What's New

The economy for Hudson has been fleshed out, with stations producing and consuming a variety of commodities. Each station also supports a number of AI subs that travel between the stations fulfilling trade missions. These agents and missions currently only operate at what I call the "summary simulation level". This is a very abstract level used to cheaply simulate the 99% of the world that the player isn't currently looking at. Future work will bring these into the "detailed simulation level", so the player can see and interact with both submarines and missions.

In the bottom right of the screenshot above you can see a snapshot of the global economy, with commodities, current stockpiled amounts, ideal net production per minute, and the quantity currently packaged up for trade. The pill shaped objects on the world are representations of the AI submarines.

I've also added patrolling military submarines, much like you can currently see in the open world test map. There's currently nothing for them to do right now, but in the following weeks when combat is added to the procedural world, they will attack hostile subs just as the currently do elsewhere.

What's Next

I'm currently working on game saving and loading. I expect it to take awhile, maybe over a week, but when I'm done  you'll at last be able to save your progress. I'm only implementing saving and loading for the full world (not the test maps), and saving will only be possible at stations. This is primarily for expediency (there will be less game state to track) but also to add a sense of risk to going on long expeditions.

Once saving and loading is complete, I'll return to work on the world simulation, bringing the AI subs into the detailed simulation level, as mentioned above.