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

0.586

(Not Yet Released)

• Updated the scrollbars to use a slightly wider display for the black track that they are in. At 4K it was showing evenly around all sides, but at 1080p it was omitting the right-hand side. Now it shows at all resolutions, although depending on the placement of the scrollbar on the screen and what resolution you are at if it's lower than 4K, it may look somewhat uneven, which is just the nature of non-pixel-perfect visuals that are thin.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• Fixed an issue with visual artifacts appearing in certain gradients used in the new UI of the game. Turns out that the problem was the use of BC7 compression, which was a shock to me. BC3 turned out not to have the same issues, but still some striations in it. I don't trust it, and this is something that I am keeping in one single atlas, so I decided to just use the native RGBA32 format instead, which is compatible with all GPUs and will render fine.
  • It makes one texture go from 16MB in RAM to 64 MB, but this is trivial as well as being a one-time thing (it does not affect other textures), as this is a texture that is used over and over again, and has all of the pieces of the entire UI in it (text aside). So making sure that it looks really good is important.
  • The most notable change will be that there will no longer appear to be a "blocky" bit of shadow over unit portraits on the lower-left interface, but it also affects a lot of larger-scale interfaces that have smooth changes from purple to blue, or similar, over an angular direction.
  • I have wasted quite a bit of time in the last couple of weeks trying to figure out what is wrong with the gradients, and thinking that it was an artifact in the original PNGs. Turns out it was an artifact of the block-compression used by GPUs, and that the higher-quality (more bits per texel) compression somehow made it worse, rather than better, which is new to me. I strongly suspect that this will vary by machine, so I'm quite willing to expend 48 MB to just never have to worry about it again and have it look nice for everyone.

• The settings and control bindings windows now both have their buttons at the bottom properly coloring their text and having that color responding to mouseover.
  • This refers to the buttons along the footer, but not yet any in the content-area.

• The load window has been updated to a preliminary version of the new ui style, again blending from a couple of different designs from Josh Atkinson.
  • In this particular case, it blends from his handbook design for the actual line items to show here. This was the quickest way for me to experiment with getting that general style of "buttons that are actually lines between buttons" in place.

• The save game window has been updated to match the load game window style.

• Corrected the armor slot icon to not be the same as the augment slot icon, on the equipment screen.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for suggesting.

• The new version of the Unit Customization screen is now in place, pending a review by the UX designer since there were some minor elements that I deviated on. But largely this is matching his designs, which are something I really love.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for designing these!

0.585 Build And Settings Menus Partial Updates

(Released August 20th, 2024)

Note: Playtest-build only, not demo. Will be this way for a bit, until some of the UX things shake out more fully.

• Updated the minor scrolling panels from the prior build to now properly have even margins; there was a scrollbar issue that I finally figured out.

• Updated scrollbars to have visuals in the new style, although in many cases they may be mismatched with the color of the window being used.
  • There is both a blue and a purple version of them, and as I go through various windows, I'll update those to match better later.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for the new design.

• Preliminary new version of the build menu is now in place, minus the category icons.
  • The colors have been updated to match the new UI, and in general these are done in a style that is more HUD-like and less like the windows that will pop up for things like the inventory, etc. We'll see if that color style is what is kept, but given the kind of pop-in nature of this, that's what I'm going with for now.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for the actual design of other windows that I pulled this middle-ground one from.

• Fixed a bug with the costs on the build menu, where if you were short one type of cost but could afford another, then all of the costs for that one building would act as if you could not afford them.

• The settings window and control bindings window have been partially updated to the new ui style.
  • In general, more logic for "purple versus blue versus other" kinds of screens are now in place, including dropdown and input textbox variants. There are different layers to menus in the game, and different ones have slightly different color schemes but not quite so jarringly-dramatically as was previously the case.

0.584 Small Popups And Arrow Tooltips

(Released August 18th, 2024)

Note: Playtest-build only, not demo. Will be this way for a bit, until some of the UX things shake out more fully.

• All of the various "small window popups" are now converted into the new ui style.
  • They're drastically more attractive. Still some possible revisions incoming for them, because I had to add some pieces onto the original designs by Josh, and I'm not super excited about the bits I added.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for designing the core of this.

• Parts of the game that referred to the left sidebar now refer to the bottom-left stats panel.

• The way that the arrow indicators point to things now use new visuals for the font and the panels, although not for the arrows themselves.
  • Overall this sizing and such is better, and based on some things that Josh had designed, but we'll have to see if this is really ideal or not after a review. This was me kind of tiptoeing into tooltips.

• Fixed a regression from a few builds ago where the plus/minus values next to resources on turn-changes were appearing way lower than they should have.
  • Thanks to Mintdragon for reporting.

• Added in code which allows me to efficiently and cross-language bold just the first paragraph of a specific set of text. This is very useful for the new style of tooltips, which use bold for their first paragraph for added hierarchy.

• The arrow tooltips are now updated to the new style, pending review by the UX designer.
  • These include a lot of the new elements from the tooltips, but they are simpler and flatter than the average new tooltip will be. So this isn't really a full picture of what the new tooltips will look like.
  • These do have adjusted colors, and a bold first paragraph, and a new use of transparency and blue mixed with purple, etc. They also have a revised font, and revised spacing between paragraphs.
  • What they lack is some of the added structure that things like the resources tooltips, or unit tooltips, will have. But this was a good test-bed for experimenting with this.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for the design that I adapted into these. You'll see his actual designs coming up very soon on the more-complex tooltips.

0.583 Ability Bar

(Released August 17th, 2024)

Note: Playtest-build only, not demo. Will be this way for a bit, until some of the UX things shake out more fully.

• The names of some of the machine structures have been simplified a bit. "Massive Plot A" and B are now just "Massive Structure" and similar.

• The new version of the ability bar is now in place in its most basic form.
  • It is now 72% of the prior size, and no longer has text under each icon.
  • Additionally, the way that locked cells and empty cells are rendered is much different, and in line with the rest of the game.
  • The way that available abilities are drawn is kind of half between the old style, and then converted into the new format of the UI as well.
    • They still have animated backgrounds, but no longer animated borders. They have borders that match the color of their background more, and the numeral text is the now-proper font and also is adjusted in color to match the background. Overall these retain a lot of the character of the prior version, but they look more like they actually belong in this UI.
  • Disabled abilities (ones that are unlocked but not performable right now) are rendered even more differently than before. They look substantially more grayed-out, and their colors are barely visible now. They also are easier to see the black icon because of this.
    • The contrast between available-now and disabled/empty/locked abilities is fairly dramatic, which is very much by design. The idea is to make it so that it's a lot less overwhelming to see what your current options are.
  • Finally, for abilities that have some sort of targeting mode that needs highlighting, this still uses the border edge like before, but just a bit smaller and less obtrusive. With the disabled abilities being darker, this stands out more in a very nice way. This has a lot of similarity to the new hacking interface, so there are some general throughlines with all of this.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for the initial designs here, which I've then hybridized to a huge degree.

