Happy Steam Winter Sale! Starcom: Unknown Space is 25% off during this sale, and Starcom: Nexus is 75% off.
I'm continuing to work on some additional side-content for an upcoming update and don't want to put any spoilers in a news announcement. I don't have an ETA yet for when it will be ready for testing.
One of the non-spoilery tasks I accomplished relates to how regions are added to the universe. As you may or may not know, many of the game's regions are added at fixed locations throughout the galaxy so the major areas have roughly a constant layout. But some content is added dynamically, either in response to player actions, exploration, or content updates.
With this new content, since it is intended to be compatible with existing saves, I'm experimenting with a change to the region addition logic. To avoid trampling existing content, the procedural system will still look for empty sectors, but will be allowed to place regions in "empty but explored" sectors.
As a cue to players, if an update does add a region in a visited space, the fog of exploration will be "re-fogged" for the affected area. I struggled with this when the addition of this new "refog" feature broke fog of exploration entirely. Here's the refog function:
What wasn't obvious, because I was too focused on the code changes (highlighted in green), was that I'd actually deleted the SetPixel line from the previous function. That wasn't highlighted because the diff tool simply thought I'd moved it down. While I don't think I've made this mistake before, most developers are probably familiar with tunnel vision: You are so convinced the problem lies in a certain area, you fail to notice when it's something obvious just outside where you're looking.
Until next week, Happy holidays!
- Kevin