četvrtak, 10. svibnja 2018.

Preview release v0.6.6

Welcome migrants to more desirable world of tier 3 animations. I think I got it all in one sentence.

Download Stareater v0.6.6-alpha

In the last release animations were introduced but nothing new was done with them, only existing animations got rewritten. Now that foundation is used to create whole new intro animation when the game program is started.


Interesting thing about how it works under the hood is that specifying when and what happens with animation eerily looks like electric circuit schema. There are resistors (delays), parallel and series circuits, only batteries are missing. Here is a bit exaggerated figure (in reality parallel and series circuits are not physically connected but series "resistor" is big enough to simulate the effect):


One more feature from old CroVar version returned: interplanetary migration. Population from more populated worlds would move to less populated ones inside a star system. This is combined with planet desirability score. For now it's just a function of current and maximum population (less crowded is better) but when I implement more functions for formulas I'll add planet traits and technologies to influence it. I'm eagerly looking forward to a day when tooltips get implemented so I can show you how underlying "spreadsheet" works.

And as usual content update for release is 3rd tier of technologies. This bring along some new ship components, updated calculation formulas and brand new colony construction project: soil enrichment. Upon completion it gives a planet the "fertile" trait which is a new thing buildings can do now.