After the 0.7.0.00 release I had plenty of bug reports to keep me busy. I of course sat on the more nasty bug reports for as long as I could because those are irritating and take longer to diagnose. I'm glad to say some of them were fixed in 0.7.1.00 but since these bugs always take longer to find I do enjoy taking a little extra time to add some features with the fixes.
Thus, 0.7.1.00 is a slightly fun patch. Here's the notes:
A lot Of the ingame UI now scales with a new setting value. Note that this is a first pass at UI scaling so it is only the elements deemed to be the best combination of important and easy to code. Also it isn't any sort of crazy fancy scaling algorithm, so if you make the UI too big and everything looks fuzzy and goes off the edge of the screen then your warranty is immediately void and we are sending our Pakistani friend to come collect your kidneys.
We've removed the autosave button from the settings. It wasn't doing anything because we removed that feature with the save overhaul so the button was just confusing people and making us rage. Autosave has been replaced by a guaranteed write to disk that ALWAYS happens when you dock, we just optimized it to be so fast you don't notice anymore.
That damn loading animation better not ever crash now
Seriously, there are 2 patch notes because I've added 2 full systems of checks to guarantee the loading animation can't crash because you moved the mouse to another screen or something stupid like that. Stupid loading screen.
added a fancy check which attempts to ensure that your game is using a real video card and not defaulting to integrated when both are available
added a fancy visual indication to the main menu that indicates when you might expect issues based on your GPU
In other words, your game will warn you if your GPU setup is doing something funky. The game still can't switch GPU because that's kinda extremely hard to do in our framework....if you know how to code such a thing in monogame I guess tell us please?
fixed a bug with taxi quests where rejecting the quest was still opening the map to show you where the passenger wanted to go
added the ability for arbitrary crew members to force station interior simulations to keep running when the player isn't around
taxi crew should now keep station interior simulations running so that they won't get stuck if you leave the station before they can board your ship
fixed a bug where taxi quests were breaking after giving you the reward leading them to finish with an error message...I'm pretty sure they did finish properly though
rewrote log data items to load their contents based on a search parameter instead of a hard coded link so that text data included in the captain's log can come from steam workshop items
changed the default icon for log entries
the flotilla creation process now checks ship inventory for custom log files and copies those files to the output directory. Please include these files with your mod upload if you want players to be able to read the lore you have written and placed inside your ship
added a fancy system for the player to enter their own log data files into ship inventory. If you are in the sandbox arena with debug mode on, click your captain's log and you will get a file selection dialogue. Any text file you select should be converted to a data log and moved to your game's data folder. Now...this will probably fail if your computer has strange issues with file permissions like that one guy on skype who's computer is a problematic mystery to everyone. Ah who am I kidding, you guys will find every single way this can possibly be broken and I'll be fixing it all next week. I hope you're happy, because you can use this to add custom lore text data files to any flotilla and it will interact properly with the captain's permanent log storage in singleplayer. If you're looking to crash the game I suggest strange character encodings or text files in chinese as a good place to start
fixed a bug where placing shields in the top left pixel of a design caused the editor to crash
you can now use the mouse scroll wheel on scrollable menu items like the load save list from the main menu
added a new module type - missile warhead converters. An active module which changes the warhead on all nearby missiles when activated. This one is only half-in as the warhead types are still a work in progress, however this is the finished solution to our planned framework for allowing different ordinance types to be unlocked by the player.
forced preloading on 2 map sectors in the red zone which should have always preloaded. If you got a waypoint that was hilariously far away it's because the quest failed to find the items in one of these sectors due to the sector not preloading. Sorry bout that.
you can now create a new profile from any workshop flotillas you have installed. I heard someone had asked for this so I did it like...last night. It cycles through every ship in every flotilla which means you can have duplicates, that's not my fault as it depends on the mod contents. If this feature is controversial I can revise it in the future to require mod makers to flag their creations for participation but I suspect it may not be an issue.
