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Astrov Prototype

6 years ago

Astrov 0.1.7 - Or why I am calling this a prototype

Greetings Pilots! This month brings smaller quantities of changes but with extra impact to the game as a whole, so let’s get right to it.

Right off the bat, I would like to warn you that this version is a highly experimental build as I ran out of time with properly ironing out everything I managed to break with code refactoring. What this means is that you may experience way more oddities and issues than usual, most noticeably HUD-related troubles, jump drives breaking, ships getting stuck, sound effects playing incorrectly and more. Due to the nature of the changes for this update and what I have planned for the next month’s, I cannot guarantee that I can fix everything in a short time span, so I may dedicate smaller, but more frequent updates. Furthermore, I strongly suggest against using old saves for this update as it will now very likely break due to how levels work.

With that said, new features are still my primary goal for the next few months, and this one is no exception. The following is now available:

Linked Missile Fire - You can now fire two missiles at once for that extra damage - you can toggle this feature with the shift-forward slash keys.
Primary weapon systems have been given a much-needed overhaul code-wise, dedicated for future content - everything is way more flexible and will allow me to add more interesting weapon mount types, including non-symmetrical cannons or being able to fire more than 2 projectiles per mount. This also means that there can be ships with more than 2 twin-cannon mounts, which will make loadout selection more varied in the future. For the occasion I have now added additional keybinds (shift-comma and shift-period) for toggling linked cannon fire.

Besides that, I have also refactored code for fleet behavior and freelance missions. There is not much to show here as it is mainly under-the-hood changes, but it should help with further improvements in those areas.

Now one of the biggest (and somewhat of a sudden) change in this update is the way the world is set up. Specifically the planet-per-scene/map from older versions have been completely scrapped in favor of an early version of starsystems! In addition to that, planetary sizes and distances have been adjusted to give a more believable world to explore and fly in. The idea behind this trick is to create a second, separate camera that mimics your ship’s movement while seeing small models of solar objects, hence giving a 3D skybox effect, similar to what you can see in older first person shooters. This does however mean that most of my time has been spent readjusting other game functions such as missions and fleet movement (while possibly breaking something else in all the chaos), but I do believe that in the long run the effort will be worth it, as this makes space feel larger than ever.

There’s not much of a reason to show the changelog, as it’s relative small this time, but feel free to check it out in the game archive if needed. Really, that’s mostly it I’m afraid, as most of the work I’ve offloaded onto this project has been rather lacking in the visual department. And even then, as I said it earlier, the changes implemented still require a good amount of ironing before they are truly ready. For this reason, I am keeping up the older version of the game as it is still the most stable of the two.

That should cover everything for now. As I mentioned, more updates are on their way to fix the most glaring of issues.

Edit; 2018. 09. 18. - version 0.1.7a Changelog: