This week, I will keep the update short. Jan and Kristian have been in vacation and Dan is still busy on figuring out the mercenary op interceptor variant. Our art team has also been working on the carrier for a while now, updating the geometry and refining the shapes and plating, adding asymmetric details here and there. Many parts are still placeholder, but you can see a new work in progress render below:

Carrier WIP render

Keith has been working on the backend to support direct pledging on our website, without passing through IndieGoGo. Doing so will be a huge step up in properly communicating instructions to new backers and being able to play the game as soon as the pledge is registered ( there are limitations on IGG that prevent us from being as user-friendly as we’d like to be, resulting in many support e-mails ). Testing the new pledge system will take a little while but should be available within a few weeks.

Finally, on the game side, haulers path generation is now complete. Last week I mentionned that it still had to avoid third-party planets in the way ( like in the scenario where you have a gas giant and two moons: the hauler spawns on one moon, and has its destination on the second moon, which is on the other side of the gas giant ! ), this problem is now solved. I have tested the algorithm in a bunch of configuration scenarios, but due to the pseudo-randomized nature of the Battlescapes at match startup it might be possible for the generated path to be sub-optimal or even buggy. We will have to test it in real conditions and improve it over time if needed.

Haulers path between moon-gasgiant-moon

The next step is having the haulers follow this navigation path and enter / exit warp. Fortunately most of the AI code is already written thanks to the existing bots so this step shouldn’t take more than a day or two of implementation and testing. After that we’ll still need to implement the warp interdiction, which should go fairly quickly, and produce the new patch.

-Flavien Brebion