• The icons of disabled abilities are now a lot more visible than they used to be, while still being much-more-clearly-disabled than they used to be, as well.
  • Thanks to Andyman119 for the suggestion.

• The ability bar changes are now finished.
  • When there is not enough room for it to fit horizontally, it now condenses to a two-row view, and then if that's still not enough, then to a three-row view.
  • This maintains compatibility with the Steam Deck in general, but then also maintains compatibility with people choosing to scale up various parts of the ui on various screen resolutions.

• The "ability options list" for things like item usage now is much wider, and shows directly above the ability bar.
  • If this is open, then the ability it is open for shows with the selection animation around it, and that ability also stops drawing a tooltip (to not obscure this new popup that just appeared).

• Fixed a regression from July 2 that was causing player mechs with their shields up to flicker their shields on and off, and largely not actually have their shields properly on at all.

• Fixed a regression in yesterday's build that would cause an exception whenever selecting network relays or similar, which are not in a subnet. It was erroring trying to show the subnet, and now instead it shows the network name.
  • Thanks to Mike Dull for reporting.

• Fixed a regression in the prior build that was causing yet another softlock during the UI tour, this time with the ability bar.
  • Also improved the wording about the "unit stats sidebar" to refer to the "unit stats panel" and have its arrow positioned better now, too.
  • Thanks to Miikka Ryökäs for reporting.

0.582 Unit Stats Corner

(Released August 16th, 2024)

Note: Playtest-build only, not demo. Will be this way for a bit, until some of the UX things shake out more fully.

• Fixed a bug from Saturday where the build button was accidentally removed from over by the radial menu.
  • Thanks to Rebecca Labfiend for reporting.

• Fixed a not-new softlock where if you entered the UI tour on an existing savegame at a point where there did not happen to be any toast notifications, you'd just be blocked.

• Fixed a regression from last build where the UI tour would fail and throw an exception at the point where it is meant to indicate the controls.

• The secondary display of the AP and the Mental Energy that was on top of the ability bar has been removed; that's already on the radial menu, and the ability bar is in for some changes soon, anyway.

• The bulk of the surgery to make tooltips work in the new fashion is now done.
  • Previously, the only thing that a tooltip target could do was return a bunch of rich text markup to fill a flat panel.
  • Now, tooltip targets can directly call to specialized tooltip windows that can be very bespoke to the specific tooltip, allowing for much more advanced formatting for key tooltips that need it.
  • The amount of carnage from this is very intense in the codebase, so it is expected that there will be unusual bugs coming up soon. In particular, things to look out for:
    • Missing tooltips anywhere in the game.
    • Tooltips that used to be nicely to the side of what you were looking at, but now get right on top of your mouse cursor.
    • New exceptions that pop up related to drawing specific tooltips.
    • Tooltips that are unpleasantly narrow or have other formatting issues.

• The customize loadout screen has been updated with more vertical spacing between the various elements, and then in particular with more spacing between the sections.
  • This screen still has a lot of further work needed to bring it up to the new spec, but this is part of it.

• There are now background images for all of the buildings on their sidebar, which also then show their large colored icon in a glowy fashion.
  • This makes it exceedingly obvious when you have selected a building, and which kind is selected. In general, this is not super high priority or something that was confusing anyone that I am aware of, so you might wonder why I'm bothering.
  • I suspect this will help in a minor way for at least some people, but then in a larger sense, the current UX redesign of the sidebar that is planned is built around there being some sort of image there, and so having this in place first keeps there from being a hole in the UI when buildings are selected in the upcoming revised sidebar UX.

• Massive update to the way that selected units and structures are shown.
  • They are now drawn in the bottom-left corner, rather than along the left side of the window. Additionally, they have some added bits of information on them, like the security clearance.
  • Tooltips that draw in the lower left corner now draw above these, which solves some very ugly tooltip-overlap issues that were very messy before.
  • When you are in the mode where you're editing the equipment on a unit or a unit type, it still draws the left-hand thin sidebar style.
  • This is meant to be paired with an update to how the ability bar itself is rendered, to bring that over to the left and make it connect up nicely with this new interface, along with shrinking down the ability bar a bit. However, that part is not done yet, and the ability bar looks the same as before for now.
  • Big thanks to Josh Atkinson for designing this, as it already makes a big difference in feel.

0.581 Turn-Change Performance

(Released August 14th, 2024)

Note: Playtest-build only, not demo. Will be this way for a bit, until some of the UX things shake out more fully.

• Fixed a regression that caused the cheats menu to stop working in the prior build.

• Shrank to radial lens icons ever so slightly on the radial menu, to make them feel less cramped.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for suggesting.

• Changed the default keybindings for the lenses, as two of them had the same binding and behaved oddly when this was the case.
  • Scavenging sites and structures both have had their defaults changed.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for reporting.

• Drastically improved the performance of several parts of the game, but most notably the turn-change when there were a lot of units.
  • Essentially, there was one overarching bottleneck for checking if there were new units to collide against, and it was having a terrible impact on performance even when there were no units to check against. This has to do with the way that the ConcurrentDictionary class that is part of C# works.
  • What I've done is made some alterations to that collection, and then also made a wrapper class, so that for my purposes in the majority-case situation (there is nothing in there) it is able to take a lot less time. On my machine, this drops something that took about 1200ms down to 50ms. On some other end-user machines, this was taking multiple seconds, and it's expected that their savings in time would be even greater.
  • Thanks to Athena for the report.

• Added in some further optimizations related to overhead when units are indicating their wish to move, and some others related to mapgen. These give similar-style speed boosts to the other improvement I've made in this build, but the results are not nearly so dramatic in any current actual use-cases of the game.
  • That said, they should prevent slowness that might have crept in in some other use cases in the future, so it's nice to have those just gone now.

• The buttons on the upper right-hand menu are now more attractive, most specifically when hovered, but in general as well.
  • I had not fully implemented Josh Atkinson's original design, due to a technical issue, but that's now solved.

• A broad bit of code surgery is now in place, allowing for tooltips to be called in a new way, where they have more self-determination on how they draw, separate from simple rich text markup.
  • This is being handled through two new intermediary data tables for maximum flexibility, and also for minimally-invasive code changes, although we'll see how that turns out.
  • There are overall 591 distinct tooltip calls in the codebase that... at least mostly should be converted over, and many of which involve some other complicated sub-options. For the moment, I've converted 27 of the simpler ones over as a test case. These are the tooltips with arrow indicators next to them, and so far so good with that. 572 to go...

