HotM:After NextFest

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

0.554

(Not Yet Released)

• The milstyle armor, and in theory PMC style armor if it was ever relevant, now blocks the Innately Alarming perk on units. It was an oversight that it does not.
  • Thanks to Choi, thelonebadger, and WingedKagouti for reporting.

0.553 Fenceline

(Released June 20th, 2024)

• The way that incoming damage is targeted is now double-buffered, as are the attack plans in general. This keeps the iconography and tooltips related to these from flickering. It was more noticeable on some machines than others, but was noticeable to some extent on any targeted unit if you zoomed in and looked at it.
  • Thanks to Cel and mblazewicz for reporting.

• There is now an X close button on the various sidebars, so that you can quickly close them.
  • Previously there was no easy way to get rid of the sidebars unless they were the most recent thing you opened.

• The "unit ready but not selected" indicator is now 50% larger than before. It was indeed pretty tiny compared to other icons.
  • Also, all of the indicators above units have been raised up a bit higher above their heads, just to give a bit more comfortable space to them.
  • Thanks to iacore for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where if you were out of mental energy, it was not showing the "end turn" display properly.
  • Thanks to Andrew Mayo for reporting.

• When you have toast messages waiting, they no longer block your units from acting, and same with choosing a research. They also do not change the function of the spacebar until you are otherwise ready to end the turn.
  • These messages do still prevent you from moving to the next turn until you deal with them, but they don't prevent you from doing the other things you have going on. This was frustrating flow for a lot of people, from what I can tell.
  • Thanks to The Grand Mugwump for some of the earliest discussion on this.

• When a major project is offering you multiple outcomes to go for, it now makes you choose one of them rather than letting you avoid the choice indefinitely. There's no reason to wait, since you can change your mind; but waiting can wind up completely stalling out progress for the player, since they may be missing tools to actually complete it.
  • Additionally, right-clicking a project outcome no longer deselects it.
  • If you are somehow at the end of your turn, and trying to go to the next turn while a project has no intended outcome selected, it now also makes you choose an outcome before going to the next turn.
  • All of this has no impact on balance, but prevents players from getting lost if they forget to select an outcome and then don't have the tools to move forward.
  • Thanks to MikeKimPiggy for reporting.

• The unreliable narrator text has been tuned a bit to be even more clear and consistent.
  • Thanks to ptarth for the edits.

• When you have exhausted all of the ideas in a research domain for your current intelligence class, it now says "Unknown" for the intelligence class, rather than confusingly stating something specific that you meet. The message directly under that already explains why you can't research this, but the intelligence class minimum stating a specific value was super confusing and seemed to contradict that other statement.
  • Thanks to 03noster for reporting.

• Fixed an off-by-one issue that was meaning that the added upgrades that were meant to start appearing at intelligence class 2 were actually only appearing at intelligence class 3, and so on.
  • Thanks to 03noster for the save that made this clear.

• The game will no longer give you a warning about missing equipment for units you have on hand but have not yet unlocked. This pretty much only applies to delivery drones.
  • Thanks to Cblln for reporting.

• In the event that there is something else to do at a building (most notably contemplate or investigate), structural engineering will not block your units from doing that thing.
  • Thanks to Trogg and The Grand Mugwump for reporting.

• Lots of improvements to NPC targeting, with some various extensions.
  • Noncombatants, and guards in a passive stance, are now identified.
  • Black ops attackers, and related defenders, will ignore all of the above even if they would normally shoot at them, as they are busy.
  • Your own bulk androids will also ignore noncombatants, and will also ignore passive guards.
  • Your own bulk androids are also now barred from walking into POIs with a security clearance above 1 (there is no good reason for them to do that, and that sort of pathing was part of what was causing some conflicts.
  • This solves: your bulks firing across the fenceline and being jerks in general; your bulks shooting friendly civilians; black ops units shooting across the fenceline and causing trouble for no sensible reason.
  • Thanks to Mintdragon, dragorislordofmercy, Half Phased, Pingcode, and Qwertyfizz for the reports and savegames.

