Lots of developments going on, and not all of them are about code! That image? Why, keeping up with current events, that's all. It may even be a hint of a future version allowing you to find long forgotten relics of humanity past...
As always here's what we have been working on for the past few weeks.
New security objects
Security has been fleshed out into its own research group, mixing a new a tiered system of turrets, shield turrets, item recipes and a high end door.
The new damage turrets won't autoscale their damage anymore so you will need to replace them from time to time (there's not a huge amount of them, don't fear a bit of micro for this one).
We are also introducing a new kind of turret, the shield turret. This defensive turret works like shield weapons, with a longer cooldown but greater duration.
And finally there's also a new, top end tier for security doors, which is almost as strong as a regular wall.
Getting serious about localization
For the past months several members of our player community have produced translations of Galactology to their languages, and we contacted them to seek authorization to include their work into our game. All of them accepted! We are forever grateful to Silas Coldfire, JonTurK, Swiloga and LeChatMG.
This means version 3.11 will include bundled translations, and it will also autodetect the user OS language in order to automatically show the right one on the first game launch. If you are already using a translation it won't touch your settings. And of course you can still go into the game options screen and select a different language if you prefer to do so.
We want to facilitate the process of crowdsourced translation as much as possible. For this reason we are preparing a new translation server for our games.
This service will allow any user to make translation suggestions and voting for existing suggestions (if we don't get spammed to death).
Going forward this system will allow us to be a lot more agile about translations, making it possible to publish our new game strings before we publish a new version for example. It will go public some days before 3.11 hits, check the forums for an announcement.
UPDATE: The server is now online, check this thread for more information:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/450700/discussions/0/1700542332324695551/
Achievements!
Yep, another "finally" :)
Development update 2018-01-26
Work has started on version 3.11, and as always a batch of small enhancements and fixes goes first. Here's what's been brewing for the last two weeks.
Resource list in galaxy view
The up/down controls to pick a resource or product to show in the galaxy view wasn't a very good solution, so a proper alphabetical menu will be now displayed instead:
Per-ship filtering in officer listings
All officer listings that allow filters now have an option to display the crew of a single ship:
New planet header images
Max has draw a new full set of images for the headers on the planet window, based on his original artwork for the planet icons:
New docks
After discussions in the forums, we've decided to give this a try:
Docks don't feature the long tube they had originally. In addition they now can only be built outside and will require a clear 3x3 area around them. Unlike the attrition rules used for "inside" objects both of these rules are "soft". Enterprising players can find ways around them. But it's the spirit that counts.
New reveal event for Lactians
Lactians now have the reveal event they were meant to. A team of Lactian priests and servants will visit your station with neutral reputation, and start littering the place with their leaflets about the Church of Lactus. Future visits won't be so peaceful tho.
Research screen final design
The research screen received a much needed cleanup. No more misaligned icons and overlapping everything.
Version 3.10 is now available!
What a better way to start the new year than with a new Galactology release!
The big new feature for 3.10 is planetary invasions. Planets are can now be invaded by hostile civs to interrupt your business, or by the player to secure extraction on hostile planets. Watch out for their vengeance!
Here's the development notes, in case you missed them:
*EXPERIMENTAL* support for OS rendered glyphs
We want to make our game localizable to the greatest number of languages, but at the same time we are limited by a years old, very simple custom text renderer. In particular we must bundle all fonts with the game. This makes it impossible to support asian languages, since the required fonts are hundreds of MB.
(For the more technically inclined and/or with gamedev localization experience: we could do font minimization to fit a given translation, but we are also allowing players to input arbitrary text in the names of officers. It would suck to remove this feature for the languages where it's not feasible to bundle a full font.)
After some experimenting it's now possible to fallback to the OS font renderer when the game encounters a missing glyph in the font, in any context:
Since the OS has access to its installed fonts, and it's very likely an user wanting to use a translation will also have those OS fonts installed, it means we can support virtually any language, at least at the glyph level. Languages that require specific shaping and layouts will still look bad, but the situation is much improved in any case. This feature is currently inefficient with VRAM so more testing is required to see if it fits in most users setups.
Direct deposit of factory products on nearby pallets
Factories are already capable of directly sourcing ingredients from pallets adjacent to them, and now they are capable of directly depositing their products too:
This means officers won't have to deliver the product themselves, further speeding up manufacturing. This action doesn't lock the pallet so several factories can dump on the same pallet. And the factory will also consider the neighboring tiles for the worker, so the setup in the screenshot will work just fine.
Noise
A new room-wide mechanic has been introduced: noise levels.
Most objects will be silent, but some will produce some noise, indicated in their description. The noise level of a room will be the simple sum of those noise values.
