We are participating in the Steam Game Festival with a demo of our upcoming game, NIMBY Rails, a management sandbox for railways you build in the real world. Design train tracks, set up lines, and serve the needs of the population. Do you have strong opinions on rail transportation and want to test your own ideas? This game was made for you.

You can download the NIMBY Rails demo by visiting our Steam Store page:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1134710/NIMBY_Rails/

Today we are announcing our new game, NIMBY Rails! It is a management sandbox for railways you build in the real world. Design train tracks, set up lines, and get that stock rolling to make money and serve the needs of the population. Do you have strong opinions on rail projects and want to test your own ideas? This game was made for you.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1134710/NIMBY_Rails/

NIMBY Rails is still in development and it will take some time to reach the Early Access release, but we have ambitious plans for it. In the meantime you can check this epic development retrospective with screenshots and videos of the prototype and pre-alpha phases of development:

https://carloscarrasco.com/nimby-rails-retrospective/

Version 3.13

We are also switching the default branch of The Spatials: Galactology to version 3.13, finally. It has been available and finished for months in the pretest branch of Steam. The capricious gods of Steam visibility and a slowdown in the development of NIMBY Rails has made this release a year too late.

Check these news posts for the changelog of version 3.13:

https://steamcommunity.com/games/450700/announcements/detail/1693802787369174715
https://steamcommunity.com/games/450700/announcements/detail/1687054997724980180
https://steamcommunity.com/games/450700/announcements/detail/3408560492363069288
https://steamcommunity.com/games/450700/announcements/detail/1687054997724980180

.13 is almost ready! I've updated the Windows build in the pretest branch for all the brave testers who want to try the new planet missions.



In some missions, like Making enemies, Intelligence assault or Unrequested demolition you will visit planets of a civ whose ancestral enemy wants you cause some annoyance, if by annoyance we consider leveling down entire buildings. You will get combat objectives on the planet and will have to pass several phases, depending on the difficulty rating. At insane level you will have to fight a boss level mob!

Defending friends, We got spooks and Stop them early are similar in concept, but this time the ancestral enemy is camping on the planets of your friends and you need to deal with the invaders and their constructions. Reinforcements will be called, for sure.

Both groups of missions are based on the ancestral enemy system between civs, and even civs that hate you will give you missions. This is an easy way to gain their favor (and to sink your reputation with their foes, of course).

Pesky fauna and Disease outbreak are meant to be earlier level missions for planets whose civ is friendly to you. Don't be fooled by their lack of warfare, at higher difficulty levels they are really hard, and reward just as good items and bonuses as the others.

After a two month pause to get some rest and some work done in non-WaW related business, we are back to working on 3.13. The next item is a big one: playable random planet missions. This is a major feature and it will take longer than the previous miscellany features in 3.13. The work presented in this update post is not yet published in the pretest branch (playing just one kind of mission would not be very interesting anyway)..

Planet missions

The big missing piece for planet gameplay now has its foundations in place. One planet per system can now get a random mission, and it will be displayed in the galaxy map with the universally familiar icon:



Hovering over the star or planet will display the full mission information, as opening the planet window:



Missions can have 4 difficulty levels, and by default, their rewards are proportional to the planet level. The player can choose to purchase a reroll of the rewards to match their unlocked tech level, but this will also increase the mission level.

Once on the ground the player will need to solve one or more objectives, and not all of them will be about killing. For example the current test mission requires to apply healing in a new way:



Now that the foundations are ready and one test mission has been implemented we will focus on adding more mission types.

The first post-EA build is now ready for testing! Please switch to the pretest branch in the Steam game properties. See this post with instructions on how to change the game branch:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/450700/discussions/0/1697169163416373010/

We are using a branch for now due to the nature of some of the changes, and because 3.13 breaks saves with 3.12. This way we get more time to test 3.13 and give more time for players to keep playing the default 3.12 branch.

3.13 still has some months of development left, stay tuned for more development updates and pretest builds.

Named enemies with progression and persistence



Enemies now always have an unique name, instead of the generic names in earlier versions. The main reason is that they are also persisting. This means a given named enemy will always have the same sprite, if they manage to survive.

Survive? Yes. Just as you can install insurance cloners for your officers, enemies that reach certain notoriety fighting you will get a chance to be saved before you kill them. They will teleport out instead of dying.

Notoriety? Yes. Since enemies are persisting, they now also have a simplified leveling system. There's 30 enemy rankings, and each ranking gives the enemy more hitpoints and more weapon power. The higher rankings make them truly formidable adversaries. Rankings are a bonus on top of their level.

Ranked enemies which survive your encounters will be able to face you again in the future. Every time the game spawns a random enemy it will also consider spawning a persisted named enemy instead, allowing them to gain an even higher ranking.

This also comes with a nerf to the loot drops from enemies. Lower ranked enemies will never drop wearable items, while higher ranked ones will, and for the first time they will also be able to roll items with rare/epic/legendary bonuses, depending on their rank.

New station raids



Station raids have been greatly enhanced in 3.13. They are now able to really scale up, to create an actual danger to your station, proportional to your development and your enemies hate.

The size of the foot soldier group is now variable and can include more than 20 units. A proportional subset will always have higher rankings, even if the game has to generate fresh new higher ranked enemies.

Siege objects are now introduced, and they will spawn in higher difficulty raids. Turrets are always spawned to protect them.

Mortars are slow artillery, that fire a slow projectile, and can reach any point on the map. The explosion of the projectile is devastating, but the game will always tell you in advance where it is going to fall with a red circle area.



Docks are exactly that. Enemy shuttles will keep docking there unless you destroy them, and they will unload small enemy groups. They have a long cooldown, but more than one dock is possible.



Tombs



Fallen officers will now occupy a new object, tombs. If an officer dies the game will try first to occupy their assigned tomb, and if they have none, any non-assigned empty tomb. This happens even if the officer dies while exploring a planet. It's not mandatory to build tombs, officer corpses will still be spawned if there are no available tombs at the moment of death.

Lactians triggered by Mystery Milk



Lactians will turn into an hostile antagonist civ when you unlock the last tier of food & drinks. They will still visit you in peace (and in litter) before that .

Balance sheet



An often requested feature, now more important than ever.

Ancestral enemies for civs



Some of the civs in the galaxy now have an ancestral enemy. These enemies are other civs, and they are always paired to each other. When gain rep with the civ, you lose the same amount with their enemy, and viceversa. This applies to all possible rep changes, not just those from combat. This means you will now have to make some hard choices about which civs you will be friends with.

Player invasions with upkeep costs



Invading's not free anymore. When you invade an hostile planet so you can extract its resources in peace, you will have to pay an upkeep price per minute, which goes up the higher the planet level is. You can stop the invasion in the planet dialog:



Going bankrupt will stop the invasion automatically:



The combination of ancestral enemies and invasion upkeep will make mid to end game more interesting to play.

New ship skills: jumpdrive and insurance



Ships equipped with a jumpdrive skill can travel instantly between star systems, reducing travel time to the minimum possible amount. They still have 10 second approach time to any body inside the system. The jump drive is always available and the AI will also use it for autopilot.

The ship insurance skill will save one officer downed in battle once every 3 minutes, while exploring a planet.

Both ship skills are only available in some ships in the higher end tiers of research.

Officer demands for products



Graduate and master officers will now demand specific products for some vitals, and will refuse to consume anything else. These demands are balanced with the progression of research and planet resources in mind. They should be easy to satisfy for graduates and trickier for masters, and they are also predictable and standardized for all officers of the same spec. This change is the most speculative of the patch, so we will see if keep it or not.

3.13.1

• Add development option to re-enable the connectivity cache
  

Tombs



Fallen officers will now occupy a new object, tombs. If an officer dies the game will try first to occupy their assigned tomb, and if they have none, any non-assigned empty tomb. This happens even if the officer dies while exploring a planet. It's not mandatory to build tombs, officer corpses will still be spawned if there are no available tombs at the moment of death.

Lactians triggered by Mystery Milk



Lactians will turn into an hostile antagonist civ when you unlock the last tier of food & drinks. They will still visit you in peace (and in litter) before that .

Balance sheet



An often requested feature, now more important than ever.

Ancestral enemies for civs



Some of the civs in the galaxy now have an ancestral enemy. These enemies are other civs, and they are always paired to each other. When gain rep with the civ, you lose the same amount with their enemy, and viceversa. This applies to all possible rep changes, not just those from combat. This means you will now have to make some hard choices about which civs you will be friends with.

Player invasions with upkeep costs



Invading's not free anymore. When you invade an hostile planet so you can extract its resources in peace, you will have to pay an upkeep price per minute, which goes up the higher the planet level is. You can stop the invasion in the planet dialog:



Going bankrupt will stop the invasion automatically:



The combination of ancestral enemies and invasion upkeep will make mid to end game more interesting to play.

Is there life after a game is released? Yes! We left some of the more far fetched ideas for trying them after our EA launch, so we are back to hacking on the game to see what fits and what is fun.

These notes reflect the work in progress for version 3.13, which is not public. We will keep adding new features to this new version and in the coming weeks we hope to open it up for testing in a Steam beta branch.

Named enemies with progression and persistence



Enemies now always have an unique name, instead of the generic names in earlier versions. The main reason is that they are also persisting. This means a given named enemy will always have the same sprite, if they manage to survive.

Survive? Yes. Just as you can install insurance cloners for your officers, enemies that reach certain notoriety fighting you will get a chance to be saved before you kill them. They will teleport out instead of dying.

Notoriety? Yes. Since enemies are persisting, they now also have a simplified leveling system. There's 30 enemy rankings, and each ranking gives the enemy more hitpoints and more weapon power. The higher rankings make them truly formidable adversaries. Rankings are a bonus on top of their level.

Ranked enemies which survive your encounters will be able to face you again in the future. Every time the game spawns a random enemy it will also consider spawning a persisted named enemy instead, allowing them to gain an even higher ranking.

This also comes with a nerf to the loot drops from enemies. Lower ranked enemies will never drop wearable items, while higher ranked ones will, and for the first time they will also be able to roll items with rare/epic/legendary bonuses, depending on their rank.

New station raids



Station raids have been greatly enhanced in 3.13. They are now able to really scale up, to create an actual danger to your station, proportional to your development and your enemies hate.

The size of the foot soldier group is now variable and can include more than 20 units. A proportional subset will always have higher rankings, even if the game has to generate fresh new higher ranked enemies.

Siege objects are now introduced, and they will spawn in higher difficulty raids. Turrets are always spawned to protect them.

Mortars are slow artillery, that fire a slow projectile, and can reach any point on the map. The explosion of the projectile is devastating, but the game will always tell you in advance where it is going to fall with a red circle area.



Docks are exactly that. Enemy shuttles will keep docking there unless you destroy them, and they will unload small enemy groups. They have a long cooldown, but more than one dock is possible.

After nearly two years we are moving Galactology out of Early Access! The battle against bugs has been won and the frameworks for a complex and fun sim have been built and polished, along with a ton of new content and balancing. Here's an incomplete listing of all the additions:

• Colony stations built on planets
  
• Building system based on rooms with separate flooring and walls
  
• New room styles
  
• Combine any floor tiles together with a range of colors
  
• New objects to furnish the station, both decorative and functional
  
• New space flight system based on wormholes
  
• Ship construction
  
• Civilizations also have ships and use them to visit you
  
• New civilizations (Chuchus, Cucurbians and Meductians)
  
• Per-factory order queues
  
• Global mode for factory production based on stock levels
  
• Per-job per-officer job priorities
  
• Class system with task-based learning and progression and a new set of skills
  
• Private property and rooms for your officers – and demands related to class
  
• Equippable items for your officers, make them more powerful with better loot
  
• Security system with item progression, shields turrets and security doors
  
• Events and disasters, spies, monsters, and VIPs can come visit your station
  
• Disease system with healthcare and hospitals
  
• Hotel system
  
• Visitor archetypes with different needs and expectations
  
• Redesigned research system and UI
  
• Redesigned staff screen
  
• Door filters
  
• Room-level aesthetic score and noise levels, which can affect vital tasks
  
• Large optimizations and performance enhancements
  
• Support for languages with custom fonts
  
• Built-in support for Chinese, Korean, German, French, Spanish, Turkish and Russian
  

.12 is a stability small features release, with no huge changes. This version has been available for some time in the pretest branch and should be a solid release. As we are close to going out of Early Access our focus has been in polishing the game.

Game guide



The biggest new content in this release is the game guide. It covers a lot more of the game systems and mechanics than the tutorials, without being intended to cover 100% of the game.

Delivery stations



Selling products to civ planets now requires to first build a delivery station on a planet. This delivery station will allow you to pick which product you want to deliver to this planet, from the list of products accepted by the planet civ.

Autopilot changes



The autopilot has been made more usable with some much needed improvements. The selection row in the autopilot window now behaves correctly when adding, deleting or moving orders. An icon will now display which resource will be loaded next to the planet icon, to make it much easier to figure out what a ship is doing. Notice the drag and drop orders icon is now a button? This is what it opens:



Instead of hunting around for the correct system and planet and then dropping an icon on top, a picker is now displayed, showing only the planets that have extractors installed, along with important information like how many ships are visiting them and which resource they are extracting.

Unique discoverable objects



Discoverable objects are back! The entire set from V2 is now available, plus another new batch for Galactology. Just keep your eyes open when landing on planets and if you find one, click it to unlock it.

Full Korean translation by kiironosora

kiironosora, a member of this forum, has produced a full and detailed Korean translation. Thank you very much!

Other changes

This release was much focused on smaller changes. Here's some "finally!!!":

• Delivery after production: only do if officer has delivery job enabled
  
• Separate menu for ship listing in officer list filter menu
  
• Add four sided fallback positions for some jobs, specially for construction ones
  
• Extra checks to not allow autopiloted ships to explore planets. Stop them first.
  
• Do not crash on some GUI errors
  
• Do not allow room marking beds (master, cryo) to be blueprinted outside of a room
  
• Fix: officers with multiple beds get wrong values in their demands
  
• NPC invaders on planets must spawn at least at raider level
  
• Outdoor attrition system: give the warning immediately but start the damage only after some minutes
  
• Add missing levels to recycler
  
• Fix: when forcing a delivery, if the officer is standing on a pallet of the resource kind, resources are teleported into the stack, even if the stack is far away
  
• Fix: floor replacing should not mark a room as outside
  
• Fix: manual repair orders via context menu do not work
  
• Fix: demands listing text does not fit for most languages
  
• Neutral civs do not come visiting anymore, you need friendly
  
• Before neutral you cannot cargo to civs, only pay tribute
  
• Reputation-based progressive tribute prices
  
• Add flagging for destruction action to objects
  
• Add storage area to copy-able objects
  
• Fix: reputation is not being added if you liberate a planet
  
• Fix: built walls over existing finished floors are not painted properly
  

• Better pathing for station raiders. Raiders will now ignore walls unless absolutely nothing else is available, including entities beyond their sight range. They will get flexible but persisting damage targets (like forced targets for officers) and will try to look for them inside the station in populated areas. This is not the big raiders review, but it's a first step to make them more interesting.
  
• Taking from a stack first splits it into two stacks, then marks one as busy. This is a subtle change with a potential big impact. For starters it should fix most or all bugs related to false job starts, failed deliveries and stampede effects on new stocks. A new system has also been introduced to unify back the stacks into one in case the job abandons the busy stack.
  
• New achievement, counter, and goal for discovering 10 uniques on planets. Reveal goal only when landing on a planet with a spawned unique.
  
• Extra ui sounds for construction
  
• Add icon to ship listing cell to indicate if it has dock assigned
  
• Fix: doctor cures counter should count cured patients, not medical actions
  
• Fix: some deconstruct wall flagging does not produce jobs
  
• Fix: direct delivery to nearby pallet after production should always work, even if the officer has no restocking job enabled
  
• Fix: focus officer in staff (link action) should switch to staff listing from recruit listing if required
  
• Fix: "Kill x enemies" goal description should not say anything about civs
  
• Fix: goal alert click should focus on the goal in the goals window
  
• Fix: Add manual recycle action to context menu
  
• Fix: do not allow to trigger self destroy more than once in pause mode
  
• Fix: manual delivery orders should respect entity max carry amount
  
• Fix: starting a job should stop any walking
  

• The star and planet name generator has been removed. Now names will be picked up at random from a list of real star names. The reason for this change is that the generator sometimes created real words that were offensive. To fix this a blacklist is required. But the game is now localized to half a dozen languages, and it is impossible to have a comprehensive blacklist. So now a whitelist will be used instead. Planets will now be named with the star name plus a roman numeral.
  
• Fix: nearby deposit on pallets for officers with no restocking job should always work
  
• Fix: stack split for jobs must preserve some flag components (fixes tourists picking up free products)
  

• Buff aesthetics for unique objects
  
• Add price to product listing when choosing a product for the delivery station
  

.12 is a stability small features release, with no huge changes. This version has been available for some time in the pretest branch and should be a solid release. As we are close to going out of Early Access our focus has been in polishing the game.

Game guide



The biggest new content in this release is the game guide. It covers a lot more of the game systems and mechanics than the tutorials, without being intended to cover 100% of the game.

Delivery stations



Selling products to civ planets now requires to first build a delivery station on a planet. This delivery station will allow you to pick which product you want to deliver to this planet, from the list of products accepted by the planet civ.

Autopilot changes



The autopilot has been made more usable with some much needed improvements. The selection row in the autopilot window now behaves correctly when adding, deleting or moving orders. An icon will now display which resource will be loaded next to the planet icon, to make it much easier to figure out what a ship is doing. Notice the drag and drop orders icon is now a button? This is what it opens:



Instead of hunting around for the correct system and planet and then dropping an icon on top, a picker is now displayed, showing only the planets that have extractors installed, along with important information like how many ships are visiting them and which resource they are extracting.

Unique discoverable objects



Discoverable objects are back! The entire set from V2 is now available, plus another new batch for Galactology. Just keep your eyes open when landing on planets and if you find one, click it to unlock it.

Full Korean translation by kiironosora

kiironosora, a member of this forum, has produced a full and detailed Korean translation. Thank you very much!

Other changes

This release was much focused on smaller changes. Here's some "finally!!!":

• Delivery after production: only do if officer has delivery job enabled
  
• Separate menu for ship listing in officer list filter menu
  
• Add four sided fallback positions for some jobs, specially for construction ones
  
• Extra checks to not allow autopiloted ships to explore planets. Stop them first.
  
• Do not crash on some GUI errors
  
• Do not allow room marking beds (master, cryo) to be blueprinted outside of a room
  
• Fix: officers with multiple beds get wrong values in their demands
  
• NPC invaders on planets must spawn at least at raider level
  
• Outdoor attrition system: give the warning immediately but start the damage only after some minutes
  
• Add missing levels to recycler
  
• Fix: when forcing a delivery, if the officer is standing on a pallet of the resource kind, resources are teleported into the stack, even if the stack is far away
  
• Fix: floor replacing should not mark a room as outside
  
• Fix: manual repair orders via context menu do not work
  
• Fix: demands listing text does not fit for most languages
  
• Neutral civs do not come visiting anymore, you need friendly
  
• Before neutral you cannot cargo to civs, only pay tribute
  
• Reputation-based progressive tribute prices
  
• Add flagging for destruction action to objects
  
• Add storage area to copy-able objects
  
• Fix: reputation is not being added if you liberate a planet
  
• Fix: built walls over existing finished floors are not painted properly
  

• Better pathing for station raiders. Raiders will now ignore walls unless absolutely nothing else is available, including entities beyond their sight range. They will get flexible but persisting damage targets (like forced targets for officers) and will try to look for them inside the station in populated areas. This is not the big raiders review, but it's a first step to make them more interesting.
  
• Taking from a stack first splits it into two stacks, then marks one as busy. This is a subtle change with a potential big impact. For starters it should fix most or all bugs related to false job starts, failed deliveries and stampede effects on new stocks. A new system has also been introduced to unify back the stacks into one in case the job abandons the busy stack.
  
• New achievement, counter, and goal for discovering 10 uniques on planets. Reveal goal only when landing on a planet with a spawned unique.
  
• Extra ui sounds for construction
  
• Add icon to ship listing cell to indicate if it has dock assigned
  
• Fix: doctor cures counter should count cured patients, not medical actions
  
• Fix: some deconstruct wall flagging does not produce jobs
  
• Fix: direct delivery to nearby pallet after production should always work, even if the officer has no restocking job enabled
  
• Fix: focus officer in staff (link action) should switch to staff listing from recruit listing if required
  
• Fix: "Kill x enemies" goal description should not say anything about civs
  
• Fix: goal alert click should focus on the goal in the goals window
  
• Fix: Add manual recycle action to context menu
  
• Fix: do not allow to trigger self destroy more than once in pause mode
  
• Fix: manual delivery orders should respect entity max carry amount
  
• Fix: starting a job should stop any walking
  

• The star and planet name generator has been removed. Now names will be picked up at random from a list of real star names. The reason for this change is that the generator sometimes created real words that were offensive. To fix this a blacklist is required. But the game is now localized to half a dozen languages, and it is impossible to have a comprehensive blacklist. So now a whitelist will be used instead. Planets will now be named with the star name plus a roman numeral.
  
• Fix: nearby deposit on pallets for officers with no restocking job should always work
  
• Fix: stack split for jobs must preserve some flag components (fixes tourists picking up free products)
  

• Buff aesthetics for unique objects
  
• Add price to product listing when choosing a product for the delivery station
  

• Make floater builder robots so they are much faster when moving and working
  
• Halve required research XP for master researchers
  
• Update some missing translations
  
• Fix: medical event adds rally flag to visitors to path to a doctor desk. Make sure the way is path-able for them
  
• Fix: make sure auto stack pallet output for factories considers the proper 3x4 area
  
• Fix: when using copy mode for the object build tool make sure fields are copied and not just referenced
  
• Fix: Turkish guide crash
  

• Translation updates
  

• Show system level in galaxy map when civ overlay is enabled
  
• Higher default amounts for shops (3/10) and pallets (10/50)
  
• Right click on crew slots to quickly remove officers from ships, plus tooltip
  
• Right click on pallet resource picker button to clear selection, plus tooltip
  
• Right click on ownership officer picker button to clear owner, plus tooltip
  
• Show a warning modal when leaving a planet with a product-less delivery station
  
• New inspector tab for officers: owned objects
  
• Add selection button to portrait in the owner tab for objects
  
• Planetarium info in systems with no pending links should explain that all the links are unlocked
  
• Add default non demand price for products in the civ screen
  
• Button to copy autopilot from another ship
  
• Add filter for kind of equipped active item for all officer listings
  
• Add tooltip listing the entire list of recipes in resource ingredient information elipsis
  
• Add factory information to product information and recipe information
  
• Add list of recipes to factory object descriptions
  
• Remember staff picker sorter/filter choice
  
• Update some translations
  
• Fix: jumpy autopilot order listing should not be jumpy
  
• Fix: delivery station "demand" is actually "demand increase speed", fix label
  
• Fix: resources refunded from dismantling ships should spawn in walkable border tiles
  
• Fix: cancel construction button for tile building job builds the tile
  
• Fix: properly focus the listing selector in the staff screen when selecting an staff alert
  
• Fix: noisy objects should force a room noise recalc for all possible construction and destruction scenarios
  
• Fix: some civ objects had wrong names
  
• Fix: some civ boxes were not spawned as boxes
  
• Fix: proper sorting in build menus
  
• Fix: when an officer is not in the station the equipment matrix should behave the same as the per-officer equipment picker
  
• Fix: allow keypad enter in text modal prompts
  
• Fix: don't require so much aluminium for so many active and wearable item recipes
  
• Fix: landing on an previously player invaded planet should not trigger the retaliation event
  
• Fix: floating robot gets stuck after building walls or objects
  

.11 is here! This version has had a shorter development cycle because we wanted to get the new translation system out as soon as possible, to make sure we get it tested. But as always you can count on a batch of small and not so small enhancements. Check the following release notes in case you missed our development updates.

Resource list in galaxy view

The up/down controls to pick a resource or product to show in the galaxy view wasn't a very good solution, so a proper alphabetical menu will be now displayed instead:



Per-ship filtering in officer listings

All officer listings that allow filters now have an option to display the crew of a single ship:



New planet header images

Max has draw a new full set of images for the headers on the planet window, based on his original artwork for the planet icons:



New docks

After discussions in the forums, we've decided to give this a try:



Docks don't feature the long tube they had originally. In addition they now can only be built outside and will require a clear 3x3 area around them. Unlike the attrition rules used for "inside" objects both of these rules are "soft". Enterprising players can find ways around them. But it's the spirit that counts.

