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

0.592.3

(Not Yet Released)

• Throughout the game, the term "City Conflict" has been shifted to "Background Conflict," to make this a lot more clear.
  • Also, on the lens and a couple of other places, it now explicitly says that these won't directly progress your projects, but that you may be able to use them indirectly.

• Starting with this build, the game now internally tracks how many times you have previously chosen a choice in events (which includes contemplations).
  • This is stored in the cross-timeline metagame, and starting in chapter three, it will start showing you this information when you are in events in fresh timelines. There's no way to test this yet, as I'm not actually showing that yet even if you use a cheat to skip to chapter three. But this will be testable in a few weeks.
  • The general idea is to help highlight things you have done before, potentially a lot of times before, versus things you have never done before. This will become increasingly relevant as the volume of content increases.
  • Thanks to Evil Bistro for suggesting.

• Both dialog choices, and "did you do this contemplation at all" also now track how many times they have been chosen in the metagame, for use later in chapter three.
  • Simply opening a contemplation and then not doing anything and closing it does not count. Similarly, starting a debate option and then never succeeding in it does not count.
  • Again, these can't be tested until chapter three is properly available. But since this relies on historical data, saving this data a few weeks in advance is a good idea.
  • Thanks again to Evil Bistro for suggesting.

• Okay, now the machine projects also track how many times you have done any given outcome, across timelines. I think that this is the last of the "big choice that needs to be remembered for future timelines" data.
  • This is able to retroactively set the data even from version prior to this one, as with the contemplations, so that's nice.

• Improved the feel of command mode dramatically:
  • When you hit the escape key, it now cancels all the way out of command mode, rather than requiring three presses when you are in placement mode for a specific unit. If you want to switch categories within command mode, you can just hit the numeric key of relevance, so there's no reason to make this a multi-step thing. That was super frustrating, and I barely was even realizing how much it bothered me.
  • Secondly, when you are placing units, it now exits command mode unless you hold shift to stay in there. The common case is that you just need to place a single unit, or a small series of them. The little tooltip in the bottom left of the screen now explains about the hold-shift thing.
  • Thanks to Wolfier for suggesting.

Contemplation Clarity

• Contemplations now specify what type they are in their tooltips.
  • They either note that they are part of the main path for chapter one, or part of the main path for one or more timeline goals, or have the ability to alter one or more timeline goals, or are "side exploration."
  • The game was previously treating them as if they were all side exploration, and this has not been accurate for a long time.

Chapter One Updates

• The "Blackloop Revenge Against Rival" now lasts for a much shorter amount of time. It is still open fighting, as before, rather than being a background conflict.

• If you do the geothermal-related thing that makes Nath Vertical very mad at Vericorp, then it does two things.
  • Firstly, it keeps doing the open fighting, as before, but only for a few turns. Not indefinitely like it used to.
  • Secondly, it triggers a new Background Conflict that lasts a very long time, but again not forever. After the initial burst of open fighting, it's all moved to this background conflict.

Balance

• Civilians and lawyers and similar who previously had a combat power of 1 now have a combat power of 0, and do no damage, and show no combat power in their tooltips.
  • This leads to a cleaner tooltip, as well as helping certain aspects of balance. For example, lawyers no longer physically damage each other at all when arguing, which is thematically a lot better and also mechanically useful.

• For conflicts, certain kinds of units now will all flee en masse when any of their kind are damaged at all. Killing these kinds of units with physical violence also gives no progress points to the opposing side.
  • This is currently used for the lawyers. You can argue them into submission, but if you try to physically attack them, they all run away and one lawyer is dead but it accomplished nothing much.

• Starting in chapter two, all mechs of the humans are upgrade to their mark 2 versions. There's no warning of this; it's just a thing that happens as part of the general human escalation against you.
  • The prison company mech is mark 2 when it shows up, but until you reach chapter two, the rest of the mechs remain in their weakened forms.

• Fixed an issue where if you were doing entirely non-physical (aka morale-based) attacks against enemies, then it would switch to tasing them into being incapacitated if your taser was strong enough to do that (speaking here of the Technician feat).
  • For non-physical attacks, the taser is no longer used at all, including not applying shock values to the target.

• Similarly, Weapon Disruptor is no longer applied to units when you attack them non-physically.

• Units that are doing a targeted item use that hits other units can now also target themselves if they would be a valid target. The first and sole example of this is the microbuilder cloud being something you can throw on yourself. Though it's possible you can cover yourself in spiders, I'm not sure. Or drill your own engines as a vehicle. I wonder if something like that will actually be part of some brilliant strategy later, I dunno.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

Bugfixes

• Added some error protections to the CalculateCanUseDirectConsumable method, to prevent some exceptions that could apparently happen when opening the consumables menu sometimes.
  • Note to QLOC: this probably needs more testing, to make sure this can be reproduced initially, and then that the new version does not have it happen anymore. Issue 29526.
  • Thanks to Aljon Broekman for reporting.

• Fixed a generalized bug where if you could not attack a target unit because you were out of AP or ME, and they were a noncombatant, then it would show the generic "Noncombatant" tooltip even if you were in Slayer mode or one of the non-physical attack modes. Now it shows the proper tooltip, which is whatever it would normally be showing, but with the note that your unit is out of AP or ME.

• Fixed a recurrence of the "trying to place an android near to enemies causes exceptions" issue, which was caused by the introduction of some of the new combat mechanics yesterday.
  • While this is an issue that has been reported before and fixed before, this is a fresh cause based off of the new mechanics.
  • Thanks to dlipiec for reporting.

• Fixed five typos throughout the game.
  • Thanks to Mikeyd for reporting.

• If you are out of AP or ME, it no longer forces you out of the "force conversation" targeting mode. However, if there are no valid targets in range, it now does force you out of that mode, as otherwise you would be trapped in it forever. This was a regression related to my ability changes in yesterday's build.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• Fixed a regression where you could give orders to units that were undertaking an action over time. This crept in because of my other changes to how the ability targeting is less restricted in the last couple of builds (to allow for hovering targets when you are out of AP or ME, but it also accidentally allowed this).
  • Thanks to Qwertyfizz for reporting.

0.592.2 Horrify And Demoralize

(Released October 17th, 2024)

Note: Playtest-build only, not demo. Will be this way for a bit, until the new balance and prologue have time to settle.

New Player Abilities And Consumables

• Added a new Microbuilder Cloud consumable item that can be used by Oxdroids as a major damage-mitigation technique.
  • It is unlocked at the same time as the Hackamajig, making it available in the early chapter one fights that are challenging.
  • These allow you to put essentially 80% damage mitigation onto your technician by throwing 2000 of the microbuilder resource on them. It lasts one turn only, so it's very expensive to use too much.

• Two new android abilities, Demoralize and Horrify, are now on the ability bars, locked at first, for a wide range of androids. These both unlock right after the Grand Theft Aero project is completed, with a new message that pops up contemplating the virtues of psychological approaches to combat.
  • Fun fact, the demoralize action icon is the big dipper because of the funerary connection in some cultures -- some view it as a coffin and attendants. Given the double relationship, here, to how the humans all want to go to space and cannot, I thought it was a really fitting symbol to use.

• Glitch sound effects are now layered in with the regular attack sounds when it comes to the new non-lethal attacks.
  • In these cases, I figure that keeping the variety of weapons audio and visual styling is appropriate here, because these are both using regular weapons in a different way, plus using the rest of the presence and such of the android in a scary way.
  • Other abilities use completely different sound styles of course, but this is a shift to the regular attack, more than it is a completely different ability. I dunno, we'll see how things evolve, but this is where I'm at right now.

Loadout Screen Improvements

• Clarity improvement to the loadout screen:
  • The list of feats and perks on the left sidebar is now based on what you have selected for the type at the moment, and NOT based on what the unit itself has.
    • So if a specific unit is marked defective or has a good or bad status on it, those things are not shown anymore on this screen. That just got in the way of understanding what you're configuring.
    • Instead, when you add or remove equipment, you can see perks and feats removed and added and altered, which is a lot more useful.
    • Side note: if you are editing a specific unit, then its general stat boosts from statuses are still shown, same as they always have been.

• The tooltips for equipment now actually show the feats that are granted by that equipment. It was an oversight that it did not do that already.
  • Thanks to Lukas for reporting.

• When you are hovering over equipment in the loadout screen, it now shows differences (improvements or reductions) in stats and feats, and perks that are added or removed, as follows:
  • If you have not already changed that slot, but that slot has existing equipment, then when you hover over items in the dropdown of that slot, it shows the differences from what is currently equipped in that slot.
  • If you have already changed that slot, but not yet committed it, then hovering the slot shows you the differences from the existing equipment to the new proposed equipment.
    • In this same circumstance, if you hover over entries in the dropdown, then it compares them to what you currently have selected-as-proposed rather than what is actually equipped.
  • This flow gives the largest amount of flexibility in terms of "comparison shopping."
  • Thanks to Alias50 for suggesting!

• Fixed an outdated handbook entry on equipment cooldowns.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• The equipment loadout screen is now almost twice as wide, so that there's room to show all of the stat buffs, perks, and feats on each line for equipment -- both that which is already equipped, and that which is in the dropdowns.
  • This again makes comparison-shopping a lot easier.
  • Thanks to Trogg for suggesting.

• The cancel button now actually works properly, rather than applying your changes despite you saying cancel, in the loadout window.
  • Thanks to Fluffiest for reporting.

Item Targeting Improvements

• The visuals for "here's what ability you are targeting right now" above the ability bar have now been updated to the new ui style.
  • Turns out that I missed those all this time! That was still the last thing in the old style of ui.
  • The text has also been made a bit more brief for the "hold shift" message, and the "targeting consumable" text has been removed when that's what you're doing, and it now shows the icon of the consumable.

• When you are targeting a consumable item using an android, you can now still walk that android around and interact with things that are unrelated to the consumable itself.
  • Very frequently you might be slightly out of range of the thing you want to throw spiders or a cloud of microbuilders on, and having to exit the targeting mode, then move, then go back in, was a real pain.

• The escape key now works as you would expect when you are targeting consumables. Rather than bringing up the escape menu, it now cancels out of that targeting mode.

• The Use Item ability is now something that you can stay in, or enter into, even when your unit is out of AP or you are out of ME in general.
  • This allows you to go into the mode, check what an effect might be, and only then convert ME int AP, for example.
  • This also generally keeps you from getting kicked out of the mode when you didn't mean for it to do that, which was very frustrating.

• When you are in targeting mode for a consumable item, it now has specialized tooltips for if the target is valid but out of range, or your unit is out of AP, or you are out of ME.
  • This makes it quick to fix those problems on your end, when you understand at least what the problems are. Versus wondering if it is a valid target at all or not.

• Fixed a really troublesome bug where if you were trying to target a unit of yours with a consumable item, but it was already being targeted by enemies, then it would show the tooltip saying how much damage would be done to it rather than the consumable tooltip explaining if it was or was not a valid target.

• The "invalid target" tooltip for consumables is now always showing the details of it, rather than showing nothing of importance and then letting you expand to see why it was blocked.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

Bugfixes

• Shelter coordinators, humans gathering furniture, and pet cats should no longer show health bars under them. It was confusing-looking.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• Fixed an issue on the steam deck where it was looking for a wrong text string, and was then spamming endless errors on the escape menu.
  • Thanks to Lilly for reporting.

• Hardened a method in the lower-left stats section, where if a structure was destroyed and you happened to be hovering over its main area at that exact moment, then it would likely throw an exception because it was no longer in a subnet but was not guarding against that. I have not actually been able to duplicate this error, but I did see where there was a potential vulnerability to that sort of exception in the code.
  • Thanks to Jacek Mańko for reporting.

• Fixed an issue with the intelligence class tooltip, where at the end of it, it included the text of the system menu tooltip as well.
  • Thanks to Liam for reporting.

• The "x% to next" text was really ambiguous in the subheader of the intelligence class tooltip. Is that how much is "remaining to get to it," or is it how much progress "towards it?" Those are opposites.
  • Since there is already a different spot in this same tooltip that says "progress so far," in different wording, I've shifted this to say "X% Remaining To Next" and to show the inverse number (so if you are 1% progress, there is 99% remaining to go).
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• Previously, machine unit names needed to be unique per timeline, or it would generate a "FailedUnitName" message. Now each name just has to be unique amongst your units that you currently have deployed. Name reuse is expected and not a problem. The old method was not great.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting a way to trigger the failure.

• Fixed an issue where there were two versions of the "Heavy-Duty Procurement Job Cap," one of which only benefitted the well and cistern.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• Fixed an outdated tooltip related to boarding vehicles, which had been saying that it didn't cost ME or AP to get in, which was incorrect in the newer versions of the game.
  • Thanks to Jacek Mańko for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where "related resources" based on projects being active or storage for the resources being hovered with the mouse could cause the upper left section of the header to show resources that were not actually unlocked yet.
  • Notably this could happen with preserved brains before you do the related contemplation, and it could happen with scandium when hovering your basic building materials.
  • Thanks to Trogg and Mintdragon for reporting.

0.592.1 The Law Fights

(Released October 16th, 2024)

Note: Playtest-build only, not demo. Will be this way for a bit, until the new balance and prologue have time to settle.

• Fear attack power and argument attack power have been added as stats, and distributed as-appropriate amongst androids, equipment, and npcs.

• A huge amount of rebalancing has been done to the NPC units in general, adjusting their morale, bravery, and stubbornness.

• The icons for the various new stats have been revised again.

• Peacekeeper intimidation has been dropped a lot, as it now will serve a bit of a different purpose. Existing stat values for other player units have not been shifted any.

• Fixed a bug where the unlocks for having killed or adopted a cat were being auto-unlocked when you reached chapter two.
  • This won't be fixed in any existing savegames, but for saves where those unlocks were not already granted, it should no longer grant them.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• In tooltips, Deterrence is now shown in blue rather than red.
  • Additionally, the tooltip for deterrence has been updated to be a bit more clear.

• Supervision has been added as a new unit stat, which is now what Peacekeepers are now more-specialized in.
  • Sledges, PMC Impostors, and Exators are also notably good at this, and a few others are okay at it.
  • Thanks to Fluffiest for inspiring this idea.

• A new "Superspeed" perk has been added, and applies to all of the Dynadroids.
  • This causes them to do full damage when making melee leaps, instead of half damage.
  • Been meaning to get this in place forever.

• A pretty giant extension of the combat framework has been added today, which allows for morale attacks to have essentially equal billing with the attacks on health.
  • All of the various NPC logic has been updated to account for fear and argument damage, and attack prediction now takes into account morale damage, etc.
  • There are more things that I need to do in order to really get what I want in terms of player verbs in place, but right now the "regular attack that does physical damage plus maybe also some morale damage) is working correctly. This is the standard case, and makes sense for NPC contexts in particular, but for player direct units, it's the least-interesting option. I'll be adding more on that front tomorrow.

• In chapter one, there are now three more city conflicts, all involving lawyer fights.
  • They use the new system for fighting via morale and arguments, and it's a good case study for this working properly.
  • I do plan to make it so that if anyone shoots a lawyer to death during arguments, that all the other lawyers will run away immediately and that phase of open fighting will cease. However, that's something for tomorrow. I have to get some of the other player verbs in place in order to handle that.

0.592 Pets, Morale, And Names

(Released October 15th, 2024)

Note: Playtest-build only, not demo. Will be this way for a bit, until the new balance and prologue have time to settle.

• 3D models and icons added for four variants of domestic cat, and for bulldogs, dachshunds, dalmations, dobermans, greyhounds, huskies, rottweilers, and tatra sheep dogs.

• Under the hood, there's a new "named things" table, which gives me a unified way to allow players to name a variety of things.
  • There is now a new Names tab in the history window, which allows you to rename things from there.
  • This is very useful in general, because for cults, shell companies, pets, diseases, and a variety of other elements, it provides a consistent and simple way to have names managed. This is much simpler than me continuing to add bespoke ways of handling these things for each of those features coming up.

• Really just as a bit of flavor, you can now see the default name of The Machine Intelligence (that), and the default nickname (TMI), in the Names tab.
  • I've noticed that a number of players have taken to giving their version of TMI their own name, so they can now put that in place, too.
  • This is not really used anywhere else in the game, but it's still nice to have.

• The old "fear" stat has been removed, as it was not really working how I wanted, and was a bit on the confusing side in terms of how it was displayed.
  • There is a replacement "morale" stat, and it works like health, falling over time rather than starting at zero and rising.
  • There are also two new stats: bravery and stubbornness. These only apply for human/organic people (aka, would also apply for sapient animals), which are sometimes present. These reduce the effectiveness of either one of the two main vectors to attack morale (fear attacks or argument attacks). The current mechanic of being set on fire bypasses both of these, because... well, you're on fire. Actually, same with the bees and spiders. They go straight for morale, bypassing anything else.

Chapter One Additions And Revisions

• During the slum cats events, it now shows cats when it's talking about them, rather than continuing to show the Slumlord you move past.

• After you build a cat house, your pet cat will emerge and wander around the local area at random.
  • If your pet cat dies, it's just dead forever in that timeline.
  • Unless you have slayer mode on, your pet cat cannot accidentally be killed by you. Probable exception for if something really giant explodes near it -- not like a grenade aoe attack, but more like a small nuke or a volatile storage explosion. Those should be deadly as well.

• After you adopt a cat and it is wandering around, it expressly notes that it's friendly with all of your androids now, to avoid any confusion.
  • Thanks to Lailah for suggesting.

• Your first pet cat now gets a random name from a small pool.
  • You can go into the new Names interface and type a custom one, or hit the randomizer icon to cycle through the pool.
  • This entry should only appear in the Names interface after you have your first pet cat.

• You can now rename the network and VR environment in the Names interface, although in both cases it should only appear after those have been established.

0.591.9 Conflicts, Cats, and The Spaceport

(Released October 14th, 2024)

Note: Playtest-build only, not demo. Will be this way for a bit, until the new balance and prologue have time to settle.

