Genre: Real Time Strategy (RTS), Simulator, Strategy, Indie
Rank: Warmaster
Rank: Warmaster News and Updates March 15, 2023
Greetings, Warmasters and Candidates! This is the newsletter for March 15th, 2023. This is more a maintenance update since we are preparing for GDC and hopefully a new announcement. Most of the change this time is some text polish to get the autoscaling and position working finally.
GDC Travel We will be at GDC! We'll have a booth #308 at Game Connection (which is in a different place than GDC) while we are there, so if you happen to be at GDC, please reach out!
Quality of Life The update to make sure the turrets are displayed properly in the building menu has been important. Also the main change is the text engine in the game has been updated to finally autoscale and center properly. It's been a "good enough" situation for a long time, but a lot of the things going on in the background made it needed to finally address it.
Short-term RoadMap
What we are doing for GDC has put a lot of things on hold in favor of GDC planning and getting things ready. Most of what has been done is some polish, which isn't as obvious, but internal stability.
Hints of things coming
That's all for this update, stay tuned for more news next time! If you'd like to give Rank: Warmaster a try for yourself, pick up a copy on Steam and begin your conquest of Mars!
Fixed how ground turrets fire (ie. beams no longer come from the middle but the barrels)
Ground based Pulse turrets work again. (They seemed to like to fire straight into the ground before)
The Navigation screen now has the Atmospheric Shader running it (more to come). This really improves the look.
Various Fixes
Rank: Warmaster News and Updates March 1, 2023
Greetings, Warmasters and Candidates! This is the newsletter for March 1st, 2023. Two significant updates this time. The newer turret is finally in the system, with all the fixes that brings, and the Navigation/RTS screen now sports better effects with the atmospheric shader being used. Also a bigger hint of up and coming announcements.
GDC Travel We will be at GDC! We'll have a booth #308 at Game Connection (which is in a different place than GDC) while we are there, so if you happen to be at GDC, please reach out!
Artistic Update For the longest time, the RTS/Navigation screen hasn't had most of the graphical improvement that the main simulation/piloting screen does. This is mostly because the shader that does the pretty atmospheric effects doesn't play well with UI elements. This isn't too much of a problem on the piloting screen, but made the RTS screen ugly to unusable in how it originally interacted with it. That issue has now been fixed as shown: There will be more graphical updates to come, to be sure.
Also, the newer turret model has finally been integrated into the system. The turret model hasn't been upgraded in all this time because the original code was very much hard coded to how the original turret model was built. The turrets are more complicated beasts than the other buildings because they have moving parts. In this case a "base", a "post", and the guns. The base doesn't move and that is what is in the ground, the post is the main body, and the guns are well...the guns. A lot of work has been done to undo the hard coding. In the process, a lot of the problems with the old turrets are now gone. There is even support for different barrel configurations now.
Quality of Life During the upgrades to the ground turrets, a lot of fixes were done. One of the biggest is the pulse weapons on the turrets weren't working realistically. Now they aim at a target at least. More work needs to be done to apply the lead equation to where they should be aiming.
Short-term RoadMap
While the Admiral AI was put on hold for internal reasons, however as you can see, work is still being done. More work is being done on the RTS section of the game and likely to fix some usability problems. Hopefully there will be time to address some of the Admiral issues as well.
Hints of things coming
That's all for this update, stay tuned for more news next time! If you'd like to give Rank: Warmaster a try for yourself, pick up a copy on Steam and begin your conquest of Mars!
Admiral AI can now be ordered to attack a Fleet or city via the Nav screen (WIP)
Fixed loading issue where turrets were involved with the save.
Fixed possible issue when viewing the Admiral from the Navigation screen.
Various Fixes
Rank: Warmaster News and Updates February 15, 2023
Greetings, Warmasters and Candidates! This is the newsletter for February 15th, 2023. More minor updates and fixes preparing for a major news announcement in the coming weeks, so stay tuned! Most of the updates this time revolve around adding some functionality to the Admiral AI.
Quality of Life
The Admiral AI is a feature that has been getting slow progress on. In this case, the update is around being able to tell the Admiral to attack a fleet or a city. While this is still a work in progress, what this means is, the Admiral will start building ships to attack the selected target group with what they are able to build. The end idea is if the main player doesn't want to micro-manage taking on a fleet or city, they can order an Admiral to do it. This can be useful if too many battles are happening at once, or the player is simply busy with something else and doesn't want to be bothered. Expect this to be fully operation by next update.
Short-term RoadMap
Work will continue to be done on the Admiral AI, as well as some other internal parts about the terrain and RTS section of the game, as mentioned in the past update newsletter.
That's all for this update, stay tuned for more news next time! If you'd like to give Rank: Warmaster a try for yourself, pick up a copy on Steam and begin your conquest of Mars!
Further memory over allocation issues resolved from older terrain code, as well as the picker/mouse over code
Fixed issue with loading of games because of a fix with the ground turrets
Fixed coloring issues with some special effects.
Main Campaign no longer refers to the Campaign as a simulation.
Various Fixes
Rank: Warmaster News and Updates February 1, 2023
Greetings, Warmasters and Candidates! This is the newsletter for February 1st, 2023. More minor updates and fixes preparing for a major news announcement in the coming weeks, so stay tuned! Most of the updates this time revolve around bug fixing and memory.
Quality of Life
A lot of memory cleanup has been done, but one of the main critical bugs that was introduced last update was a load/save issue. The save is fine, but when loading, some updates to the turrets causes issues with loading games. So your old saves should work again, sorry about that. Some long standing bugs were found about colors not being properly updated for certain special effects, as well as some other under the hood updates. On a more minor note, the main campaign no longer refers to the campaign as a simulation, since it's the main campaign. That was left over from a while ago.
Short-term RoadMap
Work is still being done behind the scenes that will affect the terrain, the Navigation Screen (RTS) and how things are handled internally. Some interesting discoveries we determined with the AI (which still needs updates) and how the Navigation screen handles zooming, which can be counter intuitive. This is being looked into and how it can be updated.
The turrets are being heavily worked on, as well as testing out using higher polygon models. Here is a first look at the new turret design.
That's all for this update, stay tuned for more news next time! If you'd like to give Rank: Warmaster a try for yourself, pick up a copy on Steam and begin your conquest of Mars!
Fixed Major issue with memory allocation on AMD systems (CPU not GPU)
Rewrote memory allocation system and fixed minor issues
Memory Cache more used in system to speed up and stabilize the system.
Fixed Nav Points trigger out of order
Various Fixes
Rank: Warmaster News and Updates January 18, 2023
Greetings, Warmasters and Candidates! This is the newsletter for January 18th, 2023, and the second update for year 2023. The holidays are winding down, so more minor updates this time. Most of the updates revolve around bug fixing and memory.
Quality of Life
For whatever reason, the way the Windows system allocates memory seems to be different for Intel and AMD CPUs, and this caused a serious issue on AMD systems. This has now been handled, so should work again on AMD systems.
Short-term RoadMap
Work is being done on the Terrain system, to make it more interesting, but this is just a first draft of the changes, and not ready for release. Everyone is getting back into the swing of development, so there hasn't been as many updates. Work is being done on some of the models, especially the turrets, so look for an update on those in the future!
That's all for this update, stay tuned for more news next time! If you'd like to give Rank: Warmaster a try for yourself, pick up a copy on Steam and begin your conquest of Mars!
