✨ Improvement – Font
You may notice the game looks a little different, and that is because we have changed the font used right across the game. The old one was Segoe UI, a font that comes built into Windows, and it had a stubborn habit of looking different depending on where you played.
In Firefox it came out crisp and clean. In Chrome, Edge and our own desktop app, which are all built on the same Chromium engine underneath, it came out noticeably heavier and a little fuzzy, especially in the small text along the top of the screen. We tried everything we could think of to coax it into behaving, and in the end we had to accept that the problem was the font itself, not anything we could change.
Each browser simply draws it in its own way. So the answer was a font that looks the same wherever you play. We lined up a handful of candidates side by side, asked our staff to put them through their paces in their own browsers, and settled on Roboto. It is crisp at small sizes, reads cleanly against the dark of space, and runs very slightly narrower than the old font, so nothing should feel squeezed.
Most importantly, it looks the same in the desktop app as it does in your browser, so every captain now sees the same game. A change like this touches every screen, so we have been through them one by one. If you spot anything that looks out of place, a label that has wrapped or a line that sits oddly, please let us know and we will tidy it up.
Numerous GUI Updates
While we were going through every screen for the new font, we tidied up a few things along the way. – The ship status bar across the top of the screen has a little more room. On 1920 wide screens, and always in the desktop app, the Energy readout could wrap onto two lines. It now stays on one line, and the bar no longer clips the corner of the location picture beside it.
The location box in the top left has been reworked. The picture sits neatly centred beside the text, the box sits a little higher and tighter, and its buttons have a new darker look that is much easier on the eye. – The headers on the Jump Gate, Active Missions, Hints & Tips, Global Research, Character Skills, Corporation and Market Vendor panels have been slimmed down to a single line, leaving more room for what is inside them.
The Jump Gate text is a touch smaller, so it no longer shouts at you before every jump. – When scrolling through your encrypted cargo at the Market Vendor or on a fleet ship, the column headings now stay put instead of letting the Sell buttons slide over them, and the stray sideways scroll bar that flashed up on opening is gone.
The Market Vendor is slightly wider, giving its table some breathing room. – Asteroid fields now simply say Mining Lasers Required because the old wording was saying the same thing twice.
The Ashar Haulage and Wesbec Industries contract lists are a touch shorter, so they no longer crowd the bottom of the screen. – The Weapon & Equipment Store has lost its pink. The category dropdown is now dark and easy to read, and the headings, names and figures are in clean white. Red is kept only where it is telling you something, such as a skill you have not trained yet or a weapon worn low.
The Refining Center has had a proper tidy. Its buttons now share one size and style, the resource list is more compact so more fits on screen, and the Batch Refining section stays out of the way until you pick something to refine.
The Refining Center pop ups, choosing a resource, the Refining Complete and Refining Collected reports and the Refining Chart, now sit properly in the middle of your screen instead of drifting towards the bottom on 1080p displays. The two reports are much shorter too, with your materials laid out in two columns.
The Deploy Planetary Harvester window at the ORSA office uses a more sensible text size, and its buttons now have readable white lettering.
Financial Management is now only as tall as it needs to be, so it sits neatly in the middle of the screen without a big empty space at the bottom. The spacing inside is a little tighter too
Double the Options
Good news for the haulers. The freight offices at Ashar Haulage and Wesbec Industries now keep twice as many contracts on their boards, twenty at every office instead of ten. The boards have always topped themselves back up every few minutes, but at the busiest spots, Feris and its neighbours in particular, a handful of captains could clear the lot long before the next delivery of paperwork arrived.
Anyone docking a few minutes later found either an empty board or whatever runs nobody else fancied. With plenty of new captains expected through the doors soon, we would much rather they found a full office waiting for them. Nothing else about hauling has changed. The contracts pay the same, the cargo sizes are the same, and the number of contracts you can carry at once is still set by your Haulage skill. You simply have far more to choose from, so a good run is much easier to find.
QOL
A pair of quality of life improvements this time, both suggested by Drylok. Thank you Drylok, keep them coming. Your Ship Loadout now tells you what your modules are actually doing for you. Fit a piece of Elite Armor Plating and its card shows Armour Bonus +250 right there, along with any hull, shield regen, cargo, passenger or speed bonus a module provides. No more trips to the Exchange to remind yourself. Every fitted item also has a Full Item Info button in the top corner of its card, which opens the same detailed view you get on the Galactic Exchange.
Explorers can now leave the mouse alone. On a planet surface, the arrow keys or WASD move you north, south, east and west, and inside a derelict they walk you forward, aft, port and starboard, with Page Up and Page Down taking you between decks. The keys step one zone or room at a time and pause while an event, a fight or any other window is on screen, so holding a key down will not send you charging past something important. While we were in there we also made sure a very enthusiastic finger on the movement buttons can no longer take you into the same place twice at once, which could occasionally roll the same discovery twice.