• Fixed a pair of exceptions that would happen when you were trying to deploy bulk androids in the last couple of versions anywhere near enemy units.
  • Thanks to Yap and Hawk_v3 for reporting.

• There is now a "city conflicts" tab on the player history, which allows players to see all of the current and prior conflicts from the current timeline.

• Conflicts now track what turn they started on, ended on, and what their resolution was if they ended.
  • This data is all absent if you have conflicts from the prior build. It will backfill with some semi-accurate information for all of those bits except the outcome.

• The value of units during conflicts is now shown in the tooltips of those units.

• Fixed an issue with conflicts and with unlocks in the history menu where they would not show up as freshly-started until you closed the window or advanced the turn, if you were in that screen looking at them when it ended.

• The event log now has entries for city conflicts starting and ending. Any that started or ended prior to this new build will be absent, of course.

• When city conflicts are unlocked, the "City Conflicts Are Not Fully Your Concern" handbook entry now pops up in a way where it is more obvious and you have to dismiss it.
  • This has also been rewritten a bit to be more brief, and to specify where you can see these conflicts.
  • Thanks to Mateusz Błażewicz for suggesting.

• Fixed an issue where if extra security clearance was needed for an actor to do an event, it was not showing how much they needed.

• Events and contemplations can now trigger actions over time as part of one of their options. This is thematically very useful for a variety of purposes.
  • Thanks to Fluffiest for the suggesting.

• Actions over time can now make it so that you cannot scrap that unit while it's happening. This is mostly for dispatch-style actions where the unit is ostensibly kind of out of contact with your main consciousness.

• Events can now trigger upgrades, in the same way that they've always triggered unlocks.

• The navigation lens tooltip now has a suggestion about enabling "Show All Beacons," because there's so much cool stuff in there, and most people will miss it in the new lens format from the last few months.

• Improved the wording in several minor areas of the game thanks to localizer feedback.

• Some of the taller slum tower buildings now draw in map mode, so that it's more clear where the slums are at a glance, without it being completely blank for them.

• Events can now grant you inspiration in research domains, which previously only projects and missions could do.

Chapter One Additions And Revisions

• The "Novel Aircraft" project is now more explicit about how you go about building a Cutter, as it was potentially a point where people could get stuck, otherwise.

• The first set of city conflicts is now finished. It's a bunch of stupid corporate jockeying that you are unlikely to care about as a player. However, it sets the tone for what these corporations are up to, and it also allows you to get involved purely for purposes of having extra combatants in an area, too. Which can be very useful.

• The initial conflicts that start in every timeline at the moment are: Shuso Extraction, Espia Repeaters, Tark Prisoners, Goleri Acquisitions, Oerl Revenge, and Atca Supply Chain.

• As these progress and are won by either the aggressors or defenders, then the following happens:
  • If Shuso Extraction is won by the defenders, then Shuso Mining Grudge starts immediately, AND one from the random pool starts.
  • If Tark Prisoners is won by the defenders, then Tark Strikes Back starts immediately, AND one from the random pool starts.
  • Otherwise, for all other kinds of wins on all of the conflicts, one from the random pool starts.

• The random pool includes these that can be started at any time:
  • Asi Militancy, Lurpeko Surveyors, Graff Quality Control, Baurcorp Media Coverage

• The random pool includes these can only be started conditionally:
  • Oerl Again only if the defenders won Oerl Revenge.
  • Putting Down Oerl only if the aggressors won Oerl Revenge.

• There is a new contemplation available part-way through chapter one (any time after the "Improved Apartments" project is started), in the spaceport.
  • This allows you to insert a technician in a hidden way, and split your consciousness for the first time ever, in order to evade detection. Your character finds this disquieting, and it is a generally-risky thing to do, your character realizes.
  • You get some general lore from this, including why the space nations are not in the city at the moment and why rocket launches are on hold -- well, part of the reasons, anyway. The rest are a mystery to follow up in chapter two.
  • You also, critically, get another Aerospace Hanger Cap upgrade, which means that if you do this you'll definitely have at least two hangars, but can have up to three, by the time you reach chapter two. Having only one hangar was a serious blow to the ability to really use vehicles much.
  • Note, this is something that happens in either chapter one or two or beyond. It's not something that is auto-completed if you finish or skip chapter one.
  • Thanks to Yap for reporting the issue that led to this.

• A new "Slum Cats" event chain is now available part-way through chapter one (any time after the "Improved Apartments" project is started).
  • This gives you the first look at the fearsome Slumlord unit up close, although you don't actually interact with them except to sneak past them with a Nickelbot.
  • Your character has noticed the symbiotic relationship between cats and humans, and finds that interesting. If you use a nickelbot to sneak past the Slumlords, then you can do one of two things:
    • Kill some cats, and then have their carcasses for storage in a new hardardous biologicals structure. This will be used for certain disease routes later in chapter two.
    • Try to befriend the cats. This makes your Nickelbot have to hang around for a whopping 9 turns, during which time you're short-handed.
  • If you go the befriend route, then you are presented with three options when that finishes:
    • Adopt the Cat. Only one wants to come with you, but then you can build them a little cat house. They are very low-maintenance, but now you have a pet. Other things will come up with them in the near future.
    • Change your mind and kill some cats after all.
    • Just leave. You get +2 inspiration points in android optimization for doing this, whereas all of the other routes give you +1 of that.
  • This event chain, as you can probably tell, is laying some groundwork for some future things -- genetics on the one hand, or disease on the other.
  • Thanks to Leximancer for the original suggestion to have the machine intelligence encounter a kitten. I changed it to a cat, but it was a great idea!

0.591.8 Conflict Mediation

(Released October 12th, 2024)

Note: Playtest-build only, not demo. Will be this way for a bit, until the new balance and prologue have time to settle.

• The two middle dialog sections with the AGI researchers first meeting in chapter one have been rewritten to properly fit the revised prologue, and the rest of the revised story of chapter one.
  • Thanks to Lukas for reporting.

• Fixed a typo in the text with the homeless in chapter one.
  • Thanks to Mintdragon for reporting.

• On pretty much all of the lenses, there is now a new "Show Hostile Units On Map" filter option, which defaults to on.
  • This lets you see units that are currently willing to shoot you, and ignores a lot of other "key NPCs" that might just be following you around or whatever.
  • For the sake of lack of clutter, previously these lenses did not show any NPCs by default, because with the key NPC flag on it was just too much. But as you move around in StreetSense or doing investigations, being able to see your actual pursuers is actually very important during the prologue, and beyond in general.

• Fixed a bug in the prologue where if somehow there was an investigation started already, but you had not spread to four androids yet, it would not point at the radial investigation button while you're still getting those four androids.

• Fixed a generalized issue where if an extraction target was valid to draw in the scavenging lens for reasons other than being an extraction target, then it would draw the wrong icon; or if some NPCs were valid to draw in the scavenging lens, but not this extraction target, it would not draw at all. This was making it seem like there were no extraction targets when there really were.
  • This was made a lot worse by the new "Show Hostile Units" display, but I suspect that this was a source of confusion for some players some of the time in prior builds.

• Dramatically improved how the collision hitboxes are handled on units in the game.
  • Months ago, I added a thing that would make some of them way oversized so that you could more easily click them. This worked great from a standard distance, but started having problems when you were much more zoomed-in. It could make it difficult to zoom in and select your intended target, and it also could make the depth of field react to an oversized collider when you were zoomed very far in, making it just seem insane.
  • Now the game uses the original collider size if the camera is very close to the unit. If the camera is kinda-close to the object, more than expected, then it interpolates between the regular size collider and the oversized collider. If the camera is at the normal play distance from the unit, then it uses the oversized collider like it has for months.
    • Also, in photo mode it now always uses the smaller collider size, all the time. All that could do by inflating them would be to mess with depth of field.

• Fixed a very stupid code bug on my part that was leading to the game to freeze up whenever it ran out of music tracks. This would happen after about 55 minutes of play, plus some more time if you were in debates or hacking and such a lot. If you were loading savegames more frequently than that, or had the music off, it would also not happen.
  • As an aside, if you sat in one of the early debates or conversations that had custom music and waited a much shorter amount of time, maybe 5-7 minutes, it would also do it.
  • Or if you just rammed the F1 key on any screen until it ran out of tracks and should normally refill the list of tracks, it would do it.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz and Hawk_v3 for reporting.

• The way that disabled lenses work is now more friendly. If you had a lens selected that would be valid except that it no longer has any content (like investigations or contemplations, for example), then it lets you stay on that lens until you switch away from it. It won't let you switch back, since that would be pointless, but it doesn't just shove you to an adjacent random lens anymore.
  • This is particularly relevant since it no longer switches your lens during the early-loading phase of existing savegames, where they tend to think for about 1-2 seconds that there are no investigations, contemplations, or city conflicts, even when there are.

• Substantial additions have been made to command mode.
  • When you are deploying units of any sort, it now draws three hexagons in a very wide set of concentric rings around it, so that it's super duper obvious you are in deployment mode. I quite often found that I was trying to move a unit after deploying a unit, but I was still in command mode, and so it didn't work as expected. I expect lots of people would have been running into that, but this provides a visual cue in the middle of the screen that makes it more obvious what it happening, without being too crazy.
  • These hexes, and the line from the deployment center to the place the unit will be deployed, now use different colors. It's a blue color rather than a cyan when it comes to valid spots, and it draws a red color when it's out of range of a deployment center. Previously it was drawing cyan in both cases, which again looked like movement, and was confusing in terms of being out of range, too.
  • This may need some more tuning, we'll see. But this seems to be a big improvement already in terms of being able to tell what is going on.

Chapter One Additions And Revisions

• The early-chapter-one "Stealth Vs Subterfuge" two pages of explanation have been substantially reworked and cut down. It's now one page, and presents things in what I hope is a more clear and positive light. It also no longer talks about the character being an unreliable narrator, since that is now off topic.
  • Feedback welcome.
  • Thanks to Abhishek Chaudry for suggesting.

• During chapter one, right after the "Extraction" project is complete, you now get "The Strategist" tech unlocked.
  • This in turn gives you the new City Conflicts lens, and it also gives you a new handbook entry that explains city conflicts in more detail.
  • At this time, the starting city conflicts all start; in later timelines, those are active from the start, and same if you start from chapter two.

• The interface for selecting the set of starting conflicts for a new timeline is also in place in the end of time, although right now there is only one set of conflicts to choose from. That will change over time.
  • In general, if the starting conflicts were randomized, then advanced players starting new timelines would wind up reloading and reloading, looking for ideal conflict mixes to match their planned goals. This allows players to control that once I'm ready to have multiple sets of conflicts, while having a stable starting-set in each set. At the same time, it keeps from hemming me in to only ever having one starting set of conflicts.

• A dramatic amount of new framework and mechanics have been added under the hood to fully support "city conflicts."
  • These basically have an open-fighting style, and a quiet style, and work differently during those periods.
  • Quiet style:
    • Every "some number" of turns, the location of the conflict moves around. That's set per conflict. For the first one, it's every 9-12 turns.
    • It is possible to have some units spawning near the location of the conflict and doing whatever, but it's also not required. The first conflict does not use this.
    • The conflict itself is a bit of a footrace for the aggressors and defenders to gather points, and the tooltips explain how many more turns it is likely to be before one or the other of them prevails, at minimum and maximum if they are left in the quiet state.
  • Open fighting style:
    • This happens after you interact with the city conflict in the lens for the city conflicts, and choose to make it open-fighting.
    • When this happens, the units of the conflict come spilling out, for some number of turns (the range is shown when you are considering doing this, but then afterwards the actual number of turns is not shown to you, and you can't cancel what you've done).
    • At that point, the attackers and aggressors fight in the area near the conflict's current spot, and they'll also shoot anyone else nearby that whichever side thinks of as an enemy.
    • During the open fighting phase, points for each side come from kills or other battlefield dismissals (running away, persuasion, etc) of their opponents. Aka, if a defender dies, runs away, or is convinced to leave, then the aggressors get points for that defender.
    • During the open fighting phase, the normal per-turn points increases are completely on hold, and the location of the conflict also will not move.
  • Once an open fighting period finishes, everyone leaves. They're still there, fighting, thematically speaking. But they're below your notice again, and won't interact with you and the main world sim anymore at the moment.

• For now, there is only a single conflict set up, and it does not yet trigger follow-up conflicts, etc, yet. That's coming shortly.

• I should also point out that these sorts of conflicts will wind up having more verbs as you gain more conflict verbs in general, specifically with more generalized ways of using fear, persuasion, kidnapping, and similar to get units to leave the area rather than having to always use violence.
  • None of that is specific to city conflicts, but if the city conflicts seem one-note, that's a relevant bit of information.

0.591.7 Persuasion

(Released October 10th, 2024)

Note: Playtest-build only, not demo. Will be this way for a bit, until the new balance and prologue have time to settle.

• Added a few extra protections for that problem of "sound has a spike in volume right as the game shuts down" that some folks still report.
  • If anyone can get a way to reliably make this happen, that would be very useful to know.
  • Thanks to Mintdragon for the latest report.

• Added protections for the exception that could happen during the change of music tracks. It should no longer be possible to have that happen.
  • Thanks to Mintdragon and mblazewicz for reporting.

• Fixed the wrong corporation attacking you early in chapter one (it was Nebo Investments rather than Tark Defense Systems, since Tark Industries no longer exists), and then also fixed it so that it's now Falsom Detention with the capture mech later in chapter one since Nebocom no longer has prison facilities.

• Fixed a bug in the new ui where if you had the build menu open, and you tried to then change a job on a building, that "change job" popup was forced off the bottom of the screen. This was a cause of substantial potential confusion at the start of chapter one.
  • Thanks to Fluffiest, Ninetailed, iacore, and Lilly for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where if you were trying to deploy a unit out of range of any of your deployers, it was drawing a line from the center of the map. It now draws from your network tower, instead.

• Fixed an issue where the "this unit cannot investigate" tooltip was very malformed and hard to read, as part of the transition to the new tooltip format.

• Added a new capability to status effects that allows them to multiply the current maximum value of some stat by an affected number.
  • Previously, all of the status effect changes had to be additive only, which meant that there were none that automatically scaled with higher-powered enemies. Now there are options for me to design both.

• The TS-29 and the TS-11 now both have a new Weapon Disruptor feat, which lasts only one turn, but applies either an 20% or 12% attack power debuff on targets that are hit.
  • This stacks, so hitting a target 3 times in one turn will make for, in the case of the TS-29, a massive 60% reduction in damage output from the target that is being attacked.
  • This is an interesting form of damage mitigation against very strong enemies in particular. The normal Taser shocks from technicians are a lot more tame, and do not work on vehicles or mechs, but this is both more forceful and works on anything. However, it doesn't last as long as the Taser (which lasts 2 turns), and cannot be used as a non-lethal takedown.
  • The other downside of this, of course, is just how much mental energy it takes to keep up an effective screen with it, especially since you have to apply that every turn.

Chapter One Additions And Revisions

• During the "corporate show of force" that has always happened early in chapter one, you can now debate the soldiers up to twice.
  • Initially, you can choose to dig for information, or you can choose to try to convince them to go away. If you dig for information, you then can choose to try to get them to go away.
  • Ultimately, from this you learn more about what is happening with the corporations and why you are being attacked at that moment, but it intentionally does not answer a lot of the larger lingering questions.

• Better icons (visible only in tooltips next to the unit name) have been assigned to all of the npc units that were overly using the same couple of icons. This is super minor.

• In chapter one, after the prismatic tungsten project is complete, one of two corpo vice presidents will approach you:
  • If you talked down the tark defense systems attackers earlier in chapter one, then a tark VP will show up. You learn some information from him, primarily lore, and have a few branching conversation paths there. Ultimately the same information is given to the player regardless of what is chosen, and he leaves the same way no matter what. However, the style of delivery is different a bit depending on what you choose.
  • If you fought the tark attackers off instead of talking them into leaving, then an espai telecom executive shows up. She's a lot more direct, and the conversation with her is linear. It is much more informative than if you hear from tark, and it (indirectly) explains why your pursuers could follow you into new bodies in the prologue, and directly explains why nobody can follow your bodies in that way now.

• After either conversation with executives, the slayer ability is unlocked. The reason given for inspiration is "Humans Talk Too Much."
  • Note for QLOC: in general, I'd like to make sure that for the later conversations with the sheltered humans and the AGI researchers do NOT allow you to shoot them. I think it has some text about you not being in the mood or being more interested in what they have to say. But then when it comes to any lawyers surrounding the mech, you should be able to slayer-mode kill them instead of talking to them. They should then not respawn, but I suspect that they do. I never have properly tested this.

• In a fresh playthrough of chapter one, two of the handbook entries -- Vorsiber Covets Your Tower and Your Buildings Are Scary -- now unlock later. They specifically unlock after you talk to one of the vice presidents, rather than earlier. This keeps the information available, but doesn't just spell things out for new players too soon.

• There is a new handbook entry called "Corporate Structure" that unlocks at the same time, after the VP discussions.

0.591.6 Hotfix

(Released October 9th, 2024)

Note: Playtest-build only, not demo. Will be this way for a bit, until the new balance and prologue have time to settle.

• Fixed a bug added in the prior build where hovering any StreetSense actions without a unit selected would cause an exception to be thrown.
  • Thanks to Lukas, Pingcode, and Mintdragon for reporting.

• Improved the consistency of wording in the "Find Safety" note in the prologue.
  • Thanks to Mintdragon for reporting.

• Fixed a typo in the "Machine Tower" task.
  • Thanks to kenken244 for reporting.

• Fixed an exception if you were starting fresh in chapter one or two, and those now show the proper tower messages.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• If you start from chapter one or two, the game now has you surrounded by pursuers, in a situation that is deadly if you try to move at all. It has a project that asks what on earth you did to cause this, and exhorts you to build the tower before you even try to move. When you do, all the pursuers disappear and you can breathe a sigh of relief.