New reveal event for Lactians



Lactians now have the reveal event they were meant to. A team of Lactian priests and servants will visit your station with neutral reputation, and start littering the place with their leaflets about the Church of Lactus. Future visits won't be so peaceful tho.

Research screen final design



The research screen received a much needed cleanup. No more misaligned icons and overlapping everything.

New security objects



Security has been fleshed out into its own research group, mixing a new a tiered system of turrets, shield turrets, item recipes and a high end door.

The new damage turrets won't autoscale their damage anymore so you will need to replace them from time to time (there's not a huge amount of them, don't fear a bit of micro for this one).

We are also introducing a new kind of turret, the shield turret. This defensive turret works like shield weapons, with a longer cooldown but greater duration.

And finally there's also a new, top end tier for security doors, which is almost as strong as a regular wall.

Getting serious about localization

For the past months several members of our player community have produced translations of Galactology to their languages, and we contacted them to seek authorization to include their work into our game. All of them accepted! We are forever grateful to Silas Coldfire, JonTurK, Swiloga and LeChatMG.

This means version 3.11 will include bundled translations, and it will also autodetect the user OS language in order to automatically show the right one on the first game launch. If you are already using a translation it won't touch your settings. And of course you can still go into the game options screen and select a different language if you prefer to do so.

We want to facilitate the process of crowdsourced translation as much as possible. For this reason we are preparing a new translation server for our games.



This service will allow any user to make translation suggestions and voting for existing suggestions (if we don't get spammed to death).



Going forward this system will allow us to be a lot more agile about translations, making it possible to publish our new game strings before we publish a new version for example. Check the details on how to contribute here:

http://steamcommunity.com/app/450700/discussions/0/1700542332324695551/

Achievements!



Yep, another "finally" :)

3.11 is here! This version has had a shorter development cycle because we wanted to get the new translation system out as soon as possible, to make sure we get it tested. But as always you can count on a batch of small and not so small enhancements. Check the following release notes in case you missed our development updates.

Resource list in galaxy view

The up/down controls to pick a resource or product to show in the galaxy view wasn't a very good solution, so a proper alphabetical menu will be now displayed instead:



Per-ship filtering in officer listings

All officer listings that allow filters now have an option to display the crew of a single ship:



New planet header images

Max has draw a new full set of images for the headers on the planet window, based on his original artwork for the planet icons:



New docks

After discussions in the forums, we've decided to give this a try:



Docks don't feature the long tube they had originally. In addition they now can only be built outside and will require a clear 3x3 area around them. Unlike the attrition rules used for "inside" objects both of these rules are "soft". Enterprising players can find ways around them. But it's the spirit that counts.

New reveal event for Lactians



Lactians now have the reveal event they were meant to. A team of Lactian priests and servants will visit your station with neutral reputation, and start littering the place with their leaflets about the Church of Lactus. Future visits won't be so peaceful tho.

Research screen final design



The research screen received a much needed cleanup. No more misaligned icons and overlapping everything.

New security objects



Security has been fleshed out into its own research group, mixing a new a tiered system of turrets, shield turrets, item recipes and a high end door.

The new damage turrets won't autoscale their damage anymore so you will need to replace them from time to time (there's not a huge amount of them, don't fear a bit of micro for this one).

We are also introducing a new kind of turret, the shield turret. This defensive turret works like shield weapons, with a longer cooldown but greater duration.

And finally there's also a new, top end tier for security doors, which is almost as strong as a regular wall.

Getting serious about localization

For the past months several members of our player community have produced translations of Galactology to their languages, and we contacted them to seek authorization to include their work into our game. All of them accepted! We are forever grateful to Silas Coldfire, JonTurK, Swiloga and LeChatMG.

This means version 3.11 will include bundled translations, and it will also autodetect the user OS language in order to automatically show the right one on the first game launch. If you are already using a translation it won't touch your settings. And of course you can still go into the game options screen and select a different language if you prefer to do so.

We want to facilitate the process of crowdsourced translation as much as possible. For this reason we are preparing a new translation server for our games.



This service will allow any user to make translation suggestions and voting for existing suggestions (if we don't get spammed to death).



Going forward this system will allow us to be a lot more agile about translations, making it possible to publish our new game strings before we publish a new version for example. Check the details on how to contribute here:

http://steamcommunity.com/app/450700/discussions/0/1700542332324695551/

Achievements!



Yep, another "finally" :)

Update 3.11.1
- Add some achievement translations
- Fix: selection rectangle cannot select entities on the +edge of the map
- Fix: add more active margin to selection rectangle
- Add support for non breakable spaces and fix French translation to use them
- Fix: spurious officer portraits in alerts
- Fix: crash with Chinese translation
- Fix other translations with potentially the same bug
- Fix: allow forced deliveries to any pallet under max stock, not just under min stock
- Update translations with more contributed strings

Update 3.11.2
- Big update to german translation, bringing it up-to-date
- Tweaks to other translations

Lots of developments going on, and not all of them are about code! That image? Why, keeping up with current events, that's all. It may even be a hint of a future version allowing you to find long forgotten relics of humanity past...

As always here's what we have been working on for the past few weeks.

New security objects



Security has been fleshed out into its own research group, mixing a new a tiered system of turrets, shield turrets, item recipes and a high end door.

The new damage turrets won't autoscale their damage anymore so you will need to replace them from time to time (there's not a huge amount of them, don't fear a bit of micro for this one).

We are also introducing a new kind of turret, the shield turret. This defensive turret works like shield weapons, with a longer cooldown but greater duration.

And finally there's also a new, top end tier for security doors, which is almost as strong as a regular wall.

Getting serious about localization

For the past months several members of our player community have produced translations of Galactology to their languages, and we contacted them to seek authorization to include their work into our game. All of them accepted! We are forever grateful to Silas Coldfire, JonTurK, Swiloga and LeChatMG.

This means version 3.11 will include bundled translations, and it will also autodetect the user OS language in order to automatically show the right one on the first game launch. If you are already using a translation it won't touch your settings. And of course you can still go into the game options screen and select a different language if you prefer to do so.

We want to facilitate the process of crowdsourced translation as much as possible. For this reason we are preparing a new translation server for our games.



This service will allow any user to make translation suggestions and voting for existing suggestions (if we don't get spammed to death).



Going forward this system will allow us to be a lot more agile about translations, making it possible to publish our new game strings before we publish a new version for example. It will go public some days before 3.11 hits, check the forums for an announcement.

Achievements!



Yep, another "finally" :)

Lots of developments going on, and not all of them are about code! That image? Why, keeping up with current events, that's all. It may even be a hint of a future version allowing you to find long forgotten relics of humanity past...

As always here's what we have been working on for the past few weeks.

New security objects



Security has been fleshed out into its own research group, mixing a new a tiered system of turrets, shield turrets, item recipes and a high end door.

The new damage turrets won't autoscale their damage anymore so you will need to replace them from time to time (there's not a huge amount of them, don't fear a bit of micro for this one).

We are also introducing a new kind of turret, the shield turret. This defensive turret works like shield weapons, with a longer cooldown but greater duration.

And finally there's also a new, top end tier for security doors, which is almost as strong as a regular wall.

Getting serious about localization

For the past months several members of our player community have produced translations of Galactology to their languages, and we contacted them to seek authorization to include their work into our game. All of them accepted! We are forever grateful to Silas Coldfire, JonTurK, Swiloga and LeChatMG.

This means version 3.11 will include bundled translations, and it will also autodetect the user OS language in order to automatically show the right one on the first game launch. If you are already using a translation it won't touch your settings. And of course you can still go into the game options screen and select a different language if you prefer to do so.

We want to facilitate the process of crowdsourced translation as much as possible. For this reason we are preparing a new translation server for our games.



This service will allow any user to make translation suggestions and voting for existing suggestions (if we don't get spammed to death).



Going forward this system will allow us to be a lot more agile about translations, making it possible to publish our new game strings before we publish a new version for example. It will go public some days before 3.11 hits, check the forums for an announcement.

UPDATE: The server is now online, check this thread for more information:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/450700/discussions/0/1700542332324695551/

Achievements!



Yep, another "finally" :)

Work has started on version 3.11, and as always a batch of small enhancements and fixes goes first. Here's what's been brewing for the last two weeks.

Resource list in galaxy view

The up/down controls to pick a resource or product to show in the galaxy view wasn't a very good solution, so a proper alphabetical menu will be now displayed instead:



Per-ship filtering in officer listings

All officer listings that allow filters now have an option to display the crew of a single ship:



New planet header images

Max has draw a new full set of images for the headers on the planet window, based on his original artwork for the planet icons:



New docks

After discussions in the forums, we've decided to give this a try:



Docks don't feature the long tube they had originally. In addition they now can only be built outside and will require a clear 3x3 area around them. Unlike the attrition rules used for "inside" objects both of these rules are "soft". Enterprising players can find ways around them. But it's the spirit that counts.

New reveal event for Lactians



Lactians now have the reveal event they were meant to. A team of Lactian priests and servants will visit your station with neutral reputation, and start littering the place with their leaflets about the Church of Lactus. Future visits won't be so peaceful tho.

Research screen final design



The research screen received a much needed cleanup. No more misaligned icons and overlapping everything.

Work has started on version 3.11, and as always a batch of small enhancements and fixes goes first. Here's what's been brewing for the last two weeks.

Resource list in galaxy view

The up/down controls to pick a resource or product to show in the galaxy view wasn't a very good solution, so a proper alphabetical menu will be now displayed instead:



Per-ship filtering in officer listings

All officer listings that allow filters now have an option to display the crew of a single ship:



New planet header images

Max has draw a new full set of images for the headers on the planet window, based on his original artwork for the planet icons:



New docks

After discussions in the forums, we've decided to give this a try:



Docks don't feature the long tube they had originally. In addition they now can only be built outside and will require a clear 3x3 area around them. Unlike the attrition rules used for "inside" objects both of these rules are "soft". Enterprising players can find ways around them. But it's the spirit that counts.

New reveal event for Lactians



Lactians now have the reveal event they were meant to. A team of Lactian priests and servants will visit your station with neutral reputation, and start littering the place with their leaflets about the Church of Lactus. Future visits won't be so peaceful tho.

Research screen final design



The research screen received a much needed cleanup. No more misaligned icons and overlapping everything.

What a better way to start the new year than with a new Galactology release!

The big new feature for 3.10 is planetary invasions. Planets are can now be invaded by hostile civs to interrupt your business, or by the player to secure extraction on hostile planets. Watch out for their vengeance!

Here's the development notes, in case you missed them:

*EXPERIMENTAL* support for OS rendered glyphs

We want to make our game localizable to the greatest number of languages, but at the same time we are limited by a years old, very simple custom text renderer. In particular we must bundle all fonts with the game. This makes it impossible to support asian languages, since the required fonts are hundreds of MB.

(For the more technically inclined and/or with gamedev localization experience: we could do font minimization to fit a given translation, but we are also allowing players to input arbitrary text in the names of officers. It would suck to remove this feature for the languages where it's not feasible to bundle a full font.)

After some experimenting it's now possible to fallback to the OS font renderer when the game encounters a missing glyph in the font, in any context:



Since the OS has access to its installed fonts, and it's very likely an user wanting to use a translation will also have those OS fonts installed, it means we can support virtually any language, at least at the glyph level. Languages that require specific shaping and layouts will still look bad, but the situation is much improved in any case. This feature is currently inefficient with VRAM so more testing is required to see if it fits in most users setups.

Direct deposit of factory products on nearby pallets

Factories are already capable of directly sourcing ingredients from pallets adjacent to them, and now they are capable of directly depositing their products too:



This means officers won't have to deliver the product themselves, further speeding up manufacturing. This action doesn't lock the pallet so several factories can dump on the same pallet. And the factory will also consider the neighboring tiles for the worker, so the setup in the screenshot will work just fine.

Noise

A new room-wide mechanic has been introduced: noise levels.



Most objects will be silent, but some will produce some noise, indicated in their description. The noise level of a room will be the simple sum of those noise values.

Some vital tasks will be affected by noise. They are, in order from most affected to least: sleeping, reading, eating and drinking (which is not inebriation, your bar can be noisy just fine). Sleep will be disturbed by any level of noise above 0, while eating will tolerate the noise of one kitchen so your initial hall can be simple.

Interrupted tasks show up like this:



And they also add a negative feeling:



Stock charts

What's a management sim without charts?



Translucent docks on mouse hover

"Finally" :)



Show ships with autopilot stop
To better tie up the autopilot editing, the planet window will now show a listing of all ships with an autopilot stop at said planet:



Manual forced delivery
An often requested feature, it's now possible to select a valid hauler then right click on a resource stack to try to force its delivery into storage:



Reputation gains when selling products
Selling products in bulk from the Civs interface now also increases the reputation with the buyer civ. This even works with hostile civs (the 3.9 tribute system is now only displayed for civs with the "at war" reputation level).



Reputation gains are inversely proportional to the price of the goods, so if you are looking to be liked it may be worth to take a revenue hit in your sales.

Planetary invasions
Inhabited planets can now be invaded by a different civ. An invaded planet looks like this on the surface:



The native civ camps are in a semi destroyed state, with the invader camps doting the landscape. Native citizens will be hidden in their (remaining) houses.
The galaxy screen and planet window will also clearly display which planets are invaded, plus an alert:



Civs that are at war with you will invade planets from civs that are friendly to you, with special predilection for planets where you have extraction going on. The invasion will blockade the planet: no extraction and no product sales will be possible, and tourist from its system won't visit your station. You will need to liberate the planet so things go back to normal:



But it's not only hostile civs doing the invading. You will also have to invade hostile planets if you want to reliably extract resources from them, since attrition damage to your extractors will be much higher on hostile ground now, and your invasion stops it. Landing on any hostile planet now starts the invasion process, and it's your choice if you want to finish it:



Of course, don't expect these civs to just sit idly while you invade their worlds for filthy lucre:



New antagonist civ variant

Some civs are now a "pure antagonist". Unlike the other civs, antagonists cannot own planets and they will always be hostile to you. Pirates, Robots and Lactians are now antagonists. Their discovery is not galaxy map based. Instead they are triggered by some conditions. For example pirates appear when your bank account reaches certain amount:



And robots appear when you first unlock the robot factory:



Lactians

The Lactians, as the members of the Church of Lactus are called, are a new civ in Galactology. They venerate a mysterious milk god entity, and are more interested on conversion than on slaughter. Here's how their planet invasions look like:



They won't hesitate to fight you if you decide to liberate the planets they convert tho. Lactians will have more content and specific events in 3.11.

Ship skills

Since planet combat is more important than ever, in 3.10 all ships will feature 6 officer slots, so you are not limited by ship crew capacity when assembling a strong force for planet liberation or invasion. But this made ship differentiation even less visible than it already was. To enhance ships and their role in planet exploration ship skills have been introduced:



Ship skills are actions that appear when you select an officer on a planet, which can be used by any officer. They have a global cooldown like the current teleport (indeed, the teleport is now a ship skill and it is standard for all ships). Each ship model has different sets of skills, with the largest and more expensive ships having a large selection of them. The currently implemented skills are:

- Surface teleport: the one already in game
- Orbital bombing: click an area on the map to bomb it from orbit (remember the removed asteroid shower event? It's back as this ship skill, and you can control it!)
- Healing wave: all officers get healed
- Ship dome: a large damage shield is spawned
- Mass hysteria: all enemy units on the map go crazy for a limited time
- Robodrop: a squad of combat robots is spawned

These skills increase in potency with bigger, faster ships. Additional skills will be investigated for future versions, and they may include non-combat abilities too.

QoL fire changes

Fire is the feature many love to hate. Combined with combat it's surely easier to hate than to love, specially in its current state. So for 3.10 some quality of life changes are being introduced with the hope to make fire less dumb overall.

Panic runs for fire are now replaced by "avoiding danger" runs. They are much shorter, and are intended just for that, to step away from the fire area. They are also non-chaining, so you won't get officers or enemies running away for an entire minute because of a fire in some corner.

Fire spawns will also proactively try to assign a nearby officer or robot with the firefighting job from the very moment they spawn. This is an inversion of how the game job system works, but it's certainly appropriate in this case.

Finally fire won't interrupt firefighters. If an officer needs to cross a fire because he's on the way to get some water to extinguish it, the fire won't interrupt the job (fire has a low DPS damage, just walking by inside won't kill a healthy officer).

What a better way to start the new year than with a new Galactology release!

The big new feature for 3.10 is planetary invasions. Planets are can now be invaded by hostile civs to interrupt your business, or by the player to secure extraction on hostile planets. Watch out for their vengeance!

Here's the development notes, in case you missed them:

*EXPERIMENTAL* support for OS rendered glyphs

We want to make our game localizable to the greatest number of languages, but at the same time we are limited by a years old, very simple custom text renderer. In particular we must bundle all fonts with the game. This makes it impossible to support asian languages, since the required fonts are hundreds of MB.

(For the more technically inclined and/or with gamedev localization experience: we could do font minimization to fit a given translation, but we are also allowing players to input arbitrary text in the names of officers. It would suck to remove this feature for the languages where it's not feasible to bundle a full font.)

After some experimenting it's now possible to fallback to the OS font renderer when the game encounters a missing glyph in the font, in any context:



Since the OS has access to its installed fonts, and it's very likely an user wanting to use a translation will also have those OS fonts installed, it means we can support virtually any language, at least at the glyph level. Languages that require specific shaping and layouts will still look bad, but the situation is much improved in any case. This feature is currently inefficient with VRAM so more testing is required to see if it fits in most users setups.

Direct deposit of factory products on nearby pallets

Factories are already capable of directly sourcing ingredients from pallets adjacent to them, and now they are capable of directly depositing their products too:



This means officers won't have to deliver the product themselves, further speeding up manufacturing. This action doesn't lock the pallet so several factories can dump on the same pallet. And the factory will also consider the neighboring tiles for the worker, so the setup in the screenshot will work just fine.

Noise

A new room-wide mechanic has been introduced: noise levels.



Most objects will be silent, but some will produce some noise, indicated in their description. The noise level of a room will be the simple sum of those noise values.

Some vital tasks will be affected by noise. They are, in order from most affected to least: sleeping, reading, eating and drinking (which is not inebriation, your bar can be noisy just fine). Sleep will be disturbed by any level of noise above 0, while eating will tolerate the noise of one kitchen so your initial hall can be simple.

Interrupted tasks show up like this:



And they also add a negative feeling:



Stock charts

What's a management sim without charts?



Translucent docks on mouse hover

"Finally" :)



Show ships with autopilot stop
To better tie up the autopilot editing, the planet window will now show a listing of all ships with an autopilot stop at said planet:



Manual forced delivery
An often requested feature, it's now possible to select a valid hauler then right click on a resource stack to try to force its delivery into storage:



Reputation gains when selling products
Selling products in bulk from the Civs interface now also increases the reputation with the buyer civ. This even works with hostile civs (the 3.9 tribute system is now only displayed for civs with the "at war" reputation level).



Reputation gains are inversely proportional to the price of the goods, so if you are looking to be liked it may be worth to take a revenue hit in your sales.

Planetary invasions
Inhabited planets can now be invaded by a different civ. An invaded planet looks like this on the surface:



The native civ camps are in a semi destroyed state, with the invader camps doting the landscape. Native citizens will be hidden in their (remaining) houses.
The galaxy screen and planet window will also clearly display which planets are invaded, plus an alert:



Civs that are at war with you will invade planets from civs that are friendly to you, with special predilection for planets where you have extraction going on. The invasion will blockade the planet: no extraction and no product sales will be possible, and tourist from its system won't visit your station. You will need to liberate the planet so things go back to normal:



But it's not only hostile civs doing the invading. You will also have to invade hostile planets if you want to reliably extract resources from them, since attrition damage to your extractors will be much higher on hostile ground now, and your invasion stops it. Landing on any hostile planet now starts the invasion process, and it's your choice if you want to finish it:



Of course, don't expect these civs to just sit idly while you invade their worlds for filthy lucre:



New antagonist civ variant

Some civs are now a "pure antagonist". Unlike the other civs, antagonists cannot own planets and they will always be hostile to you. Pirates, Robots and Lactians are now antagonists. Their discovery is not galaxy map based. Instead they are triggered by some conditions. For example pirates appear when your bank account reaches certain amount:



And robots appear when you first unlock the robot factory:



Lactians

The Lactians, as the members of the Church of Lactus are called, are a new civ in Galactology. They venerate a mysterious milk god entity, and are more interested on conversion than on slaughter. Here's how their planet invasions look like:



They won't hesitate to fight you if you decide to liberate the planets they convert tho. Lactians will have more content and specific events in 3.11.

Ship skills

Since planet combat is more important than ever, in 3.10 all ships will feature 6 officer slots, so you are not limited by ship crew capacity when assembling a strong force for planet liberation or invasion. But this made ship differentiation even less visible than it already was. To enhance ships and their role in planet exploration ship skills have been introduced:



Ship skills are actions that appear when you select an officer on a planet, which can be used by any officer. They have a global cooldown like the current teleport (indeed, the teleport is now a ship skill and it is standard for all ships). Each ship model has different sets of skills, with the largest and more expensive ships having a large selection of them. The currently implemented skills are:

- Surface teleport: the one already in game
- Orbital bombing: click an area on the map to bomb it from orbit (remember the removed asteroid shower event? It's back as this ship skill, and you can control it!)
- Healing wave: all officers get healed
- Ship dome: a large damage shield is spawned
- Mass hysteria: all enemy units on the map go crazy for a limited time
- Robodrop: a squad of combat robots is spawned

These skills increase in potency with bigger, faster ships. Additional skills will be investigated for future versions, and they may include non-combat abilities too.

QoL fire changes

Fire is the feature many love to hate. Combined with combat it's surely easier to hate than to love, specially in its current state. So for 3.10 some quality of life changes are being introduced with the hope to make fire less dumb overall.

Panic runs for fire are now replaced by "avoiding danger" runs. They are much shorter, and are intended just for that, to step away from the fire area. They are also non-chaining, so you won't get officers or enemies running away for an entire minute because of a fire in some corner.

Fire spawns will also proactively try to assign a nearby officer or robot with the firefighting job from the very moment they spawn. This is an inversion of how the game job system works, but it's certainly appropriate in this case.

Finally fire won't interrupt firefighters. If an officer needs to cross a fire because he's on the way to get some water to extinguish it, the fire won't interrupt the job (fire has a low DPS damage, just walking by inside won't kill a healthy officer).

Update 3.10.1

- Greatly decrease planet invasion event frequency
- Add per-planet invasion cooldown
- Antagonist civ reveal events must follow the same rules of invasion events
- Adjust internal event cooldown
- Remove "too close to enemy objects" rule, which is nonsensical now
- Fix some text fitting/scaling issues

Version 3.10 is almost ready, with some bugs and testing left to do. A few more features have been implemented to round up the release in the past week.

New antagonist civ variant

Some civs are now a "pure antagonist". Unlike the other civs, antagonists cannot own planets and they will always be hostile to you. Pirates, Robots and Lactians are now antagonists. Their discovery is not galaxy map based. Instead they are triggered by some conditions. For example pirates appear when your bank account reaches certain amount:



And robots appear when you first unlock the robot factory:



Lactians

The Lactians, as the members of the Church of Lactus are called, are a new civ in Galactology. They venerate a mysterious milk god entity, and are more interested on conversion than on slaughter. Here's how their planet invasions look like:



They won't hesitate to fight you if you decide to liberate the planets they convert tho. Lactians will have more content and specific events in 3.11.

Ship skills

Since planet combat is more important than ever, in 3.10 all ships will feature 6 officer slots, so you are not limited by ship crew capacity when assembling a strong force for planet liberation or invasion. But this made ship differentiation even less visible than it already was. To enhance ships and their role in planet exploration ship skills have been introduced:



Ship skills are actions that appear when you select an officer on a planet, which can be used by any officer. They have a global cooldown like the current teleport (indeed, the teleport is now a ship skill and it is standard for all ships). Each ship model has different sets of skills, with the largest and more expensive ships having a large selection of them. The currently implemented skills are:

- Surface teleport: the one already in game
- Orbital bombing: click an area on the map to bomb it from orbit (remember the removed asteroid shower event? It's back as this ship skill, and you can control it!)
- Healing wave: all officers get healed
- Ship dome: a large damage shield is spawned
- Mass hysteria: all enemy units on the map go crazy for a limited time
- Robodrop: a squad of combat robots is spawned

These skills increase in potency with bigger, faster ships. Additional skills will be investigated for future versions, and they may include non-combat abilities too.

