The only good bug, is a dead bug.
Hey everyone, since our last development blog we have been working on a pretty wide array of things and I would like to tell you about some of them!
The rebuilding efforts
We are of course continuing to rebuild and improve the client, and we have made great progress since our last developer’s blog!
Most of our important UI’s are now finished, or nearing the last stages of development. The ship designer is up and working again, we added a good way to see the total cost for any given design, and we are able to add the edit design option as well. Factories are also getting there, they are able to check if there is room for new components and able to construct those as well.
We also recently re-added the ship move markers to the game. As you can see, they look really great now, and also include any animations that their source ship has, such as rotating part of the ships.
New additions to the game
We are also busy adding new features and changes to the game of course. For example, we have added subtle vertical light rays over the planets in a system, making it easier to spot them from tactical zoom. (A top down and zoomed out camera.) Another added function to aid in this, is that we now also made the “Find Planet” button work, from Empire Management.
We also added ship death animations to the game. This means that instead of ships going boom and disappearing, they can go through an animation during which explosions may ripple through the ship and slowly destruct. This is still in development however, we are working on getting the explosions scaled right (currently they are a bit huge 
).
Stars now put more light out as well. This means that if you are in a system with a specific star, they will cast light rays upon objects in space, such as asteroids but also your fleets of course!
We now have 220 unique planets in the game, split between Ice, Magma, Rocky, Terran, Ocean, Desert, Storm planets and Gas Giants. We also already have 15 different types of stars and 10 different moons, with more coming up! So there will be loads of variety in the galaxies that you and your friends explore =].
We have improved our physics system in the game a lot too, which mean that we can now have even more stuff flying around in space, such as debris, asteroids and other stuff 
.
Stompin’ bugs!
In preparation to open up the game to the public again, we I have been working with a small team of volunteers to track down and squash as many bugs and general issues as we could find.
We seem to have found all the big ones, which we expect to have fixed this week, as well as bunch of much lower priority ones, such as sometimes having the rings that show you the orbit of planets are making around the star being all over the place.
So this is going pretty well, and I would like to thank those Infiltrators for pitching in and helping out! Although for now I’m working with a smaller team of people, I am sending out PM’s to people on the forum now and then to ask for a hand to help out, so if you get one and you have time, it’s greatly appreciated!