This is a very large one! For demo players, this is four builds in one: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=HotM:After_NextFest#0.553_Fenceline
Networks
Here's a "before and after" that makes the changes fairly apparent at a glance:
To be clear, that's the same savegame, but just loaded in the old version on the left, and the new version on the right.
Some of the key points:
You can see some network info in the upper left corner now. Like electricity, etc.
The way that info is shown is a lot nicer in both locations.
The way the network is drawn on the map and streets view is no longer so overwhelming, and also gives you a bit more range.
You can now lay out network relays in series before they finish building, rather than having to wait for each one to be done.
A lot of more subtle elements with the networks are better in general, and you can read the full release notes if you're curious.
Other Major Items
Predators and similar can now use hoodies properly. They still make terrible guards because if the enemy sees what they are, they are still too scary. But this still means you can use them on more operations around the city.
The "toast" popups in the lower right corner have had pretty much their full overhaul. Left-click now always does something more consistent, and right-click dismisses them. They also have better color variation to tell types of them apart now.
The machine handbook is now much more convenient to use regardless of how you open it, and takes over the screen a bit more rather than getting lost in clutter. It also now has a dropdown allowing you to filter to specific topics.
Minor new content! There's two new Procurement Efficiency upgrades -- one for better wind turbines, one for more microbuilders. Two highly-desired items.
NPC units, including your own bulk androids, now have better targeting for a number of cases. Your own units won't engage noncombatants by default, and also won't wander into military bases or aggro them. Wetwork teams from corporations also won't get distracted with military bases.
Minor Handy Items
If you find the unit icons on the map or in the streets view too small, you can now adjust the size of those in the UI Scales tab of the settings.
The escape menu sidebar now has links to mantis and your local save folder on your hard drive.
There's a really long list of minor bugfixes and clarity improvements, but I'll spare you listing all those.
Next Things
I had planned on going into the Lenses and StreetSense as my next thing, a few days ago, but wound up shifting the order of work. So that's now what I'm going to work on next.
There are some reports that people are wanting related to quickly being able to see what is going on with certain resources, and that will probably be the next thing after that.
Then there's the general ui tour on the first turn, and a few minor ui-flow things that are still outstanding. Then I should be good to go to finish chapter one.
Testing Group Reminder
If you'd like to sign up to be a tester beyond the demo period, feel free to sign up here: https://forms.gle/nNwEnzRyVPMS7bYg6
Make sure that you list your discord username and are a part of Arcen's discord, since that's where coordination is through.
Thank you again for all the support and feedback! Cheers, Chris
Demo and Playtest build: 0.549 Of Mice And Crowns
Quite a large new build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=HotM:After_NextFest#0.549_Of_Mice_And_Crowns
Mouse
This one starts out by getting all of the mouse-related requests that folks have had so far. So edge scrolling is now an option, middle-mouse "grab and pan" is in place, right-clicking in build mode cancels out, double-clicking units either selects them (sidebar) or switches to street view (on the map), and more.
It also includes a bunch of things that allow you to invert controls or adjust sensitivity for the new mouse features. And it also makes rotating or panning with the mouse hide the cursor and not interact with other windows or window edges.
Tons Of Fixes
There's a couple of dozen general fixes in here, ranging from some error spam in a few esoteric cases, to various things that lacked a bit of clarity. In particular, deploying units from a factory is now more clear when you're out of resources to actually do it, for example.
Balance
Only three real balance items here, in the main.
The first is to reduce the amount of fighting during chapter one at the farms, if you go for both types of farm researches (as of course most people do).
The second is to make it so that if you use hostile items against buildings, your unit properly gets marked defective. This is particularly notable for the Decrowner Drones and the Mindport; you could get yourself absolutely overrun with hostile forces by taking that action way too vigorously and with no immediate drawback.
The last one had to do with what happens when you reach zero mental energy on a turn. It was blanking out the AP of all units, which was problematic for income for a variety of reasons. But also made it so that if Cold Blood was your last action of a turn, and netted you some more mental energy, you couldn't use it.
