Wow, I keep thinking that we’re getting close to being out of beta, and then more strange stuff pops up. Thank you so much to everyone testing on the beta branch, because this really helps us to make sure things are as clean as possible when we come back off this branch.
To that end, there are two major fixes in this build that should solve a lot of issues.
First of all, the way that entities (ships, etc) are centrally tracked has been reworked a fair bit. This should prevent some of the truly bizarre issues we were seeing lately such as your units suddenly belonging to the AI, or vice-versa. Worst case, it will actually give an error message and let us know what’s up, rather than just silently robbing you or gifting you.
Secondly, there’s a lot more thread protection in there to prevent threads from overrunning themselves. I suspect that this was the root cause of a ton of issues here. Badger had figured out a way to prevent that, and applied that to some of the short-term planning threads with success, and so now this is applied everywhere throughout the game. Knock on wood, that should solve crashes and a whole bunch of other random stuff that was fairly recent in appearance.
In multiplayer, the pings now have a notification, which is a pretty major quality of life improvement. There are some other improvements to how flagships show up if they have both a control group number and an overlay (previously it just showed the overlay). ARSes also give variable numbers of units (depending on the ARS), which is quite fun and interesting.
The Lost Humans mod continues to gain more updates from StarKelp, and includes some things like a Scourge Lab that can appear, Construction Convoys, and its own galaxy map filter.
Behind the scenes, I’ve been working on artwork for DLC3, the latent DLC2 art, and the new DLC1 art (for new features coming to DLC1), as well as some replacement art for the base game in places where I feel like the art just needs some improvement. All in all, I have… 325 unique pieces of art to do for that, turns out. So… yeah. That’s going to be a few months, since I’m going to be needing to also work on actual bugs and features and so on. It took me a day and a half just to get the list and the prep work done. DLC3 is slated for late April at this point, largely because of this big list of things.
That said, as has been happening, there will be plenty of ongoing updates, including art drops and code and balance and so on. So there will be plenty happening between now and DLC3 releasing.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