reduced the quantity of stations destroyed to complete the blockade breaking quest by half
and finally, the most important patch note: I found and hopefully fixed a mega-bug relating to the storage of session contents which has been harassing me for years. This bug has very complex implications which is why it was hard to find and hard to be certain how fixed it currently is, but a few days of theorycrafting leads me to believe it could have caused empty sectors, duplicated sectors, duplicated characters, zombie ships, and all manner of AI bugs. It was triggered by approaching a sector until you were close enough for it to load, and then not entering it, flying away until it unloaded, and then repeating the process one time for each horrible curse you wanted to inflict upon your simulation. I will be carefully monitoring the results of my fix.
0.7.1.00 preview
I just spent all night wrapping my head around a bug. I change this line of code and then what happens...Running it through my brain over and over I am pretty sure it's a big one. This is often what I do after a big content release: I pace back and forth freaking out because some small thing doesn't work properly and it leads to a bug fixing and polish themed release.
0.7.1.00 is coming. I'ts not the biggest but it has some very highly requested features and some fancy solutions to very common pain-points.
UI Scaling
Since our engine is written from scratch, things like a scaling UI are just things we have to solve the hard way, and after much discussion and debate over how it might be done in a less hard way I eventually just got fed up in the middle of the night and started just adding code manually to scale every element. It will take a while to catch every single element, but I think 0.7.1.00 will cover enough to make life easier for people on 4k screens.
New Music
Chris promised there were new music tracks coming. Much rejoice was had. Now we wait and see.
Solving GPU detection
Jan has done a lot of work on solving issues relating to having multiple GPUs and has come up with a solution which should at least give you more information about what your computer is doing for diagnostic purposes. There's a lot of hardware out there on the market and I think we are doing pretty good with supporting it. The goal here is to tell the player when their computer has decided to use the wrong GPU until we can get a more long-term solution into the engine by working with hardware manufacturers or doing a satanic blood sacrifice ritual or whatever it turns out to require.
A new workshop feature?
I received a request for the ability to have data logs inside flotillas so that workshop mods can tell their story a little better. I love the idea, and have worked a little on the back-end required to make this happen. I don't know if it will make it into the patch because my work keeps being interrupted by really interesting bug reports.
Right now an ingame log file is just a text file named in a way that tells the engine what language it is in. The trick will be building a process that allows the player to easily get that item into a flotilla.
Bugs that I think I have resolved
The following are bugs that I think have at least partially been resolved. Sometimes you find code which is clearly wrong and the implications of what that code being wrong could cause are not immediately clear.
Taxi quests work now but marv will still try to murder your passenger
I am very confident I solved entity duplication
I am very unconfident that may have solved entity dissapearance
I have no evidence, but there is a chance that I solved ghost ships with strange behaviorss
I know that whatever I did should be a slight optimization
I have written so many checks and safety measures to ensure the loading loop can't crash that it had damn well better not crash again
0.7.0.07 patch notes
0.7.0.05
fixed a bug with a red zone quest which was not giving its quest reward
rewrote the binary format for ships such that a corrupt ship data file can no longer invalidate an entire sector causing the sector to fail to load
rewrote the sector loading logic to be more robust so that it can recover from some forms of corrupt data
rewrote the sector regeneration logic to hopefully regenerate the contents of a sector if it is found to be totally corrupt
fixed the logic for aiming the repair tool when zoomed out
0.7.0.06
fixed an issue where quest rewards from 0.7.0.05 were granted in a way as if they had been programmed by a drunk person
0.7.0.07
player avatar move speed slightly increased
fixed a bug with ingame design screen undo feature where everything worked except for the keybind check
the SSC shipyard interdiction effect is now produced by a station which can be blown up or sabotaged
the SSC shipyard now has fewer patrols
slightly reduced the number of fighters involved in the end battle of the SSC shipyard event
removed 2 key patrol points at the SSC shipyard which should help guarantee the player has more space to escape
bullets fired from guns directly on top of enemy targets now glance off dealing 10% damage
fixed a bug with a dialogue that pops up at shops in pirate's cove that would make shop interface behave strangly
fixed an issue that could cause hardware and software cursor to both render at the same time in some scenarios
some work on improving quest journal tracking
fixed a potential issue with programatic cammera panning
fixed a bug with interior screen shot rendering
changed how consoles apply crew faction id to ships when they are controlled such that whoever controlls the bridge should more reliably change the faction of the ship to their own faction
changed "who's" to "whose" in a dialogue
fixed some issues with the Anna agent giving the correct dialogue
0.7.0.04 patch notes
0.7.0.03
fixed a bug in procedural taxi quest saving which could cause issues when loading a save. existing saves will work fine after this update
0.7.0.04
us date format forced for save files to prevent save dialogue date string issues on non english systems
removed arrows from missile magazines so people will stop asking what those arrows do
Improved save dialog
implemented a save delete option
added GUI visibility control for interior
fixed the quest to kill pirate stations at the cut throat base. It was clearly programmed by an idiot.