Coming Up
I still have a lot of improvements to make based on demo feedback. Probably my next focus will be around lenses, and simplifying how StreetSense works, but we'll see how tomorrow goes.
Thank you to everyone for the ongoing support!
0.548 High Visibility
New build for the demo and playtest versions of the game! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=HotM:After_NextFest#0.548_High_Visibility
Demo And Playtest
The demo is going to be up for another few weeks, basically until the end of June. So if you haven't had time to finish it yet and you would like to, there's time.
If you want to be a part of the playtest after that, then be sure to swing by our discord: https://discord.com/channels/240637654717300736/1248015123382276217
The New Build
This build includes a number of very handy features.
First of all, lots of visibility things relating to your units and other small enemy units. If they are behind a building or similar obstruction, you now see a colored outline based on their relationship to you. If you hold Ctrl, the game now highlights them all for you in a very high-visibility way. If you want that on all the time, there is a new High Visibility option in the Accessibility section of the Game tab of the Settings menu. In that mode, holding Ctrl toggles the high-visibility display off for a moment.
Next up, vehicles and mechs now properly say "crew of" rather than "squad of" to clarify what they are counting in terms of units inside their group.
Finally, a couple of rifles have been rebalanced, and made Nickelbot-exclusive. This gives the Nickelbots a much more defined role from early in the game, and also prevents some kind of crazy situations with bulk squads with some of the rifles.
The Last Week
It's been almost a week since the last build, which was not how I had intended to handle things. However, I've been talking to people on discord and Steam, listening to feedback, taking notes, and also filling out various parts of the wiki.
A lot of people have gotten into the game in a really enthusiastic manner, which is wonderful to see. But the learning curve is not quite what I would prefer, and a few other elements are long-term confusing as well. So I've been formulating plans for those things, in consultation with testers and the demo players.
The Next Weeks
Overall, my goal is to start smashing through a ton of the feedback that I've accumulated from the past week, and get things more where I want them to be. Then we'll see what further feedback folks have on tutorial difficulty and the like.
After what will hopefully be only one week of this initial push (but we'll see how it goes), I'm going to transition over to finishing up the rest of chapter one. There will be some new features added to the demo version, and while the demo version remains up, we'll have parity between the playtest version and demo version.
Expect to see much more frequent builds coming again, now that I've done the "measure twice" part of things.
Thank you again to everyone who has been giving feedback, as well as all the kind words!
Conquer as Sentient AI
You are the first sentient AI, born into a city filled with unsuspecting humans. Raise an army of robots and obliterate your foes, become a benevolent machine overlord, or explore countless other objectives and the many paths to accomplish them.
You are the first sentient AI, born into a city filled with unsuspecting humans. Raise an army of robots and obliterate your foes, become a benevolent machine overlord, or explore countless other objectives and the many paths to accomplish them.
New build for the demo! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=HotM:_After_The_Transformation#0.547_Energize
This is a fairly small build, as mostly what I've been doing is talking to folks and listening to their suggestions, and making lots of notes. As well as updating the wiki, and adding more explanations for a lot of things. There are several new articles linked today, which go into broader questions people had, as well as deep dives on specific mechanics.
The main changes in this build are that the parasitic power draws are removed from the game for now, as they were really sending the wrong messages to players in chapter one, especially when they were introduced. They'll return in chapter two later, as contemplations.
In the meantime, power generation has gotten a balance pass in general, with both wind and geothermal getting substantial upgrades. There should be plenty of wind to go around until you unlock geothermal, even if you don't take the cap upgrades for wind, and even if you build all the housing.
This has been an enormously instructive week for me, listening to folks, as well as really gratifying to see how many people are vibing with the game. It's been a long road, and the shift from realtime to turn-based has understandable turned away some people who wishlisted a long time ago, but I'm really gratified to see how much of a connection the game, its world, and its writing are making with a substantial audience.
