As mentioned in last month's roadmap, I am continuing the ongoing effort of building out fleet wide and multi star system game play.

The theme this month will be on random events, known in game as "signal interference", and the dialogue surrounding it. I'd initially tried expanding on them over the course of January, but as I worked I realized I was missing a ton of required tech and that doing random events justice would require time than I couldn't fit alongside everything else. Random events are intended to be a not insignificant part of the game play loop of exploration, role play, and travel, and I want them to be done right. Thus I'm going to dedicate an entire update to create a good groundwork for them.

Signal Interference

Refactoring

As with many other aspects of my game's core data pipeline, I want random events to be encapsulated in reusable data objects loaded on game start in a similar way to weapons, hullmods, etc. This will of course allow for a high degree of modability, allowing users to trivially inject their own by simply copy and pasting a json file into the random events directory. Unfortunately the way it works now is random events simply randomly pick from a list of hard-coded dialogue files(of which only 1 placeholder exists in the pool) when you interact with them. This is a very primitive approach and prevents me from storing other important metadata that a random event might need. I'll need to resolve this before I can proceed.

Signal Interference Spawning

I have plans to build in a system that spawns in random events in a semi managed way as time goes on. Ideally as the player flies around the sector different events will spawn in systems in a radius around the player. This spawning should factor in the type of event matched with the type of system. So systems owned by the kleptocracy will be heavily weighted towards kleptocracy related events, as an example. Neutral systems will trend towards a wider pool. As time goes on I should be able to refine this system to account for a much larger array of variables and factors. This will in turn require a much larger pool of random events, so I want to start small and simple as a test bed.

Random event dialogues

I already have several rough drafts of random events planned and sitting around used for a while. I'm certainly no writer, but it's been fun doing them as writing prompts. Hoping to polish them up a little and convert them into dialogue files, should be fun.

Static effect

I'd like the screen to get all static filled when near a random event, hopefully with increased intensity based on the distance to the interference. I have similar code for it as part of flying into stars and black holes, so it should be a fun little detail I can quickly add.

Dialogue enhancements

I'd like to be able to dynamically generate and add ships and crew members to the player's fleet through dialogue actions. Other enhancements will likely come up as I work on things.

Misc

More Fleet Skill Stuff

The framework for fleet skills has largely been placed, but I will need to add textures for them which I was too lazy to do before. I'll also likely add more over time as I want there to be a good number of them. I will also begin incorporating these skills into a large number of random events where I can.

More crew portraits

While the AI generation pipeline I have set up massively accelerates the process of producing these, it still takes time and energy to refine them into something semi usable. Bandwith that can be spent on other more important things. Nevertheless, I'm going to try producing at least a handful of these each month.