QoL fire changes

Fire is the feature many love to hate. Combined with combat it's surely easier to hate than to love, specially in its current state. So for 3.10 some quality of life changes are being introduced with the hope to make fire less dumb overall.

Panic runs for fire are now replaced by "avoiding danger" runs. They are much shorter, and are intended just for that, to step away from the fire area. They are also non-chaining, so you won't get officers or enemies running away for an entire minute because of a fire in some corner.

Fire spawns will also proactively try to assign a nearby officer or robot with the firefighting job from the very moment they spawn. This is an inversion of how the game job system works, but it's certainly appropriate in this case.

Finally fire won't interrupt firefighters. If an officer needs to cross a fire because he's on the way to get some water to extinguish it, the fire won't interrupt the job (fire has a low DPS damage, just walking by inside won't kill a healthy officer).

Version 3.10 is almost ready, with some bugs and testing left to do. A few more features have been implemented to round up the release in the past week.

New antagonist civ variant

Some civs are now a "pure antagonist". Unlike the other civs, antagonists cannot own planets and they will always be hostile to you. Pirates, Robots and Lactians are now antagonists. Their discovery is not galaxy map based. Instead they are triggered by some conditions. For example pirates appear when your bank account reaches certain amount:



And robots appear when you first unlock the robot factory:



Lactians

The Lactians, as the members of the Church of Lactus are called, are a new civ in Galactology. They venerate a mysterious milk god entity, and are more interested on conversion than on slaughter. Here's how their planet invasions look like:



They won't hesitate to fight you if you decide to liberate the planets they convert tho. Lactians will have more content and specific events in 3.11.

Ship skills

Since planet combat is more important than ever, in 3.10 all ships will feature 6 officer slots, so you are not limited by ship crew capacity when assembling a strong force for planet liberation or invasion. But this made ship differentiation even less visible than it already was. To enhance ships and their role in planet exploration ship skills have been introduced:



Ship skills are actions that appear when you select an officer on a planet, which can be used by any officer. They have a global cooldown like the current teleport (indeed, the teleport is now a ship skill and it is standard for all ships). Each ship model has different sets of skills, with the largest and more expensive ships having a large selection of them. The currently implemented skills are:

- Surface teleport: the one already in game
- Orbital bombing: click an area on the map to bomb it from orbit (remember the removed asteroid shower event? It's back as this ship skill, and you can control it!)
- Healing wave: all officers get healed
- Ship dome: a large damage shield is spawned
- Mass hysteria: all enemy units on the map go crazy for a limited time
- Robodrop: a squad of combat robots is spawned

These skills increase in potency with bigger, faster ships. Additional skills will be investigated for future versions, and they may include non-combat abilities too.

QoL fire changes

Fire is the feature many love to hate. Combined with combat it's surely easier to hate than to love, specially in its current state. So for 3.10 some quality of life changes are being introduced with the hope to make fire less dumb overall.

Panic runs for fire are now replaced by "avoiding danger" runs. They are much shorter, and are intended just for that, to step away from the fire area. They are also non-chaining, so you won't get officers or enemies running away for an entire minute because of a fire in some corner.

Fire spawns will also proactively try to assign a nearby officer or robot with the firefighting job from the very moment they spawn. This is an inversion of how the game job system works, but it's certainly appropriate in this case.

Finally fire won't interrupt firefighters. If an officer needs to cross a fire because he's on the way to get some water to extinguish it, the fire won't interrupt the job (fire has a low DPS damage, just walking by inside won't kill a healthy officer).

New year, new version almost ready! Work progressed into the main 3.10 feature, planetary invasions, plus some smaller enhacements.

Show ships with autopilot stop
To better tie up the autopilot editing, the planet window will now show a listing of all ships with an autopilot stop at said planet:



Manual forced delivery
An often requested feature, it's now possible to select a valid hauler then right click on a resource stack to try to force its delivery into storage:



Reputation gains when selling products
Selling products in bulk from the Civs interface now also increases the reputation with the buyer civ. This even works with hostile civs (the 3.9 tribute system is now only displayed for civs with the "at war" reputation level).



Reputation gains are inversely proportional to the price of the goods, so if you are looking to be liked it may be worth to take a revenue hit in your sales.

Planetary invasions
Inhabited planets can now be invaded by a different civ. An invaded planet looks like this on the surface:



The native civ camps are in a semi destroyed state, with the invader camps doting the landscape. Native citizens will be hidden in their (remaining) houses.
The galaxy screen and planet window will also clearly display which planets are invaded, plus an alert:



Civs that are at war with you will invade planets from civs that are friendly to you, with special predilection for planets where you have extraction going on. The invasion will blockade the planet: no extraction and no product sales will be possible, and tourist from its system won't visit your station. You will need to liberate the planet so things go back to normal:



But it's not only hostile civs doing the invading. You will also have to invade hostile planets if you want to reliably extract resources from them, since attrition damage to your extractors will be much higher on hostile ground now, and your invasion stops it. Landing on any hostile planet now starts the invasion process, and it's your choice if you want to finish it:



Of course, don't expect these civs to just sit idly while you invade their worlds for filthy lucre:

Work has stated in 3.10. The main feature of this version will be new systems to make planet gameplay more interesting.

The usual list of small features goes first tho, so here's what been brewing since the release of 3.9.

*EXPERIMENTAL* support for OS rendered glyphs

We want to make our game localizable to the greatest number of languages, but at the same time we are limited by a years old, very simple custom text renderer. In particular we must bundle all fonts with the game. This makes it impossible to support asian languages, since the required fonts are hundreds of MB.

(For the more technically inclined and/or with gamedev localization experience: we could do font minimization to fit a given translation, but we are also allowing players to input arbitrary text in the names of officers. It would suck to remove this feature for the languages where it's not feasible to bundle a full font.)

After some experimenting it's now possible to fallback to the OS font renderer when the game encounters a missing glyph in the font, in any context:



Since the OS has access to its installed fonts, and it's very likely an user wanting to use a translation will also have those OS fonts installed, it means we can support virtually any language, at least at the glyph level. Languages that require specific shaping and layouts will still look bad, but the situation is much improved in any case. This feature is currently inefficient with VRAM so more testing is required to see if it fits in most users setups.

Direct deposit of factory products on nearby pallets

Factories are already capable of directly sourcing ingredients from pallets adjacent to them, and now they are capable of directly depositing their products too:



This means officers won't have to deliver the product themselves, further speeding up manufacturing. This action doesn't lock the pallet so several factories can dump on the same pallet. And the factory will also consider the neighboring tiles for the worker, so the setup in the screenshot will work just fine.

Noise

A new room-wide mechanic has been introduced: noise levels.



Most objects will be silent, but some will produce some noise, indicated in their description. The noise level of a room will be the simple sum of those noise values.

Some vital tasks will be affected by noise. They are, in order from most affected to least: sleeping, reading, eating and drinking (which is not inebriation, your bar can be noisy just fine). Sleep will be disturbed by any level of noise above 0, while eating will tolerate the noise of one kitchen so your initial hall can be simple.

Interrupted tasks show up like this:



And they also add a negative feeling:



Stock charts

What's a management sim without charts?



Translucent docks on mouse hover

"Finally" :)

The new station <--> civ commerce system is the big feature of this release. Cash becomes much more important with a limited amount to start with and the need produce and sell excess output from your factories to finance your station growth. Check the tutorial in the Civs screen for more details.

Here's the development notes for 3.9, in case you missed our updates.

Room-level aesthetics

Aesthetics refuses to die! I've spin again the idea, this time as a value that gets calculated for whole rooms, and displayed in the building overlay:



It's calculated from the contributions from the room flooring and its objects. Now that this is more visible officers will also require a minimum aesthetic value for their bedroom:



Notice something in the previous screenshot? Yep, graduates do not require a private room anymore. Instead they will just require a basic bed (which now can be made private to an officer) plus an aesthetic value for their bedroom (which is any room the bed is located at). Since basic beds do not assign ownership to their surroundings and can be built in multiples in the same room, this means graduates will happily sleep in barracks, as long as it's a nice barrack. This will solve the issue of having to build huge housing areas for your graduates, which could get quite tedious. Master officers will still demand a private room and will also ask for a high aesthetic value, along with all of their previous demands.

Import limits

Resources that are imported into your station (basically all recipe ingredients) now have a configurable limit:



This means your ships will stop collecting Fruit when your station stock reaches 7500 (this default value is equivalent to 10 stacks). This will alleviate the issues with having to build too much storage areas, and it will be useful when the full import/export economy is in the game.

Clone insurance

Have this super well equipped master level officer that was in the original 6 and you don't want to lose? There's an object for that now:



First you assign an officer to the clone chamber object (only one officer per chamber, as with any other object ownership association). If the officer dies they will immediately spawn inside the clone chamber, at full health, even if the officer was in a ship or exploring a planet. This will also destroy the clone chamber object, but such is the price of insurance. Speaking of prices, it's also very expensive. If you *really* like your officer you can assign them to any amount of insurance objects, giving them as many lives as your cash allows.

New resource distribution and recipe balance

Raw resources are now limited to one per planet, and are strictly bound in level ranges:



In the same vein all recipes have been reviewed so early research recipes also consume low level resources, instead of the very mixed ingredients they had before.

The research tiers have also been reviewed and the required points have been increased, since the previous amount were too low (but aided in testing the game).

Civ exports

Raw resources are not free anymore. They now cost credits, and the station wallet will pay for them when one of your ships loads them from a planet. This is expressed from the point of view of the civs that allow you to extract raw resources from their planets, so it's called an export:



All raw resources have a fixed standard price, but the more a civ likes you, the cheaper they are willing to sell those resources to you. It can go from 100% of the price at neutral to just 10% of the price at the highest possible reputation level.

Your ships will automatically purchase the resource they load from the planets, as long as you have the money for it. Higher level resources can be quite expensive, specially when purchased from neutral civs. More care will be now required to set up routes, instead of the endless abundance of previous versions.

Civ imports

The export system was clear from early on, but the design ideas for the import were less clear. After some false starts 2 designs extremes were identified:

A) Import happens only to visitor ships (simplest). The player would only be able to sell its products to visiting ships from non-hostile civs. A simple interface would display those ships demands ("We want 10 rations, would you sell them to us?") and an accept/decline prompt.

B) All galaxy planets are available as import receivers and the user distributes to them using the autopilot. All planets in the galaxy have demands for one or more products, and the player can supply them to make money. This requires enhancing the autopilot to a full blown auto trading system. Each planet order would need to include the order kind (buy resources / sell products / load from home) plus the resource subject and amount. This would also require multiple items per order (think about a home visit, it's legitimate to want to load several different products plus unload the raw cargo), smart stocking choices (what happens if there's not enough station stock to satisfy the order? Wait for more production or leave with whatever is available? Then how must the products be distributed for the sell orders, given the defined amount won't be meet?). This is a very deep rabbit hole. The end result would be formidably complex too.

In the end an hybrid solution is being implemented, with some of the complexity of B but crucially removing the auto piloted auto trading aspect.



Unlike the civ exports tab, the import tab will be interactive. Just as with raw resources, civ planets will only crave a single product. Products are also strictly assigned to civs, so for example you'll only be making rations for the humans. First you select the resource you want to sell. Then a list of that civ planets that crave that resource will be displayed, along with a price. That price will reflect the internal demand of the planet, which will be based on a simulated value over time (and it will be disturbed in case you sell to them).

In the right side you'll be able to change the amount of that product you want to sell to that planet, and which ship you want to use to perform the delivery (from the ships currently parked at home). Then you can start the delivery and the ship receive an order to travel to the planet, sell the product and come back home (this will be internal code, not configurable as an autopilot).

The idea is to make this manual action easy enough to perform, but still have some strategy and consequences. You'll be affecting demand in the planet, at least for some time after the delivery, so you can't spam a single planet with your cheap rations. You'll need to have ready to go ships parked at home, and their cargo hold size will be of relevance. But also their speed, since the demand price changes over time. It's not as complex or as "real" as the B option, but it's not the trivial solution either.

The "Avg BOM" value deserves a mention. BOM is for Bill Of Materials. Since you are selling products whose raw ingredients you paid for, this is a very important number to keep in mind when deciding to sell something. You could be selling under cost! But calculating this is very complex, since you can be sourcing the same raw from different civs at the same time. The game will try to keep average purchase tallies from your planet extraction and use those numbers to calculate the products BOM, so you can compare them to the price offered by the simulated demand pricing. That pricing in turn will be based on the product BOM assuming a purely neutral civ, so with some patience it will be possible to score large profit margins in your sales.

As you can see I'm a logistics/systems geek, but I have to exercise some restrain to keep the game playable (and to release at some point before 2025 :)

Smaller changes

- Optional exclusive fullscreen mode
- Inside the object tool alt click will now also copy the settings from the object, valid for objects that are rebuildable after destroy (factories and pallet-like objects)
- Better spawning areas for some non-violent events, including allowing to spawn inside the station. And better area selection for other events, still spawning at the border but now actively choosing a location close to inhabited areas.
- Shift click with the info tool now allows to add officers to the selection
- New officer sorting option: seniority. Sorts officers by how long they have been part of your staff.
- New officer sorting option: average item level. Sorts officers by their average equipped item level in increasing order.

For the past two weeks work has been focused on the new commerce civ import/export (AKA sell/buy) feature in 3.9.

New resource distribution and recipe balance

But before the new export system was possible, a mass rebalancing was required for raw resources and recipes.

Raw resources are now limited to one per planet, and are strictly bound in level ranges:



In the same vein all recipes have been reviewed so early research recipes also consume low level resources, instead of the very mixed ingredients they had before.

The research tiers have also been reviewed and the required points have been increased, since the previous amount were too low (but aided in testing the game).

Civ exports

Raw resources are not free anymore. They now cost credits, and the station wallet will pay for them when one of your ships loads them from a planet. This is expressed from the point of view of the civs that allow you to extract raw resources from their planets, so it's called an export:



All raw resources have a fixed standard price, but the more a civ likes you, the cheaper they are willing to sell those resources to you. It can go from 100% of the price at neutral to just 10% of the price at the highest possible reputation level.

Your ships will automatically purchase the resource they load from the planets, as long as you have the money for it. Higher level resources can be quite expensive, specially when purchased from neutral civs. More care will be now required to set up routes, instead of the endless abundance of previous versions.

Civ imports

The export system was clear from early on, but the design ideas for the import were less clear. After some false starts 2 designs extremes were identified:

A) Import happens only to visitor ships (simplest). The player would only be able to sell its products to visiting ships from non-hostile civs. A simple interface would display those ships demands ("We want 10 rations, would you sell them to us?") and an accept/decline prompt.

B) All galaxy planets are available as import receivers and the user distributes to them using the autopilot. All planets in the galaxy have demands for one or more products, and the player can supply them to make money. This requires enhancing the autopilot to a full blown auto trading system. Each planet order would need to include the order kind (buy resources / sell products / load from home) plus the resource subject and amount. This would also require multiple items per order (think about a home visit, it's legitimate to want to load several different products plus unload the raw cargo), smart stocking choices (what happens if there's not enough station stock to satisfy the order? Wait for more production or leave with whatever is available? Then how must the products be distributed for the sell orders, given the defined amount won't be meet?). This is a very deep rabbit hole. The end result would be formidably complex too.

In the end an hybrid solution is being implemented, with some of the complexity of B but crucially removing the auto piloted auto trading aspect.



Unlike the civ exports tab, the import tab will be interactive. Just as with raw resources, civ planets will only crave a single product. Products are also strictly assigned to civs, so for example you'll only be making rations for the humans. First you select the resource you want to sell. Then a list of that civ planets that crave that resource will be displayed, along with a price. That price will reflect the internal demand of the planet, which will be based on a simulated value over time (and it will be disturbed in case you sell to them).

In the right side you'll be able to change the amount of that product you want to sell to that planet, and which ship you want to use to perform the delivery (from the ships currently parked at home). Then you can start the delivery and the ship receive an order to travel to the planet, sell the product and come back home (this will be internal code, not configurable as an autopilot).

The idea is to make this manual action easy enough to perform, but still have some strategy and consequences. You'll be affecting demand in the planet, at least for some time after the delivery, so you can't spam a single planet with your cheap rations. You'll need to have ready to go ships parked at home, and their cargo hold size will be of relevance. But also their speed, since the demand price changes over time. It's not as complex or as "real" as the B option, but it's not the trivial solution either.

The (still not ready) "Avg BOM" value deserves a mention. BOM is for Bill Of Materials. Since you are selling products whose raw ingredients you paid for, this is a very important number to keep in mind when deciding to sell something. You could be selling under cost! But calculating this is very complex, since you can be sourcing the same raw from different civs at the same time. The game will try to keep average purchase tallies from your planet extraction and use those numbers to calculate the products BOM, so you can compare them to the price offered by the simulated demand pricing. That pricing in turn will be based on the product BOM assuming a purely neutral civ, so with some patience it will be possible to score large profit margins in your sales.

As you can see I'm a logistics/systems geek, but I have to exercise some restrain to keep the game playable (and to release at some point before 2025 :)

It took some time to get to full speed after the holidays, but here we are! 3.9 is well underway. This version will be smaller than previous ones, since October was not very productive and I don't want to make it too long between releases. The big new feature of 3.9 will be import/export commerce, but as usual the work started with smaller enhancements.

Room-level aesthetics

Aesthetics refuses to die! I've spin again the idea, this time as a value that gets calculated for whole rooms, and displayed in the building overlay:



It's calculated from the contributions from the room flooring and its objects. Now that this is more visible officers will also require a minimum aesthetic value for their bedroom:



Notice something in the previous screenshot? Yep, graduates do not require a private room anymore. Instead they will just require a basic bed (which now can be made private to an officer) plus an aesthetic value for their bedroom (which is any room the bed is located at). Since basic beds do not assign ownership to their surroundings and can be built in multiples in the same room, this means graduates will happily sleep in barracks, as long as it's a nice barrack. This will solve the issue of having to build huge housing areas for your graduates, which could get quite tedious. Master officers will still demand a private room and will also ask for a high aesthetic value, along with all of their previous demands.

Import limits

Resources that are imported into your station (basically all recipe ingredients) now have a configurable limit:



This means your ships will stop collecting Fruit when your station stock reaches 7500 (this default value is equivalent to 10 stacks). This will alleviate the issues with having to build too much storage areas, and it will be useful when the full import/export economy is in the game.

Clone insurance

Have this super well equipped master level officer that was in the original 6 and you don't want to lose? There's an object for that now:



First you assign an officer to the clone chamber object (only one officer per chamber, as with any other object ownership association). If the officer dies they will immediately spawn inside the clone chamber, at full health, even if the officer was in a ship or exploring a planet. This will also destroy the clone chamber object, but such is the price of insurance. Speaking of prices, it's also very expensive. If you *really* like your officer you can assign them to any amount of insurance objects, giving them as many lives as your cash allows.

Smaller changes

- Optional exclusive fullscreen mode
- Inside the object tool alt click will now also copy the settings from the object, valid for objects that are rebuildable after destroy (factories and pallet-like objects)
- Better spawning areas for some non-violent events, including allowing to spawn inside the station. And better area selection for other events, still spawning at the border but now actively choosing a location close to inhabited areas.
- Shift click with the info tool now allows to add officers to the selection
- New officer sorting option: seniority. Sorts officers by how long they have been part of your staff.
- New officer sorting option: average item level. Sorts officers by their average equipped item level in increasing order.

Planet stations are here!

The major feature of 3.8 is a new building system to enable player stations to be built on planets. The home station will now be located on the surface of a planet, as opposed to a featureless asteroid. This also comes with new features, like destructable walls with hit points.



Here's a recap of the 3.8 development log.

Full model and tool (re)making for the new build system

The new wall system is now fully integrated into the game, and a new build tool and system for walls has been implemented. A new concept of "room" has been introduced, and a damage model for walls as a mixed tile/object entity.



3.8 rooms are different from former rooms. In 3.8 a room must be 100% composed of:

- Floor tiles over its entire surface
- Entirely delimited by walls or doors

The game checks these conditions on every tile change and auto detects all correct rooms in the map. These are visualized when inside a build tool as green polygons:



This is important because in 3.8 most objects can only be constructed inside a room. The object build tool won't let the player build most objects outside of such a properly formed room.

Since a wall, door or floor tile can be removed at any time, be it from player orders or by damage destruction, a new "environment attrition" system has been introduced:



This is not meant to be a punishing disaster, the damage will be slow, but still annoying enough to make the required repairs to the room structure desirable.

New game options

Since stations are now built on planets, a new game options tab has been introduced. The planet kind selector allows to pick the general planet archetype:



It also allows to disable events from the very start. Once a game has been started they can be re-enabled in a new tab inside the options screen.

Filtering door system

Doors can now filter which entities they allow to pass through:



This is a very often requested feature, and it's finally here. Keep in mind the notes in the UI: enemies don't care about which sign is hanging on a door.

Path finding display



Selected entities will now display an overlay line over the map in case they are in the middle of a pathfind walk. Very useful to see where those pesky enemies are going or to figure out why your officers are ignoring certain route.

Multiselection with rectangular area

The game finally has proper multiselection:



Just drag with the left mouse button and a rectangle will appear, changing the selection live as you drag the rectangle corner.

Multiselection is only enabled for officer entities. The idea is that there's rarely a need to issue mass orders to any other kind of entities, with the exception of robots. I will look into adding robots to multiselection later on.

This is how the right column looks when using multiselection:



All buttons are live with item cooldowns too. The role grouping reflects the currently equipped item by the officer, not their spec.

Actions still work as usual. If you issue a walk order with 30 officers selected, all 30 of them will make a formation around the position you click on. For target orders I'm still deciding what to do, and I will probably introduce 4 separate target actions for each role. For players who want to micromanage their units this will give combat a very RTS flavor, and I believe it's a better fit that my previous designs.

Squads and the squad bar are no more, and combat mode is pending a redesign or a removal too.

RTS-like grouping

In the same vein it's possible to make ad-hoc groups like in any RTS-like game. First make a group, then press Ctrl-1 to store the group. From that point on pressing 1 will select again the same group of entities. Keys 1 to 6 are available for this.

Per-role combat target actions with selection



The player can now instruct their officers AI to focus on a group of targets instead of one, by using a combat target action and then dragging a rectangle over a group of enemies. This even works if the initial selection was a group of officers. So now it's possible, in 2 clicks (or 1 key and 1 click), to order any arbitrary group of officers to attack any arbitrary group of enemies. Quite a difference compared with the older system!

The target action has also been divided into 4 actions that only apply depending on the role of the officer, so you can keep your big heterogenous group of officers and still give target orders only to healers, for example.

Rebuild option for object ruins



One of the most asked for features is finally here. When an object is destroyed, its ruins, instead of being auto flagged as recyclable, now offer an option to rebuild the object. The new object will also remember all the pallet and factory options.

I have to say that I don't fully agree with this feature. I consider it goes against the spirit of a building sim, but I decided to implement it because pallet and factory re-configuration is not fun. What could be next, a tool to autorebuild all rubble without even clicking on it? Or why even a tool, why not a single button to rebuild the entire station? I have to draw a line in the sand. And the line is that this feature won't get any more automatic than it is now, and if anything it may be restricted further (and the future walls won't support it).

Enhanced ship autopilot

The ship autopilot now monitors the vitals of its crew officers and how full its cargo hold is, and decides on its own to visit back home to unload and let the crew satisfy their vital needs. Once they feel refreshed it resumes its orders in the same spot.







This also means it's not necessary anymore to include orders to go back home, and that there's no need to set a stay time in any order. It's both simpler and more efficient!

Also crew members get a new buff (or debuff, depends on how you look at it):



This means that when an officer is part of a crew they will care a lot more for their own vitals and will be much eager to interrupt station work to go have lunch or take a shower. This also means their refresh time while the ship aways to resume the autopilot will be shorter.

Robot inventory





It's finally here! You can check how many robots of each (unlocked) kind you have, and click on them to focus a random one. It will also display the total count, and something new, the max allowed amount. You'll now be limited in how many robots you can have depending on how advanced your research tier is.

