stuff 3: revenge of the stuff

What would appear to be inactivity is actually just developers being very quiet, we've stil been working on the game and have made a bunch of improvements since the last post here.

For starters, we've got a shiny new Central Complex Alpha which is situated inside an actual space station in the local system DSO-12. It's got a bunch of new shops and facilities and now has a hangar floor below, and an administrative floor above the mall and recreation complex floor. Amongst the new facilities are a starship store, rec dome, holotheater, medical bay, a loan terminal, four whole hangars to park your ship in, and three stores which each stock one element of the former central gear stores stock list. All in all, it serves those who visit it better than the original did and can be accessed via starship for pick-up/drop-off of things and people and refuelling.

Moons previous were dungeons which could be docked with, they now have the same randomly generated surfaces as planets (though are mostly boring rocks covered in ice and have no atmosphere) with the existing types of moon dungeon generated within a building somewhere on the moon's surface. The rarer resources are more common on moons and thusly make EVA trips to your planet's local moon a worthwhile activity. As well as this, you might find more than one pirate hideout on a moon.

Likewise, several new items and vehicle weapons have been added to the game and some existing items have had their credit values reduced to allow new players to be able to afford them from the gear stores. Here are some other changes that have been done recently:

- More balancing of crafting requirements on some items.
- You can no longer own more than one pre-fab shelter at once, this makes the retiree background less of a cakewalk.
- Plasma grenades have been added, for giggles.
- A few more starship weapons have been added.
- Vertibird health has been increased by three times, supermarine sillohuette health has been reduced to 300.
-  The starship store in central complex alpha can deliver any starships you buy to a personal hangar or starship complex, if you own one.
- Intelligent creatures (such as pirates) now behave slightly more intelligently towards grenades thrown at them.
- Planets are now centered within their zones, and their moons are spread around in orbits around them.
- Thermonuclear missiles, for extra giggles.
- A whole swathe of objects have been given descriptions.
- Tractor beam modules for solar carriers, so you can collect all those starships people have left in space and chop them up for their delicious parts.
- And a lot more.

All in all, it's been a fairly productive two months and we're looking forwards to pushing into beta (eventually).

2/20/12 update:
- Four new armor sets.
- New armor 'superior' mechanics (which give a bonus to quality, +25 module capacity and a free random module 50% of the time).
- Six new weapons and seven new ammo variations (oh boy 40mm plasma grenades).
- Battlegrounds, a set of maps and scenarios which you can compete in teams against against other players for money, skillpoints and new 'battleground points' which can be spent on goodies.
- Six new armor modules and three new implants.
- Nearly all armor pieces have had weights and values assigned for them.
- A bunch of weapons have had their attacks revamped and given multiple start/miss/hit messages.
- A bunch of new starship weapons.
- Pretty much every armor set has had their resist values changed and all armor pieces should now have the same resist values as their respective torso piece.
- A feature object added to all players to allow them to join/leave a battleground queue anywhere in the game and a command to see the status of the current battleground (it shows the current battleground and queued players if you're not in a battleground otherwise it shows players in assigned teams, team scores, match time left and the match type).
- A mechanic to allow critical success in crafting depending on your crafting skill roll, this increases the produced item's quality by 10-20%.