Greetings Pilots!

July has come and gone and it's time to once again leave my progress report on what has been done and what is still needed towards Astrov's alpha release. This one will touch upon a few aspects that I wasn't fully intending on doing this month, but felt the need to, out of necessity for a few other features I plan on finishing up later on. This time I decided to spice things up a bit with some animated goodies, as images in part 1 weren't all that interesting to look at in my opinion. Regardless, last month's highlights are as follows:

Starmap has had more love thrown at it. The control scheme is functional; displayed stars and planets are selectable. Fleets had their movement and container functions implemented, they just need their own "brain" to utilize said functions for themselves.

Just to clear a few things up, the blue arrows you see are fleets, while the dots are planets and jump nodes orbiting a selected star. All names displayed in the starmap are just there for testing purposes and are subject to change.
Due to the nature of the Network's ships utilizing Krasnikov Tubes, the bluish rings you see will play an important role in measuring (in a more simplified but understandable way) how far a given star-system is from Earth. The further they are, the more they differ in time.
In terms of development, what's left for the map itself is a control panel and a UI solution to allow full control, including the previously mentioned ability to set custom waypoints to places more than a jump away from you.

New capital ships are underway! Including an older, resurrected cruiser design I mothballed a few months back and an actual carrier intended for testing out small ship management. Their looks share a similar design philosophy to the currently available Shearwater-class destroyer, and I am looking forward to fleshing out their backgrounds explaining how they came to be.
Model-wise, the carrier requires the most polish, with the new cruiser at a close second, so the images below represent around 80% complete assets relative to our destroyer already available in the game.

Size comparison between ships. If you squint your eyes above the top vessel, you can make out a small collage of dots representing a Caramel-class fighter. Capital ships are just massive.

Front view of the ships. Got the fighter a little closer just to make it look more significant.

And finally, a 3D overview of the ships. The Caramel is once again a mere bundle of dots. The poor thing.

Basic carrier systems are now in place. So far it only works with AI ships, but that is soon to change, allowing you to dock to and control carriers you own. Not only will they be pilotable just like standard craft, but they will include an extensive system for kitting out fighters or bombers you have available in your holds, as well as giving them routines to follow once they're off the hook.

And that summarizes the main pillars of July. Honestly I ended up putting way more time into adding these new models to the game, as carriers were something I wanted to implement for a long time. Coming up next will be further work on the starmap, and I will return to bugfixing/tweaking the main portion of the game. There are only a few smaller things left that I would like to add, but as far as new features are concerned, I will be refraining from bloating my schedule any further.

That's it for this month! Thank you for reading!