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

0.549

(Not Yet Released)

• 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.

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, and Wylker 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