It has been a long time, too long, but new content update is finaly here. New way of aquiring resources has been added to the game. You can upgrade your ship with asteroid drill and mine asteroids. This will give you more yield than salvaging the debris with salvage laser. Asteroids have different pockets of resources in them, you have to scan the asteroid to see where the deposits you want are. You can then choose what to mine. Scanning speed is determined by your sensors module. Mining speed by the number of drills on your ship.
Other content updates in this release are cockpit view and ship tab in inventory window, where you can view your ship's stats and modules. Another small feature is that content of your inventory now spawns after death into a cargo box.
On a slightly different note. Azulgar Star Commanders has been in Early Access since 2017. We started as a team of people, but soon after release whole team fell apart due to lack of funding. Since 2018 it has been mostly me developing the game alone in my spare time. Volunteers came and went, mostly 3d artists who left their footprint, but 99% of code in the game was done by me. Hence the reason development is extremely slow. But it won't stop. Following is a roadmap of planned features, without any specific timeframes.
Tomas „Muad'Dib” Koza
Roadmap:
Bugfixes & Rebalance
list of multiplayer & audio bugfixes
rebalancing mining yields and ship building costs
World Generation
more sector variability and uniqueness
resources spread across different sectors
Map Improvements
show debris and asteroids on map
add option to zoom out to whole star system to see other planets
AI Enemies
neutral enemies to shoot at and shoot back at you.
Player Stations
ability to construct stations
serve as respawn point and resource storage
Player Capital Ships
ability to construct higher tier ships
similar to stations, but can fly like regular ships
Research
unlocking new parts based on research and collecting blueprints
Trading
trading stations to sell and buy resources and blueprints
Quests and NPC's
generated quests and NPC ships to interact with
Version 0.46 Gameplay Changes:
asteroid mining mechanic added
cockpit view added
new tab with ship stats added to inventory
cargo box with inventory spawns after death
Azulgar 0.45
Hello Everyone !
We have added factory stations into the game. Once inside it, you can craft ship building parts from various resources, finally giving them purpose in the game. Drop rates from salvaging have been increased, while simultaneously cost of modules has been slightly reduced. Start of the game was really long and grindy, but these changes should speed things up.
World generation and level design will be a gradual development. This update we added mega station into the earth's spawn location, to give Earth its own visual style. Dust clouds have been fixed and made a comeback.
Your ship's cargo capacity is now taken into account. Either when trying to pick up cargo pod or when receiving loot drop from salvaging. There are also a couple of minor fixes like death messages and server message memory release issues.
For the next update we will be implementing asteroid mining.
Azulgar 0.44
Hello Everyone !
After three long months we are finally releasing a new update. We have added a first type of mining mechanic into the game. That is: salvaging of debris. You will find salvageable debris scattered all around the spawn location as well as some derelict ships in Mars sector. You can start mining right from the spawn, since default ship starts with salvage laser instead of minigun.
Debris and derelict ships will drop various building parts and resources depending on their type. The drop is small and intended to give you some initial upgrades. Since there is no way to process resources into building parts yet and there is no other content you will still start with some building parts in your inventory for testing purposes. FTL jumping is also enabled by default and costs no fuel.
In this version we switched to unity's universal rendering pipeline. Thanks to this, game runs much faster, especially on lower end hardware. We also polished the visual settings a little bit, hopefully progressing towards something better.
In April status report we hinted on making the world more alive. We were playing with battle scenes with aliens along with some simple quests. We rolled back on those changes for now. The battle scene was too much too soon. With quests, we tried to conflate tutorial with world background story, but this in the end served neither of those purposes. We will definitely be revisiting this in the near future.
Nevertheless we started on enriching the world content by adding carriers that serve as shipyards and derelict ships that can be salvaged. For now only Earth and Mars are available, but we started to make them look and feel different from each other. This will be ongoing process in future updates.
For the next update we will be working on adding factory stations into the world, so you can process salvaged resources into building parts for your ship. We also plan to start working on another mining mechanic, which is asteroid mining. This will give no building parts but a lot of resources that should serve as a platform for next stage of the game. Either player stations or capital ships, possibly both.
Status Report
Hello Everyone !
During last month we were working on adding first type of mining into the game, that is salvaging of debris. This is intended to be a early game activity and will give you some small amount of building parts and resources. Unfortunately we still have a list of bugs and issues that need to be resolved. We plan to spend next month polishing everything we added during last two months, so we can release an update next month.
Status Report
Hello Everyone !
We are currently working on bringing some life into the game. Namely adding rudimentary quest system and game progression along with differentiating game locations from one another. Unfortunately it is not good enough in its current state, so we will not be releasing update this month.
See you on 1st of May.
Azulgar 0.43
Ship editor now uses building parts from new resource system. We have also reworked and improved most of the editor features. Hopefully providing more streamlined and easier to understand interface. New features have also been added. Help overlay that explains functionality that can be turned on with F1. You can now rotate ship parts via right click context menu. Automatic snapping to ship surface can be toggled on and off. Along with improved dragging of parts (they are picked at the point under cursor), this allows for much more precision and creativity with ship designs. Last but not least, you can undo changes to the ship via Ctrl+Z up to five steps.