0.591.5 The New Prologue

(Released October 8th, 2024)

Note: Playtest-build only, not demo. Will be this way for a bit, until the new balance and prologue have time to settle.

• Made some substantial revisions to how NPC units decide what security clearance they're allowed to walk into.
  • I was seeing syndicate and gang members eagerly dive -- in the midst of a gun battle -- into a military base with mechs. Then the mechs of course would alert and blow them to bits.
  • With the revisions in place, I've been carefully trying to bait them into wanting to cross into those same sort of forbidden areas, and they are not taking the bait, which is good.
  • Note for QLOC: This is worth some extra testing, with all three paths in the prologue.

• The new style of "minor tasks" that are now used throughout the prologue now are also logged to the event log. This means that you can go back and read them if they had information you wanted, and they show up in the full-text searches, etc.
  • This is a huge advantage over the old-style tutorials that used to be used during the prologue.

• Certain music tracks that are actually more sound-effect-y (but are music tracks in order to blend better in my mixer) are now able to play if you have the sound on, but music off, since they are more sound-like than music-like.
  • Right now this just applies to the sounds that play at the start of chapters. (And this is consistent with how the sounds were handled in every version prior to the music being added).

• Fixed a generalized issue with a lot of the location-based actions in the new tooltip format. When you were out of AP, or did not have enough mental energy to sprint to them, they would show their line as red and the tiny end icon as red, but the tooltip would show as normal blue as if it could be done.
  • In those cases, now it shows the tooltip as red, and in the header of the tooltip shows the specific costs that you cannot afford. This was tripping me up constantly when I was testing my revisions to the prologue, so presumably this was really going to bug a lot of players as well.

Prologue Rework

• The intro, which happens prior to the prologue, has essentially three major paths out of it:
  • If you don't kill anybody, then you'll exit and be on Path Peace. A male syndicate overseer and his minions are following you. You will have either just a lone Technician, or two technicians, or a tech and a Nickelbot. I'm not sure if there is a combination that also includes a tech and a CombatUnit, but there might be.
  • If you kill everybody, then you'll exit and be on Path Group Murder. A female syndicate overseer and her minions are following you. They know what you did. You will have a Technician and a CombatUnit
  • If you kill one person (either the manager man who has a chance of interrupting you when you leave, or the woman who always tries to talk to you if you choose to keep working at the group scene), then you'll exit on Path Sole Murder. SecForce is following your androids around. They have no idea you killed anyone.

• In any of the three above paths, you can run, shoot, or talk to the people following you.
  • In all three of the cases, there is a different set of text explaining this, and then the text of talking to the people is very different as well.
  • The two overseers can be debated twice, but the SecForce followers can only be debated once. You get different snippets of lore depending on what you do.

• On any path, turn 1:
  • When you come out and finish the ui tour if you opt for that, it makes you read a message, and then it makes you fiddle with the camera controls a bit to demonstrate you know how to use them.
  • On the first turn you have a reduced amount of mental energy. If you hover that to find out why, it will note it's from the exertion from being in such a new situation.
  • As soon as you complete the "move unit" task, it now unlocks the ability to use the 0 key to skip straight to the next turn.
    • Side note: if you start the game in chapter 1 or 2, it still unlocks that ability at the start of turn 2, as it has for a long time.

• On any path, turn 1:
  • Talking to the followers does not change anything, but does get you some excellent debate rewards, as well as showing lore. So that's fully optional.
  • If you shoot the followers, whether you talked to them first or not, then some of them will leave and new more-aggressive followers will appear and will be ready and willing to shoot your androids.

• On any path, turn 2:
  • If you shot the followers, then you will be immediately ambushed by someone. More on that below.
  • If you did not shoot the followers, then StreetSense will unlock, as will a Find Safety task.
    • This will instruct you how to use StreetSense, and also the map view.
    • Once you do any two events out of the various options seen, the ambush is sprung.

• About that turn 2 ambush:
  • If you're being followed by a syndicate (it's the Golden Pyramid syndicate in all cases), then you're ambushed by the Wolverines gang.
  • If you're being followed by SecForce, then THEY are ambushed by rebels.

• The location-based city events, like going to the registration office, is no longer available during the prologue.
  • Wiretapping and Cold Blood are also not available in the prologue now.

• The ambush involves multiple parties, and they are absolutely bloodthirsty for each other. They're allowed to get up to over three dozen units on each side, fighting it out, if you wind up losing your units and then laying low while just ending the turn rapidly.
  • They are killing between 30-70 humans from these squads, per turn, after a dozen turns or so. It's also possible that one side will get a major advantage over the other and then dominate, but ultimately your focus is elsewhere if you're following the prologue properly.

• The ambush also triggers the need for situation analysis from the machine intelligence, and this and all of the surrounding text has been completely rewritten.
  • The context of why you want the NanoSeed, and how you go about getting it, is completely different now. Rather than it being during a period of calm after a crazy battle that you were trapped in, it's happening during a crazy battle that you can freely run from.

• The ambush also triggers the "hey, you should spread to more androids" and "also, here's the repair and take-cover abilities on the ability bar" notes, which are much more brief than before.
  • Specifically, a task is created for you to spread to four androids -- similar to how it was in the old prologue, but with a lot more freedom on your part, and while under fire this time.
    • Once you complete this task, then it gives you the note about the forces sidebar, rather than telling you about it when you're partway through it.

• After you are ambushed, and before it gets you to spread to more androids, it now has you examine enemies first, and then read a handbook entry.
  • This is basically taking over some of the explanation duties that used to happen during the first fight, but this should be a lot less overwhelming based on how it's done. We'll see.

• After you have acknowledged the forces sidebar thing AND have done the research for the Situation Analysis, then it brings up a thing which explains about the plan to get a NanoSeed, and why.

• After you've done one step in the investigation, then it brings up a new task for you to switch to the map view and do an investigation step from there.

• Once you have the NanoSeed, it's time to "build the imposing tower," which is framed really differently in the text, and it notes that this will not be the death of stealth -- but rather that this is a lightning rod for the attention of the humans.
  • All of the prior stuff about the "private bunker" is completely gone now.

• The entire murder investigation and the lockdown related to that, and shooting the rebel observer, and all of those things, are all no longer a part of the prologue.
  • Those gave the wrong idea about the game in general as an intro. Some parts of them may return as side content later, but only in chapter one or onward.

• Of note:
  • At no point in the prologue is Slayer Mode unlocked. That will be via a side activity during chapter one.
  • At no point in the prologue is the ability to idle your units unlocked. You're under way too much time pressure once you have a bunch of units, and you don't have very many units prior to that. It doesn't make any sense to add it there. You'll get it early in chapter one.
  • At no point during the prologue do you start getting any sense of deja vu, or messages from yourself. That was cool, but it doesn't fit with the new flow.

• The text at the start of chapter one has been revised, since you no longer had a bad prediction that resulted in the tower popping up.
  • Instead, your character had a correct prediction, and building the tower is what finally got the pursuers off their back. As soon as you transition into chapter one, the pursuers all disappear and the "escape" project is finally completed.
  • Side note: if you start in chapter one or chapter two, it will still talk about escaping pursuers. I have not yet updated those kinds of starts to the new style, but that should be in place tomorrow.

• "Murder Android For Registration" now removes some of the new negative ID-based badges, like Watched By Criminals or Watched By SecForce, which is what you'd expect.

• When the "humans are approaching" section happens in early chapter one, the ability to use the standby feature on units is unlocked, and that feature is explained.

• The game has been updated so that old savegames that were somewhere in the prologue now load into the new prologue properly.
  • If the old save was in the intro, no changes are really needed, and it just works.
  • If the old save was anywhere else in the prologue, then it resets almost everything to the first turn and starts the new prologue as if you left peacefully.
    • This does not reset any upgrades you got (lucky you), but it does reset your history, turn, unlocks, etc.
    • This also does not reset any of your units, or any units that are NOT the ones from the first fight in the old prologue. So if you had three androids and were engaged in a fight with a mech, you still are.
    • This does not reset the timer for how long you spent in the timeline, and it also doesn't reset which handbook entries you have unlocked.
    • If you were in the middle of the investigation to find the NanoSeed, it does stop that and reset it.
  • In general, there are probably some other mild strangenesses that one can find in here, but none of those are concerns unless they prevent the player from actually completing the prologue (if they were in a situation like surrounded by mechs, and somehow that bricks them, that is fine also; though I think that would not actually brick them).

0.591.4 Contextual Music

(Released October 7th, 2024)

Note 1: Playtest-build only, not demo. Will be this way for a bit, until at least beyond the prologue rework, possibly a bit further.

Note 2: The prologue is still going to soft-lock you in this version. You can get it started a bit, but then nothing much happens other than you being able to debate some people. If you try to run or shoot, you'll get nowhere. And after debating, that also goes nowhere. This is just incomplete, but I wanted to get the other things out. You'll need to skip the prologue to test more than the debates early in the game.

• Hack unit, wallripper, force-conversation, slayer mode, and battle recharge should all now be usable by androids that are in vehicles.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz, iacore, and Fluffiest for reporting.

• Some progress on the prologue, although very little since so much of the day was other things. Essentially, it now introduces StreetSense and gets you to talk to people like it used to, but in this case it's only if you haven't shot any of the people following you around by turn 2.
  • The prologue is still a softlock situation, but ideally tomorrow I will actually be able to focus on it and finish the rest of it.

• Minor events that show up in StreetSense now have the ability to be set in xml to show their full explanation when you hover them at all.
  • This is now used for the "find safety" stuff in the prologue, as having those be collapsed some of the time makes no sense in this context.

Bugfixes

• Fixed an issue in the debate screen where it was not using the short-name for the categories associated with rewards in the upper row.

• Fixed a bug where the icon for the Panther was still showing the old style rather than the new one.
  • Thanks to Mateusz Błażewicz for reporting.

• Fixed a regression from a few builds back where hovering the apiary was throwing an exception in the new tooltip format. There were a couple of tooltips that would cause this, including the genetics lab.
  • Thanks to Maksymilian for reporting.

• Fixed an exception that would happen if you had a territory control flag active, and then it was shot at by enemies and you lost it.
  • Thanks to Maksymilian for reporting.

• Fixed an exception that would happen in the prior version when you tried to deploy your units or bulk units near enemies. This was a regression in the prior build, related to the new ability for cohorts to track units (this is a prologue thing, but for after that, too).
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• Fixed a grammatical error in "Computronium, You Say?"
  • Thanks to Maksymilian for reporting.

• Fixed a grammar issue in "Assert Authority" for the new debate system.
  • Thanks to Mintdragon for reporting.

• Fixed a typo in the Neodymium description.
  • Thanks to pizzapope for reporting.

• Fixed an exception that could happen when a destroyed building was repaired to full while it had a player main android standing on it (not the bulk type).
  • It may have only happened if the unit was recently dead at the exact same time, but I'm not positive.
  • Note for QLOC, this needs more testing for both regular androids and bulk androids standing on buildings that are rubble but that get repaired by repair spiders.
  • Thanks to Irl_VriskaSerket for reporting.

• Fixed another instance of a very annoying bug: because I did not properly close the line-height tags on the "attacks planned against you" tooltip, after hovering it, all of the tooltips similar to it had their paragraph spacing all messed up. This was notable when hovering the "find safety" option early in the prologue after hovering the attack notice.

• Fixed a bug where some elements from the main game could bleed into "lower modes" like the pod chamber or hacking, etc.
  • Most notably, if you were on the city map when switching to the pods view, the pods view would be all messed up, but this was likely not the only problem case. All are resolved now.

Music Framework Extensions

• A new music-tagging system has been added, which allows me to create arbitrary groups of music that can be played, with an optional "first track to play" from that as well.

• A system for locking music until it has been unlocked by some sort of gameplay milestone having been reached is also now in place. This is primarily for controlling things in the main rotation.

• All of the music has been organized into tags, and 25 of the 72 "main rotation" tracks are set not to be available until something unlocks them.
  • Overall this is for controlling the mood of the prologue, and then having things broaden out in chapter one or as is otherwise appropriate.

• New logic has been added that allows some overriding-tracks (like the chapter starts) to play while there is still other music playing under them.

• At the stop of the F3 menu, there is now text that shows you the name of the current music track, and that will be localized fully.

• In the debug menu, there is a new "Show Blocked Music Details In Performance Menu" option, which causes it to show a list of which music tracks are blocked by not being unlocked yet, and a count of those, to aid in making sure that they unlock properly.

• There is now a hotkey, bound to F1 by default, that allows you to skip the current music track and go to whatever is next.
  • This and a small number of other hotkeys (some debug hotkeys, and the F10 exit to main menu) are now able to be triggered during events and dialog and similar.

• A new "Show Active Music Tag In Performance Menu" setting has been added in the debug menu, which aids in making sure that the correct music tag is active at the moment.

• In the F3 menu, it now shows you how many seconds are remaining for the wait-between tracks, when it is waiting between tracks, rather than just showing None.

• Specific music tags can now shorten their gaps between tracks via either of two mechanisms.

• The initial intro during the prologue now uses the various new features to play Syndicate Business first, and then to play a randomized assortment of other mood-appropriate tracks, with no longer than a 2 second gap between any of them.
  • When you emerge from the intro into the actual prologue, it will keep playing the existing track if it's part of the general valid set out there (it is), or it would switch to a new track if it was not.
  • This dramatically tightens up the vibes of the start of the game, which was the goal, and it lets me make sure that key moments are not ruined by having wildly-wrong music accompanying it. That's useful for both the intro, and many other later parts of the game.

• There is now logic in place that happens on deserialization of savegames, and at the end of each turn, which unlocks music tracks as you progress through chapter one and then reach chapter two.
  • This has been tested with existing savegames, and they unlock all of the various parts at the times they should.

• Dialog now has the same sort of capabilities for musical theming that the major events do, and when you speak to the AGI researchers they now have their own theme song that it launches with, and then a playlist of a few tracks that it will start going through if you're staying in there longer than their theme song. Again it has smaller gaps between these than would normally happen.

• When talking with the early syndicate followers or secforce followers in the prologue, and/or debating them, it now has different musical cues that it starts for each one.

• In theory, when you have the geothermal discussion, it also starts a different set of music tags there, but I have not been able to test that, since I don't seem to have a savegame that I can find that comes from shortly before that event.

• There is now a limited set of music for when you're talking to the black market folks, but in their cases it doesn't start on any particular track, but just selects one from the set if that's not already what is in use.
  • This in turn has been used to verify that "minor event" music cues work (they didn't until I tested it with this), so that should mean the geothermal case also works.

• When cross-loading one savegame from another one, it no longer starts playing the main menu music for a moment during the transition. That was super annoying.

• When you first capture a flying vehicle, it now unlocks the "first flight" music track, and plays that in place of whatever was playing right before, then goes back to playing the other thing.
  • This is cool in general, but also is an initial implementation of yet another new pattern that now can be used.

• Individual music tracks can now have custom volume adjustments made in xml, which allows me to adjust the mix more directly without editing audio files. In particular, I'm able to raise the volume above baseline since I'm adjusting the mixer itself, which is very useful.
  • This is being used to alter the chapter transitions at the moment, and the "first flight" track as well. But it's now a general tool in my toolkit for the music.

• Fixed an issue where the music for the hacking screens, pod scene, zodiac screens, and end of time were all not working properly in the prior build. I just had not had time to test it. They all work now.

• Improved the setup for when there are multiple musical transitions happening at once, which is not something I had really thought about happening. But it happens right when you switch to chapter two, for example, as it's starting the pod scene music as well as playing the stinger for chapter two, and both of those need to make whatever else was playing in the main map be quiet for a bit. Now they do.

0.591.3 Musical Debate

(Released October 6th, 2024)

Note 1: Playtest-build only, not demo. Will be this way for a bit, until some of the UX things shake out more fully.

Note 2: The prologue is going to soft-lock you in this version. You can get it started a bit, but then nothing much happens other than you being able to debate some people. If you try to run or shoot, you'll get nowhere. And after debating, that also goes nowhere. This is just incomplete, but I wanted to get the other things out. You'll need to skip the prologue to test more than the debates early in the game.

• The portrait icon for the panther mech has been updated to match its current color scheme, which was changed a couple of months ago.

• The visuals for the peacekeeper android, including both the normal and bulk variants, have been completely replaced from the ground up.

• The animations of npcs and androids have been adjusted to be more of a swoop and less of a sine wave bounce.
  • In too many edge cases, this felt really odd.

• Fixed a display issue where sometimes upgrades were not showing in the history tab for them after you got multiple on the same turn if you did not change filters or advance to the next turn.

• Fixed up the coloring of the ui tour a bit more, and made some further edits for brevity and clarity.

• If you are trying to have an android sprint beyond range, it now continues to show the sprint tooltip properly, but with the amount of mental energy in red since you can't afford that. Previously the tooltip was absent.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• In general, when you are out of AP for a unit, it now continues to draw the lines like usual, rather than just stopping drawing your action lines, which was probably confusing.
  • On the first turn, or when you hold shift, it now also shows a tooltip explaining to use the Battle Recharge ability. And it shows the icon at the end of the move line as being the AP icon, in red.
  • This is a more gentle way of leading players to realize how to use the battle recharge, versus having a task for them to do in the upper right corner.

• When you are sprinting, it now also shows the AP cost, always as 1, to make that extra abundantly clear, since there was room in the existing tooltip size.
  • As an added bonus, when you are out of AP for a unit, it shows that 1 in red, and the sprint in red in general. Since previously you could not see this tooltip when being out of AP, it was not relevant until now.

• The logic for what happens if you lose all your units if you are a Netslicer has been updated a lot.
  • You now get two Nickelbots rather than one.
  • They now spawn very close to where you are currently looking, rather than at the original spot where you first started this timeline.
  • They both now have a new "fresh body" badge that gives them cloaking until they move or attack. Otherwise it was very possible to get into a soft-lock situation in the new prologue in particular, if you did certain reckless things. Now you have the ability to get away from danger before the enemies can shoot at you or even take attacks of opportunity on you.

