My apologies for the delayed update, life got in the way and it’s likely that next week will be problematic as well. When I have to make a choice between coding and writing here, I favor the former. So don’t get alarmed by the erratic schedule, development goes on as usual.
Anyway, I made a fair bit of progress toward the release of the Beta 3 with a massive performance and stability boost, the new “free trading” AI module for your ships and multiple smaller other changes i made to the game.
This article will explain what the deluxe edition of Unending Galaxy is including. You can acquire it through a paypal donation or by buying the game at the itch.io store. As explained before, the free version is in no way, shape or form a demo. It’s not time limited, all gameplay features are included, and it will always be that way. Buying the game ensure that I will continue working on it. Also, by buying the game at any point, you’ll get access to all future versions as they become available.
That clarified, let’s get to what the deluxe version currently includes:
First and foremost, the game modding tools which allow you to basically change anything in the game. Secondly, the Imperium map, an extremely large hand-crafted galaxy designed to increase replay value and to show everything the game has to offer. And finally, 5 additional starting scenarios with the added bonus of giving access to techs otherwise unavailable.
Sorry for the delay. As this week has been mostly about testing and balancing, it’s going to be a fairly unusual devlog format (I also apologize in advance for the mostly unrelated screenshots alongside the article). The seemingly small change of assigning sector ownership to whoever hold the most factories in the area, or to the first one to drop a military base, had extremely large repercussions in many, many parts of the game. As there’s really no accurate way to “speed up” the game to test said feature, I basically had to let the game run itself days and nights while occasionally monitoring and tuning the effects. Let’s see what happened.
I toyed around with the giant space beasts called The Swarm. But before that, I need to explain first another improvement I made this week: ownership of a sector depends on who has the most buildings there, except if there’s a military base or shipyard, in that case it’s whoever own the building. Works for every faction (except the pirates), so you can now have sectors controlled by hey, the swarm or other ‘minor’ factions.
I made it so factions now do try to expand and claim solar systems. When two factions have common borders they may plant buildings in each other territory. Also, factions need to build a dock to claim a new sector, the territorial expansion is slower and makes more sense as there’s no claimed but empty systems. It’s possible to peacefully take over sectors, you can even use pirates to help remove a foreign military base in a sector you want. It has other implications I will explain further down.
Sorry for the small delay, I made the mistake of launching Crusader Kings II, and well, restoring the roman empire took a bit longer than expected (freaking HRE who decided to be a stable and powerful blob for once). And many thanks to those who bought the game on itch.io or donated. Beta 2.1 seems to works okay for most if not all of you, which is good 🙂
Anyway, it is time to deal with the trading part of things, and there’s a lot of ground to cover. This post will discuss what I am doing now and what are the goals for the beta 3. Hopefully it should be released before the end of the month.
edit: I removed the discus comment system on the website and put back the old one. Discus was getting out of hand and calling scripts from dodgy and privacy invasive websites. Also replaced and improved some other features of the website, and added an option to subscribe by email. The mobile version should be easier to read and navigate too.
First, UG is now popular enough that I get sufficient information to fix the most glaring issues right away, and given that the download size is only 100mb or so, posting more frequent updates isn’t really an issue here. So, I fixed a few bugs found in the initial Beta 2, including various menu related bugs, an issue with cargo missions, a few possible crashes, and more importantly it should fix performance and graphical bugs a small percentage of users were experiencing. Incidentally this version should be the first to fully support bloom shaders and other hardware accelerated effects (at least on most computers that are able to run those). An option in the video settings has been added to switch between the full hardware acceleration and the old display mode just in case, it require the game to be restarted if you’re not changing this option from the launcher. As usual it’s available on the download page.
People who donated (for any version) will receive a download link shortly by email.
Unending Galaxy [Beta 2] is available for download. This is a combat focused release with an improved pirate faction, multiple new combat missions, ranks to climb, a new flight model and new ships and weaponry. The starting scenarios and maps have been reworked too.
The full changelog is available on our forums, but here are the main points:
New pirate guild and missions
Bounty hunting board at shipyards
Improved and stronger police patrols
Better pilot-to-pilot communications (traits, pay fine to cops)
Movement system using acceleration, deceleration and rotation
Nicer graphics, new nebulae and clouds
New ships, weapons, wares, stations and a new faction
Active pause, improved menus.
(to the people on forum who tried the test build on the forum, this one has been slightly updated, with a few UI bug fixes and a much faster loading speed)
It is important to note that due to the nature of the simulation, pirate base don’t start with “preloaded” missions for the player to take. It can takes a few minutes for the first missions to appear. This is true for most “mission generators”. There’s also a lot of cargo ships (even loads in the default ‘trader’ scenario), going everywhere, it balances itself out relatively quickly.
Also, the (thankfully, only) loading screen is “a bit” long. It will likely be shorter in the final release. And, yes, you still need Windows’ themes service enabled for the game to use DirectX.
