I started work on the save/load system this week. It was becoming more obvious that I needed to fix the issues with the mech model. (A problem I was avoiding for a long time.) The beginning of the year was a rough start, I had a SSD failure as I might have mentioned in past logs. This caused me to lose all the source files for the mech and my ability to make changes to it.... easily. So I began the week by exporting everything out of UE to begin working on new source files. With that I took the opportunity to smooth out the normals and re-map the UV's. I also re-textured all the skins. Of course that broke everything... But it was a easier fix than I initially thought. Yes, I knew it would break the game but it was a  break  necessary step to move forward. The new maps are also a lot cleaner in code. The old maps used 3 materials over 3 textures for the 3 parts of the mech, a total of 27 textures over 9 materials. With the new maps I was able to reduce that to 3 textures over 1 material for each part, a total of 9 textures over 3 materials. This makes the process of making changes much easier and texture streaming is much more efficient. 

I have also added a dynamic flag to the mech bay and redesigned 2 of the flags also changing the name of the region factions as well. Now when you pick a region the flag represents that change. I have also started working on character portraits a bit. 

Next update will be awhile. I plan the next dev log to be after the next alpha build. If you're interested in more frequent updates or playing the next alpha build consider joining the Discord.