Sea Power and Q1 2025 Update
Happy new years everyone! Noah (Also known as Zelos on MPS Discord!) here today to do this dev blog! So first up, I hope all of our captains out there enjoyed their holidays, as we certainly took the chance to take some much needed time away to relax. During the first two months, the SP team has been hard focused on improving stability on bugs and performance, but now we are going to be moving into working on new systems as well. For now, let's go over a few of the big topics that are going to a factor going into 2025.
Performance and Bug Fixing
On that front, we've made some pretty good strides on optimizing as well, improving FPS across the board a good bit. We still have some systems we will be looking into (for example: map system and taskforce data link) to further improve stability and frame rates. We've already addressed a handful of memory leaks with the terrain system and the trees as well, further aiding in longer player session stability.
When it comes to bugs, and oh boy there was a lot.. Everything from flying submarines to IR seekers failing to see targets (aiming at the wrong aim point vs target pos.), and everything in-between. Matt, Ivan, Martin, and Danill have all been hard work fixing issues across the board, and we still will be addressing bugs going forward as we also begin our move into new systems (which I will reveal further into this dev blog). Matt will be spending some time with aircraft formations as well, to help improve their use and the overall stability of aircraft operations (this means trying to prevent aircraft from achieving orbit). On a final note of bug fixing, thank you all for your bug reports on both Steam, Reddit, and Discord! For example, there have been a lot of reports about missile guidance defects, and issues with aircraft functions (namely around landing). While we may not respond to them all in writing, we are still watching and working on fixes!
Art and Units
Over on the art front, Mek and Nils have been working very hard on fixing already existing units and working on the new 2025 line up of units will now begin as well. Ian has is also going to be working on some of our autogen systems to help create more interesting landscapes as well, starting with trees in the near future! Right before we took a break, Nils and Mek managed to add two of our beloved Cube Ships (CV Enterprise and USS Long Beach)! There are many units that we did not get a chance to work on for Early Access, which will be our priority going forward towards a 1.0 release in the future. To give you a tiny sneak peek at what's to come, some units you can expect to see added will be..
- Farragut Class 1969 Config
- A3B/RA-3B Skywarriors
These are just a small handful, as we certainly will keep you informed elsewhere and with other post as with teasers of other units to come!
Systems Improvements and Additions
Saving Loading..
Saving and loading will be coming in the very near future (one of our top priorities), as Victor will be rejoining the team to help us finalize the saving and loading system for public release. From the survey results, Steam forums, and Reddit, we hear you on the demand for saving and loading. We didn't want to rush a release on this feature until we had the manpower and time to make sure this feature runs smoothly given how important it will be going forward. There is so much data that needs to be saved (sensors, flight deck phases, ship position, weapon stores, etc), that making it functional is a big endeavor for our small team. We are very excited to get this feature into your hands!
AI improvements..
Given SP is a single player game, the current implementation of AI is not very developed, and this showed on the survey. Now that the crunch time of early access bug fixing is behind us, we can start working on the many steps it will take to further implement a new system to make combat more engaging and dynamic going forward. With the team being back together from the holidays, this will be one of our priorities going forward into Q1 of 2025.
Closing Words
Thank you all again for the bug reports, youtube videos, twitch streams mods, and missions on the steam workshop! Shoutout to all those taking awesome and silly screenshots as well, and here are some we found particularly awesome below!
Community Screenshots
Image by tzatzikiiii - MPS Discord
Image by Timber_Loves_Lemonade - MPS Discord
Image by Ayrton_Senna30 - MPS Discord
