Welcome back for another update. This month was a bit more backend related, expanding the perk handling system that drives a lot of combat logic. I also did some sprite reworks of some of the worst looking weapon designs and added a few abilities and weapons here and there.

Perk Handling

Flat multiplicative modifiers have been added. I haven't begun reworking existing perks and hullmods to factor this in, but it's there for now.

Dynamic modifiers have been added, allowing for active perks that can grant changing modifiers. For instance FrontLine Operations now grants a scaling bonus based on how many ships are nearby, as a proof of concept. While refactoring to allow this I also made general improvements to have the perk handler essentially create local modifiable copies of modifier data, rather than being referenced directly from immutable perk data objects. This subtle but important difference means I can essentially inject custom modifiers that aren't necessarily tied to a perk data object. In essence this should allow for things like ships and crew with custom stat modifiers built in to make them more unique.

Abilities and Shields can grant multiple perks. Weapons still TBD.

Weapons

Sprite Redesigns

I reworked the Blood Moon and Crescent Moon energy weapons to actually look passable. I'd envisioned them as these weird plasma disk launcher...things, but couldn't nail the look in my head. The initial concept was the plasma getting pushed through a very thin lens/sieve to shape it, but that's extremely hard to convey in 2D from a top down perspective so it turned out really badly even for my low standards of placeholder art. Now it's more like the plasma is shaped at the top before firing, forming the donut/crescent shaped projectiles I was going for.

The Shard Thrower and Shard Storm weapons have received similar treatment. As one of the more early weapon concepts, when they were initially made I was too busy trying to make weapons actually work than any sort of cohesive aesthetic, resulting in a silly orange traffic cone design. I've now made them Mining Guild themed, giving them a yellow/black and blocky design with organic looking crystals jutting out the sides.

AFG Weapons

I added a small and medium variant of torpedo launcher for the AFG, known as the XF2 and XF3. These are fast firing pressure style weapons, befitting the AFG's style of higher fire rates.

I've also added the C98 and C53 autocannons, serving as generalists to give AFG ships a bit more range outside their usual miniguns.

Abilities

More abilities have been added.

• System Reset: Puts all abilities of nearby enemies into cooldown
• Missile Swarm: For every enemy fighter in range, spawn several SRMs to track them
• Rapid Resupply: For all weapons that regenerate ammo over time for all allies in range, set their ammo to max.
• Reverse Thrusters: Boosts the ship backwards.
• Strafing Run: Increases strafe speed for a few seconds.
• Phasic Armor: Turns the ship's armor almost invulnerable while active. Generates heat while in use and disables passive venting. Also slows the ship down.

Ship Data

I changed how ship data stores what weapons are equipped, removing it from weapon emplacement data and putting it in its own variable. This was necessary as while data pertaining to weapon mounts is immutable and ship-class specific, the ship's equipped weapons are obviously mutable. I decoupled these two fields, which is step one out of a countless amount for a very large migration/refactor I intended to perform in the unspecified future to split ship data into separate data classes.