civ5 and other modern 4X wouldn’t go amiss and I will see what I can do about that.

Optimizations

UG had a pretty long initial loading screen which I managed to reduce in a sizable manner. It is still mostly dependent on the graphical settings, but even with the maximum settings it doesn’t take nearly as much time to load the game than before. Same goes for game saving and loading functions. Saving your game takes much less time and doesn’t require large amounts of free hard disk space anymore. Loading is a bit faster too, but not by much. There is still room for improvement, but not by much.

There are also a few other optimizations related to the game itself, and as such the game should run better in the long run. Hard to tell how noticeable it will be on your side as it’s so dependent on the situation, settings, and computer.

Misc Improvements

And, as usual, plenty of small to big bug fixes and improvements. Ships that are coming out of a station or a warpgate will fade in the environment instead of just popping in. I fixed a bunch of inconsistencies when pressing the ESC key or when quitting menus while the game is paused. Fixed a few issues that could potentially crash the game under specific conditions. As I said in the intro, if you’re looking for the whole picture of what has been done so far regarding version 1.1, check the changelog on the forum.

It may sound a bit short for two weeks compared to what I usually do. But altering and testing all the menus and UI states for all situations and fixing the many small irritating behaviors is extremely time consuming. Polishing takes time and while I’d love to say that the next devlog will be more interesting, there’s still quite a few things for me to finish before I feel comfortable going forward again with features.

Cheers,
EsKa.