0.7.0.02 patch notes
0.7.0.01
fixed a bug with the dialogue for the quest to get the first cloning vat
0.7.0.02
added a fix to interior crosshairs
added a thread sleep to the loading animation loop to make sure windows doesn't think the process is stalled
added windows dog kicking to the loading loop. In addition to being animal abuse, this kicking of the dog prevents windows from thinking the game has stalled when in reality the game is just doing a long operation such as opening a save file. This change was made in response to reports of the game crashing when loading and saving which we could not reproduce on our end at all, possibly because we have nice fast hard drives
We have done a lot of testing and simply can not reproduce this crash that people are experiencing. I will watch closly to see if any changes are reported after the update. If you are experiencing the crash, please look at the version number in the bottom left of your main menu. If it says 0.7.0.02 and you still get the crash, I want to know about it.
0.7.0.00 Groovy Sandwich
Sorry it took so long. Had a short internet outage this morning. Lets get all them patch notes listed in no real order.
General changes
fixed the end of the pirate's cove entry conversation dialogue which was missing a step
Lightshaft reimplementation in progress, many sectors have had lightshafts re-added
re-enabled lightshaft settings toggle
Fixed conduit connectors on a T 2.5 large reactor which wasn't really meant to be in the game but people are using it inside flotillas
optimized interior rendering slightly
the survival arena no longer allows docking or EVA (EVA = instant death) because the architecture doesn't 100% support it and it defeats the purpose of that game mode
the above also technically fixes a bug where the game could get into an invalid state if you boarded an enemy ship in survival arena mode
revised the design of most prefabs
changed which prefabs spawn in the orange zone to save the really irritating and difficult ones for other zones
added a warp gate into the middle of pirates' cove
added turrets to warp gates
buffed mass drivers so that they are hopefully worth actually using
added an animation to current credits value when earning credits
fixed a source of potential data duplication inside the pirate faction when reloadloading a save mid-game
exotic matter now only drops from ships which aren't the player's faction
added a new drop (biomatter) from crew who die in space which increases station capacity when collected
made the collection of exotic matter and biomatter instantly apply to your currency tab instead of going to the ship's hold
designed a framework to allow portions of the world to be nondestructively regenerated so that new updates can modify the world inside an existing save instead of forcing you to create a new one
made pirate's cove more cozy feeling
AI ships no longer get pushed away from ships that have their airlocks open for docking
added a framework which allows modules to have particle effects associated with the exterior of the ship. We will extend this framework in the future with some fun cosmetic modules that will allow you to add cosmetic particle effects to your custom ships
optimized interior scene transitions to reduce visual chaos when moving between ships
friendly pirates in pirate's cove will now forgive you if you shoot them
reduced the density of asteroids in all of the red zones
the interior screen shot functionality was improved so that it doesn't crash on big ships anymore, we might even make it an official function instead of a debugging function
fixed a bug where AI could try and issue commands to their ship 1 frame after dying causing a crash
NPC trade ships are now constrained by their own budget when purchasing cargo so they won't always be able to fill their entire hold with valuable cargo. This makes piracy less of a lottery.
