And you're sure you do not have Reduced Window Size on? Because that cuts off the Timebubble button.

Stupid question but where is the button to put a system in a time bubble when advancing time in 7.1? I could have sworn it was on the sensor tab on the map screen but can’t for the life of me spot it!

About the AI, would be nice if we could have different NPR:s using different AI modules so you could have your AI fight someone else's AI and see who wins. That would create a whole new way to "play" Aurora.. and hopefully some great AI:s too.

Yep, I agree and that's exactly what I want to do!

I'm also toying with the idea of adding an automation menu the way Distant Worlds: Universe does it.  Even though it's obviously not a feature in Aurora, I feel it might actually reduce overall development time because I can have automation handle the parts of my test campaigns that I'm not currently working on.  And it's not much more work than making a pure AI module.  The pure AI would essentially be the automation code with all the boxes checked.  An NPR AI module could optionally be packaged by the author in a way such that it could be dropped in as an automation suite for the player's own race with numerous options that can be individually turned on and off.

The few things that annoy me about the game are 1) Windows-only 2) Performance 3) White background.  I'm limited to 5-10 star system games because of performance issues.

Among other issues me too   I can't wait to play a game with thousands of systems and many races.  They don't even have to all be empty systems either.  Theoretically, and I'm daydreaming here, a universe could be created containing well evolved alien empires with their own histories, and conflicts or relationships with each other, both current and past.  The code should be straightforward, it would just fast forward time for a few hundred years after new game creation, just like how Dwarf Fortress does it.  I have no idea how long that would take, but if it takes a one-time overnight run who cares, right?  (I'm years away from being ready for that sort of thing, but it's still fun to think about)

Oh I'm also really hoping you change your mind about open-sourcing this thing so I can help out 

Well, the thing is I've put a stupid number of hours into this thing so that won't happen, but not to worry: when it's time to start on AI that part will be effectively open source since the AI will be contained in external modular scripts in GDScript.  I plan to implement the AI, the API, and the docs for the API in parallel, starting with the most crude and fast AI that I possibly can so the coders in the community can get their hands on it.  The outcome I most hope for is that someone else will take the AI and zoom way ahead of me with it, leaving me with time to improve the API for them as needed and otherwise spend my time fixing bugs and filling in whatever other features are still to-do.

P. S.  Any chance Godot would make it easy to incorporate some mouse-based map pan/zoom capabilities?

Yep, would be possible, but no point in adding luxuries until there's a game to play.

I gotta leave this disclaimer, I've had way too much coffee and needed a break from coding, so I'm just here writing about ideas for way way into the future, so stay relaxed everyone

On the topic of NPR and SM...

Would it be possible to either convert a NPR permanently to a player controlled race, or just sharing vision of being able to see everything they see but not changing anything?


I think this could be very helpful both for making it easier for the community to find bugs if an NPR get stuck, understand how the NPRs AI work ( and how it can be improved ) and for storytelling where you want a NPR in your story to start doing something different.