Epic Middle States Update

The project is alive and well! The first release, the Middle States cluster, just had a major feature set completed. It is moving well along towards finishing. There are still several large features to finishing coding and many features to polish.

Some of the pieces that are in testing are wingman commands, cargo loading/unloading, boarding and capturing civilian ships, hiring mercenaries and other wingmen and upkeep charges for the player fleet. Also some of the core code, like save and restore and being able to enter any station on the map to save and loadout your ship. Plus new start game code to give player starting inventory and ships.

Next features expected soon are new planet texture (to take advantage of those wonderful round planets)! And new player ships.

The economy system is under development. Stations are being added to complete new player trade routes. A Nano-tech economy was envisioned and cargo has changed to match.

Next up is the tons of code needed to purchase new ships, view your faction relations, and code to keep track of who the player has been making really angry!

We are still expecting the first public release is a few months out yet. There are many details that need attending.

The station and cluster based economy code has taken another step toward finishing. Here is the nearly completed cargo pod purchase and sell screens.

Unlike most space sims, EoC put the cargo out into the "world". And the economy sim takes advantage of this to allow the player to move around cargo pods. The player can hire wingmen to do the hauling, or try out a new player cargo ship.

Nice. Guess I will need to get my stuff functional so I can share as well.

A little tip:

If it is possible, could you map some keybinds for those ell and sell [a]ll buttons, since it will be a major PITA if you have huge cargo of different items and you are selling it all, you have to cross click the screen 50 times and it ain't fun (many games skip things like this, stupid IMO).

Also think about buttons like sell all cargo and buy all cargo (!!!), for the exact same reasons.

If finding good traderoutes and prices goes to somewhat Elite style, could you also add a littel "notepad" ingame, a free text area for player to put into note some good prices and possible trade routes (pen&paper style gets messy after a while).

Little things, I know, but that's where you recognize the true game makers, focus on the little things as well as big ones. I still get a warm fuzz installing some of the Starcrafts, the best installer ever seen, makes you think Blizzard really put effort in the game from the very beginning to the end.

Good ideas! I need to add in a sell all button. We are looking for feedback, especially because this trade system is a little different than anything that has been done before. In EoC you actually move around physical cargo pods. The "order" system allows you to place an order with a station, so it can spew the pods out later. Most ships only carry 10 to 20 pods, so huge numbers of cargo will be rare. The number is smaller, but there is more waiting involved in handling the pods after purchase. Pods are created near your ship now. Pod spewing will be some later release.

I don't know if it will be liked or hated, but it will be unique! I am looking forward to hearing players reactions.

The amount of items is small, so I hope you do not thinkg to "balance" it by giving too much profit from a single trade. Don't make becoming a millionaire too easy.
And if you can hire trasnporters, then in the end, you still end up having _big_ loads of cargo, so those buttons would be very very nice.

Is the UniGui windows "independent" from the maingame in a way that you can crossbind buttons? Ie if I have forward thrusters in W, then could you bind W for the trade screen to do something without it activating the thrusters simultaniously? If yes, then a keyboard bind for all the buttons in the trade screen plus enable support for arrow keys for menu navigation would be great for us lazy bastards who care not to touch the mouse