Inattantive dev says sorry for lack of updates

Yea, I'm sorry. I've been up to my nostrils here, and struggling against some coder's block which struck for a few days. I think I'm more or less over it now though, and we've made some amazing progress. Considering the dev time so far, this is insane. The feature list now runs as follows:

AI ships (including police and racers) working correctly, enemy weapons balanced to allow a chance of a good fight player vs AI, and AI vs AI;

Market dynamics working correctly according to system tech and shipping levels;

The generated starsystems are totally stable, and once they are created on first execution they're saved to a file. Subsequent runs use the file rather than regenerating the whole sector;

The player has 5 save and load slots which work beautifuly (thanks to Nick Gravlyn's EasyStorage, available on CodePlex);

Taxi, courier and hit missions now work well (execpt that the time limits get screwed on file load but this is a short fix which should be done tonight);

Maps all working well, including a new map mode showing the destination on missions;

Collision detection getting better - still needs a little tweak but almost there;

Upgrades 90% complete - just the cloaking device to do but that's easy as pie;

Flight controls now bedded in and easy to get to grips with.

There's only 2 elements left to code - additional email based missions and network play. Most of the hard work for netplay has been done by choosing the right structures and behaviours early on. The missions are going to be a bit more of a challenge, since they form such an important part of the game. Actually dropping the code in is maybe 2 days work, but getting the variables right so that the game flows right will take a bit longer. Once these two features are in, we're off to peer review for a few weeks to see what people think of it so far. Here's a little sneaky-do at the game as it stands...

Aaaah, homing missiles. They look great with the blue plasma particle system. Something you can't see in this shot is the extensive colour interpolation on the panel icons and crosshair - they now crossfade gently between colours rather than hard switching. Looks great.
This is a test of a new space station model we're working on. It's a little more elegant than the old version, but still needs more work and texturing. This is all coming later, during playtest though, along with other ship models.
Here's the mission map. As your ranking increases, so does the distance involved with the taxi and courier missions. Pretty soon the standard nav map is too small to see where you're going, and the long-range map doesn't have system names on it. This screen shows your current system (yellow) and target system (red) for the selected job. I'll put in trip distance and fuel costs in the lower panel tomorrow or monday.
This is the mission screen, with Char's new icon(s). They need slight realignment but they layout of all the windows is very nearly done now.
Save and load baby, save and load! The date and time will be centered up in the next polish session. Nice and fast, and she hasn't crashed despite my best efforts.

So, things are moving on at the normal breakneck speed and we're getting closer and closer to a game that's ready for playtesting. I really want to be crashproof before we go that far, so that I can focus on gameplay tweaks rather than code revisions and bug chases and thus far we're going OK. All the list management is "IndexOutOfRange"-proofed, we're running at a pretty constant 30 frames/sec during spaceflight, hyperspace is working very very nicely, and now we just need to tie up all the upgrades and menus with really tasty missions and add "awardments" for kills (shield and engine boosts, extra cash rewards and so on).

Something else that's going to come with the lull during playtest is music, more sound effects and the space station radio stations. A few years ago I wrote and performed 4 hours of radio comedy, which included quite a few parody adverts so I'm going to write maybe 30 or 40 of them to drop between tunes when you're docked. During testing I spend about 4 or 5 minutes docked in a system, so you'll only hear maybe one or two per system. Really looking forward to doing those and getting away from the code for a little while!