Hello Navigators!
This has been quite the busy month, and well a-half. Polish on the galaxy workshop upload, digging in to system connections, and preparing for Game Con Canada! Yep, Stellar Navigator will be attending Game Con Canada again this year, so if you happen to be in the neighborhood swing by and say hello!
Progress Update
Beyond addressing several issues coming out of the open beta, polish work has continued on the Galaxy Workshop upload and subscription model. When this update reaches closed beta, which will be very soon, Navigators will be able to share their galaxies!
Share Your Work
Here’s how it will work: you will select a galaxy as you normally would through the galaxy selector, then upload it to the Workshop. You can update your Workshop galaxy as you make changes, as often as you like. Other users may then subscribe to your galaxy and, from the very same galaxy selection menu, create a new galaxy as a copy of one they are subscribed to.
Connecting the Dots
With the Workshop feature largely out of the way, time and effort have been going into the galaxy “trade lane,” or Constellation, feature. This has required fairly extensive changes to how the galaxy map operates, but don’t worry: since this feature is additive, the changes are intended to slide into place alongside your current galaxies.
For the first release of this feature, users can expect the ability to create line types, including a name and colour. Additional customization options will come in a later patch.
Shake-Up
As development goes, things don’t always go as planned. However, we pivot, adjust, and adapt until we succeed.
Over the last month, while resolving issues, adding features, and stabilizing existing functionality, some lines were crossed that resulted in custom points, self-hiding fields, and binary systems getting tangled up with later changes. While this is concerning from the perspective of possibly introducing existing issues, or worse, new ones into the system, not all of it is cause for concern. These changes have not made it out to the closed or open betas, so those builds will continue to be as stable as they have been. However, it does mean something different for the upcoming releases.
After deliberation, it has been decided that the aforementioned features will be included in the next major update alongside Workshop support and the other goodies coming with it. Does this mean it may take longer for these features to make their way to the live build? Yes. Does it mean that you can look forward to more exciting new features, many of which were requested by the community, sooner? Absolutely!
Why sooner, you might ask? Because this is a situation where significant sequential effort would be required to straighten out the tangled mess. Instead, that effort will be applied to finishing the last couple of features for the next major update and pushing it out to the closed beta branch, then the open beta branch.
Sneak Peek
It feels like it has been a while since the last sneak peek, so why don’t we let one out of the bag?
