Core Gameplay
The Core Gameplay team spent part of March progressing hacking, with the devs polishing items, improving the tutorial, and ensuring the UI is always correctly aligned to the player.
Various improvements were made to weapon handling, such as switching back to the previously held weapon after using a MedPen. And now, when equipping a new knife from the ground, the player character will store their currently held weapon or entity unless it can’t be stored.
Significant work was done toward Crafting, which debuted in Alpha 4.7. March’s tasks included implementing minimum quality requirements for blueprint aspects and the ability to dismantle items that weren’t previously crafted. Various additions were implemented too, including the ability to define which blueprints are entitled to the player by default, a HUD notification when a player receives a blueprint, material and quality information to the tractor-beam display, and the ability to stack resource containers with the same quality. Players can now also view owned and unowned blueprints in the Crafting UI.
Paging support was given for the crafting machine instead of infinite scrolling for better performance, and new resource thumbnails were added to the crafting machine, freight elevator, and inventory. Resource and quality tracking for freight elevators and inventories was standardized too.
For Engineering, the devs added collapsing headers to the diagnostics MFD, specific warnings to the notifications panel, and color ranges for damaged components on the engineering screen.
Updates were made to the refueling mechanic. These involved various changes to the docking flow, such as allowing any ship to initiate the docking procedure. This means that the refueling ship (such as a Starfarer) can initiate docking and back up to dock with the ship that needs refueling. Auto-docking now triggers when the two ships are close enough. The ships also automatically undock whenever the refueling process is complete to smooth the overall flow.
Progress continued on Drake’s Command Module, with the team integrating the Resource Network into the module’s hand-off procedure, making sure that the host and parasite ship properly connect to the same network. Functionality was also implemented to ensure that the shield faces correctly update when the Command Module is docked and undocked.
The Transport system is now largely feature complete and going through iteration with the Design teams for workflow improvements and additional changes to robustness and scalability. March’s tasks involved improving various debug tooling for easier bug identification by the developers and QA team. The setup for Area18 was completed, which will be used for the initial Tech Preview tests alongside other locations. The team also addressed major issues that caused doors to open into the void and laid the foundation for self-repair functionality. For example, if carriages get into a bad state, the transport system can fully reset the network as needed.
Toward the mission system, the team fixed various issues causing rewards to not be correctly attributed or progress for event trackers to be incorrectly calculated. Progress began on implementing Mission v2 functionality into Starchitect, including the ability to dynamically create mission locations without designer intervention, greatly improving the speed of development.
The inventory rework continued too, with the team finalizing the remaining elements and fixing as many bugs as possible, both from what was found internally and feedback from the PTU.
“Ship hangar servicing” had its first playable gate, which was met favorably. The team is now working on preparing it for the content teams.
Finally for Core Gameplay, the team is preparing to move onto social features.
