Starting with this build, and spanning the next couple of builds until 0.2, it's becoming a focus to replace as much of the placeholder assets as possible with content that looks fit for purpose; that doesn't stand out as unfinished.

New Gallant Starship Material

Part of this process includes replacing incredibly heavy starship materials with much lighter tileable materials that can be used multiple times as one of the major points of optimisation. Testing so far has shown far better performance!

Along with improved materials, this update brings an improved Gallant Hunter mesh to allow for the new tileable material to better fit the model. This is largely smoothing out many of the sharper edges of the mesh, and tightening up areas of the design. Combined, these changes aim to improve the model when viewed up close, as well as it's overall silhouette when viewed from a distance.

New Gallant Damage Material

Finally, replacing the colour identification for damage with a much more immersive damage material has been the second step of this process. Different levels of damage will display with a material change representing different numbers of holes in the armour. This effect is planned to be expanded on in future builds by featuring different particle effects to add emphasis to the effect.

New Alseer Battleship Model

The very obvious placeholder Alseer Battleship model has been replaced with a much improved mesh, featuring a design much more representative of the faction. This new design glides into the battlefield in this update, I hope you look as forward to seeing it as you do to shooting it down!

Along with the mesh, this comes with the creation of a new Alseer armour material that will be used to update the previous Cruiser mesh, as well as be used for future starships.

There's still more work to be done with the Alseer Battleship, the turrets being a very obvious visual weak point, but these updates will be coming with future versions.

Health Bars

I've never wanted health bars to be a part of the game, but during testing I have noticed that it can be very difficult to see at a glance the damage levels of your own starships. Assuming that starships under your command would report their rough levels of damage to you as their commander, I have added health bars underneath the user interface of the starships under your command. My hope is that this will improve ease of access to gameplay without reducing immersion. I do not intend to include healthbars for enemy starships, but we will have to see through testing what will be better for the good of the game.

Adjustments

• Portrait for the Starbase Captain has been updated with colour.
• Health and speed of different starships have been adjusted to create slower and more tactical gameplay.

Bug Fixes

• Unprompted, the game would sometimes launch in 4K despite being temporarily locked to 1080p while higher resolutions are not currently playable at a stable framerate and UI is not scaled correctly. This is now fixed; the game should always play in 1080p.