We're proud to announce that Foresight V1.2 has been released! As usual, we'll reveal what has been added, what's improved and the super long list of bug fixes.
New Implementations
Most of the new implementations are in the code. This means it's not something you can actually see in-game except that the game may now feel a little smoother and less prone to crashes.
What you can see is this:
Anamorphic Lens Flare is a new feature implemented as part of StridesLib 1.2, the game engine that powers Foresight. StridesLib 1.2 has a lot more new features and a brand new rendering framework with improved flexibility. However, not all of its power is shown in Foresight.
We understand that different people may have different taste and our settings for the anamorphic lens flare may not be something you like especially when the graphics were originally designed to mimick some level of such a lens flare. Therefore the option is there for you to disable anamorphic lens flare should it be too overbearing or uncomfortable to your eyes.
Here's how it looks like in the actual in-game:
Modifications
The following has been modified to take advantage of the new engine features or done so to adapt.
1) Fonts now have stoke and drop shadow. This is done so that the text will be far more readable than without. The side-effect however, may be that the font may appear to be of lower fidelity but it's not the case.
2) Briefing room now looks slightly brighter because all the holographic panels are now rendered additively. This makes the whole briefing room look more realistic but requires the fonts to have a drop shadow to ensure readability.
3) Adjusted timings of certain speeches and events during cutscenes for better pacing.
4) Graphic adjustment to sector map icons, planet atmosphere etc. These are minor adjustments made to increase visibility.
5) Mouse cursors will from now on be on the top most layer regardless of situation including screen fades.
6) Screen fades are now specified and rendered after ALL graphics. This causes a slight problem with subtitles though. We'll slowly resolve it with alternative.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed a bug where the AI player will end up trying to attack itself. But the AI doesn't detect an enemy and thus its fleets end up spinning around its own base sector.
- Fixed a bug in the introduction cutscene where the camera may be found turning a few rounds. This bug also occurred in campaign missions with camera movements.
- Fixed a bug where watching cutscenes repeatedly will eventually cause the game to crash or models to look incorrect due to a design issue that led to a memory leak.
- Fixed a bug where sometimes textures loaded aren't unloaded causing memory hogging which too lead to a crash eventually.
- Fixed a bug where cutscenes will NOT work for ATI and Intel Integrated cards.
- Fixed a series of bugs involving planets that appear untextured.
- Fixed a bug where sound loader and texture loader may cause a crash due to concurrent access to retrieve the respective device objects (causing the reference count to drop below 0)
- Fixed a bug where certain scripts were not stopped causing them to spill over to the next mission or the restarted session.
- Fixed a bug where the campaign loads the next mission but tears down the previous mission using the next mission's scripts.
- Fixed a bug where EVA voice overs will NOT play if the first attempt to play it failed.
- Fixed a remote bug where fighters belonging to the player created before the player factions were set will lead to them being permanently invisible to the player despite still being effective.
- Fixed a bug when you click on Continue Campaign, some random ships might suddenly spawn in your sector or even in-game cutscenes where key ships were actually destroyed by these random ships.
- Fixed a bug for the 1st 10 missions where they can be susceptible to having planets appear to be untextured.
- Fixed a bug in Siege mode where you may sometimes start a game without any base or player to control.
Other Bugs
Here's what I suspect still haunts the game.
1) When you quit you might still get a crash due to conflicts with the sound loader.
2) For Intel Integrated Graphics user, you might occasionally get a flickering scenario based on your actions such as pressing ESC during a cutscene and the message box pops up. This problem is intermittent and we're not able to reproduce it except that during this period the render buffers are kind of stuck. It may recover automatically.
3) For network games with heavy traffic, there might be a case where the game no longer communicates one-way (request to server or server give orders) but still tries to work accordingly.
Conclusion
We're really at the end of Foresight. It has been a wild ride and we've had many good times with everyone regardless of your opinion. We've always maintained that if you purchase Foresight and don't like it, please go for a refund.
We've also stood by our word, to serve every player with equality and with good support. We listened regardless whether if you've paid for the game or have gotten it through a giveaway or bundle. Honestly, we really don't know who got it for free.
Finally, we're moving on to our next game. So what happens to Foresight? We'll continue to support Foresight as usual for bug fixes and occasional new maps. Please, wish us luck and hope that our next game will be a better hit!
Thanks again for your support! We look forward to seeing you again here and as well as our next game (hopefully soon!)
Regards,
The Foresight Team
V1.2 will be delayed :(
Dear all,
Most of the tests have passed. However, in our standard tests, we do actually run tests for Intel Integrated Graphics and ATI cards; Foresight's debugging is done on a Nvidia card.
