Posted March 18, 2022 by Commodore Shawn
There's a new game mode on the main menu. New Campaign launches the game proper, not on a test map. Right now you start in Hudson, 20 km or so from Northburg. Eventually there will be a sort of tutorial quest to get you started, but for now you're just dropped into the world. Notably, in this mode you can now save!
Saving is only possible when docked, which I don't plan on changing. As I mentioned last week this restriction both adds some tension to travel, and simplifies things from a code perspective.
Next up I plan on adding an auto-save feature whenever you dock, as well as an confirmation on exit warning about unsaved progress. Neither of those should take long. Once they are done I'm going to get the trade missions exposed to the player in the campaign mode. They're in place behind the scenes, but the UI needs a bit of tweaking to show them properly.
All of those are fairly small, but the next bit of work will be significantly larger. The world simulation already includes simplified representations of AI subs travelling the world, but they aren't shown to the player. Adding them will take some work changing between "summary" and "detailed" simulation modes, but hopefully will be done by next week.