- The game is out now! - 2 June 2023
Dear players, I already announced last fall that there won't be any major updates coming any more. I wanted to let a few months pass to see, if there are any bug reports coming in or if there are any issues left. After no bug reports where brought to my attention, it is now time for the game's final release. In the past months, a lot changed in my private life, too. Included in these changes is a new job position that I enjoy a lot, but my contract is very restrictive regarding any development activities outside my job. Originally, I had the idea of release new updates with new content every few months, but for the reasons I just mentioned, I have to conclude the development of Galactic Crew II. I want to thank everyone who bought and enjoyed the game in the past years and I also want to thank everyone again who bought the first Galactic Crew and got this title for free. I do not know w…
- Dev Log #40: The Fall update is here! - 29 September 2022
Dear players, The summer is over and it is for another update! Highscores The calculation of highscores when you loose / end a game has changes and is less money-focused than before. In addition, when you play with online connection, you can share the highscores with others! See how well you did in comparison to the rest of the community. You do not have to play in the persistent universe, you just need to be online. New rooms There is a new room available in dungeons. I won't spoiler what type of room it is, but you should keep an eye open because there is something really valuable hidden there! There are also five new rooms for your spaceship that you can retrofit to at any space station or shipyard! Upgrading to a Tier II Cockpit improves the shield recharge rate (if any) or your spaceship while a Tier III cockpit also improves the damage of your combat drones. The Tier II botanical…
- Dev Log #39: Search for crashes - 17 September 2022
Dear players, I wanted to post this dev log earlier this week, but I got sick. So, please excuse the delay. Since Galactic Crew II was released as Early Access title, I get reports of games crashes that happen at apparently random times. Although I invested over a hundred hours playtesting, writing more Unit Tests and analyzing code, I still have not found the source of this issue and I have never encountered this issue myself. I want to solve it, but I need your help to do so. If you are someone who encountered these crashes and want to help me, please follow the guide below. Download a tool called Procdump from Microsoft right here. This tool supports a wide range of possibilities to analyze application behaviour. For legal reasons, I can't include it in the game's download since I would not be allowed to re-distribute it. But you can find the download link at the top of the linked we…
- Dev Log #38: Lootable crates and more help - 8 September 2022
Dear players, One new features, I wanted to talk about are lootable crates in spaceships. During the development of Galactic Crew II, I added looting space pirates on enemy ships and your ships, but there was not much of an incentive to board the enemy ship, if your weapon turrets were good enough. So, I completed a feature request that several players requested: random loot crates. There is a chance for up to one loot crate for each storage room on the enemy ship. That means, the bigger the enemy ship, the better the potential loot. In order to grab it, simply teleport someone from your crew to the ship and use the item. The reward is purely random. There is a chance of getting a small amount of crefits, but you can also get almost any item there is randing from simple chunks of meat to epic weapon turret crates. I wanted to make it rewarding but not mandatory. I hope that you will lik…
- Dev Log #37: Fall update is coming soon - 2 September 2022
Dear players, There was no major update this summer as announced this spring. I did not stop the development altogether, I just did not develop every day. However, I have created a nice bundle of new features most of which are completed. Today, I want to give you a broad overview while going into detail over the course of the next weeks. Expanding existing content The game has a wide variety of components and features and I built in a generic way so that I can add new content to most parts of the game. There will be new dungeon rooms, spaceship upgrades, crafting recipes, items, equipable jewelry, etc. I also want to write new missions and I am currently working on a bunch of new planetary content. When you visit a planet, the content is generated using a set of pre-created assets from an asset pool. The more assets I (or you with the level editor) add, the more variety your planetary e…
- Dev Log #36: Release of online features! - 26 May 2022
Dear players, The beta version of the latest update was available for three weeks and as I could see in the online logs, many of your were testing it out and there were no bug reports of any kind. Therefore, it is time to make the latest beta update available on the main branch for everyone. Below, you find the same patch notes as for the beta release. Online features In order to use the online features, click on the new "Online" button in the main menu and select the top-most option. If you want to auto-send any error logs, please select the second option, too. Now, the red "Offline" test on the left side of the main menu should switch to a green "Online". You should also see this switch when you start the game in the future. Next, when you start a new game, you have the new option to start in a persistent universe. You share this universe with any other player who decided to play onli…
- Dev Log #35: Beta release of online features! - 4 May 2022