Added Upgrades

• Added two new kinds of upgrades to the Procurement Efficiency research domain: Better Wind Turbines and Better Microbuilder Mini-Fabs.
  • I know that the second one is not technically procurement, and the upgrade even makes mention of that, but I think people will still find it VERY welcome.

Scaling Icons

• In the UI Scale part of the settings menu, there are now options for making the stance icons larger (this being streets view) or the city map icons larger. Or smaller, in both cases, as well. This has been requested by a ton of people.
  • Thanks to strandofgibraltar and Trogg for the earliest requests.

Toast Popups And Handbook

• There are now differentiated colors for a bunch of different types of toast popups.
  • Specifically for when research is complete, research is now available to do, a project is complete, a project is starting, an upgrade choice is ready to be chosen, and a few others.
  • This makes it way easier to tell what's going on when you have a bunch of things pop all in the same turn.
  • Thanks to Ultrapotassium for suggesting.

• All of the various toast entries now do something on left-click, and are canceled via right-click.
  • A lot of people were very confused by having some things outright disappear when left-clicked. In the cases where that was happening, it was because there's no extra information to share. However, it's deeply confusing when that happens, so now it does a related thing instead.
  • Thanks to Mateusz Błażewicz, Ultrapotassium, and others for the discussion on this.

• When left-clicking handbook entries, it now pops up a dark arrow plate with the handbook entry itself directly next to the handbook screen.
  • It also marks it as read already. Clicking out of the handbook screen in any way thus closes both this singular entry as well as other entries.
  • You can also specifically click this handbook plate to just close it, and keep the rest of the handbook screen open.
  • Thanks to Ithuriel, Mateusz Błażewicz, Ultrapotassium, and others for the discussion on this.

• The handbook screen in general now darkens the entire rest of the screen while it is open.
  • Clicking anywhere in that darkened area, with left or right click, closes the handbook screen.
  • Thanks to Mateusz Błażewicz for the discussion on this.

• All of the various toast popups now say at the bottom of themselves what they will do if you left or right click them.
  • Thanks to Mateusz Błażewicz for suggesting.

• If you left-click a minor project's toast that has no more information to show you, it now does a popup showing the minor project details next to the list of checklist items in the upper right.
  • Left-clicking into toast of regular projects still brings their usual popup, of course.

• If there is a countdown starting, and you left-click the toast of that, it now pops up a message for you to see about it, same as with the minor projects.

• Added a new dropdown on the machine handbook window, and it allows you to filter to certain topics rather than having to scroll through the entire list.

0.552 No Flicker

(Released June 20th, 2024)

This build is not included on the demo branch yet. Hopefully a third build today will be stable enough for that to move across.

• The "attack from behind" bonus now has a 110 degree cone behind it, rather than a 70 degree cone. Let's see how this feels in general.
  • Thanks to Mateusz Błażewicz for reporting.

• Updated the various networking data on machine structures to not flicker when it's in the middle of recalculating.
  • This was always a thing that could happen, but was pretty rare. But in the prior build I made it start recalculating every second, so it could be pretty noticeable depending on if your framerate was high enough compared to your background thread being slow enough.
  • Thanks to Mintdragon for reporting.

• Fixed some issues in the prior build where sometimes hovering over a building would show its network uplink rather than its subnet uplink.

0.551 Network Cells

(Released June 20th, 2024)

This build is not included on the demo branch yet. Hopefully a second build today will be stable enough for that to move across.

• A truly massive overhaul to the way that network ranges are calculated and drawn is now complete.
  • The short version is that, now the ranges are more permissive than they previously were. If the circular range touches a tile on the map, it now spreads to that entire tile.
    • However, certain facilities, like military bases and such, block network connections entirely (which is what they did before, anyway, in effect).
    • The overall net effect of this is that your ranges are a bit larger now.
  • The network ranges are now drawn as outlines around the tiles that are in-range, and this looks a lot more attractive, more machine-like, and is easier to see.
  • The one thing that this does not really do that used to be possible is allow you to build out of your normal network range, using subnets to string things along.
    • So you may wind up with some buildings out of network range in prior savegames, if you were using this and went all the way beyond what the cells touched by the network in the new model. Either just move those structures, or pop in a network relay, depending on your circumstances.
  • Also for existing saves, you'll notice that the network takes a few moments to propagate out, since it has new data that is not in the save. This in turn means that if you were above intelligence class 1, and your structures that are propping up your intelligence are a few hops out, then you'll see your intelligence fall and then rise again. That won't happen in further saves beyond this new version.

