Another major milestone has been reached in the development of Global Fleet & Trade.
The world map is increasingly developing from a simple overview into a genuine gameplay tool. For the first time, the player's own ships are visible directly on the map. When a ship is travelling, it appears on its active route. The journey is shown as a subtle dashed line between the departure and destination ports.
This creates an entirely new sense of the player's own shipping company. Ships are no longer merely numbers in a list or entries in a management screen, but can be experienced as moving units on the world map. Players can now understand more clearly where their fleet is located, which ports are connected and which routes are currently being travelled.
Ships in port are now visible as well. When one of the player's ships lies in a harbour, an anchor symbol appears there. The map deliberately remains clear: even if several of the player's ships are in the same port, only a single anchor is displayed.
Another important advance is the new live updating of the world map. Arriving ships, disappearing routes and new harbour anchors can now become visible without a complete page reload. The map therefore responds much more dynamically to gameplay.
The map's presentation has also been refined further. Names, routes, ships and harbour anchors appear according to the zoom level. The broad world overview therefore remains calm and clean, while important details become visible only when zooming in.
This development step is an important foundation for the later global fleet overview, lively trading routes and a stronger feeling of truly operating a shipping company across the world's seas.
Global Fleet & Trade has therefore taken a major step towards a lively, understandable and playable trading world.
The world map is finally alive
