News

Hey Folks! Hope everyone had a good weekend. Ours included a kids' birthday party, karaoke, and furniture shopping. And lots and lots of rain.

Back at the office, I wrapped-up the save/load bugs I found last week by delving into the room generation code. It turns out it was a simple bit of code I hadn't updated after rejiggering the save system.

The old way of doing

Hey Folks! Quick update today, as I have to run to a toddler gathering.

Most of the day was spent tracking down a weird atmosphere sim bug in the load/save system. It looks like some of the save fixes I made mishandled loading of rooms, and they were ending up both disabled in-game, and with zero volume.

I was able to fix those issues, and in the process, reduce load times a bit

Hey Folks! Managed to fix several save game and pathfinding issues, launch my crew on their maiden voyage today, but not without issues.

The first order of business was to finish fixing the save game bug that over- or underpopulated ships loaded from a save file. The issue turned out to be in the Star System's "spawn ship" code. It needed to decide whether to load a ship

Hey Folks! A lot of save system work today, as I discovered a pretty big bug while testing character gen and crew hiring.

Basically, it looks like there was a bug in the ship data saving code that caused ship templates to be overwritten by ships that were based on those templates. E.g. the K-Leg station layout template was overwritten by the current game's instance of K-Leg.

Hey Folks! Worked a bit on group spawning rules today, and a lot of general clean-up of interactions and null pointers.

As mentioned yesterday, the game's spawning rules prevented almost anyone except the first person on each station from appearing. I needed to change the spawning such that it:

a) didn't care if a similar NPC was already spawned, and b) didn't

Hey Folks! Hope everyone enjoyed their weekend. Nothing too crazy here. I ended up buying Ghost Recon Wildlands last week after trying the free weekend, so I ran around Bolivia a bunch, helping the rebels fend off drug cartels.

Back at the office, I was off to a late start due to a routine check-up at the doctor's. But as you can see in today's screenshot, it's now

Hey Folks! Working on the hiring screen today, so we can finally get NPCs to join our crew without debug commands. And hopefully, start spending more time in-game, to figure out how to improve gameplay.

Setting up the hire interaction was pretty simple. I'm starting to notice a simple pattern here for launching a specialized UI when interactions need one. So that's good. It

Hey Folks! Continuing work on the roster/schedule UI today, mostly on getting the widgets hooked-up to in-game entities.

The button alignment issue I ran into late yesterday was actually due to child text labels having widths that extended beyond the button. I guess they intercepted clicks for the parent button, and the order of preference favored buttons to the left (added earlier to

Hey Folks! Back to design tasks today, as I decided to tackle crew management.

I'm still a bit unsure where it's best to go next with features and content, but controlling crew is becoming more and more pertinent as we increase their agency. It's not sufficient anymore to assume any human on a ship is that ship's crew, as we might be at a station doing some shopping

Hey Folks! Since I was having a bit of trouble deciding what design feature to add to the space prototype next, I decided to shift gears a bit, and tackle something else I've been wondering about: custom shaders and rendering.

A while back, I commissioned some of Amandine Coget's time to do a project audit, to get a better idea of where the game's problem areas might be.