Main feature of this week update is shields. Not only they work properly now, they also look awesome! The game also now correctly calculates collision boxes for weapon hits. When the shields are raised the weapon will hit the sphere around the ship, but when they are down the hits will go directly to the hull of your ship.
Second big feature is that the dialogues are more or less working now. We even created a small quest! The quest is given by Darth Williams – “The base is under attack, go and kill these pirates” :)
Next, improved AI for NPC ships. They can now avoid collisions with objects and generally behave in much smarter way. The AI scripts are also working about 100 times faster now since we have offloaded most of the logic to the main engine. As a result even around 100 active NPC ships flying and fighting only take about couple milliseconds per frame to execute. What that means – expect HUGE space battles and custom servers with a lot of players online.

Other notable changes:

• Added cursors graphics, such as mining, picking up loot, etc.
• Changed physics engine, now we use Farseer with some slight modifications to make in platform independent.
• Extended debugging statistics. It is not important for players, but it certainly helps us!
  
• Shadows!
  
• Shield / structure bars and names for NPC ships.
• New asteroids models and textures. There will be several types of asteroids for all your mining needs.
• The sun!
• The server build for Debian. That is about confirms cross platform compatibility!