added undo function (ctrl-Z) to ship design. currently it has a limited number of undo steps (like 100)
trade ships which are docked at stations now have their computers secured by top secret trade station cryptographic bullshit or something like that and can no longer be hacked until they undock
coded up the logic that will allow attack drones to work
added logic to drone bays which will allow multi-drone drone bays which are activated from a single module
made some loot tables slightly less irritating
added code for a crazy awesome spinal weapon that's not in the story yet
added assets for a number of new ships
added assets for a number of new modules
rewrote save game logic entirely so that games can save and load from files in addition to simply continuing from the currently "open" save file. This allows you to control when and where you save/load, and it makes save file management much easier since compression is used to allow much easier sharing of save files
optimized autosave to be much less laggy when docking to a station
added light emission data for a lot of existing modules
added a lot of T3 modules which will be used in future content
added a number of station interior art assets which will be used in a future overhaul of many station interiors
added a new turret type with a fancy unique effect for use on a special ship
added a framework that allows a loading animation to be displayed on the screen by any code which will take a long time to execute. Being a super mega-genius as I am I managed to write it so that it can be called in-line by any code without leaving context so we now use it for things that in the past would simply hang the game (like loading a save)
the survival arena no longer keeps track of cargo drops to prevent clutter
increased some magazine sizes for slower firing projectile weapons
added an an attack drone bay active module
fixed a bug with the research some stuff quest that prevented the tooltip from updating after loading a save until you researched something
added a suggestion to the tutorial that the player press F1
added a new story quest in the beginning of the game that shows the player trading and rewards an entry level cargo hauler blueprint
added a new story quest in the beginning of the game that introduces the player to combat and rewards an entry level combat ship blueprint
added a check for invalid or corrupt flotilla data to prevent a crash when loading invalid flotillas
upgraded the station energy capacity research dialogue to explain to the player that station capacity can be expanded through combat
reversed the order of home base airlock use when spawning ships
moved the player spawn point inside the home station
the game will now suppress single-key keybinds when a keybind of the same key + a modifier is being pressed
stations will no longer force dead ships to undock if the player is currently boarding them
fixed a potential invalid mouse position calculation in the map screen when the mouse is outside the game window
it is now impossible for any bar to contain duplicates of the same NPC
quests now need to cause errors twice in a row before they will be removed to prevent a crash
the game now checks if it was paused after removing a bad quest
upgraded the crystal finding breadcrumb quest to alert the player that they should go get the crystals since they will be valuable
fixed a bug with the crystal finding breadcrumb quest which could have caused the quest to break if you left the session while it was doing its thing
the crystal finding quest is now easier to spot and spotting it is guaranteed if you are in the same sector
made the first cloning vat research quest idiot proof
assasination quest agents are now slightly more common, no longer require SSC shipyard mission completion, and now they always offer a quest
fixed a bug that could lead to a crash when trying to repair a module that was configured improperly due to a ship being broken
improved the rendering of rocket trails
corridor conduits now glow differently depending on energy transfer
fixed a bug where the bar screen GUI was interactive during a dialogue
improved the rendering of drones and missiles
added proper artwork and missile trail fx to rockets
fixed a dialogue in the tutorial that was obviously broken and NOBODY MENTIONED FOR LIKE 5 MAJOR CONTENT UPDATES
added SSC communication relay sattelites to worldgen
added a quest to kill SSC communication sattelites in exchange for credits
Story content
added a new space dungeon complex in the red zone full of pretty tough enemies
added many new NPC characters to pirate's cove
added new portraits for multiple story characters
added multiple quests that can be picked up in pirate's cove, or in many cases simply completed without picking them up
wrote a ton of quest dialogue for the story of the red zone
wrote a ton of dialogue in general for various pirate's cove characters and other red zone characters
new logic for loot unlocks in pirates' cove added which requires you to advance the story before unlocking everything
the core red zone story arc is now fully complete and can be played up to the placeholder for the quest that will send you to the grey zone story arc
GUI improvements
Added a mission journal for tracking quests and displaying info for active quests
added the ability to control tracking of quest objectives via the quest journal
added a new screen overlay framework that will make a lot of GUI activities easier to program such as an ingame menu which doesn't need to be a new screen entirely
added a fancy screen blur transition effect for use with the new overlay framework
redesigned the ingame menu from scratch as an overlay with modern UI design
added new GUI elements to the ingame menu and the main game menu for saving and loading named save files
arrows for objective tracking have new artwork and animation
replaced the settings screen entirely with Jan's new modern settings screen
worked to improve minimize/maximize behavior and edge cases for setting resolutions which caused issues in the past
added new options to the settings screen which may actually allow you to reduce rendering quality for low end machines
added other GUI elements which we can't even remember jeez you expect us to remember everything we add?
