Spiritus Astrum

I have completed another full round of testing!

I uncovered quite a few minor bugs this time, but nothing serious.

I have also made a note of several improvements that need to be made.

I am definitely making progress, but there is still a lot of work to do, especially with regards to artwork, etc.

There are some issues with AI pathfinding and the AI dialog system that might take slightly longer to fix, these are more complex.

I have started working on extensive debugging and improvements, which is progressing well. I am also working on optimising and balancing the games variables, etc.

I have created some more artwork for the third campaign. It is, at the moment, mostly placeholder art, but I am working on improving the texturing for large objects.

I believe that I am making progress here.

I have added “detail textures” to my artwork in unity, which has helped, and I have created more repeating textures.

I have also added a triplanar texturing shader which has showed some promise as well.

I have also begun another complete retest of the third campaign.

I have finished the first two missions already, and there have been no major issues found. There are still quite a few minor issues, but these have been mostly fixed already.

The new artwork has been integrated with the game, and I have added some new story triggers as well.

I have been experimenting with repeating textures for large art objects this week.

Repeating textures work very well for large objects, and they avoid the problem of low texture resolution.

The problem is that I cannot use them to add any specific detail work.

I intend to experiment further with texturing techniques to try to find better ways of texturing large objects.

Most of the artwork in the project is still in an early stage, and I still have a lot to do to improve it.

Most of the basic modelling for the capital ship in the third campaign is done.

I have also done a test export, and after fixing some minor issues, this worked very well too.

It should be relatively easy to integrate the modified artwork with the existing dummy art.

The problem is the texturing.

I have had multiple issues when texturing large objects before, especially with low texture resolution, etc.

I am now experimenting with repeating textures, which is helping, but there is no way to add detail with repeating textures.

I will probably produce a very simple set of textures for now, just so that I can continue development.

Later, I will need to spend some time creating much better art, but this will be a major effort for such a large and complex structure, so I will leave this for a while.

I have created some simple textures for the new vehicles and weapons that I have introduced for the new campaign.

I have also integrated these into unity and tested the new weapon models. There were some minor bugs that needed to be fixed, but nothing major.

There is a decent selection of different weapon types that are unlocked at different points in the campaign.

I have also improved the mounting code for the weapons to give the player additional choices regarding their weapon loadout.

The next goal it to continue adding art for the new campaign, as well as testing, debugging, etc.

I have finished all of the dialog for the next phase of the project. I may have some more smaller dialog sections to add later, but it is mostly done.

I have also spent some time writing a script to automatically create dialog graphs from properly formatted text files.

This has been a huge time saver, since I don’t need to create graphs manually anymore.

Working with scriptable objects, etc, was quite tricky, but I didn’t run into any major issues.

I also fixed some bugs with the character creation system in the game, and I added some more NPC character types to the game.

The next step will be to work on some more testing, and work on the artwork.

I ran into a complex bug while working on the testing for the second campaign.

After some extensive debugging, I was able to apply a solution, but I don’t know if this solution will work in all cases. I have some more testing to do to verify this. The bug is related to the floating origin system and changing control objects while travelling long distances.

In some cases, the players saved position can be off by about 10 meters, which can leave them floating in the air above the ground. This is not a huge issue, but it does need to be fixed.

I have also made some other improvements, and fixed some other bugs, with the second campaign. Overall, it is working well.

The next step is to continue testing the campaigns, and work on more dialog, story elements, and artwork for them.

I have made some reasonably extensive changes to the mission code for Campaign 3 in order to improve the way that story and dialog elements are presented to the player. I have not done a full retest yet, but I am confident that these changes should work well.

I have also looked into the issue of creating multiple cities at once. Creating the cities is actually not difficult, the problem is creating multiple navigation graphs (Or, creating one graph for each city, and then swapping between them depending on where the player is). I don’t have time to implement this now, but it should be possible, just difficult.

I have also fully retested the first campaign of the game too. I was getting increasingly worried that my work on the third campaign would cause major bugs with the other campaigns, but this has not happened. There were some very minor bugs discovered while retesting Campaign 1, but these were easily fixed (They were mostly caused by variables not being set in Campaign 1 that were only used by Campaign 3).

There were a few other minor bugs found with Campaign 3, but these were pre-existing.

I plan to fully test the second campaign next, and then get back to finishing the third campaign.

I have completed a full retest of the third campaign, including the new story triggers, etc, that I have added.

I have run into quite a few bugs, but almost all of them were minor, and have been fixed already.

There are still some issues with triggering the story and dialog elements at the right time, but this should not be difficult to fix.

I have also made some improvements to the gui system within the project, in addition to many other minor improvements and changes.

One of the more complex issues that I have yet to solve is how to create multiple cities at the same time. Currently, this is not supported, but it needs to be in the final game.

There are some issues left to fix, and some more improvements to make, which I am working on now, but so far things are going fairly well.

There is a lot of work left, but I am definitely moving in the right direction.

I have integrated all of the dialog that I wrote last week into the game itself, as I have added triggers for this dialog so that it appears at the correct points in the story.

I still need to test it fully, which is the next step, but so far it seems to be working well.

In addition, I have fixed several bugs related to the story and dialog system, and the guis, etc.

The dialog system has some basic random elements built in. Character names, etc, will be changed between playthroughs. In the future, I intend to extend this to add more replayability, and more procedural content.

The dialog for each NPC will also change during the story, depending on the game state, and the players actions, etc.

I have also started extensive testing of all of the changes that I have made recently. This will take some time, but progress so far has been good.