New Race, System Ships, and Progress!

A customer has ordered a race for the game. They're the "Space (Pirate) Hamsters" or "Space Hamsters" officially. They're pirates, salvagers, brutes, and all that. They excel in ground combat and making babies, but they're not too smart. Their ships are cobbled together from old or salvaged parts. This is what they look like (Kudos to the artist for awesome work on it):



Please welcome the Space Hamsters to the galaxy of Beyond Beyaan!

Now onto System Ships. They were simpler to implement than I'd thought they would be, and I had to tweak the UI around a bit to make it all work logically. Each star system will store a list of system fleets. If you build a system ship, it will be added to existing fleet that's under your empire. Notice the term "Patrolling" in the screenshot? This indicate that this fleet is system fleet, and can't go anywhere. Also the ship sliders for amount of ships to send are greyed out so you can't send it anywhere. They don't have the engines for interstellar travel. Now for the screenshot! (There will be a new fleet icon for system ships so you can easily see it compared to normal fleet and transport fleet)



The last thing that I'll mention is that the basics of technology is now implemented. The code for loading technologies are re-done, as well as code that updates the research progress. The new system now allows you to research each technology once, so I'll have to create a completely new UI system to work with that. One other thing that I've implemented is racial technologies. Each race now have its own technologies.xml file, and they are loaded as well as the generic technologies that all races will have. However, I don't really like the idea of racial technologies, so the vanilla version probably won't have any. But it's there for modding purposes. There's a few more items that i need to add before I can re-do the ship design screen, but this was a major milestone that I've managed to accomplish :)

As usual, comments are welcome!