First of all, thanks to the writers of Space Game Junkie for their mention of Unending Galaxy. The pre-alpha is also available on Indie DB and GameJolt now, when possible try to use those sites to download the game. I am not sure how regularly I will release updates. Doing so takes time, between the testing phase, the packaging, uploading the game to the various hosts, and updating the various websites it usually take me the best part of a day. What is sure is that you’ll get at least another small update soonish while I am still working on small compartmentalized changes. When I switch back to bigger changes and additions the pace will get much slower.
That said, I am pretty happy with the latest additions to UG.
My engine now has a basic mechanism to handle animations. So far I am using it to display explosions for missile hits, destroyed ships and stations. While it’s not much, it really make battles much more dynamic and nicer to look at. Also with some additional work it will be possible to use animations for basically any object. Not that I have the assets (and it’s memory consuming), but having the ability to do so is still a good thing and I will probably take advantage on it.
In the spirit of making things look nicer, the nebulas I added in 0.4.2 now change opacity slowly over time, it looks quite nice. Most menus are now transparent and some have been improved in a way or another.
Not all changes I made the last few days were cosmetic. I added a very basic communication dialog with other ships. You can only ask them what are they currently doing, more options will of course be added later. It was more a case of adding the last main menu I needed than anything else. Factions can use all their shipyards to build their military fleets, they also rebuild their Constructor ships when needed. I tweaked various settings and fixed a few minor (from my point of view) bugs found in the latest release.
I think that’s all for the last few days. I should post a design document regarding radar, nebulas and the pirate faction soon.