• Successfully re-routed all of the "damage you will do" tooltip logic from where it previously existed into a new spot that can be converted into a new format.
  • I am not super in love with this code, but it's by far the least-destructive method to extract this from all of the other contextual tooltips that can happen when you take an action, without spending days trying to untangle their contexts and then months fixing the errors there.
  • This specific code just grabs the specific cases that are different, and routes them somewhere else, which for the moment looks the same, but will shift a different way soon.
  • Overall I think I will be able to avoid having to update the bulk of the tooltip calls in the game, and instead will be able to just pull out the specific cases that are actually unusual, which are numerically in the minority (buildings, units, resources, attack-plan, and probably some other things like abilities. But NOT so very many other things, so that's the difference).

• Added another fix that should now stop the exception on going to customize other units after customizing a first one.
  • Thanks to Athena for the report.

0.580 Task Stack

(Released August 12th, 2024)

Note: Playtest-build only, not demo. Will be this way for a bit, until some of the UX things shake out more fully.

• The Task Stack has been converted to the new UI style, designed by Josh Atkinson.
  • The coloring on some of this might need another pass, but the general style of this being individual bars per entry, and using the colors on the backgrounds rather than one the text, is an improvement already.

• The tutorial portions of the prologue, and very early chapter one, have been updated to work with the revised Task Stack.
  • This means that, among other things, there is no longer a header for them in a checklist-y fashion anymore. But also, entries you already completed are no longer shown once you complete them, which is consistent with the rest of the game.

• The secondary "new handbook entries are available" message on the task stack is no longer ever shown. It was unlike a lot of the other task stack contents, and was consistently distracting and annoying whenever it showed up. The bubble number for new handbook entries is sufficient in this area.

• The "dire warnings" window that could pop up on the left side of the screen if you were about to die, or had failed a timeline, or had too much mental strain, is now gone.
  • Instead, those same messages are now part of the task stack, and they use a much brighter and angrier glow than even the attack warnings. This particular glow is "crisis red," and is meant to get you dealing with these problems before you do anything else.
  • Unifying these things into the task stack is just good sense at this point, but it also simplifies the positioning of some other ui elements.

• Updates to the general color palette for a variety of windows, to make them more blue than was the case in the prior version, and also to make the header fonts a bit more appropriately sized, even if they aren't perfect just yet. All of these bits are just some "roughing in."

0.579 HUD Style

(Released August 11th, 2024)

Note: Playtest-build only, not demo. Will be this way for a bit, until some of the UX things shake out more fully.

• The radial menu has been updated to the new style, designed by Josh Atkinson.
  • In general, this is more attractive and thematic, but it's not all that much more clear than the prior versions. This wasn't a particularly unclear area. But it is a lot fancier now in terms of how the details of this behave.
  • The toast section has not been updated yet, and so clashes.

• The upper left header menu has been updated to the new style, designed by Josh Atkinson.
  • This again is not all that much more clear, because clarity wasn't a problem here. However, it's a lot more attractive, and the readability has been improved some by having each number in a box, and right-aligned within that box. It's also a lot more attractive.
  • The technology portion of the upper left header menu has not been updated yet, and so clashes

• The upper right header menu has been updated to the new style, designed by Josh Atkinson.
  • This makes the separation between icons a lot more clear, and also makes the forces button a lot more of a focal point, as well as more clear in a tri-state sort of fashion. It also makes numbers for the handbook and buildings-with-problems vastly more clear at a glance.
  • This was a mix of making things more clear and more attractive, as this one had some clarity issues that the other two interfaces noted above did not.
  • The task stack portion of this ui has not been updated yet, and so clashes.

• The background styling of a ton of interfaces all throughout the game have been partially updated.
  • This is very much an incomplete update on those windows, and so there are all sorts of alignment issues, sizing and styling issues, and some general blandness in many cases since the full extra pieces of those designs are not in place yet. And there are still bits of the old designs, too.
  • Please don't worry about the colors and such on these, as this has not yet gotten much of a pass at all. This is very very partial along the path to getting these other interfaces into the new style.

0.578 Out With Color Matching

(Released August 8th, 2024)

Note: Playtest-build only, not demo. Will be this way for a bit, until some of the UX things shake out more fully.

• All of the "plated/keyshot/tooltip" icons have been updated to no longer have gaps in their corners. I was setting them to be rounded in general, but now there are many cases where the revisions to the UI need sharp edges, and then a further clipping mask is used on top of them. So all of the sharp corners have been restored.

• The "damage types" that were color-based are now removed from the game.
  • These were recently scaled back to an extent, and on further reflection and discussion, basically they just fail on every metric.
    • For new players, they were overwhelming (sometimes), and seemed to suggest that the game was going to be a very shallow one (other times).
    • For advanced players, they were indeed very simple, not requiring a lot of thought, but they did have an element of tedium in order to play "optimally."
  • In general, feats and status effects and other passives attached to weapons and units don't come with any of these downsides. The only current example of this is the Taser that the Technicians get, but there will be a lot more of them.
  • Thanks to a lot of folks for the discussion on this, including Abhishek Chaudry for a really detailed dissection of the pros and cons.

• The water investigation also will now block you if you have not yet done the weapons and armor project yet.
  • This prevents people who take the cannery route from accidentally skipping the weapons and armor project.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

Bugfixes

• Fixed several pieces of debug logging which was left in people's logs in the last few versions.
  • Thanks to golsutangen for reporting.

• Added some hardening to the equipment-change and ability-change fields on the loadout screen, since both seemed to have some exceptions that people could run into after making choices on one unit and then switching types.
  • I'm not certain that this will fix the reports, so please reopen if they do still occur.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz, Fluffiest, golsutangen, Mintdragon, Pingcode, and glencoe2004 for reporting.

• Fixed the keybind for load game being labeled as save game.
  • Thanks to Gabarn for reporting.

• The game will no longer spam exceptions if one of your units is lacking move-range for whatever reason.
  • It may be a legitimate situations, such as it has been hacked to have its movement stunned for a certain amount of time, and then you also captured it.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• Fixed several threading errors that were possible if a lockdown had just ended and you were very unlucky.
  • Thanks to Pingcode for reporting.

• The Taser now properly registers itself as a hostile action, making it so that things like shooting the rebel observer or the investigators progresses the tutorial.
  • That said, there are a bunch of other cases this would also fix.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz and Fluffiest for reporting.

