





🌟 Special thanks to our amazing supporters:
✨ $10 Tier: [Geeks Love Detail]
🌈 $5 Tier: [Arch Toasty][Benedikt][David Martínez Martí]
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/
3.13 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)..
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.
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.
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:
3.12 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.
3.12 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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:
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.
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 year, new version almost ready! Work progressed into the main 3.10 feature, planetary invasions, plus some smaller enhacements.
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.
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.
For the past two weeks work has been focused on the new commerce civ import/export (AKA sell/buy) feature in 3.9.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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...
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.
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:
- remove planet storage limit
- display current target for selected entity, like it is done for walk target
add actual target icon
- remove per-squad-member aggressor action in the bar
- add "set forced target" action
- fix: manual target is lost even while alive
- fix: manual target for healing is a bad idea, the AI is much better, ignore it
- add right click action for setting target too
- restore walk button on toolbar
- remove auto/manual control from aggressor panel
- change the border in the squad buttons to line or corners, to reflect its selection status
- idea: while 2 or more squad members are selected do not display normal right panel
- put active item icon and cooldown display on top of squad selector button
display only while in cooldown
- when in combat mode
officers in squad always display hp bar
display small swords icon next to hp bar
- to any fear-capable entity, add the ability to stop walking when an enemy is sighted
with prio between combat mode busy and aggressor SM busy
just a one-time stop action, not a busy state
this makes the AI less suicidal, and healers don't go so much into a melee
- add some scrolling icons when interrupted due to enemies or when starting combat
- when setting a target, if the entity is not compatible (healer -> enemy), do a nearby walk
with the previous system it will stop because of enemy sighting, but still accompany their fighter friends
- fix: don't waste teleporter cooldown when the target is nonwalkable
- fix: restore melee-simple
- fix: if a factory breaks while an item stack is busy with it, the stack remains busy
patch the existing missing busy catcher to also use the item busy ID
if it's the job sm ID, and the subj busy ID is NOT job SM ID, then remove busy
make the job sm set the proper IDs on busy stacks
- fix: repair can pick an unwalkable position for work area
- replace use of dots as checkmarks with a proper checkmark
in the job matrix
in the filter for storage area
- dont display item categories in storage area filter
- factory recipe selector should be a picker list
in manual order: combo list
in filter for global production: checklist
in ship recipe selector
- introduce high prio busy walk for manual walk orders
higher than flee
- display item list for officers in crew picker for ships
- add new resources
- add new objects images
- fix: stale corpses being eternally carried by officers
use busy aspect checking for the parent
- hospitality tech tree
buildings
research tiers
decors
- change "bartender" to "hospitality"
- put all room unlocks in facilities tree, for now
- fix: production tutorial is broken
- fix: asteroids still are being hardcoded to one gray shade for home
- make sure enemies are using the earlier aggressor target semantics
now they are pursuing targets to the other end of the map
- cancel forced targets on walk and teleports
- add object use purchasing
hygiene: use soap price, already there
fun: use item price
and a fixed price for dance floor
- add fixed object vital factors
fun: dancefloor is hardcoded, for now
sleep: vital-sleep-step for object model, set in component in finalize-bed, sm takes it
- normalize job xp based on duration
30s is 1 xp, with a min of 1xp
- custom mechanic: hotel
entities have can have sleep vital, and refuse to use some beds but not others
entities can get the need to make a booking at an hotel reception
an hotel reception sells bookings, needs to be staffed first, like the bar
after buying a booking, the entity is entitled to use beds of the right category
- fix: xp scaling is wrong, too high
- fix: anchor jobs for tending desks should wait for ReadyComponent on parent
- refactor "bartender" job logic and anchor entity to be used by other systems
test with pre-v3.5 hospital bed logic first
support
continuous standing (bar, reception)
spot standing (doctor jobs)
custom job data (duration, resources, comp, etc)
custom posing
custom parent aspects for job validation
generic presence component
- object building should also display needed empty tiles around an object, and complain when they are not
