It’s raining hard here today - the summer seems to have vanished completely. It’s the perfect weather for listening to the moody ambient tones of the Sol Trader soundtrack, available now as Steam DLC:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/506120/

10 dark expansive tracks await you, composed especially for the game:
A very quick extra point release has just come out, to fix a couple of minor gameplay issues in 1.1:
Trading goods quickly no longer crashes the game
Multiple trades no longer annoys or delights people too quickly
Characters now wait in the space port preparing their ship before leaving, allowing you to more easily talk to them
Enjoy!
Chris
1.1 is now released!
Hi all,
It's the moment you've been waiting for - 1.1 is finally out!
The version brings a brand new conversation system into the mix, with loads of different ways of interacting with the characters you meet. Your stats (and theirs) are now much more important, and you can now talk about anyone in the game. I’d encourage you to check out the tutorial to get the most from it: you can access it from the help menu at the top right of the screen.
Also brand new in this update is a full system map to help you find your way around. It’ll tell you which parts of the system are easy to get to and which areas aren’t accessible yet.
There are also many many other changes in this update, including the addition of much needed tool tips, the ability to pause the game, a streamlined opinions system, less memory usage, a fix for 32-bit windows, and a couple of crash fixes.
I'd love to know what you think of the new update - let me know on the forums!
Get the newsletter and win a copy of the game!
I’m running an offer at the moment for subscribers to my newsletter: I’m going to give away a copy of the game each week! Existing owners will get a $20 voucher for extras. You'll also get sent some very useful gameplay information to help you learn more about the game.
I’ll be posting more about the next update 1.2 soon. I’m going to be focusing on making modding easier, and adding lots more missions to the base game. My vision is that players will be able to discover a deep and interconnected web of stories layered onto the procedural history, and create their own stories in the midst of all that complexity. More on this in due course.
Until next time,
Chris
1.1 is complete: ship date on target for mid-August
You'll be pleased to know that 1.1 is complete and out for final testing. If the beta testers don't find any issues, then we're ready to ship as soon as I get back from a much needed break in the middle of August.
Time for me to take a bit of a break and start planning 1.2. Sneak preview: missions... see you after the jump.
Until next time,
Chris
1.1 news: conversations preview & release date update
Thanks for your patience whilst I fine-tune 1.1 for release! The conversations are almost done - here's a new preview video I released yesterday:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPb1u7MUm9k
I've been working very hard on this and have gone through two major iterations so far. There's still a few more things to add into the mix, such as opinion bonuses based on stats checks, and asking about someone's connections. I'm working on those over the next few days.
1.1 release date update
I've been working very hard on Sol Trader for the last three months. In order to avoid burnout and continue releasing regular updates for you all, I need to take a break. I'm therefore taking the family away on holiday for two weeks at the beginning of August.
I'd love to get 1.1 out to you all before I go away, but that wouldn't be sensible. I want to release a stable working build that you can all enjoy, and I won't be able to fix issues or respond to questions whilst I'm away.
I've therefore decided to release 1.1 in mid-August. It'll go live pretty much as soon as I'm back from holiday. I'm really sorry about the delay, but it's worth it to ensure that I can respond quickly to any questions or problems that come up. I hope you all understand.
Thanks for your continued support of the game!
Until next time,
Chris
Under the hood: conversation upgrade
I'm still working on the conversation upgrade still this week. Conversations are about to become much more fun... Here's a bit more about how it's going to work.
The length of conversations has been revamped. I've replaced the concept of "patience" with the character's opinion of you, and ensured that you cannot keep going on about the same thing for too long without taking a big hit to how the other character feels about you.
You can now pick different topics to talk about (ships, people, politics, gossip, etc) and a character will respond differently depending on how they feel about the topic. If you know a little bit of a character's past, it is possible to guess which topics you might get an opinion boost from.
Gone is the "choose a person to talk about" screen. You can now bring up any character in the game to discuss, and will be able to ask a wider variety of questions about them.
Stats are now a much bigger part of the new conversation system. Less intelligent characters can only handle a few topics in the same conversation, and characters with low charm are unable to handle talking about too many different people at once.
I'm also in the process of adding stats tests to conversations. For example: you might challenge a character to an arm wrestle in a bar if you fancy your chances: if you win you'll get a big boost to their opinion of you, but if you lose the opposite will happen. Of course, not all characters will take kindly to being challenged like this...
That's a taster of the new features. It's all subject to change, and I'm not quite ready to show screenshots yet, but I should be asking a few active community members to test the new system soon.
Until next time,
Chris
5 ways I screwed up Sol Trader's launch: a post-mortem
Hi all,
I've written up a Sol Trader launch post-mortem on my blog:
In the meantime, work continues apace on 1.1 - I have the conversation system disassembled in pieces right now and I'm working hard on improving it. ETA for 1.1 is towards the end of July.
Thanks for your continued support!
Chris
Developer, Sol Trader
New build (1.0.10): missions lists!
Hi all,
Here's another build of Sol Trader for you!
You can now choose missions from a list, which allows much easier and tactical selection of missions.
The location for missions are now colour-coded to show the ones you cannot easily get to because of visa issues.
Finally squashed all the gui.cpp boxCount crashes. Let me know if you come across those again.
Better error messages on crashing allowing me to fix future issues faster
Have fun! This is the last build I'm going to release (barring urgent crash fixes) before the 1.1 update. This will include a revamped conversation system with lots of extra nuances, a full system map, and lots more mission types. It is due some time in July.
Until next time,
Chris
New build (1.0.9)
Morning everyone... found another GUI crash due to large numbers of events, so thought I'd get a quick point release out to sort it out for you.
If you're still having the issue, let me know if that fixes it.
Until next time,
Chris
New build (1.0.8)
Just a small change for you today:
Work around two commonly reported crashes (Gui.cpp:28 and Gui.cpp:99)
Stop loyalty boost through failure to complete missions for an enemy faction
