This update brings various UX improvements. Each improvement by itself might seem minor, but they do add up!

The trade route lines are now clickable. If you want to adjust a trade route, or locate the corresponding cargo ship, you can now click on any of the trade routes while you’re zoomed out in space. Many of you have requested improvements to the trade routes and this won’t be the last of the improvements. And I hope this will help while I continue working on future improvements.

You can now configure how the game behaves when the application loses focus. The Options menu now has a Run in background setting. I leave this at the default “Never”, so the game doesn’t overheat my laptop when I’m not playing. But if you regularly open a browser or switch to a second screen in a multi-monitor setup, you might prefer: “When not paused”, “When not in main menu” or “Always”.

A second new setting is Dialog speed. When set to “Fast” the typewriter effect on incoming messages will be nearly instant.

Finally, I’ve tweaked the camera so that after you go back into space from a colony, the camera won’t jump to that planet, if the colony is already visible on the screen.

The demo receives the same updates as the main game build, and you can continue your save game from the demo in the regular game. Check out the fixes and enjoy!

The changelog for v1.0.17:

• Clicking a Trade Route now selects the corresponding Cargo Ship, even if the ship is out of sight or on a colony.
• When returning to space from a colony, don’t jump the camera to that planet if the colony we left is already clearly visible on the screen.
• Fix the line length under the colony map label after loading a save game with specific conditions.
• Minor performance improvement by not iterating over non-existing child emitters when starting or stopping particle systems.
• At game start, don’t automatically try to resume from an unsupported save file. This is mainly for my own testing as most save files from release builds are compatible between different game versions.
• The game will now continue loading when running in the background.
• Added “Run in background” setting in the Options menu. Here you can choose to keep the game running when you open another application, or while playing in a multi-monitor setup. The default will halt the game to safe on battery life and performance.
• Added “Dialog speed” setting in the options menu. Set this to “Fast” to speed up the typewriter effect on incoming messages.
• Other minor tweaks to the options screen, including some improved tooltips.