Welcome back for another Drifters update. There's a lot to cover with the rework, so refer to last month's progress report for more details that I'm leaving out with this post.

Overworld Revamp

The overworld has been redone into a turn based system. I also added new systems.

Stealth

If your fleet has a positive stealth rating you can enter stealth mode after a delay. This will render you invisible to any enemy NPCs. Bumping into an enemy fleet can unstealth you if their scanning is high enough.

Scanning

An area can be scanned, which will reveal stealthed fleets in a radius around the selected target provided your scanning beats their stealth

Threat Level

Threat level is set up and can be told to update through dialogue to increase or decrease, though doesn't currently impact anything yet. Eventually it'll hook in to random events, spawning fleets at high levels, and infantry combat difficulty.

Inventory Rewrites

I did a refactor on how the game handles inventory to make items be able to take up multiple inventory points, essentially "weighing" more. I had the schema set up for it and everything forever ago and never got around to it. Oh well what can you do.

Crew

Crew Classes

I did some refactoring to extract the hard coded crew type logic into configurable "crew type" data classes loaded from files. These have flags for if they can be assigned to ships, be deployed in infantry combat, or go on infiltration missions. This will mke it much easier on the validation side of things as I no longer have to directly check crew type to see if they can do stuff. Perks can be class specific now too. In short, the game now effectively allows for as many classes of crew as I want and is open to easy modding like everything else. I added the Marine class as a test for this system.

Crew Equipment

Crew now have support for equipment slots which will come in handy for boarding. Each crew class has slots that can be filled with things like weapon, armor and gadgets. If they're not filled with anything will default to a certain free equipment specific to each class.

Like hullmods and ship weapons, (non default) equipment will require you have an item corresponding to it in your inventory. Unlike the other two, you only need one instance of that item in your inventory to outfit your whole crew with them rather than the item being consumed and attached to a ship, as you're basically doing the equivalent of carrying crates of those guns/whatever around and it's enough to supply everyone. The catch of course is you need to carry that crap around with you everywhere you go, and I intend to make it heavy enough to where you notice it.

I intend to have it where gear has an infantry weight as well, which depletes stamina each deployment. Different gear will have different distributions of fleet weight to infantry weight, and the overall weight increases with the efficacy of the equipment. This will amount to putting strain on either your fleet logistics or your crew if you want the good stuff.

I added some placeholder gear for now. A weapon, some armor, a grenade, and a medkit. I still need to make actually equipping the gear possible which will require more UI work, but we're getting there.

Boarding

I've laid out a lot of the basic groundwork for boarding and infantry combat, at least on the overworld side of things. This is still a LONG ways off from getting into the game proper and is basically auto resolved instantly when you try it, but it's now at least part of the gameplay loop in an MVP way that I can slowly build on.

Ship Sections

Each ship type has support for different ship sections, and each section can correspond to an infantry map id. It also varies up the order of these sections based on the type of operation being done. Like a carrier might have a hangar section while a medical ship would have a med bay, and clearing out a derelict ship might have you simply go through a bunch of random sections clearing enemies while sabotaging an enemy ship would have you plant a bomb in the reactor and leave via the escape pods. There's a LOT of data involved with this so I auto generated most of it for now, but in the future I can custom tailor each ship accordingly.

In general the plan is boarding a capital ship or station is the equivalent of a dungeon with many stages that drain you while something like a frigate is an easy mode quick fight with 1-2 sections.

Boarding Enemy Fleets

Entering stealth mode and interacting with a fleet will give the option to board a ship of your choosing. This will allow a stealth + boarding fleet to strategically take out a ship of their choosing before moving on to the main event.

Resisting Ships

Locations can now have what I'm calling resisting ships. These are derelict ships with hostile crew on them, which must be boarded and cleared before an area can be salvaged. At most there can be 3 in one spot and I have configurables for both the cap and the spawn rate of them in case it gets annoying. This will keep infantry combat relevant and make managing them important to day to day operations if you want to explore and salvage.

Marines

Marines are generic units auto generated for each mission that you can deploy. These will be able to pad out the deployment slots a bit and can be swapped out for custom crew as you hire more guys. They're mostly there to make the early game more bearable or give you something to fall back on if your crew are tired.