Hello! We are glad to introduce a big and super important update! The world of the game no longer empty and lifeless, from now, it is filled with others ships and space stations of different factions.
Now, when you will travel to another sectors, you will encounter an hostile ships and stations which can be captured.
This may sounds simple, NPC ships pretty standard feature for a space game, but since ships in Celestial Command is fully physical, we made a great improvements to AI of these ships.
But the most important it is optimization. Earlier, just a couple of AI ships caused significant FPS drop, but for this update we rewritten and redesigned many various systems of the game, so now you may see 20-40 AI ships around with good performance!
Boost of performance is especially noticeable during combat. Earlier we used "sphere collider" component, so PhysX engine detected object in range for us, but turned out it is extremely slow in case if each ship made from many physical modules. Turrets had such sphere collider too, as result, two battleships near each other dropped performance to just a few frames per second.
But turned out, simple distance checking algorithm is very effective and much faster than previous solution. Especially if it will be performed only once per second, which is more than enough for functionality of radars. So now you may observe a battle of massive fleets without any performance issues! Here you may see how many spherical colliders (green spheres) was in the region which caused an intense drop of performance. Now this issue completely solved!

By the way, new implementation of radars turned out not only more effective, but also it opens a possibilities for new features, for example, we plan to do the next: Each ship will have different radar detection range depending on its size \ emission. Now it is possible to implement and it could be quite an interesting feature. For exmaple, low detection stealth ship will be possible. Also, we plan to check line of sight to some objects, so it will be possible to hide from radars behind planets and large asteroids.
Note, that it is just a first version of world populated with AI ships. Its logic and behavior is pretty basic, however, we are going to add more interesting features in the nearest update. Cargo ships will move goods between stations, guardians will protects them from pirates and allied fleets will try to engage on enemy sectors.
Also note that AI is not available yet in orbital mode, because implementation of AI was extremely complex task and it is not fully done even in aerodynamic mode, but when it will be properly improved and tested, we will add it to the orbital mode too.
Overall, we made a lot of improvements which are greatly improves many various aspects of the game, please refer to the full change log for more information. And also, Celestial Command is 25% off during winter sale! Happy holidays!

CHANGE LOG

• NPC! Game world now filled with life!
• Now other system populated with the hostile factions and its station. You may invade their sectors and capture a stations
• Super huge optimization of everything! A lot of code was rewritten. Now everything should be much better performance, both in terms of CPU and GPU! Performance no longer dropped to 2 frames per second during combat of several battleships! Completely rewritten radar and turret systems
• Changed a way how radars works. Now it acts as "upgrade" module for radar of command module. When additional radar placed anywhere on the ship, it will extend radius of radar of command module. Only 1 additional radar can be active on the ship.
• Turrets now works in cooperation with radar. It will search targets from the list of targets visible by radar. If radius of radar will be reduced, turrets will be able to track targets within this new radius, even if weapon range is much larger.
• AI now capable to fly on ship which have only 2 main engines
• AI now much better in ship rotation
• AI now will react on your attack and will fight back
• AI will try to retreat from combat in critical situations
• NPC Shipyard station new really looks like a shipyard
• Station's modules now available for construction!
• All warp gates now located on the edge of the region and directed toward the region where it leads
• Camera now smoothly follows movement of your active ship, as result it create better feelings of its velocity
• Added PvP mode option, if enabled, your ships will consider ships of other players as an enemy faction
• Added audio effect on ship collisions
• Added audio effect on energy shield impact
• Added new module: Small radar RLM-1
• Cannons no longer limited by "burst fire" functionality, since it have not too much sense for large ship's cannons. Now cannon may keep their rate of fire without interruptions
• Cannons no longer have 100% accuracy, direction of projectile now will have a random deviation, so now, distance of combat is important, cannons is more accurate at close range and fire-fight at large ranges now much more dynamic

• Added Christmas lights for NPC space stations. It is added only to allied stations, but enemy stations will have it too after it will be captured. Spread the celebration across the galaxy!
• Added detailed description for game modes which explains benefits and features of each game mode
• Redesigned HP bars, now they are located closer to the module and scaled down at high zoom level, as result, it looks much more better and much less annoying during combat
• Rebalanced speed and damage of rockets so it no longer so overpowered
• Turrets in manual mode no longer will fire if not directed at the position of cursor
• Added "projectile velocity" info when cannon selected
• Improved design of turret range \ angle visualizer
• New impact audio effect for light kinetic projectiles
• Map now can be dragged by any mouse button
• Added option to hide list of stations on the map
• Now when you open a system map, camera will be located at the center of system
• Switching between main view, system map and galaxy map now much more comfortable since camera located in better positions by default
• Research window now can be dragged by any mouse button
• When the game started, on the galaxy map will be revealed neighbor systems near a starting system with warp gates (not just systems within specific range)

• Fixed various bugs related to broken warp gates and impossibility to save the game after warp gate was broken
• A lot of things no longer cause intense FPS drop! Especially during combat, the game should be much more smoother
• AI now will properly avoid collision with a warp gates
• Info about lasers now translated
• Outdated fuel generator removed from tech tree
• All weapons now can be properly selected after placed on turret
• Ships now properly save \ loaded if it had rotor \ piston which was destroyed recently
• Fixed "infinite rate of fire" value for heavy cannon