• There are now options for disabling either the blue network lines, or the yellow subnet lines, but they are not on by default. This is for people who find those to be too overwhelming.

• Fixed an issue where you were being shown network towers in addition to the private bunker at the end of the prologue.
  • Thanks to dragorislordofmercy for reporting.

• The counts of subnets now only includes active subnets, not ones that were emptied of all buildings.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

0.550 Lone Networker

(Released June 19th, 2024)

This build is not included on the demo branch yet. There are enough changes in it that I am concerned may be breaking, so we'll have folks on the playtest branch run through the minefield first, and only push it to demo with the next build.

• A new "Obscured By Clothing" perk has been added, which has a different icon and description from the Blending In perk, but is otherwise pretty similar.
  • This is granted by the Security Jacket, and it replaces the normal "Blending In" on androids that have that, to no real effect.
    • However, for androids that are Innately Alarming, this now also prevents that status, meaning that a Predator in a security jacket is now actually able to hide as was originally intended.
  • Thanks to B and riking28 for the reports.

• The cap on bulk android squads has been raised from 60 to 300.
  • For more extreme scenarios that will be something we can get into, and the game supports it fine. But this is mainly a thing that avoids making some folks feel sad when they see that the final roof is so low. 60 is actually way more than most people would have in most games, but seeing a number that low doesn't feel good to most people.
  • Thanks to Wolfier for the report.

• The extended section of the system sidebar now has a link to the mantis bugtracker, and another button that lets you open your local folder that has your logs and saves in it.
  • Thanks to Mintdragon and Half Phased for suggesting.

Machine Network Improvements

• The ability to have multiple networks has been removed from the game, as that is something that would just needlessly complicate things. It had a lot of secondary effects, like making certain pieces of information way more hidden in the UI. Going to be working on those bits next. I will probably miss some pieces, so having folks catch those will be very useful.
  • Please note, of course, that having lots of network relays is still a thing. But two separate networks with separated electricity and computing cycles is just not good for anyone.
  • Thanks to a number of people for suggestions that inspired this change.

• Substantial changes to the code under the hood to only do one network rather than multiple. This fixes some potential issues that could have come up, and seems to be working okay. But this was really major surgery, so the possibility of new issues is definitely... way more than nonzero.

• Made it so that the count of networks is no longer shown in the header tooltips, since it would always just be zero or one. It now shows the count of subnets instead, which is more interesting.

• The amount of electricity and computing power provided are both now handled in the manner of "percentage of needs met" rather than "percentage used." The latter was deeply confusing, and different from every other part of the game, too. So now rather than seeing that you are using 76% or whatever of your capacity, you now see that you're providing 216% or similar of what you need.
  • I can't remember who brought this up, and it didn't make it into mantis or my notes, apologies.

• In the event that you cannot build a structure at a location because it is out of network range, the tooltip now says "Out Of Network Range" rather than "New Subnet"

• You can now see your electricity usage, and computing cycles usage, in the upper left part of the screen with other resources IF you have unlocked networks (for electricity) or the stuff that needs computing (for computing cycles).
  • Right now there is no way to dismiss these, but these are important things that are part of your now-sole network in general.

• Computing Cycles are not shown anymore at all if you're not yet to the part of the game that uses them.

• Network drawing improvements:
  • When you are in build mode, on the outer city map, it now draws the underlay of your networks in a better way.
  • It also no longer draws the network and subnet connections for individual buildings, though that will be an option later.
  • When on the streets view, it draws the same range circles as before, but also is now skipping the specific connections unless you hover over a given building, as it's just too much visual info otherwise.
  • I am actually not very thrilled with the way this all looks, even though it is better. The city map is better for sure, but it still feels too organic because of the circle-y nature. And the overapping circles in the streets view is still not good. I have an idea for something better, but I'm going to do that in the next build.

