A year has passed, no alpha yet, but some interesting things have happened.
Short-term I'd like to finish weapons: it needs mountable weapons, client-server exchange of weapon slot configurations, particles to make it look fancy, and, most important, ship damage. If I do it right, I can reduce weapon-releated network chatter to a minimum and handle the graphics completely client-side. Currrently, projectiles are standard entities and a large firefight will probably clog the intertubes.
Most of this works now. I took a shortcut by skipping the slot configuration, but weapons are mostly operational,
and network overload turned out far better than I'd hoped for. The new particle engine seems do produce acceptable results as well.
The most exiting development as of late are the NPCs: I had a revelation on how implement the autopilot,
and from there the code started to flow like water. I already had tons of laughs with the stupid AI,
and a number of quite challenging dogfights. Explosion sound was just the icing of the cake,
I was even surprised to hear it yesterday, after I had forgotten I had implemented it.
In the meanwhile, I also had a lot of time to think about the alpha. Unlike other projects,
I'd like the alpha to be more than something that gets tossed as
this might be interesting in the future.
The alpha should attract interest, but must have enough to offer to make hardcore fans stick around.
It goes without saying that, until then, I'll keep on offering new development builds.
For the near future I'd like to concentrate on two things. First if all, keep on building the universe:
create skies for the Dagon systems, add the Southern Rim, add factions, bases and patrols. As far as programming
is concerned I still want a decent options menu: players should be able to do basic configuration
without using the console (or reading the manual), the inventory should be made less confusing, and,
in networked games, the map needs infrastructure to show zones other than the current one.
The recent host move also broke the custom wiki theme, that's something that will need to be addressed as well.