Hey guys, I’ve been working hard on GodSpace tonight! I’ve almost completely rewritten the vehicle script to be much more efficient, as well as allowing ships to have different roles, such as fighting, mining, transport, etc, or a mixed set of roles. This will allow for many different kinds of ships, such as mining probes, defensively armed transports, and offensive only ships, as well as the much needed performance cost cut. With the rewrite came the change to make weapons act independantly of each other, which will allow for turrets on the sides of destroyer class ships that fire at seperate targets from the primary weapon. Also added with this update is a new exploration function, triggered by a lack of nearby enemies or mineable objects, in which the ship will roam within range of its home planet, rather than just heading in one direction until eternity. And ships will now mine nebulas for their hydrogen, which will be used as fuel by both ships and planets in later updates. And lastly, I fixed the bug where changing the empire of a planet wouldn’t change the empires of its previously spawned ships, meaning new ships would shoot the old ones, even though they were from the same planet.

I fixed some problems with the explosion script as well, as small explosions weren’t damaging large objects because of the distance calculation, as well as explosive damage being transfered to what an object was orbiting in addition to the object itself.

I’ve also added a hangar function to planets and shipyards; when ships are created, they are stored in the hangar until either an enemy ship is within range, or an asteroid/nebula is in range. If either of those happen, the planet/shipyard will release ships with offensive capabilities or ships with mining capabilities. Later on, the hangar will be accessable through the advanced target editor, providing for “garrison/ungarrison” abilities similar to RTS’ like StarCraft or Age of Empires.

The single biggest drain on cpu performance however is still gravity at the impossibly costly 80% of cpu calculations per frame. Many attempts have been made to lower this number, but it’s stubbornly remained expensive.

Anyways, I’ll still be working on it for at least a little while longer tonight/today, so you may see another update out later!