Release notes here.
The way that the AI sneaks around has some bugfixes and works better now, and the Hunter fleet should be a lot stronger because of the AI knowing better when to retreat. AIs choosing to sneak past your forces and harass you should now be more effective, too. And the nanocaust should do a lot better of a job of dispatching its units. Thanks to Badger for all of these changes.
Puffin also made some tweaks to things that make transports slightly better, though there’s more I need to do directly on that. And he also made the Fusion Bombers really really a lot more effective in their targeting and also more powerful in general. They’re now a lot better without you having to micro them.
On my end, I put an end to fixed-int math, which fixes several immediate bugs such as ships circling other ships when they were supposed to linearly kite, or ships getting stuck on forcefields. These were a couple of bugs that I just couldn’t figure out a graceful solution to, no matter how long I stared at them over the last half year or so. I also had been unable to figure out a graceful way around some obvious multiplayer desyncs that I knew were going to be persistently arising; that is part of why I haven’t implemented multiplayer yet.
Yesterday I finally had an insight, which is partially detailed in the link above, about a way to simply auto-repair desyncs in this game and thus solve all of these problems at once. Part of the reason this fixes anything in single player is that it lets us stop using fixed-int math and use floating point math instead. Those bits are now in place. The actual auto-repair of desyncs in multiplayer is something that I still have to code, but it should be under a week of work when the time comes for that, and it’s certainly less than the months of chasing desyncs that was otherwise going to happen.
This is a pretty big deal, because it will allow for multiplayer sooner than later — no I still don’t have a timeline, though, just yet — and it also lets us simply brush away some of the more inscrutable bugs that were due to threading issues, fixed-int precision problems, or the like. Definitely a case of working smarter rather than harder, but it’s only possible because of a long laundry list of other architectural choices and flexibilities that this game has thanks to the last couple of years of work. So if we’d thought of this a year or two ago, in an abstract sense, it still wouldn’t have seemed feasible because the architectural constraints of most games just make this infeasible. But because of the multi-layered, pooled nature of the current game, suddenly I realized that this was possible.
For those who missed the recent news, I am fully back at work now – yay! If you were wondering what was up, I recently put together a video explanation of what happened. I don’t go into a lot of detail, for privacy reasons, but there’s enough there to get the important pieces across. Anyway, I’m back now and very happy about that. Actually pretty happy in general, these days, which is good.
Continual thanks to Badger, Puffin, and Quinn for having held down the fort while I was away.
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 choose most_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 our new Steam Developer 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