General Fixes

• Fixed an exception that could happen when pruning old autosaves if there was missing data in the autosave itself
  • Thanks to Wolfier for reporting.

• Fixed a harmless but annoying error that could pop up if things happened just wrong after your units were moving out of range of an enemy.
  • This wasn't really an error, but was self-check code to make sure that if I made a mistake, it would let me know. As it is, the only times it ever shows up are false positives, so it has been removed.
  • Thanks to Wolfier for reporting.

• Updated a thing with the mouse, where it was only disappearing after you dragged a large distance because it was factoring in mouse sensitivity in an unhelpful way. Why this shifted after my testing of it yesterday is not clear, but I think I did not test it sufficiently after adding in the distance gate. Prior to the distance gate, in my personal testing, it was bricking the ability to click things at all.
  • This fixed version should require much smaller movements, and not care about your personal mouse settings, but if it's a problem for someone, then I have some other math I could put in place. For now, should be good, knock on wood.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• Fixed a regression in the prior build related to the right-clicks in build mode, and how that prevented buildings from highlighting properly as targets for your to building.
  • Thanks to Paladin852, mblazewicz, Mintdragon, and Andrew Mayo for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where buildings that could be built-in were not being unhighlighted when you switched out of their category.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

0.549 Of Mice And Crowns

(Released June 18, 2024)

• Updated the descriptions on the "Stack Armor-Piercing Rounds x3" minor project to also include the following extra explanation:
  • More copies of the armor piercing on an attacker lets you drill through more armor. Think of it like extending a ladder upwards to 'climb over' the armor, metaphorically. The same amount of armor piercing applied to three separate units is like making three too-short ladders to try to get over that wall.
  • Thanks to ainz ooal gown for reporting.

• Rebalanced the investigations at the farm fields in chapter one; they were too long.
  • The bovine carcass one now takes 3 turns instead of 5,
  • The field samples used to require three separate fields, 2 turns of combat each. It now takes only two fields.
  • Apologies for forgetting who suggested this; I can't find it in my notes.

• Powered Armor is too similar to "Power Armor" from some other games, and so has been renamed to "Armor Plating."
  • Other words that don't include the word "armor" (like hull plating, etc) really don't work because of the need to be clear that Armor Piercing works against Armor Plating.
  • Thanks to Wolfier and Mintdragon for suggesting.

• Fixed an issue where item-based attacks on buildings were not marking units as defective. The most notable case of this was the Decrowner Drones, which could stack up truly insane numbers of aggressors who then end your game.
  • Thanks to Rhomplestomper for reporting.

Mouse Control Extensions

• Substantial mouse handling updates:
  • The game now has a grab-and-pan function that defaults to middle mouse button, in roughly the same way that this works in AI War 2 and a variety of other games.
    • You can also set the sensitivity of this on the Input tab of the Settings menu.
  • When you are either in mouse-pivot mode, or mouse-grab mode, it now hides the mouse cursor and thus prevents it from moving over top of a lot of things or out of the window, etc. Without this, it can be very awkward to grab and pan in particular, but even rotation can be problematic depending on how your mouse sensitivity is set compared to your monitor's visual size.
    • Normally this would orphan your cursor back in the center of the screen, which would be super annoying and which is why I never implemented anything like this in the past in prior games (all of the options for this were deeply windows-specific). However, thanks to the new unity input system, I'm able to return your mouse cursor to where you expect it to be, in a cross-platform fashion.
  • Thanks to Bobtree and Cyborg for suggesting.

• There are now individual mouse-inversion toggles in the settings menu for both the mouse pitch/incline, and grab-pan modes.
  • Thanks to Bobtree for suggesting both.

• The general mouse input section of the settings has been split into five sub-sections, because it was getting way too long to comfortably read.

• Mouse edge panning can now be enabled for the game, but is still off by default.
  • You can also adjust the speed at which it pans.
  • Thanks to The Grand Mugwump, Endless Rain, and others for requesting.