Per-ship cargo filters





It's now possible to select which cargo resources are allowed to be picked by a ship when it visits a planet. This way you could save your faster ships for food ingredients for example.

Contemplation





Officers will now, from time to time, stop and marvel at your decorations and other higher aesthetics items. They will also prefer owned objects, so they will trek back to their room to look at their fancy possessions.

Shops are actual shops now



A very old issue is visitors just grabbing items from storage areas or pallets, ignoring the shop objects. They are just going there because it's closer or more convenient! But it's not right. The game was working around this issue by charging visitors for the items only once they sat down to consume them. This looked strange.

Now that 3.8 has doors with filtering, we can do the right thing. The game will charge visitors for items when they pick them up, and allow them to get them for free if they somehow manage to find some not stored in a shop (and show the message you see in the screenshot). And how is this right?! Because it's now also possible to enclose your visitor area with doors that don't allow visitors to pass, but allow officers and robots. The player can now build the storage and production areas inaccessible to visitors, while allowing shop stocking tasks to work just fine.

New combat mode



Combat mode is now on a 1 minute timer, and it will disable itself if the officer hasn't participated in combat. Once it engages, or when the player gives the officer a direct manual order, it will bump itself again to 1 minute. This will hopefully stop the problem with forgetting to disable combat mode. It still needs to be toggled manually for the AI to consider to apply it.

Version 3.8 is now almost ready, and we have started its internal testing phase. For the last two weeks work has been focused into making the planet station prototype code into a playable system, and the results are satisfactory.



Full model and tool (re)making for the new build system

The new wall system is now fully integrated into the game, and a new build tool and system for walls has been implemented. A new concept of "room" has been introduced, and a damage model for walls as a mixed tile/object entity.



3.8 rooms are different from former rooms. In 3.8 a room must be 100% composed of:

- Floor tiles over its entire surface
- Entirely delimited by walls or doors

The game checks these conditions on every tile change and auto detects all correct rooms in the map. These are visualized when inside a build tool as green polygons:



This is important because in 3.8 most objects can only be constructed inside a room. The object build tool won't let the player build most objects outside of such a properly formed room.

Since a wall, door or floor tile can be removed at any time, be it from player orders or by damage destruction, a new "environment attrition" system has been introduced:



This is not meant to be a punishing disaster, the damage will be slow, but still annoying enough to make the required repairs to the room structure desirable.

New game options

Since stations are now built on planets, a new game options tab has been introduced. The planet kind selector allows to pick the general planet archetype:



It also allows to disable events from the very start. Once a game has been started they can be re-enabled in a new tab inside the options screen.

Work continues steadily on version 3.8. The development time was mostly devoted to work on the backlog of small enhancements, while at the same time prototyping the major new feature for 3.8: planet stations.

Planet stations

After the last update sneak peek, and the feedback thread in the forums, we are now fairly sure having stations on planets is doable and that it will result in a net positive from a gameplay POV. Here's the latest prototype:



It shows (randomized for testing) wall damage, which was the last feature to test. The aesthetics are also a lot better compared to the original cubes. Development focus will now center on bringing this prototype to the actual game, and adding the new separate wall and flooring systems. Once that's finished and tested we will have 3.8 ready for release.

Per-role combat target actions with selection



The player can now instruct their officers AI to focus on a group of targets instead of one, by using a combat target action and then dragging a rectangle over a group of enemies. This even works if the initial selection was a group of officers. So now it's possible, in 2 clicks (or 1 key and 1 click), to order any arbitrary group of officers to attack any arbitrary group of enemies. Quite a difference compared with the older system!

The target action has also been divided into 4 actions that only apply depending on the role of the officer, so you can keep your big heterogenous group of officers and still give target orders only to healers, for example.

Rebuild option for object ruins



One of the most asked for features is finally here. When an object is destroyed, its ruins, instead of being auto flagged as recyclable, now offer an option to rebuild the object. The new object will also remember all the pallet and factory options.

I have to say that I don't fully agree with this feature. I consider it goes against the spirit of a building sim, but I decided to implement it because pallet and factory re-configuration is not fun. What could be next, a tool to autorebuild all rubble without even clicking on it? Or why even a tool, why not a single button to rebuild the entire station? I have to draw a line in the sand. And the line is that this feature won't get any more automatic than it is now, and if anything it may be restricted further (and the future walls won't support it).

Enhanced ship autopilot

The ship autopilot now monitors the vitals of its crew officers and how full its cargo hold is, and decides on its own to visit back home to unload and let the crew satisfy their vital needs. Once they feel refreshed it resumes its orders in the same spot.







This also means it's not necessary anymore to include orders to go back home, and that there's no need to set a stay time in any order. It's both simpler and more efficient!

Also crew members get a new buff (or debuff, depends on how you look at it):



This means that when an officer is part of a crew they will care a lot more for their own vitals and will be much eager to interrupt station work to go have lunch or take a shower. This also means their refresh time while the ship aways to resume the autopilot will be shorter.

Robot inventory





It's finally here! You can check how many robots of each (unlocked) kind you have, and click on them to focus a random one. It will also display the total count, and something new, the max allowed amount. You'll now be limited in how many robots you can have depending on how advanced your research tier is.

Per-ship cargo filters





It's now possible to select which cargo resources are allowed to be picked by a ship when it visits a planet. This way you could save your faster ships for food ingredients for example.

Contemplation





Officers will now, from time to time, stop and marvel at your decorations and other higher aesthetics items. They will also prefer owned objects, so they will trek back to their room to look at their fancy possessions.

Shops are actual shops now



A very old issue is visitors just grabbing items from storage areas or pallets, ignoring the shop objects. They are just going there because it's closer or more convenient! But it's not right. The game was working around this issue by charging visitors for the items only once they sat down to consume them. This looked strange.

Now that 3.8 has doors with filtering, we can do the right thing. The game will charge visitors for items when they pick them up, and allow them to get them for free if they somehow manage to find some not stored in a shop (and show the message you see in the screenshot). And how is this right?! Because it's now also possible to enclose your visitor area with doors that don't allow visitors to pass, but allow officers and robots. The player can now build the storage and production areas inaccessible to visitors, while allowing shop stocking tasks to work just fine.

New combat mode



Combat mode is now on a 1 minute timer, and it will disable itself if the officer hasn't participated in combat. Once it engages, or when the player gives the officer a direct manual order, it will bump itself again to 1 minute. This will hopefully stop the problem with forgetting to disable combat mode. It still needs to be toggled manually for the AI to consider to apply it.

With 3.7 wrapped up and bug-squashed it was time to start work on 3.8. In fact work started a bit earlier than the 3.7 launch, so there's plenty of interesting stuff to show by now.

3.8 has, for now, no major content theme. It's meant to be a version that adds a lot of small missing features and fixes some others. Our small and medium feature backlog has gotten quite long and it's better to finish it now than to continue adding major blocks of content, and to prototype and test some new ideas.

Filtering door system

Doors can now filter which entities they allow to pass through:



This is a very often requested feature, and it's finally here. Keep in mind the notes in the UI: enemies don't care about which sign is hanging on a door.

Path finding display



Selected entities will now display an overlay line over the map in case they are in the middle of a pathfind walk. Very useful to see where those pesky enemies are going or to figure out why your officers are ignoring certain route.

Multiselection with rectangular area

The game finally has proper multiselection:



Just drag with the left mouse button and a rectangle will appear, changing the selection live as you drag the rectangle corner.

Multiselection is only enabled for officer entities. The idea is that there's rarely a need to issue mass orders to any other kind of entities, with the exception of robots. I will look into adding robots to multiselection later on.

This is how the right column looks when using multiselection:



All buttons are live with item cooldowns too. The role grouping reflects the currently equipped item by the officer, not their spec.

Actions still work as usual. If you issue a walk order with 30 officers selected, all 30 of them will make a formation around the position you click on. For target orders I'm still deciding what to do, and I will probably introduce 4 separate target actions for each role. For players who want to micromanage their units this will give combat a very RTS flavor, and I believe it's a better fit that my previous designs.

Squads and the squad bar are no more, and combat mode is pending a redesign or a removal too.

RTS-like grouping

In the same vein it's possible to make ad-hoc groups like in any RTS-like game. First make a group, then press Ctrl-1 to store the group. From that point on pressing 1 will select again the same group of entities. Keys 1 to 6 are available for this.

One more thing...



Could it be true?! This is just a prototype implementation for now, I'm gathering feedback about this in the forums in this thread:

http://steamcommunity.com/app/450700/discussions/0/1471966894883588413/

The focus of 3.7 is new station events plus some much needed small and medium enhancements.

Unlike earlier releases 3.7 is save compatible with its previous release, 3.6. This has been done so testing the new events can be done with mature saved games that have bigger stations. The frequency and severity of events is part of the game balance and it may be untuned, so tell us what you think about it in the forum.

The main new enhancement is the staff screen which is now vastly improved, along other quality of life and UI improvements.

You can find the development updates for 3.7 in the rest of this post, in case you missed them.

New art for civs screen

Max has prepared new header art for the civs screen, and a small redesign was also done to better fit and prepare the screen for future UI work:









All civs have now unique background art and their full detail, full sized logos and advisors are prominently displayed. The new layout will also enable us to fit the future diplomacy UI in the lower area with a much nicer look and feel.

Top bar redesign and new alert features

The alert system will become more important since it will be the UI mechanism to report and track ongoing events, so more space was required to display alert icons:



The right side of the top bar is now more compact. The guide access will be moved to the tutorial system (when the guide is ready), and the report screen will be moved somewhere else (in 3.x that screen was half-working and mostly useless).

Many events have an "ongoing" mechanic that defines a start and an ending condition. The alert system is now prepared to show this information, and to express some alerts as persisting.

A persisting alert is displayed with an "ongoing" progress, meaning its duration or progress is not fully known (yet). Persisting alerts are always displayed to the left of all alerts:


A persisting alert displays the progress of an event (in this case the % of pirate invaders dead, it was captured just after the last one died). Both the alert icon in the bar and the alert popup display the completion %:


When an event is done its alert is turned into a plain alert and can be deleted normally:


Persisting alerts have an additional visual cue to make them stand out:


Event: Space worm

A huge worm from space is annoyed enough with your advanced technology to come pay a visit. Why? Nobody knows, but it's here and it's pissed off:



The worm has a devastating, fast melee attack with extra long range, but it's rooted in place. It will burrow and surface again every 30s.

Event: Space octopus





Space megabeasts keep attacking you, sigh. It's just the reality of space-ing I guess. The space octopus has a similar melee attack to his pal the worm, but it can move (slowly). It can also pull closer any station defender into its melee range.

Event: The pest



Dozens of fluffy animals are spawning around your station. They look cute but are crowding everything. They only attack when attacked, but in any case they have to go. Kill enough of them to force their queen out of hiding and end the pest for good.

Event: Xenomorphs



Short of Augustus showing up to make some omelette, you better hurry up and deal with those ominous looking eggs before it's too late...



This event also introduces a combined system of progress and countdown timer.

Enhanced fire



Fires are now more dangerous, do more damage and can expand faster. Additional smoke effects are now spawned alongside, and there's more conditions that can spawn a fire. Some bomb-like effects have been refactored to offer more variety and, you guessed it, more FIRE. The xenomorphs from the last update also love it:



New small events

Two new malfunction mini-events have been added. Showers now have an obvious failure mode:



And since this is space and the year is 5781, things can explode sometimes for no reason. Anything:



New event: meteor shower



A devastating new event, whose effects are too horrible to picture (they involve plenty of fire too). You'll have one minute to try to lock doors and move your officers away from the area.

New event: miasma cloud



Accidents happen even in the best kept stations. Rush to repair the malfunctioning factory, or trigger its self destruct mechanism (for a chance of starting a fire, of course).

New event: medical emergency



Your hospital area will struggle to treat this many patients, but if you manage to expect a nice reward. This is the first goal-like, rewarded event and more will come.

New event: somebody set up us the bomb
(I'm old enough to remember that meme).



Another possibility for your enemies to annoy you: a random, hidden hostile can now spawn in your station and it will also spawn a bomb nearby. The bomb is not directly focused by clicking on the alert but it will always be near the hostile. After you find it it's possible to disable it by destroying it (it's a neutral object, so your officers and defenses won't auto attack, you have to find it and give attack orders). If your run out of time, well, more FIRE.

Small enhancements



A counter is now displayed in the staff listing in the staff screen, including both your total officer count and the current filtered count.



In the same vein the filter menu now has counters for all categories, to quickly get an idea of how your work force is distributed.



A very often requested feature is now in: the staff picker for ships now includes a basic overview of the officer vitals, to make a more informed decision about your crew picks.



The orange warning icons on top of objects were often confusing, so they are now smaller and inside the standard object icon bubble.

Proper autosave system

Autosaving in previous versions was poorly conceived, requiring manually saving often the game. The game only autosaved when landing or taking off from a planet. In 3.7 autosaves are now much better implemented.

First, there's now 5 autosave slots per galaxy, which automatically rotate based on the save age.

Second, autosaves are now on a timer, and do not depend on visiting planets or any other gameplay action. Since our save system is UI-blocking, the timer is flexible and tries to sync the saving with major UI transitions, like changing the game screen. This starts after 15m of the latest save (manual or automatic). If 30m or more pass without any screen change, the autosave system will block the game for a few seconds and save it anyway.

Save picker remake

The save picker has nearly been unchanged since our first pre-1.0 prototypes back in 2014, receiving only minor improvements since then. It was time to bring it up to a better quality standard:



Saves are now grouped by galaxy for a much more tidier interface. And it's also finally possible to name your manual saves, the game will prompt you for a name when manually saving a game.

Staff screen enhancements

A picture is worth a thousand words:



The goal is to finally make the staff screen an useful information resource rather than a place to put UI that it's too big for the station inspector. It should offer the same level of information plus any other specific features.

New event: Bernice



VIP reward events are in, and Bernice is the first one. She's your manager back in HQ and will inspect your station from time to time, then give you a random timed goal:



And if you manage it:



Failing the goal has no negative consequences (there's plenty of events with big time negative consequences, so for this round things are much more chill).

New event: Augustus



The crazy robot chef from V2 is back! He's mellowed out quite a bit (or has he?) and he's here to help you with your cooking orders. He's a maxed out master spec chef with a special double production bonus.

New event: Кошка



Another V2 protagonist, Кошка is back too! Our beloved socialist cat and her robot army will patrol around a bit in your station, and they will help you with any task a robot can perform, except they are capable of all of them at the same time.

New event: Liberty



The USA couldn't be left behind when it came to sending live animals to test in space, and in our lore Liberty was one of them. She's just as much a mystery as Кошка survival for 38 centuries. She will roam your station, curious as any dog, and quickly increase the Morale of any visitor or officer she comes across. Good dog!

Staff screen: new Spec tab

The Staff screen overhaul continued, and a new Spec tab has been introduced:



The spec progression is now much more clearer, and it manages to show more information in less space.

Staff screen: new Jobs and XP tab

Jobs and XP for officers is available to consult in the job matrix tool, but there was no focused way to do so on an officer by officer basis. This is now fixed:



The XP tiers of each job are clearly displayed, plus the speed bonus and ratings. It's also possible to toggle the jobs or edit manual priorities without having to use the job matrix tool.

The same per-officer toggles are now also displayed in the station info inspector, so there's no need anymore to go hunting for an officer in the job matrix:



New tool: per-officer-per-slot item picker



In the same vein as the job tool additions, there's now a new dialog to directly equip items into an officer equipment slot, by picking from the station stocks. Using the equip matrix was suboptimal when you were directly manipulating an officer, so now you can do the same task, in a more focused way. This tool can be open by clicking the small t-shirt icon in the right side of the equipment slot in both the info inspector and in the new Basics tab in the Staff screen.

Improved inventory window



The inventory window is now based on a listing, and it can also be filtered to focus down on a single kind of resource.

Logistics after production

In previous versions, when an officer was done producing something in a factory, the result was thrown on the floor. They now will look for a non-busy, non-full pallet, shop or storage area and transport it there. They will do this even if they don't have the delivery job enabled (just as they do for ingredients).

Version 3.7.1

- last minute event toggle settings in main menu

Version 3.7 is almost ready! All the planned features have been implemented and now we are testing the game. Unlike previous versions v3.7 will keep save compatibility with v3.6, so you can keep playing you current save. This is done since the focus of v3.7 is random station events and testing them will benefit from a developed station.

New event: Bernice



VIP reward events are in, and Bernice is the first one. She's your manager back in HQ and will inspect your station from time to time, then give you a random timed goal:



And if you manage it:



Failing the goal has no negative consequences (there's plenty of events with big time negative consequences, so for this round things are much more chill).

New event: Augustus



The crazy robot chef from V2 is back! He's mellowed out quite a bit (or has he?) and he's here to help you with your cooking orders. He's a maxed out master spec chef with a special double production bonus.

New event: Кошка



Another V2 protagonist, Кошка is back too! Our beloved socialist cat and her robot army will patrol around a bit in your station, and they will help you with any task a robot can perform, except they are capable of all of them at the same time.

New event: Liberty



The USA couldn't be left behind when it came to sending live animals to test in space, and in our lore Liberty was one of them. She's just as much a mystery as Кошка survival for 38 centuries. She will roam your station, curious as any dog, and quickly increase the Morale of any visitor or officer she comes across. Good dog!

Staff screen: new Spec tab

The Staff screen overhaul continued, and a new Spec tab has been introduced:



The spec progression is now much more clearer, and it manages to show more information in less space.

Staff screen: new Jobs and XP tab

Jobs and XP for officers is available to consult in the job matrix tool, but there was no focused way to do so on an officer by officer basis. This is now fixed:



The XP tiers of each job are clearly displayed, plus the speed bonus and ratings. It's also possible to toggle the jobs or edit manual priorities without having to use the job matrix tool.

The same per-officer toggles are now also displayed in the station info inspector, so there's no need anymore to go hunting for an officer in the job matrix:



New tool: per-officer-per-slot item picker



In the same vein as the job tool additions, there's now a new dialog to directly equip items into an officer equipment slot, by picking from the station stocks. Using the equip matrix was suboptimal when you were directly manipulating an officer, so now you can do the same task, in a more focused way. This tool can be open by clicking the small t-shirt icon in the right side of the equipment slot in both the info inspector and in the new Basics tab in the Staff screen.

Improved inventory window



The inventory window is now based on a listing, and it can also be filtered to focus down on a single kind of resource.

Enhanced fire



Fires are now more dangerous, do more damage and can expand faster. Additional smoke effects are now spawned alongside, and there's more conditions that can spawn a fire. Some bomb-like effects have been refactored to offer more variety and, you guessed it, more FIRE. The xenomorphs from the last update also love it:



New small events

Two new malfunction mini-events have been added. Showers now have an obvious failure mode:



And since this is space and the year is 5781, things can explode sometimes for no reason. Anything:



New event: meteor shower



A devastating new event, whose effects are too horrible to picture (they involve plenty of fire too). You'll have one minute to try to lock doors and move your officers away from the area.

New event: miasma cloud



Accidents happen even in the best kept stations. Rush to repair the malfunctioning factory, or trigger its self destruct mechanism (for a chance of starting a fire, of course).

New event: medical emergency



Your hospital area will struggle to treat this many patients, but if you manage to expect a nice reward. This is the first goal-like, rewarded event and more will come.

New event: somebody set up us the bomb
(I'm old enough to remember that meme).



Another possibility for your enemies to annoy you: a random, hidden hostile can now spawn in your station and it will also spawn a bomb nearby. The bomb is not directly focused by clicking on the alert but it will always be near the hostile. After you find it it's possible to disable it by destroying it (it's a neutral object, so your officers and defenses won't auto attack, you have to find it and give attack orders). If your run out of time, well, more FIRE.

Small enhancements



A counter is now displayed in the staff listing in the staff screen, including both your total officer count and the current filtered count.



In the same vein the filter menu now has counters for all categories, to quickly get an idea of how your work force is distributed.



A very often requested feature is now in: the staff picker for ships now includes a basic overview of the officer vitals, to make a more informed decision about your crew picks.



The orange warning icons on top of objects were often confusing, so they are now smaller and inside the standard object icon bubble.

Proper autosave system

Autosaving in previous versions was poorly conceived, requiring manually saving often the game. The game only autosaved when landing or taking off from a planet. In 3.7 autosaves are now much better implemented.

First, there's now 5 autosave slots per galaxy, which automatically rotate based on the save age.

Second, autosaves are now on a timer, and do not depend on visiting planets or any other gameplay action. Since our save system is UI-blocking, the timer is flexible and tries to sync the saving with major UI transitions, like changing the game screen. This starts after 15m of the latest save (manual or automatic). If 30m or more pass without any screen change, the autosave system will block the game for a few seconds and save it anyway.

Save picker remake

The save picker has nearly been unchanged since our first pre-1.0 prototypes back in 2014, receiving only minor improvements since then. It was time to bring it up to a better quality standard:



Saves are now grouped by galaxy for a much more tidier interface. And it's also finally possible to name your manual saves, the game will prompt you for a name when manually saving a game.

Staff screen enhancements

A picture is worth a thousand words:



The goal is to finally make the staff screen an useful information resource rather than a place to put UI that it's too big for the station inspector. It should offer the same level of information plus any other specific features. The spec tabs will also be re-done and a new one will also be added to have a better look at XP and jobs. Stay tuned for the next update!

After the pretest release of 3.6 a lot of issues were found, so most of late May and early June were devoted to finding and fixing them. One particular very obscure crasher delayed the start of 3.7, but it has finally been squashed and I was able to move on and start the new version (3.6.7 contains the fix and it is the current published default build, but saved games started with earlier 3.6.x versions may still be corrupted, keep it in mind!)

The main new content theme for 3.7 is events. Galactology has contained some test events for months now, the familiar invasions, sneakers and impostors. Events are meant to keep station gameplay more varied than a pure min-maxed machine. They will cover a variety of systems so it's not all pew-pew and explosions, but, since the current events are the basis for the new work, I started implementing new invasion-like events for the past three weeks. There's still more than twenty event ideas to explore and implement!

New art for civs screen

Max has prepared new header art for the civs screen, and a small redesign was also done to better fit and prepare the screen for future UI work:









All civs have now unique background art and their full detail, full sized logos and advisors are prominently displayed. The new layout will also enable us to fit the future diplomacy UI in the lower area with a much nicer look and feel.

Top bar redesign and new alert features

The alert system will become more important since it will be the UI mechanism to report and track ongoing events, so more space was required to display alert icons:



The right side of the top bar is now more compact. The guide access will be moved to the tutorial system (when the guide is ready), and the report screen will be moved somewhere else (in 3.x that screen was half-working and mostly useless).

Many events have an "ongoing" mechanic that defines a start and an ending condition. The alert system is now prepared to show this information, and to express some alerts as persisting.

A persisting alert is displayed with an "ongoing" progress, meaning its duration or progress is not fully known (yet). Persisting alerts are always displayed to the left of all alerts:


A persisting alert displays the progress of an event (in this case the % of pirate invaders dead, it was captured just after the last one died). Both the alert icon in the bar and the alert popup display the completion %:


When an event is done its alert is turned into a plain alert and can be deleted normally:


Persisting alerts have an additional visual cue to make them stand out:


Event: Space worm

A huge worm from space is annoyed enough with your advanced technology to come pay a visit. Why? Nobody knows, but it's here and it's pissed off:



The worm has a devastating, fast melee attack with extra long range, but it's rooted in place. It will burrow and surface again every 30s.

Event: Space octopus





Space megabeasts keep attacking you, sigh. It's just the reality of space-ing I guess. The space octopus has a similar melee attack to his pal the worm, but it can move (slowly). It can also pull closer any station defender into its melee range.

Event: The pest



Dozens of fluffy animals are spawning around your station. They look cute but are crowding everything. They only attack when attacked, but in any case they have to go. Kill enough of them to force their queen out of hiding and end the pest for good.

Event: Xenomorphs



Short of Augustus showing up to make some omelette, you better hurry up and deal with those ominous looking eggs before it's too late...



This event also introduces a combined system of progress and countdown timer.

Finally! After two grueling months of technical work version 3.6 is ready to play. This is an unusual version. It contains very little gameplay additions. You can read about them in this March post:

http://steamcommunity.com/games/450700/announcements/detail/483414098550226384

So what happened in the two months since that post was made? A massive rewrite of all the gameplay code in order to port it to LuaJIT, from a completely different programming language.

