Enormous quality and gameplay update

After two years in which, for a variety of reasons, I've been unable to dedicate almost any time at all to my personal projects I'm now back in a position to continue doing so. Again I want to thank all of my followers for bearing with the frustration of having backed a project that seemed dead. This first huge update revitalises the journey toward a final game and brings us ever forward to game release :)

It's important to note that as always this update goes into "edge" first, where there will be testing and bug fixing before it goes into the actual release, so understand it for what it is. The official Release is still more than two years old but hopefully through the testing of this new edge release we'll get that rectified in no time as well.

Firstly, having not been able to work on this for slightly over two years, the first thing that needed to be updated was upgrading the entire game to the latest Unity engine, I chose 2019 LTS (the newest long term support version) This should offer stability and not require too much updating going forward until a 2020 LTS becomes available. Along with that there are several third party libraries I've used off the Asset Store and are integrated in the game. I went through the painful process of having to update and upgrade all of those as well. This took the longest of all the changes coming to this release but puts me in a position of no longer having stale code using an old engine or old libraries.

Secondly I upgraded the render pipeline significantly to take advantage of the newer Unity version and what it offers. The overall quality of what you'll see on screen has been massively improved. This process will be ongoing as I (re)learn the newer features offered by the newer Unity engine :) It really does look amazing and it surprised me just how much a small amount of motion blur on post-processing can change the whole feel, those spinning rotors really do feel like they're spinning and I'm way more pleased with the overall aesthetic.

On to the good stuff, I'm now maintaining an online Development Roadmap that you can view at any time and see where I am and even add your vote to features you'd like to see. You can also see what's planned and what's in edge vs final release. I will mostly try work on planned items with the most votes first, what could influence that not being the chosen order would be dependencies on other work first.

Here's a short summary of what new features come with this new edge release:

• Fuel barrels provide more fuel (balance adjustment)
• Altitude can now be raised with spacebar and lowered with left-shift, previously only the mouse scroll-wheel could be used for this
• Fuel barrels now have a yellow outline and glow to be more easily identifiable
• Friendly bases that have been visited and mission objectives are now shown as direction indicators within the main play area (this is very experimental and I already want to make a few tweaks)
• Inhabited buildings at bases and in the oil fields now turn their lights on at night

Lastly, I'm starting to build a community on Discord, you'll find us here if you have any questions, comments, suggestions or just want to share cool screenshots and brag about your latest high score ;)