default tile by peeking into the object settings
anchor: prop for other objecs
fix: restore immediate floodfill area draw
- full disease system
different disease have different effects on entities
vomiting
interruption: forced sleep
interruption: dizzy
gigantism
shrinkage
color change
mutant reskin
slowpox
each disease has a checklist of treatments to be performed, in order
generic vital fullfill system that can delegate to right SM and their data, based on the disease checklist
generic registry for medical objects
once the checklist is at the end, the entity is cured
- fix: correct selection reticle for scaled entities
- inspector for disease checklist
- introduce doctor desk (placeholder gfx)
desk job for officers
must have officer present
- re-introduce hospital bed for resting and treatment
using the new tender system
tender consumes pills
- fix doctor desk anchors
- fix hospital bed anchors
- add tender job bias support
- introduce xray
pose patient as idle
once a patient is on one side, a standing job opens for officers
- introduce analyzer
same as xray
- introduce surgery pod
same as patient bed, but requires organs for doctor job
- introduce regenerator pod
same as a shower, but requires bionanites stock
- add tint layer for cryopod
- temp recipes and factory for new medical and hygiene products
- helper to decide if a disease can be applied given the tech level
- patch and enable random officer disease system to consider tech level
- hygiene area of new health tech tree
properly model objects
- restore research tiers for medical and hygiene objects
- commercial tech tree
gfx
object models
add products to shops
product recipes
add recipes to factories
research tiers
- add missing soap tier
- use new checklist style for shopping list
- entertaiment tech tree
gfx
divide fun into more vitals
fun, gambling, inebriation, knowledge, dancing
object models
add products to shops
refine systems and makers for each object
tavernbar: transition to inebriation
tavern table: for inebriation
barbar: transition to inebriation
disco table: for inebriation
holo1: for knowledge
holo2: for knowledge
library table: for knowledge
comics
book-shelf
dancefloor: for dancing
jukebox: dance in front, for dancing
gogobot: dance in 4 sides, independent, all must trigger action pose, for dancing
pinball: for fun
arcade: for fun
excessivemachine: for fun
photobooth: verify angles, for fun
changemachine: shop for casino coins
slotmachine: for gambling
blackjack: needs croupier, for gambling
- entertaiment tech tree
roulette: 3 sides like gogobot, plus croupier, for gambling
billiard: 2 anchors for vitals, independent, both must trigger action pose, for fun
product recipes
product factors and prices
add recipes to factories
research tiers
- add some randomness to vital obj selection
- add prices for medical object use
- show full object info in description panel
- increase social vital gains
- visitor archetype model
pick a few vitals or systems
name plus short description
research dependencies
min civ rep
archetypes
Researcher
Shopper
Sick
Bored
Wasted
Tired
Gourmet
Party animal
Gambler
- update visitor maker to use archetypes
check research dependencies and civ reputation
diseases must be curable by unlocked tech
goods must be purchasable by unlocked tech
disable some harsh negative consequences for low vitals in visitors
- display visitor archetype in vitals inspector
- opinion vital and system
update based on avgs of visitor archetype vitals and systems
expectation mechanic
the more civ rep, the more expectations
ui on archetype block
High expectations (35% meet)
Reputation hit on departing: -15
hook rep deltas when visitor leaves
- move chemical factory as soap factory to health tech
- use placeholder metal press for fuel cells
- bring back vital progression tied to officer promotion
- fix: update officer power stats on spec promotion
- fix: diseases not being applied
- fix: visitor archetypes with no extra vitals not being handled correctly
- fix: wrong var in consumerist SM
- enable PoseAnglesCache
- fix: unlock item pallet at right moment
- slow down doctor xp progression
- increase tourist ship frequency, amount of tourists
- add missing decorations in hospitality: wardrove, wardrove02, wardrove03
- fix: tending job for hotel desk was not created
- fix: rotation errors
comic library
book libary
motel desk
hotel desk
- fix: add some missing strings
- fix: billiard is not working
missing maker call
check for non-stock objects when applying vital delta for product in vital SM
- ease up min vital thresholds for visitors
- different vital thresholds for visitors and officers for all vitals
- fix: non ascii renamed officers are not serialized properly
- fix: tavern bars had wrong hints
- make inventory window not display locked products, unless some stock already exists (or are unlocked)
- inventory min stock UI should be more visible
- station: prices for each object in finalized trees
- set initial cash to 150K
- fix: set mead as default stock for tavern
- add homelydivisor to dinner tier
- add classydivisor to bistro tier
- increase req xp for doctors and tenders
- fix: add proper owner hint for job transport sm items
- leak: while on pause the mover system creates useless move objects
disable pause mode for mover system
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.
