Merry Christmas!

Lots of enhancements to report and the first proper gameplay trailer.

From a gameplay perspective the biggest fun factor improvement was a rewrite of the astronaut controls. It's now faster and hopefully easier to pilot astronauts in spacesuits.  Rotational controls have been tweaked to provide more counterforce when the player is trying to take an astronaut out of a spin . Astronauts can now return to the engineering ship by flying into the cargo bay just like spacecraft.  Most of the effort around EVA functionality for astronauts was the implementation of UI elements. Both an EVA menu and the flight menu required changes for what is still a minimalist UI.

Another subject that required significant attention was  unexpected behavior when individual spacecraft modules disintegrate within a spacecraft. A substantial amount of debugging and edge case coding was performed to eliminate off behavior in the aftermath of spaceship crashes. Although this also resulted in show stopping behavior that sometimes occurs during high velocity collisions.

Enhancements to terrain generation include mountains and caves. Some code to sprinkle debris and resources to recover make missions to the lunar surface more interesting. The debris is embedded in the surface and unique from that floating in space.

It's probably worth noting that many of the items listed here are not featured in the video. Partly because that is the first attempt at a video and was focused on showing flight dynamics, but also because it was made in early December before many of the features listed here were implemented. There will be another video with a greater variety of activities featured in January.

Developments

• lunar surface 
  • alignment improvements
  • mountains
  • caves
  • items to recover
• multilayer debris field
• eliminated HUD unit shake
• added Spacecraft human crew 
• pause functionality
• improved spacecraft disintegration
• astronaut EVA functionality
  • astronauts can enter spacecraft
  • astronauts can exit spacecraft
  • astronauts can return to engineering ship
  • astronauts can die

Coming Up

There's nasty bug that result in spacecraft modules being duplicated during high velocity collisions. That has been mitigated, but needs to be addressed further. New functionality will focus on the UI for activities between flight missions and surface terrain generation. Gameplay enhancements will focus on a new surface to explore, new spacecraft modules, and more items to recover.

Please add Disaster Lander to your collection and look for another devlog in January 2023.