improved camera interpolation and smoothing effects, you won't even notice how much you like it
added the ability to zoom out from your character from the ship interior screen
added a fancy damage overlay grid effect functionality to the repair device
improved interior lighting quality
optimized interior rendering even more
added a display of reactor heat levels to the ship interior mini-map
added special rendering for corridors in the ship interior mini-map
added icons and animations for active airlocks to the ship interior mini-map
added new icons for the existing elements of the ship interior mini-map
improved rendering of ship status effects
ship status icons now display remaining duration
redesigned dialogue GUI
added fancy text effects and sounds to dialogue GUI
quick slots are no longer selected with the mouse wheel
0.7.0.00 Tomorrow
We've added a new trailer, it is the 0.7.0.00 trailer.
We've also decided that the version number of the next patch is 0.7.0.00
Our system for deciding the version number of a patch is that we make a patch and then we say "hmm, maybe this should be 0.7.0.00. Yeah that seems like a good number!" Maybe we consider that this means we are 70% of the way to version 1.0 while recognizing that that's impossible for us to calculate...maybe it just seems like a number that's suitably exciting. Either way, the next patch is 0.7.0.00 and it is planned for release....TOMORROW.
Release plan
12/16/2017 at: whenever George wakes up and has his coffee.
We will of course do the usual thing where we release the patch and then immediately find things wrong with it and upload fixes. Those will come as 0.7.0.01 and so on, and I will be paying close attention to feedback all week, however this patch has been play tested slightly more than previous patches so...here's hoping for a smooth release.
Also note that while we are contractually bound to say absolutely nothing of the sort...I can guarantee Zero Falls will be on sale very soon, so if you want us to have as little of your money as possible you should put us on your wish list and wait a few days.
All night tonight we will be play testing the early game tutorial changes looking for last minute fixess and posting our beautiful trailer on social media.
Tell your friends!
We're a small team and publicity is hard for us because we're anti-social computer nerds who live in caves and have practically zero friends on Facebook. (I don't even use Facebook) If you like Zero Falls, and want to help us make it the greatest space game ever, you might consider spending a few minutes to help us conquer the great Steam visibility algorithm by writing a review or telling your friends that we exist. We have some of the best fans ever as is evident by our workshop, and I want to say thank you for your nerdy space-ship loving passion.
p.s. I install practically every workshop mod when I do play testing
Christmas update preview
We have a big update coming out next weekend which also happens to be the weekend before everyone starts taking time off work to sit at home in front of their computers drinking eggnog and playing space ship games. I want to release official patch notes after the patch is out, so right now I'm just going to group upcoming changes into categories and write summaries for them. We are busting our butts with testing and polishing right now as all of our planned content is in the game and just needs to be debugged.
New story content
In the previous update we overhauled a lot of the orange zone and replaced existing worldgen parameters of the orange zone with new content, new NPC interactions, new prefabs, and new quests and rewards to make the orange zone just generally better. In this update we are doing the same with the red zone.