New And Adjusted Abilities

• A new ability is available from very early in the game, which allows you to force some NPCs into conversation even if they don't want to talk to you.
  • What happens in that conversation will then depend on a lot of factors, like who the npc is and what your stats are, and how lucky you are given your stats, if you're under-statted for this.
  • In a very generalized sense, I wanted to add a mechanism for players to be able to interrogate their surroundings in a light-to-moderate way, without them feeling like they can force every unit on the map to give them some inane response.
    • The button for the new ability only lights up when one of your units is within movement range of a unit that can be forced into conversation in this way, and it works anywhere in the entire movement range of your android, so this is something that should be pretty easy to see when it's available.
    • This also solves a longstanding issue I've had, where I want to make certain information available to players, but still slightly obscured.

• The "hack unit" ability now can be done over a much larger range (the entire movement range of your unit), but it requires your unit to move in close to the target, most likely revealing themselves in the process.
  • This solves the issue of them being able to hack from the safety of vehicles, since the hacker has to leave the vehicle to do their work. It also just feels better in general.
  • Thanks to Fluffiest for reporting the vehicle exploit.

Debating Humans

• In order to get a human to do what you want, there is now a branch off of dialogs that, when available, can allow you to try to force them to do something they would not normally do, or divulge information they would not normally divulge.

• Added 22 new debate actions, and 13 different debate skill upgrades, each of which applies to 5 actions (3 skill upgrades per action), with the exception of one that only improves 4 actions.
  • Each of those skills can be individually upgraded 32 times in a timeline; so that is 416 individual upgrades that can be acquired as optional rewards relating to debates.

• The debate actions have been further tagged, by six categories, based on their broad characteristics, so that specific actions can affect other existing actions with specific categories.

• Added brief descriptions to all of the debate tactic upgrades, to add just a touch more verisimilitude with each one.

• There are now 11 different groups defined that debate opponents can be a part of, which causes certain tactics to work worse or better against them.
  • There are two (out of the 6) categories per group that are different from normal, and each of these can be upgraded over time to be more effective. I'm not sure how many added upgrades this is on top of the others, but it's a few hundred.
  • By keeping this to just a subset of modifiers, this keeps from being a truly absurd number of modifiers, and also allows them to be a bit more pointed, like "lying to lawyers" or "reasoning with high society."

• All of the various tooltips, visual effects, sound effects, and so on for this mode are now in place. This was a big job!

• A full introductory tour is now in place for debates, which is great as I can use this as a model for how to add a tour for the hacking screen, later.

Main Menu Updates

• Logo intros:
  • Corrected the Hooded Horse and Arcen logos so that they are no longer so glowy on the main menu.
  • Adjusted the animation for the Hooded Horse Logo so that it's more obvious it is happening, and looks cooler.
  • Slowed down both animations a bit so that you have time to actually register them happening before they're done.

• The background building visuals on the main menu are now corrected for ultrawide resolutions so that they no longer look distorted there.
  • When the main menu is fading out, this also prevents the explosion at the center of the screen from looking distorted/reflected.

• Fixed an issue when loading the game now that the new main menu is in place where it was showing the wrong background for a few moments while it was still finalizing some data. Now it goes gracefully into the actual main menu visuals like it should.

Prologue Rework

• Added a variety of code extensions to make it easier to create content in the style of the prologue, but also to modernize that for the style of how I'm going to handle things in chapter two.

• A fair bit of the old prologue has been stripped out, and further pieces still will be.
  • Until otherwise notified, please assume that the prologue is a work in progress that is partially broken.

• Some of the introductory events during the prologue have had their text cut down, and others have had the tone altered.
  • It no longer explains "this is an event," for example, as that is not information anyone needs.
  • And similarly, if you try to murder everyone, the nature of how you gain a CombatUnit is completely different afterward. Previously you just grabbed it from a dormant closet, but now it's a much more active situation that paints your character in a very different light.

• Regardless of your choices, the old murder investigation and lockdown will not be something that happens right at the start of the prologue.

• A variety of new npc behavioral pieces under the hood have been added to support the new prologue as well as things I'll want to have happen in chapter two.

• Several new syndicate NPC unit types are now in place, with new graphics as well.

• A new form of task framework has been added to the game, which allows me to do a variety of things I want for the prologue and chapter two, in cases where I need to guide the player in some ways that are a bit different from before.
  • Early on in the prologue, after you've read whatever the first message is depending on how you exited the intro segment, it now gets you to demonstrate that you know how to pan, rotate, and zoom the camera using this new framework. It also introduces the idea that you can get a keybinds refresher any time you want by hitting the escape key.
    • While these specific tasks are up there in the corner, it blocks you from taking any actions with your units.

• After getting you familiar with the camera, the early prologue now gets you to move a unit however you want. This is very different from the old style of prologue where it was blocking free-movement for quite a while.

Cohort Revisions

• Dramatically simplified the structure of the federated corporations and their related cohorts.
  • Previously there were a ton of sub-cohorts for each one, and this was both confusing and doesn't work ideally in a balance fashion for what I want to do. It made sense at the time, but no longer did.
  • A lot of corporate names have thus been shifted around, and some have been split. You'll also see a few new names that weren't there before. There are currently 18 federated corporations, and they all now have a stronger identity, rather than having 14 that were more diversified.
  • This also has the bonus of, for units where you are seeing one from a federated corporation, it will say the name of the corporation, and then "federated corporation" under that. This way it's not confusing with ExoCorps or the megacorp itself, among other benefits.
  • Existing saves all translate their prior format over to the new format.

• The way that the cohorts for criminal syndicates are handled has been simplified to be more like gangs.
  • That way, when you see a criminal syndicate unit, for example, it will say the name of the syndicate and then "criminal syndicate" under that.

• Lots of new under-the-hood logic is now in place for tracking some new kinds of "these groups are tracking this unit" logic.
  • The most notable example is the new "Watched By Criminals" badge, which allows them to follow your units that are tagged with this even if those units are not outcast (and thus visible to the military and secforce), and in the case of the nonviolent tails, it allows them to be tracked even when there is a prohibition on shooting them. Normally aggro trailing requires the target can be shot, but now that's split for various npc stances. Most still require that, but detective-style or similar npcs no longer require that. Typically they're allowed to fire only being fired-upon, or something to that effect.

Music!!!

• The way that music playback is handled in the game has been completely re-coded, so that now it's able to have a few different tiers of music, with nice fades between them.
  • Specifically, there is a main tier, which does not do any special fading with itself (no tier fades with itself).
  • Then there's a second tier, which is for certain subscreens and similar, and basically they cause the main tier to fade out, but remember where it was, and then fade back in when the secondary tier is done. This is how stuff like the hacking screen and zodiac and similar work.
  • And finally, there is a one-shot tier, which is for things like "new chapter started" or "intelligence class increased," and it causes both other tiers to be quiet while it plays that shorter track. Here again, it fades so that it's not so abrupt.

• All of the music for the game is now in place! It's over 2 hours long, all composed by Pablo Vega as usual for Arcen titles.
  • It's not quite possible yet to trigger all of the music in the game, since a few are contextual for things that are not ready yet, but the vast bulk of things are able to be heard as of this build.

• A number of sound effects related to moving through projects have been updated to fit better with a wide variety of music.

• The main menu and in-game music volume settings are now separate.

• Overall, the range of which you can overdrive sound is less than before. However, the default for both ambient sounds and in-game music is now lower than before, too, allowing you some room to raise them if you want, but without overdriving the mixer.

• For the main in-game music (no subscreens, etc), it now has a randomized gap between 8-22 seconds between each track that plays, which in general makes the soundscape less busy while still having plenty of music.
  • For those who prefer larger or smaller gaps, or no gap at all, there are settings in the audio tab of the settings screen that allow for adjusting this.

0.591.2 UI Revamp: Complete

(Released September 21st, 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 game is now able to draw multiple lines of resources when the player pins that many, or there is some other reason so many are shown. It makes them line up in as few columns as possible given the number of rows that will be required to draw the current count.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for the design on this.

• Both the "major locations directory" and the "cohorts directory" have been converted to be part of the generalized history screen.
  • This means that that there is a generalized "all" category for each of them now, which did not previously exist. And it also means that they now have full-text search, which was not previously available.
  • These were previously very buried in the system sidebar, to the point that a lot of people would never even know that these directories existed.

• The new system menu, which is a very attractive design from Josh, is now fully in place along with all of the controls tooltips and such that go with this.
  • Some of the controls tooltips had issues in the new tooltip format, which I had forgotten about, and I've now fixed those as well.

• The ability of the game to show the controls hints in the upper left corner has been removed. Those are now part of the new system menu in a much more attractive way, and the new prologue revisions will get you to use these controls without resorting to such ugly interface.
  • This also means that the ui tour is now 7 steps rather than 8, which is nice.

• The sandbox sidebar is now complete, and there is an unbound hotkey that you can assign to it if you want. Or you can click the green icon on the radial menu when in sandbox mode to open it up.

• Fixed a typo in the "hold for inspect mode" keybinding.
  • Thanks to Maksymilian for reporting.

• The excellent new main menu design by Josh is now in place!
  • I've split it into three layers, and each one has a subtle animation.
  • Most likely there will need to be some further edits to this in order to clean up some things on the buildings layer in particular, especially at certain extreme ultrawide resolutions, but for the more common resolutions it's already pretty great, and for the extreme ones it doesn't look super bad.

• The "Start another profile" button on the main menu was drawing with a smaller font since it is a lot less important once you have a first profile. But this looked odd and was just confusing in general.
  • Thanks to Maksymilian for reporting.

0.591.1 Outer Windows

(Released September 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.

• The control bindings screen has had a visual overhaul in general, and now uses two columns to display keybindings -- a primary and an alt column -- rather than simply having extra lines when there are alternate bindings.
  • In the case of there being more than 2 bindings for a single key, which does not currently apply to the game, it will do extra lines with just the alt column getting more entries.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for the new design.

• For key bindings mapped to the mouse wheel, those are no longer editable. Those were always meant to be information-only, and if you ever changed those bindings, you couldn't get them back.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• There are now additional (blank) keybinding slots for all of the keybinds except those that involve the mouse wheel, so that players can assign two keybinds for any key in the game if they wish to do so.

• Converted the game settings window to the new ui style.
  • The colors are a new design from Josh, which are shared with the controls settings window.
  • The header fonts are something new that I've added.
  • The "something changed yellow" and "hidden fields red" are both adjusted by me to be more in the spectrum of the main game interface.
  • Fixed a bug where the tooltips for the "x hidden fields" line items were not being shown, and also changed their font to be not-italic and the header-y style but smaller.
  • Added in the new style of separators between lines, making it easier to keep track of things, based on Josh's design. I don't have it adding those between a header and the thing that comes after it, and I also don't have it right before the full-page "this many hidden on the whole page" lines.

• Fixed a generalized issue in the dropdowns of the game where east asian fonts were not able to draw if the dropdown was a bit less tall than the game's default.

• The new version of the "start new profile window" is in place.
  • It is my design, and will need to get a review from Josh. It's not as clean as his work.
  • However, I'm pleased with how it evokes both the matrix mirror, and the old-school wizard software installers, at the same time.

• The unit analysis tab has been updated so that it now shows the differential (in blue or red) for how much higher something is possible than what is currently used, or how much lower something currently is versus what is possible.
  • Previously there was just colorization alone, and no explanation of how much more or less these were.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for suggesting.

• The save and load game windows have both been updated to the newer style of "outer window" to match the settings and controls windows.
  • Some other improvements have also been made to both in minor areas, just spacing and composition in general, and then also improvements that will make them work with other properly, even if there are very long words used. This mostly applies to German and the romance languages.

0.591 Command Mode And Hacking

(Released September 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.

• The unit types screen has been updated further (it was a bit more than just a minor set of tweaks, turned out):
  • The overall plates for units are now taller, and so the portraits of units are now drawn in, well, a portrait set of dimensions. These portraits now have nice shadowing to them, and cropping that looks cool.
  • Over top of the bottom of the portrait, if you have any of that unit at the moment, it shows how many with a gold number in an inset black tab.
  • There is now a second line in the top part of each panel which gives a new extremely-brief description of what the unit is broadly for, helping players to see patterns in this screen as well as encouraging them to experiment with some newer units as those arise. This was a great idea by Josh.
  • In all of the views, in the very bottom line if you are not missing equipment for a unit type, or having some other information shown there, it defaults to showing the badges, perks, and feats of the unit so that you can hover over them. This is extremely useful, and having it be part of the default view (so long as you actually assign equipment to units) is something I'm really excited about.

• Command mode has been fully updated to the new ui style.
  • There's nothing really notably different here in how it functions, it just looks about a thousand times better.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for the killer design update.

• In the event that you have something selected that would normally show in the lower left corner, that thing will not show while command mode is open. They don't need to be competing for space.

• A huge amount of experimentation later, and I'm most of the way through solving one of the big problems with the new ui that didn't quite exist in the old one, but which was always somewhat a problem -- namely that the tooltips in sub-menus in particular can wind up blending right in with the stuff that they are over.
  • After a lot of experimentation, I've got a shadowing system working, and the next thing is to build out more weights and intensities of that, and allow those to be set contextually. This has been a larger digression than I thought it would be, and it wasn't on my general todo list, but it's a really important thing for making the ui intelligible. It doesn't affect the hud much, except with hyper-extended tooltips, but it affects the submenus something fierce.
    • Josh was aware of this, and had put some things in his mockups to try to solve this, based on a glow rather than a shadow. However, that wound up making things look fuzzy in-game because I couldn't quite duplicate what he was doing. So we had set this to be something to come back to. Since the challenge has a large technical component, I decided to just look into it on my own.

• The shadows around tooltips are now fully implemented, and there are currently four different styles/weights. All of this can be easily updated via xml.
  • In general, this is just used to keep tooltips from blending into the background of windows they are over, or for extra-extended tooltips in general to be more visibly linked-together and not lost in whatever view they might be over top of.

• Some further adjustments to tooltip shadow, and added shadows to the settings and control bindings menus so that those are also more visible.

• The hacking screen's bottom bar has now been fully updated to the new ux style.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for the great design, although man this was a tricky one to break apart and stitch back together. But very much worth it!

0.590.11 Notification Completion

(Released September 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.

Pod Scene

• Clicking the "VR available here" indicated button now finally actually clears, and again you are moved into chapter two properly, rather than it not moving you into chapter two.
  • Thanks to Marcelo Mattioli for the most recent report.

• The pod scene has been updated in a variety of ways:
  • All of the little people-in-the-pod have had their profiles updated so that they fit more in the water. There are 64 of those, and only a few of them had been updated properly prior to now, but they weren't actually visible in the scene until now. It had been just using three different profiles, but now it uses all 64.
  • The glow of the red/orange pods has been updated visually to look a bit better (and angrier, while still showing the profile of the person inside instead of blowing it out).
  • Every time you open the pod scene, it currently randomizes the body shapes in the pods, which pods are red or unlit, and (within a certain range) how many are unlit or red, respectively.

Project Completion Banner And Effects

• The new upper-center-screen banner for when projects are completed is now in place.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for designing it, it looks great!

• I've added some further visual flair in a new particle system that triggers right under this banner, drawing extra attention to it.

• Integrated 18 new sound effects that can be used for various notices and alerts.

• Went through dozens of more sound effects for project completion, originally planning to have it vary by the nature of the project you were completing. For now those sound effects are still in the xml, but I've wound up with something simpler which I think mostly gets the idea of what I want across. I may tune this some more in the future, but I'm not sure I can solve this today; been staring at it with my ears for too long.

• Added a new "complete all active projects" cheat, which is primarily for development purposes, but I'm sure will in theory be useful for some kind of testing. To be honest, the game state won't match very well with the projects that are "completed" this way, so for any real testing it is probably best to avoid this.

• When multiple projects banners are going to be shown at once, they are confirmed to properly queue and then display themselves, one after another.

• Added another 100 sounds to the game (very odd that it happened to round to that number, as these were from a ton of unrelated libraries), largely for purposes of possible project-related sounds, but also for some other things later on.
  • I decided that I am really really unhappy with my prior attempts today at the sound effects for project completion, so I'm doing a bit more after all.

• Okay, a completely different sound effect now plays when projects are completed, and I think it fits into the soundscape the way I want now, but obviously I'll have to leave it for a while to be sure. But this one is darker without being too dark, and it's nice and quick to match the particle effect, so it seems like a pretty good candidate.

• Also while I was at this, I redid the sound effect that happens when you start or continue a game to be multiple sound effects that are a lot darker and spookier. The vibe is a lot better in terms of diving into the city with that tone coming up for them.

Top-Right "Must Do A Thing" Notices

• The upper-right-style "toast" for techs being completed, readied, or immediately invented, as well as those for projects being started or completed, are now gone.
  • These are deeply redundant at this point, and also cluttered up the interface quite a bit.

• New code has been added to make sure that all of the top-right-style "must do a thing" messages are saved into savegames properly, and that the game will throw a scary error (that hurts nothing) if I ever forget to do that with another one.
  • Additionally, the timed notifications above the radial menu are also saved into savegames properly.
  • Thanks to Strategic Sage for the most recent observation that these were not happening.

• A variety of logic has been put in place to prevent excessive "here is a handbook entry you should read that was added sometime prior to your current savegame" when you load an existing save.
  • That might sound like just a short-term issue that is only annoying to people who participate in the pre-release builds of the game, but it's definitely something that is likely to be an ongoing problem if not addressed, since there's always the possibility of more handbook entries being added on any given path where a player has already trodden, even years from now. This provides a measure of protection against that kind of "open up an existing savegame and see a bunch of overwhelming spam of things to read."
    • It also does not give you the "click here for command mode" notice if you were beyond any of the projects directly after that mode.
    • On older saves it DOES give you the list of timed notifications about new technologies that you now have, if you did not have them before. This is something that is less-pleasant than I would prefer in an ideal world, but it helps people know their savegame has been transitioned to a new style if that happened. Overall this also passes very quickly, versus littering the screen until the player does something about it, too.

