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SOLDate: 20230101: Deepspace broadcast

[/quote] Captains, recruits, trainees, main-screen-operators and officers. I welcome you to a new SOL cycle. As you all know, we still measure the passing of time in rotations of our home planet Earth around its star. I guess this makes us all feel more connected. Or just nostalgic. Looking back on our last SOL, we have had a few good updates:

• The transition from the old SFML based engine to SDL2 engine went smoothly without many engine hickups.
• Our French and German speaking officers finally no longer need to depend on sticky notes on their screens but can configure their screen in their native language.
• Many of our training scenarios have seen some update, and we have a brand new scenario The Omicron Plague, which reminds us that plagues should be taken seriously.
• Many small repairs to various systems.
• We've started to connect to a new source of recruits. While integration is still happening, hope to expect new recruits from the Steam side of the universe.

Steam

On that last point. I would like to welcome any new recruits from Steam. We are gearing up to give you access to your stations soon. Until that is done, you can always go to a non-steam station to connect with your fellow officers. All preliminary checks for steam access have been done. But there is still one final checklist to process before high command gives the all-clear for steam access.

Looking forward

Looking forwards, our engineers have some exciting new things planned. To start off, officers from Steam should be able to join us somewhere in the first few months. Next, some engineers are working on retrofitting a lot of parts to allow for a higher degree of customization. This work is many months from finished, but once done, it will allow a lot of things that were previously impossible. Like fitting stations with weapon systems, giving asteroids shields or removing the self-destruct button (but not sure why anyone would take that risk) More details will follow once this work starts to crystalize into a working state.

Connecting with your fellow officer

This is a reminder, if you are looking for fellow officers to fly with in an online session. The USN discord is where weekly games are organized, open for anyone. https://discord.gg/xs4V9wCj