And another week bites the dust. Some of you may have noticed that our forums went down for a few hours earlier this week. That was due to the maintenance I spoke about during the last weekly update. I’m thrilled to report that the last of the forums issues caused by our outage in September have been resolved.

Updated WIP mockup of the HUD (not in-game)

Over the last few days we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the HUD of which you can see the latest mockup above. Our guiding theme for the SFC faction is balancing 80’s industrial sci-fi with advancements in technology you could expect way out in the future. To that end we want our HUD to be a blending of what you’d see in modern military aircraft and futuristic elements you would need to make newtonian spaceflight manageable.

You’ll notice in the top left corner we have radar similar to what you’d find in many other space games. This is just a placeholder as radar is currently one of the least defined systems in the game. We expect it will morph heavily over time once we get into Alpha.

WIP mockup of the main menu (not in-game)

We’ve also done some mockups of the main menu system. You’ll notice from the picture above there’s nothing particularly glamorous about them. We’ve discussed the possibility of zooming around the solar system as you open different menus but that will likely depend on how much time we have during the polish phase (probably not much).

A couple of new station mockups

A couple of new patches have been released for the I-Novae launcher and the installation runtime over the last week. We’re fixing problems and releasing patches as backers find them. Unfortunately this has come at the expense of finishing the pledge upgrade system however we’re currently only aware of 2 remaining outstanding issues with the installation runtime so we’ll be getting back to the pledge upgrade system shortly. A lot of backers have been asking us when it’ll be ready and it’s one of our top priorities.

Updated shot of the corvette cockpit

To summarize we’re currently finishing up the networking improvements and pledge upgrade system. Once those are complete we’ll be moving onto implementing weapons, our new menu/HUD system, and incremental patching.