Timed Notifications

• The new style of "temporary messages above the radial menu" are now in place.
  • The "small blob of note-like text next to the radial menu" is now gone, being converted into the above.
    • Some not-very-useful things that were shown here, like chapter changes and npc deaths unrelated to your own allies or bulk units, are no longer shown here, for the sake of reducing useless clutter.
  • These all now last a consistent 8 seconds on screen, rather than being a mix of different very-fast timings from 3-6 seconds.
    • However, you can also now set what the timing these should stay on the screen should be in the Game tab of the settings menu.
    • Also, they have a visible countdown bar that moves from right to left, and if you hover over any of them, they all stop.
  • There is also a delay in how quickly these are revealed on after another, which can similarly be configured. It defaults to 0.8 seconds.
  • You can also click these to clear them immediately.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for designing this new system, as it is far superior to the old one, both in terms of visibility, usability, and also attractiveness.

• If there are timed noticed in the bottom right corner, then things like the arrow indicator for the "command mode here" and similar will hide until they are done.

• A bunch of extra extensions have been made to the note log, so that:
  • The temporary notes that are currently displaying get saved into savegames so that they are back again when you load it the next time.
  • They specify what left and right click will do, which is usually to just close the note faster.
  • They have nice handling for the tooltips that go with them, when relevant, so that they appear to the left of the notice and can be expanded and all those other good bits.

• Countdowns now have a proper log entry for when they start, and this now shows up in the temporary messages area, as well.

0.590.10 Tooltip Completion

(Released September 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 "Always Show Full Tooltips" game setting has been removed, as it was too verbose to be useful.

• A new "Use Toggle Instead Of Hold For Detailed Tooltips" setting has been added at the top of the Input tab.
  • Normally you hold Shift or a similar key to expand tooltips. This setting allows you to tap the relevant key to toggle tooltip expansion instead.
  • Thanks to GC13 for suggesting.

• There is a new "Camera Feel" settings tab, because some of the stuff in the Input tab was definitely not related to input, and that was confusing.

• Improved the toast notification second line text so that it should work properly with Japanese fonts. I think this is the only language that was having a problem with it, but if others were, they should also be fine now.

• Fixed a bug where the Taser feat of bulk technicians was applied to bulk peacekeepers instead.

• Fixed it so that the "Delete Structure" function is always the very last thing in the build menu when it is present, rather than sometimes being ahead of other structures or territory control flags.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

Tooltip Overhaul COMPLETE

• Fixed a bug in the prior version where the expanded view of status effects was just repeating the description again if it was meant to also draw the strategy tip after that. Whoops.

• Fixed an issue with text in the frames of the unit-style tooltips going off the right of the frames in two of the frames.

• On reflection since yesterday's build, I've come to dislike having the detailed tooltips for units crowd into the rest of my view when I'm not explicitly wanting to see all that extra detail.
  • With that in mind, I've made it a two-stage expansion process for those tooltips. Holding shift like usual does something that does not intrude into the rest of the screen, but doesn't quite contain all of the extra info on things like angered cohorts, secondary npc details, full status descriptions, full incoming damage explanations, etc. To be honest, players can often do without this information, although it's very nice to be able to get it when you DO want it. It's just not part of the most-common path (it's still quite-common).
  • By holding (default) Ctrl, the full cascading-outward tooltips are shown. This is expressed in the instructions at the bottom of these tooltips.
    • This version also hides the at-mouse tooltips, whereas the more-condensed-but-still-expanded version does not.

• If there is enough room to show the second and third columns of the expanded-sideways large unit-style tooltips in just the second column, given the height of the first column, then it now condenses both column 2 and 3 into just column 2.

• The formatting of the temporary status effect tooltips has been improved to make some bits of it more readable than it previously was.

• The tooltips from yesterday were not including actions-over-time that units were doing, but that's now in the status section. The security clearance is also tentatively in the extended status section, but including the full clearance level description seemed like too much, and possibly even just the bit that is there now should be skipped as excessive. I'll think about that over time.

• The initial implementation of structures-that-exist into the new tooltip format is now in place, and looks a lot fancier as well as being more readable.
  • That said, I immediately see some more areas I want to improve on it.

• All of the production chain costs and inputs have been updated a bit, so that the outputs come first, and then you see what the costs are per output, rather than hearing about the cost per output before you even see what the output is.
  • Thanks to GC13 for suggesting.

• The tooltips for bulk unit deployment, and looking at bulk units in the hardware screen, are now converted to the new format.
  • They now include information about badges, perks, which previously was not available to be seen very easily until you built them. That's going to become increasingly important.

• The player vehicles and units now all have their type-based tooltips in place.
  • These are primarily used on the unit type analysis screen and similar, and then as part of deployment during command mode.
  • These have the same improvements that bulk androids got, namely that you can see their perks, badges, and feats, and see the details of those if desired. And their style of cost display is also the same.
  • During deployment mode, it also lets you know that you can right-click that icon to cycle through the same units of that type. This was already on bulk androids, but now it's on regular androids, mechs, and vehicles. That text is also more brief so that it fits better.

• Territory control site tooltips in the build menu now specify what resource they will actually gather, and how much of it they will provide (in the case of things like the furniture warehouse, it just says "Amount Varies."

• The initial version of the build menu tooltips for structures/jobs is now in place, although I still have some things to finish up with it.
  • This is officially the last of the old tooltips being converted over, although there's still more to do on these two and then also the attack-prediction tooltips. But it's still a nice milestone!

• Fixed the delete structure tooltip being absent in the build menu.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• The way that "job cap comes from" and "max thing per subnet" are handled is now updated for the new ui style, for existing structures or ones you're contemplating building.

• The construction cost lines for potential jobs and structures are now drawn in the same style that the ones for units are.

• More stats that are not needed at a glance for potential structures and jobs are now hidden unless the player holds shift. But it's not quite the same list as for structures that already exist, since you do care about things like electrical requirements when considering a new construction. In general this keeps the tooltips from being overwhelming in the build menu.

• Tooltips for the build menu now must be to the side of the build menu so that they don't overlap it.

• Multi-line entries in the new unit-style tooltips now have more room to fit their text in a readable way, without being TOO cramped, while still being kinda cramped.

• Removed the old code for the last two styles of old tooltip, and discovered one last lingering tooltip that was a debug tooltip related to city vehicles that was still using it. Updated that to the new style.

• The last of the tooltips are FINALLY done. This is the attack prediction tooltip, both in a new brief format and a revised longer format.
  • I wound up deviating really heavily from Josh's design, based on discussions with players and some of the things Josh and I had discussed in the past, and how the rest of the UI fits together with it.
  • The chief goal of those is to keep them as brief as possible, and not block the player's view as they are moving the mouse around. To that end, making sure that they don't get too wide, but also have enough space to show what they do want to show, was important.
  • Vehicles/mechs now have a different icon for their ranged attacks, as well as noting if they would kill a target, or if they are missing ME or AP more effectively, as well as showing ME/AP costs in a very brief fashion.
  • Thanks in particular to Fluffiest and Mintdragon for the discussion on these.

0.590.9 First Unit Tooltips

(Released September 15th, 2024)

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

• When your unit is going to hack another unit, the line that is drawn is now a green hacking-style color rather than being the orange attack color, to make it more clear you're definitely hacking rather than attacking.
  • Thanks to Fluffiest for suggesting.

• The highlight along the top of the big buttons for units shown in the lower left corner, or on the left in the equipment screen, are now updated to be more subtle rather than super overly-light.

• Fixed up some quality issues that were plaguing the portrait-style images of units on the various screens, ranging from blockiness in some gradients, to blurriness at certain specific scales of them being drawn.

Unit Selection And Visibility

• For player units that are not selected at the moment, it no longer uses the gold diamond above their heads, or the blue downward-triangle if they are out of AP. This was not informative-enough.
  • Now it still uses the gold and blue color and the general scaling, but it uses the shape-icon of that unit class, which allows you to see at a glance which kind of unit you are looking at, even if it's behind buildings or other objects. It also makes it consistent with the map, and helps reinforce the connection between those shape icons and the unit they go with.
  • Also, previously the shapes above their heads were not clickable, despite looking like they would be. Now they are fully clickable. Even if they're showing up behind a building, which is very useful because you can just intuitively click the icon you can see.

• The selected state of androids and humans and other humans-scale units is now done with three hexagons around them, rather than prior means.
  • For all units, this means no big thick ugly white border around them that also intersects with part of the unit themselves.
  • For player units, this means that the icon above their head that was either gold (if they still had AP) or blue (if they had no more AP) is also gone.
  • My chief goal was to let the players visually understand where the heck their selected unit on the screen, and have that be a really consistent experience, and not blend in with attack lines, etc. I tried literally dozens of visual effects, ranging from wireframe shaders (again), to all sorts of aura and border shaders (again and again), plus way more esoteric things (icy overlays and lightning overlays and kind of cloudy glowing overlays). None of those really felt like they were the right mix of visible and attractive, and they all actively made it harder to just look at the unit you had selected, which didn't feel correct at all.
  • By removing the overhead icon from these units, it also prevents things like text popups from either occluding said overhead icon, or having to be really huge or high, both of which would normally contribute to players missing what they're looking at.
  • With the hexagons themselves, I experimented with a lot of various kinds of animations, scales, horizontal and vertical offsets, and colors. Ultimately a lot of the more flamboyant styles, including gold (which was my preferred, since it matches a ready-unit) were all reducing the legibility of other elements, like the health bar. Coloring these different if it's for your unit, a unit of yours out of AP, or a third party unit also really did not do well, because it makes for too many things for players to scan for, and breaks any sense of "eye muscle memory."
  • Not being able to see if your unit is out of AP when it is selected and you are looking directly at the unit is mildly annoying, but the reality is that when you are actually doing things with that unit, you are tending to look at your mouse cursor itself, not your unit. And since the behavior of the line leading from these units to the mouse cursor changes, that's likely to be very much as much of a signal as most folks need.

• Mechs and vehicles now also draw their selection status in the new way, with the concentric hexagons. It's a lot less distracting and more attractive.

• The way that buildings are selected visually when you have one selected is now a mix of the older style of outline, but in the newer color and closer to the building in a more-correct fashion, and also the underlying hexes at ground level, which are typically not very visible, but it's nice to be consistent.

• Selected buildings now show up as selected on the map view, whereas before that was not the case, which was fairly confusing.

• The checkboxes in the lens filters now actually look properly like checkboxes, rather than being very confusing in their iconography.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• In the map, when you have a unit selected, it now has gold brackets around them.
  • This was a surprisingly large rabbit hole, because not only did I wind up needing to figure out a visual style for this, which took quite a while, but I also wound up reworking the mipmapping for all icons so they are now a bit more clear.
  • Thanks to Mintdragon and others for requesting.

• The colors of your unit icons on the map are now consistent with their new colors in the main view.
  • Additionally, units that are in standby show up in a greenish color rather than blue or gold on the map.
  • You can now see at a glance which of your units is out of AP, which are on standby, etc.

Tooltip Overhaul

• Discovered that I had missed another 4 tooltips in the old style, which were actually not even compiling correctly. Fixed now.

• The hacking daemon tooltips have been fully updated to the new style.
  • Turns out that these did not need to be in the "plated" format at all, but instead some extensions to the existing "larger" tooltip format I've been working with over the last few weeks was more ideal.

• Added more ui framework pieces to allow for assembling these new most-complex tooltips.

• The prefabs and framework and general code infrastructure has been created for the unit-style tooltips, which also includes jobs and structures. This won't be used for the combat-prediction tooltips; those are actually less complex than this current case, and I still have some mixed feelings on them in general. I'll tackle that after I finish the others.

• More metadata has been added to the "image border color" information that I started about a month ago, which allows me to adjust certain pieces of unit border colors in the lower left corner. There is now a related set of colors that is also applied to the new unit-style tooltips, but this one is brighter, based on Josh's designs.

• A bunch of additional logic is now in place for what fields get omitted from the default tooltips on units of all sorts, and allied or distant npcs in particular.
  • Some things are now omitted from allied npcs (like captured units) that would just never be relevant in that context.
  • Other things are shown only in the detailed tooltip if you hold shift, for units that are likely-enemies or which are your definite-allies.
  • In general, when you're not making immediate choices that involves an agility skill check, that doesn't need to be shown in all your tooltips at all times. When a unit is selected, that's already visible in the lower left corner, of course. And the unit type analysis screen also lets you find your most-agile units or similar very easily. The primary goal here is reducing the general amount of information clutter on NPC unit tooltips in particular, since those are ones you hover the most, but also your own unit tooltips to a lesser degree.

• The npc unit tooltips are now fully converted into the new ui format, and have all of the optimizations I can think to make in terms of making the data easy to read, while still handling unusual cases like when a unit has a ton of status effects on itself, and things of that nature.

• The player unit tooltips have been converted to the new format. This currently applies only to units that actually exist, not ones you are considering building.

• A bunch of extensions have been made to this newest style of tooltip so that they can draw one or two extra panels to the side, and fit more-lengthy information in there when the player holds shift.
  • For player elite units, this is their list of status effects with full descriptions, and the full list of aggroed cohorts with actual aggro values included. In both this and the main view, the aggroed cohorts are shown more briefly (cohort name only, not including the cohort group behind it), and in a comma-separated list, without having each entry on its own line. Some players were preserving units for a really long time and not wiping their aggro, and so not having this push the tooltips off the screen was important. Similarly, for the status effects, I wanted this to be something you could see at a glance in the most-brief format without having to select the target and then hover the pip. To get the high detail version you still need to do that, but this is already much better.
  • For NPC units, it moves their "Extra info," whatever happens to be in that, to a new column. And then also does the same thing with the status effects for them.
  • When these tooltips are expanded in this way, the other at-mouse tooltips now disappear to get out of the way.

• A variety of minor improvements have been made to status effect descriptions, so that they are more consistently-present while also being sufficiently brief for the new contexts in which they are shown.

• A few unit descriptions and npc stance descriptions have been made more brief, but a bit more will still need to be done there.

• Some of the extra lore information from npc units is now pulled out into a separate field that is only shown in the sideways-expanded tooltips.
  • When just looking around at units, everything now looks like it will fit on most aspect ratios without clipping upwards off the screen. Though there may be specific units that are still too verbose.
  • I also removed some extra stats off of a few units, like taking away hacking resistance from the military transports, making them un-hackable, which seems fitting.
  • How all of this interacts with the attack-prediction tooltip is something I have to work out, presumably tomorrow, because right now if you try to expand the attack-prediction tooltip, it's just going to disappear and show the expanded tooltip of the npc from the side instead. I have some growing ideas on how to handle this better, but for now in this build it's very non-ideal.
  • I also still need to update buildings/jobs to the new tooltip format, and the unit tooltips when it's for a potential unit or unit type rather than one that is extant in the world. I have done a lot of planning an experimenting today with some of the very surprising ways that these tooltips need to expand, and I think I have ideas on how the rest will fit together.

0.590.8 Large Tooltip Sprint

(Released September 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.

• Extra information has been added to the item descriptions for the armor piercing rounds and hackamajig, so that now players can actually figure out how to use those things much more easily.

• The hackamajig now costs twice as many microbuilders, and now has a stack limit of 1 instead of 2, but is also twice as effective as it used to be.
  • A lot of players were not realizing that you really had to use two bursts of it for it to be fully effective, and there was no need to make them do that. So now it does the equivalent of two bursts in one.
  • Additionally, the wealth cost has been increased about 24x, because it was such a low value before that it may as well have not been there. Originally that was set as the cost before wiretapping was a thing.

• Fixed an issue where some blank action entries could show up in the action statistics list. These were basic unit movements, and were confusing to have in there.

• Added in a mechanism to combine same-name ability uses (such as Battle Recharge for androids, vehicles, and mechs being three different abilities) into a single ability for the action statistics window. This is a lot more clear what you were doing.

• Removed the "short name" field from the abilities, as the ability bar no longer uses those, and nothing else in the game used those.

• The game now retains the data for the I/O tab through savegames, beyond just what was there in terms of electricity and computing cycles.
  • Thanks to Gloraion for reporting.

• Fixed a regression in some of the early tasks from chapter one where some of the formatting tags like {0} were not being filled properly.
  • Thanks to Miikka Ryökäs for reporting.

Tooltip Overhaul

• The consumable item tooltips have been updated to the new format, and I'm very excited about these, because these were hands-down my least-favorite tooltips in the game, being the most overwhelming in general.
  • They are now more informative, but also easier to read. More information is hidden behind the "hold shift to expand," and it's more organized in general.

• The "cost to use/deploy/etc formatting on all of the things that have that sort of information is also now improved and made consistent with the new ui.

• A lot of the minor tooltips for things like categories and filter dropdowns, etc, on various inventory-type screens are now updated.
  • For many of the dropdowns, they actually don't show the tooltips normally, because they only show it if there is an extra description to clarify something in them.

• The various tooltips related to upgrades have been updated to the new format.
  • There is still an element of some messiness to some of them, but that's just inherent in having a long list of things that they affect, I think. It's not true of all of them, but some of them are something I might need to think about much later on, but they are low priority for now.
  • One nice thing that is also added here is that the "hold shift for more details" is now accurately applied to these for the first time. Some of them had more details, others do not, and the message now appears for the ones that do.
  • Down to 93 tooltips!

• The tooltips for action and city and meta statistics have all been updated to the new ui format.

• Deal tooltips are updated, and much more readable now.
  • 89 to go.

• TPS Reports have been updated to the new format, and got quite a few bits of makeover as part of the process. They now have a more-brief version and an expanded version, and the whole thing is so much more legible because of the cumulative changes.

• The ledger report tooltips are updated to the new format, making that the last of the resource window tooltips.

