Greetings Lords of Rigel,
We’re plugging away at reported issues and making headway on our Early Access 1 milestones.
In terms of quality of life features coming down the pipeline:
• Auto ship design generator: With the optimizations done on ship designer we’ll be adding in an “auto” button to have the AI generate a design of your selected size class.
• Loading and saving build queues: You’ll be able to select various buildings and items to set up a build queue order. Unavailable items will be filtered out. These queues will be tied to your user settings and should be able to be shared between games. Along with the existing auto construction tool this should provide a lot of control for automation for players
• Autocombat report: In addition to the existing event ticker we’ll be adding a post-combat breakdown for autoresolve and tactical showing the outcome balance of power bar and status of individual ships.
• Simple mouse input: As some users have reported not having middle mouse buttons or mouse wheels another quality of life feature will be an alternative control scheme that can be toggled. Players can currently change these bindings in settings but this will provide another accessibility option.
There’s also been a number of under-the-hood adjustment to economy and a pass on data fed to the AI. That being said, our emphasis on looking at AI behaviors will be during the next stage of EA to fine tune issues of it either being too aggressive or being too passive depending on the game.
This week we also wanted to give a deep dive on one part of the game: how planet effects are generated.
In Lord of Rigel galaxies can have up to 10,240 individual planets or objects in the largest galaxy sizes. They also need to be distinguishable by climate type but look somewhat unique. To do this we relied on developing master materials for stars and planets that could be adjusted by each type and by lighting.
Stars have colors based on their temperature and other details such as the amount of sunspots is determined by stellar type. Smaller, cooler stars as in real life have more sunspots and more activity. Stars also adjust the lighting in system view so yellow stars have a more natural white light while blue stars or red dwarves tint their systems a particular color.
Planets have set color palettes and detail textures based on their climate type. Some details such as continent layouts are procedural and set during galaxy generation. Other features such as icecaps are determined by if a planet climate has water and distance from the parent star. Planets further out will have larger ice caps, while ones close to the star will have small polar caps or none at all. Other planet types like Toxic worlds and Gas Giants also have lightning storms on their night sides. Planetary rings also have a few base materials, but are also adjusted procedurally so each looks unique. Additionally, planets have city lights with patterns set by where continents are located and height and the amount of cities is scaled by the population amount on your planet. Planets also have cloud shadows that help add more depth. Many of these effects are a bit more subtle than other games to try to aim for a more naturalistic look.
We believe our mix of procedural details, lighting, and planet type detail textures creates a believable and diverse universe.
Image 1. Binary system with sunspots
Image 2. Ocean planet with icecaps
Image 3. Example of Planet Material
Let us know what further changes you would like to see or if you have encountered any technical issues. Please post on the forums, reach out to us via Discord or send an email: [email protected] Saved games and clear steps to reproduce the bug are critical. It helps us more quickly track down the bug and get it fixed. Additional information on bug reporting tips can be found here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/437440/discussions/.
As always, we appreciate the feedback, conversations, and support from all of you!
