Might be another sort of boring update today, sorry!

Today has been mostly about technical improvements and getting ready for things.

Omni is working on several things right now, he should be finishing up the Options menu and getting all the back end stuff tidied up with that. He’s also still doing some work to get ship transitions working properly, which turned out to be a pretty big technical challenge. The details are a little hairy, but essentially we have special Worlds just for things like ships, and transitioning a live world between one ship and another ship without causing all sorts of chaos is a bit tricky! Getting all that straightened out turned out to involve both Omni and myself, but it seems like it’s all straightened out now and ready to finish up.

Bartwe has been hard at work fixing bugs and making improvements to the code that runs our intro comics and splash screen. He’s also made emotes configurable and moddable in data and he and the artists have been hard at work making more emotes and fixing timing and things like that.

Both Omni and Bartwe are doing lots of GUI improvements and fixes that are required for later GUI work. GUI work is generally way harder than you would think it should be and kind of boring and thankless, so everyone really appreciates all the work they’ve put in to making the GUI well.. work!

I’ve been working on a couple of things also, like doing the big technical improvement that allows Omni to dynamically change ship structures, scripting flying NPCs, and of course The Big Physics Change. The Big Physics Change was necessary to get flying NPCs working properly, and like Tiy said, will allow us to be a lot smarter and more capable about giving the Player upgrades, handling vehicles, and things like that. Now, finally everything in the game has been moved from the old “approach” based physics to new physics with actual mass, force, friction and all that good stuff. Planets with different gravity levels are also back in now, and this time they work without bugs! Also, by by turning the player’s mass way up, the air friction way down, and the bounce amount to 0.9 you can make bouncy castle mode :D

The artists have been doing their thing, writing more recipes, drawing more costumes, adding emotes, and generally doing artsy things that I’m utterly incapable of doing.

So no exciting updates today, but it’s all important stuff! More to come tomorrow!