After version 3.5 was released it was clear the game performance was bad once your station grew a bit. This was specially relevant in 3.5 since it added enough content and fixed enough balancing for players to build a bigger station.

At that point I decided to stop adding new features and concentrate on fixing the performance. Otherwise the game future viability and quality would suffer a lot. It was a gamble since there's a lot of abandoned half finished games in Steam and doing this would make Galactology look like just another one, even while I was working my hardest on improving it. But I decided to take quality over appearances.

Version 3.6 is the result of that work, and I believe it's successful. Moreover it also means mods can now be written in Lua, making it much easier for moders to work on our game if they desire so.

Technical details

40K lines of code have been rewritten (some manually, some with the help of a custom transpiler tool developed just for the task) from Scheme to l2l, a Lua-based language similar to Lisp. This allows the very sizable scripting side of Galactology to be based on LuaJIT, for the maximum possible performance for this kind of programming languages. sol2 provides the C++ binding layer for Lua.

The performance improvement is roughly 4x to 6x. In addition GC pauses are dramatically shorter thanks to Lua(JIT) incremental collector.

Missing Linux build

Sol2, the C++ binding layer for Lua, requires a GCC version which is too new (4.9) for the default GCC installation of the Linux Steam Runtime (4.8.1). The clang version is recent enough, but it uses the same C++ library as GCC (libstdc++), so it's also not possible to compile the game with clang (libc++ would solve the issue but it's not bundled with Steam RT). I'm running out of options. My next step is to try the beta version of the runtime, which in theory has shipping support in the normal client, and bundles GCC 5.

Next version

Version 3.7 will be a return to our feature roadmap, and you can bet I missed it!

Steam Trading Cards have been uploaded and are now dropping while playing Galactology! Max finished the card artwork some months ago and I (Carlos) finally got around to write the copy and upload them for review and publication. One more step towards a finished game! And speaking about that...

Current development status

I've been quiet for the past months. As I mentioned in our last development update back in March, 3.5 highlighted an important performance problem once a game hit the mid to end game and your station grew up a bit. This was rooted in a very core decision to adopt certain scripting language plus its VM. While that language is very performant for its category (as a purely interpreted Scheme, it's probably the fastest non-JIT Scheme), it became clear it wasn't performant enough. And the remaining optimizations promised improvements in the order of a 20%, not the order of magnitude required to support truly big and complex stations.

For this reason I decided to target LuaJIT instead. This requires a massive rewrite of 37K lines of code. Fortunately there's already a Lisp-like transpiler for Lua (l2l), and my own transpiler had a relatively easy job of transpiling from two different Lispy languages. This part of the work, statically translating from a language to other, is done.

Now comes the part where that new code has to be loaded into LuaJIT and the game has to run from it. Just translating the source is not enough, since the scripting-facing API has to be rewritten, and many semantics are not the same (1-based counting in Lua, for example). This is the current development task, and it will still take some weeks to progress and then stabilize. But I can say that now I'm past the 50% mark!

The details of these tasks are very technical (much more than the previous paragraphs) so I haven't keep a public log of the work, since my status updates are meant to highlight gameplay additions and changes, not techno babble. But rest assured that regular features status updates will resume when the translation work is finished and stable.

This work is delaying 3.6 and thus advancement into our development roadmap, but it's required if we want the game to live to its full potential (and yes, it will enable Lua mods, making it much easier for modders). For this reason I may do a 3.6 pre-release after the translation is mostly working, to find out all the problems with the help of our players. We will see in some weeks!

Happy two year anniversary to The Spatials! To celebrate get our game 50% OFF this week!

http://store.steampowered.com/app/346420

First of all, I want to thank both our existing a new players who discovered us with version 3.5. It was our biggest version in the V3 series so far and we received very valuable feedback that helped us a lot. Thank you!

After getting 3.5 out and doing a week of hotfixes, we went back to version planning. The main gameplay theme for 3.6 was already decided months ago, and it's going to be station events. The current invader events are just a taste of what we want to do with this system. We want to expand the variety of these events, and not all of them will involve combat. This is a good moment for it too, with the base station systems in good working order and with a lot more content after 3.5

We also triage small features from our huge internal backlog, prioritize them and devote some weeks to them before we start with the big new gameplay implementation. Here's what we've been doing.

Individual colors for all specs

This was suggested by a player in the forums. Indeed, why have your most specialized officers share an uniform color with your graduates?



Actual gameplay for opening new star systems

The last "cheat button" is gone in 3.6. We've finally implemented the regular gameplay system to open up new systems. We wanted it to have something to do with planets, so now you'll find a new special building in one of the towns in the inhabited planets in any start system:



As the description implies, this building contains the knowledge on new star routes. But you will have to pay for it (in case the planet civilization is friendly to you) or get it by force by destroying the building. Doing so will tank your reputation with that civilization, fast. Which may not be a problem when the civilization is hostile to begin with. But watch out for neutral civilizations!

Small features

Proper naming: A lot of planet objects, and all visitors, had placeholder or boring names. There's now name generators for all civilizations and all planet objects have proper names.

Hiring cost credits: Getting officers for free was more of a development cheat. Now officers will cost credits to hire, and the more officers you have, the more expensive it will be.

Drunks: There's now a random debuff for entities that drink too much. They may have some problems walking in a straight line...

Civs start hidden: In 3.6 only Spatials and Humans will appear in the Civs screen. You will unlock new civs as you unlock their systems.

Early visitor exit: A missing but very important mechanic for station efficiency. In 3.5, when a visitor is done of their tasks and completely satisfied, will linger without doing anything until their timer runs out. This is now fixed in 3.6. They will just walk back to their shuttle after they are done. And if all the shuttle visitors come back early, the shuttle will leave and thus make the dock available again.

Wallet scaling: Visitor wallet initial balances are now proportional to your reputation with their civ. The more reputation, the wealthier their visitors.

Performance woes

We've know for awhile that game performance wasn't great with a middle sized station. Frame time starts getting too big, and GC pauses start going for too long. In 3.5 this has become more visible than ever since the more polished station gameplay has kept players playing for longer and noticing this problem.

This is rooted in the choice of scripting VM made very early in the development of the game. Initially meant to be a way to make mods, it now powers most of the gameplay, with many thousands of lines of code, running for millions of cycles on every frame. It's not a performance oriented VM and it struggles when things get complex enough (which is not much, because we want people to build huge stations).

There's some optimizations left to do, and some of them have already been done. But the game needs a tenfold solution, not a 10% incremental improvement. This means I need to migrate to a new VM.

Finding a new VM that can interpret the specific dialect of Scheme I am using is impossible. So I either need to rewrite the entire core of the game in another language, or modify an existing VM to be able to run my Scheme code.

The only VM that can realistically make the extremely dynamic nature of the Galactology Scheme source go fast is LuaJIT. And, fortunately, there's already some Lisp-like eval libraries available for Lua, along with amazing bindings builders for C++ to connect the VM with the kernel of the game.

This means a partial rewrite of the game is looming on the horizon. And I'm tempted to tackle it sooner than later, because every new feature I write, is just adding more technical debt. It is a very complex task and I will have to rewrite thousands of lines, but it's not a total rewrite. In any case, as a very optimistic estimation, this will take at least a month.

While this is going not many new gameplay features will be able to be written. The fact the new scripting system will still be able to interpret some Scheme-like source (in addition to Lua!) means I can still do some new feature work as a break from the porting tasks, and still keep that work for 3.6 in case the porting takes too long for 3.6.

I've not decided yet when to proceed. On one hand this porting needs to be done, for sure. On another hand, it's feature updates like 3.5 which sell our game for real, with little sales volume between versions or discounts. Delaying 3.6 for at least a month goes directly into our bottom line.

If the next development update takes longer than usual, you now know why :)

A new major version of The Spatials: Galactology is now available!

The goal of version 3.5 was to flesh out many "placeholder" objects, items and game systems. It introduces 3 all-new research tech blocks, with proper progression, and dozens of new objects and products. All-new game systems like medical checklists and hotels have been added to the game to make the new content more interesting. There's now a lot more variety of options for satisfying vital needs and for building the perfect tourist trap.

The main highlights for this build are:

• New, simplified combat controls
  
• The Hospitality tech block with the new hotel system
  
• A new Health and Hygiene tech block
  
• New diseases with a new system for medical care
  
• A new Commercial tech block with new commercial products with new shop objects
  
• Fun has been divided into new vitals: fun, gambling, knowledge, inebriation and dancing
  
• The new Recreation tech block has many new objects and products to serve the new fun vitals
  
• Visitor archetypes, opinions and expectations
  

The past weeks were devoted to the bulk of new v3.5 content. The addition of the hotel system and the revamp of the disease and medical system were done first and documented in previous updated. For the last two weeks another two blocks of new and revamped content have been added: commercial goods and recreation.

Commercial goods

The commercial system is exclusive to visitors and 3.5 will enhance it with more product varieties and qualities.



This is now a big and varied tech block. For now the corresponding entity system remains very similar (a random shopping list of 5 unlocked items) but it may require some further refinement in the future to make it more interesting, like per-civ affinities.

Recreation

The recreation system has grown out of the old fun vital and associated systems. in 3.5, instead of a single fun vital, four more have been added: gambling, knowledge, inebriation and dancing.



This will give more variety to both the visitors and to the needs of your officers, which will become more extensive as they become more experienced, like in V2.

A dozen new objects have been added to this tech block alone, and they include new interaction modes, like objects with multiple user.



RIP Cheat-O-Matic

Our favorite development aid, AKA cheat, has been eliminated. The cheat-o-matic is no more! All the placeholder item recipes it supported have been re-done and assigned to new and existing factories. Although the recipe ingredients themselves are not final (a raw resource review will be done as part of the final game balance), the quantities, duration, difficulty and unlock order are looking good.

This past week work continued on the new medical system, adding more diseases to the game, introducing the treatment checklist, and starting the systems for the new objects.

Visualize entity anchors while constructing objects

The object build tool has gained a new trick, it will now show the required positions for interacting with the object:







I hope this will reduce some confusion when building certain objects.

Add new diseases

The new medical system in v3.5 finally abandons any relationship with the health vital. Health is cured by officers equipped with healing items, and it's now considered more of a combat vital.

The new medical system is instead based on curing diseases and injuries. Gastrodisaster remains in the game, and seven new diseases are being introduced:

Slowpox
Entities affected by slowpox walk a lot slower than normal.

Narcolepsy

Narcoleptic entities fall asleep from time to time, interrupting their work.

Dizzylapse

Dizzylapsed entities feel sudden dizziness from time to time, interrupting their work.

Argyria

Even in the 55th century people keep ingesting things that they shouldn't.

Gigantism

A huge hassle.

World enlargement

It all depends on your frame of reference.

Mutosis

A terrible disease, it will require your best equipment and research to cure.

Treatment checklist

When an entity is afflicted by a disease, it gains a checklist of all the objects it needs to use to be cured:



There's a variety of new medical objects. One was already in game (the hospital bed), and a new one has been introduced, the doctor desk. Entities will need to visit a doctor desk as the first step of their treatment, but it must be staffed by one of your officers to be usable.

Next week the remaining medical objects will be introduced to be used by the disease checklists.

Hotel system

Work continued on integrating the new Hospitality tree. A new system has been introduced in the game: hotels.

Beds are now segregated between officers and visitors. Visitors will need to purchase a booking at a reception table before they can make use of a visitor bed (which will be a motel or hotel bed, with different pricing).

The system involves the visitor entity transitioning into different states. First a visitor arrives, sleepy and wanting to book a room:



He needs to find a staffed reception desk. The old, too-specific bartender job is now the hospitality job and it covers all desk tending jobs in the station.



In the reception desk the visitor is able to purchase a booking:



And then he's able use hotel or motel rooms:



The hotel system may receive some more mechanics in the future, like better room furnishings for higher categories and prices, but for now its initial implementation is ready for testing.

Work started in new health and hygiene block

A new, fleshed out progression and mechanics for health and hygiene are now ready to start its implementation.



This new work will introduce new game systems: the hospital/medical care system, and the diseases system. We all know and love the Gastrodisaster, but more diseases are needed to make the system interesting, with varied effects, plus a more fleshed out medical care system. The current bed care by doctors will be just one of the possible treatments. More objects and products are being introduced so treating diseases and injuries can become a multi-step process, from initial diagnose to surgery to resting.

After v3.4 and the holidays break, we are back! Work has started on v3.5, with a general review of manual combat controls and the start of a big content and mechanics upgrade for many station systems.

Simplified and enhanced manual combat controls

Now that v3.4 is finally enabling some light combat on low level planets, the flaws of the manual combat system were made evident. It was too complex, with bad UI.

It has now been removed from the game. There's no more "manual" combat mode for officers. Instead it's now possible to manually select a target for your squad or for individual officers, with the new Set Target action:



This is aided by the new target visualization, which displays the current combat target of any entity, officer or enemy:



This new system is still being tweaked, but for now it enables a much more usable walk+set target interaction, leaving the details of when and how to fire to the officer AI. And setting targets is still optional, the AI will automatically pick them up if none is set (or the set one dies).

Better squad visualization

The current squad selection will now be displayed for all officers in the squad:



The primary selection is still a rectangle, but now, when pressing Tab or manually selecting officers in the squad bar with click+shift, they will get a 4-corner reticle around them to indicate they are also part of the selection.

Additionally it has also been made much more clear that squad members are in exclusive combat mode:



Now, while in combat mode, the HP bar is always displayed, and it also gains a small combat icon.

System and research review: hospitality

The first systems review has started, and it tackles a remake of the hospitality tree:



It adds new objects that will serve a new game system: hotels. The current beds will all be restricted to officers. Then new beds will be introduced: motel and hotel beds. These beds will only be usable by tourists, and they will first need to make a booking and pay for it in the check-in tables.



Players will need to make sure there are enough beds for your visitors. There's nothing worse for their opinion than overbooking!

A new major build of The Spatials: Galactology is now available!

The main highlights for this build are:

• Real civ ships in the galaxy, so when you get visitors or invasions, they will travel the galaxy map just as the player does. This also influences tourism, which now is generated by the civ systems in the galaxy.
  
• The Medus and the Chuchus, two new civs
  
• Item system enhancements, like looting, master craftsman bonuses, and a simpler power system
  
• New alert system, less annoying and more useful
  
• Made many fixes to attacks in order to standardize their procs and systems
  
• Introduced more crowd control items and a new item category, damage shields, for passive healing
  

Damage absorption shields

A new kind of combat ability is now in the game:

Damage shields are an alternative way of providing healing to your officers. They spawn an hemispherical shield over its area of protection, usually centered in the casting officer:



After it's spawned it will absorb every damage hit sustained by friendly units under its surface. It will be destroyed once its own HP reaches 0, or when a timer runs out.

Any officer will be able to wield this ability, but it will be much more potent in the hands of a Scientist.

Civ ships visiting your station

Other civ ships are now able to visit your home asteroid, and they will be displayed in the galaxy map:



This is the backbone of making more sense of some station systems and events, so other civs NPC wanting to visit your station first have to get there, instead of magically spawning.

No more than one ship will be spawned per system, to keep their numbers under control.

A galaxy filter will be implemented later on to hide these ships, if the user desires so.

Civ-specific shuttles, visitors and ships

As a continuation of the on-galaxy civ ships, visitors now arrive in one of those ships, and dock in your station using a civ specific shuttle:



Visitors will respect its visiting ship schedule, coming and going using their respective ships.

Invasions based on ships, hostile event gating

The next system to migrate to galaxy ships will be group invasions. Before any group invasion happens a ship will have to be spawned from an hostile system, so the advance notice for the invasion will make more sense (and the area warning will also be kept). This means the user first has to unlock a system with a hostile civ before invasions start.

Other smaller invasion events, like sneakers and impostors, will also be locked this way, making the early game free of invaders.

After some offline events kept us off development in the past two weeks, plus some traveling, we are back to v3.4, on track to be released before the end of the year.

The past week was devoted to refining the new alert system and combat system before moving on to new systems.

Final UI/UX for alert bar



The prototype alert bar introduced in the last update has now been fleshed out and it has taken on a more important role. Alerts will now be displayed one by one, to avoid the much reported spam. They all will still be displayed, but at a slower pace. You will also be able to select recent alerts by clicking on them on the alert bar, or delete them by right clicking. A focus rectangle is now displayed to highlight the corresponding alert icon in the alert bar.

Unification of specialized passive power bonuses in items



Items do not boost any more a particular kind of combat action. Instead a new generic bonus as been introduced, "power". This bonus is automatically added every time an active combat action is performed by the officer or NPC, no matter what kind it is.

This simplification was introduced in order to make officer specs participate in combat bonuses:



The spec factor gets multiplied to the power bonus from wearable items. This makes clothing easier (removing complexity from gearing officers), while making officer specialization more important and meaningful.

Refactor of procs for active combat items



Combat items now have independent proc and effects. The proc is what "carries" the attack (a projectile, a bomb, a beam, etc.). The effect is what happens when the proc is done (damage, healing, crowd control, etc). This change makes it easier to develop new items.

New attacks (ongoing)



The last item for the week was reviewing our notes on new attacks and mechanics and introducing new ones. For procs, there's now support for damage over time areas and direct attacks. For effects, crowd control has been fleshed out and there's now items that can make officers and NPC dizzy, sleepy or crazy. And finally work is also starting on a new kind of combat action: damage shields.

This past week was devoted to smaller system-level features, and some non-development tasks.

Steam Cards!

Max has advanced a lot the work on adding Steam Cards to Galactology. Here's a sneak peak at one of the cards artwork:



We will probably add the cards to the game on the v3.4 release or a bit earlier.

Looting
Now that there's an item system, looting items dropped by enemies is back in the game:



First an item generation and spawning proc was added to enemy deaths. This is straightforward for the station, and it actually doesn't involve any looting at all, since everything that falls on the station floor is yours to keep.

For planets a similar system to V2 was adopted, you need to order your officers to walk near the dropped items to loot them. They are then added to the exploring ship cargo (with zero mass), and dropped on your station when your crew goes back.

Master item making bonuses

Items can now have extra bonuses over what is provided by the basic item template:



In the example screenshot, the item is "Strong" because it includes an extra health bonus (no gun has +health, by default), and it's "Epic" because said health bonus is +2 levels above the item roll. For now only master engineers are able to produce such items, with a chance proportional to their experience.

Revamped alerts

The remake of the alert system is underway, and it's looking much better already:



Alerts should be useful, not something that gets in the way, and the old ported over system from V2 wasn't very good. Alerts are now a lot more robust and have new features. Clicking any alert popup will automatically change the screen and focus on the correct object. Alerts are now also displayed as icons at the top of the screen. Clicking the icons has the same effect, plus also bringing up again the alert popup. Inside the popup you will also find buttons to hide it again, or to delete it forever.

Carlos at IndieCade Paris

Carlos is traveling tomorrow to Paris to visit IndieCade!



Say hi if you are around!

Work has continued on small enhancements. Some of them have been pending for months and weren't scheduled earlier because of some of the complexity, but now it was time to tackle them.

Autopilot visit icons in planets



The system view in the galaxy screen will now display an icon next to the planet to indicate if any ship has an autopilot order that visits that planet, plus the number of ships that do so. This will be very helpful when planning autopilot routes, so you can see quickly what planets are visited by your fleet and avoid making unwanted visits.

Warning icons and progress bars for jobs



Jobs now have an on-map progress bar to quickly glance how long is going to take. Consumption actions also display this progress bar.

Jobs that have been stopped or have some kind of status warning will now also display an icon on top of them. Clicking the object will give more information, as before.

Raid landing area hint



It has been requested that there should be some indication of where a raiding party is going to strike. While we agree it's a good idea, having the exact position would cheese up too much the game, since then it's very easy to isolate it by removing corridors, for example. But we still wanted to add such a feature to the game, so now a big wide circle will be displayed. The raiding party will spawn inside this circle, but the exact position will be random inside its area.

Invaders shuttle



Raiding parties will now arrive by shuttle and stop just over the spawning area, to make this station event a nicer feeling. The shuttles are unique for each civ. We really want to go back to adding new station events, and making a better design of the current ones is a first step.

Work has started on v3.4. We are first starting with small enhancements and content updates that have been waiting for awhile to be integrated into the game.

Much more informative tooltips in research screen

The research screen icons representing objects and recipes now display a lot more information. Before it was just the name, now it's:



This is a very often requested enhancement so it's good to have it now in-game.

Recipe and ingredient info for resources

Products will now display a simplified recipe information when displaying their information. And raw resources will also display a list of icons for the recipes they are an ingredient of:



New civs!

The main body of work for the week has been adding two new civs to the game:



Meet the medus and the chuchus! Those names are obviously temporary while we find better ones. But the entire set of visitors, enemies and architecture is now in-game.



The medus are aquatic creatures that live inside a glass balls. Aided by their technology, they can enjoy your station amenities or vaporize your officers just fine.



The chuchus are a formerly brutal species that got a bit more civilized in the past millennia. Unlike currently brutal species they can be convinced to buy your shinny baubles in peace.

After the v3.3 release two weeks ago we made a break to rest a bit and to plan our next releases. V3.3 was an important milestone since it marked the equator of the Early Access development phase of Galactology.

V3.4 and beyond

Unlike previous releases, which focused on one or two large, major new game systems in isolation from the rest, for v3.4 we are taking a look at the remaining roadmap as a whole to plan several new releases in advance, up to launch day. The reason is that we have reached a point where the remainder of the roadmap requires a more cohesive release, with more integration between existing systems and whole new systems.

Finalizing tourism is the best example of this. To implement it we need to at least finish civs and reputation, and also implement more production recipes and flesh out research.

The rough outline for v3.4 is:
- Finalize combat with more attack types
- Revamp the alert system
- Final tourist system with archetypes
- Civ spaceships
- 2 new civs
- Diplomacy and reputation systems
- Station events (block 1)
- Review recipes, products and their research tiers

Work has already started on v3.4, check again next week for the first development update.

A new major build of The Spatials: Galactology is now available!

The main new feature in V3.3 is the item system. Your officers can now manufacture and wear items like pieces of armor or guns. These items have a variety of effects, like increasing the max officer health and causing more damage. And they increase in power the higher their level. A new factory, storage system and research tiers have been added to support the item system.

As always other minor changes and features have also been added to the game. Check out the new galaxy visualizations for ships outside a system and for the star influence areas or the new right mouse button actions in a context menu.

V3.3 is not save game compatible with v3.2 save files. But your saves are still there! If you want to keep playing them you can opt out of v3.3 by right clicking Galactology in your Steam library listing, select Properties, select Betas, then select the v3_2 branch. This will force your game installation to be v3.2 forever. When you are done make sure to go back to the default branch to keep getting updates and new features.

New fleet visualization in galaxy screen: "ship bubbles"

A major eye sore in the galaxy screen is the ship panel or toolbar, located in the lower left area. It also has UX issues, with duplicating the ship avatars and being a limit to how many ships can be in your fleet unless some complicated scrolling is introduced. But not anymore!



The new fleet display concept is "ship bubbles". In the zoomed out galaxy nothing has changed. It will still display all the ships next to their current system or en-route in a wormhole. But the zoomed in system view now displays far away ships in a circle around the planet orbits, in the same overall direction the ship is relative to the star system. This new visualization also has automatic layout code to handle ships in the same system or close to each other:



This is a practical and more usable solution to the problems posed by a static toolbar, and is flexible enough to also support NPC ships in the future. Finally, to make the screen even cleaner, a new mode that displays only the galactic bodies and ships has been added:



Civ clustering and influence areas

Civs are now distributed in clusters, and own the entire system. This radically simplifies the civ structure in the galaxy and feels a lot more natural. To support this a new visualization mode has been added to display the extents of civs domains over the star systems you've discovered:



Random patrols for robots

Robots will now have a new idle system that compels them to patrol much further than they currently do. This is still compatible with the patrol point, so you can combine both for optimal patrolling behavior.

Map interaction revamp

The big item for 3.3 is revamped map interaction and combat, plus the initial implementation of skills. Work has been started in this area with the interaction revamp. Now right click is devoted for giving direct walking orders (by popular demand, no more walk key!), and when the target area has multiple options, a neat popup menu is displayed:



It's easy to go overboard with this and start adding too many things to the context menu, so special care will be taken to only add options where it makes sense. In particular actions that have a subject-verb-object structure are prime candidates, as in the example ownership action. Combat actions will be better served by the dedicate action bar, which has been improved to display key bindings when they exist:



New item system

After devoting most of the version cycle to their design, the V3 item implementation has started. We've finally decided to go with on-map items and random loot, which exist as any other entity. Going with abstract skills felt too limiting and less interesting than V2. We will make sure the UX for equipping them is fast and smart, foregoing logistics where appropriate, so it doesn't become tedious to keep your staff gear up to date.

