Alpha 4.131 change notes:
- Systems spawn Pirate Hideouts and Pirate Builders at system generation, but cannot spawn on player's starting asteroid belt.
- Several changes and improvements to Contract UIs in particular. Brought some of the whole Contract system up to speed with where the rest of the game is at. Still much work to be done here.
- Rebalanced fuel and ammo stats across the board for all ships. Definitely not finished with tweaking these numbers, but fuel and ammo feel a little more reasonable now.
- Added more in-depth 'Leisure Time' system. Ships now have a 'leisure script' that represents their leisure activity preference. When checking for leisure time, ships will first do a Rest if they have not rested recently. If already rested then will perform their preferred leisure activity. (For now this mostly involves drinking, although there are some more 'cultured' ships out there too)
- Several camera fixes. Camera now smoothly jumps from point to point. Still some strange edge cases in there. I honestly still don't know how 25% of my camera system works... This is quite an improvement in the last week or so, down from probably 80% in retrospect
- Player can now click on specific Game Log entries to have the camera zoom to the location. This could be a ship, an asteroid belt, etc. Helpful for giving quick heads-up info to the player about what is happening in the system, and then letting them jump quickly to the point of interest.
- Right-side UI update, mostly changes to the Game Log. It now has its own UI box and a little more space, along with fancy new highlighting technology on mouse-over
- Moved all research data to Faction object instead of the Player object... Still not entirely sure why I wanted to do this but it's now done.
- added Leisure Time to PoliceSquaddie behavior
- Fixed UI positioning of Tutorial
- several savegame fixes: view set correctly on load, player object correctly loads variables now (as in it never actually loaded any local variables before. I have no idea how that worked out for as long as it did), planets save position and asset data properly now, etc.
- Federation Beacon added. Large, expensive, slow-making structure that grants a Research bonus when finished. Can only get 1 bonus per system, and can only construct 1 beacon per system.
- several small tweaks to ship chatter and descriptions during 'Leisure Time', and in general cases too
- added 2 new 'Neutral' drone ships
- made several modifications to ship and structure sprites, made new sprites for neutrals, etc., etc.
- added AI Cube structure for the 'Neutral' AI faction... It's kind of a powerhouse right now. Will be toned down by Alpha. 'Neutral' is becoming a bit of a gag faction name.
- made some small changes to main command scripts, some pirate structures and to the way that pirate AI works and how Pirates and Creeps are generated in the system_generate script
- adjusted global ship accelleration down quite a bit... Looks much better at 4x game speed
- Made move speed inversely proportional to how far the ship needs to steer when doing non-combat moves like Patrol or MoveXY
- yet MORE adjustments to acceleration, steering and ship movement in general. Ships now decelerate to 0 if pointing more than 90 degrees away from target, and steadily goes to full speed as point more towards target. Should be less endless loop-de-loops
- all factions now have a boolean 'active' variable which can be used to turn the AI on or off, and also determines if the faction gets free ship or structure spawns at system generation. All faction objects are now spawned on each map
- Explorers now operate based on nearest unexplored or nearest explored site to scan rather than a random site.
- Explorers play nicer together now, no double counting anything
- Explorers only have 5 tries to scan for Research Sites per belt. If no research found then there's no more trying. Exploration is better described in Game Log.
- UI feature: retired ships now show up with Red buttons to make it obvious what is happening to them.
- Beefed up total minerals in a system a little bit
- removed music again to save space for now
- Several, several balance tweaks
- Several, very many UI fixes/tweaks
- Whoa bug fixes all over the place, both big and small