• Photo mode now properly hides the mouse and works as expected as a first-person view.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• Right clicking in build mode now allows you to fully cancel a category you are in, or cancel all the way out of build mode if no category is open.
  • Thanks to teo4512 for suggesting.

• Double-clicking on units in the map view now selects them and goes to the street view. Same with slow-clicking, where basically a unit is already selected but you click them again.
  • Thanks to Monkooky and Trogg for suggesting.

• Double-clicking units on the forces sidebar and similar now causes the camera to focus on them. Again, technically it moves the camera to them them as soon as you single-click them if they are already selected, but the general effect is the same. You can also continue to right-click them to move the camera to them without selecting them at all.
  • Thanks to Trogg and Phase for suggesting.

• The game no longer zooms in on targets when you are switching which unit is selected. If your zoom is too low to see it, it will still zoom OUT to make sure it is in view, but it won't zoom in if you're already at a height where you could see it fine.
  • Thanks to Trogg and others for requesting.

General Bugfixing

• Fixed an improper use of affect/effect in the intro text.
  • Thanks to Winston Smith for reporting.

• Fixed an issue with the collision areas for the build mode and command mode buttons, which meant that the mouse did not interact with them in the bounds you would expect.
  • Thanks to Wolfier for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where if there was only one investigation available at the moment, then it would let you assign it to even units without the proper skills to carry it out.
  • Thanks to The Grand Mugwump for reporting.

• When you have a unit or vehicle factory open, and none of the sub-menus of it open, it now has an arrow pointing to the Deploy button that says "Click here to deploy the unit when it is ready."
  • Thanks to Alias50 and Darloth for reporting.

• When you are at a unit or vehicle factory, and you DO have one of the sub-menus of it open, it now still will show you the normal tooltip from the Deploy button; which tells you if there are some problems, or some things you can't afford, etc.
  • Thanks to ScrObot and ZeusAlmighty for reporting.

• When you cannot afford a unit or vehicle, and you are also at unit cap for that type, it will no longer open the sub-menu for "which unit do you want to replace"
  • Instead, it just shows the tooltip with the cost failure noted in it, and plays the error sound when you click deploy.
  • Thanks to B for reporting.

• The Computronium Factory is now properly called the Computronium Refinery, and is classed as a refinery rather than a factory.
  • This is a funky case kind of, because it's the creation of an intermediate good rather than a final good. So I need to make sure I'm consistent with calling those refineries, except in cases where a good is both a final good and intermediate good in the future (fun).
  • Thanks to Half Phased for reporting.

• Added in extra instrumentation into the map rendering view, to help with hunting down a bug.
  • Thanks to Zeal for the log and repro instructions.

• Fixed a bug where if there was a building POI inside of a larger POI at a cell, then it was checking for the alarm at kind of a mix of both.
  • Split the xml tags so that they can now trigger off one or the other.
  • This prevents the alarms at military base buildings of certain sorts from being in a mixed state of both on and off.
  • Thanks to Cblln and 03noster for reporting.

• Made it so that the prismatic tungsten event can only happen in the larger and midsize POIs -- the ones that are at least a full cell in size, not a tiny outpost.
  • Alarming them properly does not really work on the mini ones, and they don't have appropriate guards, etc.
  • Thanks to Cblln and 03noster for reporting.

• Shelter coordinators, and humans picking out furniture, now both properly show blue outlines, rather than red.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the normal ability to hold Ctrl and see high-visibility units was not working.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for working.

• Fixed an issue where large vehicles were showing up as kind of behind themselves a bit with the new outlines thing. In general, this is not for large vehicles anyway, so it's not used there anymore.
  • The tooltips about high visibility mode have been updated to note that these only work on smaller vehicles and then human-sized units, but not mechs. Which was always the idea, but nothing in the game said that.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• Hardened a per-second background thread method against exceptions that could happen after a lot of buildings were destroyed, and also instrumented it further for if anything like that happens again.
  • Thanks to FroGG2 for reporting.