Max has prepared a first batch of item art. We will need guns, lots of guns:



The data model for items is the first part code-wise, and it also will influence changes in the existing combat system. There's now a specific info panel for items:



There's a lot of pending work in this area and it won't be finished in v3.3, but starting this work is a very important step and a big part of the gameplay.

Work orders in context menus

Any entity capable of work can now be directly ordered to work, as long as the job giving object is not busy:



For now most work orders have been enabled as a direct context action. We will keep adding new actions if they make sense.

Logistics improvements: exclusive sources and restocking minimum

Shops and pallets can now be linked to other pallets or storage areas as their exclusive source:



For players that desire to micromanage their resource chains this allows for precise flow control to the consumer shops and for making intermediate pallets more useful.

The "min stock" feature supported by pallets has been replaced by a "restock at" amount, and also enabled in shops. This means that shops and pallets won't advertise a restock task unless they match or go under the "restock at" amount. This will cut down on useless restocking jobs.

Toggle factory recipes for global production

It's now possible to disable unwanted recipes in a factory to not make them available for global production:



This enables very precise control over production, even when using global stock automation.

Storage area filters

One of the most requested features is now in game:



The filtering is additive/substractive. Instead of selecting resource categories, you are always editing the resource list. But you can use the filters to make bulk editing. For example, to only stock food and drinks, you first Exclude->All, then Include->Drinkable and again Include->Edible.

First mod translation

XANA-Umbrella has provided a French translation and it is available in the Workshop:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=767491368

This is the first user-provided translation for Galactology and we want to say thanks!

Cooldown support for actions

Actions can now export a cooldown value, visible in the toolbar:



The teleport action was the first one to test, and it's here to stay, to balance it better vs. walking orders.

Active wearable items from squad members now display an action

A first new piece of the combat update was added to the UI:



The action bar will display all the available actions for the selected entity, plus the action of the active wearable item of the squad members, as long as they are in the squad selection. This makes it possible for the player to interact directly with those actions. Which leads to...

Auto and player mode for officer active items





It's finally possible for the player to disable the attack AI and take control of an officer attack. The player can shift-click an action to toggle auto AI behavior, or change the option in the combat info panel for the officer. The UI will also automatically pick a shortcut key for the manual actions.

Healing items and healing AI

Active healing items are now possible, both targeted and untargeted. The attack AI was adapted to also be able to track friendly hurting entities and to try to heal them, with the same support for range, line of sight and chasing behavior.

Combat exclusive mode for squad

Having an active squad doesn't mean they will *only* do what the player wants. The AI is still active and may make an officer go work on a nearby task, for example. This may be fine in peaceful times, but when there's combat going on in the station, it's better to make sure your squad focuses only on fighting invaders.



This new mode will prevent any officer currently in the squad from going away to work somewhere, or to satisfy their vital needs. Remember to disable it when the danger is gone!

More item art

Max has drawn dozens of new items:



The new art is meant to represent of implants (passive items that enhance damage or healing actions) and support active items (for healing and damage shields).

Starting work on the wearable inventory for officers

Officers can now equip passive items in addition to their active item:



This is very much a work in progress and there's still no formalized stat model for them, this goes next. But the basic model work and UI is now in a good shape. Hovering the mouse over the item slots displays a full info tooltip:



More items by Max

Max has drawn the last batch of items for this version, with sets of chest, feet and hands armor:



There's now 85 items in the game.

Random and scaling loot

Loot is now always instanced, with its stats based on its level and changed randomly over the default value. Different pieces of loot have a different roll bracket. Some of them can roll very high, almost doubling the normal power for an item of its level. They also have a rarity value, which will be used later on for random drops and manufacturing.

Directly equipping items from the map

The first equip capability is the most direct one:



Just select the officer, then right click an item. The context menu will offer the option to equip it, and also give you an error message in case the officer is unable to equip the item. Like in V2, items are forever bound to the officer who equips them, and destroyed when replaced.

Equipment matrix

Having to keep your staff equipped by finding items all over your station would be a nightmare. An efficient UI is required:



The equipment matrix displays all the current equipped items by your officers on the left, and all the items in your station on the right. To equip an item just drag it from the right panel onto the left panel. You don't even need to aim for the correct slot, the game will automatically recognize it and prompt you before the item is replaced. It still needs a bit more work, to add item filtering and officer sorting by item quality.

Technical development notes


- remove the multi recipes for rations since it confuses the global queue
- randomize freaking debuf a bit
- bubbles around screen concept for ships in system view
ships not in the zoomed system are displayed by using bubbles around the limits of the screen
will need so scale down the system orbits
bubbles appear in the rough direction of the ship, with an arrow
code avoids bunching them up when too close
this allows to remove the shelf toolbar and allows for a lot more ships while keeping the screen usable
- separate civs icons from default galaxy view ("civs view")
- random idle patrol system for robots
like idle walk but for a random path 10 tiles away, for example
as a busy system so it says "On patrol"
watch for interaction with rally point
- polish action interactions
allow rmb for a single action (undefined results when more opt in)
rmb drag still pans the map, click is assumed when the down-up distance is short
identical logic to left click
disable the sticky modal flag in the current actions
make rmb cancel left click modals
- robots must be able to be controlled by walk and teleport actions
- key labels for actions
- bug: it's possible to change crew assignments while the ship is not in home
make checks more robust
re-check after picker is done too
as a last resort support disembarking straggled officers
may come handy in the future for special missions
- voronoi regions for galaxy map in civ mode
change civ conquest model to use proximity to a point to decide the entire system civ
add sanity check to at least have N systems for a civ
3 closest must have the civ. if already have civ, continue checking next closest
after 3 for every civ, remaining systems use closest
precalc voronoi polygon for every system
GalaxyLayer::reset keeps a draw node for the polygons, discards and redraws, use color from most civ in system
the filter reset must show or hide the draw node
draw node must go with zoom, like other layers
- enable fade and colorization for vector nodes
- add darken layer for the more info heavy modes in galaxy
- fix galaxy tutorial, still mentions fleet panel
- scroller in galaxy for the act of loading and unloading cargo
delegate for GUIListing now preserves scroll position during a change notification
- missing shop component in robot recharger and consumerist shops
- use new ray-grid hit testing, this new one actually works correctly
- allow direct diagonal movement when there's no obstacles
- change pathfinding
no need to look up the current step, trust the internal index
fixes to allow direct diagonals with more than 1 tile length
automatic slowdown is now based on distance, not tile step
remove some of the staircase pathing
- support "fat" ray test by default (needed for combat revamp)
- ModalPopup
fix anchors and screen bounding
right click should dismiss too
- allow non-button actions on right click with context menu
if only one action matched and is rmb-direct execute it
otherwise build a context menu with all the options
context menu options opt in by running its own entry validation and can keep a ref from an entity hit list
highlight referenced entity for each menu option
- fix: #@bar-served counter is broken
- target actions
work on
many cancellation and stickiness issues
add a busy check, allow only when workable is not busy
on busy it displays scrolling text with error
check work on proxies (hospital bed, bar, repair)
introduce job-proxy-hint-component
- lower patient prio to 20
- change pallet min amount to "restock at" amount
means to not issue a restock job unless the amount is equal or lower than it
and restore it for shops
- support text edit keys in PC numpads
- single source for pallets
allow to select an entity as the source for any pallet entity
allow exclusive or preferential link
- fix must-have-findable-resource for pallets
it wasn't properly using the sourcing preferences, even for pre-3.3 features
- storage area: filter by kinds
include and exclude buttons with popup for all + every category
- block clicks passing thru in some overlapping UI areas
- combine mind and vitals panel
people are ignoring mind value and feelings, believe vital bars are the main view of officer status
a reason they are so worried about aesthetics despite its influence being very minor
- allow to enable or disable factory recipes in global mode
keeps a separate list for this
- item model: divided in blocks, shared by various systems
kind tags (as current resource kinds)
used to pick correct AI, action mapping and equipment slot
Active
Weapon, Crowd Control, Medical, Shielding
Passive
Armor, Implant
common blocks
bonus power mod block
+ damage
+ healing
+ absorb
reqs block
valid officer specs or none
valid slot
active-only blocks
mechanics block
actor pose
fixed point
cooldown
cooldown-id
power block
damage
healing
absorb
range block
sight-range (allow #f for default value, override for things like snipers)
attack-range
near-range
procs block
proc-sym
action-sym
proc data (open structure)
sprite
speed
sound
duration
color
...
- registry and maker for item model metas
- maker for item entities
- update item info panel to support equipment items
- aggressor sm and support code must be based on item model now
port the test beam and projectile code too
change make-aggressor and attack-model-component to carry item meta before actual equipable inventory
- port melee, turret, beam to new item meta model
- proc makers for each kind
- add guns for all current projectile damage attacks
- add per-world cooldown to teleport action
- display cooldown in action bar buttons
- action must respect cooldown and display error
introduce AlertFlash
- planet: disable all idling for officers
- display active items in action toolbar for selection and squad selection
add support for optionally delegated button model creation for actions
it can return a listing of entire new action models to create 0 to N buttons
- hook cooldown for actions
- hook attack order for actions
- flag in aggressor-component for auto mode for active items
procs for control
add shift-button callback for toolbar toggling
- display AUTO for auto actions instead of keybiding
- consider target-less actions for manual control
add model in item meta
button model proc must disable modal cursor
- adapt "attack" sm for defensive skills (heal and shielding)
healer mode introduces minimal branching
pick the right entity aspect for matching targets
make sure only hurting targets are picked
proto a targetless heal
- enable keybindings for multibutton
declare a set of fixed action bindings
use them on demand and in the same order of the action buttons
- fix: auto flag is ignored
- exclusive combat mode
a toggle button, next to "All", with a binding
makes all squad entities ignore all busy tasks under aggressor-sm priority
natural with a busy system, but when aggressor-sm takes over it could leave a window open
add phase 0 system to force a busy status
- item inventory model at entity level
display slots in combat info
use rich tooltip for item info
wearing-component for passive slots
- item inventory model for officer model
centralize equip procs to keep in sync
'item-active
'items-wearing
- keep stat sum in wearing-component, including the active attack model
- passive items must be able to raise health max value
stat sum for health is applied on every item change, hp kept proportional
- attacks must check the wearing-component bonus stat and change their power
- vis for wearing-component stats
- scaling item models
procs for base values based on power law
item-scale proc: given a level 1 item, scale all relevant values for the desired level
item-meta-scaling
rarity: for drops
min-scale, max-cale: to roll a random factor after level scale has been applied
- internal attack model for NPCs
use a maker proc to apply a level scale to them
also scale base-health
update make-npc
- simple test npc scaling for test invasions
use number of opened planets as max value
disable for now!
- add npc scaling to match planet level
- add some npc healers to test invasion
fixed 1 healer, no more
- temp balance
make level progression curve much softer
make station obj hp in the middle of it
- declare a new item model for every item gfx, different names, using helpers, varying item-meta-scaling
make some items clearly better in their scaling, but rarer
- formalize slot model
each slot has a kind ID and a locked flag
pass data in make-can-wear-items
proc for enabling slots depending on tier spec
- item equipping on map
right click action for equipping
if item exists for the slot, prompt about replacing
implants replace lowest level
- formalize slot limits by spec tier
- idea: equip matrix
like job matrix, but the cells are the equip slots for each officers
at the right of the matrix a station inventory of all items is displayed
user can drag and drop to equip items
all items have rich tooltip
- equip matrix: save scroll pos for items
- equip matrix: item filter
by slot
by power
remodel the comps to allow this
- equip matrix: item sorting
- equip matrix: better align of item list
- AlertFlash must have higher Z
- RoomSpec
make tilemapImage and tilemapColorLayerImage aliases
- disable squad edit on planet
- item storage
storage pallet in station
keep items inside as entities
auto organizes as a 3x3 grid, so max 9 items per pallet
make sure the limit is respected
- allow tile recolor by rebuilding on top of it with same floor
- item production in station: item forge
one recipe for each slot
times one recipe for each 5 levels bracket
this makes it natural to increase both required skill and required materials
item produced is random among available items in the slot, using the rarity value
item level is random within the bracket
- add flag to disable drops for some items
- fix: rolls look bad
add more mudflation
- fix: too many recipes will cut the info panel in item forge
use popup menu for recipe selection
- fix tutorial for recipe menu
- at game start only spawn 2 default officers with healing item
- test level progression on invaders based on tech level for producing items
- item disposal
can set a min level in recycler, it will send out tasks to deliver and recycle all items at or lower than
this needs special handling in the item finder for the recycler
- new art for recipe gfx and pallet
- goals and counters related to items production
- goals and counters related to items equip on officer
- equip matrix: sort officers by slot power
- empty slot labels are wrong
- fix vitals tutorial, no more mind tab
- fix mentions to walk button in tutorials
- bump save version number
- gastrodisaster is interrupting too much officers with healing item
remove periodic -delta
- fix: interrupted job-transport-sm workers do not drop their held item
- set vsync to off by default
- fix: missing frame in item forge anim
- test: enable right mouse button scroll
- fix: autopilot can cause silent failure when replacing items in equip matrix
- make xp gain faster (or lower xp tiers) for professions in general


Work has progressed on the implementation of wearable items, with a focus on usability given the predictably large staff sizes.

More items by Max

Max has drawn the last batch of items for this version, with sets of chest, feet and hands armor:



There's now 85 items in the game.

Random and scaling loot

Loot is now always instanced, with its stats based on its level and changed randomly over the default value. Different pieces of loot have a different roll bracket. Some of them can roll very high, almost doubling the normal power for an item of its level. They also have a rarity value, which will be used later on for random drops and manufacturing.

Directly equipping items from the map

The first equip capability is the most direct one:



Just select the officer, then right click an item. The context menu will offer the option to equip it, and also give you an error message in case the officer is unable to equip the item. Like in V2, items are forever bound to the officer who equips them, and destroyed when replaced.

Equipment matrix

Having to keep your staff equipped by finding items all over your station would be a nightmare. An efficient UI is required:



The equipment matrix displays all the current equipped items by your officers on the left, and all the items in your station on the right. To equip an item just drag it from the right panel onto the left panel. You don't even need to aim for the correct slot, the game will automatically recognize it and prompt you before the item is replaced. It still needs a bit more work, to add item filtering and officer sorting by item quality.

Work has continued on the new wearable item system, along with combat improvements. V3.3 is shaping up to be a more complex update than previous ones, so we may finish it a bit later than usual.

Cooldown support for actions

Actions can now export a cooldown value, visible in the toolbar:



The teleport action was the first one to test, and it's here to stay, to balance it better vs. walking orders.

Active wearable items from squad members now display an action

A first new piece of the combat update was added to the UI:



The action bar will display all the available actions for the selected entity, plus the action of the active wearable item of the squad members, as long as they are in the squad selection. This makes it possible for the player to interact directly with those actions. Which leads to...

Auto and player mode for officer active items





It's finally possible for the player to disable the attack AI and take control of an officer attack. The player can shift-click an action to toggle auto AI behavior, or change the option in the combat info panel for the officer. The UI will also automatically pick a shortcut key for the manual actions.

Healing items and healing AI

Active healing items are now possible, both targeted and untargeted. The attack AI was adapted to also be able to track friendly hurting entities and to try to heal them, with the same support for range, line of sight and chasing behavior.

Combat exclusive mode for squad

Having an active squad doesn't mean they will *only* do what the player wants. The AI is still active and may make an officer go work on a nearby task, for example. This may be fine in peaceful times, but when there's combat going on in the station, it's better to make sure your squad focuses only on fighting invaders.



This new mode will prevent any officer currently in the squad from going away to work somewhere, or to satisfy their vital needs. Remember to disable it when the danger is gone!

More item art

Max has drawn dozens of new items:



The new art is meant to represent of implants (passive items that enhance damage or healing actions) and support active items (for healing and damage shields).

Starting work on the wearable inventory for officers

Officers can now equip passive items in addition to their active item:



This is very much a work in progress and there's still no formalized stat model for them, this goes next. But the basic model work and UI is now in a good shape. Hovering the mouse over the item slots displays a full info tooltip:

This past week was focused on finishing a few ofter requested small features, work orders in context menus, and breaking ground on the V3 item and skill system.

New item system

After devoting most of the version cycle to their design, the V3 item implementation has started. We've finally decided to go with on-map items and random loot, which exist as any other entity. Going with abstract skills felt too limiting and less interesting than V2. We will make sure the UX for equipping them is fast and smart, foregoing logistics where appropriate, so it doesn't become tedious to keep your staff gear up to date.

Max has prepared a first batch of item art. We will need guns, lots of guns:



The data model for items is the first part code-wise, and it also will influence changes in the existing combat system. There's now a specific info panel for items:



There's a lot of pending work in this area and it won't be finished in v3.3, but starting this work is a very important step and a big part of the gameplay.

Work orders in context menus

Any entity capable of work can now be directly ordered to work, as long as the job giving object is not busy:



For now most work orders have been enabled as a direct context action. We will keep adding new actions if they make sense.

Logistics improvements: exclusive sources and restocking minimum

Shops and pallets can now be linked to other pallets or storage areas as their exclusive source:



For players that desire to micromanage their resource chains this allows for precise flow control to the consumer shops and for making intermediate pallets more useful.

The "min stock" feature supported by pallets has been replaced by a "restock at" amount, and also enabled in shops. This means that shops and pallets won't advertise a restock task unless they match or go under the "restock at" amount. This will cut down on useless restocking jobs.

Toggle factory recipes for global production

It's now possible to disable unwanted recipes in a factory to not make them available for global production:



This enables very precise control over production, even when using global stock automation.

Storage area filters

One of the most requested features is now in game:



The filtering is additive/substractive. Instead of selecting resource categories, you are always editing the resource list. But you can use the filters to make bulk editing. For example, to only stock food and drinks, you first Exclude->All, then Include->Drinkable and again Include->Edible.

First mod translation

XANA-Umbrella has provided a French translation and it is available in the Workshop:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=767491368

This is the first user-provided translation for Galactology and we want to say thanks!

After launching v3.2 we went back to triaging small and medium improvements to start the v3.3 series. Here's the work in this area for the past week.

New fleet visualization in galaxy screen: "ship bubbles"

A major eye sore in the galaxy screen is the ship panel or toolbar, located in the lower left area. It also has UX issues, with duplicating the ship avatars and being a limit to how many ships can be in your fleet unless some complicated scrolling is introduced. But not anymore!



The new fleet display concept is "ship bubbles". In the zoomed out galaxy nothing has changed. It will still display all the ships next to their current system or en-route in a wormhole. But the zoomed in system view now displays far away ships in a circle around the planet orbits, in the same overall direction the ship is relative to the star system. This new visualization also has automatic layout code to handle ships in the same system or close to each other:



This is a practical and more usable solution to the problems posed by a static toolbar, and is flexible enough to also support NPC ships in the future. Finally, to make the screen even cleaner, a new mode that displays only the galactic bodies and ships has been added:



Civ clustering and influence areas

Civs are now distributed in clusters, and own the entire system. This radically simplifies the civ structure in the galaxy and feels a lot more natural. To support this a new visualization mode has been added to display the extents of civs domains over the star systems you've discovered:



Random patrols for robots

Robots will now have a new idle system that compels them to patrol much further than they currently do. This is still compatible with the patrol point, so you can combine both for optimal patrolling behavior.

Ongoing work: map interaction revamp

The big item for 3.3 is revamped map interaction and combat, plus the initial implementation of skills. Work has been started in this area with the interaction revamp. Now right click is devoted for giving direct walking orders (by popular demand, no more walk key!), and when the target area has multiple options, a neat popup menu is displayed:



It's easy to go overboard with this and start adding too many things to the context menu, so special care will be taken to only add options where it makes sense. In particular actions that have a subject-verb-object structure are prime candidates, as in the example ownership action. Combat actions will be better served by the dedicate action bar, which has been improved to display key bindings when they exist:

A new major build of The Spatials: Galactology is now available!

The central theme of this build was adding depth to the job system and adding a system of job experience for officers. Officers can now gain experience in individual jobs and get better at them as time goes. But nothing is free and as they get better, they will demand more from the station management. Also included are better tools for officer and job management, the ownership system, new art for station decorations, and as always many small details and fixes.

V3.2 is not save game compatible with v3.1 save files. But your saves are still there! If you want to keep playing them you can opt out of v3.2 by right clicking Galactology in your Steam library listing, select Properties, select Betas, then select the v3_1 branch. This will force your game installation to be v3.1 forever. When you are done make sure to go back to the default branch to keep getting updates and new features.

Freaking out debuff



When officers hit rock bottom and cannot take it anymore, they don't handle it well. One possible debuff was already in game, making them turn their weapons on their own friends, but it was too destructive, so its chance of happening is low. A less destructive one was needed, so there's now a debuff with random low damage melee attacks with a funny walk included:

It will also be useful for other future effects, like drunks.

Decorations revamp



Max has reviewed all V2 decorations and has adapted them for V3. Some decorations that were too specific or that didn't play well with V3 concepts have been removed, and some others have been redrawn to better match V3.

Global production control based on stock keeping



It's now possible to set your factories to be controlled from a global queue. Once you do this, they will receive production orders from the inventory system. In the inventory window you can now set a minimal amount for produced resources. If you have set the appropriate factories to global production, they will start receiving production orders for those items until the minimal amount is reached.

Per-job per-officer job priorities



It's now possible to (optionally) input a priority value for a job for an officer. This allows for very fine tuning of labor in your stations. You can also see in the screenshots the start of work on job experience. The cell background in the table will be more intense the more the officer is experienced in that job.

Job XP has been implemented. The more officers perform a job, the more experienced they become in that job, adding 1 XP point for each task performed:



This in turn can give some bonuses, depending on the job. Many of them will receive a speed bonus. Some others, like production-centric jobs (cooking in the screenshot) now divide their recipes into difficulty tiers, and you need more experience officers in order to reliably make more difficult recipes.

But getting to high levels of expertise involves being specialized and some sacrifices, like in real life. This leads to a new major feature, officer specs.

Officer specs

The concept of an "officer spec" is now in the game, and all officers start in a certainly familiar one:



Redshirts are jack of all trades, masters of none. The spec of an officer dictates what jobs they can perform, and initially there's no restrictions, but it enforces a cap on how much XP (and thus benefits) can be gained from a certain job.

The staff UI now exposes the possible upgrades to the current spec:



In the screenshot, the redshirt officer has 4 possible upgrades, but none of them is ready yet. They must first reach a certain amount of XP in one or more jobs to make the cut. For example, to make a scientist, we can set one officer to be a fulltime cook in our kitchens. After it reaches the required XP, a message will pop up:



We can now visit the staff screen again and see that we can now perform the upgrade:



After the upgrade some jobs will become forbidden for the officer, but the XP cap for some others will be raised, enabling them to tackle more difficult recipes and to work faster. And it will also allow the to further specialized one more time, into a very focused tier 3 spec if desired.

Meta jobs

The concept of meta jobs has been added. Most jobs in the game are about performing tasks in the station, but some others go beyond. For example, combat tasks are not only performed in the station, and they are not part of the work system. For this reason a new kind of job has been introduced, one that's not exposed in the job matrix.



The first two meta jobs are combat and navigation. Combat still needs work and will be the subject of another patch, but navigation has been implemented.



When officers gain experience flying on a space ship, they will contribute to increasing its speed. Redshirts will be very limited in this experience, but if you spec your redshirts into diplomats and then navigators, a large potential speed bonus will be possible.

Ownership

A new game system, the ownership system, has been implemented. Some objects are now able to be setup to use for anybody:



Or, if desired, to be exclusively used by only one officer:



Only the ownership part has been implemented for now, with the usage exclusivity pending for this week (the reason is the complexity of object usage in V3. If you want to make a private shower for only one officer, is the officer also supposed to handle the soap restocking? Or its repairs? Master level specs may not even allow such tasks to be performed by them).

