Nukes and lasers

Shooting part of space combat is mostly done. Ships can cut each other with lasers and drop nuclear bombs on planets. Colonies can be wiped out too but I'm still testing and polishing that part. Functionally, cloaking and detection is missing and I have to decide how to make inaccurate weapons like bombs viable in ship to ship combat. The idea is to give small and maneuverable ships means of seriously hurting large ships.

Visually there is a lot of work left and I'm feeling like I am stretching Windows Forms (Windows default user interface solution) way past intended purpose. Customization options boil down to either a set of inflexible switches or overrides where I have to do whole component from scratch. There is no middle ground where I could override some parts of default look and functionality but reuse the rest. Yes, I could instead work on adding more visual feedback on hex grid like beam rays and causality numbers but GUI part is bugging me so much. I'm seriously thinking about adopting GWEN.Net (an OpenGL friendly user interface solution) and ditch WinForms as much as possible.

And I see another cloud creeping over. At some point I'll have to improve my rendering engine and basically reinvent part of Unity engine, which poses a question: should I have made the game in the Unity in the first place? I'll try to stick with no as long as I can. Rewriting would probably take way more time then it seams at first glance and I have some experience on implementing scene graphs so it might end up being faster solution. Also, doing it on my own gives me the opportunity to tailor it to my needs. There are some design decisions in Unity I don't agree with and I can work with assumptions that apply only to my project. I'm confident that my current code base is good enough to endure such changes.

It's eating me too but you'll have to suffer through ugly GUI until version 0.5 is finished. I'll put more effort in visuals in the next version.