Unending Galaxy 0.4.5 Released news

This new version implements animations, new weapon behaviors, quite a lot of graphical improvements regarding both the GUI and the game itself, and, as usual, it fixes several issues found in the previous version. This is going to be the last release for at least a few weeks as I am going back to the coding of more complex features.

The most visible addition to this release is probably the new explosions and weapon hit impacts. Now, any game object can be linked to an animation, either for display or for special cases like dying. This is not necessarily something I will do, lacking the art assets, but the ability is here for the engine. There's still some improvements to be made as I can't set specific animations speed or looping in my editor yet, but that's something I can implement later without too much hassle.

That's another of the big improvements. I added a new general weapon behavior: homing mines that activate when an enemy ship is near enough. I also added area of effect damage support for any weapon. Finally, the ability for bullets to spawn more bullets on death has been added (it is used for flak missiles). I can also prevent NPC ships from using specific weapons, which will be useful to an extend to prevent them from using items they can't understand. However, It may be somewhat hard to try out the various changes to weaponry as only a few new weapons have been added to the game (homing mines, and the new flak missiles).

Most of the menus have been made transparent. I also added a "pause" menu which can be accessed via the [pause] key on the keyboard, from there you can also change the controls and quit the game, later on, you'll be allowed to save/load here too. The very first basic stage of the ship-to-ship communication window has been implemented. So far you can only ask another pilot what he is doing, but much more will be implemented later on. There's also a bunch of minor changes and fixes regarding the UI: some fonts have been made bigger, the game window will ignore player inputs if it's minimized, and so on..

I added several new planets, suns and nebulas types. Also by playing with nebulas transparency the same way I do for background stars, I managed to make the sectors look a little bit more alive. I also changed the graphics for all the trading stations (each faction get an unique one) and some of the other stations. The Drath Alliance gets a few unique buildings, the pirates gets a new pirate base, and the Sirak Empire has a new battleship, to complete their unique ship list.

I fixed several multithread related crashes. Those are issues that as a player you don't see because the game automatically restart any crashed thread, but it still make the game more stable in general. I also fixed a few cases where factions would ignore the cap put on how many stations or ships they could build per sector. That should fix issues with very long games on large maps. On the other hand, due to the major additions to the graphic engine without much time spent on optimization, FPS may drop slightly on lower end machines. That will be fixed in time.