HotM: Initial Tester Groups

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

0.304

(Not Yet Released)

• When the game explores something adjacent to an existing cell, it is now less random. First it tries to find a random cell in the same district. Then it tries to find a random cell that is not part of a POI (like an airport, spaceport, or military base. Then it just looks at all the remaining tiles.
  • This means that you have to repeatedly do dispatches in the same cell in order to have it jump districts or into military bases, whereas by default it will fill in the current district first. This feels a lot better.

UI Improvements

• Updated cult management window

Dispatches

• The game no longer locks you out of doing dispatches when you are out of the starting area or far from your nearest dispatch hub. Instead, it applies a penalty to all of the skills of you units, making it so you need to send more of them or just have them be better upgraded (or of course you can actually just go put a dispatch hub there).
  • This is a softer form of gate, making it so that dispatch hubs are not quite so annoying to wrangle.

• The cheat to remove the dispatch restrictions is now gone, since that is no longer a thing.

Encounters

• Criminal Syndicate encounters updated, and should now spawn
• District Security encounters now all use security forces
• Going through the Cult encounters, updated about half to have skill checks and results
  • Fixed some related things to cult encounters
  • The Metaphysical Cult (exclusive) encounters are updated to have skill checks and results, and should now spawn
  • The Occult Cult (exclusive) encounters are updated to have skill checks and results, and should now spawn

Tech Tree

• The second tech column is now nearly 'beta quality', meaning tech names, icons, descriptions, and an initial balance pass for costs and prerequisites/flow have been done.
• The outliers are disease techs, which are going to be reviewed later and probably have some contraction of tech benefits once we are able to start using them in-game, and how much surface area we want to have for the earlygame tech choices. I'd like to revisit that part in a week once we have another group or two of testers in looking at the earlygame flow.
• Some techs that have multiple levels now scale at different rates for higher levels of the tech (example: contracts scale faster than wildlife manipulation).

Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug in the prior build that was causing all cohort-desire-based encounters to not properly spawn.

• Fixed a bug in the prior build where once you disabled certain skills, they would not be able to be re-enabled because a contextual disable on top of the regular disable created a logical trap.
  • Thanks to The Gerbilest and Mac for reporting.

• The number of "simulated cells" is now a lot lower, but this should mostly just affect performance (for the better), and not actually any functionality.
  • Essentially, we lazy-unloading simulated cells in order to keep them from rapidly loading and unloading if you were moving rapidly between tiles, but to be frank this is a situation that is fairly manufactured, and in practice the performance is already good enough to handle that even if you do manufacture that. This drops the number of simulated cells to the 40s or so, from what was often in the 180s before (it just depended on how you had moved your camera during a session).
  • Functionally this doesn't change anything except some stuff disappears that is too far away for you to interact with it in general, and possibly too far to even see.
  • Thanks to Mac for the original report.

• Fixed a bug with how some of our transparent shader variants for vehicles and such was not interacting properly with the fog, leading to them being darker than expected when they were fading in.

0.303 The New Corporate Order

(Released April 29th, 2023)

Cohort Updates

• The new hand-designed corporation data now in place, with hand-designed and named corporations. Rather than procedurally-generating them, this lets us link them to much more interesting storylines.
  • This is going to break all of the existing savegames to some extent, so we're doing several cohort shifts all at once.

• The cohorts for the citizens have been split out into lower class, middle class, upper class, and collaborator -- previously these were sub-cohorts, but now they are full cohorts that can independently act.
  • This is actually very important for the upcoming storylines stuff. This also breaks existing savegames pretty bad, so it's good to go ahead and have in place.

• A bunch of cohorts that previously had IconTodo now have actual icons.

UI Improvements

• On the main screen, you can now always see your machine hearts, factory capacity, and cpu cycles.
  • When viewing the tech screens, you can now see the AI Level and AIP after the tech levels.
  • Thanks to NihilRex for mentioning how hidden these were.

• Added a new difficulty details popup that happens when you click the difficulty level icon on the top bar.
  • This will be needed, soon, in order to see the concrete things that have shifted from each difficulty level.

• Replaced the temp icon on the difficulty button in the top bar.

• Tweaked lair building tooltip things
  • Near-mouse value shows a "lair effective size" value
    • This value is based on the building's storage volume the lair appropriates for its own uses
  • The previously shown "provided resources" value moved to the lower-left tooltip panel

Tech Tree Changes

• Raven moved to Microbiology, Protector to Philosophy
  • Seems better for both balance & thematic reasons

• The research points for the tech trees now have their own separate icons, which are simpler and colorized, and the tech trees themselves show both icons as appropriate, while other places show the simpler icon that is more fitting with those other screens.
  • Generally this improves readability of things, and prevents some odd overlaps in iconography and text in various tooltips.

Encounters

• Additional logic and data parameters for cohort spawning systems
  • Nothing player visible yet, but a lot of new levers for encounter design

Bug Fixes

• Shell services no longer Null Reference Exception over various things
  • Thanks to CRCGamer for reporting (even if it was already known, but not logged)

• Shell service screen now remembers your prior allocations

• Cryo services now require Cryo institutes (and not data centers) or general science labs (but at a premium)
  • Added general science labs so that it is possible to perform this service without having to scour the city for the rare cryo institutes

• Fixed a couple of message log bugs that were showing the ID string of the message rather than the message itself.

• If dispatch skills are above what the skill check availability is, it now caps them off and does not let you go above. In the tooltip, it shows what it would have been with the units you are sending.
• This solves a number of exploits with getting massive amounts of resources or similar from very low-level encounters by over-committing your own units.
  • Thanks to NihilRex for reporting.

• Fixed a bug in the prior build that would cause dispatch thwarted and solved icons to say 4 rather than 1.

• Added in some new framework that allows us to control word-wrapping and text overflow better on all inline text and buttons.

• Various parts of the game that were word-wrapping inappropriately now go to an ellipsis if the text is too long for the area you're looking at. The most visible spot of this is in the name of encounters in the body of the dispatch window.

• Fixed an issue where the tech costs on the tech tree were often going off the right side of their buttons if they were more than three digits.

• Fixed a couple of issues with colliders not updating properly (on all sorts of things, really) when the game was paused.
  • If you pause the game during the first 3 seconds or so of loading a game, this still happens, but it's universal to literally everything in this case, so that's less severe in many ways. I'll have to figure out what that is, but the previous issue was sporadic and only on some objects, and happened any time you paused. That one was a lot more nefarious, and is now fixed.
  • Thanks to Mac for reporting

Other

• Added a new debug interface that shows a list of all of the city story flags and their tripped state, and in sandbox mode which allows us to manually trip or untrip them.

• The code for should_be_seeded_at_non_building_spots="true" is now fully in place, and a couple of the homeless encounters now take place away from buildings.

• If you are in machine vision and try to dispatch at an encounter, that now works. Previously it was blocking you, which was super confusing.

Visual Revisions

• Massively reworked a lot of the post-processing and a few of the textures and such to try to recapture the feel we had going in our first prototype images back almost a year ago. Aspects of that have been lost over time, and there are a few aspects of that we want to recapture.
  • The complex ground texture has been removed and replaced with a flatter gray, which is a better use of negative space and makes things look less cluttered. Not sure that we've entirely captured what we had before yet, but it's closer at least.
  • The saturation on most of the buildings and objects is a lot higher now, more like what it was before, and more like the plated-art icons and such. This makes the whole scene a lot more cohesive, although certain buildings got missed, certain ones are due to be replaced by new models by Blue, and certain others may just need further tuning.
  • The screen space ambient occlusion is now a lot more aggressive again, but also has a few other things changed. First off, it's less intense. Secondly, it's more diffuse. Thirdly, it includes more color bleed, which does a bit of a standin for "color bounce" if this were raytracing, which it's not. Thirdly, it is also bluer in its general color rather than being black, which is softer in general but also mimics the way actual shadows in real life work (fun fact, actual shadows are blue not black).
  • The fog colors during both the day and night have been heavily revised to be thicker, more brightly colored, and intrude a bit closer into the foreground... but with a sharper falloff. The overall effect is different from what we had last build, or last year, but is moving in the direction of both. Part of why shifting this now is to get a chance to get used to it and then make further tweaks as needed.
  • The vignette effect has been loosened a lot in terms of how its aspect ratio is. I was going to turn it off entirely, but that was causing over-glow near the top bar, so instead I've just changed the shape of it.
  • The bloom is the same now as it was last build, in terms of both threshold and intensity and style. This is very different from what we had a year ago, but overall that's not something that affects that part of the feel all that much. However, especially when looking sideways rather than down, it makes for a more dramatic sunrise, etc.
  • There is a slight boost to vibrance, a slight reduction in ACES exposure, a slight increase to general contrast, a slight reduction in post-processing sharpening, and a slight increase in dithering (to remove banding in large areas). Mostly this just cleans up the image slightly, and maybe makes it a slight bit more like it was a year ago.
  • The actual LUT used for color grading is the same now as it was last build, and it's different from the one we used last year. The one from a year ago was sharply cutting out greens and transitioning those to yellow, and while that was pretty in some respects, it really messed with certain kinds of visuals. I don't want to return to that part of what we had before.
  • In general, a year ago the shots were lower-zoom and higher-fog, and that's not something that really would work all that well here now; there was also a compositional difference with there being a whole lot more negative space, which is not something we can really duplicate now, either. That said, we might consider working on some revised skeletons for road networks, that include more negative space, to make this work. We'll see.

