Alpha 21 - The one with Training

Hi Gang. Happy Thorium Thursday.

Since the last post, I've been hard at work. Everything has mostly gone to plan.

• I added the entirety of the star map, with some 300+ solar systems.
  • I took a side quest to add moons to the star map.
• I've written damage reports for using remote access codes, exocomps, and engineering panels.
  • I took another side quest to implement engineering panels, since the damage reports were kind of boring without them.
• I wrote fully automated training for every station, which walks players through every part of how to do their job.
  • I did yet another side quest where I redesigned the systems monitor screen to make it much easier to understand.
  • In yet another side quest, I created a coolant loop card for managing coolant as it flows through systems to remove heat.
• I added one more ship class, which will be the primary player ship class for the first campaign. It's a small, two-deck ship with minimal crew.
• I made lots of improvements to the timeline system and mission authoring tools to make it easier for me to write timelines of all kinds.
• I made huge improvements to the app package — the thing you download and execute to run Thorium. It should be really speedy to get up and running now.
• And I took a side quest to revamp thoriumsim.com to be faster, easier to navigate, and easier for me to maintain.

All of that is packaged up as Alpha 21, which you can download and run now. Before you run it, make sure you delete the thorium-nova data folder thats stored inside your Documents folder so you can get the new data.

Feel free to play around with it. If you find bugs or issues or weird things, feel free to email me, get in touch on Discord, or file an issue on Github. And as always, if you have ideas or suggestions, I'm happy to hear about them too.

The biggest thing that's missing from my earlier promises: A fully fleshed-out mission. I'm about 2/3 through the first draft, and I realized that we'll need a few more capabilities before the mission can be implemented in Thorium Nova. The short list being:

• Transporters
• Tractor Beam
• Another ship class for the big bad guy
• Ship Status screen
• Space Stations & Docking
• Asteroid Fields

Those last two are bugbears that will take a lot of thought and planning to implement well, but I'm excited for them to take shape.

Once those features are done, I'll finish the mission and release another alpha. At that point, development will focus on improving the features that already exist, mostly focusing on the starmap and viewscreen. I'll implement the necessary set pieces for the remaining 10 missions in the campaign, write the missions, and release alphas as I go.

That's all for now! Please let me know what you think of Alpha 21. Until next time!