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.
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.
A new major build of The Spatials: Galactology is now available! The main highlights for this build are:
- add richer popups for research tree
recipes, objects and floors have full panel info equivalent
- display mini recipe in info panel for products
separate from basic info to not be reduntant in research screen
- display mini "ingredient of" in info panel for resources
just list of icons for recipes
- update planet editor mod
- add all sprites for new civs
- hide walls should be persisting in the game model
- add build info text line about object solid mode
- add info text and image to pallet build info panel
- fix storage area once for all
stronger buildable check
on building area, refuses if room is not empty
for every other object building attempt (!) refuses if area is present
- hide aesthetics bar
- create new civ rules
- scale planet buildings to planet level (prev was only for enemies)
- auto scale station object hp based on unlocked invader level, plus some auto factoring of the kind of object
add manual factors for doors and similar
- auto scale station turret attack power based on invader tech level
- fix: interrupted vital objects do not reset pose to idle
- plain bed must be listed before officer bed
- building job and out of money keeps officers becoming busy for no reason
fix job sm to not go into wait-for-worker when missing money
- viz in galaxy for planets visited by autopilot
show icon in planets visited by autopilots
- more icon and progress vis on top of factories
feedback for % work progress, bar on top of object
icon with job warning
- spawn some kind of marker with the "incoming raiders" warning to indicate the area of arrival, 1m in advance
do a big circle with some random offset to avoid cheesing with floor deletion
- add hovering pirate etc shuttle over the spot where invaders spawn
enter and exit animations
- test drops on death on station (no problem with pickup or ship transports)
- item drops and pickup on planets
store metas in ship
on ship station arrival dump metas as new items
looter system for officers in planet
- show looted items in bridge stock view
- ship bridge placeholder job should not display warning icons
- add goal and counters for looting
- remove shower demands from master specs
- remove in-shop and in-storage components from resource stack when dismantling any pallet like object
re-enable passive shop and storage marking system
- item forge: masters with high xp can add random extra bonus to item
also change meta name
chance is factored over XP ramp past master level
Rare: +1 level bump for bonus, 15% max chance
Epic: +2 level bump for bonus, 5% max chance
Legendary: +3 level bump for bonus, 2% max chance
Powerful: +dmg, Surgical: +healing - don't add those to items that doesn't make sense to
Strong: +hp
add bonus on top of existing bonus for items that already have it
- alerts revamp: model
focus
must support checks for liveness
any entity from any world (also support planets)
position on a world
officer for staff
ship for bridge
planet
galaxy
introduce internal IDs for ships and officers (sigh)
icon: any frame or any officer id
flags for enabling minimize and trashing
keep existing flags for read, etc.