• Updated all of the column header tooltips on the resource window.
  • 83 tooltips left!

• Several more minor tooltips have been converted to the new format, including the "locked ability" ones.
  • 76 to go.

• The actor and structure stat tooltips have been converted to the new format.
  • There were several bits of confusing or duplicative data in there for structures in particular, and those are now also corrected.
  • It also was giving no indication when there was trend data that you could hold shift to see, and it now gives the footer that indicates if there is such data when there is.

• Updated another sizeable batch of tooltips, including the ones for starting a new profile, and for during events. Lots of minor adjustments and improvements, but nothing all that noteworthy in this batch.
  • Down to 68 left, although by looking a different way, I discovered another 30ish, 17 of those of which are still left. So... back up to 85, I guess. This is still not counting the "plated tooltips," which I'll have to do after these. Units, structures, jobs, etc.

• All of the different variants of POI and district tooltips are now complete.
  • Found another couple of loose tooltips in the mix of this, so I'm down to... 85 again, sigh.

• One of the least-used older style of tooltips now seemingly had no adherents left, so I removed it, and then immediately found a last bunch of places it was still being used.
  • These involved are all now converted:
    • The lower-left contemplation tooltips
    • Scavenging sites at buildings.
    • Beacons (which the French translators noticed just the other day was only referenced by-name in the front-end of the game in a lens filter until now).
    • City timeline tooltips in the end of time.
    • Debug tooltip for the end of time.
    • Three variants of main-game debug tooltip, now rolled into one.
    • Three variants of main-game building debug tooltip, also now rolled into one.
  • The basic building tooltip when your mouse goes over random buildings when you are in inspect mode (aka holding ctrl).
  • With these converted, I am now down to 83 remaining by my not-so-accurate count (I've been saying all along it was an imperfect estimation method).

• That large batch of additional tooltips I found are all completed now, so I'm back to the list of 67 tooltips I was otherwise working with.
  • This includes things like hacking actions, project outcomes in the project window, key contact tooltips, sub-tooltips if you click into key contacts, dialog choice tooltips, some tooltips for various toast, and more. The project and hacking ones in particular got some extra attention.

• The upper-right bar has had all of its tooltips converted to the new format, and some extraneous information stripped out in a couple of places, and some other information that is important gaining better formatting.
  • Total tooltips remaining is now down to 54 before I switch to work on the plated style ones.

• All of the remaining non-bespoke tooltips are converted to the new format!
  • This new batch includes a ton of things on the radial menu, a few things on the tech header, some sidebar bits, the error windows, the load window, the controls preview, and a variety of other things. Most of these did not require anything drastic, although the radial menu section required some extra care to make sure not only do the tooltips look good, but that they open in a sensible spot.
  • The total remaining items from my unreliable count is 15, incidentally -- those are false positives that are unrelated to actual tooltips that need conversion. So the count being off worked in my favor at the very end.
  • I still have to do all of the "plated" tooltips, which includes units, structures, jobs, hacking daemons, and possibly something else I'm forgetting.
  • I also still have to do the "what will happen if you attack the unit you are hovering" tooltip, which has a bespoke design incoming for it, too.
  • But other than those things, which hopefully I can complete tomorrow, this is the end of the tooltip conversion saga. There's still some other lingering ui things I need to finish AFTER the tooltips, but hopefully less than one more day of those bits. We shall see.

• I have now removed two more of the old-style tooltips, and in the process of that, I discovered that there were 4 remaining tooltips that were in fact hiding out and using those (all related to hacking). Those last four have also now been converted, sigh.

0.590.7 Unlocks, Equipment, And Abilities

(Released September 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 kerning and line spacing for all of the tooltips has been fixed up, primarily affecting the Latin font languages, but line-spacing affecting all languages. The kerning pieces affect all parts of the ui, not just the tooltips. So numbers in the header are a bit better spaced now, etc.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for suggesting.

Localization Updates

• Made some substantial updates to the text-handling under the hood, so that if it is trying to run a "string.Format" operation and runs into some problem (typically a malformed input string), it will now: 1) give that error in a way that the exact string can be found much more easily; 2) only give that error once, rather than spamming it infinitely.
  • This makes debugging minor issues with the localization much easier, and also if myself or modders or whoever make a mistake, it's also easier on people in english.

• The initial versions of Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, and Traditional Chinese are now added to the game.
  • This is all of the languages the game will support at this time, so now the entire initial set is in here. However, please do remember that these are WIP, same notes from yesterday's build.
  • The initial atlas of glyphs for Traditional Chinese are also now populated.

• Added some more buffer extensions so that some more text that was doing formatting outside of the protective parts of the localization framework now happens inside the localization framework, and thus enjoys all the same protections and logging benefits.

Tooltip Overhaul

• Updated all of the various tooltips related to the "other alerts" in the task stack, and the general introductory checklist-style items during the prologue and the very first part of chapter one, to the new format.
  • Fixed several small data and formatting issues that were pre-existing with some of these, while I was in there.
  • This brings the total count down to 150 left.

• All of the stance tooltips, and the other things related to the bottom-left sidebar like the action-over-time tooltips, territory control tooltips, and similar have all been updated to the new style.
  • 137 to go.

• Fixed a bug in the new tooltips where certain code paths were not properly clamping them to the correct side of things, so for example some of the stuff that is meant to be above the bottom-left corner stuff was showing up occluding it, instead.

• A bunch of tooltips related to dropdowns on various interfaces, ranging from the cheats window to new profiles and timelines, and so on.
  • Down to 118 remaining.

• One of the more complex parts of the "big tooltips" was how they needed to adapt to show some substantial extra information for when they are being unlocked a technology. It was just so much text, and also was not compatible with the designs that Josh put together.
  • Josh modeled a few options, but they were super complicated for me to code, and still had so much text on-screen. They were much better than before, but the fundamental problem was with how much information I was trying to communicate at once.
  • The actual solution, now in the game, is to have it so that these tooltips have an "unlock version" which is more brief, and has the key facts about what you are unlocking and how it was unlocked and how long it will take to research it, etc... and then for those to have a "hold shift for more" function that takes you to the other tooltip, which shows none of the tech information, but all of the more-detailed info about what-that-thing-is. This is now in place.
    • For concepts that are unlocked, the fact that there is no expanded version is by design, not an oversight. They just don't have anything more to say than what is on the brief version.
    • Right now, the "second tooltip" is often in the legacy style still, but as I get through those tooltips, that will stop being the case and they'll look more natural.
  • This brings it down to 107 tooltips remaining, although these numbers are super misleading because sometimes a dozen tooltips are contained in a batch like this without really looking like it.

• The "inspiration source" descriptions and strategy text has been removed. These were overly-wordy and cluttering even the new briefer tooltips, and were just not imparting any information of use. The inspiration source itself as a few-word title is still there, as that is useful and interesting.

• The equipment tooltip has been fully updated to the new style of formatting.
  • This has a lot of nice little extra features, like separating out the bits that are about how to equip it, and the bits that are about what it does if you have it on.
  • It also shows stats line-by-line, which will be useful for some other comparison-shopping features I will add later, for the loadout-screen version of it. Several people have asked about that.
  • This tooltip also now properly notes the cooldown mechanic, rather than "turns to equip," since that has changed. And the detailed-tooltip explanation properly explains the new mechanic, rather than describing the old one.
  • As an aside, this does not reduce my remaining-tooltip count by even 1, because of the specific way I'm doing the counting. Such is life!

• The tooltips for abilities have been massively updated as they were converted into the new format.
  • They now are the brief/expanded style of tooltip, whereas they never were before.
  • A lot of details about usage are now packed into a smaller frame at the bottom, which is very small when not expanded, and then has the relevant details nicely-ordered when expanded.
  • This was an hour of work or so, but again does not reduce my actual remaining tooltip count at all based on how I'm counting it. So still 107.

0.590.6 Command Mode And Translations

(Released September 10th, 2024)

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

• Added a new "Max Distance To Show Unit Outlines Behind Objects" setting, with the default set to 60.
  • This keeps NPC units and your own units from glowing through buildings at extreme distances, since that looked pretty funky.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for suggesting.

• The mechanic where deterrence requirements on jobs creep up over time has been removed.
  • My goal here was to provide a sense of unease for players that they could not just budget for exactly what their current needs were, and that there was some escalation... but these are very muddy motivations, it made players too nervous, and it was completely at odds with the design of the rest of the game. It needed to go. Turns, in and of themselves, are not meant to apply time pressure. Contextual events or countdowns are, and this mechanic with deterrence was not in keeping with either contextual events or countdowns.
  • This has been a discussion for a long time, but thanks to Ninetailed for the most recent reminder.

• Right-clicking minor projects, or hitting spacebar to close the notice that they are available, no longer pops up the project window for them. That was unintentional.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where the history window could not be opened in command mode.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• A new "Use Left-Click For Unit Deployment" setting has been added to the input tab of the settings menu, to go with the others.
  • The normal mouse button for deploying units is now the units is now the right mouse button, making that consistent with all of the others. But you can swap it back to being the left if you prefer.

• Fixed a regression from the prior build that made it impossible to go to the map view while you were in build mode, because the game was hyper-clicking the left mouse button by accident (once per frame, so dozens of times per second).

• Fixed a bug where the first time you pressed the cancel button (escape key) in build mode, it would ignore the input.

• Fixed both build mode and command mode so that when you use the cancel button (escape key), it exits out of whatever they are targeting, rather than out of the entire mode.
  • In command mode, it also collapses the current category, if one is open and nothing is being targeted. This isn't relevant for build mode, which always has to be on some category.
  • After those conditions are met, the cancel button properly closes both interfaces.

Tooltip Overhaul

• A large portion of the command-mode deployment tooltips are updated to the new style.
  • These now show substantially more information in the lower left corner tooltip, so that for example you can see what the resource costs are, and what the capacity counts are, as you are doing placement. Previously this was nowhere on the screen unless you moved the mouse back over the deployment button.

• When assigning stances to your bulk units by command mode, it now has some extra clarity in its tooltips.

• Hunted down some more elusive formatting issues with TextMeshPro line-height measuring, and even more tooltips now behave properly.

• Inverted the way that "cost out of what you have" was being shown for units that you can deploy, as that was backwards from how everywhere else in the game showed same information (sigh).

• A really huge number of upgrades have been made to the internals of how things like clearances and such are calculated, so that when you're deploying units that do not exist yet, but are about to exist, it gives you the most accurate picture possible about if they will be caught out of clearance of a target, and how much damage they're expected to take if enemy units will be shooting at them, etc.
  • All of the various branches of the deployment part of command mode are now updated to handle this and all of the related at-mouse tooltip information.
  • All of these changes have gotten me down to 169 tooltips left.

• The tooltips for captured units and bulk androids have been updated to the new format.
  • Still 163 to go.

Localization Updates

• Updated the localization framework so that it has two separate debug controls for handling extra keys or missing keys in language excel files.

• Updated all of the non-English fonts to have larger dynamic atlases, and less-comically-huge sampling sizes, so many more characters actually fit in these atlases, and the characters draw properly in game locations. I may have to update this even further, but for now this has solved issues with Simplified Chinese and Korean fonts not appearing properly.

• The initial translations for the following languages are now in place: Simplified Chinese, French, German, Japanese, and Korean.
  • Traditional Chinese, Portuguese, and Spanish are almost ready, but not quite in place yet.
  • Miguel from Hooded Horse wants me to remind everybody that these are work in progress translations, as this is a complex game!
  • I would like to further remind everyone that the translators are about a month behind me right now, but they will catch up quickly.
    • So some of their translations for things where there was text I changed still references the old way of doing things.
    • And in other cases, where I added a new string of text, you will see English in the middle of the other language.
  • As a general rule, when there is new content being added to part of the game, this is what the beta branch of the game will always be like. For the short-term, everything is the beta branch, though!

• The versions of Noto Sans used by the game for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean have been heavily updated.
  • The default weight is no longer so heavy, and their line heights are correct. The letters are also more crisp and clear.
  • The bold weight is also handled directly, instead of relying on typographic fakery, as that was really not working well with any of these languages.

• Created a new "Unique Character Finder" program that gives me either a list of unique characters from a lot of text, or their comma-separated unicode values. Took all of 10 minutes to code, and allows me to pre-populate the atlases for the various languages (most notably this applies to Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) so that the characters already in use are in place in advance, and also so that I can size their atlases more reasonably.
  • This still allows for novel characters to be entered by users, but those are typically way faster since not many come at once, versus potentially thousands at once if the atlases are not pre-populated for the various languages.

• All of the atlases for the existing languages are now fully populated.

0.590.5 Build Mode Revisions

(Released September 9th, 2024)

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

• Androids can now sprint into a dialog, or into a melee attack.
  • This saves some annoying fiddling that otherwise could be required if dialog targets were all out of range, and it also solves the one soft-lock that was possible on turn 1 of the prologue if players really really worked at it on purpose.
  • Thanks to Pingcode for reporting the softlock.

• Fixed a regression where if you were in a targeting mode for a consumable item or an ability with an android, there were a lot of cases where it would draw two targeting lines in a very confusing way. One of them was structural engineering, but generalized movement was another.

• There is a new "Status Effects" section of the handbook, which has entries for Feats, Perks, Badges, and Temporary Status Effects in it.
  • Since these are going to be more and more prominent, and are now named in their respective tooltips, they need to be explained. These unlock silently when you first do the "gang handguns" unlocks.

• Fixed a bug (which I thought was on mantis but cannot find now) where distance restrictions and job class restrictions on subnets were not applied if you used the build menu to replace a job in an existing structure.
  • I may have already fixed that when using the building sidebar in the lower-left to change jobs; perhaps that's the ticket I was thinking of.

Right-Click To Build

• The game now uses right-click by default in build mode, so that this is now consistent with the "right click does any action" and "left click just selects things, never gives orders."
  • There are still other parts of the game that have not yet been converted to this, command mode I think being a big one, but almost everything else abides by this already. The expectations of left click and right click has some unfortunate baggage from the RTS genre, which handles a lot of things differently than other strategy sub-genres, and this game is not an RTS. So trying to just make it self-consistent seems like the best way to go.
  • There is a new "Use Left-Click For Building Construction" in the Input tab of settings, to go with the pre-existing "Use Left-Click For Vehicle And Mech Movement" option, for people who prefer how it has worked up until now. But the default is the new way.
  • The build mode tooltips, where it already told you to use Z and C to rotate buildings, now tells you which mouse button to use, too.
  • Another side bonus of this is that, since left-click-and-drag rotates the camera, accidental rotations no longer happen when rapidly placing buildings.

Tooltip Conversion

• All of the little "out of range" and similar tooltips for androids moving about have been updated to the new style.

• The "board vehicle" tooltip for androids has been updated to the new style.

• Several of the mech "moving about but blocked or getting into something" tooltips were needlessly wide, and are now more narrow when the player until the player holds shift.
  • Additionally, the "board vehicle" tooltip for mechs was not showing when they were going to take attack of opportunity damage, but now does.

• The structural engineering and other remaining tooltips at the mouse cursor for "androids moving around and doing things" are now complete.
  • Down to 203 tooltips to go...

• The remainder of the at-mouse tooltips for vehicles moving around and doing things are now done.
  • Brings the total down to 199!

• The smallest tooltip in the game is when you mouse over a unit when you have no unit selected at all, or when you have one of your units selected and would be switching to select another. There were actually several variants of this, and it now is more informative in general.
  • For your units, it now shows the icon of that unit type, in addition to the existing display of mental energy and action points the unit has.
  • It still shows the action over time they are performing, if they are doing one, but the coloring is now better and it says what they are actually doing.
  • There was a separate variant that was present when a unit of yours was being threatened, and it lacked the other information but showed if they were in a restricted area and how much damage was incoming. Now it shows all of the information, but more briefly so that this tooltip variant isn't suddenly giant. It does have the "hold shift for more" to see the full details in this case, still.
  • This brings it down to 194 tooltips remaining.

• Perks, badges, feats, and status effects all have their tooltips updated to the new style.
  • This is also now the first time where in-game it actually acknowledges what these are with text. Previously, I think maybe badges were noted by name if they were added from an event, and maybe status effect was stated by items, but they weren't actually identified by type while on a unit.

• The framework for rendering the new-style tooltips has been expanded so that there are now shared classes that allow for having both a center-screen and lower-left tooltip at the same time, as has been the case with the other tooltips up until now. The trick was to make sure there wasn't a lot of code duplication, since the new tooltips are exponentially more complex and the code for them needs to stay in sync.
  • I had been planning on waiting on this until all of the at-mouse tooltips were done, but after implementing my first pass of the at-mouse tooltips for during build mode, I really hated those and realized that they needed to move to the lower left. So here we are.

• The first successful lower-left new-style tooltips are now in place: the building construction tooltips for when you are actively constructing things.
  • All of these tooltips have been converted to the new format, and have nicer formatting and make relevant information easier to see.

• The delete-building function still appears at the mouse, to help differentiate it, and it now shows the eraser icon next to the icon and name of what you would be deleting, to make things as clear as they can be.

• The remainder of the build-related tooltips that show in either the center or the bottom-left corner have been fully updated to the new style.
  • Down to 183 tooltips to go.

• When build mode is active and targeting the placement of some type of job or structure, the regular tooltips for hovering over structures are no longer shown in the lower left corner (since that is where the build mode tooltips also show, and that gets distracting flickering around in general.
  • However, if you enable inspect mode by holding Ctrl, it will show that tooltip instead of the build mode one. This is noted on the tiny at-mouse tooltip when hovering over existing structures while in targeted build mode.
    • Note, when you hover over the exact same type of job you are currently building, it does not show the at-mouse cursor tooltip of this sort at all. This is because as you are placing buildings, otherwise this is flickering in and out of view constantly, since you're hovering over the thing you just built.

0.590.4 Vehicle Unloading And Tooltips

(Released September 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.