Demands system

Demands, as opposed to vitals, are material needs that officers develop as their prestige and experience grows. Redshirts only demand a low salary, but graduates and masters demand a furnished room. For example:



Providing a room is done by assigning a new kind of bed to the officer, which fills the delimiting area, and automatically changes ownership of all objects:



Not catering to all of the demands of an officer can give them negative feelings:



This is a stacking negative feeling that goes down faster the less fulfilled the demands of an officer are. If you let it go down too much, officers can even go on strike:



Striking officers will refuse to work and will randomly break objects around them, but are otherwise fully abled. The will still satisfy their vital needs and will participate in combat.

Having expert officers in your station will be a balance act, between making sure you can provide to their needs and wages, and how expendable labour is for you.

And more decorations

Max has also prepared new decorations. Some of them will have gameplay purpose and become a specific demand from your most experienced officers:



Some others, well, we now have exploding space rugs.

Technical, raw development notes

- vsync default/on/off options in video options
- add tooltip to non-button mode for officer slots in bridge view
- always enable construction and destruction while on a planet for all officers
- non-violent miserable feeling does not stop activities in general
change to exclusive high lvl busy with some animation
like dancing but random
add some low damage melee too
- building costs are not being applied for planet construction
- production control: global queue
toggle factories into global or local queue
UI on inventory window
a global condition like "stock of X is under Y"
logic based on querying current state of global factories
bin them by ability to make products
then pick one by one based on pending products
also substract queued products to not overproduce
regular tick from InventorySystem
- reports of fuel cell shelves stealing from other shelves
fix: inmediately mark deliveries to shops as in-shop
- new decors
- job matrix
new cell states
officer X job
cell is not available for officer
cell is available
experience plus per-job prio
experience plus enabled/disabled
vis
cell bg intensity is experience level
with circle means enabled, with optional number for the prio
model
remove jobComponentKinds and use job IDs instead
enable per-job prio in officer
per-job prio
per-job experience
allowed jobs
- job matrix
button for toggling per-job prio settings
while per-job prio is enabled, click on job should prompt for prio
- worker system must handle officer per-job prio
- add max stack size to resource info
- visitor dock on off panel
- make electric area weapon suck less
remove sound
smaller area, shorter duration, higher damage
keep a spark fx in the center, only spawn other fx when damaging something
- repairable object actions
trigger broken on purpose to call a repair
self destruction
- fire now records incremental efforts so it can be extingished in more than one attempt
- don't deliver over target max amount, or max stack size
- force a stock system update for the target object after every delivery job
avoids useless hauling jobs and keeps min/max values real
- model for specs
add finalization to officer
- job difficulty
some recipes have a difficulty rating now
keep it simple, 1 to 3, to match rookie-class-spec
proc for getting officer expertise tier based on the job xp
can fail production
do red scrolling text, do not produce, still get xp
- fix spec-delta-job-xp
- job xp
xp is expresed in amount of finished jobs
counter proc call in job sm
- specs raise the xp ceiling for some jobs at the cost of not being able to perform some other jobs
model for this, cap is now for all spec jobs
- officer tick phase checks jobs xp in order to flag one of the children spec as unlocked
alerts when a new spec is ready
- test ui in staff to apply a new spec
- solve the problem of rookies trying to make too dificult recipes
extra filter in job search to avoid picking too difficult jobs
- display difficulty capabilities in job matrix
- remove tiers from jobs that don't need it
- don't display job matrix difficulty for one tier jobs
- for research use one tier, to at least allow speedup
and then arbitrary values for officer progression
- remove xp system from jobs where it doesn't make any sense
- make job matrix a window
- keep the job component on a job after a cleanup to avoid useless walking and to make sure priorities are considered
- job speed
opt-in in job model
use total xp? use job tier like factory does?
phase times a factor depending on job difficulty vs worker experience
can be done out of step nodes but affect how many calls they get, interact with phase
check the step nodes in all job sm in case they do useful work (research, doctor)
make research delta on finish, not on ticking
pass the doctor speed to patient sm
- job experience influence, recipe influence
cooking-job-component: speed, diff
research-job-component: speed
chemistry-job-component: speed, diff
engineering-job-component: speed, diff
doctor-hospital-job-component: speed
pharmacist-job-component: speed, diff
- add icons for specs MiniSuitmaterialgraficoiconosclasesset003subclases
- specs
rookie
scientist
chef
cooking-job-component
chemist
chemistry-job-component
researcher
research-job-component
engineer
industrialist
engineering-job-component
medic
doctor
doctor-hospital-job-component
pharmacist
pharmacist-job-component
fix recipe for this
diplomat
PR
bartender-job-component
- sorting job matrix also by xp
- staff ui for specs
info ui display for spec data
show current spec
show possible child specs, with a button for the unlocked ones
click applies spec, warns about no undo
- remove OfficerFrame and do it in scheme
- officer frame for listing: display spec instead of obsolete level
- badge on officer portrait when an update is pending
- darker color for officer bg
- redo staff ui header
- show xp info for recruits
- rookies should have some initial job xp on some jobs
- introduce meta jobs
jobs registered as usual, but not do appear as a station job in the matrix
they can gain xp and appear in the staff screen
- meta job for ships: navigation
low cap for reshirts, can get higher for diplomats
navigator spec for max cap
ships increase their speed based on the sum of the navigation xp of its crew
appears in the crew display in the fleet view
display navigation xp and combat xp in crew picker
add xp deltas for ship actions
parking on a planet
per travel tick delta
- job matrix: remove buttons for not allowed jobs
- need differentiation for PR job
only bartender for now, more in later patches
add extra fun increase based on bartender xp
increase price
- new style job logistic sm with conservative job component deletion appears to deadlock
both object and officer
pre-check must remove busy (and do a proper clean overall) when no more stock is needed
- other pending specs pending on combat xp
add meta job #@meta-combat
fix specs xp caps for combat and navigation
only the soldier spec is pure combat min xp
dont try to add specs to soldiers, for now it's just a placeholder
other specs need first some station work, then can spec into a base class + combat
also still a placeholder but needed to test mechanics
engineer-sapper
medic-combat surgeon
diplomat-ambassador
add xp deltas for
any attacking direct hit (no LAC empathy, but AOE OK) 0.1
killing blow 1.0
- galaxy ship tooltips
display distance to current system if applicable
display if under autopilot
- change color of explore button when exploring a planet
- fix very old leak in ButtonGroup (!)
- add subtitle and desc to specs
- generic ownership system
set of entity IDs or refs per officer
owner-component
all are references to station entities
model API to add remove
must remove previous ownership if applies
a tick removes destroyed or invalid objects
remove ownership on officer death or firing
also keeps a room size value for room defining owned objects
add can-be-owned-component and propagates-owner-component to subset of station objects
info inspector to show and pick owner
display owned objects in staff ui
add button to center and select in station view
display owned objects in also in picker
need rules for uniqueness about owned objects (only one bed per officer)?
NO, it doesnt matter
need rules that disable or "mark bad" an owned object (a room with two beds)?
NO, just do it on building time. if the player messes up on purpose, the room will be bad anyway, since objects are single-owned
- a system automatically propagates ownership to objects inside owned flood fill rooms
add info text to objects that behave like this
in order to reduce player surprise, add a scrolltext over the object when ownership changes
with name of officer and originating object
also make flood fill area appear for a few seconds, while the the scroller is in screen
- new entry level bed
reemplaces old entry bed. generic for all
- new quality bed for tier 2+ officers
defines a room
doesnt allow more than one in the same room
has ownership area system
- officer preference for using owned objects
vital systems and job systems must always query first over the owned object list
and when none matches, the normal query must avoid owned objects
this can be done using the custom ordering and filtering support in ecs-query
ordering: collect a hashtable of owned ids, if entity id matches, add extra prio
filtering: if entity is owned and owner is not actor, filter it out
not all systems want this
vitals: all
jobs: all factories, research
all others: not supported
- make lockers have min z
- display owned room area in ui
- ownership concept icon
- new decors
rug, mats and carpets
spec-specific high status object
new lamps and small tables
redone some cabinets and wardrobes
new plants
- officer demands: structure
base
nothing
graduate
low salary
9+ tiles room
officer bed
shower
master
high salary
15+ tiles room
officer bed
shower
officer status symbol (for their spec)
2 other decors
- officer demands checker
tick that sets a cached state for the demands satisfaction
tick that pays the salary if possible and sets the satisfaction
room size
objects
they must be assigned to officer (N or more)
must match the demands model name or component plus amount
- staff ui for listing demands and check status
- missing officer demands must have negative feelings
demands sentiment is gathered from cached demand checker
each item can have a weight so salary is more important
initial feeling is low impact
stacking feeling without timeout
stack amount is delta at a fixed rate
max stack is determined by how bad the sentiment is
if it gets too bad, then officer goes on strike
uses stack size, can start happening even if not at max
put fist icon on head
timed so it's not too bad
refuses to work, still has vitals covered
can do acts of sabotage per strike period (set objects to broken mode)
- extreme feelings (with sprite icon) have their icon displayed next to the title in the feelings panel
- optional busy icons
- new goals and counters: act of upgrading officers
- bump save version
- fix: after game load or new game, staff ui may show diff focus officer vs detail view
- fix: officer recruit screen
- fix: have to hit escape twice to get out of placing a building
- increase default build priority
- fix: stuck research sm
make very sure to take a de-owner-ing path in the wait-for-resource loop
also fix base sm to stop advertising the job in the de-owner case, and fix repair sm and research sm
- fix: officers stuck in strike mode
- new gfx: self destroy, break, portrait backgrounds
- slower buildup for demands feeling
- fix: production tutorial not detecting opening job matrix window
- add sound to order creation
- fix: test fire button is not a test anymore
- reduce required exp for some manufacturing
- increase test tourist wallets
- increase some entry level prices
- fix: do not change floor color on already built tiles
- fix: chemistry is not pharmacy
- fix: properly remove strike busy status
- put officer gold bg in more places
- make staff icon gold while one or more officers is pending an upgrade
- slash salaries
- reintroduce reciprocal auto destroy for job-giver BusyC
- add sound to acts of sabotage
- introduce modal popups
like modal dialog but passes clicks outside of itself
and cancels itself
also captures esc for cancel
determine screen anchor from a node tag
flow logic to keep inside screen
- various filters and sorters for staff lists
filter by
No filter
needs demands
pending upgrade
specs
sort by
alpha
mind vital (cached)
display in
staff view
officer picker
fix mouse events and priorities (not autoclosing on outside click, but buttons work?)
job matrix
- disable mouse hover effects when modals are displayed, except for the modal content
- center on map button info header in map
20px button over portrait
remove action
- focus-on-staff button for info header in map
- focus-on-map button for staff ui
- increase random chance of sickness
- decreease again tier reqs for pharmacy, engineering, chemistry
- make robots and ship tasks 1 star rated
- graduates want 6 tiles
- move officer bed to higher tech tier
- remove firing of officers, since it removes all risk from bad feelings
- increase initial cash to 20k
- longer phase for low intensity melee
- add cash scroller when spending money
- tourists pay entrance when landing
- idea: when tooltip parent dies, detach tooltip and keep it around for some seconds
- global production: allow interleaving products into an already used factory
otherwise cannot do simultaneus orders for the same kind of factory
- idea: lazy changed update for non-visible
gui-observer and the listing observer check parent chain
on dying is always run
if any parent or self are non-visible, they wont refresh, but set a flag as pending
when the node is visited for drawing, it's implicitly known it is visible
clear the flag and call the delayed update proc
- make mind visible in info header
use cachedMind with the old morale icons
- fix: stale tooltips
- further increase initial credits
- further lower required xp in some tiers
- officers flagged as missing demands when they are not
object counter wasnt considering min 0
- remove shower from graduate demands
- nerf xp rate for combat, research
- introduce system for pasive check of item stack busy status
if target is not busy, remove busy
if target is busy and job-sm, and its item-ref is not us, remove busy
- increase disease and miasma chance
- too much initial points for some levels or jobs
- increase tier 1 research xp
- add some explanation about ownership
- staff button doesnt go gold sometimes
- cannot build extractor in tutorial
clear camp area for resource nodes
- ships get stuck approaching planets


The main feature development work for the next build is now done, and now it's time for testing and polishing. There's still a few extra UI features that are planned but pending (like officer list filtering), but the build is on track for next week.

The past week has seen the implementation of the demands system. Demands, as opposed to vitals, are material needs that officers develop as their prestige and experience grows. Redshirts only demand a low salary, but graduates and masters demand a furnished room. For example:



Providing a room is done by assigning a new kind of bed to the officer, which fills the delimiting area, and automatically changes ownership of all objects:



Not catering to all of the demands of an officer can give them negative feelings:



This is a stacking negative feeling that goes down faster the less fulfilled the demands of an officer are. If you let it go down too much, officers can even go on strike:



Striking officers will refuse to work and will randomly break objects around them, but are otherwise fully abled. The will still satisfy their vital needs and will participate in combat.

Having expert officers in your station will be a balance act, between making sure you can provide to their needs and wages, and how expendable labour is for you.

Max has also prepared new decorations. Some of them will have gameplay purpose and become a specific demand from your most experienced officers:



Some others, well, we now have exploding space rugs.

Development is progressing nicely in fleshing out the specs system for officers.

The concept of meta jobs has been added. Most jobs in the game are about performing tasks in the station, but some others go beyond. For example, combat tasks are not only performed in the station, and they are not part of the work system. For this reason a new kind of job has been introduced, one that's not exposed in the job matrix.



The first two meta jobs are combat and navigation. Combat still needs work and will be the subject of another patch, but navigation has been implemented.



When officers gain experience flying on a space ship, they will contribute to increasing its speed. Redshirts will be very limited in this experience, but if you spec your redshirts into diplomats and then navigators, a large potential speed bonus will be possible.

A new game system, the ownership system, has been implemented. Some objects are now able to be setup to use for anybody:



Or, if desired, to be exclusively used by only one officer:



Only the ownership part has been implemented for now, with the usage exclusivity pending for this week (the reason is the complexity of object usage in V3. If you want to make a private shower for only one officer, is the officer also supposed to handle the soap restocking? Or its repairs? Master level specs may not even allow such tasks to be performed by them).

This system will also give support to another feature coming soon: officer demands. As your officers progress they may demand private living quarters with specific needs. In order to make assigning ownership to objects more efficient a new kind of bed has been introduced, which also automatically delimits the officer room and auto assigns ownership to any object inside:

Job XP has been implemented. The more officers perform a job, the more experienced they become in that job, adding 1 XP point for each task performed:



This in turn can give some bonuses, depending on the job. Many of them will receive a speed bonus. Some others, like production-centric jobs (cooking in the screenshot) now divide their recipes into difficulty tiers, and you need more experience officers in order to reliably make more difficult recipes.

But getting to high levels of expertise involves being specialized and some sacrifices, like in real life. This leads to a new major feature, officer specs.

The concept of an "officer spec" is now in the game, and all officers start in a certainly familiar one:



Redshirts are jack of all trades, masters of none. The spec of an officer dictates what jobs they can perform, and initially there's no restrictions, but it enforces a cap on how much XP (and thus benefits) can be gained from a certain job.

The staff UI now exposes the possible upgrades to the current spec:



In the screenshot, the redshirt officer has 4 possible upgrades, but none of them is ready yet. They must first reach a certain amount of XP in one or more jobs to make the cut. For example, to make a scientist, we can set one officer to be a fulltime cook in our kitchens. After it reaches the required XP, a message will pop up:



We can now visit the staff screen again and see that we can now perform the upgrade:



After the upgrade some jobs will become forbidden for the officer, but the XP cap for some others will be raised, enabling them to tackle more difficult recipes and to work faster. And it will also allow the to further specialized one more time, into a very focused tier 3 spec if desired.

After publishing version 3.1 plus a hotfix, it was time to go back to our backlog and triage the major feature for the September build, and, as always, to keep implementing minor features.

Freaking out debuff



When officers hit rock bottom and cannot take it anymore, they don't handle it well. One possible debuff was already in game, making them turn their weapons on their own friends, but it was too destructive, so its chance of happening is low. A less destructive one was needed, so there's now a debuff with random low damage melee attacks with a funny walk included:

It will also be useful for other future effects, like drunks.

Decorations revamp



Max has reviewed all V2 decorations and has adapted them for V3. Some decorations that were too specific or that didn't play well with V3 concepts have been removed, and some others have been redrawn to better match V3.

Global production control based on stock keeping



It's now possible to set your factories to be controlled from a global queue. Once you do this, they will receive production orders from the inventory system. In the inventory window you can now set a minimal amount for produced resources. If you have set the appropriate factories to global production, they will start receiving production orders for those items until the minimal amount is reached.

Per-job per-officer job priorities



It's now possible to (optionally) input a priority value for a job for an officer. This allows for very fine tuning of labor in your stations. You can also see in the screenshots the start of work on job experience. The cell background in the table will be more intense the more the officer is experienced in that job.

Major feature for September: officer classes, job experience and progression

This is a group of tasks meant to flesh out officer classes, job experience and officer demands. It will be based on a rookie class plus five higher experience classes. And top it off, we will introduce expert classes as a last experience step for classes. So for example you could recruit a rookie that has some experience with cooking and assign him to cook rations. Gaining experience with each ration made, at some point you will be able to turn him into a Scientist, the generic class that includes cooking as a specialized profession. Keep him in the kitchen and he will be able to become a chef at some point.

Experience gains will be automatic but the choice to evolve your officers into classes and specialists will be yours.

A new major build of The Spatials: Galactology is now available!

This build features almost a hundred of individual commits, with both new features and bug fixes. It adds a major gameplay component, you now have to build your own spaceships. And it also contains many small features as previewed in previous development updates. These updates follow this introduction, in case you missed them. You can also find the raw, detailed technical changelog at the end of this post with a note for each of the 200+ individual changes in this new version.

V3.1 is not save game compatible with v3.0 save files. But your saves are still there! If you want to keep playing them you can opt out of v3.1 by right clicking Galactology in your Steam library listing, select Properties, select Betas, then select the v3_0 branch. This will force your game installation to be v3.0 forever. When you are done make sure to go back to the default branch to keep getting updates and new features.

Ship construction

The major feature for 3.1 is the ability to build space ships in your station!



All the ships in the game have been assigned stats for speed, cargo size and crew size, then sorted by tiers to give a nice research progression.



The construction system is based on first research the required factory objects, then new ship blueprints. Once you build a ship design planner and some ship workstations then you are ready to pick a blueprint. The planner will automatically distribute a series of engineering jobs across your workstations.

Empty stock warning



By user request, shops and pallets now always display their selected resource, and visibly warn when its stock is 0.

Toggle resource extraction



It's now possible to disable extraction of one or more resources on a planet, to make more efficient use of both the on-planet storage and ship storage.

Single resource view in galaxy



The resource view in the galaxy screen is so crowded it's useless. In addition to balance changes, the galaxy screen will now only display one selected resource, making it actually useful.

Firefighting fixes and job priorities

Firefighting has been improved by making the fear to fire only affect hurt officers, and by finally implementing job priorities. This means different jobs can have different priorities, even from the point of view of a single officer (this is different from the general priority system in the game, which governs things like working vs fleeing in panic, and is already working well). A future task will expose this new priority flexibility in the job matrix. But for now firefighting has been hardcoded to be the highest priority job.

Storage area animation



In an effort to make the storage area better, now officers dump the delivered resources in the central object, which warps them to an empty tile or stacks them over an existing stack. This means it will stay better organized. To make this clearer the storage area now animates the action of warping or stacking.

Additionally stack sizes and max pallet stock has been increased.

De-bunch-up officers
The game won't send your officers to the exact same spot anymore when teleporting or walking around. They now will stand in formation:



Patrol points
It's now possible to select a point in the map as the default position for your officers and robots. Once an officer or robot has a patrol point, and they see themselves completely free of work or needs, they will walk back towards the area around that point. While not very useful for officers until we have a combat mode that disables any other actions, this finally makes the security robot useful.



Production orders queue
Factory objects are now based on a order queue system. By default, newly constructed factories have no orders. You create a production by selecting a researched recipe and then picking an amount of times to repeat it:



After your click the Create button, a new order is added to the factory queue:



There's still work pending in this area, like some sort of central production control in case you don't want to micromanage factories. But this is already a big step ahead of the launch build and ahead of V2 parity.

Technical changelog

[code]
- #% is sometimes emiting eval-string to eval time, this is bad and useless
just do plain (read), works perfectly
- statemachine.scm is shameful
it will always be without heavy restructuring of a lot of things, too late
make it faster at least
focus on removing eval
instead use (lambda (env) (with-let env ...))
alternative for state nodes
create lambda for vars block: each var is a define plus body
create 2 lambdas for state transition
condition lambda
transition lambda
-> obsoleted by to: change
-> this eliminates all evals inside run-state-machine
remove assv in let for run-node
change data to hash table
remove for-each looking for transtions in run-node
to: is now a single shot lambda with (cond), with a clause for each possible transition
put the matched and curret setters inside the generated clause code
make let* into let
will be possible after transtion to hash table
faster args injection
- fix: tooltip mousemove receiving spurious events before it has a parent
also fix corner case for call after onExit
- fix: rare case with -1 idx passed to build category cell list renderer
- optimize SpatialIndexSystem
buckets: vector of std::unordered_set*
prealloc buckets
overlaps: vector of std::unordered_set*
indexed by entity slot, realloc when insertion of one that doesnt fit
overlapsOwner: vector of int
to check correct slot owner, discard when it doesnt match
- always refresh research on game load
- stop the planet orbit animation while the game is paused
- use 3.major.minor.build for version strings
- tentative fix: always use C++ deref code, also check for isValidInstance
- immense amounts (50% of all objects) of useless repeating PoseAnimation[Layer] and friends
it would be very good if those could be reused between diff entities, half the mem and allocs!
cache hash id -> PA instance in Game
unique signature from model-name
building.scm and npc.scm manages transparently, will need model-name
no model name, old system
never erases so the ptr are always valid
make sure "not owned" flag is correctly set
done for building.scm but disabled
do for npc.scm too
- re-enable pang cache for officers
- maybe timer ticks are being delivered to deleted nodes? (gui-observer, gui-timer downpanel)
add unscheduleAllSelectors() to destructors. in theory not needed since they get paused in onExit buuuut
- fix: missing deref #f check on info action matcher, finally caught this!
- regression: some (all?) objs with wrong preferred postion
var with "angle" name was being shadowed by a built-in in strange circumstances
- Sound::play should check for simultaneus play of effects and throttle down
- after the new busy-less semantics of gathering for jobs, stampede effects occur for single stack items
example: single pill in the station just produced, many doctors go for it
for now just add item locking again when the stack is small
- refine storage area
only allow one storage area per room
all delivery jobs go to object
keep the proxies on it
the final state of the delivery always considers the entire area, for perfect stacking
stack is warped or stacked on top of whatever is required
- buff planet cargo obj capacity (and price)
also add a per planet limit to how many allowed to build, warn in build too
- make teleport and walk sticky modal, so they remain activated after one use (can use esc to cancel)
- more levels for volume settings
- squad buttons are a bit inconsistent with selection on single click
- actions must do a prio busy check, equivalent to flee prio
- allow actions to have a non-hold modal pointer
- action: set patrol point
plus low prio rally system
enable for some robots too
- fix: crash on setting new keybinding
- fix extractors goal
- walk action target placeholder (v2 parity)
shown when selecting entity
selected-component+physc+pathc display system
use for patrol point too
- walk destination position layout to not bunch up officers
use in teleport too
- consumerists respect unlocked status of products
- simplify starting unlocks and research groups
- rooms must unlock from research
add research refresh to room tool
- new gfx for patrol point and icon
- starting spawn on station and planet should use group layout
- production control: local queue
local queue: pick a recipe and an amount and add order
decrements amount in order when production done
system updates queue when no recipe is present
allow infinite amount
SM updates queue after production
fix: leaves factory in bad state because it nukes SM and clenaup doesnt run (pose etc)
gui in factory panel
better layout
add recipe icon to order list
add delete order
add an in-panel modal mode for creating an order
keep amount and recipe id out of panel state
- add support for infinite amount orders
- update production tutorial
- spawn landing shuttle on planet
- fix: make table view more robust by using index to track touched cell
- rework earliest log output
game version
one check for each Steam API singleton
Steam user ID
- on detecting a too old OpenGL version or driver, popup a message and quit instead of crashing
- fix firefighting once for all
do not mark fire as an enemy
remove aggressor empathy from fire
increase firefighting job radius
- to give firefighting proper prio, jobs must support prios, now!
introduce job-hint component for reverse job model lookup (finally!)
ecs-query now supports order-by
lambda (e) that returns a numeric
result is memoized for that query, no multiple calls
also optimize by-distance
add path to run both, or only one
- separate cleaner and recycler jobs
increase prio for recycler job, decrease for cleaner
- cleaner sm must be removed
it interferes with common job management, giving it 50% or more prio in practice
extend from job sm to use common worker query
lazy put job component and nothing else
lazy start and run sm only when busy
- report of cleaners stuck with corpses
add autodrop for held litter
- item placeholder to display missing stock in pallet and shops
- storage area new gfx
dropper with layered animation
add spawn and suicide comp
- fix: check subj in dismantle-cancel
- increase stack sizes for all
- increase max pallet stock
- remove decoration bench (missleading decor)
- enable patrol points for all robots
- increase times for eating and most other vitals
- storage area must mark existing floor stacks to avoid (too many) strange behaviors
- force first system to have fixed set of planet kinds and resources
- move onion layering code for objects inside the cached proc
- soap recipe is unlocked but its factory is not
- stop the random choice for de-diagonalized pathing
- new gfx for storage area (again)
- limit diff resources per planet kind and hardcode some planets in early systems to guarantee supply
- production on off control in planet popup
and display icon in red for system resource overlay
- decrease extraction rate
- galaxy resource view for only one resource
simple chooser under filter buttons
leave system view as-is
- introduce steel
new icon for alu
new node and icon for steel
rules model
- ship building
flesh out all ship designs with spec and progression over: ship speed, cargo hold size, crew size
ship speed model
ETA display
info alert when manual order is done
add ships to research, add research group
research and category icon
integrate objects and recipes
introduce factory editable param
single object provides for design table to select ship
workstations
they provide 1m jobs that consume lots of resources and advance ship construction
standard recipes (hull, structure, life support, engines)
amount of each kind of recipe comes from the stats of the selected kind of ship
a central system distributes jobs, there's no user controlled queue
associated to the planner, so if it's gone, it doesnt advance
model for keeping construction state
start, cancel, pause, status
model for spanwing ship
planner
just for selection and tracking of ship
keeps track of construction
can cancel construction but all work is gone (like research)
can pause
remove cheat
must check fleet size limit before construction
display selected ship on top of planner desk
scrap button when at home
goals and counters
- less vertical space for ship images in planner panel
- fix alignement and sizing issues in research screen for ships
- dont display vitals panels when only health is a vital
- build planner error when building workshops
- explain in planner desc the need for workshops
- stock tutorial is broken due to default resources
- change desc text for corridor
- clicking two times with object eraser deletes the entity
- separate tier for tier 2 ships
- pose planner in action while there's a ship under construction
- faster ships, req less materials
- remove civ icons in galaxy in resource view
- ceiling "turrret"
- ships must always take shortest path
- assigned bartenders not doing their job
the item clearing done after building was moving the proxy entity for the bartender job workplace
- job matrix enhancements
tooltip with job priority (just info, not editable)
sort by job (click on job)
click officer to select in map, if in station
- fix: still crashing on lookupHook: unknown hook (this time on the refresh timer from a GUIObserver)
not an abnornal code path! it is legitimate: a Persisting instance is destroyed and ::changed clears the hook
but tryUpdate does NOT check for the validity of the hook, fix this
also review similar patterns in other widgets and harden them
- having one button per job per officer in job matrix has a real impact for mouse move events
enable visible parent check, again
- busy-stuck item stacks
actions that perturb job state, like changing the resource in stock info panel, destroy the ref on the job-giver side
this makes the item be busy with the giver, but the giver forgot about it -> item is locked and unusable
add optional "any busy" check for the subj, to remove busy comp when the subj is not busy (no matter if reciprocal or not)
- ship build objects are missing their animations
- faster phase in storage area
- increase max cargo carry for officers and robots
- increase ship speed a bit
- reduce gas needs for ship recipes
- job matrix: add job name to tooltip, restore rotation
- fix inside-node bound testing to only use own affine xform of hit coords plus node size
- add extra bodies in lvl 1 with extra resources
- hospital beds get stuck with has-patient after interruptions
add system for cleanup
- increase initial credit allowance
- increase a bit miasma, disease and trash
- decrease a bit the negative feeling from bad aesthetics and miasma

