Unending Galaxy 1.2.6 has just been released on all platforms!

This is a major content update with tons of new features, like the ability to directly play any faction, the new dreadnought, corvette and drone ship classes. It also includes dozens of gameplay and user interface improvements like the revamped shipyard menu, the ability to double click any of your ships or stations to open the relevant menu. It also got a graphical update with better sprites and fluid ship rotations. It’s also way more stable even in large, long games, and loading times (initial and save-games) are much shorter.

You can buy Unending Galaxy from the download page. For those who already own the game, your favorite store should get the new version shortly depending on how long it takes to upload everything. The full changelog is available in this article.

Major New Features

Play as any faction

While in previous versions you could look like any other faction in-game, you couldn’t really take the place of an existing one. This is now a thing of the past: the overhauled “new game” menu allows you to select any of the major factions from the get go. This is the best way to play the AI Core as intended (aka with free buildings).

Ceridans aren’t accessible due to the fact they spawn late. Pirates aren’t playable, nor is the Swarm (because they rely entirely on AI “ships”). I will see what I can do to make both factions playable in the future.

Dreadnoughts, corvettes and drones

Drones replace fighters, they are fully automated, used by carriers and military bases and come with preset weaponry. To fill the void, the corvette class has been added. Those are usually fast, but lightly armed. Combat-wise between drones and frigates.

I also added the new Dreadnought class. Those are extremely though and powerful combat ships (often coming with drone support), but they are also quite slow and costly. So don’t get fooled by the numbers: as with any large ship, they can be overwhelmed by large numbers of smaller ones if they aren’t provided an escort.

While at it, most ships and weapons have been re-balanced, and the worst looking sprites have been replaced by much nicer ones (AI Core cargo ship to name the worst offender). You can look at the various new ships in the updated wiki too!

Graphic Update

Another major feature (and one that has been requested a lot) is fluid rotations for ships, bullets and other misc objects, both in normal and sector map view-ports) with no negative impact on FPS. Now that this feature has been implemented, I realize how crucial it was, the game feels and looks way better than previously, it’s like night and day. Which means that I will likely need to remake my trailer now, it’s hopelessly outdated.

This improvement also allows me to animate ships and (technically) any in-game object. As such, I added some animation frames to a few ships, more will surely follow in future updates. Another side effect is that shields are now shaped and rotate like their owners.

While at it, asteroids are randomly rotated for variety sake, and the warpgate animation is much smoother.

Stability and performances

This is the main reason why I want to publish the 1.2.6 version before the planned 1.3 update. To sum it up it’s much, much better. The 1.2.1 was known to freeze completely or become unstable when you reach a large enough amount of agents (ships and stations). On my computer, it was at around 20.000 of those, this is now fixed. Same goes for

This release also massively increases initial game loading speed. It has a much smaller RAM and VRAM footprint too, which should make things easier on low-end hardware.

Loading a save-game is also much faster (3 or 4 times). Issues of ships duplicating are resolved. Long games in which you saved and reloaded multiple times no longer mess up hangar assignments and so on and so forth.

Miscellaneous

There are so many changes it’s hard to keep track of everything. I’d suggest you to check the full changelog at the bottom of this post for more information, but here are a few of the major gameplay and UI changes.

As you can see on this screenshot, the shipyard menu has been overhauled, it’s much better looking and requires less clicks to do the exact same thing as before (which is normally a good policy :p). Other menus have been slightly improved and will continue to be.

The empire manager allows you to set policies for your factions like the ability for your building manager to build outside of your borders or not, if you want to allow your automated military to defend your allies during invasions (which is a thing now: AI allies will defend each other, and they will defend you too if you have this policy enabled), if you want your faction to generate ‘civilian’ raiders, and so on. I will probably add more policies as the time goes on (suggestions are welcome, just understand those are YES/NO policies, no slider or values as parameters).

Oh, and I know many will like this one: You no longer need to fiddle with the various money accounts when you want to build or buy something. The game will automatically use whatever money is available in all your accounts. For instance if you want to build a space station, it will first use the money in your general account, and if it doesn’t has enough, it will check your building, then military, then diplomatic accounts. I think I got all menus beside the colony building one that I will update before the official launch.

Important Warning

Note that this version isn’t save-game or mod compatible with previous editions. A tool has been provided (located in the data folder) to update old mod files (ships, factions and profiles formats have changed), but it’s delivered “as is” and you will need to review the changes in the game editor.

Full Changelog

Faction AI

• Better allocation of money
• Better at detecting and responding to building of military bases in territory
• Allied factions can defend each other against invasions.

