The good news is that I've recently gotten back to development, again. The bad news is that there's quite a lot of cleanup to do before I can release a new patch, and performing that cleanup is likely to break existing savegames.
A few things to look forward to in the next release:
- More rationalised and balanced starting ships! I'm still playing around with exactly which hulls I'm letting you start the game with, but it's getting close to being settled now. More annoying or limited types have been removed and some new classes added to be more interesting. The current lineup includes the Hammerhead II, Naga, Ronin/B, Oromo, Sotho, EI100/M, Mako, and the mighty Mouse. It's likely that one or two of these will be trimmed out before I do a release.
- More tweaks to differentiate various hulls and add variants for shipyards and NPC use. Shipyards are very finicky to work with in the current version of the game, but I've fleshed things out reasonably well I think.
- Added a variety of new weapons, mostly at the lower levels. Xenophobes now use their own custom weapons.
- Only some Himal interceptors have missile launchers, rather than all of them.
- The CLAW and heavy CLAW now spray their shots a bit, so they're less likely to immediately punch through the armor on the slower starting ships if you run into one early.
- Reverted some more experimental changes to high-level weaponry so I don't have to do complicated geometry to work out what the effective damage is.
- Added quite a lot of level 3-4 armors, including expanding some vanilla types into same-level sets. This is an ongoing project.
- New fuel types now actually spawn in fuel depots (the vanilla implementation is hardcoded, which prevents new types from showing up. I haven't fixed that, but I've added the extra fuel types into the hardcoding.
- I'm continuing to develop and redevelop autons so that there's a respectable range across the entire game. It's not practical to do an auton-only run yet, but between this and hopefully some fixes to the auton bay in vanilla....it's moving in the right direction.
- All larger NAMI playerships (Constellation, Asterion, Armstrong, Aldrin, and both Minotaurs) have non-removable auton bays and identify autons if you're flying them.
- XMH is now a tiled armor that can be repaired by scavenging other segments (unlikely, since no NPCs use it), or by using boxes of XMH Scales, which are sold at most places that repair armor and also at fuel depots since I was changing their inventory anyway. This should make XMH much more viable, though still finicky to use.
- The gaian terraformer bug that causes them to spawn hundreds or thousands of nanite cannons has not been fixed because it's in the core engine, so you can still break the endgame economy if you really want to. It's on the honours system until George fixes it.
- The Britannia, Minotaur, and several other craft no longer start with armor that is heavier or lighter than their 'standard' and thus have their advertised maximum speeds by default.
- To this end, added P180 and P250 Hexphase armors at level 7 and 8 to provide heavy fleet armor for these and other types.
- Prototyped a new faction using some nice new kitbashed graphics by Nym, but probably won't be able to get it operational for this release. They're gonna be a beamspam faction, so look forward to that at some point.
- Here's their frigate
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