So where are we? I had to devote November and December to our company's work. We do have to earn a living. Right now I'm quickly building a platform game and will put it on Google Play, again hoping to bring in some money. We'll see. In about a month or two, we'll finish our current writing project and start work in earnest on the main book in the Exodus series. Since a game called Exodus was recently released, a science-fiction story-driven shooter, by the way, we'll rename our project Last Exodus or something similar. I moved to engine version 5.3. What does that give us? Size. With 32-bit coordinates, we had roughly 2,000,000,000 units. If one unit is one centimeter, the map spans 20,000 meters, or 20 kilometers. If one unit is a meter, that's 2,000 kilometers. That can work for a local space battle, but accuracy is then only one meter, which is too coarse. In version 5.3, among other things such as support for the database we need, coordinates have moved fully to 64 bits without any awkward workarounds. That's 9,000,000,000,000,000,000 coordinate units. We can position a bullet or fragment precisely and have a map spanning 90,000,000,000,000 kilometers. Yes, 90 trillion kilometers. Divide that by 150,000,000 kilometers, or one AU, and you get 600,000 astronomical units. We can simulate a bullet flying through a triple star system, easily and without special tricks. Roughly 300 AU is enough to model the Solar System; with the Oort clouds and other trans-Neptunian features, 1,500. Previously, using strained workarounds and unable to model a star system larger than our own, our smallest step was 10,000 kilometers. Ships closer than that were considered to occupy the same point. Now we can calculate to the centimeter.
Work hasn't stopped, although it's moving slowly for now. If you can help, either with work or money, that will speed everything up. There's work to do and there are things to spend money on: assets, music, models, and so on.