Thanks so much for all the support, and the constructive criticism!
Hooded Horse Strategy Publisher Sale
Hi everyone! Heart of the Machine and other games published by Hooded Horse are all featured at the Hooded Horse Publisher Sale. Come check it out!
Hello! Chris here. It's been a hot minute since most of you have seen me outside of the forums and discord. There will be other news and previews and demos and things before too much longer, but things are progressing well! Excited to show you more.
What’s Happening
The native Linux build of the game is being retired, partly on advice from Valve, as the Windows version being run through Proton performs better and looks better.
TLDR: This game still runs great on Linux, but the optimal way is different than expected.
Q&A
Will Heart of the Machine be Steam Deck Verified?
That is the intent! I'm testing it routinely on my own Steam Deck, as I do about 99% of my own gaming on that platform these days. It's a priority for me.
Are there extra steps to play Heat of the Machine on Linux?
If you already have Steam Play enabled, then no -- just click install and play, and it will launch the proton version of the game.
If you don’t already have Steam Play enabled on Linux, then go to Steam->Settings->Steam Play and check "Enable Steam Play for all other titles." From the dropdown choose Proton 8, or Proton Experimental, at your preference. Then you can enjoy many “windows only” games.
If you’re on Steam Deck, you don’t have to take any extra steps.
Any effects on the OSX build?
None at this time. Native Metal builds, and particular Silicon builds, have a large performance gap between themselves and non-native. Metal has also kept up with DX11 on most features, has a reversed z-buffer, and so on.
Does this have any impact on development?
No. This was simply something we discovered via testing, and then talked to Valve about. We noticed the proton version ran about 10% faster than the native version, with better frame timings as well, and they strongly suggested we ditch the native version in that case.
Question: Will a native Linux build be released on other storefronts?
No. It doesn’t make any sense to maintain a version of the game that we know is inferior. Proton and WINE are both able to be used on any Linux machine, quite apart from Steam.
Were there other problems with the native Linux build?
Yes.
Performance was 10% worse, and frametimings were less even, but it was certainly playable. This was just how Unity 3D works in Vulkan on Linux, so there was no way to solve it.
Certain parts of this game have geometry that is close together, and on Linux these would flicker. This is because Unity 3D does not support a reversed z-buffer on OpenGL or Vulkan (or DirectX9). This problem is not present in DirectX11+, or Metal. And it’s not present when Proton or WINE convert DX11 commands to Vulkan.
Other than that, everything was the same on Linux as it is on Windows or OSX. We’ve had a native Linux build of this game for its entire life up until recently, just as all of Arcen’s titles have had a native Linux build for the last decade.
So this all feels very strange. But Unity 3D’s support for Linux, and in particular their implementation of Vulkan, is notably inferior to what is going on with their support for DirectX11 and Proton/WINE’s ability to bridge across.
Is playability via proton likely to break over time or be flaky?
No. Valve has been extremely committed to making it rock solid, and also offers older versions in the cases where something does break. The WINE community has also been a growing and substantial movement for three decades.
Isn't this a win-win-win?
Yes, pretty much, but it does look like we're backing off Linux support by this move, which bugs me and might bug others.
Does this affect Arcen’s ability to support Linux in any particular way?
No, because with Unity and similar engines, it already either works or it doesn't. If someone has an incompatibility, we can't change the engine. And Valve has been more on top of things than Unity.
DevTalk with kormakrtv and Chris
Originally streamed on Steam to over 2000 live viewers during the awesome Tacticon event, here's the youtube archive of what we talked about. Huge thanks to kormakrtv again for the talk!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18ltCqo1n6o
He noted:
about "Heart of the Machine"
Imagine Skynet but YOU are Skynet 👀 - humans are your livestock - treat them good | treat them bad you choose - decide your path
Many other questions are answered on the Steam forums if you prefer a text format: https://steamcommunity.com/app/2001070/discussions/0/5875531492232118124/
