The lockdown is certainly bad for our business, but the temporary closure of the shop has freed up time that I'm putting intensively into Exodus. I work on the project for at least eight hours every day.
Today I achieved the following results: little ships now fly around the star system. They aim toward their destination, start their engines on their own, correct their trajectory, and begin braking in time to approach the target.
A great deal of time went into debugging and getting the calculations right when very large and very small numbers occur in the same formula. Once everything worked, though, I managed to fly all the way to Pluto. Accelerating at 5 g, a ship reaches that planet in seven in-game days, or 100 minutes for the player, reaching 15,000 kilometers per second halfway there. A journey from Earth to the Sun, and therefore to the interstellar transition zone, will take the player about 15 minutes. There is no need to fear those 100 minutes, by the way. A player isn't tied to one ship. They can have any number of ships, as well as bases and a great deal of other content. While the ships are flying, you can check production and the colony's population, conduct espionage, assign heroes to missions, fly a combat mission as the commander of a flight of warships, and do much more.
Next I plan to build the user interface for controlling the ship's parameters and tasks, and introduce ship statuses such as in orbit, hovering, docked, landed, in flight, and drifting.
The most interesting thing is that the hardest part of this game element is already behind us. Almost all the mechanics have been created and debugged. What remains is to finish a lot of easy but very important details, add the visuals, connect it to the general game interface, and voilà: one of the key parts is ready.
I sincerely hope that by the middle of January I'll begin gradually connecting all the separate components. Then we'll be able to fly to other stars and land on a planet. Once base construction, production, and resources are added, those flights will gain purpose and become necessary. Space combat will follow. I'll make ground combat last.
Happy upcoming New Year, everyone, and I'm not signing off yet! There are still a couple of days before New Year, which means I have time to build something else new.