Hi everybody! ALPHA 12 development is well under way. We're working on navigation this time, and here's what's involved:
We're replacing region navarrows with a new passive and active scanning system. Objects are evaluated based on their components (especially activated ones). These will show up on the passive scan. There is now an active scan ability which will show all objects in the region, based on direction and mass. This will fade with time and will require a refresh when wanted. At the moment scanning is a set ability, but will be adjustable in the future when bridge components are added. Inventory and components will be accessible while in warp. There will be some restrictions--like no dropping of items. But now you can swap stuff around without having to leave warp, making for a smoother experience.
Beacons are also going to make their first appearance ingame. These are objects that can appear in a region or a star system, and can be used to signify things of interest. They won't have collision, so you need not worry about destroying them. They will have a customizable name and icon. We hope these prove useful for marking things of interest for later visits. In the future "world" beacons will start showing up. We've added a "discovery" system (different from ALPHA 4's discovery), which affects visibility of things when at warp within the star system. Areas can now range from completely undiscovered to completely known, and various steps in between. This will tie into things like faction as well, where a standing with a faction will reveal some information that otherwise wouldn't be available unless in the immediate vicinity of the area.
Finally, we're introducing a proper star system map. This will utilize the information available from visibility based on the "discovery data", certain radius from your ship (that will be changeable in the future). Some of the data will be clustered together when they're in close proximity (like the moons of a planet), but we hope it will provide enough information to be useful for exploration, navigation and other related tasks, while not too revealing. We expect a test build to be ready in the next 7-10 days, and the actual ALPHA 12 build sometime not long after.