Hey all,
I have nothing visual to show today, because my work over the past week has mainly been on adding the ability to pause all simulations in UNION. I have the pausing itself working, and am in the process of adding the ability to the UI.
I'll get into the details in a minute, but first I wanted to explain why this feature exists and that is singleplayer. We believe that UNION should be a rich experience for anyone who wants to play it solo. In UNION any empty roles (stations, in Artemis speak) will be filled by AI crew members (this can be disabled in the game options). These AI crew members can be given simple orders by the Captain, like plotting a path on the navigation map and ordering the Helm to follow it, ordering Helm to orbit a target, ordering Tactical to lock or fire on a ship, or ordering Engineering to go to Silent Running mode etc.
At any point a player can jump into any of these AI controlled roles for full control, then leave it again and allow the AI crew member to take over.
This is not meant to replace multiplayer, but to exist alongside it. At any time a person playing singleplayer can invite other players to join their game as crew members. It also serves as a nice training platform for new players.
So back to pausing. Pausing is only available if there is only one player-crewed ship in the game, so if a second player-controlled ship joins then pausing is no longer available. Pausing can also be disabled in the game settings.
Only the Captain can pause the simulation. I say "pause the simulation" because the crew can still interact with all of their UIs, changing and tweaking all of their systems. While the simulation is paused Engineers can reconfigure power, use coolant, reassign Technicians, Tactical can modify weapon groups, lock new targets, and so on. Obviously none of this has any effect on the simulation until it is un-paused. This pause functionality allows a single player, or a minimal crew, to manage a whole ship.
I realise pausing could be used as a crutch for a crew, removing urgency, but that is their choice. We will recommend in-game that pausing is disabled in cooperative games.
Oh also, speeding up the simulation is not feasible for us as it would require a lot of extra work to implement and support. So the speeds are normal and paused.
I'd love to hear your opinions.
Thanks for reading!
Mark
