Now that 0.03 is out is time to think ahead and into the next version.

First of, this version lacks many quality-of-life features that I wanted to put in. The main reason being that I didn't want to hold onto releasing 0.03 for another 3 months. So the next public version, 0.03.2, will focus on those missing features:

First of comes performance. Compared with previous versions, 0.03 has taken a huge dip in performance mostly due to all the new events, which aren't that many, and all the new systems that went in to make them work. So starting next week I'm going headfirst into trying to improve simulation performance as much as I can until it gets nearer to or better than what it was in 0.027a.

Second will be UI. The current UI is very clunky and unintuitive. Although, I don't think it's going to get much better, I'm not a UX designer after all, I still want to add some stuff that I feel is sorely missing. First of all I'll add several keyboard shortcuts to be able to open menus and switch between different map views and overlays. Then add some small fancy stuff like zooming in and out on the map. I also want to give it a try and implement a shader to draw the map texture on screen. I takes a loot of processor time to update the map and, honestly, any decent game programmer would had implemented a texture shader for that from the start. But I'm not a decent game programmer so there you go.

In parallel with 0.03.2 I'm going to start brainstorming what 0.04 is going to look like. And for this, I'm going to try to involve the small community that is forming around. The plan is to set up a continuous survey both on the Patreon page and the subreddit to gauge opinions on what people want to see for 0.04. It's not going to be a very expansive survey. I'm probably going to add only two or three options at first but I'll keep adding more over time. Once 0.03.2 is done, I'm going to observe the results (if any) and use them to finalize the set of features that will be in 0.04.

Expect a more detailed discussion on the options for 0.04 on the next weekend update.