Last week was not that busy, but I still made quite a lot of progress. The main focus was on reworking the UI and implementing split-screen. I must say I am quite happy with how things are starting to turn out.

Split-screen

The player HUD is quite simplistic, but I believe it shows all the needed information. I did not want to fill the whole screen with different progress bars, so I concentrated most of it around the radar. Available weapons are then displayed underneath it, with the currently active weapon highlighted. The icons are still a work in progress, but I can say they are already quite close to the final product.

I am also happy with the performance. I was afraid that rendering four separate views would be much more demanding, but there is basically no noticeable performance difference, even on my old hardware.

Four-player split-screen

Fresh Freight

On the other hand, I am still thinking about how to make the Fresh Freight racing mode more interesting. Currently, ships simply restore their energy automatically if they do not use it for a short time. This is really convenient while developing the game, but from both a racing and lore perspective, this needs to change.

Because of that, I decided to allow ships to store more energy, but it will no longer refill automatically for free. Since Ethanol is a scarce and sacred energy source in Frutiverse, I implemented liquid drops of Ethanol that float around the system. When a ship enters one of these blobs, it starts draining it and refilling its fuel tanks.

So I also spent quite a lot of time poking liquid drops around in space and tuning the physics of liquids in a weightless environment.