Before getting to whats in the update, an announcement: 

I've started a community forum for Dark Nebulae Online. This is a place to discuss new game idea, report issues and otherwise start building a community for the game. I'm still largely operating in stealth mode for the project, but will be using it to influence development. If you have any interest in this game, please feel free to participate in both the forum and the alpha which is currently free and open to all. 

The next update is now released and free to all and centers around ships, audio and new a server deployment build system, the downloads are attached to this post. You can connect to the cloud server just by entering and un-used username and password. You can also host local servers if you wish. This video shows many of the new features in action:

Ships

1. Refactored ship code (using Godot's scene and script inheritance feature). This should not be perceptible(hopefully) but it opens the door for  more advanced ship classes, AI behaviors and more. The next bit of work to do on this is integrating the hivemind network code for all the ai ships. 
2. New Ship art: Since it would be lame to have the ships look exactly the same after a big change, new ships across the board!
3. Player ships have physics tweaks and a big boost to health while minions and bots have a reduction in health. This is moving toward the idea's discussed in the community forum about making the player the hero. 
4. Refactored hive minion AI and a "hive seed" object which allows you to temporarily weaken the hivemind boss.  

Audio System: 

I've overhauled every aspect of the audio system.

1. I made a content creation pipeline which lets me batch dynamically generated spoken dialog. Essentially I can type a phrase on the linux command line and quality game-ready audio files are generated. 
2. I used this system to generate audio for the ships AI assistant. She now has a lot she can say, which will be relevant once I've coded her. Currently if you right click anywhere, she will say a random phrase. I've also made a holographic physics-based screen for her to appear on. 

1. There is now a dynamic system which switches from more "spacey" music to electronic "battle music" when you are hit by an enemy. This does a gradual fade between the tracks so that the transition should be seamless. 
2.  Are 8 new music tracks, 4 are battle music and the others for the general soundtrack. 
3. Instead of having all the music statically loaded in memory, it is now loaded as-needed and in random order. This is a small memory optimization. 
4. All music and sound effects now properly routed through busses via Godot's 3.0's new audio server.

7. This is kind of boring, but with the busses set up, I finally implemented volume control widgets.