We do not use vendor specific features. However, in some cases, some things do differ between video card vendors. Therefore, in this case, the Cutscenes are actually the ones in question. We're currently working to understand the issue and resolve it as soon as possible.
Here's a preview on roughly what v1.2 will look like:
The anamorphic lens flare shown here are exaggerated for effect.
As mentioned before, the in-game effect will be noticeable but won't disrupt gameplay. The in-transition effect will be slightly more pronounced, enough to see the effect but won't appear everywhere.
Please be patient with us for a few more days and we'll get it out as soon as possible.
Thanks and have a great weekend!
Jeremy
Update: V1.2 will be out soon!
Dear all,
Foresight V1.2 will be out soon and it will feature some upgraded features from the new iteration of StridesLib.
This version will not include some of the additional contents we wish to put into the game but will fix quite a few bugs with the game itself. Of course, that'll mean there'll be future patches, mostly on contents.
A notable shift (not change) is that Siege mode will not longer be restricted to just fighting large bases. Scenario-based co-op missions may be added from time to time to add to the fun.
Thus, please hang on a little while longer as testing is currently underway. If all goes well, we'll deploy the patch by Friday 7th April towards midnight SGT!
Thanks for your patience and support!
Jeremy
Update: Just an Update!
Dear all,
It has been weeks since the last update. Basically, StridesLib, the engine that powers Foresight is undergoing major revamps and technically is in the next iteration already.
Thus, Foresight will still get a slice of the new pie. Foresight V1.2 will be based on the new engine iteration and will be a lot more stable and possibly faster.
On top of that, we might add a few more surprises into the fray but reworking the meshes slightly to keep it a little up-to-date. Yes, we know, Foresight is an old game.
What's next?
Well, it's no surprise... but we're going to start working on our next game! Hurray! The only thing we can reveal now is that it will not be a RTS. But there'll be some familarity.
We'll keep everyone updated as soon as we have confirmed release dates (for V1.2) and other information as well.
Conclusion
Thanks to everyone who has supported us, ranted at us, marked us down for a negative review (it's REALLY OK!!) or given us a positive review, we've learned a lot. This experience is invaluable to us as it'll guide us to our next game without making the same mistakes as we did for Foresight.
We hope to get your support in the future as well!
Thanks again and may everyone have a great week ahead!
Regards,
Jeremy (Producer)
Patch V1.10b-5 Released!
Dear all,
We've just released a patch that fixed potential issues with Campaign #2, ie, Mission 11-15.
What's the problem?
Apparently, it started when someone feedback that Mission 11 cannot be completed. So as usual, we asked for the saved game, loaded it up and checked the states.
Well, it's not the case. Apparently, there's a condition that wasn't properly communicated to the players and that the player can actually skip that area without fighting and end up not completing the mission.
Who are affected?
Players who typically avoid a fight and focus directly on the mission objectives will be affected initially.
How can we fix it?
Fortunately, this is a trigger issue that doesn't require a major fix. For current players, you can return to the sector Naura-2 and destroy everything there and your reinforcements will arrive.
What else?
We improved Mission 11 to make it clearer to the players on what has to be done. It wasn't right that the player can skip the combat without the reinforcements being triggered. In any case, it's now made clearer to the players.
Mission 12-15 has been changed slightly. Ivan Bahktin's flagship Syuzeren will now have more hit points than a standard Mothership. This is required so that he'll stay in his flagship more than usual. (The AI controls his safety so it's hard to determine if he'll run during combat)
Just a gentle reminder - your fleet commanders and advisors will automatically escape or upgrade to a safer or better ship automatically. This is done so that you don't have to babysit your fleets.
Conclusion
Keep those feedbacks coming! I'd love to explain why we didn't catch these issues during our own testing back then but I'll leave it to another post for another day.
Have a great weekend!
Regards,
Jeremy
Patch V1.10b-4 released!
Dear all,
This is just a small patch addressing a critical issue with Mission 9.
What's the problem?
A player has given us feedback and saved game that mission 9 cannot be cleared. We checked the conditions and confirmed that it's supposed to work.
Why didn't it work?
Regression. When we added Celestial Disasters, the randomness of the disaster and type will cause structures to take damage. If this happens a few seconds before you enter the final colony sector, the script will misfire because it's taken that the structure WAS under attack.
What happens now?
Fortunately for this case, the fix is non-executable based. That means we made adjustments to the scripts that will trigger itself regardless of whether if the colony was under attack or not.
There might be a little bit of off-timed speeches but it'll ensure that the mission is complete-able.
