• Checkpoints everywhere

  
  
  You now have checkpoints in both Intruder and Arrival. When Saving your progress pops up in the top left corner, you’ve hit a checkpoint. If you EXIT TO DESKTOP and later return to the game, select CONTINUE from the game menu and you’ll continue from the last checkpoint you achieved. Checkpoints add major replay value because you no longer have to replay 2 - 3 hours just to get to a point where you’d like to do something different. There are checkpoints every 3 objects in Intruder and 4 checkpoints in Arrival. Bot Colony poses special checkpoint challenges: everything you did and said is saved, if you had a PDA or a briefcase – you’ll have them after the checkpoint, the messages you received on your PDA will be there after you return, your gameplay history will survive the checkpoint. With checkpoints you’ll be able to explore alternatives, and dive deeper into the game without losing your progress.
  Known problem: Please DON’T use EXIT TO MAIN MENU – it has problems! Always EXIT TO DESKTOP.
  
  

• More background story in Arrival

  
  
  You can now explore the story of what happened in the Airport before you landed, and AFTER you landed (did you notice the bald guy?). Remember that you can always ask “What day is today?” and “What time is it?” to get an idea about what happened when. You can now explore the background to the events that take place in Airport, and what led to the situation you find yourself in. Right now you can explore the story using time questions, so a robot who overheard conversations can tell you what it heard. Later, you’ll be able to explore by asking a robot what it observed a particular human character do or say (for now, you’d need to refer to characters precisely, like ‘what did the woman with the red hair and blue jeans say?’; we obviously need to make that less precise to access this feature).
  
  

• Robot Personalities

  
  
  In their quest to ‘do as people do’ (read the book:) robots now have personalities. They’re so eager to please humans that they deviated from standard operating protocol (it’s up to you to find out when and how!). Find out more about Cindy, Tina, Mike, Mary and Joanna from their colleagues (co-bots).
  
  

• Big Brother

  
  
  You can also ask a robot “When did you first see me?”, “What did I say then?”, or “How do you know?” (about the answer it just gave you), and you’ll realize that they observed YOU and they remember where you were and what you said when. You can also find out about the conversations they overheard passengers in the airport have, prior to your arrival. It’s Big Brother unleashed, a unique experience that makes you appreciate where our connected world might end up! Coming: Two new achievements for exploring the Arrival background story in a coming upgrade.
  
  

• Robots remember.

  
  
  With the checkpoints, we put in a personalization feature: you can tell a robot whatever you like, and ask questions to test it remembers after a checkpoint (so after you exited the game). We didn’t make this really persistent (meaning - between games), but we will if you give us some feedback about what you’d like to see (we want to see some engagement from you first). For example, we could get Miki or Jimmy (or any favorite robot) to remind you to do things outside the game, keep track of your priorities, etc. This robot could become your assistant if you'll want it to. FYI, our robots are already very good at banking through voice, see www.northsideinc.com, We're now using the same NLU pipeline for Bot Colony and serious applications - that's why this upgrade took longer.
  
  

• Microsoft Cognitive LUIS Speech-to-text

  
  
  We did massive work to improve the speech-to-text feature: remember, hit Enter, start speaking when the mic icon shows it’s listening, then hit Enter again to signal that you’ve checked the text in the textbox and it can be processed. If there’s a mistake, fix it with the keyboard. We’ve disabled speech-to-text when the robot is speaking, so the sound from the headphones doesn’t get into the input. However, if you hit Enter while a robot speaks, you’ll cut him off. We’ve eliminated most of the crashes occurring during speech-to-text (to make it 100% we’ll need to replace Scaleform libraries and we’re waiting for the source code). If it crashes, remember that checkpoints work, so you won’t lose much.
  
  Finally, if you like the game, please Recommend it on the Bot Colony store page. We’re still shy of 50 reviews that we need to be found more easily in the store. Thank you!
  

• Checkpoints everywhere

  
  
  You now have checkpoints in both Intruder and Arrival. When Saving your progress pops up in the top left corner, you’ve hit a checkpoint. If you EXIT TO DESKTOP and later return to the game, select CONTINUE from the game menu and you’ll continue from the last checkpoint you achieved. Checkpoints add major replay value because you no longer have to replay 2 - 3 hours just to get to a point where you’d like to do something different. There are checkpoints every 3 objects in Intruder and 4 checkpoints in Arrival. Bot Colony poses special checkpoint challenges: everything you did and said is saved, if you had a PDA or a briefcase – you’ll have them after the checkpoint, the messages you received on your PDA will be there after you return, your gameplay history will survive the checkpoint. With checkpoints you’ll be able to explore alternatives, and dive deeper into the game without losing your progress.
  Known problem: Please DON’T use EXIT TO MAIN MENU – it has problems! Always EXIT TO DESKTOP.
  
  

• More background story in Arrival

  
  
  You can now explore the story of what happened in the Airport before you landed, and AFTER you landed (did you notice the bald guy?). Remember that you can always ask “What day is today?” and “What time is it?” to get an idea about what happened when. You can now explore the background to the events that take place in Airport, and what led to the situation you find yourself in. Right now you can explore the story using time questions, so a robot who overheard conversations can tell you what it heard. Later, you’ll be able to explore by asking a robot what it observed a particular human character do or say (for now, you’d need to refer to characters precisely, like ‘what did the woman with the red hair and blue jeans say?’; we obviously need to make that less precise to access this feature).
  
