Phew, finally ready. Things got more complicated than I expected. Together with technical difficulties and overall hassle, the second-to-last -release of 2020 ended up being the first one of 2021. Better late than never, I hope. There are so many changes, that the next fixing update may be required pretty soon...
Download links: Windows, OSX, Linux
Major features
Three new module types
Cutter weapon that is extremely powerful from close distance.
Energy balls that ignore collisions and cause massive collateral damage.
Backup energy modules for speeding up energy recovery.
Energy consumption visible on energy sources
Energy sources now glow according to their load. No longer need to look at the crosshair.
Forward direction in closeup view
Use left shift or Y-button on gamepad to open the closeup view. Helpful when camera zooms far and it is hard to see the orientation.
Fixes and smaller improvements
- Many light pixels in menu background (!) and reference audio for future development. These will hopefully improve in the future.
- New built-in ship that contains all available module types. Good for practicing.
- More variety to AI behavior.
- Settings storage is re-formatted in order to avoid crashes with changing graphics drivers and similar, rare situations. Changes may cause new problems, though.
- Mouse cursor no longer wanders outside the game screen during battles when multiple displays are used. Old functionality remains in menus.
- Many UI improvements to menus and shipyard. And even more enhancements and fixes under the hood.
Issues
- AI has some serious issues handling energy balls. At least it's not as suicidal as it used to be, but there's still lots to fix.
- Sometimes secondary modules keep running after usage is finished. It hardly causes problems for human players, but may be fatal to AI.
The next version
- Custom fleets for tournaments.
- Even more background colors, perhaps music and other cosmetics.
