Greetings Lords of Rigel,
This week has been more under the hood bug fixes and quality of life changes and optimizations but some of the major ones are:
This Patch:
• Empire, Fleets, Diplomacy, Planets, and Ship Designer menu optimizations and visual enhancements on the sort menus. Menus and filters should be faster for slower systems. There is also smart filtering added on categories. (ex. Filtering out asteroids when sorting by gravity or minerals in Planets menu)
• Tutorial menu anchor and render order fixes and adjustments to match with new menu features in New Game, Ship Designer, and Build Queue.
• Autoturn stop trigger adjustments- Turns off when hostile fleets are approaching your systems instead of detecting fleets in general
Still coming down the pipeline for EA1 are:
• 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
As for another deep dive this week:
Selach Ships!
The aquatic traders, the Selach, have been a fan favorite. Selach ships are meant to be sleek and aquatic, with flowing forms similar to marine mammals and fish. Their ships are large due to the size of the Selach but have smaller crews. The ships are also massive as they have open spaces containing seawater and have large engines to counter the mass. Selach starbases have radial symmetry and a central “fishbowl” with docking ports and utility arms that have the weaponry. The large docking areas also fit with their role as traders. The reactor cores are also typically at the base. Texture wise Selach ships have a slight water caustics styling, and this is also seen on their ground units like the hovertanks.
Selach ships also have a separate animated material for the fluid inside. There is a slight emissive glow and fluid flow animation. Finally, the smooth lines on their ships are visible in the normal maps and parallax occlusion maps that help details pop out more on their ships.
Image 1. Selach Cruiser
Image 2. Selach Starbase
Image 3. Selach Heavy Assault Vehicle (Hovertank)
Image 4. Selach Window Material
Image 5. Selach Frigate Normal and Parallax Occlusion Maps
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!
