This month will mostly be a content update, with lots of abilities and hullmods in the pipeline. I'll also be doing some minor optimizations here and there. As a soft focus I'm trying to get the Glith and Marrock factions up to snuff content wise. July's AFG rework went pretty smoothly and I'm trying to give the other factions the same level of quality. Once I get those factions more polished I can move on to adding in some new ones without spreading myself too thin.

Collision Reworks and Misc Optimizations

Optimization isn't a huge focus for me so early on in development, but there are a few pain points I have that I'd like to tackle where I can.

I'll be spending some time rewriting how combat handles collisions. Right now I have only a handful of collision layers: One for ships, shields, non-point defense projectiles, point-defensibles(fighters, missiles, turrets). When collisions are reported I typically do checks for which team the entity is on, among some other flags like shield piercing and friendly fire. This worked fine in the beginning but has since become a touch messy, and I'm also beginning to think less performant. Ideally I'd like to not have these collisions even happening in the first place, let alone performing additional logic on top of that. As I expect fights to involve hundreds if not thousands of projectiles going off at once, this will be a good place to start optimizing in on the CPU end of things.

There's also currently a lot of UI elements from the overworld that could stand to be culled during combat for some easy performance gains. Combat is technically drawn over the overworld screen because it's too much of a pain to do otherwise, so there's a lot of objects running in the background even though ostensibly they shouldn't be consuming resources due to being paused/made invisible.

Ship Editor

Weapons and hullmods are supposed to be actual items that must be present in your inventory to equip, so I'll be working to get that functionality in. I'll also be updating hullmod icons to only use the chip style image for the item itself, rather than the hullmod on the ship editor. Should look a bit nicer. I also intend for building in hullmods to require X amount of that hullmod's item to do it, to make it a bit harder/more expensive.

I'll have a flag to dummy out inventory integration out once I'm done writing it, so there won't really be much difference to the end user, at least in these alpha builds.

Along similar lines, I'll be improving ship stripping with various wrapper methods and various bells and whistles. This will be nice for looting derelict ships as I'll have a method to randomly take off pieces.

Ships

I'll be adding in a small handful of ships and populating data for some neglected ones. I'm also going to do some sprite reworks on some of the uglier ones. Marrock ships in particular need a heavy rework as I continue to refine their aesthetic and design.

Shields

Shields will generate heat while in use.

Abilities

Adding quite a few new abilities. Many of these are designed around using ship size tiers. They're also very faction flavored, mainly Kleptocracy, Glith, and Marrock themed.

• Thermal Stabilizers: Upon activation, any nearby allied ships of lower size tier that are overloaded will lose their overloaded status and be set to 50% heat or lower
• Backpropagation: Using Backpropagation will cause the ship to become increasingly stronger with each use. Caps out at 3 improvements.
• Tractor Field: All enemy ships of lower size tier will be pulled towards the ship.
• Coolant Injectors: All flamethrower weapons will generate no heat while active.
• LEECH: While active, enemy energy based projectiles will be turned into "motes" and drawn into the ship. Each mote will regain stamina and lower heat by a small amount. Generates a lot of heat while in use.
• Disposable Heatsinks: Ejects heatsinks from the ship, instantly cooling the ship by 50%. Limited Charges.
• Armor Patcher: Shoots globs of molten metal at friendly ships that grant Armor Regeneration status effect.
• Menace: Inflicts Demoralized on all nearby enemies at or below ship size tier

Hullmods

• Chain of Command: All destroyers and cruisers with chain of command equipped will gain a boost to armor and stamina loss, so long as at least one capital sized ship remains and has CoC equipped. Losing this ship will remove the buff and grant some kind of status effect debuff (likely Demoralized) and incur a huge immediate stamina penalty. Unlike other hullmods gets cheaper to equip the bigger the ship.
• Thermal Redirectors: Energy weapons will do 30% more damage above 50% heat capacity, in exchange for doing 20% less damage below it.
• Second Wind: Regain 20/15/10% stamina on winning a fight. This effect is doubled for the player's flagship.
• Shieldless: Removes primary shield in exchange for a boost to armor resistance.
• Inferno: Flamethrowers cause more heat but have more damage and extended range
• Regenerative Plates: Every 5 seconds restore armor, scaling with ship size. Decreases ability charge rate and ion resistance. Effect improved if Shieldless equipped.

Status Effects:

• Demoralized: Drastically increases stamina decay for the duration of the effect
• Armor Regeneration: Restores armor every few seconds. Stacks with Regenerative Plates.