This update marks the first in a series of updates focused on greater overworld interactions. There's still much work to be done but so far things are going well.

Distress beacons 

The player can now place a distress beacon at any jump point should they not possess sufficient fuel to make a jump. This will spawn a beacon response fleet which will path-find to the player and begin a dialogue.

Added support for random dialogue selections, which can allow for a single base dialogue to branch out into any number of randomly generated responses. This means a response fleet can randomly do any number of things ranging from benevolent to hostile. This functionality can also be extended to other dialogue trees of course. I've added several placeholder dialogues to branch into for the time being.

Improved pathfinding and AI

I greatly improved the pathfinding system I was using. It now prebakes an all-pairs pathfinding navmesh on game start, frontloading the work and storing most of the system to system pathing solutions. This also allows me to very cheaply query the next fast travel point given a start and end destination system.

AI fleets can now be told to follow any arbitrary object or position, and will use any fast travel points they can to get there, prioritizing relays.

Quest and Star System Integrations

Some backend work was done to rewrite how quests are generated. Quest generation can have search data attached to only generate quests in systems with various attributes, such as hostile/friendly systems, unpopulated systems, and systems belonging to certain factions. Additionally quests can be attached to systems which has various uses.

Fleet Screen

Fleet skills are now displayed on the fleet screen with a total of each displayed. Clicking the skill will show a description of the skill and a breakdown of how much each ship in your fleet contributes to that skill

Fleet income(crew wages) is also displayed on this page.

World Map/Intel Screen

I made decent headway into improving the intel screen and world map this month. Clicking on a quest or system brings up a tab with information on either of them. Additionally, clicking on a system will show the cost of the shortest path to get to that system, allowing for easier route planning. Custom player notes can be added to systems using this page

Orbital icons were added to system icons on the map screen, which show quests belonging that system. These can also be clicked to bring up the relevant quest info.

I was hoping to get zooming/panning in but it turned out to be much more challenging than I'd anticipated. Shelving it for now.

Game Overs

Game over events can be invoked through dialogue, such as losing a fight. This will reset the player's items and credits and send them to a currently predefined location.