HotM:Preparing For Launch

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

0.600.7

(Not Yet Released)

0.600.6 Localization Fixes

(Released December 11th, 2024)

• Fixed a missing space between two strings in the MainMenu_StartAnotherProfile_Details and MainMenu_StartAnotherProfile_Details2 text.
  • Thanks to Marta for reporting.

• The main menu now says what build it is, instead of "Alpha v" whatever.
  • This wasn't properly translated in all of the languages anyway, so changing this doesn't seem like a problem.

• Fixed an issue with the localization file reading process, where if a specific debug flag was not on, then it would not read certain data properly.
  • I always have this debug flag on, and so it was not noticeable to me. But in the actual game, for anyone playing normally or testing things, it meant a lot of things were not translated properly at all -- primarily this affected only a specific kind of row that is a copy-from row, but it was certainly noticeable.
  • Thanks to Wilson for reporting.

0.600.5 Hotfixes

(Released December 11th, 2024)

• In chapter one, if you are going the way of the protein cannery, it now suggests two drone factories in the build menu.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for suggesting.

• Hotkeys for switching to specific lenses will no longer select those lenses if those lenses are not unlocked yet.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• Fixed a bug introduced in the prior build where NPCs would fire back on death during your turn, which was not intended at all. I was missing a key piece of logic in some of that code I introduced.
  • Thanks to Lord Of Nothing, Mandy, Mateusz Błażewicz, and ptarth for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the options in certain windows (those with two lines and an icon in a sub-window. They are used for a variety of purposes.) had a fixed-size top font, which was preventing certain languages (Traditional Chinese among them, but definitely not just that) from showing any text on those lines at all. Those now properly size dynamically.

• Updated the pre-population of the used-character atlases for Chinese (both kinds), Korean, and Japanese. Bold and not-bold.
  • This should make text display more quick in general for them, and also prevents issues with characters failing to appear despite being in a dynamic atlas.
  • In the case of Korean, I also had to increase the size of the atlas in order to account for more characters. It was too small, but the atlases for all of the other languages were okay in terms of size.

0.600.4 Fifty-Two Achievements

(Released December 10th, 2024)

• Keanu, Carver, and Exator now all cost 1 AP per attack, rather than 2.

Achievement Work

• A lot of updates have been made to the achievements framework, and the achievements are now shown in the game itself for both the current timeline as well as in a cross-timeline fashion in the end of time.
  • It separately keeps track of which achievements you did in this timeline, and which you have ever done, and has the date that you achieved each one.
  • This in-game system is useful for keeping track of them in general, and also includes full-text search. I will add collections by group, but that's not in there yet.
  • It also mixes these in with your general event log in the metagame and the main game, so that you can see when they happened chronologically, too.
  • In general, this in-game functionality is a lot more functional than what any of the storefronts offer, and lets you see what is going on in the game without having to go to the storefront. In the event that someone is not connected to a storefront, it also lets them still experience achievements from the game.

• Overall I have hidden all of the achievements in-game, so that I can reveal them as I make them actually pop, for easier testing. If you can see it, it should work. Right now, there are only two achievements visible this way -- the two for waking up, aka Hello World and Calm Awakening.

• A new setting under Data Integrity on the Debug settings screen allows for extra debug logging about sending achievements to storefronts.

• The achievements logic for sending them to Steam is now in place. I had forgotten that I'm using a completely new API from past games, in order to get the Steam Deck support in other places, so this was a mild learning experience, but works great.

• A big batch of achievements are now properly triggered, mostly based around timeline goals. In total this new batch is 50 of them, so there are now 52 fully ready to go.
  • I've only tested a handful of these. But the code is very universal and there's really not much chance of them going wrong if the paths themselves unlock. The main risk is me having linked the wrong achievement to the wrong path completing.
  • Note to QLOC: if you want to do a check at the xml level, which I would actually appreciate as that is more thorough in some respects, you can look at GameData\Configuration\1_TimelineGoal\TimelineGoals_L1.xml and compare that to entries in GameData\Configuration\Achievement\Achievements.xml to make sure I didn't do anything insane.

Bugfixes

• Added some logic so that during the "npcs firing" phase, if an NPC dies prematurely, it still does its scheduled damage to its target.
  • This is something that prevents the load-balancing logic for shots fired, or other rng luck, from causing divergences in damage-dealing compared to what is expected.
  • The downside of this is that in some very large battles, or some low framerates, players could see a unit explode that was not actually shot. The upside is that the "scheduled damage" against that same unit would not be mysteriously lower for reasons that the player can't discern.
  • I don't think that most players would notice this at all, either way, but this way ensures that there are not cases where your bulk units or worker units fail to do their jobs, which would be a lot more noticeable, if intermittent.
  • Thanks to Fluffiest and Lukas for the discussion on this.

