Since the last update progress has been fast. The test effort has grown & there has been a lot of polish especially on the UI side. More features have been cleaned up to game ready state.

Some major bugs have been identified & fixed up, which has led to further improvements on various systems - especially around Boarding, Deploying crew to land, and Character Creation and Selection.

The new artwork is making appearances in the improvements to the Character related screens. Your character in game can now have hand painted portraits, based on some real historic pirates and fictional characters.
The command system for ships in your fleet has been redone - instead of large intrusive items showing above every selected ship, you will now see a nice icon above ships in a deployment state, that can be mouse-over'd to reveal a radial menu with a more intuitive deployment screen.
The same has been done for Reinforcing ships and Boarding operations, with more details available on mouse over.

A new audio system has been implemented over the past few weeks to accommodate the new layered tracks in development. This has been a joy to work on & is one part of the project that really needed some TLC.

Some large issues were found since the last patch that required some engine updates. Working on these issues has led to improvements to the overall stability of the game, as well as providing the opportunity to include some new quality of life improvements.
A new, more intuitive flow through the Main menu has been implemented also, the flag creation and customization is currently being cleaned up to allow for a more fluid transition through the character creation and selection flow.

As always, a full list of the improvements, fixes and features worked on during this patch can be found on the Discord, but here is a summary of the more important items.

• Flagships command can now be switched easily in RTS mode.
  
• Redone the deployment UI and added support for less intrusive overlays.
  
• Rebuild the global event system.
  
• Improvements to the enemy AI.
  
• Improvements to ship aiming.
  
• Added a new ship - Prince
  
• Rebuilt Wind system.
  
• Improved Night time Cannon fire lighting
  
• Replaced placeholder systems for Armory and Barracks
  
• Improved Line of Sight checks logic.
  
• Redone Audio Manager.
  
• Redone the Control Group, Selected Unit and Alert UI's.
  
• Added Oars to the troops in landing boats.
  
• Added tooltips for Custom Scenario across the board.
  
• Rebalanced a bunch of Scenarios.
  
• Improved some Tutorials.
  
• Rebuilt system around NavMesh dynamic generation. (Part of a major bug)

The test effort continues to expand & we are working through and exhaustive list daily.

The Audio work that is ongoing will hopefully be in place from an infrastructure point of view before next patch. Really looking forward to getting that in there & implementing something similar for the Campaign.

I still need to improve on the privateer code & finish up on the current improvements to the character system. This has been largely rewritten over the course of the year and is almost there I feel.

This patch has seen a lot of improvements and reworks of existing systems. The overall stability has been improved massively as a result. I'm very happy with how that's going.

Thank you to everyone who has supported me and provided feedback so far. A special thanks to the testers also.

- John