• The "lighting profiles" code and related asset bundles have been removed. We haven't been using those since we introduced the day/night cycle, and the original intent of these was for interiors, which we haven't been doing for quite some time. So this was just vestigial, and has now been cleaned up.

• Finally figured out what the issue was with the big floating military and security vehicles not interacting with the fog correctly. They were being drawn in a layer that was being picked up by an overlay camera. They now have their own dedicated layer so that they continue to work properly with raycasts against them, but they actually blend in properly with the fog. This looks so vastly much better, like it was supposed to from the start, and still functions properly in terms of mouse handling.

• Removed all of the specular highlights on all vehicles, flying and otherwise. That's not a visual feature we use on anything else, and it was standing out in a negative way on those. It was also causing glare in the bloom filter, frequently.

0.302 Sweet Release From Death

(Released April 27th, 2023)

Core Balance

• Nanoparticles and raw materials no longer spoil at all.
  • The player is therefore no longer constantly dying. This was a relatively recent addition, and not a good one. It makes everything a tug of war. We'll handle this a different way.
  • Essentially, some of the ways that we were planning on handing the victory paths were too... distant. The dying thing was meant to solve that. But it's a whole can of worms to balance, and shifts the focus in the wrong ways.
  • It will take us a few days to regroup on the new victory path methodology, but essentially what that will do is give you something immediate as well as something long-term, all in one. One graduates into the other.

• The Desperation resource and the Emergency Nanoswarm now appear if you get critically poor in terms of nanoparticles and raw materials, not when you are near death, since near-death is no longer a thing.
  • This is like a SimCity loan for getting out of a critical hole if you accidentally get into one.
  • The actual Emergency Nanoswarm no longer shows in the normal dispatch window unless you actually have some desperation resource, now. Previously it was always shown, but grayed out, to hint that it was there for people who were worried about their drain/death. That's no longer needed, so this can just be a happy surprise.

Early Game Adjustments

• The Logistics tech has been removed, as the deployment center tech benefit has also been removed (you just start the game with this once it's unlocked)

• The Lair Infestation tech has been removed, same notes, this time for the mind farms and the deployment hubs.

• The biolab machine lair no longer requires an unlock from Basic Gene Editing, but Basic Gene Editing is still there.

• Two of the initial-tile possible encounters now are resolved with dexterity from the keanu rather than through violence, if you wish to choose that one.

• It is now possible for encounters that are "completed" (aka, the kind that don't do anything if you ignore them, but give you rewards if you do) to give you the following kinds of rewards:
  • changes in difficulty level (this is actually more of a punishment, but actually is desirable in various ways.
  • research points
  • machine materials
  • faction resources

• The early encounters on the initial tile and the adjacent tiles now all give you some flat research points.
  • I initially thought about making them give varied amounts, but that would be asking new players to make a decision they don't yet understand, and also coloring the rest of the consequences of the choices. Much better to just keep it always the same for these early-stage things.

Unit Abilities And Balance

• Manual Labor is now a category of dispatch ability, which primarily predators, and one variant of cyborg, are able to do. There is one noncombat robot that is also able to do it. May need to add another.
  • This is another way of solving certain dispatches, like medical intervention or similar.

• The first example of a successful dispatch via the relatively-new "must be solved rather than thwarted or assisted" logic is now in place, and uses the new manual labor check. This is the homeless hunting wildlife, and you can essentially aid them in this in order to improve things for them. If you do nothing, nothing will change for them.

• There are now three different techs and tech benefits in the tree for increasing your store of Nanominds.

