The last days we started over some parts of the current code to clean it up and find early bugs.

We was able to get some more performance out and made some pretty nice techniques.

At the moment we are able to process nearly 300 Space Ships in one Battle on one of our old Quadcore Machines - sure, there is no High Quality Star Wars Epic Battle Super Graphics involved - but it looks quite nice.

We also got some impact caused by overwhelming use of sounds (which happens, when 300 ships fire their cannons) so we need to tweak that a little. I have some nice ideas about that so i don't count it as a real problem :-)

The overall Game has now progressed to a more real-play state - so buildings really need employees, energy and credits and the build-time was setted up.

Because personally i HATE Games where most of the time i have to wait for something to finish - there is a speed-up mechanism implemented - to speed the gameplay up by a factor of 10 while holding the 'V' Key.

Because the ships are really simulated and therefore use a fixed timestamp like it is used in physik engines, speeding up during a greater space battle causes the game to slow down dramatically - so maybe during battles the speed up will be not available. The Game works during this "freeze" but u have to wait until all simulations had been done .. that's not funny, so it will be unavailable.

Even the greater Space Battles will not last more than some minutes because of good pilots and heavy use of cannon fire - the ships drop like flies, resulting in a great firework of explosions and so on.

There will be 2 groups of Ships - one engaging the fleet and the other one engaging the asteroid itself.

So it is crucial to get information about the asteroid which u want to engage to see if u need a bigger escort for your Destroyers.

Also we improved the overall User Interface. In the first phase we used moveable panels/windows which you can move to a desired position where they stay. But lastly we dropped it and now we have fixed panels for the different parts of construction and information. Ultimatly - it is not an RPG, so why use features of an RPG ;-)

In the current phase we also come to the need of thinking about the handling. Like assigning a ship to a fleet and so on, because a Fleet has other options than a single ship.

A single ship could be used to investigate an enemy asteroid or get an ore probe to see if it is worth to colonize there.

A fleet on the other side is able to engage or defend an asteroid.

Some Ship Types will not be worthy to got with a fleet, like a transporter (used to transfer ores) or a scout (explore unknown space, get ore probe) or a satellite.