Alpha 0.3: The Builder Rebuild

The Builder Rebuilt: Ship Design V2, Decals, and a Fighter Overhaul

The ship Builder has been rebuilt from the ground up, a full appearance and decal system is in, and fighter pathfinding and balance has been reworked.

Builder V2: A Complete Rewrite

• The ship Builder is brand new, rebuilt from scratch. The old Builder is fully retired. - One unified shape system: freeform paths, prebuilt parts, grab and warp outlines, and curved segments all work the same way, with per-corner rounding and smoothing. - Consistent controls everywhere: left-click always selects, right-click always creates. Every edit is undoable. Able to be undoed. Undoned.Undoneded. - Symmetry by default: mirrored twins stay linked through moves, rotates, copy-paste, and saves, and the mirror axis is draggable. - Cut tool: Make doughnuts in your hull! - Sketch mode: draw a reference underlay (or import an image) and build your hull over it. - Armor painting with cell brushes and per-material budgets. - Player prefabs: save any selection as a reusable prefab and stamp it into other ships. - Damage view with per-cell readouts opens automatically when you return from combat. - Quality of life: live skin preview, context-sensitive hint bar, crash recovery restores your unsaved session, and editing large ships is much smoother.

Appearance & Decals

• New Appearance mode: stamp decals and draw liner strokes directly on your hull (Liner is WIP--I wouldn't use it yet). - Text stamps with a full font catalog, including text that follows curved hull edges. - Decals sit in the hull, not on it: embed depth and weathering controls, and decals scorch, char, and burn away with battle damage. - The Photo Booth: pose your ship with adjustable spotlights and paintable damage to take clean screenshots.

Fighter Combat Overhaul

• Fighters fly better attack runs now: vector in, strafing pass, break away. Real Top Gun stuff. - Ripple fire, break afterburners, and PD blooms make squadron fights much fancier. - Full balance pass: fighter HP, uniform point-defense range, and time-to-kill baselines per weapon. More PD variants coming, including some beam-based point defense! - All hanger pets have had a visibility pass to make them easier to see.

Performance

• The galaxy simulation should be smoother in long games, hopefully through 500+ turns.

Fixes & Balance

• Torpedoes and mortars detonate at their aim-line range. - A live Core can no longer be pierced by shots passing through the hull. Well, more than once. Because, you know, kaboom! - Engaged enemies keep maneuvering instead of parking in place. Unless, you know, they're using the sniper AI type. - Export-build fixes: sound effects, planet and portrait art, and the version stamp now ship correctly in released builds. Turns out there's only been one song per scene in the Steam build, but four in each scene in my local developer builds. Whoops. - Manual saves reliably capture your latest Builder work, and the load window splits Manual and Autosave sections. I say reliably, but omg, I've fought this so many times now. My fault I keep changing things that need more properties in the player save. - Milestone popups no longer stay in place when you exit to the main menu, and enemy scan audio is quieter.