Merry Christmas everyone!
Version 0.9.1.8 is now live, and it introduces a couple new mechanics and features:
* Roads and Bridges are back in the game! They'd been in a much earlier version, but hadn't affected gameplay much. Now they're back and buildings which are adjacent to a road get an efficiency bonus proportional to the percentage of buildings on the planet that you can reach along that road. There's also a new special vision mode which highlights how much of a bonus each building is currently getting.
* The placement of your Outposts and Forts matter now. Buildings are considered 'defended' if they are close to a Fort or Outpost, and your colony's chances of withstanding an invasion drop with each undefended building you have. As with Roads, there's now a special rendering mode that lets you see how well defended each building is -- this is available in the Military menu.
* I've added an option for changing the style of the water between the classic look, and the new wavy look. Feel free to choose the style you like better. =)
* Now that the game has two special rendering modes that use red and green to highlight problems in your colonies, it seemed like a good time to introduce some options for color-blindness. Now in the options you can pick from a variety of color schemes for the game to use when it shows you how efficient the road network is, or how well defended buildings are.
* I've fixed a bug where you couldn't load very old saves from before the time that I introduced a story to the campaign. Now if you load a save that's that old it will be in sandbox mode (where there is no story).
* Also, a bunch of small fixes went in for missing localization and UI that wasn't working properly. For instance, the Interplanetary Trade menus should now correctly identify the names of the planets you're trading between.
Broadly, here's what I'm planning on looking at next:
Optimizations - There's still bugs where the game will slow down to a crawl sometimes, especially with large civilizations that span many worlds. I've also noticed that the game is generating far too many draw calls for what it's rendering - trees, for instance, are all rendered separately when they could be rendered as a single batch. Fixing this will make the frame rate a whole lot better. I want to look into moving the game's AI towards an entity/component model as well, which will further improve performance.
Story Rewrites - I'm not satisfied with how the story plays out at the moment, and that means two things need to change: 1) I want to rewrite how the engine handles story events, so it's easier for me to make changes without breaking peoples' existing saves, and then 2) I want to introduce more events and make the pacing a little faster in the beginning.
Building Upgrades - I'd like to add upgraded versions of existing buildings, which can be unlocked thru research and built with late-game resources.
That's it for now; Happy New Year everyone!
-Pouchmouse