Dear players, I am excited to announce that the latest update has became available sooner than expected! I spent the last weeks testing the current build and I just uploaded it to the test branch. That means, it won't be automatically available for you, but the update is public for testing. If you want to beta test the Online update, right-click on Galactic Crew II in your Steam library, select "Properties..." from the context menu and choose "Test" as branch on the "Beta" tab. Now, the game should update itself and you are good to go. The update will leave Beta state and become a regular update in a couple of weeks if no major bugs are found or any found bugs have been resolved. Here is the content of the latest update. Online features In order to use the online features, click on the new "Online" button in the main menu and select the top-most option. If you want to auto-send any erro…
- Dev Log #34: More planetary content - 1 April 2022
Dear players. The development of the upcoming update is going very well. The servers have been rented, software has been deployed and the development of the new online features can now be easily tested on the actual game servers. The hardware infrastructure is done. Meanwhile, I was also working on new content for the game. An ongoing process until the update's release in late May is the development of new planetary content. The way the game works is that when you land on a planet, all suitable assets for this planets are taken and a random subset of these assets are scattered over the map. This way, each planet is unique. However, there are two limitations: the maps on which the assets are placed and the number of assets. I have added over a dozen new maps for different scenarios. They are automatical in the pool for new planets for you to explore and you can also use them to design yo…
- Dev Log #33: Advanced officer careers - 18 March 2022
Dear players, Two weeks have passed and I want to keep you updated on the game's development. I am currently investing time into the server infrastructure. Since you will all have the option to play in a shared universe, I want to make sure that everything runs smoothly. It will take some time until everything (server, data bases, network, etc.) has been fully set up but I made good progress so far. The dedicated servers are already rented for over a year in advance. Advanced officer careers You can have up to three officer's quarters in your ship and you can have up to one officer per officer's quarters. Nothing is going to change here, but you have now the option to upgrade your officer to one of two different advanced classes once they reach level 10. Depending on your choice, you will get a bonus to one of your officer class skills. This bonus stacks with any ranks you put into this…
- Dev Log #32: Weapon turret upgrades - 4 March 2022
Dear players, While I work on the multiplayer infrastructure, I am also working on features that are available for all players. In this dev log, I want to introduce you to weapon turret upgrades. There are already weapon upgrades for firearms that you can get by disassembling looted weapons. With the upcoming update, you can also craft upgrades for your ship's weapon turrets and mining turrets! You can craft these upgrades at any item processor or colony workshop using items that are already available in-game like diamonds and sapphires as well as loot items that will be newly introduced such as other types of gemstone. Kind regards, Benjamin
- Dev Log #31: What's coming up next? - 17 February 2022
Dear players, Today, I want to give you a short glimpse at what is coming up next in Galactic Crew II. I started the production back in 2019 and spent most of my spare time of three years into the game. I've already implemented more than I promised, but I want to go further. In the next update, hopefully coming in April or May, I want to expand on various existing features to improve the immersion and use potential of various features. While this description is very vague, I will showcase one feature after another every two weeks in a new dev log. There will also be one main feature: a shared galaxy. I can't provide you a full multiplayer experience (yet), but sharing the galaxy with other players brings possibilities that are currently not available. Like visiting other players' bases or trading with them. I am currently setting up the infrastructure and servers to provide a smooth exp…
- Dev Log #30: The engine update is out now! - 3 February 2022
Dear players, It has taken some time, but the engine update is now finally available outside the public test branch. I have taken the feedback from you and further improved some features and I hope you will have fun with it. I will not spoil too much right now, but I already started the pre-production of the next update which is going to be massive! it might take until late spring or early summer, but I will enhance the game to the next level. This engine update was a great preparation for the new content that is going to come! Let's just say you won't be longer alone in your galaxy... So, for those of you who are not following every dev log: What's new today? Inter-dimensional storage You can now pack resources and items into inter-dimensional containers and share them across any galaxy in any save game! Do you have achieved riches in one save game and want to start a new game? Just st…
- Dev Log #29: Test branch now available! - 8 January 2022
Dear players, The past weeks have been very stressful for me for many reasons. That's why I wasn't able to publish the test version of the new update in December as I had planned. I am not completely done with the update and I also have a lot of personal things to do that will take a lot of time (including moving across the city) in the next few weeks, but I wanted to give you the opportunity to test the improved engine and new content. In order to test the new version: Right-click on Galactic Crew II in your Stream library Select "Properties..." from the context menu Click on "BETAS" Select "test" Wait for the update to download Thats's it! I will provide a full feature overview when the update is completely done, but here is a brief summary. Most of the stuff has already been explained in previous dev logs. Inter-dimensional storage You can now pack resources and items into inter-dime…
- Dev Log #28: New features! - 9 December 2021