• Fixed a regression in yesterday's build that broke the ui tour, thus causing it to be a softlock state.
  • Thanks to A Devil Chicken and Cimbri for reporting.

0.577 Visual Upgrades

(Released August 8th, 2024)

Note: this also went out only to the playtest build, and not the demo build. There are now some more substantial additions planned before the next demo build, so it may be a few weeks at this point. A bit of a timer reset there.

• Huge amount of artwork done, but not yet visible in the game, related to four upcoming areas for interacting with the game.
  • All of these also have custom code associated with them, which helps to manage and generate them, and only two of these four are ones you can experience so far in this new build.
  • This is what has taken the bulk of the time in the long period since the last release, though, so I figured it was worth sharing what has been going on. For those in the playtest group following along in the spoilers channel, they've been seeing screenshots of the progress of this, and have been weighing in on various options, etc.

• The definitions of the skyboxes has been moved out of the main game, and into external asset bundles.
  • This is easier for me to manage, and I needed to add a few new ones. Also, this is more modder-friendly, in the future.

• Extended the bloom logic so that for any camera where the game uses bloom, it now properly handles the mip weights at different resolutions to give the same general visual effect per resolution.
  • That was something I had previously put in place for one of the bloom effect locations when we discovered that footage taken at 4K resolution was twice as glowy. But now this applies to the new scenes, and is just a fundamental part of our bloom tool.

• When hacking, your targeting cursor now expands outwards vastly faster when you're moving between squares. It was frustratingly slow, previously.

• The hacking interface has been remade in 3D, so that it's a lot more atmospheric and attractive, and also looks a lot less overwhelming in general due to not being acute-menu-itis on viewing it.
  • As part of this, the number of columns has also been decreased a bit, and the number of rows has been increased slightly. This leads to a slightly smaller board, which feels better and also is better balanced with enemy movement speeds.
  • Also as part of this, there is now a "notch" at the edge of the bottom few rows (they are missing their outermost cells on the left and the right), which is both a general intentional visual affectation, and also something that ensures that this fits on 4:3 aspect ratio screens.

• When you visit "the place," it is a completely different screen now.
  • There are actually three screens in progress for this, and normally this is not the screen that would show here. However, it was the most interesting one to show there in the short term.
  • Please bear in mind that the "pods" do not show varied humans shapes in them, or varied patterns of the pods, quite yet. That's coming, along with the other two screens of this sort.
  • Photo mode works in this mode, as well as in the new hacking interface, and it allows for some very interesting footage capture.

• The "network sidebar stats window" that would show up on the right-hand side of the screen when a building was selected is no longer relevant, and has been removed.

• The microbuilders resource now has a steel-gray sort of color to itself, rather than red, as the red was making folks think it was an error warning.
  • Thanks to Mintdragon and others for suggesting.

• A revised icon is now used for the "max AP" that units have, since the other was super confusing. This new one is more in line with board game conventions.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for suggesting a change from the prior one.

• Places that previously used the abbreviation "AP" and then showed the amount of AP now use the AP icon instead, so that it's consistent throughout the UI.

• The entire left sidebar has been completely reworked visually, in terms of the thing that you see when a building, unit, flag, or similar is selected.
  • This is a design by Josh Atkinson, the Hooded Horse UX designer helping rework the UI in general. This is an initial litmus test to make sure that all of the designs he's doing are actually able to translate into unity and my UI framework on top of that properly. Took a lot of work, but it does, and looks correct at 1080p and up, and very-close (some lines that disappear) at 720p with default ui scaling. Such is the nature of thin lines, so that's just kind of par. It still looks great a 720p.
  • You may notice that there are now three distinct UI styles in the game, representing different levels of updated-ness. This will be resolved over the next month or two. This first UI rework took a solid 10 hours for me to get working, just because I had to try lots of different approaches to get the thin lines working well on all the various screen resolutions, etc. Now that I have a pattern I can follow, I should be able to do future ones way faster.

0.576 Equipment Flexibility

(Released July 29th, 2024)

Note: this also went out only to the playtest build, and not the demo build. Next demo build sometime this week probably, but not quite yet.

• The "Format Optimization" augment can no longer be equipped on Bulk Androids. It was pointless on those.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz and Lukas for reporting.

• Feats can now be added to units from equipment. This is something I'd been planning to add for a while, but just never got around to it until now.

Technician's Taser

• Technicians have a new Taser feat, which is part of their unit class and pairs with any weapons they happen to be using.
  • If a target human's health is lower than this attacker's Engineering Skill, the target will be removed from battle.
  • If not, then the human will be shocked and their attacks will be weaker over the next few turns.
  • So, starting in the initial fight, if you take down the health of the squads somewhat, you can incapacitate the remainder nonlethally. Of course, taking down the squads somewhat does mean that you're killing some of them, so this is not a full nonlethal option for actual combatants.
  • More importantly, this is a form of light damage mitigation. Essentially you can throw a 15% attack power debuff on any human target for two turns, and have those stack, for the cost of one technician's attack. That's not super cheap, but it's quite effective in the right circumstances.
  • This also finally provides a nonlethal way to take out confused gang members and the ambushed corporal, etc.

Clarity

• Spindletroopers, and any other silhouette-style robotic enemies, are now drawn bone-white to set them apart from the humans.

• A variety of stats have been changed so that they no longer show in circumstances where it does not matter:
  • First of all, a bunch that don't ever matter when you're looking at NPC units that don't belong to you. This was the largest area of clutter.
  • Secondly, a few things don't need to show when they are exceedingly low (like when contraband scanning is reduced to 1 by the stance of the enemy, it should just not show because it is actually off).
  • And thirdly, a few things are percentage-based and don't need to show if it's a value less than 100 (specifically, the area damage of units. If it's fully 100%, we don't need to be told this.
  • Thanks to Hawk_v3 for the report that led to this.

• The various key slots on units in the equipment screen now show the name of a basic weapon where there was previously just blankness, since almost all of the units come with a basic weapon.
  • Thus you can see that Raven uses "Fists," while Sledge uses "Basic Grenade."
  • Thanks to Pingcode for suggesting.

Player Unit Stats

• Player units no longer have variable stats. That led to a lot of situations where the same-looking unit on your side was slightly different, and trying to choose the optimal of your units for certain edge cases was a real waste of time.
  • Thanks to Fluffiest and Mintdragon for suggesting.

• Notable vehicle balance shifts:
  • Bastion HP is about 100 higher.
  • Troopship attack is about 50% higher, and health is a bit lower, and scavenging skill and engineering skills are drastically reduced.
  • Mindport HP drastically reduced, as it was way higher than other vehicles, and its attack power is about 75% higher, and its scavenging skill is a lot lower.