We also started working on visual side of the game. Station parts have all been unified in style. Previously there were some pieces of stations that were not textured in the same style. In terms of graphics and visuals, this is not the final version and we plan to continually improve it along the way.
Next we will focus on changing the world generator and adding minable resources to the world. More information next month.
Editor Changes:
Uses building parts from new resource & crafting system
Added F1 help overlay
Snapping to ship can be toggled (Alt)
Undo function with 5 steps (Ctrl+Z)
Added rotation via context menu (right click on module)
We added new sectors into the game. Namely: Earth, Venus, Ganymede and Saturn. It was our long time plan and was necessary to implement before moving forward to mining and giving players ability to do permanent changes to the world, like building stations. You can travel between them via warp gates. At the moment the sectors don't differ from each other in content, only in celestial body in the background. But this will be changed when resource mining comes to the game. Along with future expansions to other, possibly procedurally generated alien sectors.
Most of the time since last update we spent upgrading the networking code to improve performance. In the old version all the players were synchronized with each other all the time. Synchronization interval between players in one sector is now based on distance and players in other sectors are not synchronized at all. This will allow for many more players on the server.
We also added interface for ship's inventory and new ship building parts and resources. At the moment all you can do with them is drop them into space in cargo pods and pick them up again. Editor still works with the old system, where the idea was that the ship's chassis will be build with structure parts and every other module would have to be crafted by itself. But this seems a bit too tedious and inconsistent, so we decided to move to a new system. More about that with improved editor in the next update !
We have decided that starting year 2021, we will be posting status report every 1st of the month. Potential game update will be released alongside status reports.
Since last update we have been working on expanding world to new sectors, so the game is not situated just around Mars. We needed to do this before implementing mining and resources in the world. It was also prudent to upgrade our multiplayer architecture to handle more players sooner rather than later, so we did it. We used to synchronize each player with each player every 100ms. Now the speed of player synchronization depends on distance between them. Server also does not synchronize players in different sectors. This should allow many more players on the server. These changes need to get through some additional testing, but will be released with next status report on 1st of February.
We have added shields and three new weapons into the game. Guided Missiles, that follow locked target. Plasma Gun, which is a short range beam weapon with bonus against shields. And a Rail Gun, which is a long range sniping weapon with high reload time. Minigun has also been tweaked and now uses overheating mechanism. Shields create a protective bubble around ship, that takes energy upon damage based on shield's ratio. There have also been several other tweaks and bugfies. Full List at the end.
So what's next ? Resource gathering and crafting update. See you soon !
Release Notes:
Key action mapping added to options
Added new weapons (Missile Launcher, Rail Gun, Plasma Gun)
Added shields (take energy instead of damage)
Added shooting indicator for minigun (other weapons dont need it)
Added bottom action panel to activate/deactivate weapons & shields
Minigun now has overheat mechanism (along with Plasma Gun)
Railgun and Missile Launcher use reload mechanic
Added ship camera zoom with right mouse click
Ship camera follow distance can be changed with mouse wheel
Split Autopilot and Free Look into two separate actions
Shipyard entrances (Hangars) shown in Ship HUD
Ship HUD markers colorized based on faction (Players are green)
Azulgar is not dead, it's undead. It will keep coming back.
It took us 16 months what we originally planned for 4 months. We stayed silent, because there was no point in promising a date that we didn't even know would come. So we decided to work on it until it is finished and prove it with results not words. First we moved to a new version of unity. Then we had to rework a lot of internal features (again) to work with multiplayer. And after that, the multiplayer itself took 8 months. It has been too long, longer than we had hoped for, but it is here.
Multiplayer is in. We are releasing standalone Server Application for Azulgar, that can generate its own world and run the server code. It can be downloaded directly from our website (link below) or you can find it in your Azulgar installation directory packaged as Azulgar Server.zip. To connect to a server you have to manually fill in the public IP. Your server has to have appropriate port forwarding set in order to function. IP that is filled in by default in the game is our server located in central Europe. Its player limit is currently set to 24, maximum possible player limit that can be set for your server is 64. We didn't test such high player numbers and in this first iteration we doubt it will work smoothly. This is the first rough version and there are plenty of optimizations and improvements ahead of us like: list of public servers, NAT hole punching, performance and player synchronization improvements.
Our game is still not in a state that we would consider "fun to play", but we added minigun into the game, so you can at least shoot at each other. Various other parts of the game have seen rework and improvements too (world generation, ship controller, UI, map, graphics, music). This version is what we wanted to have a year ago.
So what's next ? Next update will focus on weapons. Adding guided missiles, shields, energy guns, minigun overheating, etc. Along with improving server application and multiplayer experience itself. We are a couple of people working on this project in our own free time. Which has its advantages and disadvantages. Development is slow, but we will not stop. We won't be setting up any dates for the next update, but it is definitely going to be much sooner than this one.
Even if it didn't seem like it, we go trough every feedback, suggestion and bug report. So we will be happy if you leave us any kind of feedback on our forums or on steam. Thanks !
