{"id":220,"date":"2014-10-17T06:40:40","date_gmt":"2014-10-17T06:40:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.brasswatchgames.com\/?p=220"},"modified":"2014-10-17T06:40:40","modified_gmt":"2014-10-17T06:40:40","slug":"shipyard-development-news-16-oct-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/brasswatchgames.com\/?p=220","title":{"rendered":"Shipyard Development News 16 Oct. 2014"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s officially been\u00a0ages\u00a0<\/em>since I last posted anything here, so I figured it was about time I posted something. I’m going to be honest here: update 0.8.1 is coming along much more slowly than I’d hoped due to a combination of factors. The first is that, with school butting its way back into my life uninvited, I have very little free time. Another is that the shuttle system, as I explained in an email to an inquisitive fan (is that the right term? It feels weird but I can’t think of a better one), is proving to be a real pain in the rear. Unlike items, systems, and weapons, which are essentially just lists of statistics, each shuttle has a unique behavior that warrants its own activation mechanic (e.g. targeting an enemy vs. targeting a planet) and AI behavior once in the world. As of yet, I’m still only laying the ground work so I don’t really have anything interesting to show you in that department. However, I do have a few smaller features to show off:<\/p>\n

Dynamic World Loading<\/b><\/p>\n

Until now, when you loaded up a previously-saved game, the world would read all of the data for every sector into memory, then not touch it again until you closed the game. This is fine right now while the game has very little content, but would only cause problems as it grew in scale. So, for version 0.8.1, I have altered the way world loading works such that only the current sector is kept in memory at any given time. When you warp to a new sector, the old one is saved and the new one is loaded in. This will prevent the game from becoming hogging more RAM than it deserves as it becomes more complex. The new system has, however, made the “Quit without saving” option obsolete, thus\u00a0it has been removed from the pause menu.<\/p>\n

Character Window<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the current version, after you initially create your character, you never see him or her again. Even though\u00a0character skills and stats are not coming in version 0.8.1, I decided I’d add a character screen in anticipation of when they do. It’s pretty primitive at the moment: just a picture of your character and the one (non-functional) skill they get from the background you chose for them. It is accessible\u00a0from the navigation screen.<\/p>\n

Options Menu<\/strong><\/p>\n

I can’t remember if I mentioned this already, but it’s pretty important so I might as well\u00a0make sure. The game now has an options menu, available currently only through the main menu. All it has at the moment is a slider\u00a0to adjust the music volume, but I plan to\u00a0include options such as resolution and full-screen mode in future updates.<\/p>\n

Rebalanced Crew Damage and a New Item<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the current version,\u00a0the crew damage formula makes energy weapons far too powerful. They’re supposed to do less crew damage than equivalent ballistic or explosive weapons, but because crew damage scales inversely with the target system’s HP, attacking a system at low enough health will, without fail, kill all crew inside of it. Because energy weapons do more HP damage, they are also the fastest way to get a system’s hit points down to zero, swinging the balance even more in their favor to the point where ballistic and explosive weapons (with the exception of the railgun solely due to its massive single-show damage) are almost completely obsolete. Additionally, because the AI allocates crew to the ship’s reactors before all other systems, attacking those even with weapons as weak as the Twin Autocannon will allow you to rapidly drain the crew from the enemy ship. When the ship runs out of crew members,\u00a0it will be destroyed regardless of its remaining hit points. While this is an intended functionality, victory by this method is supposed to be much more difficult than it is. As such, a few\u00a0big\u00a0changes are being made to the system to try to deal these problems:<\/p>\n