Work avances steadily towards the next build, planed for next week. A lot of small enhancements have been added to the game, and then work on the next big feature, ship building, has been started.

Empty stock warning



By user request, shops and pallets now always display their selected resource, and visibly warn when its stock is 0.

Toggle resource extraction



It's now possible to disable extraction of one or more resources on a planet, to make more efficient use of both the on-planet storage and ship storage.

Single resource view in galaxy



The resource view in the galaxy screen is so crowded it's useless. In addition to balance changes, the galaxy screen will now only display one selected resource, making it actually useful.

Start of work on ship building



The ship building system has been started. First all the ships in the game have been assigned stats for speed, cargo size and crew size, then sorted by tiers to give a nice research progression.

The next task is implementing the station objects for ship buildings,which will be base on a series of resource intensive jobs that contribute to an overall completion %.

Firefighting fixes and job priorities

Firefighting has been improved by making the fear to fire only affect hurt officers, and by finally implementing job priorities. This means different jobs can have different priorities, even from the point of view of a single officer (this is different from the general priority system in the game, which governs things like working vs fleeing in panic, and is already working well). A future task will expose this new priority flexibility in the job matrix. But for now firefighting has been hardcoded to be the highest priority job.

Storage area animation



In an effort to make the storage area better, now officers dump the delivered resources in the central object, which warps them to an empty tile or stacks them over an existing stack. This means it will stay better organized. To make this clearer the storage area now animates the action of warping or stacking.

Additionally stack sizes and max pallet stock has been increased.

For the week after launch we focused on fixing the most urgent issues found by our new players. A lot of small changes were also made to improve the usability of the game. This work produced the first post-release build. Here's the news post with the detailed changelog:

http://steamcommunity.com/games/450700/announcements/detail/804274005441485163

With the most pressing (small!) issues resolved we are now back to our regular development schedule. The first days after 3.0.23 were focused on some performance optimizations that, while already planned, were deemed too risky to be done for the EA launch. They are not needed until stations grow to medium and big sizes, so we re confident it's not something our players are going to notice at this point in the alpha. There's still more optimizations planned, this is just the first batch.

After this early round of profiling and optimization we went back to feature development. Our next feature build is planned for early August, and we've already triaged which features are going into it. Here's an highlight of the most visible ones implemented in the past few days.

De-bunch-up officers
The game won't send your officers to the exact same spot anymore when teleporting or walking around. They now will stand in formation:



Patrol points
It's now possible to select a point in the map as the default position for your officers and some types of robots. Once an officer or robot has a patrol point, once they see themselves completely free of work or needs, they will walk back towards the area around that point. While not very useful for officers until we have a combat mode that disables any other actions, this finally makes the security robot useful.



Production orders queue
Factory objects are now based on a order queue system. By default, newly constructed factories have no orders. You create a production by selecting a researched recipe and then picking an amount of times to repeat it:



After your click the Create button, a new order is added to the factory queue:



There's still work pending in this area, like orders with infinite amount and some sort of central production control in case you don't want to micromanage factories. But this is already a big step ahead of the launch build and ahead of V2 parity.

A new build has been pushed into the default branch for all users. It doesn't include any new features but has a lot of small fixes and some enhancements. It should be compatible with current save files but some of the fixes will only show up in new games. Here's the patch notes:


- osx compilation for 10.9
- shop pallets now have a hardcoded min stock value of 0 in obj model
- default resource for most pallets
- shop like objects should have pallet shipping enabled by default (!!!)
- algae and spores: indeed it should spawn in at least one other kind of planet to be in line with the rest
- when missing resources in job, give hint of which one
- integrate BugSplat in code and build
upload pdbs when uploading to steam
- upload fixed sountrack
- add mouse hover in galaxy map and system view to make clicks easier
hover covers the dndtarget area, which is uniform and nice
remove all other target testing
use also for clicks
- do something about building on top of item stacks
warp to nearest walkable on building
- nerf litter spawn, again
- station objects are too squishy
- invaders should prioritize living targets
- increase vital decrease again
- increase max carry of officers and robots
- bug: missing keybindings for rotate building
- build tool must mention esc can cancel drag
- tutorial must say "waiting" somewhere when there's no next:
- tutorial must say "tutorial ended" somewhere when there's no next: and no done?:
- single kind of extractor
additional obj model to preserve saves
fix tutorial
fix research
- add name/desc to litter
- clicks are being stolen in planet popup
new click code in GalaxyLayer fixes this
also lower click prio for ShipAvatar's in GalaxyLayer
- item info panel
show stack size
button to open inventory with resource kind selected
- randomize officer stats a bit on spawn
- make it impossible to set building blueprint when all 4 neigh are nonwalkable
- the choice of towels as the placeholder decorative example is bad
- bridge gui
display cargo hold size
display resources as icon + number + tooltip, to fit more variety
- review repair system
migrate over to broken system
now objects can break if too damaged
stop using default spawned proxy repair entities
new system to monitor and spawn the proxy when needed
broken system stops handling this
introduce maintenance-factor so objects can receive repairs before they break
repair factor is just the max between maintenance and broken
make sure to spawn proxy only on walkable tiles
auto destroy proxy if its ground becomes unwalkable
repair system will try to re-spawn it
fix: proper facing
- enable medicine and repair jobs for all by default
- fix music problems (windows and linux)
sound volume is not reset properly on game startup and after a song plays
not really shuffling songs


If you are a Windows user and are experiencing crashes with this or with earlier builds, please check this thread:

http://steamcommunity.com/app/450700/discussions/0/365172547938211635/

The Spatials: Galactology is now available in the Steam Store!

After more than one year of development today we release to the world our reboot of The Spatials as a much improved and deeper game. And this time we are doing it as Early Access with a solid roadmap and amazing new features in the pipeline.

Buy it now with a launch discount of 25%, enjoy our soundtrack DLC by Bernie Sanchez a.k.a. Murdoc with a 25% discount too, and consider our new bundle deal, The Weird Collection, for an even lower overall discount of 37%!

Our Steam release is approaching!

On the 7th of July we will release The Spatials: Galactolgy to the wide Steam audience. Looking back at the early days of V1 in 2014 it has been an amazing journey. Later, with our V2 release last year, the Steam community gave us vital support to keep going, and we are now excited to share our latest work with you in Galactology. This time we will switch to a public alpha under the Early Access system, to develop and shape the game as we go, with weekly development updates and monthly builds.

In other news, Galactology will feature a Mac port on the 7th! Ports are one of the most requested features so we're making sure we prioritize work on them.

This past week marked the end of feature development for the 7th launch, and we are now (more or less) in feature freeze mode. Only fixes and minor enhancements will be done from now until the 7th, and lots of testing. As such the week was full of new developments that set the foundations for entire new game systems and major UI pieces. Who said indies don't crunch?


- vitals needy thresholds
optional system for checking needy status
instead of a fixed min value, use a min value + sated value per vital component (to allow per-entity custom)
when it transitions under min, a needy flag for the vital is activated, and it's always needy for it
when it transitions over max, needy flag is removed
this allows more than a single consumption


The vital algorithm was refined again, to make needy impulses "sticky" until a threshold has been reached. There's two camps to this, one prefers this behavior, the other doesn't. It could be interesting to switch individual entities between sticky thresholds and single thresholds. Maybe with a "binge" character trait, once we have those?


- item consumption can require cash
introduce optional wallets
wallet procs to check affordability, decrease amount, keep purchases log
resources and items already have prices
other objects can have a price-component
vital sm and its users now check for affordability when searching for items and objects
vital sm and its users now debit the price from the wallet when required
- stock control must update price-component
- display prices in item info
- pallet objects for vitals: only consume the set resource, not any other




Entities can how hold wallets full or not so full of credits. When they do they spend them in the products that are priced, be it a lunch or some fancy clothes. Despite visitors still not being fleshed out and basically acting as testing placeholders, they have been equipped with wallets, to test this new feature, and to serve as a source of income. Get them to spend their credits!


- direct action bar in info tool
a slim panel is drawn in the bottom position
shows a series of buttons, depending on the aspect of the selected entity
walk to
work on
actions can opt into having a modal cursor when activated
info tool then waits for next click, then calls action with coords
draw label over action bar when in modal mode
make action button highlight in modal mode
disable modal mode with esc or on tool activate deactivate
switch modal mode when an action is switched
- harden action bar and modal info cursor wrt destroyed entities
- fix spurious error in change notification
- action: center view




There's finally a GUI for giving direct orders to your officers (or to anything else that accepts them, which will be also robots in the future). It's flexible and adapts to the current status of the entity, with its action set dynamically calculated. A very basic set of actions has also been provided. The teleport action is too powerful, but for now it's useful for testing.

The action bar is also available in the station, with the same functionality as in planets.


- squads
action panel has an add and remove from squad button, then it can display button for each squad member
click on button targets the member
timer does ligthweight check to refresh entire bar
matching ids in hashtable
button label shows color, hp
button label is under observer for vulnerable component, for perfect updating
show mini face in squad button
single click on squad button resets multiselect to one
shift click in squad button can do multiselect
"all" button selects all squad
multiselect shows all actions for all selected but no dupe actions
on click it is invoked for all matching
- formalize attack model a bit to allow for action matching
add one component for each attack kind
the attack model maker adds the comp and removes any previous one
add registry for attacks
- create squad on planet by default
- one of each class at start
- add one distinct combat skill for each class
- limit squad size
- optional passed filter for action model, to allow more fine grained matching
- add default squad for new game in station
- update planet basic tutorial to mention squads, tab, actions




And with more V2 parity features, Galactology now has a squad bar. This feature will evolve in the future, but for now it consists of a set of up to 6 officers you can select to be always displayed above the action bar. When you select them all with the All button or the Tab key, all the orders you give will apply to all of them.

Some attack model refactoring was also done as part of this work, with the idea of finally providing targeted attack actions, but in the end there wasn't enough time to do a good job, so it has been postponed post-release.


- declare keybindings at mod meta level
- allow info actions to request a keybinding name
info tool must listen for kb and trigger action on keydown when valid
- tab keybinding for "all" button
introduce concept of ToolShell-level keybindings for tools
tab can be pressed inside any tool anytime to quickly select the entire squad and perform actions


Mods can now ask for keybindings to be registered in the mod manifest, and they will appear in the Options screen for customization like any built-in keybinding. Mods still have indirect access to the keyboard and must register a Tool to "play nice" with the rest of the GUI. To make this a bit more flexible tools can request a screen-global keyboard listener (only for their screen, not the entire game). Use this sparingly!


- minimal station attack event AI, with plenty warning and/or lead time wrt tick 0
add spawnable npc lists to civs
trigger checker
invaders
spawn some from a hostile civ in a random spot of the station
add teleport fx and sound
add critical alert
add "a raid approaches" previous to spawn
where? need more state?
sneakers
spawn one npc from a hostile civ in a random spot of the station in sneak mode
deceivers
spawn one visitor npc that is actually an hostile in disguise




And a very fitting end for a crazy week of coding. The station events system has been inaugurated, and its first guests are angry and armed. The station can now receive visits from raid parties, sneakers that hide unless spotted by a camera, and deceivers who look like a standard visitor. All of those events end up in bullets or worse, as to be expected. This is just three events out of the two dozens we have thought about, so a lot more is coming in the future.

The last big piece before the release deadline is here. Galactology now has a research and technology system:


- new gfx for food/drink tiers (objects and resources)
- new gfx for research table
- research model for groups and tiers
fully implement food/drink group
- research stub groups for existing useful objects and recipes
- research unlocking
checker to update unlock cache
- fix tutorial to use first tier objects
- research must also unlock planet objects
- research check in tools
build tool must check if object is unlocked, with optional toggle default to #f
factory panel must check if recipe is unlocked
- research job and table
fix setter for current selected research group
- reverse research table
- fix: object builder tool must rebuild listing on research
delay to activate if needed, to not need observers
- call unlock checker on some tick
- research screen
- move research to left menu area
- research stub group for decorations
- goals/counters for research
- tutorial for research
- add vital effect modifiers to food and drink
- support in vital sm for vital effect modifiers from consumed resource
problem: many objects are stock keeping pallets, no explicit item reference
need to get stocked resource kind? please dont use a spatial on step node...
callback for special effects on completion
can move to base? again problem with which item/resource is right one
- placeholder factory for everything
to enable consumerism, fun, etc.
- bug: research job becomes stuck




Technologies will be divided in groups (Food and drinks, Facilities, Security) which for now are just the same as the object construction categories, but this may change in the future. Each group has one or more tiers. In order to unlock a tier and be able to use its technologies (which for now are objects and production recipes) you first start the research for the tier you want to open up, then you will need to build research desks and enable the research job in one or more officers:



As long as they work in the desks, your officers will generate research points. Once the required amount is meet for the selected tier, it will be unlocked and you can pick a different tier from any group.




- new new game image


Max as drawn a new image for the new game dialog, the bad pun is my fault:




- central stock view window
system counts all item stacks every X time
shows icon+amount
clicking shows more info




Galactology finally features and inventory view. This is very different from V2, which had no in-station logistics. Instead this inventory is more of a statistical view of the item stacks in your station. In will also be the future home for global production controls.


- bug: alert "#f is going desperate now!"
fix ecs-name once for all
- bug: don't show planet tutorial too soon
- bug: planet tutorial remains after takeoff
- bug: sometimes the planet world view is not displayed
do explicit planetview reset from game, no other way to be 100% safe
- bug: try to fix phantom shiny rectangles for tutorial
make them node children
- remove autodoctor object, it's confusing players
- remove unused factories
- make vital loss slower
- w8 icon
- building things needs a list of materials, even if it's still a placeholder
- job sm now supports optional job-cost, deducted on transition to finalize
can fail if not enough credits
- introduce placeholder price for objects
- bug: officers stop building despite having mats and jobs to do
stop using BuysC on the item stacks
this also makes jobs more efficient overall, avoids dumbness
- bug: recycler has bad busy semantics, not playing well with others
very old code, had its job always enabled, even when not litter found
- increase extraction rate
- do not require AL for base objects
- investigate stuck ship with autopilot
order editing was confusing the wait timer
- bug: ecs-walk-to-entity must check for impossible targets
- mention resource layer in galaxy tutorial
- better placeholder visitors
center on a limited set of vitals
overall revise vital thresholds
set those vitals to low enough
- increase walk speed for officers
- add dummy resource stack on planet resource nodes to make them stand out more
- when unloading a ship, always try to find an existing stack
keep stack limits in mind
non busy non child non pallet


And last but not least another large amount of bugfixing and polish work towards the release day build.

As part of the final development weeks before we go public with our Early Access on Steam, I'm adding new user guidance oriented features to Galactology. Goals is a big one. There's not much time now remaining, so polishing and misc fixes are also steadily coming in.


- new gfx: pallet v3, recycler v3, storage area




Max keeps making new art for some V2 objects and to placeholder objects. Purely logistic objects now share a color scheme too.


- goals
a series of goals to give the user guidance
includes single page explanation
comes from Bernice or other advisors
has a ready? checker: displays it in the goals list
this allows to have locked, hidden goals to not overwhelm
has a done? checker: marks it as done and stops checking
problem: cannot use GUI timers, it must be active even when window is hidden
hook from game tick
throttle checking to not be too much with phasing plus a scheme vector for ids
there's a top-level reactive proxy for notifications
vis
a listing with selection
an area for the goal info
hook window to top toolbar button
add support for 0 to 1 progress
can replace done?
add support for reward
hardcoded to credits for now
add some counter hooks
production (total, by resource, by resource kind tag)
robots production (total, by model-name)
build object (plus some categorization)
needs model-name in V2 stuff for proper counting, keep in mind when doing goals
tiles built
resource collection on-planet (as opposed to cargo delivery)
recycling (plus some categorization, incl corpse)
clean
vital satisfaction
dances
docked ships (both visitors and officers)
camera detected
scanner detected
visitor received
repair
cargo unload
doctor treatment
served drinks by bartender
visited planet (by level, by category)
killed enemy (by civ)
reached rep level with X civ
job change
recruited
opened system
resource consumption (vitals, jobs, consumerism)
add some goals
cook/make drinks
build robot
build some important objects
Logistics basics: build one pallet, one storage area and a recycler
Security basics: one ceiling camera and one security door
Living basics: build 3 beds and a Hygienizer 3000
Factory basics: build a chemical workshop, a metal press and a medical workshop
Starter hospital: build a hospital bed, a meds dispenser and make at least 10 pills
Dance club: build a bar, 3 bar tables, and 2 dance floors
Decorations: build 10 decorations
generic small/med/big station goals (n objects plus n tiles)
build embassy
build recruitment center
build extractors
extract resource planet by tag (100 of each)
fill ship slots
recycle/r.corpses/clean
basic vitals satisfied
dancing
docked ships
visitors 3t
repair
cargo unload 3t
10 patients
42 drinks
land on planets 4t
killed enemies 3t
job change
recruitment
open star system
consumerism
- add info alert when a new goal is made ready
only when it is not a default ready one
- stacked alert display
- do not use pointy popup bg for alerts
- tutorial should point to goals
"If you are done with tutorials check the Goals in the top toolbar" in menu
- manual claim for completed rewards
- shine in gold the goals button when a goal is completed
- icons for goal titles


Tutorials can only go so far in teaching the game to users. They are time intensive to write, can break depending on the UI instrumentation, are at risk of being outdated (very important when the game is in EA), etc. For this reason an additional layer of interactive guidance is required, and Galactology now features Goals:



Goals are small objectives given to the player, that can also award some small reward once they are completed. The motivation of Goals is to make the user explore the UI and game systems on their own, after they have been introduced to them by the tutorials. Goals will have them clicking on every screen of the game and interacting with many of the tools. Some Goals are available from the first second of a new game, but some others are unlocked as the game advances.



Implementing Goals also required implementing a large number of event counters. These counters will also be used for achievements and statistics in the future. There's approximately 40 counters and 50 goals in the game right now, with more to come as new systems are implemented.


- add tooltip to all shell menu bar buttons
- fix corner cases for ships with all dead officers
a ship with 0 crew can only travel to home, no other path is possible
make sure autopilot respects that too
- add default 10m wait for new home orders
- job-warning-component to display stock failures and similar
lack of resources, waiting for worker, etc.
generic on job-sm, anybody can display them
display from inside existing panels (stock, factory), more relevant this way
- new icons for some tools
- fix planet tutorial


Another week, another batch of fixes, including non-obvious ones like what to do with a dead crew. Many more small fixes remain to be chased in the next four weeks.

After nine months of development we've finally announced how we are going to release V3: it's now a new game called The Spatials: Galactology. You can check our announcement for more details and the trailer in youtube.

And now for the development update for the past week! This is the current post for the ongoing Galactology development log. You can check the archive here.

There's a new tutorial system, implemented from scratch as an independent core game mod:



Unlike the V2 tutorial, this new system is based monitoring all interaction of the user both with the GUI and the game world. This allows for detection of construction, production, or any other gameplay effect. This will enable much better tutorials.

Initial tutorials were also implemented for the station, the galaxy and planets. Only the station tutorial is in a relatively advanced state, with the other two only covering the basics to form a working resource chain.

Galactology now supports flood fill areas:



It's a staple of many sim games to define areas with some kind of brush, for many gameplay reasons. I was avoiding this sort of functionality since it seemed very complicated for our game, given that the floor tool was already doing the same thing. So it dawned on me, why not allow common floors and rooms to serve such a function? Thus the flood fill system was born. Any object with FloodFillComponent (it's done in C++) will keep an updated set of tile coordinates that are adjacent to it and that share the same floor kind, up to the limits of the room.

It's now possible to build new systems on top of this foundation. And the first one is storage areas:



Galactology will now support two kinds of storage: stock controlled storage has been implemented for months and it allows for very precise orders. You can pick one single resource and then give a max and min amount to keep on stock, and select options for what are its valid sources (and this may be made more complicated in the future, allowing to pinpoint a single object as the source). Many objects keep its internal stock controlled using this system.

But, what happens when a ship unloads a large amount of varied cargo in your station? It can be very cumbersome to micromanage a pallet object for each kind of resource. Enter storage areas. A storage controller uses the flood fill system to declare a room as valid for storage. It also allows to select the subset of resources allowed in the room, so you can have diferent areas for different resources. It has not stock control, which will still a feature that requires pallets. This system is much more similar to how storage works in other sims, compared to stock control pallets.