Work continues every day. Although I had aimed to start flying in January, I decided not to rush, and here's why. Technically, the little ships really could fly by early January. BUT they need to do more than merely fly: the player needs a convenient way to send them, inspect nearby star systems, navigate the map, and so on.
I decided to bring all these elements into working order first. Flights also involve transporting cargo, which requires mechanics for receiving that cargo at the appropriate destination, along with many other things.
So we'll start flying in February, but in a much more functional version of the game.
Many parts of the work follow the same pattern. Our game is highly complex and interconnected. Without one element, another won't work, followed by another, and so on. Progress therefore isn't uniform. Yes, I'm currently making many elements in simplified form, but their core mechanics must exist or nothing will work.
Only today, for example, did the starting-corridor areas for interstellar travel finally appear. You might wonder what's difficult about that. Place three to five marker objects on the map, arbitrarily or thoughtfully, and that's it. Well, sort of...
But jump range varies. One set of corridors will suit one ship, while another ship can use additional ones. How do we account for that? Under certain conditions, some systems have 15 to 30 corridors... Fine, place them all and sort them by distance. Now multiply that workload by 45,000 stars. Even at half an hour per system... 22,500 hours. That's 937 days of work, 24 hours a day... Not ideal, is it?
So I took the tactically longer route. Based on the active ship and therefore its jump range, the system reads the star-catalog data, calculates the distances to surrounding stars, and automatically places jump zones according to the stars' real positions.
That took most of today. But it works in every system. It still needs refinement, but the core functionality is running.
Speaking of the star catalog: although we're generating 45,000 stars, our catalog now contains 120,000. It's completely up to date. Many dwarf stars have been added, making logistics more flexible and interesting. It now also includes absolute luminosity, which we'll use to calculate heat load, solar-panel output, and other useful things.