Kooooopoooooop?! Are you ded?
:O
Nope! Business as usual, although i wouldn't blame you for thinking otherwise considering how quiet i've left this thread recently.
"So what the bleddy 'ell 'ave you been doin?"
Let's recap quickly on what i've been working on and give some broad stroke insight to the coming projects i have currently got assigned.
Firstly, as you're mostly all aware we've been improving some aspects of our UI/UX. The brand new Adv.Buildmode UI landed recently, making use of some new menu structure ideas and incorporating quite a lot of community feedback and tool suggestions. The current pre-release shows another UX improvement, contextual hotkey helpers to show current options available to the player and how to access them. Efforts are still being made to ensure these are looking and working well.
There have been some new textures, albeit nothing to write home about (or here apparently... :3 )
Cargo Load and Cargo Unload blocks of course are relatively straight forward and Motherboards have been brought more inline with the general aesthetic of the current texture set. Quite a few emissive or normal map "mistakes" were fixed on gravity modules, ice crystal, lava and decorative blocks. Additionally small quality improvements were made on a number of blocks . Lights, decorative blocks, power blocks, shield caps and all docking blocks from the top of my head. Couple of "bugs".
Minor changes like this rarely make the patch notes or this thread, but recently they've certainly stacked up and (arguably) if I've done a good enough job, nobody c̶o̶m̶p̶l̶a̶i̶n̶s̶ notices.
This all of course takes place on top of my current over arching project; To replace all terrain / organic blocks that were delayed from the Default texture set overhaul. No ETA on
implementation is being given for this yet as a few bugs are present in the 4x4 system working with terrain and i believe power features should of course take priority.
I will be working on a couple more UI/UX improvements. As outlined in Dev Blogs, some new mechanics or changes to existing ones are required to help expand our gameplay in meaningful ways. Many aspects of the UI, such as the Galactic Map will need revisions to facilitate these adequately. The "Power Update" requires both UI and texture work for it's new blocks, pretty excited for those, first new block textures in a good while!