Hello everyone and welcome to the 2nd Dev Log.
Since the last one was mid may this dev log is not very exciting regarding new stuff.

Public Relation:

Prototype:

I’ve updated the Prototype for it to also ship the required Java Runtime Environment. This way the Prototype should just work out of the box with no other configuration. The launch scripts for Linux and Windows where updated accordingly and also I dropped the 32bit compatibility libraries for it as well.

Also I reworked a little bit on the overall packaging for the itch App to better integrated with it and showing the correct launch options to the user rather than trying to run the JAR-File directly. Which doesn’t work.

This way I also learned a little bit about distribution on itch so this experience will benefit the Godot Version for sure.

Also the Java Prototype was moved to it’s own page you can find here. This was made to better district between the new in development version from the old one.

New Logo:

Next I also redesigned the Space Conflicts: Empires Title Logo. It’s not that I was unhappy with the old one. But the old one is the old one which for me personally is deeply associated with the 2013 Java Prototype. The game as it is currently in development is an entirely different beast so I felt an updated and more modern look would be a good thing.

Also the old Logo looked like from the 90s which might give future players a false expectation of what’s actually in the game. As the logo is the first thing potential players are exposed to I felt like the new logo is a little bit more engaging.

Old:

New:

In addition to this I also published a “Press Kit” which contains the new logo in different variants. Just in case someone like to cover the game in some online post some when in the future.

Technical Improvements:

No let’s talk about the technical improvements made to the actual game code:

Orbit Camera:

The orbit camera was further refined to do proper transitions if the focused game object has changed. Even though there is always room for improvement I deem it ready for the upcoming alpha release. Zooming works fine enough now as well and also rotating the camera around the focused object works better now.

Planets / Warpgates / Stars:

Planets, Stars and the warpgate have been further improved to make use of the orbit camera. When ever someone double clicks one using the left mouse button it will tell the orbit camera that it is now the new focused game object.

This will then issue the above mentioned transition.

With this in place I can now further work on implementing the scene builder on the client side. More about this as soon as it is ready.

Stars

In astronomy main-sequence stars are categorized as O, B, A, F, G, K and M with this comes their avg. size, color and how likely they are to be found.

The client can now visualize each of these main sequence stars and adjust the shader and light color accordingly. While the server does now generate them depending on how likely they will occur in real life.

Star field environment texture

Also I replaced the star field environment texture as the one used before was actually not mine and therefore I wouldn’t be allowed to ship it with the game.
After figuring out how to properly render textures to be put on a spherical surface with Blender it was just a matter of modelling the environment in Blender and render it.

Updated Planet shaders

Just as the star field background was updated. Since I now know how to render these textures using blender I also took the opportunity to update some planet shaders as well.

Reworked shaders for the following biomes:

• Oceanic
• Arid
• Lava
• Rural
• Rocky

Scene builder

The scene builder is still very WIP and also on the server side there is still some stuff missing. But in the current state the client does at least fetch the required data to (later on) build the local scene for the player.

That’s it for the may update. I hope you all doing well! Looking forward to June and all the little improvements and pieces slowly falling together.

Kind regards,
V.