• Fixed a rather severe issue where if you ever got to zero mental energy, it was immediately blanking out the AP of all of your units. This meant that their gather abilities would not work properly, shorting you resources.
  • Also, if you used your last mental energy of the turn to do Cold Blood, then it was functionally useless, as well.
  • Thanks to veevoir for reporting.

• Unity is having some race condition errors with their version of FMOD, as noted here: https://forum.unity.com/threads/fmod-errors-regarding-subsounds.1510550/
  • There is no known solution for this right now, but it's pretty darn rare to happen, and in the cases where it happens for this game, things should self-correct regardless.
  • So for now, when this exception happens, it is catching it and doing nothing with it, and then trying the sound again, which from current evidence should play fine right afterward. Unity notes that this is some sort of start-timing issue, but there's not a way for me to actually fix their bug in this case. But this should -- knock on wood -- make it invisible and harmless.
  • Thanks to AviKav for the report.

• Fixed the bug where if you were on the city map, and deleted a territory control flag, it would spam errors.
  • Thanks to Thatboi193, Zeal, Wylker, and Lord Of Nothing for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where certain kinds of files in the save and load menus would flicker back and forth every second or so, depending on the sort method if they had identical sort criteria.
  • Also fixed an issue where the sort by name was descending rather than ascending.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• Corrected the wrong text being applied as the motivation for your harvester drone, as if it was one of the enemies.
  • Thanks to Lord Of Nothing for reporting.

• Fixed a typo in the word SEcForce in the water fight.
  • Thanks to Wolfier for reporting.

0.548 High Visibility

(Released June 17, 2024)

• Added outlines of units that show through buildings if they are being occluded by buildings. It makes your own units, and npcs of various sorts, easier to find.
  • Also added in the ability to hold the Ctrl key to make all units glow those colors when not being occluded. I still want to refine that a bit more, but it's very helpful when trying to quickly find your units.
  • Thanks to Puffin, Cblln, and lordtrogg for suggesting various elements around this.

• Painstakingly got the outline shaders to work even better. There were a bunch of funky edge cases where they would show various NaN pixel distortions or just not appear at all, because of the nature of the zbuffer not being super precise.
  • I wound up having to make one of the variants (the kind that only shows if the shader is behind something) work on one camera, and the other kind (the kind if you hold Ctrl) show up on a higher camera in the stack, in order to make all of the cases actually work.

• Added a new Use High Visibility Unit Colors option to the accessibility section of the game tab.
  • Normally only shown when you hold the Inspect key. Enemies glow bright red, your units bright gold, semi-allies-or-better bright blue, and guard units and secondary units a dimmer purple.

• Inspect mode now only draws the floors of buildings if you're in either the structure lens or the scavenge lens.

• Vehicles and mechs no longer say "squad of," which was confusing, but now say "crew of," which is actually accurate.
  • Thanks to Cel for suggesting.

• "View Types" were confusingly named, as that is very generic. They have been renamed to "Lenses," since that's something that some other strategy games use lingo-wise, and it's more specific in its meaning.
  • Thanks to Creakit and teo4512 for inspiring this shift.

• Rifle rebalance, Nickelbot-style.
  • The nickelbots are now noted as having "locking arms" that allow them to use some specific rifles that now no other units can use.
    • Other rifles can still be used by the same larger set of units as before.
  • The AN-14 Achilles is now Nickelbot-only. However, it ALSO now has a base damage of 35, rather than -10. So this is a total improvement of 45. This is very very useful in the hands of Nickelbots, which is honestly who this was always intended for. Sorry, Red CombatUnit.
  • The N150 Tactical is also now only for Nickelbots.
    • It has had its range dropped from 30 to 24, and its attack power increased from 15 to 30.
    • This prevents the insane balance problems that it had in the hands of more powerful bulk units, and it also allows you to still set up some bulk nickelbots with a very crazy amount of sniper coverage for your holdings.
  • Thanks to Kenken244, Lord Of Nothing, Strategic Sage, Gloraion, Creakit, EagleShark, and others for the discussion of the sniper rifle balance, and then loads of other people for the nickelbot notes.

Prior Release Notes

After The Transformation