In the spirit of continuing to liven up the campaign layer of the game (and also knocking out a swath of high-level features in the most-straightforward-possible way), I’ve been working on terrain in the past couple of weeks.

But first, in the name of putting something shiny before the break: fleet contrails!

In addition to being eye candy, these also serve as visual indicators of ability use. For example, using the “Emergency Burn” ability brightens up and extends the trail, while activating “Go Dark” reduces its length and duration.

With that, onwards to terrain. What does it do? It affects fleets that are in it – their speed, detection range, that sort of thing. Why is it there? As usual, part of the answer is “to give the player an opportunity to make interesting decisions”. Without terrain, if you’re being pursued, running one way or another is pretty much the same.

If you might lose your pursuers in an asteroid belt, or hide inside a nebula, then you’ve got reasons for going one way or another. Beyond that, adding terrain to star systems gives them more personality and makes them more interesting.

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A little while ago, an update to the patch notes revealed hyperspace and multiple star systems as some of the features that will be in the next release. Patch notes being what they are, there wasn’t much detail, so I thought I’d write a post about how hyperspace works.

First, perhaps obviously, hyperspace is a means of moving from one star system to another.

The way it works is a ship transitions to hyperspace using a jump point, travels to its destination (another jump point, whether it’s naturally-occurring one or artifical), and then transitions back to normal space. Movement and combat in hyperspace work just the same way they do inside a star system.

The Corvus system, as seen from hyperspace (the background is a bit of a placeholder)

Well, not exactly the same. Movement in hyperspace also consumes fuel, based on the ships in the player’s fleet. For now, in the absence of an economy and only having two star systems, fuel is plentiful and cheap. Ultimately, it should become a significant limitation. For example, to explore distant star systems, the player might go out and create an outpost to stash fuel and supplies. They could then use a smaller, fuel-efficient fleet to poke around in the nearby star systems, resupplying as needed.
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