Greetings Pilots!

When I first started writing this month's update, I was wondering if I should balance things out by giving myself a few more days to catch up on some lost time, what with the half-month of chaos leaving me unable to show anything more substantial. But then I came up with the idea to make a compromise - there's less to show off overall, but I have some more footage to even things out. This way I can retain my schedule without harming anything in the process.
Now I don't think I'll need additional text to point out what that entails, so let's just get to the fun stuff.

Collision avoidance - Things have been taken in the right direction. Ships can now not only avoid obstacles, but can properly scan and find the closest point to fly around larger objects. This was tested several times with some ships with orders to dock to a carrier nearby and some primitives I scrambled around which blocked the way to their destination.

For context, blue lines represent a ship's collision check whenever they have a waypoint set. The white spherical gizmo is a chosen direction a ship deems to be unobstructed. Said gizmo freezes as seen above whenever they consider their path to be clear.
And they managed to fly around every single obstacle as intended, making their way into the carrier's hangar once its entryway was in direct field of view. Previous attempts were nowhere this competent, though there are still more room for improvement. For example, when it comes to waypoints, or docking procedures in general, they first focus on what's in front of them, and then make small corrections until the obstacle has been avoided. This means that in certain scenarios, they're less efficient with their maneuvering, since if they happen to, let's say, face away from their target, they would ignore any opportunity to get closer. There are ways around this, but sadly I haven't managed to resolve it just yet. Hopefully the next month will prove to be more fruitful in that regard.
And before I forget, I also refined the carrier's collision model this update. When I first tested the launch/docking feature, I had a few box colliders surrounding the hangar, so I felt it was a good time as any to flesh it out now that the AI could properly utilize it.

Free camera - I've mentioned this before as an idea with the universal camera design I talked about in part 3. With a bit of experimentation, it became quite apparent that this could help way more than just take screenshots. Namely, I've been trying to get the camera in a truly free state - being able to not only fly, or orbit around ships, but also be able to travel great distances between planets. 
The results are quite lovely.

This also brings up a topic about making travel more seamless. The current warp effect and the screen fade-out can only be seen so many times before it gets too repetitive. Not to mention in modes such as free flight you have to do a lot of jumping between locations to get anything done.
There are ways around this of course. One of those ideas would be to drop inter-system warp altogether in favor of cruise engines. A transition in that case wouldn't be necessary, and you can get a proper feel for the scale of the world without needing to do anything special. The downside of such a change would mean  figuring out how exactly this modification should translate to gameplay, chiefly game balance, such as tactics between fleets - can they change course whenever they wish during an active drive? Should they behave similar to the old system? What would this mean for the player? Should it be more hands-on or -off?
The alternative would involve doubling down with what I have, making it fancier, more flexible for the camera, coupled with proper UI, animations etc. This would require a more abstract approach to transitions, but as I said, it's simpler on the current gameplay loop. Whatever I will pick, I'm definitely going to think this over some more before I take any substantial steps.

And with that, I shall conclude this post. Coming up next is some more refinements on the starmap proper, followed by me revisiting the free flight and scenario modes to give it a good round of polish.

More is coming next month. Thank you for reading!