Limitation of fix?
This fix only works for the following:
1) Starting the mission from the beginning via continue campaign or saved game
2) Restarting the mission
3) Loading a saved game just before entering the final sector
The fix doesn't work if the game was saved AFTER entering the sector.
Conclusion
Please, keep the feedback coming! We take feedback seriously and to be honest, the fix came slower than usual because the team was on a day off on Friday.
Thanks for your support! We hope to hear from you soon!
Regards,
Jeremy
Patch V1.10b-3 released!
Dear all,
We're happy to announce the release of patch V1.10b-3! Amongst the list of bug fixes, we've also added improvements in to ship behaviors which should help a lot in ship battles.
New Features
There're just 2 new features in this patch. Basically, you might have encountered cases where a ship actually becomes totally blindsided when attacking another ship from a certain angle.
FEATURE #1 This feature applies only to attackers, not defenders.
So now, if you have a ship that goes too near and ends up losing the firing solution on all the turrets, that means, none of the turrets are able to fire upon the target, (turrets that are undergoing cooldown does not count) then the ship will back up a little to expose more guns to fire at the target. Yes, if you haven't noticed by now, every turret has a fixed arc of fire in which the weapon can be fired. It's by no means, omnidirectional.
The effect of such a movement may feel like a push. This is automated and will not affect the ship's ultimate destination (ie, if you're doing an attack move). So in a way, your ships have become a little more intelligent in attacking rather than having you to monitor their every progress.
FEATURE #2
The second feature is basically the ability to command multiple fleets at once. The trick is to select all the flagships and give them the orders. This will in turn cause the entire fleet to respond as a fleet command.
This is done in case you just want to quickly command all 5 fleets at once. Unfortunately, multi-fleet selection will not be available. But since you're now allowed to select ships from remote locations, you can select multiple flagships even along with their fleet subordinate ships included, to give them orders all at once.
The only requirement is that all flagships must be in the same sector for it to happen.
Modifications
Siege Mode Updates - HARD Difficulty has been increased. The final boss now have 1,000,000 HP and with better weaponry. Its nuclear missile has been changed to an advanced version where it'll do a lot of damage but will not splash much onto other ships.
- Game logs have been reduced to a minimum as bugs get lesser.
- Performance monitoring has been disabled thoroughly.
- Verified an attacking unit's behavior. Now if it attacks, it'll never change target.
- Upgrade icons are now placed below the commander dossier panel. You'll still see hints of an upgrade though.
- Fleet advisor ship will no longer leave the fleet when the shortcut for leaving fleet is used. Ie, Fleet 1, you select a bunch of ships and press Ctrl+Shift+F1 and those ships leave the fleet? The standard behavior applies except to the flagship (fleet commander's ship) and advisor's ship. If you want, you can still decomission the fleet advisor using the Leave Fleet button. This is balanced against accidental demotion of advisor which can be very irritating.
- Added speed dampers for ships approaching their destination. This is done so that you won't get cases where ships end up orbiting around their destination without the ability to stop.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed a bug where you open Foresight and see the main menu without any buttons visible to click on.
- Fixed a bug where fighters appears to buzz around the wormhole or mothership at insane speeds without any ability to control or recall it.
- Fixed a bug where ships on a flight plan can suddenly stop, turn towards another destination or behave erractically.
- Fixed a bug where the options menu background will go missing after the following:
1) Change of screen resolution, confirm YES
2) Change of screen resolution, confirm change, NO, screen resolution reverts.
3) Go to Options from the main menu, back, then start a skirmish game, then go to Game Journal and go back to the main menu. Then go to Options again and the background will NOT be there.
- Disabled all the logs as much as possible as well as performance monitoring. This will minimize excessive writing to disk in which some instance can cause the game to be unusually unstable.
- Fixed a regression bug due to the game engine's upgrade where there's a small memory leak occurring. This, over time will cause the game to crash without warning. This has since been fixed, all existing saved games are not affected.
- Fixed the attacking behavior of ships where they'll no longer change their targets if attacked by a target of higher priority.
- Fixed a small bug where text colors of the main display for shields, hull and damage ratings are incorrect at times.
- Fixed a bug where fleet advisors can be inadvertently demoted without little or no notice. The behavior has been changed to avoid demoting advisor flagships.
- Fixed a bug where the screen might suddenly turn white during a medium intensity battle. This is due to an excessive amount of polygons being rendered due to the fighter's engine trails. It has since been fixed and tested for with high intensity battles.
Update on V1.10b-3 patch
Dear all,
By right the patch V1.10b-3 should be released by now. Due to some complications found during testing, we realised that more testing is needed to resolve those complications before launching.