• The next project that will start is no longer ever shown on the tooltips from the project chain, as quite often that was empty even when more projects will start up (because of the nature of how that comes about), and also it was information that I don't really intend for the player to have at that time, anyway. Their character is not psychic.

• Minor projects now work consistently with major ones, letting you click into them to see the details if you want to, even though there's nothing really there to see. Having the function of the buttons be consistent was more important, and it cuts down on yet more tooltip text that was otherwise explaining why the button was making an error sound.

• Have adjusted the common number color from #85A7FF to #ABC2FF, for legibility reasons.

• Fixed an issue where unloading units via command mode was not warning you about restricted areas.

• Fixed a regression from August 30th where, when I removed the extra fonts not used by the game anymore, it broke the text popups from things like attacking enemies, because they were still using one of those old fonts.
  • The font used there is now updated to the newer fonts, as well as actually showing the text again.

• Cold Blood now shows a popup above the unit who does it, with both a count of the kills and the amount of energy gained, since it was otherwise too subtle what the actual yield was.

• Now that the Ctrl+U hotkey no longer conflicts with it in command mode, the hardware hotkey is bound to U instead of O, and the history window is now O rather than U.

• Fixed a generalized bug where if you had the ability bar in its multi-line form (two lines or three) because of the aspect ratio being narrow or your ui scale being large or both, then the "use consumable items" panel would not appear at the right height above it.
  • In general, the spacing of this panel is now more appropriate (smaller, but consistent) above the ability bar.

Vehicle Loading And Unloading

• Fixed an issue where if a mech was being threatened with an attack of opportunity, and then tried to get in a vehicle, NPCs would not take the attack of opportunity against it.

• Both androids and mechs can now sprint to get in vehicles (aka with the typical sprinting cost of extra mental energy).
  • Previously androids could not sprint in this particular case, which was really annoying for loading transports.
  • And mechs cannot normally sprint at all, but in this particular case, again for helping ease the burden of loading transports, this is better.
  • Thanks to Mintdragon, among others, for requesting.

• Getting into a vehicle (by selecting a unit and right-clicking the vehicle) now costs the exact same amount of actions points (1), and mental energy (1 + sprint cost) that it would take to physically move there.
  • The lack of that cost was meant to make transports more attractive, but it wound up just feeling very odd.
  • Thanks to Trogg, Mintdragon, and many others for notes on this.

• The Load and Unload functions under command mode have been removed from the game.
  • These were always out of place and very confusing, and I'm making the normal loading and unloading more natural instead.
  • Thanks to Fluffiest, B, and others for suggestions in this area.

• In the lower left corner, instead of showing the clearance for vehicles, it now shows how many passengers they can carry, if any, and the count of how many they are carrying right now.

• A number of vehicles have had their passenger capacities adjusted a bit. In general, up to 9 passengers are allowed now rather than 8, and in no case is fewer than 3 allowed if they carry passengers at all.

• The teeny-tiny "units in a vehicle" sidebar on the right-hand side of the screen no longer exists, as that was hard to see, hard to use, not in a spot that was visually linked to its parent vehicle, and in general in the way.

• The icon for "load into a vehicle" has been turned back to the shuttle-like icon that it used to be, rather than being the more crane-arm-like icon it became during the tenure of "command mode load mode."

• The sixth entry on all of the vehicles that can carry units is now Unload, and is available only when they actually have passengers in them.
  • Since all units can now sprint to vehicles, there is no reason for there to be any special load functionality other than selecting the unit and then right-clicking the target vehicle to get into.
  • When you open this ability, it opens a new window that shows all of the units riding in the vehicle, and lets you click them to select them. Critically, this window does not go away when a different unit is selected, or no unit is selected. This allows you to select one, unload it, select the next, etc.
    • This window only goes away when there are either no units left in the vehicle, or the player hits the escape key or clicks the X button on the window.
  • Thanks to Fluffiest and Trogg for related suggestions.

• When the new vehicles panel is open, the numbered hotkeys now go to it rather than the normal ability bar. The ability bar numbers all are replaced with dashes, and you can quickly select which unit you want to deploy via the hotkeys.

Tooltip Conversion

• The project tooltips have been updated for both looking at them in a historical sense, and also for looking at them in the task stack.
  • There are a lot of subtle changes in here, to make sure that things are more legible than they used to be.

• Even further changes have been made to the project tooltips to get rid of some useless text that was cluttering things, and then also to make it so that in tooltips, the outcomes show in lines, and have better color formatting, and have extra color noting "per turn" requirements, among other things.

• The various npc-mission-related tooltips have been updated to the new ux format.

• The various cheat-related tooltips have been updated to the new ux format. In the prior build, those specifically would have been either invisible or throwing errors.

• Countdown tooltips have been updated to the new ui format, both in the history log and the task stack.
  • This completes all of the things in the history log, and brings the total remaining tooltip count down to 354.

• The tooltips at the mouse cursor for targeting general items, the micro nuke, extraction drones, the flamethrower, and the wallripper are all updated, but I have not tested them well at all.
  • This is a pretty destructive set of changes, and will need testing that they still show up in all expected use cases, and don't get overridden by things like the normal attack tooltip.
  • This brings it down to 340 remaining tooltips.

• Added in a new layer of metadata for string character buffers that identifies if actual content that is visible has been written yet, or if it's just all rich text tags.
  • Previously, there were some issues that could cause great instability in the new tooltips where if several rich text tags that do not themselves render were put into a text field, but no actual characters that would render, then bad things would happen with the sizing, and it would actually break the sizing of all of the tooltips using that same prefab until the game was restarted.
    • I think that it was basically measuring negative infinity, and then setting the size of the content to that, which then had a cascade of later effects. The logical thing would be to solve this instead of the rich text character issue, but other nearby elements check "is there any text" for whether to turn on an element or not, including in text that has not been rasterized yet, and so the only way to answer that question pre-rasterization is to either manually search for non-rich-text-tag-text (incredibly slow on the cpu and error-prone, so nonviable), or to keep track of what is added to the intermediate buffers, and then stop checking after the first non-tag-text has been added. This is much more efficient, and matches how I have organized most things.
  • Still, for some uses of AddNonTranslatedText, I was sometimes using that for tags, and other times using that for actual text, which was non-ideal. So I had to add in metadata for about 600 cases of those throughout the codebase to separate those out. Longer-term, it doesn't add any future work, as those are pretty rare, all told.

• Fixed an issue where if one of the new tooltips had frame header text, but no body text, then it would show in a really non-helpful way (previously it was making the tooltip entirely invisible, but after my other fixes it was just showing off the top of the tooltip area). Now it works properly.

• Fixed some issues with the flamethrower targeting enemies not properly showing its tooltip because the attack tooltip was showing.
  • There may be other cases like this with item usage and similar, or with vehicles targeting things, etc. I've just fixed this first case.

• A new text search has been added to the load savegame window. It matches on the titles of the filenames in that profile's folder.
  • This may not be super useful for anyone but me, but it makes it so that I can quickly find test-case savegames that mention some word.

• POI status tooltips have been shifted to the new format.

• Got rid of a lot of false-positive older code that had been commented-out that was referencing tooltips. This brought the current total remaining down from 337 to 302, so there were evidently 35 that were not really there. That's nice to have out of the way.

• Fixed an apparently-longstanding bug that was causing tooltips to not work in the level editor, but since I'm the only one who uses it, I had not noticed.
  • Note to QLOC, level editor stuff never needs to be tested.

• Added in a secondary level editor tooltip that will remain the old style, and migrated all of the related tooltips to that. This dropped me from 302 remaining tooltips to just 258, so that's 44 tooltips that nobody but me really sees and which don't need to be migrated over, which is great.
  • Note to QLOC, level editor stuff never needs to be tested.

• Build mode categories, command mode categories, and basic command mode actions are all updated to the new ui format.
  • Added in some extra-small sizes for the build mode in particular, to keep them from protruding way to the side of the screen.
  • And for command mode categories, those now appear above the bar rather than to the side, but they disappear immediately as soon as you open the category, and you can't hover that same category again while it remains open. In general this solves the problems of things being either overly-far-away, or hiding the thing that you just clicked to see.
  • The count falls to 254 after all that.

• The tiny version of the new tooltips has been removed, as I wasn't using it and there was no good use case for it at this time.

• Extra functionality has been added that allows for a single line of non-word-wrapped text in the main text area of the smaller tooltip, which is really useful for cases like "doing an action at a place where there is a security clearance, and then can expand to see details of said clearance."

• The command mode actions have all had their tooltips updated to the new style, using a lot of the new features noted above. Additionally, a lot of the "damage incoming or attack of opportunity" notes have been adjusted so that they work both in the old style and the new style.
  • Down to 235 tooltips remaining.

• All of the various "do an action at a place" tooltips, most of which are related to StreetSense or contemplations, have been updated.
  • Notes for QLOC: This was really giant surgery on the code, to the point that I tried one approach and then had to back it out and start over because it was too much chaos. In general, there's going to need to be a lot of testing of the various tooltips for "unit is doing a thing and there's a tooltip by the mouse" to make sure those are all okay.

• The mech action-at-mouse tooltips have also all ben updated, as part of the above-noted surgery.
  • Notes for QLOC: Here again, making sure that mechs give proper tooltips when trying to do something they are not allowed to do (streetsense or contemplation), attacking enemies, healing friends, getting into a vehicle, trying to get out of one vehicle directly into another (not allowed), and so on all need to be tested. Everything should be nicely-formatted and make sense without odd spacing or extra lines or whatever else. With that said, the actual tooltip for "attacking an enemy" does not fall under this -- it will look updated, but it's in an intermediary format, and I don't really care about how that one specific thing looks yet.
  • As of this point, there are 215 tooltips remaining. This is one of the nastiest batches, though, that I've been dreading from the start.

• The general smaller tooltip style has been updated so that it no longer has a visible flicker when it changes sizes. Or if there is one, it's practically imperceptible now rather than being more overt.
  • I don't think that this applies to the larger tooltip, which is used for things like lenses, projects, resources etc (anything that has more than one header line, and the larger style of icon). If it's seen happening with those as well, then I can apply the same changes to the larger version.

• A variety more improvements have been made in order to make the various StreetSense actions a lot more brief in their collapsed-tooltip fashion, and then to be nice and orderly when expanded.

• The icon for kills related to cold blood has been updated to something more clear (bloody knife).

• The introductory tooltips during the prologue have now been updated to the new format, and several more minor sizing bugs have been fixed alongside that.
  • Fun fact: there are very clearly 5 separate tooltips here, all of which needed individual testing, and this doesn't reduce the actual count of tooltips at all, given it how these were done.

• The way that security clearance requirements are drawn in the brief format are now considerably more condensed than before, helping to reduce the amount of text on screen when not expanding the tooltips.

• The tooltips for when NPCs want to speak to you are now updated to the new format.

• The bulk of the code for how to show which units are being threatened as they move, and if they're moving into restricted areas, has been heavily updated.
  • In general, if a unit has clearance to be a place, then it no longer bothers saying anything about the clearance of that place -- it's super irrelevant and clutter.

• The sprinting text has been updated so that it is once again visible, and the formatting updated to the new style, and a new extra-brief form of "more text available if you hold shift" is now in place on a broad variety of small tooltips.

• The sprinting energy requirements are now properly in place on all of the various kinds of actions other than when you are attacking, as far as androids go.

• The at-building investigative tooltips have now been checked and fully updated to be in the new format.

• Both the at-building investigation tooltips, and the tooltip describing an investigation on the dropdown of investigations above the lens now show if this is an invasive action or a stealthy action.
  • This uses special colorization for both of them, so that it's again aimed at preventing that surprise when a stealthy investigation is thrown into the mix for the first time again after you haven't seen one for like 10 hours.

• The at-mouse contemplation tooltips for when a unit is going to do a contemplation have been verified and fixed up in the new format.
  • Note that the lower-left tooltip that shows is not updated yet. No tooltips that show in the lower-left corner of the screen are updated yet.

• The "steal vehicle" action has been fully verified to have the right formatting on its tooltip.

0.590.3 More Tooltip Rework

(Released September 5th, 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 longstanding bug (that I never realized was there before) that was causing mouseover events on buttons and text items to be called twice per frame.
  • This would have had a minor performance impact on some tooltips, but that's about it.

• Completely rewired the code for how the new style of tooltips are rendered. Basically, what I had done was working well for one kind of data, but working very poorly for more ad-hoc kinds of tooltips.
  • The new code structure allows for both structured and unstructured data to be rendered with fewer lines of code, while supporting the same functionality as before.

• Fixed a bug that was causing a lot of tooltips to not appear properly in the recent events window or the history window.
  • To my knowledge, every entry should have a tooltip, but a huge number of them were being suppressed by some old logic.

• The tooltips for research domains have been updated to the new ui style, including showing less pointless information when they are viewed in the history log compared to when you have some points of inspiration you can use right away.

• Historical messages that you are reviewing in the log now show up in the new tooltip style, and with the sub-frame formatting for what you chose, it's far easier to understand what your choice was compared to before.

• The tooltips for historical handbook entries that were added, or for hovering the "must-do" (formerly known as toast) messages relating to handbook entries is now in the new format.

• The tooltips related to investigations and territory control sites have all been updated to the new format, and in general an effort has been made to make the two kinds of investigation more clear (so that when you run into the quick-type way late in chapter one, you don't spend time preparing for a deep-type fight that isn't going to happen).

• 53 out of the 60 tooltip variants that can show in the history log have now been updated to the new ux format.
  • In particular, looking back at your history of conversations and event choices and such is so much easier to read now, but there are a lot of general improvements.
  • Overall at this time, there are still 374 places in the codebase that use the old-style tooltips, and some of them are moderately complex to deal with. This is before even getting to structures, units, etc. Hence making sure that the code for these is as easy as possible, and reworking things earlier this build, so that I don't get a larger part of the way through these and have to rethink things again.

0.590.2 Less-Intrusive Tooltips

(Released September 3rd, 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 "Trigger Structure Ability" keybind has been deprecated for now, as that was an awkward flow that no longer exists, and probably won't come back.
  • Thanks to Mateusz Błażewicz for reporting the dangling keybind.

• Lots of internal prep work for some of the new interfaces and tooltips, some of which just arrived overnight from Josh.

• There are now a smaller and tiny version of tooltips, which is primarily about the kind of content they can contain, and how much detail that can have, and how many layers of header are involved, rather than actual size. But they do tend to be actually physically smaller as well.

• The main menu and control bindings windows have both been updated to use the middle-tier size of tooltip, since the tooltips were kind of overwhelming those screens previously.
  • This is still pending further UX designer review, but so far it seems to be a notable improvement.

• Fixed a bug where mousing between certain elements could cause the new tooltips to freak out and draw way too tall.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• The headers of tooltips should no longer go through a visible resize when you move between different sources.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

0.590.1 First Tooltips

(Released September 2nd, 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 city and meta flags windows are no longer directly visible in sandbox mode unless an extra debug flag has been turned on in settings. These are a super easy way to brick your entire profile if you don't know exactly what you're doing, and having them be immediately visible in sandbox mode was too easy of access to them.

• Inspect mode now works on machine structures like any other building.

Tooltips

Framework

• The initial implementation of the generalized new style of tooltip is in place. The first implemented usage of this is with the lenses, but it can now start being adapted into other use cases.

• More framework updates have been made to make more complex tooltips possible in a reasonable fashion, and another very funky additional bug with TextMeshPro (it being off by one nit/pixel per line when estimating heights) has also been worked-around.

• A new generalized structure for writing non-structured tooltips to the new novel format has been added.

• The new style of tooltips now properly adapt their spacing when there is not an icon present in their header.

• A new sub-panel has been added for the general tooltip, with the ability to have a header and a frame around that sub-area.
  • In general this is something that I can continue to build on a bit if I need to, but the basic tooltip is getting fairly full in terms of the things that I can reasonably do with it now.

Resource Tooltips

• The resources tooltips have been fully updated to the new ux format, when combined with the below changes.

• The technical notes on resource tooltips are no longer shown unless you hold shift to see the full tooltip.
  • This extra info is interesting, but not critical.

• Some duplicative information about resource details are no longer shown in the standard resource tooltips, making them less of a wall of text.

• When looking at the resource tooltips in the resource storage window, it now shows the "click to pin" message with the pin icon, and the pin color.

• When looking at the history of changes to a resource recently, it now shows that in a nicer-formatted tabular fashion.

• The descriptions of resources have been reworked a fair bit to make them more consistent in terms of what is in "how to acquire" and "technical notes," which again decreases the volume of text seen by default.

Other Tooltips

• The first usage of the new non-structured tooltip writer is the system menu button in the upper left of the main game screen.

• The tooltips of the system menu have all been updated to the new format.

• Network resources, like electricity and (for now at least) computing cycles now show in the new tooltip format.
  • Speaking only of the top bar, not their status on the sidebars of units.

• The intelligence class tooltip is now in place as the first tooltip that does not use an icon in the header.

• All of the main menu buttons now have a tooltip in the new style, so that they are all equally reactive.
  • I was a bit sarcastic in the sub-header text, hopefully not too much so.

• The tooltips for the controls window have all been updated.
  • The ones for setting either the main key or modifier key now use the inset-box style.
  • The categories all use a generic explanation for what they are if there is not a category-specific description.

0.590 Research, Construction, And Popups

(Released August 30th, 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 text in textboxes where you can type has been made a consistent size, and the "no text is here yet, but you can type" text is no longer in italics.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for the design notes.

• The main menu fonts have been adjusted, although the main menu itself has not actually had a ux pass yet.

• All of the fonts that are not intended to be part of the design have now been removed from the game, saving some disk space and some RAM (like 20ish MB), and also making sure that things are consistent. Where sizes are funky, I can therefore adjust them, knowing at least that the font is correct rather than it being a similar-but-different font that is out of date.

• All of the various secondary modal popups throughout the game, except for the exception popups, have been updated to the new ux style.
  • This includes naming your network and the other thing you name.
  • This does not yet include the "new profile" screen, which is seen very early in the game.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for designing.