We have remade pirate's cove with some QOL improvements like a warp gate that will take you there instantly once unlocked, and we have upgraded it to serve as a proper quest hub for the new story content that is being added in this update. You will find new NPC characters of varying degrees of sobriety to interact with that will give you quests and things to do, and the existing stations and loot tables have been massaged to fit better into the story progression of the zone.
We have also added a TON of dialogue. I seriously probably doubled the amount of dialogue in the game, and I had a lot of fun writing it so if you enjoy the story elements of Zero Falls then you are hopefully going to enjoy the new writing. Of course you jerks who skip all dialogue will be glad to know that there's still no pause between dialogue response clicking and the quest log should tell you everything you need to know in 1 or 2 sentences max.
Did I mention we have a proper quest log now? More on that later.
The red zone also has a massive space dungeon area added to it which is part of our goal to move the gameplay progression more in the direction of space combat. A lot of the story elements in the red zone will revolve around space combat, and your progression should be gated behind your ability to take out increasingly powerful enemy space ships. This is the first iteration of the endgame gameplay loop where we put the player up against increasingly difficult space enemies, and we don't have any data yet on how it should be balanced, so we ask you to be patient with it, give feedback, and expect it to improve in the next big update once we have tester feedback.
New game engine features
We have done a lot of work on the engine as usual, here's some of the important changes:
added some support for rendering quality settings that can be changed to affect performance
many optimizations, mostly around ship interior rendering
added a new framework that allows us to force sections of the game world to regenerate so that new content can be added in an update without invalidating past saves
currency items that drop when you blow up ships are now instantly collected and there is a new one that increases station construction capacity, goal is to shift the grind away from trading and towards space combat
Complete rework of save game logic which makes your saves into a file instead of a folder and allows you to maintain more than 1 save. Also uses compression so the files are small and easy to share
Added a new framework for attaching particle effects to the exterior of a ship via modules. Any module can have an arbitrary number of particle effects associated with it, and we plan to add 1 tile structure modules in the future which will allow decorating custom ships with particles
Many mechanical upgrades to the codebase such as ctrl-Z undo inside the editor, a working full interior screen-shot feature, and proper loading animation for long duration calculations
Many assets and module types secretly added for use in future updates which will probably immediately show up in workshop mods
GUI improvements
Jan has gone absolutely nuts with making the game look more professional. He has written a new GUI framework, and has been methodically going from screen to screen changing things in the order of what irritates him the most.
We have a quest log now!
You can actually zoom out to see more of your ship in interior view
All dialogue GUI has been replaced and made more readable
Text in general is rendered better now
The ingame menu and settings menu have been 100% replaced
There are new animations and sounds for some minor things
Check out the cool new stuff with the interior minimap and with repair guns
Switching between interiors of ships is faster and smoother now
Camera smoothing and screen blur transition effects
Early game improvements
I've also added a few new quests to the early game which will help the player with unlocking their first real ships and hopefully make the early game experience less painful. We know that the overall "feel" of progression in many areas isn't quite there yet, and this is maybe 2 small steps in the direction of fixing that problem by giving the player more guidance at the beginning of the game and getting them past the hump of initial difficulty due to having a crap start ship. If you've got a save game where you already got to pirate's cove, these quests probably don't represent very much missed content, you can think of them as an extension to the tutorial.
Our goal with this update is that anyone, no matter the state of their save game, can load their existing game and immediately jump into the new story content, however we also expect many people will be trying the game for the first time with this update. We wanted to polish both ends of our beloved turd.
We hope you enjoy the new update, and have a happy holiday season filled with lots and lots of irresponsible capitalism.
New content is being tested
Our latest batch of improvements and story content updates has gone out to testers on the private test branch. If I receive any positive feedback I will push to a new unstable test branch on steam for everyone to get an early preview and give some feedback, however until I do I will just be debugging and polishing as usual.
New fetures currently being tested
Overhaul of save game management with optimized auto-save, save to file, load from file, and the ability to maintain multiple save games at once, as well as all new GUI elements and smaller easier to share save files
Red zone story arc. Return to pirate's cove to start the next phase of the story. No need to make a new save, you can just pick up where you left off.
