Well, we're just about ready to post another beta for Altarian Prophecy. Some new features in this build will be 2 new AI players, 4 new ships, and logistics. I think that I've gotten all of the bugs out of the new save game format. The crash has been fixed for awhile, but there were a lot of little things that weren't re-initializing correctly when the game was loaded. We'll also be including docs for the editors with this next update. And the infamous invisible ship bug has been squished! (If you want to see what was causing it, you can read my sticky thread on the Gal Civ forums.)
Besides the bug fixes, I've worked on the new ships, logistics, and tweaks to the difficulty and alignment. My changes to the difficulty level and alignment are cosmetic, but the screen changes and string description on the stats page will be more accurate. Also, you won't be able to trade for techs that you can't use. You will be able to trade for ships that you can't build, but you won't get their special bonuses.
The new ships are a lot of fun! Here's a description of the new ships (an edited quote from Brad's post on the forum)
1) Paladin (Good). Besides being a tough ship, all friendly ships in the sector with it will have their hitpoints restored slightly faster.
2) Wraith (Evil). Being a fast, lethal but small attack ship, the Wraith causes all enemy ships to take a -1 -10% to their defense rating in a given sector. So all enemy ships will take at least -1 hit to defense, but they won't go below 1.
3) Vamp (Evil). The Vamp is a Capital ship that restores its own hitpoints by as much as it damages the ship it's attacking.
4) Sovereign (Good). The Soveriegn is the anti-wraith. All friendly ships in a given sector get +1 +10% to their defense. So all friendly ships will bet at least a +1 boost to their defense.
Ship abilities won't stack (i.e. 20 Sovreigns will not give you +20 to defense), and the Sovereign and the Wraith will cancel each other out if there are an equal number of each in the sector. If a bonus or penalty is in effect from a Sovereign or a Wraith, it will show up as Defense + Bonus in the ship data window.
It's a good thing that I squished the invisible ship bug. All the new models for the new ships probably would have caused the bug to happen more often. I'm just waiting for Brad to tweak the final stats and costs of the new ships.
Brad also ended up giving me logistics to do because (a) he's got a ton of stuff on his plate right now and (
he knew that I could code it faster than he could. He was a bit worried when he found out I didn't start it until this morning, though.
However, it only took me a few hours to code it, and I actually spent more time on trying to get the darn string in the dialog to format correctly. With logistics, starbases will cost money to build. The more starbases that you have, the more it will cost. But the logistics ability will reduce the cost of building a starbase. So we'll need to make some techs and maybe a trade good for increasing the logistics ability. We may need to play with the base cost a bit too.
Scott did the coding and a lot of the art for the new races, so mostly all I had to do was make sure that his code played nice with my code. So far I haven't had any problems with it. I also tweaked the way that the difficulty level is calculated. Since Scott had to make a new race setup screen, I'll have to make a few changes to make it work with the campaigns. First, though, I want to check in my current code, and I want to do a little more testing before I do that.