After nine months of development we've finally announced how we are going to release V3: it's now a new game called The Spatials: Galactology. You can check our announcement for more details and the trailer in youtube. And now for the development update for the past week! This is the current post for the ongoing Galactology development log. You can check the archive here. There's a new tutorial system, implemented from scratch as an independent core game mod:
Unlike the V2 tutorial, this new system is based monitoring all interaction of the user both with the GUI and the game world. This allows for detection of construction, production, or any other gameplay effect. This will enable much better tutorials. Initial tutorials were also implemented for the station, the galaxy and planets. Only the station tutorial is in a relatively advanced state, with the other two only covering the basics to form a working resource chain. Galactology now supports flood fill areas:
It's a staple of many sim games to define areas with some kind of brush, for many gameplay reasons. I was avoiding this sort of functionality since it seemed very complicated for our game, given that the floor tool was already doing the same thing. So it dawned on me, why not allow common floors and rooms to serve such a function? Thus the flood fill system was born. Any object with FloodFillComponent (it's done in C++) will keep an updated set of tile coordinates that are adjacent to it and that share the same floor kind, up to the limits of the room. It's now possible to build new systems on top of this foundation. And the first one is storage areas:
Galactology will now support two kinds of storage: stock controlled storage has been implemented for months and it allows for very precise orders. You can pick one single resource and then give a max and min amount to keep on stock, and select options for what are its valid sources (and this may be made more complicated in the future, allowing to pinpoint a single object as the source). Many objects keep its internal stock controlled using this system. But, what happens when a ship unloads a large amount of varied cargo in your station? It can be very cumbersome to micromanage a pallet object for each kind of resource. Enter storage areas. A storage controller uses the flood fill system to declare a room as valid for storage. It also allows to select the subset of resources allowed in the room, so you can have diferent areas for different resources. It has not stock control, which will still a feature that requires pallets. This system is much more similar to how storage works in other sims, compared to stock control pallets.