Not a build-update just yet, just wanted to briefly talk about some things I've been working on over the past few days...

Got tired of having to do the math to convert RGBA (0-255) values to RGBA (0-1) values - wrote a quick Hex Color converter, then realized LibGDX already has this in the Color class, for example:

image.setColor( Color.valueOf("ff00ffff") );

Woo! That makes copy/pasting color values out of Gimp or Photoshop much easier.

Water Collection

Ice is currently a non-renewable resource in the game. And if you're using a lot of it for greenhouses or crafting food, then you can find yourself having to travel really far to get more.

So I wanted players to be able to make a base module that would accumulate water over time.  Started with the idea of an underground well, but I didn't really want the output to be that constant. Sooo, I've been updating it into a sort of rain-water collection device, that produces water bottles during rainstorms. Every ~20 sec of rain -> 1 water bottle. And it'll store up to 3 water bottles at a time, that you have to go manually collect and add into your Water Supply module.

I'll have to mess around with testing the collection rate and see how it feels, since rainstorms right now don't happen very often.

Cargo Containers, indoors and outdoors

So the current cargo containers / storage crates in the game have bothered me for a little while. There wasn't a good reason that the module needed to be a habitat (requiring power etc), and often resulting in more air leaks etc. And like most tile-interations in the game, you don't need to be "in" it to access it (and you can access it through walls).

Then a player suggested having an outdoor, stand-alone item crate. I thought that it sounded easy enough to try - and it gave me the chance to refactor the item storage code so that I can use it in the future with a buggie trunk. It also now uses a tile "Behavior" (which has a nice and easy way of saving data to disk when you save your game, and means less special-cased code for world saving/loading. Yay!).

So the new outdoor item crate will hold 8 items, and will probably be relatively cheap to build.

The current habitat cargo container's crafting recipe will be updated to require one outdoor item crate + habitat module. And this one will still hold 16 items.

While working on item storage, also fixed a user reported bug where transferring items from a cargo container to your inventory would report as "inventory full", even if you had a stack of that item type in your inventory for it to go to.

And lastly concerning inventory items, debating on whether to finish implementing item stack limits (i.e. can only hold 20 Plants in a single inventory slot). Might end up just finishing it and seeing how it feels. Just don't wanna make inventory management even more burdensome.

Better Vehicle Camera

Got inspired after watching a video for Orangepixel's new game Ashworld and seeing the parts where the player gets to drive a car around. It puts the camera farther ahead in the direction that the vehicle is driving... so that you can see more in front of you, giving you time to react to obstacles etc.

Added this in last night, and it feels really good. Also added more camera movement smoothing when entering and exiting the buggie.

Anyways, that's all for now! Going to hopefully get a new update pushed out this weekend :)

Update July 17 - I ended up going away for the weekend, so didn't have enough time to test everything. Going to try tonight or tomorrow.