Version dev 10.1 is out! This is the last few features I managed to squeeze in before the release. From now until the 16th it's going to be bugfixes and maybe some work on the tutorial.

That said, I would be very grateful if you could try this one out, especially the new multiplayer features, and let me know if there's any problems.

So, new multiplayer features:



You can now collectively decide on what speed MP conquest should run at. If all players agree to pause the game, the game is paused.

And you can now edit ships in MP. There's three new little buttons for ship/landship/building editing. The state of the editor gets preserved and the design autosaved when you leave it, so you can work on ships alongside doing other things.

With the game gearing up for release, I’d like to show people all the cool things about it. For this, I’ve put a GIF creation tool in the game’s replay system. So when you replay a combat, you can hit the GIF button and record a short animation.



Now it’s a question of finding some cool-looking GIFs, and this is something you can help me with.

Anything that shows off the game, the details, the combat, the designs - modded or not. Make them, share them in places, link me to them. Of those I get sent in the next week, the creators of the three I like best will get a custom coat of arms and a sticker, and the very best one will also get a gold-print Airships T-shirt.


To create a GIF, select “Replay” from the main menu.



Pick a combat to replay.



You can play back the combat, and move the camera freely using the usual WASD/Arrow Keys/Right Drag to move and Scroll Wheel/+- to zoom.



You can click on the playback bar to move forwards and backwards.



To make a GIF, get the playback and camera to where you want to start.



Click the GIF button.



Click the OK button. The combat will start playing back again. It won’t be moving at full speed, but that’s just because it’s recording the GIF - the GIF will play back normally.

You can move the camera during recording but note that a moving camera may be confusing to viewers.

Hit the Escape key to finish recording. A 3-6 second GIF or so is good. If it’s too long, the file will be too big.

The file will be saved automatically to the Desktop.


Share them on Steam, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Imgur, etc. The purpose of this exercise is to let people know about the game and get new players.

Message me with the things you’ve posted, and you’ll be added to the giveaway. Note who gets rewards will be entirely at my discretion. Void where prohibited. Note that I may re-use your GIFs in other places to promote the game.

The Call For GIFs ends at midnight GMT on Monday, August 13.

OK, but what’s a custom coat of arms? Well, you can register a coat of arms for yourself in the game. The custom arms means I’ll draw a custom symbol of your choice - a heraldic charge - for you and link it with your account. Only you will be able to use it. (And yes, obviously, nothing obscene or awful, and nothing that someone else already has.)

Here’s some examples:







So yeah, no super-fancy pixel art, but it’s all yours, and yours alone - and a grant of arms is the traditional reward for a service rendered.

I am happy to announce that Airships: Conquer the Skies will be released on August 16, 2018.

It's been five years of development, nearly all of it with public builds available, going from a ship construction prototype with weirdly greenish-tinged wood to its current state, with multiplayer, dragons, landships, and well, more ship design.

Today also marks the release of dev 10, the final major pre-release version, featuring conquest multiplayer, a tech tree, and graphical improvements.



Here's a bunch of the cool stuff the game now contains:

• Explosions
  
• Free-form ship design where you're not limited to some fixed layout
  
• Historically authentic heraldry
  
• Dragon taming
  
• Giant sky squid that eat your crew
  
• Grappling hooks
  
• Giant land-walkers
  
• An in-game editor for challenge missions
  
• A combat replay system that lets you re-enter the fight on either side
  
• Multiplayer map conquest
  
• Extensive modding support with more than a hundred mods, adding a huge number of extra modules and other things
  
• Explosions

From now until release, I'll be concentrating on improving conquest mode and the game tutorial. After, I will of course continue supporting the game with bug fixes, balance patches, and user interface improvements.

Oh, are you a member of the press or a streamer? Would you like to know more? Are you going to gamescom? Drop me a line.

New beta release, fixing various bugs and balance issues, getting translations up to date, and adding Korean!



Release date announcement tomorrow.

Oh, and I've set up a Developer Page on Steam now. So if you follow that, I'll see a number go up and you'll see future projects I work on.

#dontforgettolikefollowandsubscribeguys

There is now a public beta version of Airships dev 10. You can opt into it by going into the game properties in Steam, selecting the betas tab, and choosing "dev10beta".