Balance

• Shipyard Build time proportional to ship value
• Bounties proportional to military strength
• AI Core gains the “fast shipyards” trait
• Added “armored” ship tag: hull absorbs 50% of damage
• Increased colony building time x10 (takes a few minutes instead of seconds)
• Large shield systems need a longer period of time before being able to charge after a hit
• Killing a carrier will deactivate all its drones
• Missiles stop tracking target after 50% of their total lifespan
• Ceridan (AI) get more money on spawn so production isn’t crippled

Gameplay

• You can now play as any in-game faction
• Ships are using a tag system to determine how the simulation is going to use them
• Military bases and carriers use drones instead of fighters.
• Drones can’t be piloted directly and come with preset weaponry
• New faction trait “fast shipyards” : 20% faster ship production
• SPQR has gates closed to non allies until the SPQR related event fires
• Pirates use more ships
• Warp-gates can be destroyed
• Small chance of spawning capital class raiders and bounty hunter after an hour of gameplay
• You set various policies for your faction to follow
• Claiming all sun/planets in a system will convert *empty* sectors even if already owned by other faction

Game Data

• Weapons fire rate reduced, damage increased (keeping roughly same DPS)
• Rebalanced weapon prices, damages and energy consumption
• Rebalanced stats of most ships, too many changes to list
• Reduced most missiles flight time and turn rate
• Added many drone variants for each tech group
• Added corvette class ships for all factions
• Drath : new dreadnought and armored cargo
• Federation : new dreadnought and changes to existing ships
• Siraks : new dreadnought, new corvette, and replaced frigate
• AI Core: new assault cruiser, old cruiser become a frigate
• Slightly reduced AI Core shield stats to make up for increased production

Graphics

• Higher quality sprites for the Siraks
• Resized many ships
• Replaced a few sprites by better looking ones
• Improved Ceridan battleship sprite (added border, reworked glow)
• Newly built docks fade in instead of popping
• Replaced AI Core cargo ship sprite by better looking one
• Replaced SPQR frigate ship by larger one, old one reused as corvette
• Added colored flags
• Fluid object rotations on both the map and standard view
• Shields are shaped and rotate like their owners
• Added animation to Helios, Charon, Hades, Fenrir and Cerberus ships
• Added animation to Swarm Queens and Gargants
• Asteroids are spawned randomly rotated
• Changed sprite for Swarm Queens and Gargants bullets

Modding Tools

• Improved ship and weapon editors (filters, list, stats)
• Improved faction editor (additional flags)
• Included file format conversion tool for modders
• Added option to auto set weapon prices (approximate)
• Ships can be animated

Performances / Code Stuff

• Improved performances all around in a major way
• Much faster savegame loading (3-4x faster)
• Much shorter initial loading time
• Smaller memory footprint (both RAM and VRAM)
• Ship order management should use less CPU cycles
• Ship order managers no longer continuously get and free memory
• Addition and deletion of objects optimized
• Large fleet battle should run better thanks to less bullets
• Killing a carrier ship no longer use way too many CPU cycles
• Misc stability related improvements
• Game can recognize outdated, unusable savegames (and warn you about it)
• Save system error correction mechanism improved
• Reduced CPU cost of scavengers
• Some new functions added to debug/cheat menu
• Removed useless cargo component from asteroids saving ram, disk space
• Rotating objects can be animated now

User Interface

• Manual money transactions, colony and dock building no longer need funds to be in specific accounts to work
• Click home-base in ship scan to center camera on it
• Small improvements to shipyard build queue
• Added command to sell all cargo in Ship Setup menu, with optional notification
• Move Cargo menu is larger
• Improved New Game menu layout
• Added option to filter out drones from asset list (default)
• Double click on player owned ships/docks will open relevant setup menu
• Check-boxes are easier to read
• Changed confirmation sound for trade and guild operations to something more “money-ish”

Bug Fixes

• Game freezing due to memory management (usually in large / long games)
• Game crash due to sound library
• Free traders trying to sell to hostile factions
• Potential issue in cache system which could cause the game to slow down and crash
• Money management wasn’t thread safe
• Carriers able to auto build their own drones would ignore manual ship type selection
• Minor display bug in colony build menu
• Minor display bug in station setup menu if player is using a transparent logo
• “My Assets” map filter is counting bullets in currently focused sector
• It was possible to click game editor button while database is still loading [modding tools]
• Saving weapon in editor doesn’t auto update ware [modding tools]
• Updating ware data in weapon editor delete ware’s picture [modding tools]
• FPS counter obstructed by money widget
• Small issue with ships calling for help
• Station destroyed with a carrier docked to it would cause problems
• Rare bug where the pirate guild would ask for way more money than necessary
• Galactic map would show gates that are closed to you
• Ships escorting raiders could still call police for help causing relationship issues
• Rare case of ship/object duplication
• When spawning, Ceridan could (temporarily) declare war to self, locking military fleet in place
• Ships visible in unexplored sectors when fog of war is disabled
• Crash when reloading database [modding tools]
• AI Core couldn’t build colonies on non capital icy and oceanic planets
• Some issues with tech group selection
• Fixed color of some clouds on Imperium map
• Map descriptions aren’t accurate regarding size
• Shield and weapon info popup not closing up on mouse leaving area
• Closing dock menu while popup is open wouldn’t close the popup
• Saves messing up hangar assignments on rare occasions
• Derelict and refitted derelict carriers had the exact same name
• Trade operations not changing left panel info in dock menu
• Trade menu not refreshing properly on some OS / config (windows 10)
• Misc pirate guild menu issues
• Ships ‘twitching’ from a rotation angle to another when facing a direction
• Weird looking gate rotations
• Rifts aren’t rotating like gates
• Can’t take over system sectors if those aren’t a planet or a sun