Spiritus Astrum

I have been continuing with the debugging and improvements.

I think the project, or at least the planetside part of it, is at a quite advanced stage now.

The next major goal is to add more for the player to do, as well as work on story elements, etc.

I have added a smaller radar system to the project.

This is a common feature in most exploration games, but I haven’t added this feature to my project yet, because I wanted to emphasise exploration as much as possible.

However, given how complex the project is becoming, a radar system like this is really necessary.

I have also made improvements to the AI system, and fixed some long standing bugs.

These improvements should make the project a lot more playable, without compromising immersion too much. The radar, for example, is not always displayed, the player must show and hide is as needed.

I have added the ability to scan for distant structures to the project.

This will make it much easier for the player to find interesting places and structures to explore, especially when travelling through dense forests, etc, where visibility is limited.

I have also added several more improvements to the existing system, and I am continuing with the debugging.

The concept for ringworlds is complete.

There is nothing that shuold prevent me from adding the ringworlds to the system. I had to make some minor changes, and there are some minor issues, but they are mostly working fine.

The prolbem now is integrating them into my code.

I would need to change quite a lot.

The system to add grass and trees, etc, needs to be changes, as well as the system for determining the closest stellar object and the gravity vector.

This would take quite a long time, but there is nothing that can’t be done here.

I have been looking into the possibility of adding RingWorlds to the project.

The SpaceExplorationEngine, which I am using for the generation of planets, the floating origin system, etc, does support RingWorlds, but I have up until now assumed that I would not be using them, so adding them in would require extensive changes to my custom code.

I have done some preliminary experiments into this however, and it seems like the work involved may not be as much as I first thought.

I have made several improvements to the state variables and status effects system in the project.

All of the status variables (Various injuries, temperature related effects, etc, etc) now have their duration stored on the server as well. This means that it is much easier to remove these variables when the effect expires.

Previously I was storing the duration as a client variable, but this was causing some issues.

I have also made several changes and improvements to the AI, as well as a lot more testing.

The debugging is continuing to go well.

I have not discovered any more major bugs, and I have fixed some pre-existing ones.

There is one minor bug with the rotation of AI characters which I cannot fix, but I can look at this in the future.

The debugging is still going quite well.

I have fixed a very long standing bug in the navigation system that was causing the navigation objects to flicker.

This was caused by the fact that I was using raycasts to determine the placement position of the nav objects, but the rays were being fired from within the ship that was being moved and rotated, which was causing them to intermittently fail, causing the flickering.

I was able to fix this by removing the raycast and instead putting using an algorithm for line to plane intersection. This turned out to be a lot easier than I thought.

I have also made improvements to the random story generator system.

I have been continuing with the testing and debugging.

I have fixed many minor issues and bugs, and added some minor improvements, such as new AI dialog and interaction options, the ability for the AI to point out enemies to the player and to sprint, and various other improvements and quality of life updates.

I have also added the ability for AI members of the players party to be harmed, and for the player to be able to heal them.

The position issue has been fixed!

This was a difficult bug, since it was within a complex core system, but I was able to solve it.

The solution turned out to be quite easy, the difficult part was finding it.

I am hopeful that the number of bugs in the core mechanics of the project is quite low at this stage, most of the bugs I have been finding are minor or cosmetic at this point.