Developer Updates: Developer Blog #29

Development

Over the next few weeks we will be focusing on overhauling and optimizing many systems that will not affect the current state of the game for the player, but rather change things on our side of the scope.

With these changes happening on our side, we wish to ask everyone who has access to the infiltrator system to please spend as much time in game as possible from Monday onward and to report any problem they come across.

Some of the changes that have been implemented, or be this week:

  • New Chat Server is finished this weekend, the UI should be finished soon too and then implemented into the game. This will include a new Friends list.

  • FLT Scattershot - Units will scatter further from each other as they exit FTL depending on the length of the FTL jump.

  • General Performance Optimizations.

  • We found out that currently when the camera is moved, all systems (with everything inside) actually get moved instead to be placed under the camera. This is pretty hard on the system of course, and will be changed to be replaced with a simpler and more efficient camera movement system.

  • We are currently looking at an exciting new system to deal with diplomacy, morality and War declarations. This new system is still extremely early in development / design stages at the moment, we will be sharing more about this in future blogs if we move ahead with this.

  • A new system to make it easier to see what your units can see in the Fog of War.

  • Finishing touches on unit damage effects.

  • Changes to the ship designer UI.

  • Lots of movement related fixes. Rubber-banding is fixed, ships can cross from one system into the next without FTL again, etc.

  • General bug fixes.

  • Reduced asset sizes, which should increase performance of both the client and the amount of game files you need to download during updates and installation.

As you can see, much of what we are currently working on are things which will not affect the current state of the game directly. These changes will make the game run a lot better though and once all this in implemented, the focus will shift back again to more feature implementation.