Probably biggest part of this update is AI player you can play against in a single mission with a base. So far in the campaign this isn't present, but it will be in some future missions. This update also doesn't have any new missions (except this 1v1 scenario). AI is not very smart, but it mines, builds, attacks, defends and harass your resource asteroids and easy targets. This is just a first version, there are still a lot of things
missing.
Based on feedback, I reworked tutorials so they don't just go by and expect you to keep up. Tutorials are now displayed until you dismiss them by pressing button. First tutorial mission now also wants you to attack ships and tries to teach you that attacking ships from front deals the least damage. And speaking of first
mission, you can now skip it as well. Objectives are now always displayed (unless you hide them) in upper right corner, and you can open "chat history" to display all the text that was displayed in the mission (no scrolling yet), if you missed anything.
Based on even more feedback, I added some convenience features like autosave (3 saves, you can set frequency or disable it, and also save at mission end), key binding preset for WASD camera movement, and added options menu (except for graphics settings) to in game menus. I also made some attempts to differentiate sensor view from regular view, especially if you have ship icons always on, by adding "compass" and ship vision bubbles (featured in first screenshot)
Last but not least, I made some rendering optimizations (mostly just removing dumb stuff) and loading optimizations (time to main menu, and loading of meshes and textures). There were some bug fixes, including a stupid bug that broke rendering of font when ending mission. I made some new models, most notably rework of enemy frigate where I removed beam frigate and left only gun frigate, which got extra unguided bomb launcher. I also redid few backgrounds and changed tone mapping to better
operator.
For a next release, I will definitely finally rework UI system a bit to support resolution scaling, for now if you have high DPI monitor, you still need to lower resolution to get larger UI
