Hey there !

So, that happened …  gone for weeks. Well, after the planned (but rainy) vacations in July, I slowly got back to work. And when I was about to publish the following article, my power supply decided to die (literally just before hitting “publish”). Oh well, it was old and dusty, it was bound to happen sooner or later. So, I ordered another one online and got it a couple days later. The story should have ended there, but nope. Long story short, the day I received the new power supply, I got mugged, beaten and ended up at the hospital with multiple fractures and contusions. Fun ! The cherry on the top of an already very passable summer. I am just out of the hospital now, but I am still in bad shape. Hey, at least, the new power supply works fine.

But there’s a good news ! We’ve just been accepted on Steam ! Thanks a lot to everyone who voted for the game, you rock ! It’s going to take a few weeks to do all the paperwork and effectively putting the game in store. Given that I am in no condition to do it right now anyway, I will likely align that with the 1.1 release which has been delayed from September to late October due to all the horrors listed above.

Anyway, let’s get back to the game itself with one major new feature, colony management.

Colony Management

Depending on your faction you’ll get access to specific colonies that you’ll be able to build on the planets you conquer. Some colonies can only be built on specific planet types. Each colony type offer different bonuses. And until now everything was happening under the hood, colonies were assigned at semi random each time a planet changed hand. Well, that will end with the upcoming 1.1 release with the addition of the Colony Manager.

Let’s give a look at our new menus.

This is the new Colony Manager. The actual look is not final, and it will probably get a few filters, but that’s close enough to the final product. This is a listing of all the sectors in which a colony is or can be built in your territory. It gives the general statistics about each sector (income, supply, parts production). Double clicking any item in the list will bring you to the following menu:

This is the colony setup menu (it can also be accessed from the sector info panel). Here you can see all the statistics about the selected colony, taking into account racial and planetary modifiers, and what it can import and export. If the colony is one of yours, there’s a drop down menu at the bottom which allow you to build another colony type as shown in the screenshots below:

This is the gist of the colony management, as you can see it’s pretty straightforward. Of course, don’t take the values in those screenshots too seriously, they will likely be tweaked during the development. Right now, this is a “player only” change, but AI factions will start using this system as well instead of building colonies for free.

Also, If your faction cannot support a colony in 1.1, it will be flagged as a rebel colony of sorts and will not provide any resources until you build something else there. Of course, construction will take money and time, and during the process, the colony won’t produce anything either.

Misc Improvements

More work has been done toward the free camera mode detailed last devlog. It’s mostly finished but I still need to review a few commands/shortcuts to make them consistent across all view modes (which isn’t trivial).

I also fixed a bug that was causing weapons/shields to disappear if you try to uninstall them when the ship’s cargo hold is full. I am still working on the sound issues  where too many sound FX being played at the same time can cause some kind of temporary audio failure.

And, that’s all for now, hopefully we’ll get back to a more normal schedule soon 🙂

Cheers,
EsKa.