The focus of 3.7 is new station events plus some much needed small and medium enhancements. Unlike earlier releases 3.7 is save compatible with its previous release, 3.6. This has been done so testing the new events can be done with mature saved games that have bigger stations. The frequency and severity of events is part of the game balance and it may be untuned, so tell us what you think about it in the forum. The main new enhancement is the staff screen which is now vastly improved, along other quality of life and UI improvements. You can find the development updates for 3.7 in the rest of this post, in case you missed them.

New art for civs screen

Max has prepared new header art for the civs screen, and a small redesign was also done to better fit and prepare the screen for future UI work:



All civs have now unique background art and their full detail, full sized logos and advisors are prominently displayed. The new layout will also enable us to fit the future diplomacy UI in the lower area with a much nicer look and feel.

Top bar redesign and new alert features

The alert system will become more important since it will be the UI mechanism to report and track ongoing events, so more space was required to display alert icons:
The right side of the top bar is now more compact. The guide access will be moved to the tutorial system (when the guide is ready), and the report screen will be moved somewhere else (in 3.x that screen was half-working and mostly useless). Many events have an "ongoing" mechanic that defines a start and an ending condition. The alert system is now prepared to show this information, and to express some alerts as persisting. A persisting alert is displayed with an "ongoing" progress, meaning its duration or progress is not fully known (yet). Persisting alerts are always displayed to the left of all alerts:
A persisting alert displays the progress of an event (in this case the % of pirate invaders dead, it was captured just after the last one died). Both the alert icon in the bar and the alert popup display the completion %:
When an event is done its alert is turned into a plain alert and can be deleted normally:
Persisting alerts have an additional visual cue to make them stand out:

Event: Space worm

A huge worm from space is annoyed enough with your advanced technology to come pay a visit. Why? Nobody knows, but it's here and it's pissed off:
The worm has a devastating, fast melee attack with extra long range, but it's rooted in place. It will burrow and surface again every 30s.

Event: Space octopus

Space megabeasts keep attacking you, sigh. It's just the reality of space-ing I guess. The space octopus has a similar melee attack to his pal the worm, but it can move (slowly). It can also pull closer any station defender into its melee range.

Event: The pest

Dozens of fluffy animals are spawning around your station. They look cute but are crowding everything. They only attack when attacked, but in any case they have to go. Kill enough of them to force their queen out of hiding and end the pest for good.

Event: Xenomorphs

Short of Augustus showing up to make some omelette, you better hurry up and deal with those ominous looking eggs before it's too late...
This event also introduces a combined system of progress and countdown timer.

Enhanced fire

Fires are now more dangerous, do more damage and can expand faster. Additional smoke effects are now spawned alongside, and there's more conditions that can spawn a fire. Some bomb-like effects have been refactored to offer more variety and, you guessed it, more FIRE. The xenomorphs from the last update also love it:

New small events

Two new malfunction mini-events have been added. Showers now have an obvious failure mode:
And since this is space and the year is 5781, things can explode sometimes for no reason. Anything:

New event: meteor shower

A devastating new event, whose effects are too horrible to picture (they involve plenty of fire too). You'll have one minute to try to lock doors and move your officers away from the area.

New event: miasma cloud

Accidents happen even in the best kept stations. Rush to repair the malfunctioning factory, or trigger its self destruct mechanism (for a chance of starting a fire, of course).

New event: medical emergency

Your hospital area will struggle to treat this many patients, but if you manage to expect a nice reward. This is the first goal-like, rewarded event and more will come.

New event: somebody set up us the bomb

(I'm old enough to remember that meme).
Another possibility for your enemies to annoy you: a random, hidden hostile can now spawn in your station and it will also spawn a bomb nearby. The bomb is not directly focused by clicking on the alert but it will always be near the hostile. After you find it it's possible to disable it by destroying it (it's a neutral object, so your officers and defenses won't auto attack, you have to find it and give attack orders). If your run out of time, well, more FIRE.