• Keanus are now unlocked right from the start of the game, rather than being gated behind an early unlock. This again opens up the surface area of the early tech tree.
  • Keanus also now have an analyze situation ability right from the start, which should signpost to players a bit earlier that this ability exists at all.
  • Keanus are also now less overpowered in combat than they were; they were kind of double-effective what they were meant to be.

• There are two new general skills: Dextrous Work, and Hazardous Work.
  • Keanus are specialists in the former, and liquid predators and a few psyops units are able to do the latter.
  • This gives some more variety to the non-combat roles of these units, allowing us to use them in more fashions.

Tech Tree

• Continued improvements in tech names, descriptions, and icons for the second column.
  • The majority of that column is now in place, but some more remains to be fixed up.

Scouting

• Whenever you complete an encounter on a cell that is adjacent to an unexplored cell, it now explores a random unexplored cell you are adjacent to.
  • As part of this, completing an encounter on the very first cell no longer explores all of the cells adjacent to it. Only one.

• Building machine lairs no longer does any scouting at all. You'll need to do dispatches to do that. Those dispatches can be against buildings or encounters, it does not matter.

Bugfixes

• Added some better error handling to GenerateOutput of shell company services, which previously could error without us knowing which kind of service was even the problem one.
  • Thanks to CRCGamer for reporting.

• Fixed an issue with the neruonet being overpopulated for one reason or another

• Tweaked butterfly reproduction rate to be closer to baseline-stable, instead of exponentially growing

• Fixed some bugs with being able to run multiple dispatches against the same encounter if the game was paused.

• Fixed a bug with encounters not visually disappearing if they were destroyed and the game was paused.

• The game should no longer allow you to complete dispatches against encounters or other targets where there are no skill checks. This is untested, so if that still happens please let us know.

• Fixed typos and some double spacing.
  • Thanks to Mac for spotting these.

• Seem to have fixed the issue with no cohort-desire-based encounters spawning after you get through the first couple of cells in the prior version.
  • Thanks to The Gerbilest for reporting.

Other

• Game auto-pause when background-blurring screens are open (and some other select windows)

• Initial framework for a cult management screen (currently you can only rename the cult)

0.301 Early Game Flow

(Released April 26th, 2023)

• Nanominds are now produced from nanoparticles, not from raw materials.
  • The actual end cost is effectively the same, but essentially this solves a case where you could soft-lock yourself if you didn't raid for materials enough. You could have nanoparticles but no nanominds, and no raw materials, and thus be unable to proceed forever.
  • Raw materials seem a bit pointless at the moment I'm sure, but those are used in shell company contracts, coming up. So between those and the conversion to nanoparticles being an over-time thing, they have a pretty solid role.

Early Game Adjustments

• First Encounters:
  • These are encounters that are eligible to spawn in the starting tile. Skipped including the details here for spoiler reasons.
  • These give you an early easy choice with not a lot of consequences, and basically have you do a dispatch against an encounter before you can do anything else.

• Starting Encounters:
  • So these encounters are different from "first encounters." These will spawn in neighboring tiles, after the player scouts with a lair. These encounters are essentially "Negative Mutators" - if you "fight" the encounter, you are opting to make the game more difficult. The encounters themselves vary in terms of what specific ways the game gets harder, but essentially it will aggro the cohort/faction that initiated the encounter.
  • These won't show up in the game yet since this is just scaffolding while the logic of these are still being set up. The details of them are being skipped from the release notes for spoiler reasons.

• You now start with 0 of every kind of tech tree research type.

• There are now two new internal city story flags: HasSolvedFirstCell and HasSolvedAdjacentCells.
  • These will be used for gating a variety of things.
    • Gates have been added, suppressing UI and encounter spawning as appropriate

• Some more metadata added to encounters, but it's not used just yet.

UI Improvements

• The last of the direct shell company services logic is now in place, at least as an initial version!

• Add in proper view of the difficulty increases in a game, and their effects

• Added details to the lair building tooltip to indicate what benefits a lair provides.

• Found and fixed a number of issues with encounters and their tooltips, tooltips for encounters now display what they do when they succeed
  • And also, you know, actually do those things

• You can now directly click an encounter and go into the dispatch menu against it, even if you're not in dispatch mode.