• Hardened the various pathing methods further against rare exceptions that could happen if a unit was trying to decide where to move right at the moment that another unit, or that unit, either died, or when a building was destroyed.
  • I may not have gotten every possible case, but I got all of the ones that I could see for now. This is really not something that can be stress-tested via tester means. The timing has to be just wrong on the scale of nanoseconds for the exception to pop up. So it's a matter of cumulative hours of the game running NPC actions while things are dying and blowing up, it will happen every so often as long as a weakness remains. I shored up all the weaknesses that I could see in a code review, but it's possible I missed one, in which case someone will run into this at some indeterminate date in the future, on a very rare basic, and I'll repeat this exercise. But trying to further induce this via testing is probably not a great use of resources unless there's absolutely nothing else going on.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

0.600.3 More Music

(Released December 9th, 2024)

• A number of music tracks that do not apply for the demo have been removed from the demo, to reduce the download size a bit and also just be better organized.

• 9 new music tracks from classic Arcen titles have been added for a new "danger" vibe.
  • These are from a mix of AI War 1 and 2, and The Last Federation.
  • The general idea here is that for certain situations where the vibe needs to be really different, we already had a classic selection of music that was fitting for this.
    • Future music going into the main rotation and other specialized situations for this game makes more sense, so using existing tracks in these cases is a nice callback in general.
    • In total, these are 38 minutes of music.

• 24 new music tracks from classic Arcen titles have been added for a new "war" vibe.
  • These are from a mix of AI War 1 and 2, The Last Federation, Bionic Dues, Shattered Haven, and A Valley Without Wind.
  • This is the same idea as the danger type, except for "open war" games, there have already been a ton of Arcen titles that explore that in some way, musically or otherwise. So having callbacks to those during those sections of the game felt like a really cool thing to do.
    • Future music going into the main rotation and other specialized situations for this game makes more sense, as this sort of total war situation is just one of several kinds of situations that can crop up in chapter two and onward. So focusing future musical efforts on places where there isn't already a vast library of Arcen work to pull from makes more sense.
  • In total, these are 99 minutes of music.

• The following situations now trigger the new music options:
  • If you are involved in an invasion with an exo-corp, or in ww4, then it plays the war tracks (all of this is chapter two).
  • If corporate aggression is happening (early chapter one), or pmc revenge is happening (late chapter one, optional), or the prison mech kidnapping is happening (even later chapter one), then the danger music plays.
  • Additionally, if vorsiber is doing security sweeps (chapter two), then the danger music plays.
  • If there are things going on with the war raptors or space nations, none of that currently causes any difference in music. Currently cyberocracy and slum fights also do not trigger any difference in music. Open to suggestions, but this seems okay for now at least.
  • Thanks to New and Tasty for making the suggestion that we should have some custom music for the war situations. Pablo and I both got very excited by this.

0.600.2 Localization

(Released December 6th, 2024)

• The first 112 achievements all now have icons, and have been uploaded to steam. Although, not for the demo or playtest app.
  • These have also been added to the game in a way that will be visible in all versions of the game before long, but I have not finished coding that in just yet.

• Fixed a generalized bug where if you had a machine structure selected when it was completely destroyed (not just burned out, but actively and completely removed, as in the slum removal situations), then it would spam infinite errors until you selected something else.
  • Thanks to Waladil for reporting.

• The mechanical dragons are now Innately Alarming, which is a lot more thematically-appropriate, and also prevents some of their general over-powered-ness while not actually nerfing them.
  • The various contemplations that previously said that they now had to be cloaked now are okay with them being cloaked/liquid-metaled.
  • Thanks to a lot of folks on discord for weighing in on the dragon balance issue.

Major Localization Updates

• The localizations for the up-to-the-moment version of the game are now in place for all languages! They are now ready for starting the LQA process.

• Completely revised how Excel files are being read in for localization purposes. I had been using something called FastExcel, which took about 400ms per file in order to read them. However, it was having a lot of errors with certain kinds of formatted strings, and in general being very problematic.
  • I have managed to code my own version of this which is simpler, does not have those errors, and does the same work in a quarter of the time (so about 120-140ms instead).
  • There were also some persistent issues with linking of strings in cells that had sub-cells that were causing a ton of problems that I was not fully understanding before, because I can't easily read a lot of the languages. I think it was making Chinese in particular incomprehensible at times, and it all came back to this one form of Excel-reading error.

