Dev Log #6: Planets and level editor
Galactic Crew Patch Notes — August 7, 2020
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
Dear players,
Over the past weeks, I focused on a new planet system to make developing planety expeditions faster, to make modding easier and improving performance and efficiency. I am not done, but I want to present you infos about the current state.
Before I started anything visual, I made a complete revamp of the way planets are stored and processed in my game engine. I created a few demo levels to test both the level editor and my data structures and even complex planet levels were less than 2 MB big. This means you can create many levels and share it with this community without wasting any hard drive space and you don't have to care about network bandwidth when using them in multiplayer games! I am still optimizing the loading time of planets, but I am already down to a few seconds. I plan on further improving the loading time for an even better gaming experience - no one likes to wait.
A key element to both fast content creation and easy modding is a good level editor. After I completed my work on the data structures, I threw the old level editor away and made a new one from scratch. The following image shows the current state. It most certainly will change or evolve until the game's release!
One thing you will immediately notice is the water! After spending a lot of work last year on my game engine, it now features a realistic fluid water simulation that will be part of Galactic Crew II. You might also see a dragon. It's one of many new enemies I am currently adding to the game. The level editor already has way more features than the old one in Galactic Crew 1, but there will still come a lot of new features. I want to make modding as easy as possible and include Steam's Workshop functions so that you can share you work with friends and other people.
What's next
As you can see, the terrain is still bumpy. I will spend the new few weeks on improvements to the way terrain is rendered to make it smoother and more realistic.
I will also continue integrating new enemies to the game which results in a lot of side-work, because I have to expand the model importer and other components.
I also want to further improve the visual effects of the game and add completely new visual effects. I most probably will spend most of the time until the next dev log on creating a shield effect for ships! Shields were already featured in the first game, but they were not visible. For Galactic Crew II, I will render the shields and its effects to create a better immersion into space combat. I also want to add more visual effects, but I do not know if I have enough time for them unil the next update!