• All of the units of the player have gotten a balance pass.
  • Most of it just reinforces what they already were, but minus the stat ranges.
  • For some of the more advanced mechs, it gives them proper attack strengths, since those had never been set up, as they are only available through cheats in the game.
  • For Sledge, the AOE of its attack is now 12 rather than the old 6-8 it used to be, so that's a lot more useful.
  • Harbinger is a lot less intimidating, as its methods are indirect and the spooky appearance alone doesn't fit compared to a terrifying Predator that's just standing there.
  • Some of the agility android classes were made a bit more consistent.

Possible Stats Report Vs Current

• For all player units, it now calculates what the maximum possible values are for each stat if you configured that unit to maximize that stat with the equipment available to them at the moment.
  • In the units tab of the inventory screen, you can now see a sorted list by the current values or by the best possible values, for things like deterrence, strength, etc.
  • This allows players to quickly discover units that could be configured to be very deterrent, or very strong, or whatever else it is they need.
  • Thanks to Abhishek Chaudry for suggesting something along these lines.

• Added three new sets of sorts/filters to the unit tab of the inventory screen: best cognition, best hacking skill, and best drone quality.
  • I had completely missed that these were not in there, and cognition in particular is a big one, since a lot of missions in dangerous territory require high cognition.
  • Paired with the "best possible" compared to "best current" options, this allows players to quickly discover that PMC Impostors can outclass Technicians on intelligence, and of course the player probably knows that is a highly-stealthy unit able to go where technicians cannot.
  • Thanks to Abhishek Chaudry for reporting.

Color Bonuses

• The specific colors of attack type are no longer limited based on weapon type.
  • They're instead available to be selected by any of your units at any time.
  • I had been considering taking out the attack colors entirely, but decided to do something intermediate instead.

• Changing equipment on units, and also setting the attack color on units, is now something that happen instantly and then has a cooldown afterwards where it can't be changed again.
  • This is simpler for a variety of reasons, but it also allows players to enter an unknown combat situation, see what the enemies are like, and then adapt themselves to best fight the foe they are now seeing.
    • This gets rid of any sort of memory games, where players need to remember what is coming and configure themselves and then return.
  • What it still keeps players from doing is constantly changing their equipment around (since the interval of possible change is the same as before), and thus it takes away from painful micro that could happen.
  • Another new and interesting aspect, however, is that the first units you see in a combat may not be the only units that you see, and the color types may not entirely match forever on this.
    • So do you make all of your units match the types you initially see, or do you avoid changing one or two of your units in order to have those in reserve if more enemy unit types show up during this combat?
  • I am also pleased that this inherently rewards bringing a diverse array of units to an unfamiliar fight that is dangerous, since the more types you have, the more you can hold things in reserve.
  • Thanks to Hawk_v3 for the color discussion in particular, and Destructively (Half) Phased and Kenken244 for bringing back up the cooldown idea.

0.575 Resource Colors

(Released July 29th, 2024)

Note: this also went out only to the playtest build, and not the demo build. Next demo build sometime this week probably, but not quite yet.

• Replaced all of the double-spaces after sentences in the game with single spaces.

• Clarified the Mineral Scrounger so that it is clear that where it is placed does not matter for what resources you get.
  • Thanks to Mintdragon for reporting.

• 403 more icons sourced and set up for the game, for a variety of the new content that is coming up shortly. This about two and a half times the size of one of my normal batches of these, so it took some substantial hours.

• Replaced the furniture icon with a nicer one that is more clear, and which also doesn't look misaligned in the tooltips.

• All of the various resources in the game now have colors for their icons.
  • This makes them easier to recognize, and makes the inventory screen a bit less of a stun-lock when you open it and it's a ton of things there.
  • Thanks to Levily, ainz ooal gown, Solar Sausage, WingedKagouti, Cblln, teo4512, SciencePenguin, and Slayer for suggesting.

• The icons for Neodymium and Wealth have been scaled down slightly to be consistent in size with the rest of the resource icons.

• The colors for the resource icons are now used consistently throughout the UI where there are questions of how much something costs.
  • The text color for the resource is still colored whatever it was before (usually one thing if you can afford it, and another if you cannot afford it), but the icon color for the resource is consistent with the resource itself to make things easier to see at a glance.
    • If I missed any spots, please let me know.
    • That said, for the usages of the icon in places where it's part of a "hey, something was unlocked" message, or part of a "per turn X is consumed per y at this job," those do not use those colors, by design (for now).

• The icon for the cost of items-to-be-built are now drawn to the left of the cost, rather than to the left of the text name of the cost.
  • Thanks to GC13 for suggesting.

• The contraband scanner icon has also been scaled down a bit, so that again it lines up with the other icons.

• The color of the numbers next to job/structure stats are now all correct, rather than certain kinds of them being white at all times.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• The icons of stats in tooltips are now shown next to the numbers of the stats, rather than next to the name of the stats.
  • This applies to structures, units, etc. If I missed anything, please let me know.

• If a stat in a tooltip is long enough to word wrap, it will now be at the same offset as the rest of the text, rather than wrapping over to intersect with the icons and numbers. This still looks cramped a bit, but it doesn't look outright wrong.
  • It is possible that somewhere in the tooltips, after a section of two columns like this, that something will have a wrong indent to match the second column of the text columns above it. If anyone sees this, please do let me know.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• Initial set of 5 new resources for some of the mental things related to "the place," which will feed back into hacking.
  • Figuring out exactly how to divide this up, and what sort of iconography to use, was surprisingly time-consuming today, but I'm pleased with the result.
  • In order to finish the proper costs for some of the hacking stuff beyond the first, I needed to get these in place so that they could be used that way.

0.574 Firewalls

(Released July 28th, 2024)

Note: this also went out only to the playtest build, and not the demo build. Lots of fixes, and so it should be closer to ready for the demo branch sometime soon. Early next week perhaps.

• The hacking interface no longer shows the amount of AP your hacker has, as that won't be used.

• The lines of fire that would automatically form between consciousness shards when hacking no longer happen.
  • They were often unwelcome, and/or confusing.

• There is a new Firewall ability, which allows you to create the lines of fire between two more more consciousness shards.
  • However, two critical differences compared to prior implementations of this:
    • First of all, it does not consume any of your shards. This is usually a very good thing, but could be a bad thing if a daemon is about to eat one of them and do something bad out of it.
    • Secondly, this now costs one mental energy to do. So it's something to be done more sparingly of course, and that's the cost now rather than it consuming the shards, which was too steep a cost, I think.

