Release noteshere. Reminder: to play the beta, you MUST go into your Steam properties for the game, go under the Betas tab, and choose the "current_beta" option. Otherwise you're going to be stuck on the pre-fleets version of the game. If you don't know what I'm talking about regarding fleets, then reading this link is a really good thing to do or you are likely to be mighty confused. So what's new in this build? This is obviously an incremental one, headed towards the non-beta full release of 0.900 that we're aiming at in the next... weeks? That timeframe is unclear, and will be based on testing feedback, which has been rolling in well so far; but there will be loads of incremental beta releases during this period. Anyway, what's new:

• A couple of minor lobby improvements, but nothing super major.
• There are now some lobby options that can be changed during gameplay, and the performance options (stacking is the only thing there right now) have moved to that section. This prepares us for multiplayer staying in sync down the line. All the other settings (not lobby options) are player-specific and local-only, versus the lobby options stuff is shared across the entire galaxy. So this is big groundwork for later stuff. Thanks to Badger for suggesting.
• A variety of improvements have been made to the selected units / fleets window, including having it show selected fleets instead of individual units when you've selected an entire fleet. This is pretty useful for a lot of reasons.
• AI units were being aggro'd from way too far away when your ships were just sitting there innocently, and that now both defaults to a (vastly) lower value and also is something you can customize in the lobby options.
• Also AI units were being aggro'd even by your cloaked units, which is fixed. So between this and the prior change, there's a ton of deepstriking you can now do. Thanks to Puffin for figuring out these last two ones in terms of what was wrong.
• Fixed a bug where on the galaxy map (and in the lobby) it would often seem to click the wrong planet if you were zoomed out a lot in particular. Thanks to WeaponMaster for noticing that this was because there were some collision hitboxes we were leaving turned on for icons of "important ships at the planet." So that should all feelway better, now.
• And then command stations no longer are able to be exploited to keep things like beam cannons from your military command station after transforming it to an economic one.
• Then fixed some other visual glitches and oddities, including a variety centering around the Zenith Trader.
• Side story: I keep working on the fleet management screen on paper and then tossing it out, because it's really complicated in that it can be different between different types of fleets, and I'm not sure how many things we might want to add to this screen in the future in general, which makes it hard to settle on a design. I've decided today that I'm going to use a settings-screen-like approach with categories and such, but that is all code-driven, which is kind of a cross between the map tab left sidebar in the lobby, and the newin-game galaxy-wideoptions screen that I implemented today. The work that has gone into the lobby has given me a big advantage on doing those sort of interfaces super quickly, turns out, so that seems like a reasonable way to design this screen and then it will also be kind of infinitely extensible.
• So the moral of the side story is that I think I can finally stop messing around on paper with the fleet management screen and actually implement that thing without worrying about how I'm hemming myself in (because I won't be). In some ways it's slightly less elegant than I was planning, but it is definitely going to be more usable, which is the bigger thing to me. And vastly quicker to implement. It can always be reworked later if need be, I figure, but this would be a great place to start. It's a relief to have that mechanic figured out.

More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-06-04 19:48:55 CET ] [ Original post ]