News

Hey Folks! Once again, sorry for the lapse in news yesterday. My conference calls with the contract devs in the other hemisphere basically means my afternoons sometimes run late.

However, we're having some really productive discussions!

Our first attempt at the drama room experiment started strong, but we quickly realized it was a dead end. It was fun watching the crew

Hey Folks! As mentioned yesterday, we'll be looking into crew drama and management next. Basically, doing a hack job prototype to get some ideas up and running, and to hopefully figure out the best way of making this feature a viable game mechanic.

Our first test is a simple drama scene:

Mal, Zoey, and Jayne are in a ship that's rapidly losing atmo. There are two EVA

Hey Folks! First off, sorry for yesterday's missing news post. I was on a dev conference call that was pretty productive, and that ran long (into dinner).

That said, we have made some decent progress in the past few days. Front and center is Michael's latest feature: custom key bindings!

He changed the way we handle hotkeys in the game so we could allow the user to re-

Hey Folks! Bit of a mixed bag today, as I tackled a variety of unrelated things to both unblock others and make things run smoother.

As you can see in today's screenshot, the status indicators are mostly filled-in with first draft info. Pretty much every basic stat is covered here, much like NEO Scavenger. For now, it's limited to stuff we can feel immediately. Things like hot

Hey Folks! My apologies for the missed news yesterday. We devs had a conference call at the end of the day, and it ran a bit long.

However, it was a productive chat! We all fired-up the game, and talked about how the salvage game loop felt. Each of us started in the same save file, in a salvage pod docked with a derelict. No starting tools, so first step was to board the derelict in

Hey Folks! Got a little bit done on the work lamp today. Chris tried out a hacking effect. Michael's updated the inventory grid. And administrivia strikes again!

The work lamp now support a power toggle action, so it can be found in an "off" state, switched on, and used around dark places. Still no battery usage or anything, but it's getting there!

Chris

Hey Folks! Hope everyone had a good weekend. Mostly relaxing here, and discovering just how little insulation our old house's walls have :)

Back at work, I set about fixing the way AIs interact with locks. Previously, they could just grab anything they wanted from any container. But now that we have locks, that won't do.

Instead, I added code to selectively control

Hey Folks! Busy day today, as we continued to smooth out the salvage experience.

K-Leg station got a bunch of upgrades to shore-up the process of offloading and buying loot. There's now a dedicated hardware store and shopkeeper, from whom we can purchase tools to salvage, or sell tools we find. I also adjusted the forbidden NPC zones so the shopkeepers would stay in their store.

Hey Folks! Today I tackled a few remaining bugs, so that I could finally test the stuff we've been working on: looting a derelict!

The first order of business was to fix the velocity calculations in the celestial bodies. After Chris upgraded a lot of the code to honor Sir Kepler, the velocities were no longer accurate. We chatted a bit about it yesterday, and he suggested we

Hey Folks! Some more progress to show today on both locks and UI, plus a small fix to celestial mechanics involving precision.

The main thing on display today is data cards, which are sort of a stopgap I've added to cover our data/info item needs. Each PIN lock needs a unique code, so the first thing I did was to setup ship initialization to assign one to each lock when finished.