- alerts revamp: UI
update report log
icon with subject
clickable popup to focus
timer is prop to text size
minimize button to keep around in alert bar
icon alert bar shows latest alerts
trash button to remove from alert bar
- change alert popup display system
only one alert is ever displayed
icons for pending messages get an icon to indicate it
user can interact any time and override the displayed popup
each message gets a display time then moves away to display the next pending one
- more alerts
final code for autodeletion, respect the canTrash flag
keep just latest 10 alerts any required fixed alerts, independent of MAX_ALERTS
right click alert bar icon to delete it
check throttling for some alerts (going crazy, strike, demands)
add cursor rect for open alert popup over its icon in the bar
- fix: highlighted alert icons look bad
use a simple dot instead
- fix: panning from system to system is introducing artifacts
- items: introduce active items with crowd control power
- items: unify all bonus powers under a "power" stat
- items: classes can now factor over the bonus power
medics: extra power to healing
strategist, engineer: extra power to damage
diplomat: extra better CC power rolls
scientist: extra power to absorb
think about enemies too
pick a base bonus based on carried active item
- add factor and base bonus to aggressor info panel
- add spec factor bonus to staff screen
- fix equip matrix filter
- new standarized proc "carriers" for combat
Direct
affect a single target directly
Beam
point to a target or point then produce a ray that can hit anything between it and the target
Instant circle area
Centered on a target or point, affect everything inside its area
Projectile
an entity is spawned and moves in a direction until it hits something, or some time passes
Explosive projectile
same as projectile but does a circle area on hit, instead of single target
Reactive circle
a circle is put on a point or target, then ticks a proc fast, with a duration, start radius, end radius
procs are called at random for entity hits
Reactive projectile
same as explosive, but the circle is held for N seconds
- compose functions for sounds and sprites
- new standarized hit procs for damage and healing
proc is passed reason of call: hit with map, hit with entity, timeout
- port all existing items to the new proc system
test and debug
- new crowd control procs and items
add cc proc
support various kinds of cc
applied based on power formula roll vs max hp
stun attack items
- final attack selection for active items
- fix: after new combat changes, officer attacks and healings do not have any effect
- review random picker for enemy npcs for new items
- fix: sleep stun should work for all entities
- new shield items and mechanic
vis: hemisphere dome of horizontal lines
model: on every hit, a point query is performed to catch any friendly shield
then decrease delta from shield hp until it goes 0 or less, then destroy
also destroy on timeout
introduce optional delta proc for vitals
- bump save version
- wider squad bar buttons with hp bars
- fix: dont call hit proc on healing (blood)
- per-system civ alien ships
one potential ship per system
n equal to systems, so max 1 ship per system, goes nice with progression
model
declare all civ ships
add ship name to civ model
add shuttle name to civ model
fleet has separate set for civ ships
galaxy view iterates over both, disables most interactions for civ ships
- docking for visitors
"waiting for a free dock" concept
ships come from friendly systems by themselves and park in home
consider all home parked npc ships, visitor travel ship state must be VISITOR_SHIP_WAITING_DOCK
never use central teleporter
only use built docks
if all are in use, it waits parked for a max of X minutes
use correct shuttle for the ship civ
- fix: errors on notifications for sneakers and others
- fix: hit proc is randomly firing for blueprint objects
- fix: civ ships should not be clickable in any way
- fix invasion event: do it visitor ship based, with warnings
dont do it in the system tick, keep the central event control for this, and use a helper to find a system
use faster ship
so only can come from hostile systems
base invader level on tech unlock level, not highest planet level
divide event in two halves, so the raid event is independent from the ship launching event
- fix sneaker event: if no hostile systems are open, do not enable
and make sure aggressor civ matches a civ with open systems
- fix impostor event: if no hostile systems are open, do not enable
and make sure aggressor civ matches a civ with open systems
- proper rep deltas and display from killing enemies
- tourist deaths should carry large rep loses
- sync planet constructions with greatly increased rates
for all involved models (build, rep, storage, etc)
- fix: proper visitor ship timings
- tourism: advert buildings (1 per planet) makes visitor ship cycle go faster for their system, up to 3x
- system view with civ filter should display icon for embassy, recruitment and ads objects
- diplomacy system: delta+ for hostile
allow embassies buildable on hostile, no margin area
make them invulnerable
ask for them to be built near any town
also for recruit and ads objs, but only with friendly towns
- fix: stop planet enemies from attacking fauna, stop fauna from attacking enemies
- galaxy view filter to display all ships or only player ships
with save game persistence
- double points gained from research, reduce xp tiers a bit
- add hp power factor to all officer specs, including redshirts, for balance vs npc
- dont spawn fauna in tutoland
- update vis for any item stacks after obj destruction
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.
This past week was devoted to smaller system-level features, and some non-development tasks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
- #% 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
[ 2016-08-02 20:34:30 CET ] [ Original post ]
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.
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/
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.
[ 6084 ]
[ 1345 ]
[ 4067 ]