  

• Robot Personalities

  
  
  In their quest to ‘do as people do’ (read the book:) robots now have personalities. They’re so eager to please humans that they deviated from standard operating protocol (it’s up to you to find out when and how!). Find out more about Cindy, Tina, Mike, Mary and Joanna from their colleagues (co-bots).
  
  

• Big Brother

  
  
  You can also ask a robot “When did you first see me?”, “What did I say then?”, or “How do you know?” (about the answer it just gave you), and you’ll realize that they observed YOU and they remember where you were and what you said when. You can also find out about the conversations they overheard passengers in the airport have, prior to your arrival. It’s Big Brother unleashed, a unique experience that makes you appreciate where our connected world might end up! Coming: Two new achievements for exploring the Arrival background story in a coming upgrade.
  
  

• Robots remember.

  
  
  With the checkpoints, we put in a personalization feature: you can tell a robot whatever you like, and ask questions to test it remembers after a checkpoint (so after you exited the game). We didn’t make this really persistent (meaning - between games), but we will if you give us some feedback about what you’d like to see (we want to see some engagement from you first). For example, we could get Miki or Jimmy (or any favorite robot) to remind you to do things outside the game, keep track of your priorities, etc. This robot could become your assistant if you'll want it to. FYI, our robots are already very good at banking through voice, see www.northsideinc.com, We're now using the same NLU pipeline for Bot Colony and serious applications - that's why this upgrade took longer.
  
  

• Microsoft Cognitive LUIS Speech-to-text

  
  
  We did massive work to improve the speech-to-text feature: remember, hit Enter, start speaking when the mic icon shows it’s listening, then hit Enter again to signal that you’ve checked the text in the textbox and it can be processed. If there’s a mistake, fix it with the keyboard. We’ve disabled speech-to-text when the robot is speaking, so the sound from the headphones doesn’t get into the input. However, if you hit Enter while a robot speaks, you’ll cut him off. We’ve eliminated most of the crashes occurring during speech-to-text (to make it 100% we’ll need to replace Scaleform libraries and we’re waiting for the source code). If it crashes, remember that checkpoints work, so you won’t lose much.
  
  Finally, if you like the game, please Recommend it on the Bot Colony store page. We’re still shy of 50 reviews that we need to be found more easily in the store. Thank you!
  

BUG FIXES

• We fixed the bug of the game hanging on Waking Up the Robots.
  
• There was a bug that New Game would not erase videos seen or objects placed for which you got an achievement, so if you got the achievement it was hard to replay from scratch. Fixed.
  
• There were billing issues with the Microsoft Cognitive Speech Recognition (CRIS.AI) that resulted in service interruptions. We worked with Microsoft, who were very helpful, to address these issues.
  If at any time you have a doubt whether Cognitive speech recognition works (only available on Win10), try it at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-ca/services/cognitive-services/speech/ If it works there DIFFERENTLY from how it works in Bot Colony, it's because the service is down.
  
• To help prevent the UI text box crash that could occur when using Cognitive Services, the user is now prevented from typing while the speech engine is still in the middle of recognizing and producing partial results.
  
• Reminder: the quick reference guide on the Store page of Bot Colony http://cdn.edgecast.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/263040/manuals/Robot_Questions_and_Commands_Guide.pdf?t=1499898569 is the most up to date resource on robot commands, questions, etc in Bot Colony. This is also the first (PINNED) topic under Discussions.
  

• The feedback we received says the training is too long. We'll bring you shorter, more experimentation-based training. You'll learn by doing rather than have Miki give you a guided tour - it's more exciting to get a goal and figure it out yourself. The current training will be still be available, but we'll make it on demand. You'll get the two achievements above if and when you do it.
  
• We're thinking to let you chose the mission you'd like to start with in Intruder, or let you play both simultaneously (the software supports that). This way, you could then choose to do the training for the particular mission (Investigation or Clue Removal).
  
• In Discussions, there's a new thread about Arrival, we're watching it carefully and will react. We'll bring you more content in Arrival, and more achievements.
  

• We’ve integrated the Microsoft Cognitive Services speech API. No more speech training! Click Enter, start speaking, and click Enter again when you finish speaking. Check the text as it takes shape in the text box – you’ll find that much less editing is required. This upgrade is only available for Windows 8 and Windows 10 ( because Windows 7 doesn’t support websockets which is required by the cloud-based speech recognition, sorry!). More background here http://steamcommunity.com/games/263040/announcements/detail/2171147026184566319 - there's also a Microsoft-approved press release on this Monday morning.
  
• We’ve promised the next major release will have ACHIEVEMENTS. We're now delivering on this promise: 18 achievements, with more to come in the future.
  
• The game understands references to objects much better. You can now click on an object before you issue a robot command to put it in context.
  
• There’s more story to explore in the Arrival level.
  

• after every 4 Jimmy videos. BTW: Jimmy’s videos you uncoverd are listed like this (Thursday HH:MM, HH:MM, Friday HH:MM). Green HH:MM means you’ve seen all the videos in that morning, afternoon or evening, yellow HH:MM means there’s still videos to discover around that part of day.
  
• after every 3 objects replaced.
  

• Improved, shorter speech training ( got a earful about that :))
  
• Fixed hang on return to main menu from gameplay
  
• Fixed screen resolution configuration problem
  
• Fixed ‘Cannot start Vision Application’ at startup
  
• We now have automated server monitoring to improve uptime
  
• A quick reference guide available from Store page links
  

• Achievements
  
• improved Speech-to-text quality
  
• better understanding in Arrival (it’s not yet at par with Intruder)
  
• the Riot episode