• There is now an indicator that stretches out of the consciousness shard that is going to do the move, when you're going to move in the hacking interface.
  • This makes it much more clear what is going to happen, especially when you have a lot of shards in a small area.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for suggesting.

• Editing pass has been done on the new text from the builds of the last month.
  • Thanks to Kara McElligott Park for doing this!

• Adjusted dropdowns to be more attractive and less overwhelmingly purple, and scrollbars to no longer do the flickering animation, and textbox borders to be more subtle and less rainbow.
  • These all still need work, but this is a step better.

0.573 Point To Point Relays

(Released July 28th, 2024)

Note: this also went out only to the playtest build, and not the demo build. Lots of fixes, and so it should be closer to ready for the demo branch sometime soon. Early next week perhaps.

Balance

• The distance restrictions for "large mines" are now actually split to be separate for the two kinds of skimmers and then the slurry mines.
  • This essentially does make it much easier to get both kinds of mines at once, without any extra deterrence requirements, and that's okay. The extra hassle for these is not worth it for the player otherwise -- it's annoying without much purpose -- and adding in complexity to the deterrence stacking is not something I want to do if I can avoid it.
  • Thanks to Wylker for initially raising this issue.

• Dramatically reduced the key support job cap -- this affects repair spiders, contraband jammers, scanners and network range extenders.
  • For all of these except perhaps contraband jammers, you don't need anywhere near what the prior cap was. For the network range extenders in particular, maybe you DID need that, but that wasn't quite what I was going for with the networks.

• Contraband jammers have had their individual ranges increased from 16 to 30, making them consistent with scanners.

• Dramatically reduced the "subnet booster job cap" from the absurd levels it was at.
  • You couldn't even use all of those, it was way too many of them.

• A new "Point to Point Microwave" tower has been added to the game, and is unlocked at the same time that your normal network relays are.
  • This provides networking anywhere on the map, allowing a giant gap between your main network and this. But then other network relays can chain off of the new one.
  • You only start with two of these, but the new Heavy Support Job Cap allows you to get more.
  • In general, the idea here is for players to be able to get where they need to on the map, without having the sense that their network entirely coats the entire map.

Rank 2 Cities / Chapter 2 Start Improvements

• The game now explains the more advanced city-starts as being "rank 2" cities, for the sake of wording clarity.
  • And this opens up the possibility that I can add further ranks, which could be useful for jump-starting certain later timelines.

• When you start a rank 2 city, it now properly explains the already-allocated slurry spiders and the passive income and resource stockpiles, etc.
  • These features were added in the prior build, but not really explained.

• On rank 2 cities and above, it has you build the network tower rather than a "private bunker."

• Rank 2 cities now start with the full set of weapons and armor you would normally steal during chapter one, and those StreetSense events no longer happen in chapter 2 onwards.
  • No sense making people do this repeatedly.

• Optimized microbuilder income is now also provided as part of rank 2 cities, so that players can't forget to get that started, or forget to use the optimizers on them, and thus run into shortages while setting up the rest of their stuff.

• When starting in chapter two, you now get the mining unlocks immediately, and the officer's sigil.
  • If you managed to progress naturally to chapter two without getting the mining unlocks, it also unlocks those for you that way, as well.

• The Mindport is now unlocked as soon as you are in chapter two, rather than needing to do a contemplation for it.

• The contemplation for getting geothermal power now works properly in chapter two. Previously it would not show up if you had not gone through chapter one first.

• In rank 2 cities and upwards, you now get an extra 160k energy, and it treats 7 of your 8 wind power plants as if they are already built.
  • This actually is a boost of about 20k energy compared to coming here through chapter one, but it hardly matters since geothermal is likely to be a priority in general, and that dwarfs this amount.

• In rank 2 cities, the territory control options for getting furniture and daily necc are both now provided.
  • This is the final thing that was missing, and a player in a fresh chapter 2 start can now get all the way to intelligence class 3, and unlock all the things.

Fixes

• There are now actual sound effects and particle effects when using command mode to place androids, mechs, and vehicles. Previously it only had any for bulk androids, which was an oversight.
  • Thanks to Pingcode for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where the build mode toggle was not working properly in the VR environment.
  • Thanks to Half Phased for reporting.

• The build mode sidebar has been updated for the "new place," and no longer shows stuff from the main game inside it.
  • In general it also has things set up for when I'm ready to start adding things you can build in the new place, which I am not quite yet.

• Fixed a bug with the bulk android launchers that was making their tooltip always claim they were out of network range, even when they were perfectly in range.
  • Thanks to Pingcode for reporting.

• Fixed a regression where certain things were not unlocking on the first turn, thus softlocking the game.
  • Essentially, the logic I put in place was appropriate for when you start fresh on chapter two, but it bricked both the prologue and chapter one's first turn.
  • Thanks to Fluffiest for reporting.

0.572 Rank 2 Cities

(Released July 27th, 2024)

Note: this also went out only to the playtest build, and not the demo build. Lots of fixes, and so it should be closer to ready for the demo branch sometime soon. Early next week perhaps.

• Network towers and scanners now provide cutting through the fog of war equal to their full detection-of-units distance. It was confusing having it be less.
  • Thanks to Mintdragon and Kenken244 for suggesting.

• The "end of demo" message now shows up when demo players reach chapter two, rather than the prior location it showed up.

• The right header bar now shows while more windows are open, but in an abbreviated fashion.
  • Additionally, clicking between them via their icons now properly closes the other windows and opens the new one.
  • Someone asked for this, and I can't for the life of me figure out who now. Apologies.

• You can now right-click the icon for the "new place" to rename that place at will.

• Some more improvements have been made to not include certain sub-parts of the header windows when you are in the hacking environment.

• When you're in the hacking interface, if you hit the escape key to exit, or click the little X in the upper right corner, it now asks you if you're sure (unless all your shards are already gone). This prevents accidental abandonment of hacking sessions.
  • Thanks to Usama for suggesting.

• Added some general under-the-hood frameworks to make flat stat additions or subtractions possible from badges and NPC stances.

• Added a new "Local Intimidation" stance that you can now assign to your bulk squads.
  • This is like "deter and defend," except that instead of doubling the range of the defender, it reduces their attack range to 75% of normal, and gives them +200 intimidation.
  • If you need less coverage, but more deterrence, then this is a strong option now.
  • For Bulk Nickelbots with the best equipment for intimidation at the end of chapter one, their natural deterrence is 3833, give or take a bit per squad. Switching them to the new stance makes that 6088 from a single squad of Nickelbots, instead.
  • This can be quite useful with a variety of configurations for a variety of unit types.