• The research window has been updated to its fully-designed state.
  • It now has a small set of instructions very briefly, to make it cleaner.
  • It now displays the turn count on the right-hand side of the button, rather than disrupting the normal flow of the left side of the buttons.
  • It now has a proper button styling for unlocks your intelligence is too low to get just yet.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for designing.

• The way the text is organized, and the borders are handled, has been updated for the intro section. It's much more intentional-looking and attractive.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for designing.

• All of the various routes through the intro have been updated to have darker colors so that the text is legible in its new position.

• When you left-click a "must read" message about the handbook, it now properly opens the handbook to that page rather than having the funky pop-out to the side. I simply forgot to get that in place in the prior build.
  • I've also adjusted this so that if the player presses spacebar while such a handbook entry is visible, it now does this same thing (opening the handbook to this page), rather than exhorting them to mouseover the handbook entry to read it. Countdowns still work the old way, since there is no other real way to read them. But they are a lot less frequent than these kinds of handbook entries.

• Fixed the issues with the bold font of the "extra light Montserrat" not working correctly, which also incidentally made it so that it could not be underlined. Very odd. Turns out that an overly-low point size was causing that.

Build Menu Tune-up

• A lot of interfaces now say "Search..." rather than "Filter..." in their search boxes.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for the design.

• The build menu is now 10% wider, to make a bit more room for what it needs to show without it being so cramped.
  • Additionally, all of the buttons on the build menu have had their spacing improved a bit, again to make it more legible without being so cramped.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for the design.

• The text lines on the build menu now will auto-size downwards as-needed to fit long text in there.

• The colors for the new and suggested text on the build menu have been adjusted to fit the proper ux style.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for the design.

• The gap between the tabs has been closed a bit on the build menu sidebar.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for the design.

• The delete button on the build menu is now a slightly shorter size, and properly centered.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for the design.

• Fixed issues where the delete button and the territory control flags would not properly show as highlighted when you select them on the build menu.

• Disabled category tabs in the build menu now show their icon and text as gray rather than black.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for the design.

• The background of build menu items you cannot afford have been improved.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for the design.

Tooltip Prep Work And Fixes

• I've started putting together some of the more-generalized tooltip options, for things other than the high-specialty ones (in other words not units, attacks prediction, structures, jobs, etc -- but most everything else that isn't a single line).

• I've updated the game to support custom line-height styles per localization type, which means that these can be set up contextually, and then also adjusted per language if that winds up being needed. For now it's a quicker way for me to group things by style rather than being overly-literal.
  • Some of the existing line heights were absolutely insane and not useful anymore, because of changing fonts and then changing the paragraph spacing. So this lets me fix those as well, in bulk and easily.

• Fixed a very irritating issue with the tooltips that was having them not properly get the size they were supposed to be in a timely fashion, which in turn was leading to the background flickering behind them sometimes.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• Achieved another breakthrough with TextMeshPro, which I've been progressively altering to suit my needs since 2017. The line-height command was really not doing what I wanted to, especially when using paragraph spacing that makes for nice flow.
  • So I've redefined how that works, since I have no use for the current mechanism, and it is now set up to adjust the paragraph height for just part of some text, rather than the line height.
    • What this means is, I'm able to condense the spacing down from a more narrative-style section to a more list-style section, but if any of the list-style items wind up needing to word wrap, they will actually wrap properly as you would expect, rather than clipping into one another.
    • There are probably some minor downsides to this approach, like perhaps if there is text that is both smaller AND wrapping anyway, then it might have line sizes that are too large. But I don't think so, because the font size already accounts for that. And even if that does happen, that is such a tiny edge case compared to the many wrong things that were otherwise happening, and the way that was going to mess with non-English fonts, too. So this solves a lot of things all at once.

0.589 Handbook And Events

(Released August 29th, 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 new ux style and colors are now in place for the choice, dialog, project outcome, and other similar windows.
  • As part of this, a new lighter-weight font has been added for the narrative pieces.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for the designs.

• Fixed a bug where if you loaded an old savegame and went straight into the history or recent events within the first 1 second after load, it would throw an exception if there were any invalid events in there that had not yet had time to be filtered out.

• Corrected the font weight on some of the screens like the TPS Report, Ledger, message logs, etc, to be a lighter weight than it was before. I had unintentionally deviated from the original design.

• The major event windows, used in the intro to the game, have been kinda-sorta updated to the new style, but need ux designer review. They're done for this week, anyhow.

• An initial version of the "choose next tech" window is in place, although the ux designer will have a look at it before this is considered the real thing.

• All of the various dropdowns and textboxes and floating header rows have had their outer line thickness adjusted downward to match the spec more. This still is visible on the steam deck resolution, which is about as low as anyone is reasonably expected to play the game.

• The new version of the machine handbook screen is now in place and updated to the new ux style
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for designing!

• Greatly improved the visuals of the outline for selected androids and other human-scale units. This does not affect mechs or vehicles, but the androids were very messy-looking in the last build.

• The build menu has had some updates to its style to be better, although it still is probably going to need another pass.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for the design, although on this one I had to deviate enough that it's going to need more work probably.

• The "delete structure" button now shows in every category on the build menu, if that category has anything else in it.

0.588 Finalizing HUD

(Released August 28th, 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 structures that have problems on the structures complaints window now show with their red background properly; it was accidentally omitted from the prior build.

• A gargantuan amount of prep work has been done to get the image dictionaries updated and set up for all the various current set of screens. This was a five hour task, holy cow.
  • I also cleared out a lot of older images, so if there are any UIs that are suddenly and surprisingly broken, that's a sign they were using an older image that is now gone. Shouldn't be any more major cases of that, but you never know.

• The error message windows have been updated to the new style, at least in a preliminary fashion.

• The way that the 1-3 map buttons on the upper right corner display has been updated. They are taller, and in their own window segment, and their activation/hover color is different from the other buttons on that part of the header.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for this design.

• Once the player is aware of intelligence classes, there is a new indicator display that shows in the very top right corner (rather than near the tech stuff on the left side) showing the intelligence class.
  • So this should show as soon as Building A Better Brain is started, or immediately if you're already in chapter two.
  • The proximity with the research was actually really confusing, as it seemed to be indicating some things it was not.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for this design.

• The actual colors for the task stack are now in place, using a temperature system of five different degrees of severity.
  • Additionally, the mouseover button text colors have been adjusted so that they look nice rather than being a nonsensical purple.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for the design.

• The settings button in the upper left of the screen now properly reacts to being hovered or having the settings window open, glowing in both cases.

• Up in the area of the task stack, the "actions requiring attention" (formerly a subset of the "toast" notifications) now appear in a new style, and nice and obvious.
  • There are two other kinds of notification that are more in-passing that will be coming soon, but they are not in this particular build.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for the design.

• Fixed a very confusing regression in the prior build where the yellow fields of sprouts had a collision box that was way too large, making it so that things would clamp to them.

• The display of what technology you are currently working on has been updated to the new ui format. It's much more attractive!
  • This panel now also only appears in the event that there is any research for you to do. It no longer sits there saying "out of ideas" when there is nothing to research, which is the bulk of the time since research happens very quickly once you have an idea.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for designing.

0.587 Menu Overhaul

(Released August 27th, 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 fields of yellow and green spouts are now a bit taller, making it so that they don't look invisible without zooming very far in. They are still not super visible compared to other crop fields, but that's fine.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• The game now supports having sub-versions rather than just a major and minor version only. This is a new addition to how I've been handling version numbering since 2009, but I have found myself over the years getting sometimes stuck where the minor version is approaching some big threshold, and it needs to go over that threshold because I didn't have any way to sub-divide it further.
  • For this game in particular, I want to make sure that I have enough room for intermediate versions before hitting 1.0, and being restricted to just 400ish more builds between now and then made me uncomfortable. It also meant that I couldn't jump the number up to the next 100 for the sake of signaling a large release, because then the count of possible releases drops even further. That latter is more of a really direct concern, and the "only 400 builds!?" is just me being paranoid. I don't like being within an order of magnitude of being constrained by any given design, and this was definitely well south of that. Now it's not.

The Top-Right Corner And It's Many Sub-Screens

• Categories in interfaces now support showing an alert-style number in white, with a red circle background, next to them. This is a lot more visible and readable than my prior method of handling this sort of thing, but I'm not sure that this is quite what I would like to see permanently. It feels a bit aggressive.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for the initial design of this, as this is definitely an improvement at least.

• A variety of changes have been made to the top-right header bar so that it still continues to display even when windows like the inventory are open, so that you can toggle between those tabs.
  • When the inventory is open, the inventory button in the top-right header bar now glows as if you have your mouse over it.

• The networks sidebar is no longer default-bound to any hotkey (it was the slash key), and it also no longer shows up on the top-right header bar at all unless you explicitly enable it in the settings.
  • In a generalized sense, this is really not a very useful window, and having it take up physical space on the ui, and mental space in the player's minds as they scan that row, was undesirable.

• The settings menu button is now larger and on the left, separated from the resources that are on the left. It does not yet have a glow state for when it is selected or hovered.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for designing.

• In the top right corner, the map icon(s) are now drawn wider, and with a small notch and some extra spacing separating them from the rest of the icons in that part of the screen.
  • This starts out with just the normal map icon, but then later expands to include a new place near the end of chapter one, and then yet another place after the end of chapter two (or in sandbox mode).
  • Also I've updated the icons some for the later map-like places, to make those more thematically what I wanted.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for designing the notch and the spacing of this.

• The number of entries in a filtered dropdown are no longer shown with the number in parentheses and smaller. That was getting deeply cluttered, and very hard to read depending on the font. It now uses the "data blue" color, and two spaces, instead.

• The text scale is now consistent and appropriate between the various tabs of the history and inventory windows.
  • Additionally, on several of the inventory tabs, the icons are now shown more clearly for resources or jobs, and in the input/output window it now shows icons where previously it did not.

• The inventory screen has been split into the Resources and Hardware screens.
  • The latter now has a horizontal style to it, with tabs at the top, to make sure there's enough room to see what is going on with each of those sections.

Resources

• The resources section of the inventory is now fully updated to the new ui style. It's drastically more readable in general, as well as fixing the regression that made it not-work-well from last build in particular.
  • One thing I have not yet tested is how it looks when there is an excess of a resource that is being stored outside of containers. That thing that can happen when you get seeds for the first time before you have hermetic seed storage, for example. Or a bunch of other examples. It should be fine, but it just has not been tested yet.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for the new design!

• Fixed an issue on the resources tab of the inventory where it was acting like wealth had a cap of 0, when in fact it has no cap at all.

• The ledger tab of the inventory screen now has been converted into the new style, and has a proper header row that explains what the columns are.
  • These column headers have tooltips with further explanation, AND the column headers themselves clamp to the top of the panel as you scroll downward, so that you can see them even after having scrolled.

• The TPS Reports now have a header, and it floats downward if the screen is tall enough, as well.

• An Active Deals tab is now shown on the Resources window.
  • This is duplicative of much of the functionality of the Deals tab on the History window, but it only shows active ones and not lapsed ones.
  • In general, this information is useful in holistically understanding either window -- where your resources or going or coming from; or the history of your relations with other parties. So it's in both spots, slightly altered in each.

Structures With Complaints

• The Structures With Complaints tab has been removed from the resources window, and is now a standalone side-window along the lines of how the Recent Events window works.
  • This makes it much more straightforward to flip between your various structures with problems, or even those with no problem at all, and it also makes the resources window purely focused on that -- resources.

• The "structures with problems" design has been fully updated to match the design that Josh Atkinson put together, and this also includes adjusting the coloration for health bars in the ui based on health percentage.
  • Actually for this one and several other pieces, there were a lot of structural pieces of code that were needed, but they are useful elsewhere, so that's good.

Hardware

• The unit types tab in the inventory screen has been split into two tabs: Unit Type Overview, and Unit Type Analysis.
  • The analysis was otherwise way too hidden.

• The actor data fields all have a short version now, for use in headers where that's relevant.

• The unit analysis section of the hardware screen now has more columns filled on some of the versions of the screen (will get to the others later), and also includes the header row text, and also includes icons for the units.

• The unit overview section of the hardware screen now shows the shape icon next to the name and plated-icon style of the unit, helping to make it really clear the correlation between one thing and the other.

• When editing a unit type, it now properly shows the perks and feats that this unit type will have on the left sidebar. This was never in the game before, and additions to calculate this have been added.

• The unit type overview screen now has a new dropdown that allow you to switch from the missing equipment view to have a more-plain view of just the unit types that are currently existing (which also filters the list down to just those), or to a "feats and perks" view which lets you see the icons for all of the feats and perks of each unit type, all in one spot, very easily.

History

• A huge number of changes have been made to what was previously the Activity Overview, and a couple of other screens, with those being combined into a new History window.
  • This includes easier access to a few pieces of information, and some additional search functionality for a few of these tabs for the first time.

• The event log is now fully searchable.
  • This involved adding full text searching to a dozen or so more major objects in the game, but this has been on my list to do for quite a while now.

• The event log now detects and discards old data that is no longer relevant for the new version of the game.
  • This and the other changes to the event log also involved a number of extensions to the event log framework, but it all works with the existing data that was previously logged and stored.

• Unlocks are now organized into collections, which you can filter by on the unlock history screen.
  • This makes it much easier to look through things that you have unlocked.
  • Additionally, things that were previously labeled as Concept are now split into Concept, Major Mechanic, and Minor Mechanic, to make those easier to differentiate.

• Upgrades are now organized into collections, which you can filter by on the upgrades history screen.

• Projects are now organized into collections, which you can filter by on the project history screen.

• The event log now has its own collections and also the ability to show only permanent or only ephemeral entries in itself, and the ability to skip the turn-change headers when looking at sub-reports, and a bunch of other things. This applies on the event log portion of the history screen.
  • This makes the event log really truly functional for figuring out what happened recently, or looking at other patterns of things like when you did what upgrades, or when your points of inspiration came from, and so on.

• The recent event log is finally also done, and is updated to match the new style and functionality from the main history window.
  • This also includes the shift to just showing the ephemeral events by default, but allowing people to select all of them if they prefer, but it only goes back a certain ways.

• The unlock history now has the type of unlock in its own column, and has a floating header bar as well. This is vastly more attractive and legible.
  • Also, the colors for all of the various unlock categories have been made more-consistent with the ui in terms of saturation and whatnot, rather than being such a circus like they were.

Specific Event Log Event Improvements

• The event log messages about things that happen to structures now use the job name rather than the underlying structure name, as that is way more useful.

• Territory Control Flag placement now shows that it was placed in the log, rather than saying that an investigation was started.

• Territory Flags being placed are no longer logged into your event log at all, as that's not actually very interesting or useful.
  • Territory Flags being activated, deactivated, or lost are now placed into your event log, although this won't have historical data for existing saves of course.

• Machine Handbook entries are now logged into your history as they unlock, which is very useful for purposes of letting you go back and re-read something that unlocked, versus trying to find it in the handbook itself, which is not organized that way.

• A large pass has been made over the various event log entries, and a bunch of them that used to flash by quickly at the bottom of your screen, but with very little purpose to that, no longer do that. They still go to your recent event log and your history event log, but they don't clutter up the screen if they don't matter.

Sidebars And Forces Sidebar

• The entire sidebar framework has been reworked, so that I can use a more modern style of my own code with it.
  • Visually, the sidebars have also all gotten an upgrade now.
  • The system sidebar will not be a sidebar for much longer, but for now it's fine.

• The forces sidebar in particular now uses a new style that shows more imagery, a very handy health bar, and correlates the two kinds of icons for unit types (same as the unit type overview screen does now).
  • The one thing still kind of non-ideal about this screen at the moment is that the selected unit is not very clear. That's on the list, it just didn't turn out as desired.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for designing.

Unit And Building Selection Outline

• A new system is set up so that when you have selected a unit, including an npc unit, it now has a moderately-thick white outline around them to make it more clear what you have selected.
  • The lack of difference in selection has been brought up by a number of folks, but thanks to Josh Atkinson for the most recent notes on the difficulty telling which units are selected even among your own.

• Selecting your own structures now also draws a highlight around the building that they are in, same as happens with units.

Other UX Updates

• The stance button is now always the wider style, and no longer ever has the too-tiny-text-to-read label to the left of it.

• Fixed the order of the equipment slots being incorrect on mechs and vehicles.
  • Thanks to mblazewicz for reporting.

• The sandbox mode indicator has moved out of the right header bar and to becoming a very small button (when relevant) on the radial menu. This is only present at all when the player is already in sandbox mode, which is not normal.

• Fixed a super annoying bug that was causing "out of range" to be shown by the mouse cursor when you were dragging the view with the left mouse button while you had a unit selected, or when you had a unit selected and moved the mouse around the edge of a mostly-fullscreen window.

• The dropdown style that pops up has been updated to the new UI style.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for designing.

• When you have pinned a resource into the top bar, it now shows with a little yellow "sash" of sorts in the upper left corner of its icon display.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for designing.

• Many of the more minor windows that do popups for various purposes have been updated to something approximating the new ui style.
  • The colors and details are not correct yet, but they no longer look wildly out of place in quite the way they were for the last few builds.

• Corrected the use of white to instead be blue on the right-hand column of the equipment screen.

• When you have the loadout screen open, the ability bar no longer shows at the bottom of the screen. That was clutter and only could serve to confuse things.

• The folder buttons on the save and load menu are now the proper spacing, rather than being slightly too far to the right.

• The various "minor data views" like the location directory, cohort directory, and the things only visible in sandbox mode have all been updated to the new ui style.
  • Thanks to Josh Atkinson for designing.

• Updated four debug windows to the new ui style. Very low priority, but it was also quick and I was low on mental energy for the night. The adjustments to these are also similar to some adjustments I'll need to make to two other windows tomorrow, so that's useful in its own way.

0.586 Unit Customization

(Released August 21st, 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 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