Small enhancements

A counter is now displayed in the staff listing in the staff screen, including both your total officer count and the current filtered count.
In the same vein the filter menu now has counters for all categories, to quickly get an idea of how your work force is distributed.
A very often requested feature is now in: the staff picker for ships now includes a basic overview of the officer vitals, to make a more informed decision about your crew picks.
The orange warning icons on top of objects were often confusing, so they are now smaller and inside the standard object icon bubble.

Proper autosave system

Autosaving in previous versions was poorly conceived, requiring manually saving often the game. The game only autosaved when landing or taking off from a planet. In 3.7 autosaves are now much better implemented. First, there's now 5 autosave slots per galaxy, which automatically rotate based on the save age. Second, autosaves are now on a timer, and do not depend on visiting planets or any other gameplay action. Since our save system is UI-blocking, the timer is flexible and tries to sync the saving with major UI transitions, like changing the game screen. This starts after 15m of the latest save (manual or automatic). If 30m or more pass without any screen change, the autosave system will block the game for a few seconds and save it anyway.

Save picker remake

The save picker has nearly been unchanged since our first pre-1.0 prototypes back in 2014, receiving only minor improvements since then. It was time to bring it up to a better quality standard:
Saves are now grouped by galaxy for a much more tidier interface. And it's also finally possible to name your manual saves, the game will prompt you for a name when manually saving a game.

Staff screen enhancements

A picture is worth a thousand words:
The goal is to finally make the staff screen an useful information resource rather than a place to put UI that it's too big for the station inspector. It should offer the same level of information plus any other specific features.

New event: Bernice

VIP reward events are in, and Bernice is the first one. She's your manager back in HQ and will inspect your station from time to time, then give you a random timed goal:
And if you manage it:
Failing the goal has no negative consequences (there's plenty of events with big time negative consequences, so for this round things are much more chill).

New event: Augustus

The crazy robot chef from V2 is back! He's mellowed out quite a bit (or has he?) and he's here to help you with your cooking orders. He's a maxed out master spec chef with a special double production bonus.

New event: Кошка

Another V2 protagonist, Кошка is back too! Our beloved socialist cat and her robot army will patrol around a bit in your station, and they will help you with any task a robot can perform, except they are capable of all of them at the same time.

New event: Liberty

The USA couldn't be left behind when it came to sending live animals to test in space, and in our lore Liberty was one of them. She's just as much a mystery as Кошка survival for 38 centuries. She will roam your station, curious as any dog, and quickly increase the Morale of any visitor or officer she comes across. Good dog!

Staff screen: new Spec tab

The Staff screen overhaul continued, and a new Spec tab has been introduced:
The spec progression is now much more clearer, and it manages to show more information in less space.

Staff screen: new Jobs and XP tab

Jobs and XP for officers is available to consult in the job matrix tool, but there was no focused way to do so on an officer by officer basis. This is now fixed:
The XP tiers of each job are clearly displayed, plus the speed bonus and ratings. It's also possible to toggle the jobs or edit manual priorities without having to use the job matrix tool. The same per-officer toggles are now also displayed in the station info inspector, so there's no need anymore to go hunting for an officer in the job matrix:

New tool: per-officer-per-slot item picker

In the same vein as the job tool additions, there's now a new dialog to directly equip items into an officer equipment slot, by picking from the station stocks. Using the equip matrix was suboptimal when you were directly manipulating an officer, so now you can do the same task, in a more focused way. This tool can be open by clicking the small t-shirt icon in the right side of the equipment slot in both the info inspector and in the new Basics tab in the Staff screen.

Improved inventory window

The inventory window is now based on a listing, and it can also be filtered to focus down on a single kind of resource.

Logistics after production

In previous versions, when an officer was done producing something in a factory, the result was thrown on the floor. They now will look for a non-busy, non-full pallet, shop or storage area and transport it there. They will do this even if they don't have the delivery job enabled (just as they do for ingredients).

Version 3.7.1

- last minute event toggle settings in main menu

[ 2017-07-23 22:02:02 CET ] [ Original post ]