It adds a lot of new things, including strategic conquest multiplayer and research. I'll be going over those in detail when it leaves beta.

For now, do try it out, and let me know about any bugs, crashes, or balance issues you encounter. We're coming up to the 1.0 release.



Edit: Did an update, beta 3, that fixed some crashes and desyncs.

• Fixed a lighting error on turrets.
  
• You can now use the arrow keys and cursor to change the insertion point in text fields.
  
• Uploading ships to Steam now gives you the fixed list of tags, and auto-generates cost tags.
  
• Clearer indicator for which modules are disconnected.
  
• Mac Steam integration once again works, in a limited fashion. You can subscribe to workshop items but you can't publish them.

With the new graphical options now available, I'm re-doing the AI ship designs for v10. Each opponent empire will have a specific design style that is visually distinct and has certain strengths and weaknesses. Here are some screenshots:











In other good news, I think I have convinced Kaspersky Antivirus to stop issuing false positives for the game!

• There's a problem on some graphics cards with the new flags code. I'm still working on fixing it, but I've made it so that the rest of the graphics draw properly if you're affected.
  
• Added a 1x1 inert filler block.
  
• Fixed some crashes.
  
• Armour masks now work with mods.
  
• Combat replays are now more visible.

Some more on combat replays and GIF creation soon...

This update is all about aesthetics. Ships in the game, being made of blocks, have always looked very, uh, blocky. Numerous mods have been made to address this, but mods are limited in what they can do.

The main technical change this update introduces is pixel-perfect collision for modules. This means that you can have complex, rounded shapes that collide correctly, rather than having weird non-collisions or collisions at a distance.



To take advantage of this, beyond adding pixel-perfect collision to rams and turrets, I've added a whole bunch of slopes and curves to shape your ships. These slopes and curves can also be armoured like normal modules.



In addition, there are figureheads:



Lanterns:



More sails:



There's also two new weapon modules, muskets and heavy turrets:



The appearance of many weapon barrels has also been updated to be more distinctive:



But wait, that's not all! There's flags and pennants that move based on wind and ship movement:



Oh, and around 50 new decal items, such as new gold leaf:



And "greebles", small textural details like tanks and panels:



The aim of all of this is to enable ships to have all kinds of distinctive looks, such as the following three:

Age of Sail



Battleship



Mad Max



Beyond all these new things, there are of course also some bug fixes and balance adjustments:

• All shots now do at least one point of damage, which means you no longer get into a situation where your weapons mysteriously don't fire.
  
• Module adjacency bonuses have been significantly decreased, to prevent penalising ships that aren't just flying bricks.
  
• Fleshcrackers now have a maintenance cost, preventing mad scientist nests from spawning an infinite number of them.
  
• Crew can no longer avoid being hurt by boarders by hiding behind the corpses of their fallen comrades. This should resolve problems with boarding stalemates.
  
• Fixed animation logic for bees, wasps and air dragoons - boarding flyers.
  
• Flamethrowers have a wider firing arc.
  
• Gatling guns' shots now wander rather than spraying around wildly.
  
• Increased armour HP by 50%.
  
• Doubled Air Hussar reload time.
  
• Spider legs now have a lot of propulsion power.
  
• Increased Suspendium Dust Tank HP.
  
• Fixed a mission editor crash.

What's next? More work on multiplayer conquest...

Edit Just released v9.8.0.1 which fixes a crash happening to people with no custom coat of arms set.

I've finally gone and tidied up the tags available in the workshop.

Unfortunately, the tag management is a bit unsophisticated: I can only create a white-list of tags to be shown, which means that tags I haven't thought of won't show up.

That's why I waited for quite a long time to do this tidy-up: I wanted to see what tags would naturally occur. Now, pretty much every tag that has at least a dozen or so items in it should be represented.

This isn't reflected in the game itself yet, which still lets you add arbitrary tags to ships when you upload them. I'll change it so it gives you just the existing options. And it can also auto-generate some of them, actually.

Anyway, I hope that this is an overall improvement in quality of life. If you have any tags you'd like to see added to the whitelist, let me know at any point!

Unrelatedly, here's a quick preview snap of some of the new aesthetic options in the upcoming version: