HotM:Moving To Chapter Two

Reporting Bugs

• Any bugs or requests should go to our mantis bugtracker
  • If you need to submit log files, those can generally be found under your PlayerData/Logs folder in the folder your game is installed in. The most relevant one is called HeartoftheMachineLog.txt. You can send us the whole thing, or just strip out relevant parts.
  • In rare cases, mainly if your entire game crashes (that almost never happens), we will need your unity player log. That gets overwritten the next time you run the game after a crash, unlike the other log. These can be found here:
    • Windows: C:\Users\username\AppData\LocalLow\Arcen Games, LLC\Heart of the Machine\Player.log
    • macOS: ~/Library/Logs/Arcen Games, LLC/Heart of the Machine/Player.log
    • Linux: ~/.config/unity3d/Arcen Games, LLC/Heart of the Machine/Player.log

0.570

(Not Yet Released)

• Wallripper is now automatically assigned to Sledge units, but simply locked before you do the related contemplation.
  • The contemplation also now mentions that it will be on sledges, rather than the player having to figure out which unit it can go on.

• On the investigation for water purification, it now notes that you are strongly advised to pick a target not in a military base.

• Reworked the coloring of the Panther mech again. It was bugging me a lot, as it looked too jungle-military rather than looking urban-police-like.

• The population of the city is now shown on the city statistic tab.

• The city statistics, action statistics, and project history are all now searchable.

• The icon for bulk androids has been adjusted to not be a cone, but instead to be the parachute that was previously used for deployment.

• The way that the units are sorted in the inventory is no longer by name, but instead by progression within each category that is shown. There's a general sequence to them that makes sense, with groupings of like things near other like things, and more advanced/expensive versions of similar things, etc.

• The Android Chamber project in early chapter one is now a Neuroweave Factory project, and that then is followed by a new Command Mode project. This winds up giving a much better sense of how to use command mode.
  • You wind up getting one extra Structural Improvement upgrade out of this, and you also don't get The Thinker until after the Command Mode project is done AND the security patch is done. Before it would happen as soon as the security patch was done, which could be at a time where you were distracted.

• The intro to chapter one now does a better job of being clear about directly installing the wind power job rather than using the build menu.

• The parts of command mode that are not relevant until later are not unlocked until they are relevant, now.
  • In the past, command mode was unlocked late enough that everything was relevant by the time it did. But that is no longer the case.

Balance

• Deterrence has been updated to include armor piercing and armor plating, to quite a heavy degree as well.
  • This makes captured mechs actually useful, rather than just a liability.

• The microbuilder cost per computronium cube created has been reduced by a lot.

• Slightly reduced the amount of electricity used by both slurry spiders and microbuilder mini-fabs, and then also increased the amount of electricity generated by the network tower, so that the players are not in a power deficit on super early turns.
  • That deficit made it so that you'd have to skip turns for an increasing amount of time in order to get the electricity to build the stupid wind tunnel.

• Increased the output from microbuilder mini-fabs by about 11%, since players were consistently short on those, and just as part of this general balancing pass.

• Increased the base production from slurry spiders by approximately 20%, to make sure there is enough left over after microbuilders use what they need.

• The large majority of the jobs that used to cost elemental slurry to build now cost microbuilders for that component.
  • This is more expensive than before, but with the added microbuilders you have now, plus the less pressure from unit construction no longer costing them, this makes more sense. And is cleaner in the interface!

UI Improvements

• For daemons with intermittent movement, they now have a different color when they are not about to move. It won't show you the countdown of them moving, but it will show if they're going to move after your next move, or not.
  • Thanks to Kenken244 for suggesting.

• Cells that are threatened by the potential movements of daemons on the next turn are now shown with a different color and border, to make it clearer where the ragged edges of danger are.
  • Thanks to Pingcode and Kenken244 for suggesting.

• The various line item colors for jobs/structures have been lightened for easier legibility.

• The build sidebar is now only 72% of the width it was previously. It was too wide, taking up too much of the screen.
  • The text on the line items and the categories have also been adjusted a bit, to make it less of a wall of text.

• In the upper right header bar, the following changes have been made:
  • The forces sidebar is always first (sandbox-mode indicator aside).
  • The "buildings with problems" button always shows a number, even if that number is zero.
  • Same deal for the handbook. The handbook has also been moved forward to be right after structures with problems.
  • The current activity icon is now after the handbook, right before networks, and never shows a count.
  • Networks no longer shows a count at all, since that also was very low-value information.

• When in photo mode, the selected/not-selected icons above the heads of player units no longer draw.

New Content - All The Way To Chapter Two

• After you have hacked the mech, sheltered humans who are bored and angry start wandering around. They bring up the idea of a militia, but that idea is off the table for now. Your character says that entertainment will come first, and possibly jobs later.

• With that in mind, this starts a new project to locate VR software that you can use with the mech pilot cradle. Ideally pilot training simulator software.

• As part of the project for the VR Sim Data, you now do an investigation of the sort that is done in the prologue, then collect a certain amount of it into your inventory, in an encrypted format.

• Added a new Computing Optimization research domain, which is slim for the moment but will grow.
  • This is what the project for the military sim data yields now.

• Added a new Better Mainframes upgrade, which doubles the effectiveness of tower mainframes, and which is the first computing optimization you're forced to get (right after you get the military data to decrypt, so players will be sure to have spare cycles for it).
  • Note that this does not improve the biological mainframes on purpose.

• A new Codebreaker job has been added, and resources are set so that they can be decrypted either into other resources or into statistics.

• A new project for decrypting the military data you captured is in place.

• A second tier of upgrades for the computing optimization research domain is now in place. One is for a new heavy computing job cap, which both the Coprocessor and Codebreaker now use, and the other is for the mainframe cap.

• Full-Dive VR Cradles are a new resource, and there is a new VR Cradle Factory that is unlocked as soon as you get the Full Dive VR tech.
  • These will be useful, but without software to connect them to, they are not useful at first.

• An ongoing project to decrypt the rest of the military data starts after the first batch is complete, and a new "initial VR simulation" is unlocked as soon as the first batch is done.

• Added a new Mineral Scrounger job, which opens up starting at intelligence class 2 (so you would have had this for quite a while by now if you're at the end of the content at the moment).
  • The general idea of this is that it provides a low-level source of some common minerals and metals that you frequently need, but only up to a very low cap each (1000). This can allow you to, for example, skip building a mine if you just need occasional Neodymium, rather than being forced to either build a giant mine to handle that, or wallrip constantly.
  • Alumina you're almost certain to need enough that you'll want to build the mine for that, but it's up to you.
  • The secondary function of this, when you're above that very low cap, is to give you more microbuilders. That also is incredibly welcome, and it is tuned in such a way that we're talking about potentially 20% bump in output if you have not been making use of subnet efficiency additions.
  • I'm pleased with the fact that this is softly dual-role -- providing an easier transition into certain materials, but not replacing the larger mines; and then being a longer-source high-value source of microbuilders.

• There is now a project that has you prepare a certain number of VR day seats at minimum, which means that you also need to have your residential housing in order to a certain extent.

• You can actually establish the virtual reality environment, and it gives you the choice of several randomized names, including The Zodiac, or you can type in your own.
  • It gives you a different message if you're still a bit early into decrypting the military data, or if you're later into things.

• The wording on the "building a better brain" strategy tip no longer talks about having to choose intelligence class 3 as the target if you want to see all of the demo content. Instead it says that if you find those methods distasteful, then perhaps just go for intelligence class 2 and something less brutal might occur to you later.
  • Teaching-wise, this is a key thing for chapter one, because it basically shows that you don't always have to rush to something the first time you see it, if you don't like the methods. The previous method of this being semi-forced for the demo undermined that, but so it goes.

• There's a new project that opens up at the same time as you start preparing VR cradles, which is to get to intelligence class 3.
  • This makes it even more explicit what is going on and why you're doing these things, if someone is clicking around fast and missing things. It also keeps track of your progress in terms of neural expansion, so you can see that you're getting closer when you are.

• The total number of day-use cradle hours are now tracked, both at the city layer and the meta layer, and this is also converted into Neural Expansion at your human residences.

• The "dies in the virtual environment" is now in place for when you pass 100k hours of people being in the virtual world, or pass 60% of the progress to intelligence class 3, whichever is first, if you're still on the "initial simulation."
  • Rather than death being a "you die in the real world if you die in the virtual one," this is a system where it's more nebulous, and the amount of abuse your virtual body is taking is a factor in whether your real body dies. This uncertainty makes it much more stressful for people.
  • The usage of your virtual world drops to 25% of what it had been before, as people are being a lot more careful.

• There is a second discovery in the data you're decrypting, as soon as it hits 20% decryption percentage.
  • This causes the extended VR landscape to become available, rather than the mech fighting version.
  • After closing the message from this, it will jump your completion of the encryption from about 20% to about 99%, so it should probably complete the decryption project on the next turn.
  • If you previously had a death from burning in the VR environment, and interest was way down, then that will jump back up to healthy levels.

• If you found the virtual environment after the above discovery, you're given a different message than if you try to found it prior to that.

• After you have the virtual environment in place at this expanded level AND you have gotten back up to intelligence class 3, which probably should be about the same time if you've been prioritizing cradle construction and installation, then it adds a new button to your upper left bar that says that you can click there to go to "the zodiac" or whatever you called it.
  • Upon entering the virtual environment for the first time, a tone plays, and you're now in chapter two.

Unit Deployment Revamp

• The entire flow of how you create androids, mechs, and vehicles in chapter one and onwards is completely revised.
  • This is now done entirely through command mode, pretty much like the bulk android placement.
    • You get to choose exactly what you want, placement-wise, which is a really big win for vehicles in particular.
    • You also get to spawn exactly the thing that you want, right when you want it, rather than having to build it for some number of turns in advance.
      • The importance of this as you start having a lot more types of units to choose from cannot be overstated. The level of inconvenience that was created when you wanted to change unit types at a factory before was really frustrating. Early in chapter one it was not a big deal and hardly noticeable, but it was hitting points at the end of chapter one that were rage-inducing for me. So I can only imagine for players it would often be even worse.

• The mental energy cost of deploying bulk androids is now baked into the type of android, rather than being something global for all bulks.
  • So some are more expensive now, and others are notably cheaper, when it comes to mental energy. And the majority are same as before.

• When deploying new androids, mechs, and vehicles in the new way, they now have a mental energy cost associated with them, since they no longer take turns to deploy.
  • The mental energy cost is much lower than the bulk equivalents for androids, but again varies by type.
  • For vehicles and mechs, they are notably heftier, which again makes them hard to spawn heavily during combat.

• The photo-style icons for unit types are now drawn in command mode's buttons, since that's a lot more informative with the new way that this is set up.

• The Bulk Android Launcher job has been completely removed. It's no longer needed, and it was confusing to begin with.

• The rules for android, mech, and flying vehicle placement -- including bulk androids -- are all now completely different once you get into chapter one.
  • Androids and mechs:
    • If it's in your network, you can build it there. Building placement does not matter.
    • If it's outside your network, then you need to have a troopship or foundry in range for androids, or a mech carrier in range for mechs (mech carrier also works for androids).
  • Vehicles
    • It needs to be within a certain range of an aerospace hangar, but you get to choose the specific spot that it pops out.

• The entire factories / unique queue sidebar is gone now, as that's no longer relevant at all, very happily.

• The "Android is ready but no room on your roster" message is gone, happily, since that's no longer how things work. That was needlessly complex.

• The "choose a type to build" and "deploy from here" buttons are completely gone from the android chambers and the aerospace hangars, since those have been replaced with the command-mode alternative instead.

• There is no more "factories building this" and "ready to deploy" or "turns to create" on the unit creation tooltips, happily. All of this was really needlessly complex, and again is now replaced by the command mode stuff.

• The "build mech over time in a vehicle" logic is completely gone, and the abilities related to those are also gone. Once again, replaced by the unified command-mode bits that handle everything the same.

• The handbook entry for "be careful where you put your aerospace hangars" is now gone, as that no longer matters in the same way.

• Added a new Neuroweave resource, and the Android Chambers have been removed while Neuroweave Factories have been added in their place. Your existing Android Chambers have become these.
  • This resource is used by all units you construct, and it makes some androids in particular more-expensive or less-expensive to create.

• The aerospace hangars also now produce a new Morphologic Lattice resource, which is used by both flying vehicles and mechs.

• There are strict limits on how much of these new resources can be stored and produced, and this more or less takes the place of the older turn-limits on how quickly you can deploy a bunch of units in a short period of time.
  • Arguably mental energy already does this, since that's now a cost as well on units. But these work in tandem to impact your ability to respond to an emerging threat under a variety of circumstances, and after you've taken a certain number of losses, or when you have a certain amount or warning or no warning.
  • Also of note, units almost never cost microbuilders anymore. The microbuilders not being a cost is a huge deal, because it takes them out of competition with buildings in terms of what needs them.
  • In general, this makes the economy for creation of units a lot more balanced with itself, while not being impacted by the building costs anymore.

• The baseline squad size of bulk technicians has been doubled, since for their purposes in the future that is more useful.

• The Bulk Android Frame Kits have been renamed to Robotic Motivators, and have been rebalanced entirely as well.
  • The Bulk Android Factory is now the Robotic Motivator Factory.

• Bulk Androids also now required Neuroweave rather than Microbuilders, and the amount of Elemental Slurry each requires is now multiplied by the number of units in the squad compared to the base unit.
  • This puts more pressure on elemental slurry while taking it off of microbuilders when you have a lot of bulks, and it also makes them compete with Neuroweave like all other units, rather than competing with buildings for microbuilders.

Bulk And Captured Units

• Bulk Units no longer have a flat cap of the number of units. They now have a "Capacity" that each squad requires, and a total capacity.
  • This allows you to field more nickelbots than you can other units, for example.
  • This same system is also now used for Captured Units, in a separate pool, so that different mechs and androids and such cost different amounts there.
  • Thanks to Pingcode for suggesting for bulk units, and Kenken244 to bringing up the issue related to captured units.

• The Bulk Squad Controller has been replaced with the Remote Unit Controller.
  • This provides capacity for both bulk squads and captured units.

• The overall header information when deploying bulk squads is now more informative. It also specifies the squad size, which before you couldn't see there.

• If you have an excess of some class of unit (android, vehicle, mech, bulk unit, captured unit), the game will no longer let you progress to the next turn until you scrap something to get under cap.
  • It already did not let you make any moves with that class of unit, but players could have used the new system to exploit having extra units as damage-sponges-that-don't-move, and this new restriction halts that.

Fixes

• Fixed an exception that could happen during recalculating the list of subcells within cells on game start.
  • Thanks to Hasrem for reporting.

• Fixed up the tooltips for "speaking with" to be the new and proper format for NPC units.

• In the event that an exception happens right on loading into a savegame, the task stack no longer throws errors after closing the first error.

• Fixed an issue where if you loaded into a savegame where it wanted to start an investigation immediately for some reason, that would fail because the rollups for the building data tables were not yet in place.

• Removed some legacy camera code from over a year ago that I had added but which was causing the camera to act oddly when it was at the top of its zoom extents, rotating itself instead of just zooming straight out. It felt very odd when you were at the top end of the zoom spectrum.

• Fixed the positioning of the Peacekeepers in event windows, so that we can see their freaky heads and not just stare at their crotch.
  • Thanks to Mintdragon for reporting.

• Fixed two separate but related issues where some units and objects would not be properly revealed by player units, most notably by vehicles.

• Fixed issues where a lot of targeting modes were not highlighting their building targets properly in the map mode; the buildings were drawn too low. This normally was a mild problem, but for buildings that are very short -- like mines -- it could make them literally invisible.
  • Thanks to riking28 for reporting.

• The NPC mechs now have proper intimidation values on them, which are commensurate with the player versions.

• Projects in general now communicate what their projected results will be, and what the research domain inspirations will be, when they are hovered from the task stack.
  • For minor projects, this means this is the only way to actually see this information, which was not available previously.
  • Thanks to Michael Dunkel for reporting.

• Improved the way that subnets merge, when they do. Essentially, it will now make a more sensible shortest-route path between nodes, rather than always preferring the oldest nodes as the parents.
  • This also applies to existing subnets that are already linked, and so can cause things to look a bit different. It allows you to add ripples in an otherwise-straight-line connection between a couple of things, for example.
  • This does have the side effect that the preview of what exact nodes will be connected in what way isn't entirely accurate before you place a new node, but that was already inaccurate when the subnets were merging. The difference is the old approach looked like a crazy bug of some sort of the subnet merge cases, whereas the current approach looks more-correct.
  • The logic in general is that it DOES prefer older connections unless there is another connection that is at least 1/3 the length of the connection to the older node. This keeps there from being really strange radial lines out of the oldest node, from another subnet that was merged into this one. And it also makes most forms of "drawing lines with spikes off of them" still work, but only if the spikes are 3x the distance from the nearest other node (which, by chance, most of the time they are likely to be).

• Fixed a hilarious and annoying issue where it turned out that mechs you had converted to your own side via hacking (wololo) were running contraband scans on your own structures.

• Fixed a bug where jobs suggested to be built by a project were showing the total count they felt you should have, and not the additional count over what you currently have.
  • Thanks to Hasrem for reporting.

• Fixed a bug with the "dire warning" tooltip in the upper left corner, and how it was not sizing at all properly in recent builds since the ui work started.

• Fixed an exception that could happen if you loaded a savegame while having a structure selected in the savegame you were leaving behind for the new save.

• Fixed an issue where the note-text popups could appear directly on top of the command mode bar.

0.569 Fixes

(Released July 22st, 2024)

Note: this also went out only to the playtest build, and not the demo build, to make sure anything new and less-tested isn't shoved in the face of demo players during Tacticon.

• Fixed the bug with the full-dive VR opening right at the start of chapter one, rather than after your first mech hack.
  • Thanks to Pingcode, Trogg, and others for reporting.

• Renamed Goto in hacking to be Jump instead to be more clear.
  • Also clarified the rules on it so that it's not just about being stuck when there are no-adjacent-higher cells to choose.
  • Thanks to Kenken244 for reporting.

• Removed the whispering from the background ambience in the hacking interface. I had been uncertain on it, but it was just a bit too far.
  • Thanks to Mintdragon for reporting.

• Fixed several grammar issues.
  • Thanks to Mintdragon for reporting.

0.568 Introducing Raven

(Released July 20th, 2024)

Note: this also went out only to the playtest build, and not the demo build, to make sure anything new and less-tested isn't shoved in the face of demo players during Tacticon.

• Huge number of systems updates to support the new content, including an entirely new hacking system that is kind of a game unto itself.
  • But also major extensions to the sound effects playback system in this specific build, and then a variety of other enhancements noted over the other builds of the last couple of weeks.

• At the start of phase 5 of chapter one, which is at the point where the demo used to end, an upgraded BL-5 Machinist mech shows up near your housing structures (as much as it can, anyway), and then starts kidnapping your sheltered humans.
  • If you did the nuke for Baurcorp OR refused the nuke, they have a lawyer show up with an offer to file an injunction for you against the mech. If you stole the nuke, they do not have this offer, and the dialog is different if you made the above two choices.
  • If you have met the Nurturist Exalter and spoke to her, then she also sends a lawyer who can file an injunction for you.
  • If you accept one of the lawyers, then both they and the mech disappear.
  • If there are no lawyers present, or you don't agree, then there's nothing you can do about the mech just yet.

• The legal injunction now actually works for 9 turns, and uses a different sound effect than before for the countdown. This is a less-severe sound style for this kind of thing that is counting down.
  • The mech also returns, but without any lawyers, after the countdown is done.

• An entire giant hacking mechanic is now in place, although only the first two scenarios are ready at the moment.
  • Hacking the machinist mech gives you the introductory hacking scenario, which allows you to corrupt a mech pilot cradle.
  • Hacking other mechs after the first will give you more complex hacking scenarios, allowing you to corrupt more mechs to your side.

• Upon hacking the pilot cradle, you get three things:
  • An epiphany that unlocks the Full-Dive VR concept, which currently does not lead to new content, but will shortly.
  • The specifications for the machinist mechs so that you can build more of them like you can build the Hellfire... but you must get to intelligence class 3 again before you can actually do it.
  • You also get a new Corrupted Unit which is the machinist mech you were hacking.

• Corrupted units work a lot like bulk androids, but -- for now -- you don't need any extra hardware to run them.
  • Balance-wise, the more corrupted mechs you have at the moment, the harder the hacking becomes to get more. This doesn't mean the total number of corrupt-mech hacks you have ever done, but the number of corrupted mechs you currently have under your control. The more you get, it becomes exponentially harder until it's eventually impossible.
    • Once you have at least two mechs under your control at the moment, it starts giving you Ring Nodes instead of Leaf Nodes, which is a lot harder to game. So the first two are pretty simple to get, all told, but keeping a roster of more than two takes a lot more work.
  • They show in a separate section on the forces sidebar, and can be given reposition orders like bulk androids.
  • You can adjust their stance like bulk androids.
  • If your mech is looking to pick a fight instantly, then move it out of the POI it is standing in. ;)

• All of the mark 2 mechs now also have increased armor piercing so that they are now strong enough to take down each other.
  • Note that throughout the city, the rest of the mechs are still mark 1. So that one machinist mech is going to be oddly stronger than even a Convictor that is still mark 1. That won't be for long.
  • Also note that your engineering designs are based around the stats of the mark 1 mechs. Your character doesn't know how to make armor plating or armor piercing that is that good yet. The humans are using components you can't easily replicate.

• After the initial hacking session, there are new targets available to hack on targets that you can hit. Specifically you can hack the hydraulic actuators, weapons systems, or armor plating service panels on mechs to cause targeted debuffs to them.
  • The strength of the debuff, and how many turns it lasts, are both determined based on the skill of the hacker doing the work.
  • To destroy these types of nodes in the hacking interface, it notes that you must have a strength of at least 80 to corrupt them. This is slightly misleading.
    • The strength of 80 requires for adjacency-based corruption only. If you use line-style corruption, which is far harder to set up while being pursued by other daemons, then there's no extra requirement from these nodes. You freaking earned it by then.
    • If a daemon pushes these interfaces to an adjacent cell, then the requirement can actually drop. If you made an extreme Goto, in theory it could also rise. The latter is a very edge case, while the former is a slight bonus you can exploit if you're paying really close attention. Neither of these are bugs.

• The current set of daemons available in the hacking interface are: Gnath, Code Priest, Recursive Loop, and Triswarm. Others will be added later.
  • In addition to that, you can interact with Leaf Nodes, Ring Nodes, and Mech Pilot Cradles.

• There will be many other kinds of targets to hack, but this is enough for the moment.

• You may also note, there are a bunch of abilities beyond Run and Goto, and they are all unavailable right now. They will require you to do some things in The Zodiac before you can power them.

Unit Visual Updates

• The old visuals for the Panther mech have been replaced with completely new ones, since the old one kept getting complaints about looking too similar to some mechs from another game.

• New visuals for one other mech have also been added, although it's not yet applied for any unit yet.

• The icons for the sidebars for all of the mechs and the bulk androids have been replaced, so that the colors are more consistent and readable and attractive.

• The visuals of the Hellfire mech have been improved to be more fitting with the rest of the visuals in the game.

• All of the main mechs seen so far in the game have now had their LODs adjusted, so that there are now fewer polys in their LOD0, and so that they have fewer steps for their LODs, and so that they don't flicker between LODs as the player is looking around.

0.567 New Edges

(Released July 16th, 2024)

Note: this also went out only to the playtest build, and not the demo build, because of the ongoing risk of regressions.

• The sidebar no longer has a generic "riding units" section, but instead has specific headers for vehicles that contain units, with the units broken out by vehicle.
  • Thanks to Mintdragon and others for requesting.

• The "unit is busy with something" text is no longer so long on the unit/vehicle cards, so it no longer wraps.
  • Also, now it just shows the actual name of the thing they are doing next to the icon and the turns.
  • Thanks to Leximancer and Mintdragon for reporting.

Fixes To Prior Build

• Fixed a complicated issue with the arrows not being offset correctly from the tooltips that have those.
  • Also fixed a very simple accidental issue with them that was causing their backgrounds to not show correctly.
  • Thanks to Mintdragon for reporting.

• Fixed the true issue with the ui tour softlocking, where the game was checking for the wrong flag before showing the wrong step. This was a casualty of the sheer volume of code I changed in the prior build.
  • Thanks to Mintdragon for reporting.

• The passenger seats used and available on vehicles is now shown properly in the other stats, same as is the case with vehicle types.
  • Thanks to Mintdragon for reporting.

• Fixed an issue with the arrow-type tooltips in general, where they were not appearing properly until you actually moused over the element that they were anchored to. This was code applied wrongly from some other tooltips, and could soft-lock the ui tour as well as just making it seem like it wasn't working prior to that point, too.
  • Thanks to Mintdragon for reporting.

• Fixed a regression in the prior build where characters were not showing during minor events or dialogues unless there was also a visual effect playing at the same time. During major events it was fine.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

Other Fixes

• Adjusted some text that was a bit misleading, where "click here" sounded like it wanted you to click the tooltip.
  • Thanks to Mintdragon for reporting.

• Fixed a bug with some of the objects on the main menu having overly-dark blotches that would show through the fog incorrectly. These were NaN pixels that were being transmitted via a shader's interaction with the PBR lighting pipeline, and which the fog didn't know how to deal with. A different shader that is unlit is now used, and things now look correct.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

Visual Improvements

• Revised the edge detection logic and a few other things that were subtly degrading image quality.
  • Thanks to Mateusz Błażewicz for reporting.

• Fixed a pervasive and annoying issue where mipmaps were causing some emissive texture bleed-over in some of the models, most notably roads, making it look like antialiasing was failing on them.

• A completely new edge-detection effect is now in place, this one by Michael Kremmel.
  • I've used I think six different versions by different folks, and the prior one was the best one I had seen, in terms of being able to get the blend of effects I wanted in there. However, it had artifacting around very thin things like trees, and was applied after the anti-aliasing pass and thus looked very jagged in a way that is very annoying.
  • The new effect is equally flexible to the last one (not sure how I missed this effect before, but maybe this one is that new), and does not have those specific artifacts. I was able to tune it well to the range of colors in the game, so that it's using both color and depth information from the camera, and it is applied in a resolution-consistent way right before antialiasing happens, which makes it appear much more smooth.

0.566 Tooltip Conversion Part 1

(Released July 15th, 2024)

Note: this went out only to the playtest build, and not the demo build, because of the large number of changes that had a high chance of causing regressions.

• The mark 1 and mark 2 mechs are now properly separated out by tag, and so the new mark 2 mechs should no longer seed uncomfortably early. In the prior build, the new mechs were able to seed earlier than intended. Existing saves that already have them will still have them.
  • Thanks to Mateusz Błażewicz for reporting.

• When any savegame is loaded, it now calculates extra density of spots where npc units can stand, which makes it so that mechs and vehicles in particular can handle things a bit better.
  • Additionally, these use some relaxed seeding logic for being around fences and fields and so forth, so both now do far better around tight spaces.

• Some new logic is now in place for allowing npc managers to seed things really close to a target, and for npc managers to target a specific type of player structure, with fallbacks for if the more ideal groups are not found.

• The "units behind objects" highlighting now has more natural interaction with the fog. I still have more to do with this later, but for now it's an improvement.
  • Thanks to Mateusz Błażewicz for reporting.

• Added in some more hardening for protection from exceptions from recently-dead npc units.
  • Thanks to Wolfone and mblazewicz for reporting.

• Improved the handling of killing key contacts, and added a variety of functionality for gating certain things based not just on their flags, but if they are alive (met or unmet), met and alive, or dead (met or otherwise).

• Fixed an issue where Sledge was too large to fit in the dialogue windows properly.
  • Thanks to Mintdragon for reporting.

• Fixed a typo in the AGI researcher warning where it was saying there was widespread agreement when it should have been the opposite.
  • Thanks to Kenken244 for reporting.

• The old "Robotic Compromised" stat has been removed, and is now replaced by a "Hacking Resistance" stat, instead.

• Previously there was an exception when loading the level editor if you were on windows and did not have the SpaceMouse drivers installed, which of course most people would not.
  • This should be fixed now, but I am not positive.
  • Thanks to Gloraion for reporting.

• Substantially revised the camera layers to accomplish a couple of things, but in particular to allow for some particle effects to be drawn in front of the UI as-desired.
  • Also updated the particle effect system so that this works now, as well.

• Adjusted a bunch of internal things about how key contacts work, prepping for near-future additions.
  • Adjusted the Baurcorp nuke event to now trigger based on these. They should still attack you if the countdown timer runs down and you don't use the nuke, or if the nuke is used, the other two factions should still start fighting with one another.

• The new contemplation to unlock the raven is now in place as soon as tier 4 of chapter one is complete.

UI Updates

• Windows and tooltips and such in general now fade in rather than appearing instantly, although the current fade-in is very fast.
  • More will be done with this, but this already makes things feel dramatically less abrupt.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for suggesting.

• The code for how tooltips are rendered has been completely reworked.
  • Essentially, previously it did a lot of extra math to figure out how big things should be first, and then actually drew the tooltip at that size. However, due to occasional inaccuracies inside TextMeshPro about how this was calculated in advance, this meant that it would sometimes overflow its bounds. To get around THAT, I let the tooltips increasingly eat into the right-hand margin, which was still problematic in others ways.
  • Now it applies the text only once, and then has to wait a frame to find out how big that actually was, and then it does a further pass of size adjustments based on that new information.
  • This works out really well with the fading-in logic, since it's invisible for that first frame now, regardless of whatever else is happening. By the second frame, which may be something like 16 milliseconds later, it is sized properly. This fixes the margins issue, which looked really bad, and also just makes them more efficient to render in general, as well as easier to maintain later on.

• Added in a 200ms delay before tooltips are shown. So if you are just moving your mouse across the screen, it is less likely to get up in your face with instant tooltips.
  • I may make this more configurable later, for people who prefer things that pop up even slower, or which pop up faster.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for suggesting.

• The way that panels that size height-wise to their text work is now consistent with the new tooltips approach, which also means that it is finally accurate versus me having to give extra buffer to them.
  • In general extended several parts of my ui framework to make this work more seamlessly, and it also now will update text slightly faster on buttons and similar. Probably no-one will notice that, but it's about 200ms more responsive on average.

• Fixed a number of interfaces having the right-border incorrectly not matching the left border, so that text would seem to kind of overrun that some.
  • For tooltips that had to do with the old measurement issues, but for these interfaces this was just something I defined incorrectly for some reason.
  • Thanks to Igor Savin for reporting.

• Fixed a very ugly dark-greenish button color on the event windows, which really were not meant to be that color.
  • And in general made the buttons on those screens and the reward screens and so forth more stylistically consistent.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for suggesting.

• The visual-pause and visual speed up and speed down controls no longer have default keybindings. These were kind of time bombs for players, and are mostly for trailer creation.

• The entire "cosmetic" section of the system sidebar has been removed, as it was too much information and not relevant.

• The performance and cheats entries under the Extended part of the system sidebar have been removed, as has the map link under the Exploration section.
  • Again, these were contributing to that menu feeling overwhelming.

• The system menu has been split up so that the exit section is still at the bottom, but so that save/load and then settings are now at the top.

• The sidebars for units no longer expand and contract. They just always show all the stats, which is less overwhelming than having some of them hidden some of the time for no clear reason from a player perspective.

• Stats for units and structures now have two different colors associated with them. One for the left sidebar, and one for tooltips.
  • It is no guarantee to have a single color that will look right in both contexts without clashing.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for suggesting.

• The colors used in the sidebar are now more consistent per stat, rather than trying to color-code importance. Previously color was being used in a way that was inconsistent with the rest of the game as a whole, and also which was not super great for readability even in isolation on this one interface.
  • These colors are not final, but it's an improved draft for now at least.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for suggesting.

• Huge amount of progress on the tooltips for key entities (units, structures, etc) in the game, making them much more vertically-aligned, with better spacing for sections and the header of them, to make them much easier to read at-a-glance.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for the lengthy and informative discussion that led to this, although this is the preliminary version of the changes prior to his actual mockups.

• Fixed an issue where units without area of effect attacks were showing 0 as the AOE attack range and damage, when those should have simply been omitted for the sake of brevity.

• Removed the entire concept of "digging basements" for machine structures. This caused a huge amount of tooltip bloat, and some minor questionable things with how structural-engineering-helpers would spend their time, and it added no meaningful gameplay features.
  • When I first added this, you had the option of getting things faster but lower-capacity, and slower but higher-capacity, by putting jobs in different structures. That was a waste of time and so was removed before testers even got their hands on things, but the basement-digging remained.
  • Removing this makes the tooltips for structures already a lot less overwhelming.

• Sidebar headers are now actually larger in font size than sidebar content.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for suggesting.

• A ton of ui colorization and minor-style updates. It touches literally every interface in the game, and does things like: make sure that dropdowns are visible against windows they are in front of; make sure that the purple in the main hud is not quite as overwhelming, and gets tempered by little bits of blue and cyan; removes some unfortunate green that was seeping into some gradients; makes the dropdowns more visible; increases contrast between text and their background in more cases; makes the textboxes more visible in the context they now exist, where the backgrounds are darker.
  • There are still some things that I really don't like about the new version, such as the exact coloring on the dropdowns and the textboxes in particular. I'm not sure I'm wholly sold on the tooltip border in all cases, either; in some instances I feel like it needs to be stronger, and in other instances subtler.
  • Regardless, several hours of staring at this today and working on it is enough; I'll need to figure out more things with this later.

• Split the tooltips into two groups after all, and also improved the textboxes and dropdowns while I was at it.
  • The tooltips for the plated/card information has a brighter border and softer background, and the ones for other purposes has a much dimmer border and a darker background.

• Added an extra amount of margin around the edges of the plated/card tooltips, to help complete their look as distinct from other tooltips.

• Removed the passive android and mech repair that vehicles could do. This was old from before repair spiders, and I doubt anyone was using it, if anyone even noticed it. It was just cluttering the vehicle stats.
  • Also have removed agility from the vehicles who had that stat for now, as that's not actually going to be used by them for now.

• Reversed the order of the costs in the tooltip for units and structures and such, to be consistent with the build menu.
  • Thanks to Rhiwaow for reporting.

0.565 Preparing And Stunning

(Released July 4th, 2024)

• The game now detects if it is the demo build or the main game (playtest version counts as main game for these purposes).
  • The "end of demo" notice now only appears if the player is actually on the demo.
  • The main menu "wishlist" button is replaced by a "wiki" button on the non-demo builds.

• Tower Mainframes and Biological Mainframes are now immune to subnet stun, as are Contraband Scanners. There was nothing fun or interesting about those being stunned, and a whole lot of things that were frustrating.

• The following structures are no longer subject to being stunned when their subnet is attacked: slurry spiders, microbuilder mini fabs, biomulchers, bovine replicators, protein vats, hydroponic towers, compact water filters, repair spiders.
  • The following related structures are still subject to their stuns: slurry mines, full microbuilder fabs, protein canneries, water filtration towers, overdrivers and efficiency improvers, mining skimmers.
  • Having stuns mess up the core of your economy with a cascading effect is just annoying and does not add much strategy. Having stuns mess up your largest producers, so that their more vulnerable, and if you're reliant on that beyond your core production is a lot more interesting.

• Added a large amount of new framework logic to allow for relaxed spawning of mechs so that they can spawn stepping on really small buildings and fences relative to their size.
  • Basically, I need for certain things to reliably seed near a target no matter how crowded things are. This wasn't super relevant before, although it did lead to some very odd vehicle spawning from player aerospace hangars that is in one bugtracker report.
  • To be able to test this, the cheat "spawn npc unit for local authority" has been updated so that if a player has a structure selected, and they try to spawn an npc unit, it will try to be as close as possible. This allows for testing a variety of situations in a more direct way. Note that this only applies to that one specific cheat at the moment.

• There is much-improved logic for seeding things closer to targets when it crosses cell boundaries, which allows me to be sure that when something big is supposed to spawn near to a target, it is almost certain to do so.

Bugfixes

• The tooltip for the language label in settings now includes the same information that hovering over the dropdown for the language does.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• The UI tour now saves the controls popup for the last step, rather than that being the second step. This makes the tour a lot less overwhelming in general, and in general just makes more sense.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for suggesting.

• Added in some extra logic to prevent the ui tour from popping up on existing savegames that are already past turn 1.

• Fixed some funky issues with the way that subnets would form at times, where the lines would appear to cross roads even though technically the connections were valid, or a new building would link up to a node that was inexplicably far away, etc.
  • This turned out to be entirely cosmetic, but it was confusing as heck when you had large U-shaped subnets with blocking roads in the middle.

• Fixed an exception that could happen if a machine structure was rebuilt underneath an npc unit that was standing on it at the exact same instant that the npc unit died.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• Photo mode now allows you to freely move the mouse without turning the window view, unless you hold down either the left or right mouse button.
  • This allows for setting up a shot and then making further adjustments, or activating other software to take the screenshot rather than losing the position of the shot due to the mouse moving it away.
  • Additionally, when holding down the M key to adjust the position of the manual focus during photo mode, that now properly shows the mouse cursor. In recent builds that had not been working right.

• Fixed an ongoing annoyance with the TPS reports and ledger for certain kinds of resources where if they were hitting their resource cap, but that cap is very high, then they were still complaining.
  • This was most notable with elemental slurry, but it could happen with other things as well.
  • It now just treats these as neutral, since they are producing enough to stay at the very-high cap and just sitting there.
  • Thanks to teo4512 for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where vehicles coming out of the aerospace hangar in certain circumstances could reliably spawn very far away from the hangar. Now they will hug up close to the hangar in some fashion, as they should.
  • Thanks to riking28 for reporting.

0.564 Finishing The Localization Framework

(Released July 3rd, 2024)

• Editing pass has been done on the new text from yesterday's build.
  • Thanks to Kara McElligott Park for doing this!

• The critical hits text now includes the line "The color of a target is the thin line under their health bar, not the large icon over their head."
  • Thanks to Isith for suggesting. This was confusing a number of people.

Localization Framework

• There is now a setting option that allows for changing languages, for now between the original English and the test languages.
  • This all gets saved into the settings properly, and loads the external language files only as-needed.
  • Things are loaded properly in terms of the timing on loading the program, as well as when changing the dropdown value.

• The main "language table" entries are now properly read from other language files, and display "properly enough" for this point of testing Chinese and Spanish.
  • Fixed an issue where certain things that were very commonly-used, like button text, were being left as stale when changing languages.

• Added a new system where table rows with localized contents on themselves or sub-components now register themselves as targets for localization import, and there's a whole new framework around this.
  • The localization imports are now able to fully identify all of the tables in question, and they also are able to match to rows and put their general display names and descriptions in an automated fashion.
  • The setup for noticing rows that are missing a field hooked into this system is also there, which helps me self-check any issues and correct them before translators ever get involved with a given field.
  • This has been a lot more surgery than I thought it would be based on where I had things mid-day, but my original estimate for how long it would take me to do this was a week (that was pessimistic, but still), so I'm still happy this is going so quickly.

• All of the localization linkages are now in place and working, using sub-rows and swapping things out on the fly as-needed.
  • The last bit I need to handle are the things for duplicate text that is auto-linked in secondary languages, but all of the bits that involve reading in the input spreadsheets are complete.

• The way that linked localizations is handled has been shifted to be faster to read at runtime, and the proper linkages are now in place.

• If the extra localization logging setting is on, it now complains about missing rows that were not present but which were expected.

• Discovered that rows that were copied-from other rows using the xml copy_from tag were not properly pulling localization entries. There is now logic where they grab what they need to.

• At this point, all of the localization links of all sorts are self-checking and verify that they are all read in properly.
  • There are some font-sizing issues that cause display issues in Chinese, but that's a problem for later; the actual text is being read in properly, and I already have some underlying font stylesheet capabilities that I built into my custom version of TextMeshPro to handle cases like that. That can safely be handled during LQA, later.
  • Note: any testing done with the Chinese language is going to have a lot of missing text right now because of this font sizing issue that will be left for later. Testing with Spanish does not have this issue. Of course, both languages are largely gibberish at the moment since they were machine-translated for these early tests, but that's not the point for the moment.

• Fixed a bug with how building variants were storing updating their names, which made it so that switching languages mid-game was causing some wrong display of text.

• Added a new feature which allows post-validation of arbitrary rows after language changes happen.
  • This is used for the various statistics entries, which "bake" some localized elements into place for whichever language they are using at the moment.
  • Now when you swap back and forth between languages, and look at the statistics screen, it updates as expected.

Prior Release Notes

After NextFest