Hi everyone! It's been a while since the last update as we've been hammering away at replacing our entire UI code with the new Unity UI system. I outlined the reasons in the previous update, but needless to say it had to be done. Unfortunately it took longer than we hoped, so we have a lot of updates pending with features we also developed in the mean time. This update actually went out last week but I wanted to hold off an announcement until we squashed some major bugs that came up from it. Thanks to everyone reporting in and working with us by e-mail to solve them, was a great help.

New Front-end Look

We've completely re-done the style of the menus as it was a great opportunity to do so while we were gutting the menu code. Here is an example below (yes the background animates!)

More Cutscene Backgrouns

We now have more cutscene backgrounds to match the scenario and add some variety. These include all seasonal variations. I hope I wasn't the only one sick of grassy river for every cutscene!

Upcoming HUD

While we have more improvements to the front-end coming in incremental changes, we also have some big improvements to the HUD. Now we present less information at first, with optional details available to users. This helps get the HUD out of the way and let you focus on the game in front of it.

Upcoming Multiplayer Modes and 4-player

The code is ready for the new Multiplayer modes and 4-player, and we're just working on adding the UI flow to allow this. Stay tuned for the next update.

Unity 5

We're looking into the possibility of a Unity 5 update, now that we're using their new UI system. If we can do the upgrade, it will allow us to transfer all the performance improvements and fixes from the new engine version directly to our game.

Remaining Singleplayer Missions

We have the remaining single-player missions completed, and intend to release them in a future update once we've completed some testing on them. After this point we will be 100% focused on polishing the game, testing, addressing major requests and concerns etc.

Major Bugs Squashed

We've hit some big outstanding bugs, such as the Lua DLL issue a few users have had, and others during the time we were updating the UI. They are frankly too numerous to list (and I didn't write them down as we went!) but you should see generally less game stopping issues. As always, your reports help immensely. Updates will return to more regular (bi-weekly) releases.