Last week was not that busy, but I still made quite a lot of progress. The main focus was on reworking the UI and implementing split-screen. I must say I am quite happy with how things are starting to turn out.

Split-screen

The player HUD is quite simplistic, but I believe it shows all the needed information. I did not want to fill the whole screen with different progress bars, so I concentrated most of it around the radar. Available weapons are then displayed underneath it, with the currently active weapon highlighted. The icons are still a work in progress, but I can say they are already quite close to the final product.

I am also happy with the performance. I was afraid that rendering four separate views would be much more demanding, but there is basically no noticeable performance difference, even on my old hardware.

Fresh Freight

On the other hand, I am still thinking about how to make the Fresh Freight racing mode more interesting. Currently, ships simply restore their energy automatically if they do not use it for a short time. This is really convenient while developing the game, but from both a racing and lore perspective, this needs to change.

Because of that, I decided to allow ships to store more energy, but it will no longer refill automatically for free. Since Ethanol is a scarce and sacred energy source in Frutiverse, I implemented liquid drops of Ethanol that float around the system. When a ship enters one of these blobs, it starts draining it and refilling its fuel tanks.

So I also spent quite a lot of time poking liquid drops around in space and tuning the physics of liquids in a weightless environment.