This iteration focuses on improving the experience of individuals in the game. Along with some updated visuals for the crew, I have also enhanced the history system for each person. Additionally, the created statistic system can be easily extended to other uses, which I will show you below. Furthermore, there has been a significant update to the underlying framework, resulting in better graphics and improved performance.
History
A general history system has been added to the game that can store changes in the simulation. It has been integrated deep into the core of the game, designed to be efficient and save memory. This system has been implemented in several parts of the game, including:
Resource Charts
Each resource container now has its own history chart, showing the value over time, as well as increases and decreases over time. This makes it easier to track the status of resources in the game.
Ship Systems
The history system also works for ship and air systems such as energy, humidity, oxygen, and more.
Productivity
The new system now monitors the productivity of interior items, allowing you to see a graph of the item's usage in the details panel. Clicking on it will expand it.
Person Activity
The old history system for individuals has been replaced. While it no longer shows what kind of activity a person was doing at a specific time, it provides a good overview of the different aspects of a person. Additionally, you can now get a statistic for a week or month.
More Animations
A new animation has been added to the game: the bath door.
Person Improvements
The Person system has been enhanced with bug fixes, performance improvements, and better rendering quality. Specifically, I added LOD (Level of Detail) levels and other generator improvements, which means that person models will now switch depending on how far the camera is away from them, resulting in a better performance with only 10% of the vertices being handled by the GPU.
More Person Clothes
In addition to bug fixes, I have also added many new clothes, haircuts, beards, and more to the Person system, as well as improved the rendering quality.
Backpacks
The main reason for these changes was to add backpacks to the game, making it visible when a person is carrying something.
Person Customizer
To test and debug the new systems, I have created a Person Customizer Tool that works directly in the game. Although not yet perfectly finished, players can test it by enabling cheats and right-clicking on the person icon.
Consultant Avatars
Consultants in the game, who raise quests and show things to the player, are now animated persons that move their lips to the voice.
Consultant UI
The UI of the consultants has been converted into speech bubbles next to the element avatars, providing more space in the lower right corner. I plan to add some person-related features here to make them more easily accessible.
Nations
Each Person now has its own nation in the game. I have also added more random names, depending on the selection and the number of names in that speech region. Although I did not add it for all ~250 Nations, the game will pick random names from a similar region to get as close as possible. It is easy to add more names, and players can contribute in the Discord.
Organization
In the Storyline, nations have joined together to form larger countries. I used real data for all of the nations and tried to group them together from different perspectives and balance their GDP. Although not perfect, this is a start, and I plan to add a starting screen where players can choose this and get persons mostly from the nations of this organization in the future.
Supply Crew
As a result of these changes, Nations and Profile pictures are now visible in the supply popup with a nicer style.
Better Path calculations
The pathfinding algorithm has been improved, resulting in more direct routes for crew members.
Updated Framework
After a long process, the fourth attempt to update to the new Unity and Entities package was finally successful. The update comes with a brand new rendering pipeline and more features to come in future updates.
Special Thanks
To show appreciation to the community, contributors have been added to the Credits Window in the MainMenu. If they've configured an Avatar, they will also spawn in the game as crew members.
Other changes
- Fixed Unit for Energy
- Added Persons LOD levels to improve Performance for large ships
- Persons not created with underwear.
- Added Progress bar to Tutorial Achievement
- Sending more debugging in Crash Log
- Added Unity RichText support to I18n Elements (more next iteration)
- Improved InGame Tooltips are not over the mainmenu anymore
- Improved Error reports and Feedbacks sending to the server for better debugging
- Popups also closing with rightclick
- Improvements to Translation Editor
- Added caching to persons animation creation
- Added caching to persons avatar pictures
Want to see more?
I also post the progress and more pictures to our Discord:
And don't forget to wishlist and follow us to keep up to date.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1638030/Generation_Ship/