AI War 2
5.591 Exception Tidying
This one is various bits of tidying and mod updates.
Enjoy!
Heart of the Machine private testing will resume in 1-2 weeks! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ Feel free to go to our discord https://discord.gg/arcengames and post here: End of Feb update on testing if you're interested in being a part of one of the phases of testing in the future. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5
5.590 Informative Quickstarts
This one adds more tweaks to the Sidekicks mod, and also adds more information on the quickstarts screen. It also fixes a regression in the prior build where the savegame folders were not in the most-recently-used order.
Enjoy!
Heart of the Machine private testing will resume in about 2 weeks! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ Feel free to go to our discord https://discord.gg/arcengames and post here: End of Feb update on testing if you're interested in being a part of one of the phases of testing in the future. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5
5.587 Deguardianing
This is a small one that is basically a dewormer but for giant guardian spacecraft. A fix in the prior build to a 5-year-old bug caused massive shifts in balance that were unintended. Fixes are nice, but giant shifts in balance are not; aside from opening the floodgates to too many guardians, the game balance was just as desired without the fix, so we simply reverted it. In some respects not my preferred solution, but at the same time with a game this complex, we would have been chasing unintended consequences to AI types for months. So in this case, a particular bug which is bad math is actually working as intended. Hmm.
There are also a few tweaks to the Sidekicks mod.
Enjoy!
Heart of the Machine private testing will resume sometime in March! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ Feel free to go to our discord https://discord.gg/arcengames and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of one of the phases of testing in the future. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5
5.586 More Polish
This is another small one, mostly bugfixes. This also includes several mods like Classic Fusion becoming functional again. And more updates to Sidekicks.
Enjoy!
Heart of the Machine private testing will resume sometime in March! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ Feel free to go to our discord https://discord.gg/arcengames and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of one of the phases of testing in the future. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5
5.585 Sidekick Updates
This is a pretty small one, with mainly updates to the Sidekicks mod, by Badger.
This also suppresses an occasional error about memory leaks that is very much a false positive (it usually is indicative of a thread being a bit slow, not an actual memory leak). Rather than being up in your face with a scary message about what seems to be a major bug, it just logs a silent warning instead. This really only is a tool for modders; if they see a log flooded with those, then they should know they are doing something wrong and be able to fix whatever their issue is. But regular players, often not even using mods, would occasionally get one or two of these and think there was a much larger problem, when in reality it was just kind of a burp of one background thread being a bit slower to give something back than ideally is the case.
The network improvements from the prior build are reportedly really helping the game a lot in multiplayer, so I'm very glad to hear that.
Enjoy!
Regarding Heart of the Machine, if you've been following our discord, then you know that the testing on that got pushed back some. Testing will likely resume in March. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ It's really nice to be able to give the game the amount of development time it truly deserves, but thanks for your patience with the repeated delays on it. Feel free to go to our discord https://discord.gg/arcengames and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of one of the phases of testing in the future. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5
5.583 MP Hardening
This one has some mod updates to the Sidekicks mod, and then it also solves some issues that could occur in multiplayer.
Most notably, this makes it so that doing a resync in the middle of an MP game no longer causes a rash of spurious errors, with an additional risk of the game crashing. Secondarily, it hardens some methods against potential exception in general during regular partial syncs on MP clients.
Overall I would not expect this to be a panacea for MP, but every time a full sync is done, things generally clean up nicely. And a lot of the things that cause a client to diverge are based around errors, so that also helps from the other end.
Beyond that, why exactly sometimes clients get into a strange mode that is only fixed with a resync is a mystery to us. It's not something we can easily replicate with two players, as it pretty much always works perfectly for us that way -- but then some players run into problems quickly with only two players, even on LANs. The larger the game, and the further apart people are, the more likely problems seem to be -- usually. That's what is so frustrating about those particular MP gremlins, is that not only can we not reliably reproduce them at all, but the conditions others are experiencing to cause it are really varied. That is deeply frustrating.
So the improvements in this build should help ease that substantially, and if you're using auto-resync then that should be way cleaner in particular. But as a perfect solution for the issues that folks still run into more than I had realized, I don't think that's there. If you are playing multiplayer and you run into outright exceptions rather than strange behavior, always do send those to us, though -- that really helps, since those are things where we can tangibly fix something that is a contributor.
Thanks for reading.
Regarding Heart of the Machine, if you've been following our discord, then you know that the testing on that got pushed back some. Testing will likely resume in March. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ It's really nice to be able to give the game the amount of development time it truly deserves, but thanks for your patience with the repeated delays on it. Feel free to go to our discord https://discord.gg/arcengames and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of one of the phases of testing in the future. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5
5.582 Tuning
This has some tweaks and tuning in general, and then updates to a bunch of mods.
This also removes a folder called MSBuild, which was only useful to modders, and which was being (erroneously) flagged by Malwarebytes as a trojan. Since this was consistently annoying and alarming a number of people, that's removed and modders can just download it from our discord. A text file is there instead, with instructions for how to find it for the few people who need it.
Steam is not always great about removing files, so if it's still there for you, and you care, then look in the ReliableDLLStorage folder in your game install folder, and just delete the MSBuild subfolder. It won't come back after you delete it, but steam should ideally delete it for you. Leaving it in place also will be fine, as it's not a harmful folder and never was. But if it's being wrongly flagged by your antivirus, and that bugs you, go ahead and get rid of it.
Enjoy!
In other news! Our first console release has happened. Yesterday, Starward Rogue launched on the XBox, Playstation, and Nintendo Switch platforms. Very exciting! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pldE6CJGkmc
Regarding Heart of the Machine, if you've been following our discord, then you know that the testing on that got pushed back some. Testing did not start in late December, but instead will be a February or March thing. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ It's really nice to be able to give the game the amount of development time it truly deserves, but thanks for your patience with the repeated delays on it. Feel free to go to our discord https://discord.gg/arcengames and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of one of the phases of testing in the future. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5
Minor patch to address an issue with M3 macs.
5.581 Mod Updates
This one is mostly focused on some updates to mods, including fixing the AMU mod so that it no longer errors on start. It also tweaks a couple of minor text things in the main game to make them more clear.
Enjoy!
In other news! Been talking about Heart of the Machine for a year and a half now, and it's very close to opening back up for alpha testers again. That will start in the week after Christmas, for those who are interested. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ Essentially it's on the border between alpha and beta there, because the bulk of the art and core mechanics and code are complete, but it's a matter of actually fleshing out content on the systems that are now in place. If you have time in that timespan, and that style of testing seems interesting to you, please do sign up. Feel free to go to our discord https://discord.gg/arcengames and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of either this earlier stage of things, or a later phase. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5
5.580 Curve League
This one has quite a long laundry list of small and midsize tweaks, fixes, and changes. Primary thanks to Dismiss, but also SirLimbo and Arphar for a variety of the items.
There are a number of new experimental features that you can opt into if you're interested (see link for details), as well as updates to several of the included mods.
Enjoy!
You can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine! Steam page is very out of date, but will have updates in the next few months. You can see more sneak peeks of things on our discord in the meantime, if you want! The game will be launching in 2024. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll be resuming having alpha testers before the end of this year; the game has gone through a huge amount of growth and changes, and I can't wait to show that off to more folks. Feel free to go to our discord https://discord.gg/arcengames and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of either the early alpha or a later phase. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5