Engine architecture improvements. We added the ability to force the regeneration of key story sectors inside an existing save so that we can add more game without forcing you to remake your save
New GUI. Like, so much of the GUI has been redone you will just have to see it. Still working on more.
New ships and new tech. In addition to new story content in the red zone there are also new rewards.
Upcoming content
The last few updates have focused very heavily on the engine and on the polish, so we are delighted to be spending a large amount of time on the story progression for the current update. Lets preview some of the things that are coming.
Red Zone Storyline completed
Our first goal was to move the game's storyline through all of the red zone so that you can play up to the completion of all core redzone content. This work is essentially done at this point, but has not been debugged or fully tested.
The red zone includes a batch of new characters, about 500+ lines of dialogue, and many new missions with a big emphasis on space combat. It also comes with a significant leap in available technology and ship hulls, only some of which is currently available in the red zone's current unfinished state.
The story will have you uniting the forces of the red zone against a common enemy...or just killing lots of them for fun and profit. It's hard sometimes to draw a line between these moral grey areas, and where the pirates live everything looks red.
We also wrote a new algorithm for forcing areas of your save file to regenerate themselves when upgrading a save file to a new version. This gives us the power to change the layout of key storyline terrain such as the pirates' cove which now has a warp gate in it. It's also probably the only core engine feature we worked on, since the emphasis has been on new story content.
Grey zone under development
Under development right now is the zone which will come after the red zone story content, pitting the player against the core SSC regions and even more new characters.
Note that this process requires not just mapping, but designing characters with unique personalities, goals, interests, and varieties of alcoholism. I've mapped out the plot for 5 more games worth of story in the big picture, but in order to actually write quests and dialogue we need to hammer out the small details of the story and that takes time.
Oh, and by the time we are done with the grey zone the player should expect to have the entire tech level 2 unlocked so we can finally start moving into the more interesting stuff that Jan has saved for the end in order to motivate himself.
Or put another way, while this image continues to grow on the bottom half...we aim to have the entire top half (plus all the secret stuff not pictured) available to players by the time this update is released.
Also in the works
We've looked into unique missile types and are working to add a module which will finally solve the problem of choosing what type of warhead will go onto your missiles. This will allow new missile variants like cluster missiles, incendiary warheads, emp warheads, etc. We have more ideas than we have time to explain but suffice to say we've figured out how you will select and fire different types of missile in the future.
Fast travel inside space stations. People complained about how long it takes to walk through stations, and I hate those people because now Jan has produced a series of modules to solve the problem which I will have to code. Thanks jerks! Anyhow, it will improve the overall aesthetics of station interiors while giving a nice convenient way to move around stations so I only complain in jest. Besides, it's not too far of a stretch to imagine real stations having a form of subway connection between distant locations, I mean who wants to walk all the time?
Some work has been done that might potentially lead to huge future improvements to the crew and monster animation system. If it pans out, it would allow us to easily make better animations for things and that means it isn't such a burden to have more than 1 monster type.
New ships have been made. Some of which will be available in the next update. Also some unique story-specific color variants are being thrown in to mix things up. Hope you like your ships covered in pink hearts. ;)
New interior modules for station interior beautification have been worked on.
A polishing pass has been done on prefab designs to make early game space dungeon less frustrating in the average case and to make late game locations feel just better overall.
We work on whatever we feel like working on, so probably other things will make this list once we are ready to release
When will we get this content?
Although it is obviously not public knowledge when a steam sale may or may not happen in the future...it is often the case that sort of thing takes place with greater frequency as the year approaches its end. Today is an excellent example, however the future holds even more. It is often our goal to push out content slightly before one of these events so as to maximize our potential impact on your unwitting bank accounts.
While we can't disclose what may or may not happen around the winter holiday months, we can disclose that our developers are working their butts off to be free from the burden of this patch by the time the eggnog starts flowing.