• Fixed up several things where "some text linked to some other text" was not working properly in the localization framework. The main set of these were just data design errors on my part for specific tables, and debugging tools allowed me to fix those up. As I add more data tables, there's always the risk of these sorts of things happening again, but it's fairly small, and it's easy to fix in this way.
  • The other set of these were more fundamental, with certain kinds of cross-links not working because I didn't think of those at a framework level, and these were fixed "once and for all," since now the framework accounts for them properly.

0.600.1 Audio Tweaks And General Fixes

(Released December 3rd, 2024)

• Adjusted all of the volume mixing defaults, after ongoing notes from players. I think that having the audio be too quiet is a lot less likely to anger people than having it be blaringly too loud.
  • Please note, I have also done this in a way that it will overwrite your existing settings if you're loading from an older version, so that you get the default intended experience no matter what. Feel free to then readjust to taste, and feedback is welcome.
  • Specific changes:
    • Overall volume (which changes everything) is now defaulting to 80% instead of 100%
    • Main menu music volume now defaults to 90% instead of 100% (this is a double nerf to its volume because of the above).
    • In-game music volume now defaults to 85% rather than 88% (just a slight tuning, but as a whole it is nerfed a lot more because of the overall volume change. This may be too far, please le me know if so).
    • Ambient sound effects now defaults to 95% rather than 90%, increasing its overall presence in the now-quieter mix. If some of this is too annoying, then after the 19th, I may need to split out things like the rain and wind from the birds and vehicles in the background.
  • Thanks to Techbane for the most recent round of feedback on this.

• Fixed a typo in one of the background conflicts.
  • Thanks to Jake Cooper for reporting.

• Fixed a demo-only bug when trying to sell things to the casino. It was trying to reference monster pelts in a way that only works in the main game.
  • Thanks to Lord Of Nothing for reporting.

• Fixed an exception in "'Decoration-DoPopulationOfHoleTile' error at DebugStage 900" that could randomly happen during mapgen. I ran into this myself, it's just bad luck if it happened. But it should no longer be possible. I think it may have been related to starting a new map super fast after loading the game program, but I'm not positive.

• Removed some remnant code that was still allowing you to install jobs into other jobs by clicking them in build mode.
  • This was likely to cause a variety of problems, but the most notable one is that you could try to put infinite wind generators into the machine tower, and spend the resource to do so while having nothing happen.
  • Thanks to dlipiec for reporting.

• Fixed an issue during the prologue and early chapter one where you could recruit more androids than you could support, then needing to scrap some.
  • It now properly behaves like it used to, blocking you from recruiting anything that would take you over cap.
  • Thanks to Techbane for reporting.

• Added some new logic options that allow me to make certain npc units target the closest possible building to what they are doing.
  • This is now used on all of the worker units, making it so that all of the cyberocracy and slum-clearing actions go vastly faster.
  • Thanks to Waladil for reporting.

• Made it so that the PMC Impostors no longer use the "all slum buildings" logic, which is patently useless (and stupendously slow), but instead only use the "large buildings" logic that the predators use.
  • If someone were to use only PMC Impostors since they assumed a difference in violence level (reasonable, but inaccurate in this case), then they would move at a glacial pace instead of the intended pace. Lots of clearing of buildings with like 5 people in them, rather than only those with 800=1500 at a time.
  • Thanks to Waladil for reporting.

• There is now visual clarity between rebel breachers and your workers (purple vs light blue, rather than both purple).
  • Thanks to Waladil for suggesting.

0.600 New Demo - The 151 (Days Since Last Demo)

(Released December 2nd, 2024)

• Fixed a regression from over the weekend where if you tried to do the geothermal event with the PMC Impostor, and failed, then it would softlock you. You're supposed to be able to come back with a technician, but it was not letting you.
  • This also fixes busted saves retroactively, so that those can progress.
  • Thanks to Evil Bistro for reporting.

• Fixed a demo-only bug where an exception would happen whenever shelter coordinators did their work, due to it trying to reference the housing agencies which are only in the main game.
  • Thanks to MOREDAKKA for reporting.

0.596.7 Tweaks

(Released December 2nd, 2024)

• Updated the in-game links to point to this new set of release notes.
  • The prior set was something like 47 thousand words long, so it was time to split them.

• Fixed some possible exceptions that could happen under rare circumstances for StreetSenseDataAtBuilding.ApplyAction()
  • Thanks to Fluffiest for reporting.

• Rearranged a bunch of files and code so that things can properly be split out into demo and non-demo content, since it has been 151 days since the last demo update.
  • This has no effect on the game, but a lot of stuff is moved around in terms of xml files in particular, and more code gates are in place to prevent things from erroring.

• Fixed an issue with the chapter one project about neuroweave still asking you to build 6 Neuroweavers, when really it is only advised that you build 4 (so that you have enough left for other purposes later).

Prior Release Notes

Chapter Two Initial Set