This is not a regression problem.
Updates will be coming shortly. We apologise for the delay and hope you'll understand that while the game isn't free of bugs, we're not in the business of intentionally introducing bugs into the game or releasing a patch knowing that it'll break the game.
Just a little heads up for the new patch - have you ever encountered cases where you ships simply can't attack a certain target due to it being too near? You can't turn around since you can't fire backwards and might be yourselves destroyed inadventently. So we have a solution for you in this patch. We get a feeling you'll like it.
Thanks and I hope the next announcement will be the release notes.
Regards,
Jeremy
HAPPY NEW YEAR!!
Dear Foresight players!
Have a happy new year and a wonderful time in 2017!
Foresight has been around for 2 years already. We appreciate all feedback and complaints and have since improved. We are extremely grateful for the support the community has given us even though things have quietened down quite a bit over time.
While we're committed to support Foresight in terms of bug fixes and small additions to the game, we're also slowly reallocating resources to start working on our new game.
I cannot reveal too much since it's currently under pre-production stages but all I can confirm is that there'll be a new game coming in 2017.
Will it be Foresight 2? The short answer is no. But rest assured it's in our plans to develop it in the future.
At this point, if there's anything the community (you guys yes) wish to see happen for Foresight, please do not hesitate to leave it in the comments!
We'll continue to serve you as we've always did and will always be listening to you.
THANK YOU and have a wonderful year ahead!
Jeremy
Patch V1.10b-2 Released!
Dear all,
As promised, the next bug fix patch is out. It fixes quite a few regression errors and will definitely improve the flow of the game.
Improvements
It was initially thought that the AI is smart enough to play Siege mode with the player. Apparently, that's not the case. We've revised and improved the AI to be more flexible and attacks the enemy nonetheless. Previously, it's very player-centric. When it attacks, it'll definitely go for the kill. In Skirmish, that works but not in Siege.
Do note however, the AI improvement is an on-going process. The AI may not be thoroughly smart enough just yet.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed a bug where your ships when attacked by more than 1 target, may keep turning to the latest attacker. This behavior is incorrect and is supposed to take the high value attacker as priority. That means, if you're attacked by a UNC heavy turret first, then a UNC railgun turret, your ship will still automatically turn to strike back at the high value target first.
- Fixed a small bug where allied ships can sometimes flicker. This is due to an obscurity rule against ships that don't belong to you. Codes were added to take alliance into consideration.
- Fixed a bug where you can never see the details of your allies. Ie, you can't see which ship is the flagship with the fleet commander. This is now fixed. You can see the icons, but not the complete details like you would on your own ships.
- Fixed a major bug where in some cases, all ships will turn up to be "unarmed". This happens sporadically and is highly dependent on the PC's performance.
- Fixed a major bug where a ship is immediately assigned to a fleet as it is leaving the shipyard. The problem comes when you can actually select that ship and override its deployment behavior. This causes a problem since the ship is not allowed to enter any wormholes until deployment is done. Thus solves the case where certain ships get stuck in front of the wormhole without any means to enter.
- Fixed a major Fleet AI bug where if they're given a position to attack move remotely, they do not do so. This may explain why in some cases, AI fleets simply charge towards the center of the sector without engaging your forces. Fleet Attack Move is a special way of moving a fleet - while on the move, it's not attack-moving per se. The attack-move portion is only activated when your fleet is in the target sector. It's very different from setting the entire fleet to Pursue and Destroy - in this mode, the fleet will always attack everything it sees along the way.
- Fixed a major bug with AI ship building. This is a regression bug and due to a misunderstanding of the codes, the AI ship building manager monitors for the wrong ship ID, causing the manager to keep building a certain ship. This has certainly crippled the skirmish AI for a period of time. This has been fixed and thus restored the AI's ruthlessness and lethalness.
- Fixed a AI behavior problem where they allow fleets to stay idle for excessive periods of time. Now there's a push to keep attacking IF the fleet is sufficiently beefed up and isn't going anywhere. That means, a more persistent AI.
* A note though - the AI I'm referring to here is the Skirmish/Siege AI. It doesn't apply to campaign AI except for fleet attack move.
Conclusion
Expect more bug fixes and small features to be implemented in the near future.
Yes yes it's almost done.
To that end, we'll like to ask - do you wish to hear what your allied AI player is trying to do? We're thinking of adding their thoughts so that you can coordinate with them to attack another player. Please comment below if you wish to make a difference!
Oh yes, have a happy new year! We should be done for this year and will be back next year!