Dear players, Two weeks have passed since my last dev log and I have been very busy playtesting. I played the game many times starting with a simple Var-class scout and completed all three story lines plus and upgraded my way up to a Zeus-class testing all the new and old features with the updated engine. I also did a playthrough with the version currently published on Steam and I was happy to see the difference in memory usage between the current release version and the version I am working on. There are way less memory leaks and the few remaining ones will be found and terminated! I also used my old laptop to test the game to make sure the game runs smooth on older computers. The GPU was barely over 40% usage and the CPU was only busy when calculating very long paths over planets. So I made a great progress in performance here. As you know, I am not only working on the game engine its…
- Dev Log #27: Stuffing leaks - 26 November 2021
Dear players, In the last dev log I gave you a glimpse at some of the new rooms that will find their way to Galactic Crew II with the next content update in January. I have made great progress in the past two weeks developing the game. I mainly focused on an issue that was reported by a few players over the last months: random game crashes. I did a deep dive into the components I created for the game engine and into the few external components that I use. In one of the past dev logs, I explained that I use a component called SharpDX as an interface between DirectX 11 and the programming language C#. It was the best interface component for this purpose when I started the game engine project many years ago, but this project has been abandoned since and there is no real alternative. Therefore, I now modify and improve this component myself to fit my needs better. While doing so, I found me…
- Dev Log #26: Preview of new rooms - 12 November 2021
Dear players, As I discussed in the last dev log, I am not only working on game engine improvements, but also on a lot of new content. The main content will focus on inter-dimensional trading and the rooms show-cased below are playing a major part in it. There will also be a lot of other new features and also many quality-of-life improvements as suggested by you. I will present them in future dev logs once their development has been completed. Portal room The portal room is a rather small but important room. When you access its portal, you get access to a shared container inventory. You can store any kind of container in there and access it from any other portal room in any of your games! That means, if you have collected a bunch of high-end weapons and you want to use them in another game, just pack them into a container and put the container in there. You can then retreive the contain…
- Spooky halloween fixes! - 31 October 2021
Here is a quick patch that was requested by a new player. When you kill a pirate who boarded your ship, you are now able to loot him/her. So far, it was not possible to loot defeated enemies on your own ship. When you board an enemy vessel, enemy crew members who are idling will attack you. When you try to harvest a resource or grab an item and your inventory is full, the character will not try to grab it. Instead, a message is displayed to inform you about the filled inventory. Moving the camera with arrow keys or WASD is now smoother.
- Dev Log #25: Preview of upcoming content - 29 October 2021
Dear players, As you know from my previous dev logs, I am working game engine improvements. I migrated the game engine, all game projects, and all tools from .NET Framework to .NET and I also integrated my own code in one of the modules that I use, which is no longer in maintenance by the original developer. The work is almost completed and it brought a measurable performance boost for the game. When you look at the following image, you will see that the CPU load during a salvage operation is only around 3% on my machine. This should make the gaming experience much smoother for players with older computers. I originally planned on publishing the performance update in December, but I changed plans. Instead, I will publish an update in late January or early February with not only the performance and engine enhancement, but also with more game content. I will present the upcoming game cont…
- Dev Log #24: Status update - 8 October 2021
Dear players, This dev log will be very technical. I try to express my work in a way that is understandable for non-sofware developers, but please excuse me, if I fail doing so. As I announced in the last major update, I am currently putting a lot of work into the game engine. If you read previous dev logs, you know that I started creating a custom game engine for all my projects six years ago and it grows with my games that I develop. I started the developing in C# with .NET Framework 4.5.2 back in 2015 and since then the .NET technology has evolved. It spawned .NET Standard, then .NET Core and now everything is united in just .NET 5 (6 is coming soon). I wanted to take the opportunity to migrate my game engine and all my tools and games that I've written from .NET Framework to .NET 5 but that brought some additional work with it. I am using only very external components, because I wan…
- Dev Log #23: Modding update is here! - 23 September 2021
Dear players, I am very proud to announce that the latest update of Galactic Crew II is now live! You can now create your own content for Galactic Crew II and share it with other players using Steam Workshop - or send your mods directly to your friends. How to use mods? You can go either into the Steam Workshop and subscribe to mods you want to use or you can put mods that friends sent you into the "%appdata%\Galactic Crew 2\Mods" folder. Either way, when you start Galactic Crew II the next time and create a new game, you will see a mod selection field on the right side of the game creation screen. A tool-tip shows you a list of the mod's content. Simply select the mods you want to use for this save game and that's it! What can be modded? If you want to mod Galactic Crew II, you can add new items, new crafting recipes, new quests and new planetary content! More options are going to be a…