• Another really huge update to how the tooltips work, as well as tooltip-like panels.
  • Essentially, now that they fade in, they have to have some criteria to fade in over. Previously, that was set to be "when the text is different from the last text you were going to draw." For maybe 90% of cases, that was fine.
  • But, when something has a change in it ever second, it would cause the tooltip to blink in and out every second because the text was different.
  • Similarly, when showing the extended version of a tooltip, it would blink between the smaller and larger version since the text was different.
  • When new items were being added to a list, such as with the note log in the bottom of the screen, it would blink in and out every time there was something new.
  • If you moved the cursor between two different units that happened to have the same text, it would NOT blink, which was confusing because it seemed to think they were the same thing (for example, moving between two diplomats, the cursor by the mouse would just slide across).
  • The solution to all of the above was to have a new tooltip ID, which identifies "what is the thing we're talking about," and to only change (and always change) if that "thing we're talking about" is different.
    • For the chat log, for example, the "thing we're talking about" is the chat log itself, so it never blinks unless it was not visible at all and is becoming visible. There is a slight stutter of it showing a bit too long for its sizing when a new line item is added, but that's different.
    • For things like hovering over units, it only changes the text if the unit is different, and then always changes it, even if the text is the same.
    • And then for brief/longer versions of things, those now work as you would expect.
    • And finally, for things like the turn tooltip that shows a count of how many seconds you've been playing, it no longer blinks in and out every second, which previously had made that tooltip and ones like it impossible to read.

Starting In Chapter Two

• If you're not on the demo version of the game, you can now skip straight to chapter two, and it unlocks all the things it should be unlocking for you, near as I can tell.
  • It needs to start you with a project to get to intelligence class 3, but that's not ready yet either.
  • Side note: I am aware that demo players can simply change some plain-text xml to jump themselves straight to chapter two. This is not a concern, as the content that would be "actual game only" simply won't be there in the demo. So if demo players choose to do that, that's not an issue.

• When skipping straight to chapter two, or later when starting a new timeline, the game now does some things as a convenience for you.
  • First of all, it pretends like you've already built the bulk of your slurry spiders and biomulchers, and then just gives you the equivalent of passive income from those.
    • You therefore don't have to build or defend these, but that's not super interesting to begin with by this stage of the game. It also presumes that you were optimally boosting them, and gives you that amount, while subtracting 3 of the related boosters.
  • Secondly, for some of the basic storages, like construction and rare earth metals, it assumes that you had built some of those. It reduces the cap of those, and then just gives you the storage for free, without you having to construct these. These would be built every time, in a very annoying fashion, so skipping that makes sense.
  • Third, it gives you a bunch of a variety of resources, presuming that those would have been gathered over the equivalent of chapter one. Mostly things like microbuilders, but also some scandium and alumina and similar.
    • This is enough for you to quickly get started, but not enough to give you an advantage for having skipped.
  • For certain other things that are lower-cap (microbuilder mini fabs) or not always something you will do (water, meat, etc), it leaves those for you to build. You have all the techs and such so that you can quickly build what you need, but it doesn't skip these.
    • For the buildings it is skipping, those are ones that would take a really large amount of clicking (we're talking 50+ clicks across the first few turns) to get in place, and which don't have any interesting strategic value at this stage of the game. It's a boost to get new timelines and chapter 2 fresh-starts off to a quicker start, without 5-10 minutes of fiddling with things before you can do anything.
      • That said, there's still several minutes of initial construction when you start in this fashion, but it's just dramatically reduced.
  • When starting this way, it needs to tell you about these mechanics, but it does not do that yet.
  • If folks have suggestions for other things that could/should be improved here, please let me know.

0.571 Boatload Of Fixes

(Released July 26th, 2024)

Note: this also went out only to the playtest build, and not the demo build. Lots of fixes, and so it should be closer to ready for the demo branch sometime soon. Early next week perhaps.

• Previously, Neodymium was only unlocked if you did the geothermal contemplation. Since it's possible to bypass this at the moment, that's not a great thing.
  • So, there's a new Reactive Lanthanides unlock that directly unlocks Neodymium, and that is unlocked when you get any of the following other techs: Geothermal Drilling, Raven, Thortveitite Mining.
  • Thanks to Pingcode for reporting.

• Rebalanced the Morphologic Lattice costs for all of the mechs in particular, and the most-expensive vehicles, so that they are actually attainable values.
  • Thanks to kenken244 for reporting.

• The contemplation for the Red CombatUnit can now be done at the Robotic Motivator Factory, Remote Unit Controller, or Neuroweave Factory.
  • Last build, it could only be done at the Android Launcher. It can still be done there.
  • Thanks to Wolfier for reporting.

• The contemplation for the Raven can now be done at either of your kinds of mainframe, which is where the game tells you to look for answers after falling from class 3.
  • Last build, it could only be done at the Android Launcher, at odds with the text.
  • Thanks to Vinco and Wolfier for reporting.

• Androids can now always consistently be deployed within range 40 of the launchers, rather than it being their move range from the tower.
  • For some androids this is a reduction, for a few this is an increase, and for most this is about the same.
  • The consistency is important for making this consistent with mechs and vehicles, and also for allowing preview lines when no unit is indicated.

• When you are in deployment mode for any kind of unit, it now shows a bright cyan ring for each spot it can be deployed from.
  • Also when you are building a launcher or an aerospace hangar, it now shows the rings for existing spots and for the new building.
  • Thanks to Gloraion for suggsting.

• The way that "rings around investigation targets" are drawn is now much improved.
  • Rather than it just centering on the cell where there is a target, it actually uses the centroid of all the targets on that cell.
  • For very small farms in a corner of a cell, it could look like there was no farm at all, and that the ring was pointing at nothing.
  • This is not a new behavior, by the way. However, this only comes into play when there are more than 30 targets to be highlighted. So I think this may just have been hitting people more now that there are more small farms in the city, or just nobody noticed until now. The fact that tons of people all noticed at once is suspicious, and so I am guessing that the number of valid farm fields increased.
  • At any rate, it no longer looks like it's pointing at nothing.
  • Thanks to Wolfier and Pingcode for reporting.

• Added a new xml feature where buildings can have their highlights be set to be extra tall, for things that are otherwise way too hard to see.
  • This is now used on all of the various farm fields, so that they are dramatically more visible when they are investigation targets.

• The mining sites now draw taller when you are looking for them, which is very useful because they were still quite hard to see. It's now far more easy to put skimmers in them.
  • Thanks to golsutangen , Lord Of Nothing, and Mintdragon for reporting.

