Greetings Pilots!

Apologies for the delayed post, this week and the last has been somewhat chaotic for me and it took a few days to put this whole thing together.
Last month has been a pretty busy period - between dealing with real life stuff, experimenting with the (admittedly buggy) alpha build of Unity 2019.3 with me playing around with its new features and quirks, and even trying to compose tracks for variety's sake, things have been anything but uneventful.
Development for the alpha hasn't slowed down much fortunately, though some slight changes to the original plan did occur due to quirks I ran into. The starmap, for example, has remained unchanged for this month despite planning the contrary. There's just too many things that popped up which require attention and I simply ran out of time. 
Regardless, here's what I've done so far:

Autopilot/AI docking for carriers have been implemented, letting the player naturally take control of any carriers they own, or alternatively, use its hangars to refit if allowed. I'm planning on further expanding this functionality by making docking routines with stations similar, as the current method - the screen switching to the loadout without any proper transition doesn't feel quite right.

One issue that surfaced was the fact that collision avoidance for fighters are relatively basic. They don't like being up close and personal with larger moving objects and this has gotten quite apparent since carriers were introduced. Resolving this is definitely high on my priority list for the next few months.
What's still missing from this equation is the ability to make approaches like these manual, without the need for an autopilot. Simply flying into the hangar would automatically prompt the player to dock, but first I will need to add detail to the interiors of the docking area.

Optimizations done to how ship data is stored - While fighter AI development has been steadily improving since the project's inception, I admittedly haven't been paying as much attention to optimization. The main component governing fighters is a perfect example of this, as a good portion of data (such as ship specs - speed, acceleration, maximum hull points) which could be stored in one place was instead left copied on each game-object individually. It was quick and easy for prototyping but it's about time I started addressing it.
Which brings us to a solution with external .json files - an easy to read format, which loads relatively fast and shouldn't leave much of an impact. Alternatively, I could've left these stored away inside a single script or with some other, more 'locked-away' method (something I did with strings for conversations; expect that to change as well), but honestly I just found this to be a solution more my style. Why? Because I love moddable games and I would love to do the same to Astrov. The easier, the better.

So in some limited fashion, Alpha 1.0 will be the first version of the game you could 'mod'. If you change anything in these files, it will be reflected in gameplay. This also means you could rebalance certain aspects or cheat the ship prices so you could buy stuff sooner.

Fixed some HUD elements (such as weapon markers) from getting misaligned in larger resolutions; Due to how the script created and handled these markers around the crosshair, there was a hitch that caused them to be misaligned in a few cases. This has been corrected.

The currently implemented cameras are being replaced with one universal camera - another form of optimization I am working on. Currently every ship piloted by the player, and every type of map has its own unique camera tied to the main gameobject, and is something I would like to, instead, modify into a single modular object, intended to accomplish any role when needed. This will also help me eventually add a fun little cinematic/photo mode for those who enjoy capturing the moment.

And those should be the biggest changes. The starmap update I mentioned in the beginning will be put on hold for a little while until I refine the camera and AI collision avoidance, among other things. I can't say this has been a non-bumpy ride so far, but I'm confident this will all be worth it in the end.

I'll do my best to post earlier next month. Thank you for reading!