Balancing Changes to Tech Tree Second Column

• Split the commercial goods tech in Materials Science from one group of 6 to two techs of 3 each
• MindFarm improvements moved from Philosophy to Computing
• DataGathering improvements moved from Robotics to Computing.
• Factory Lair improvements moved from Philosophy to Materials Science; Technician moved to Philosophy in the swap.
  • These make the affected categories more balanced in terms of the variety of tech benefits available in each one, and also more balanced between categories.
• Paired the commercial Cloaking Tech Production with HumanScaleCloaking, because duh why didn't I just do it that way in the first place.
• Some tech names, descriptions, and icons added.
• Requirements for unlocking the second column in Material Science & Psychology reduced to 2 unlocks instead of 3 due to them having fewer available techs to research than the other categories in the early game. This may be temporary.
• All unwritten tech descriptions everywhere changed from 'TBD' to '.' to avoid confusion per Chris.

Tech Costs Scaling

• Rough tech cost scaling adjustment; later techs in a series escalate somewhat faster, and later columns escalate faster as well. More changes will be made as warranted.
  • Thanks to Mac for utterly breaking the tree to microscopic smithereens within hours.

General Additions

• Added 2 additional citizen sub-cohorts.
  • The Middle Class, such as it is.
  • The "Collaborators": Citizens actively opposing resistance movements by reporting to MegaCorp secret police

• Added Military Troops and Security Forces as two district-level resources that are now tracked, and which grow based on which buildings are in them.
  • We had previously been trying to pull this sort of thing from the regular populace, but that really just doesn't make thematic sense, and also has gameplay issues, both of which were made clear from the first day of testers.

• Using the district resource view, we can now see the details of the forces posted at all of the districts. First glance passes the smell test so far.

• Added the internal CompanyContractsByCategory data for shell company contracts, so we have a place to put that data.

Technical Improvements

• Added a new set of MapEncounterSpot entries that we calculate on game start, or when older saves are loaded that do not have these, which provide a list of safe spots at which encounters can seed away from buildings and away from one another, so that we don't have them clustering in tile centers and overlapping in ways that we can't interact with.

• Systemic encounters now only spawn on the non-building encounter spots, and thus look a lot more correct, are never hidden inside a building, and so on.
  • We'll also be using this for certain other kinds of imminent encounters that are not tied to a specific building.

• There is now a new blocks_encounters_not_specifically_targeting_this_building_tag="true" available on building types which prevent encounters from casually spawning at buildings of those types. Essentially they must be explicitly targeted by things that are meant for them. No more homeless hunting wildlife in underground detainment centers, for example.

• Added the ability to have OverridingName specified for cohorts when we want to.

• Encounters that successfully resolve can now trip or un-trip city story flags.

• City Story Flags can now give either warnings of "this will be remembered" or happy notices of "this will unlock new features" along with optional text beyond that, specifically if an encounter unlocks them.

• Encounters can now be set to have their results only happen if you thwart or solve them, rather than when they expire (aiding them is disabled when this feature is used).
  • This is useful for all sorts of things where we want to have something that is a passing opportunity that does nothing if we ignore it, but which does something if we interact with it.

• The specialty implementation logic for encounters has been removed, as literally none were using it, and that's just not how encounters are set up to work as of the last month or so.
  • As for modders in this code, they can already do all the things we do with them, and this external code gave no extra power for the sorts of things encounters are now used for.

• New specialty logic has been added for city story flags, as I need some of that now, and will need more of that in the very near future for doing more efficient checks to enable or disable various flags from background threads. This is also a more modder-friendly approach to this particular part of the code.

• The concept of "having vision" at a cell, separately from having explored said cell, has been removed.
  • We weren't really using this lately, and it just confused things. I doubt testers even realized it was there.

Bugfixes

• Fixed issues with all resources, including things like AIP, AI Level, and the machine materials, being wiped on load of a savegame.

• Put in a couple of pieces of logic to prevent some errors that could happen when encounters were missing or malformed when you were trying to dispatch against them.
  • Thanks to Mac for reporting.

• Fixed lair provided computing resources being off by a factor of 10.

• Fixed shell company rentals not being saved/loaded.

• Fix to make AI level only add to machine hearts instead of all computing resource types.

• Fixed being able to build infinitely many lairs without consuming machine hearts.

• Fixed some more issues with exceptions after removing a machine lair.
  • Thanks to The Gerbilest for reporting.

• Bunch of fixes to the systemic issues encounter system where it was essentially spawning a systemic encounter of every type in every district all the time.
  • This was due to a couple of oversights or assumptions that were subtle.
  • There's also some logging info so that if things don't look right, check that before reporting