New Features in Alpha 0.1.9

Power and Cooling Grid

The new powergrid is not only much faster, but also includes better functionality. You can draw straight power- and coolinglines very quickly by holding down the Ctrl-Key and setting start- and endpoints with the left mousebutton.

Basic Ship Design Tutorial

The first ingame tutorial helps you step by step to create an entire ship and makes the confusing (and outdated) video-tutorials obsolete.

New fuselage

The new small shuttle fuselage "Little Bug" was created especially for the tutorial, but can be used to design several contract missions.

New Missions: Yellow Alert and Asteroid Collision

"Yellow Alert" is a short mission necessary to record the alarm positions for all future ERS missions.
In the ERS Mission "Asteroid Collision" your ship and crew have to withstand a constant bombardmend of asteroids. Keep the crew on board and the ship from losing one of its core modules and you will succeed.

Power and Cooling Connection between Decks

The Deck Connections enable the Designer to create much more streamlined constructions, bundeling up generators and cooling units to specific decks or well protected areas.

Power Switch

The new Power Switch Room enables the commander to quickly switch between entire circuits, for example between shield and weapons or emergency power.

Better Hatch Placement

Hatches at an angle of 90 degrees can now be placed right next to each other, this way enabling much more efficient constructions.

Removed Corridor "baking"

Corridors and Hatches don´t need to be "baked" anymore. Corridors you want to connect (because you want to place a hatch on its seam) can easliy be connected by holding the CONTROL key and dragging with the left mouse button from one corridor to the other.

Unlimited Undo

Every room creation or deletion you ever make for a project can be undone by pressing CONTROL + Z
(at the moment outer hatches are excluded)

Single Armor

I added a single armor panel to be able to fill the "holes" in ships protection that sometimes develop next to outer hatches.

Quicksave Shortcut

You can quickly save the current design (not the game) by pressing CONTROL + S

Ship Class Load Time

Load time for crew mangagement has been drasticly reduced.

Space Suits

Crew members can now put on their suits by using the right-click action menu in their respective quarters. It takes some time to put them on and slows down their movement, but is absolutely essential when dealing with fire or hullbreach.

WAIT Action usability

I changed the way the time is set for the WAIT Waypoint Action.I realised watching other people play, that many really like to set very specific wait times. This was almost impossible, because the up and down "button" was so sensitive. Now the timer is relative to the distance of the mouse to the icon, so that you can very quickly set an exact time.

Improved Computer Messages

I "updated" the ship´s computer: It used to tell you, for example:
"Malfunction on Level B1, Room Onehundredandtelve",
which was not helpful at all ;)
It now says:
"..Malfunction on Level B1, Bridge",
or (if there are more rooms of the same type):
"Malfunction on Level B2, Fueltank 3".

Added new malfunction type

The old malfunction type has got a new icon and is now called "mechanical malfunction", damaging the room over time. The new type affects the powergrid in rooms with bad efficiency, and will destroy single segments of the powerline - disconnecting parts of the grid. Destroyed parts can be repaired quickly, but as you can imagine, failing to do so (in time) can have devastating consequences.

Shortcut for Room Power

You can now very quickly turn on/off rooms you selected by pressing the "O" key.

Thruster Hatch

Maneuvering thrusters now need an outer hatch, just like cooling or cargo units.