• In the upper left corner, it now says surplus computing cycles and electricity, rather than generated, since that was quite confusing when paired with the other things in that same tooltip.
  • Thanks to Strategic Sage and Gloraion for reporting.

• Another slight bump to slurry spider production, to penalize people less if they don't use subnet optimizations.

• The Bootstrapped Mind contemplation now spends a fair bit of space strongly encouraging you to go back to the Task Stack and accept intelligence class 2 for now.
  • Players can do what they like, but the idea is to make sure they even know that they CAN change their mind from what they chose before.
  • Thanks to kenken244 for suggesting.

• If a structure you are building will finish on the next turn without the help of any structural engineering robots who are helping out, then the structural engineering robots will stop trying to help.
  • Thanks to kenken244 for reporting.

Bugfixes

• Android Launchers no longer increase your cap of android motivators. That was an accident...

• Fixed a half dozen typos discovered by the various folks doing localizations into other languages.

• Fixed the "too many androids online" text saying "too many mechs.
  • Thanks to kenken244 for reporting.

• Savegame names are now limited to 30 characters, to prevent errors from entering infinitely-long savegame names.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• Fixed typo in robotic motivators description.
  • Thanks to kenken244 for reporting.

• Fixed an issue that would spam infinite errors if you had more captured units than you could maintain.
  • Thanks to Shalax for reporting.

• If you're in build mode or command mode, it will now automatically shut the list of options for things off the ability bar, like "use consumable."
  • Thanks to Gloraion for suggesting.

• If you switch to the end of time or the VR environment, it now closes command mode if that's open.

• It also closes build mode if you're in the the end of time, but does not close that for the VR environment.

• Hardened all of the tooltips against possible errors that they could experience if they tried to position themselves before they had actually set their interior content. Exactly what was triggering this was unclear, but hopefully this fixes it. One trigger was if an arrow tooltip was set to be visible as soon as you loaded into a savegame, but it's not clear if that case is actually fixed, or if other similar cases are also fixed.
  • Thanks to Andyman119 and Wolfier for reporting.

• Added protection against an exception that could happen during clicking a list of units to scrap because of an overage.
  • The exact specific thing that was wrong with it was not clear at all, so if this does not fix it, then it should at least make things more clear to where it should be easier to deal with in the future.
  • Thanks to Wolfier for reporting.

• Fixed a typo in the description of the private bunker.
  • Thanks to Mintdragon for reporting.

• Fixed a typo in the tutorial checklist, and changed the wording to be more clear. Instead of saying that people "have a philosophical stance," which is very indirect, it now says "With the intensity of this city's violence, everyone has a casual attitude about violence by or against security and military personnel."
  • Thanks to Gloraion for reporting.

• Adjusted the wording in chapter one to not sound like you had tried the "wrong way" to intelligence class 3 when you may or may not have.
  • Thanks to Gloraion for reporting.

• Fixed the hacking resistance having leftover text from the drone resistance.
  • Thanks to Wolfier for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where any newly-added daemons that were created based on the actions of daemons that acted earlier in a daemon-move would also get to move that same turn. The new daemons now properly have to wait until after the move where they are created.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where if you failed a hacking attempt, it would spam the log with the same two messages over and over again, and also log that you lost tons of hacking events when really you only lost one.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• Increased the armor of the mark 2 machinists so that players can't solve that problem without hacking, if they are lucky enough to have just the right kit.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• Fixed a bug that was allowing androids to still attack when the player was out of mental energy, but the android still had AP.
  • There were actually several flavors of this, and all of them should now be fixed.
  • Thanks to golsutangen, Mintdragon, Pingcode, and Trogg for reporting.

• Consciousness shards are no longer allowed to jump to cells with a value of 1 or less.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• "Use Consumable Item" can now be done by androids who are in a vehicle. It was unintentional that they could not.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where "key contact has been met" was not working properly in gating logic, because of a boolean inversion. It was checking that they had been met and that they were "not not dead," which is not the idea of course.
  • The lawyers for the exalters will now properly show up for the first time for folks, during a certain kidnapping event.
  • Thanks to kenken244 for reporting and providing the save.

• Fixed a generalized issue with seeding NPC mechs, specifically when they were trying to seed as close as possible to a target. They were often ignoring nice close targets because of a re-check that was happening and which was giving spurious false results (due to extra strictness that was intended to be ignored), which then caused them to "wiggle" to somewhere further away.
  • This was leading to lots of things, like the kidnapper mech spawning way further away from the actual target building it was supposed to be near, among other things.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz and Pingcode for reporting.

0.570 Virtual Landscape

(Released July 25th, 2024)

Note: this also went out only to the playtest build, and not the demo build. Because one, there's a lot of changes in here that need testing. And two it's now SimFest, so having the demo change a lot during that is probably not ideal.

• 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.

• Added an extremely handy feature, where if you have an overage of androids or vehicles or whatever, you can now click the warning (and it tells you this) to get a quick list of the relevant units, move between them or look at them as-needed, and so you can quickly scrap them with a single click each.
  • This makes the flow so much better, because you can start by overbuilding units, not worrying about that overage until you have your new things set, and then go back and correct the existing overage. This also is a flow that works very well with hacking to capture units, since you can make the choice to scrap something else AFTER you're sure you've actually captured the new unit.

• You can now switch straight to the technolgy window from the inventory or activity windows, and vice-versa. The inventory and activity already supported swapping to each other, but technology was left out and it felt odd.

• Fixed several cases of hotkeys that were set to work in build mode, but not in command mode, for whatever reason at the time.
  • With command mode getting more focus, these felt very odd being left out.

• Scrapping units no longer asks for a confirmation if you are over cap on that kind of unit, just directly deleting them instead.

• Scrapping units is now silent, rather than an incredibly loud explosion. The unit melts away.

• Scrapping structures is now quieter, and shows a puff of dust, rather than being a loud explosion.

• 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.

• When you are deploying units, including bulk units, it now gives a prediction of who will be attacking them wherever they are being placed. This was a larger undertaking than I had expected, but it seems to work quite well, and this has been a request for quite some while with the bulk androids. With regular androids and vehicles and such now also using this system, it was a must to add it.

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.

• There is a new Android Launcher job that unlocks when you unlock command mode.
  • Your androids can be deployed anywhere in range of your network tower (their movement range from that), or within range of any android launcher you build, or in range of a foundry or troopship.

• Mechs can be deployed in range of an aerospace hangar or mech carrier.

• 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 are noted above.
  • Vehicles need 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.

• Bulk Androids can now be built over their cap, same as the other kinds of units can. As with the others, it gives a message about needing to scrap some, and a convenient way to do that, etc.

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