OMS News (& General news from me):

Life has been very hectic lately for me, my masters is starting up, and I've got quite a few life bits and bobs going on too and between all of that I've been plodding on with the work on the simulator. Most of the work has been documentation and commenting code in preparation for the code review that should hopefully be coming soon.

What can we expect in the next update?

Realistically, my main goal is to fix most of the more prevalent bugs first before adding more features and potentially introducing more issues and bugs. But, besides all of that, here's what you can all expect in the next update:

- Bug fixes! (of course)

These will primarily be the ones listed on the GitHub issue tracker found here. I don't plan on fixing all of these, but I want to fix a big portion of them.

- A basic spaceship!

These will increase the mayhem that can be had in the simulation, and, if I'm candid, I've already got a nice working version of this that is already a bunch of fun to fly around in! There are a few kinks to work out with it (mainly being that they can knock the planets off of their orbit), but seeing as I only started work on it a little bit ago I think it's looking like its going to be my new favourite thing to mess around with in the sim. It's using KennyNL's Space Shooter Extension pack so there's lots of possibility in the future for  more advanced system with multiple parts (although I'm not sure that's the direction I'm going to take). For now, it zips and spins about but isn't affected by the planet's gravity, take a look at it below!

Additionally to the spaceship itself , it'll need some extra backend work to get working with the camera system and Click to Focus system. Most of that shouldn't be too hard to do, but famous last words am-i-right? You can follow the progress of the spaceship on this trello card.

- UI Improvements!

This one is a simple one, really want to make the main menu look better and get a settings menu in

- Fix  the Universe Scale

This one might not make it in but it's worth mentioning as it's something that would be better to do sooner rather than later. To cut it short, I'm pretty limited by floating-point accuracy in the current simulation. This should fix some of the jumpy stats in the utility window and actually give me room to expand. On top of that, it'll also smoothen out the physics interactions too so it's really a no-brainer.

Conclusion:

Changes are coming soon, and I'm actively balancing life and dev work, for now, I've found a somewhat good balance but that can ebb and change as I get stuck into my masters more. In any case, I'm excited to see how far I can take it for the next update so we will see for sure!

Watch this space :)