Commanders,

Over the last week, we’ve progressed through several internal builds, and accomplished the following:

·         Implemented tooltips in the third scene of the Campaign demo (While CAP Omar is talking, his commentary is intended to give you tips/advice on how to beat the enemy. What he’s explaining is now highlighted so it makes more sense.)

·         Fixed an issue where the CMC keyboard event was incorrectly set to be the same as the Nav’s

·         In Scene 3 of the Campaign, the tactical window is forced open just before XO begins speaking to ensure visibility of hints

·         Modified the behavior of player look coroutine to accept a speed parameter

·         It is hoped this will fix the mystery TAO bug, this is the only station that moves the player camera manually

o   Speed is now greatly increased for the TAO turn in the first scene of the campaign to prevent any potential issues with coroutine lockout there

·         Moved interior player start position to just behind the command chairs

·         Fixed a bug in how beam hit is calculated. Enemy beams are now much more effective. (We’re looking carefully to see if this throws balance out of whack. So far, internal play testing suggests that while it does marginally increase difficulty, once you get the knack of how combat works, its quite possible to take out the three enemy ships in the third scene.)

While this is does mark the end of our current levels of funding (and therefor, most activities on SCOS), our Unity developer has very graciously offered to keep working in his spare time on improvements.

To that end, we are now marching steadily towards our Kickstarter, hopefully in the month of April; if not, May – look for a major update next week as we refactor the Kickstarter based on feedback from the community.

Sign up for Kickstarter launch notifications here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/danielgibbs/starship-command-orion-spur

And finally, the art team put together some additional in-universe ship propaganda videos… this time from the perspective of the League of Sol.

Here’s the first one, the Rand-class heavy cruiser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2phXY172f88

v/r

Daniel Gibbs

The SCOS team (Dustin, Brian, Nyx and myself) have been working hard for the last few weeks on bug fixes and implementing QOL improvements based on player feedback.

Here’s a short list of what’s been done so far:

•         Performance improvements from improved occlusion culling

•         Hardware warning added to the main menu

•         Improvements made to how hardware is scored (and therefore initial settings are decided by the game should be more accurate and result in fewer instances of low FPS gameplay)

•         Fixed the black square issue appearing on the sun in all maps

•         Video options confirmation will now close when reverting

•         Various logic errors fixed in the campaign mission

•         Contacts list no longer stays open by default in the interior

•         Control guides updated to include the interior bridge controls – Tactical, Engineering and Comms

•        Hotkeys added for bridge officer interaction on the bridge

  •   F1 - TAO

  • F2 - ENG

  • F3 - NAV

  • F4 - COMM

  • F5 - SENS

  • F6 – XO

•        Keyboard targeting control added:

  •   B: Next Target

  • N: Clear Target

•        Ajax missile tube doors have been found for all scenes including campaign and skirmish

•        When a player enters space mode from the bridge, autofire/pilot settings are maintained until the player fires weapons or moves the ship manually

•        The UI now properly displays the player’s ship sensor range

•        Various interior clipping issues were fixed

•        You can no longer go down the stairs and get stuck in the machine room

•        The game ends properly if you’re destroyed in campaign mode

We’re continuing to work on some improved tooltips and tutorial aspects for the third mission and general bugfixes. However, we would like to note that this is the bulk of our planned efforts for the Alpha Demo. In the near future we will start sending the game out to games media/blogs/YouTubers, etc in hopes of gaining support for our Kickstarter which will be upcoming in the near future.

We’d like to thank everyone for their support, feedback and bug-hunting assistance.

We can’t wait to share the full experience with you, and hope you’ll consider giving us some fuel to continue the journey via our Kickstarter.

Daniel Gibbs

SCOS Producer and Military Science Fiction Author