Unending Galaxy 1.2.6 has just been released on all platforms!
This is a major content update with tons of new features, like the ability to directly play any faction, the new dreadnought, corvette and drone ship classes. It also includes dozens of gameplay and user interface improvements like the revamped shipyard menu, the ability to double click any of your ships or stations to open the relevant menu. It also got a graphical update with better sprites and fluid ship rotations. It’s also way more stable even in large, long games, and loading times (initial and save-games) are much shorter.
You can buy Unending Galaxy from the download page. For those who already own the game, your favorite store should get the new version shortly depending on how long it takes to upload everything. The full change-log is available in the article on our website.
Major New Features
Play as any faction
While in previous versions you could look like any other faction in-game, you couldn’t really take the place of an existing one. This is now a thing of the past: the overhauled “new game” menu allows you to select any of the major factions from the get go. This is the best way to play the AI Core as intended (aka with free buildings).
Ceridans aren’t accessible due to the fact they spawn late. Pirates aren’t playable, nor is the Swarm (because they rely entirely on AI “ships”). I will see what I can do to make both factions playable in the future.
Dreadnoughts, corvettes and drones
Drones replace fighters, they are fully automated, used by carriers and military bases and come with preset weaponry. To fill the void, the corvette class has been added. Those are usually fast, but lightly armed. Combat-wise between drones and frigates.
I also added the new Dreadnought class. Those are extremely though and powerful combat ships (often coming with drone support), but they are also quite slow and costly. So don’t get fooled by the numbers: as with any large ship, they can be overwhelmed by large numbers of smaller ones if they aren’t provided an escort.
While at it, most ships and weapons have been re-balanced, and the worst looking sprites have been replaced by much nicer ones (AI Core cargo ship to name the worst offender). You can look at the various new ships in the updated wiki too!
Graphic Update
Another major feature (and one that has been requested a lot) is fluid rotations for ships, bullets and other misc objects, both in normal and sector map view-ports) with no negative impact on FPS. Now that this feature has been implemented, I realize how crucial it was, the game feels and looks way better than previously, it’s like night and day. Which means that I will likely need to remake my trailer now, it’s hopelessly outdated.
This improvement also allows me to animate ships and (technically) any in-game object. As such, I added some animation frames to a few ships, more will surely follow in future updates. Another side effect is that shields are now shaped and rotate like their owners.
While at it, asteroids are randomly rotated for variety sake, and the warp-gate animation is much smoother.
Stability and performances
This is the main reason why I want to publish the 1.2.6 version before the planned 1.3 update. To sum it up it’s much, much better. The 1.2.1 was known to freeze completely or become unstable when you reach a large enough amount of agents (ships and stations). On my computer, it was at around 20.000 of those, this is now fixed. Same goes for many other stability problems, fixed.
This release also massively increases initial game loading speed. It has a much smaller RAM and VRAM footprint too, which should make things easier on low-end hardware.
Loading a save-game is also much faster (3 or 4 times). Issues of ships duplicating are resolved. Long games in which you saved and reloaded multiple times no longer mess up hangar assignments and so on and so forth.
Miscellaneous
There are so many changes it’s hard to keep track of everything. I’d suggest you to check the full changelog at the bottom of this post for more information, but here are a few of the major gameplay and UI changes.
As you can see on this screenshot, the shipyard menu has been overhauled, it’s much better looking and requires less clicks to do the exact same thing as before (which is normally a good policy :p). Other menus have been slightly improved and will continue to be.
The empire manager allows you to set policies for your factions like the ability for your building manager to build outside of your borders or not, if you want to allow your automated military to defend your allies during invasions (which is a thing now: AI allies will defend each other, and they will defend you too if you have this policy enabled), if you want your faction to generate ‘civilian’ raiders, and so on. I will probably add more policies as the time goes on (suggestions are welcome, just understand those are YES/NO policies, no slider or values as parameters).
Oh, and I know many will like this one: You no longer need to fiddle with the various money accounts when you want to build or buy something. The game will automatically use whatever money is available in all your accounts. For instance if you want to build a space station, it will first use the money in your general account, and if it doesn’t has enough, it will check your building, then military, then diplomatic accounts.
Important Warning
Note that this version isn’t save-game or mod compatible with previous editions. A tool has been provided (located in the data folder) to update old mod files (ships, factions and profiles formats have changed), but it’s delivered “as is” and you will need to review the changes in the game editor.
Very nice !
such pach, much features!