Thanks for your suggestion in previous post when we discussed the plan of development. as we understand, the priority is next: New Features -> Gameplay -> Multiplayer. So, lets do this. Fortunately, multiplayer is pretty functional, we just need to implement some kind of lag compensation, but we will make it little bit later. For now we decided to implement several new features and after that, missions and finally gameplay.
So, we started a new big update which will add new features, but this time decided to share the progress so you know how things are going.
The main feature of this update will be the crew! And it will looks like something like this.
Someone may be disappointed, you probably expected that each module will have a visible interior and visible little humans inside. But we decided to make the crew as the icons above modules.
The game is quite technically complex, and visible interior inside the ships is quite a difficult task, besides, the player likely will be focused on events outside the ship, so the interior will have not enough attention.
Now the concept is slightly different, earlier, the player controls a ship, now we want the player controls the crew, and the crew controls the ship.
For example a player may have several crew members, they belong to him, but they can be located inside the ship which belongs to another player.
Actually the ships are no longer have a owner, it is just a ship. The ships can be controlled by players whose crew member takes the pilot's seat. At the same time, crew of another player may occupy turrets and two players will control different systems of the same ship. We think it's cool. :)
Crew members require food, water and resting in the special modules. Also it will have skills which will increase with the time. Skills will be very important (not just a +5% to evasion). There will be pilot, engineer, miner, gunner, medic, trooper, radar operator, shield operator and maybe something else. Also ships should have life support module which is defines the maximum amount of crew on the ship.
Also we want to implement escape pods. The life of each crew member should have high value. Later we plan to implement missions where you should save the crew of NPC and other players.
Also we added polar grid, which can be turned on\off and will help to feel a movement thoruh the space
Start to add ion engines
Discription and tips for modules in build menu
And also we removed "New Ship" button, now you can build second Command Module on your active ship, assign a pilot, disconnect it and it will acts as a new ship!
Of course there still a lot of work with a crew before an update, but we think it should not take too much time.
If you like such kind of posts, we will publish something else along the development progress.
upd:
About ship boarding, what we are thinking, crew members will have skill "close combat", when two crew members of opposite factions located in the same module. They will slowly attack each other and causing amount of damage which is depends on the skill.
However, this system has some problems, like the fact that the modules have a limited number of slots, and if all slots are occupied, then the attacker will not be able to enter it. Maybe we'll figure out something later.