Evolution RTS
Evolution RTS Development Concluded
Improved lobby. Skylobby supports self hosting games, it also supports direct hosting where your friends can connect directly to you instead of using the central server (this is a big feature, I'm a fan of having a centralized server but I'm a bigger fan of not needing that centralized server for multiplayer)(ports must be forwarded).
Development on Evo is effectively concluded. The game is in an excellent place now. It was always a platform where I tried interesting ideas that I had. I am now in the process of building a new game, not to supplant Evo, but more along traditional RTS lines. It's a safe bet that if you like Evo you'll probably like my new game too. New game is mainly focused on single player and coop (although multiplayer PvP is 100% doable). I'm roughly 50% done with it so maybe I'll have a beta ready in 3 months or so. I'll make an announcement of sorts when the time comes.
I have only tested this build via itch, so if you try to run it and it doesn't work, I suggest you grab it from itch.io. I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work from steam.
Evolution RTS is leaving Steam
I first want to say how grateful I am for valve allowing me to put my little indie game on steam in the first place. I cannot explain to you how much it meant to me to get approval.
Evo is a hobby for me, a labor of love. It has no microtransactions nor any revenue mechanics of any kind. It was always meant to be completely free and it was my way of giving back.
That said, I have endured years of abuse via steam reviews and other avenues (as a direct result of it being on steam), and frankly I am at my breaking point with it. Evo is a completely different (and revamped) game from what was released in 2014, yet valve offers no way to shed the negative reviews (which tend to simply breed more negativity due to the fact that there is zero quality control on these reviews).
Evo is my hobby. I don't have the manpower to have vast infrastructure, tutorials, guides, media, etc. I still work 40 hours a week and steam has become less of a helper than an albatross on my neck. Understand, I am not blaming value for this. Steam is not a platform that is designed for free games and certainly it is not designed for games with only 1 or 2 developers.
So with all of this in mind, it is with a sober (and heavy) heart that I formally request that Evolution RTS be removed from steam. It is still available elsewhere (Itch.io and a standalone version exists), so users are not left high and dry and I will continue developing it, but I need to focus on having it on a platform where it can thrive, in an environment that is designed specifically to work with indie developers and projects with very little manpower.
From the bottom of my heart, thank you for the opportunity for my little hobby to be on steam. While the experience was unfortunately not as positive as I would have hoped, I am very happy that it was allowed to happen in the first place.
The above was the request sent to the steam team. For those of you who still want to play evo and follow it's development, I recommend that you install evo via itch.io (it's a client similar to steam, more lightweight and geared towards indie projects). The install from itch is identical to steam.
Furthermore, checkout our discord at https://discord.gg/v2hXV7e
Messing with music: What your mother never told you…
The Enigma TNG is back!!! But it gets even better! We recently got permission from the AMAZING Dreamstate Logic to use his music in Evolution RTS! If you haven’t heard either of these guys, let me just say that they are INCREDIBLE. That is what your mother never told you, because she wasn’t cool enough to find them on her own.
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Drones on a low budget – 4 Strategies to make it work
Aircraft have been revamped, renamed, and are now Drone Platforms. Aircraft (Drones) in the Spring Engine are a difficult beast. They are unpredictable, impossible to really control. In a lot of ways, it’s almost as if aircraft in the spring engine follow form over function. By that I mean that they tend to look really good if you set them up properly, but at the same time, their dps tends to be all over the place due to unpredictable flight behavior, sometimes they will leave the map and become unresponsive, etc.
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The top 5 most annoying things about Defensive Turrets
If I had the smallest sum of money every time that I thought that I had defensive turrets dialed in, I would be an exceedingly rich man. However, past failures of balance help shape the balance of tomorrow, or something like that. But while we’re on the subject of pointless lists…
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The Future is all about flashy Effects
Evolution RTS has seen a little bit of an effects overhaul recently with regards to base structures. In this screenshot I tried to cram all of them in one shot, but I’m missing a few. Regardless, the effects are actually color coded to show the structure’s tier level. Orange is Tech 0; Orange and blue is Tech 1; Orange, blue, and purple is Tech 2; Orange, blue, purple, and green is Tech 3.
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The uncensored cheat sheet to Energy Usage!
Energy usage has changed, a lot. No longer will your units require energy to fire. This change means that you will no longer have to worry about your army being completely unable to fire if your energy economy tanks. The energy to fire mechanism was unique and was a neat little mechanic, but the problem is that it was always simply to opaque to end users, especially newbies.
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Bye bye, GitHub. Hello, new DAI!
Holy crap. Clickbait title indeed! So this is what happens when you amusedly search google for a clickbait title generator and plug in your own stuff (No, evo is not moving away from github… we aren’t insane lol).
Before I get into anything though, I want to mention that I’m trying out a new format for newsposts. I HATE writing news stuff with a passion. So what I’m going to try now is “micro news”, as in, I’m going to pick narrow subjects that are important, write a paragraph or whatever I need to to explain it, and call it a day. Perhaps if I do news this way, I can be persuaded to write news stuff more often.
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New server upgrade!
The server that the hosts run on has now been updated to a machine with 6 cores and 28gb ram running on a brand new SSD! It's worth noting that this server also runs the "Official" BA hosts as well, so they get the benefit of the new hotness. The server is set up in such a way that even if SPADS hits a critical error (which does randomly happen sometimes), the script will simply wait for 15 seconds and restart the server.
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Resource layouts, Extraction schemes, Visual Representation, and how I fixed it.
The Issue: Mappers currently take a shotgun approach to resource layouts. They try to put resourcing locations in strategic places, and try to define resourcing amounts that will work for for most, if not all games using the spring engine. Unfortunately, that approach will generally work well for one game, and be fairly mediocre for others.
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