Some vital tasks will be affected by noise. They are, in order from most affected to least: sleeping, reading, eating and drinking (which is not inebriation, your bar can be noisy just fine). Sleep will be disturbed by any level of noise above 0, while eating will tolerate the noise of one kitchen so your initial hall can be simple.
Interrupted tasks show up like this:
And they also add a negative feeling:
Stock charts
What's a management sim without charts?
Translucent docks on mouse hover
"Finally" :)
Show ships with autopilot stop
To better tie up the autopilot editing, the planet window will now show a listing of all ships with an autopilot stop at said planet:
Manual forced delivery
An often requested feature, it's now possible to select a valid hauler then right click on a resource stack to try to force its delivery into storage:
Reputation gains when selling products
Selling products in bulk from the Civs interface now also increases the reputation with the buyer civ. This even works with hostile civs (the 3.9 tribute system is now only displayed for civs with the "at war" reputation level).
Reputation gains are inversely proportional to the price of the goods, so if you are looking to be liked it may be worth to take a revenue hit in your sales.
Planetary invasions
Inhabited planets can now be invaded by a different civ. An invaded planet looks like this on the surface:
The native civ camps are in a semi destroyed state, with the invader camps doting the landscape. Native citizens will be hidden in their (remaining) houses.
The galaxy screen and planet window will also clearly display which planets are invaded, plus an alert:
Civs that are at war with you will invade planets from civs that are friendly to you, with special predilection for planets where you have extraction going on. The invasion will blockade the planet: no extraction and no product sales will be possible, and tourist from its system won't visit your station. You will need to liberate the planet so things go back to normal:
But it's not only hostile civs doing the invading. You will also have to invade hostile planets if you want to reliably extract resources from them, since attrition damage to your extractors will be much higher on hostile ground now, and your invasion stops it. Landing on any hostile planet now starts the invasion process, and it's your choice if you want to finish it:
Of course, don't expect these civs to just sit idly while you invade their worlds for filthy lucre:
New antagonist civ variant
Some civs are now a "pure antagonist". Unlike the other civs, antagonists cannot own planets and they will always be hostile to you. Pirates, Robots and Lactians are now antagonists. Their discovery is not galaxy map based. Instead they are triggered by some conditions. For example pirates appear when your bank account reaches certain amount:
And robots appear when you first unlock the robot factory:
Lactians
The Lactians, as the members of the Church of Lactus are called, are a new civ in Galactology. They venerate a mysterious milk god entity, and are more interested on conversion than on slaughter. Here's how their planet invasions look like:
They won't hesitate to fight you if you decide to liberate the planets they convert tho. Lactians will have more content and specific events in 3.11.
Ship skills
Since planet combat is more important than ever, in 3.10 all ships will feature 6 officer slots, so you are not limited by ship crew capacity when assembling a strong force for planet liberation or invasion. But this made ship differentiation even less visible than it already was. To enhance ships and their role in planet exploration ship skills have been introduced:
Ship skills are actions that appear when you select an officer on a planet, which can be used by any officer. They have a global cooldown like the current teleport (indeed, the teleport is now a ship skill and it is standard for all ships). Each ship model has different sets of skills, with the largest and more expensive ships having a large selection of them. The currently implemented skills are:
- Surface teleport: the one already in game
- Orbital bombing: click an area on the map to bomb it from orbit (remember the removed asteroid shower event? It's back as this ship skill, and you can control it!)
- Healing wave: all officers get healed
- Ship dome: a large damage shield is spawned
- Mass hysteria: all enemy units on the map go crazy for a limited time
- Robodrop: a squad of combat robots is spawned
These skills increase in potency with bigger, faster ships. Additional skills will be investigated for future versions, and they may include non-combat abilities too.
QoL fire changes
Fire is the feature many love to hate. Combined with combat it's surely easier to hate than to love, specially in its current state. So for 3.10 some quality of life changes are being introduced with the hope to make fire less dumb overall.
Panic runs for fire are now replaced by "avoiding danger" runs. They are much shorter, and are intended just for that, to step away from the fire area. They are also non-chaining, so you won't get officers or enemies running away for an entire minute because of a fire in some corner.
Fire spawns will also proactively try to assign a nearby officer or robot with the firefighting job from the very moment they spawn. This is an inversion of how the game job system works, but it's certainly appropriate in this case.
Finally fire won't interrupt firefighters. If an officer needs to cross a fire because he's on the way to get some water to extinguish it, the fire won't interrupt the job (fire has a low DPS damage, just walking by inside won't kill a healthy officer).
Update 3.10.1
- Greatly decrease planet invasion event frequency
- Add per-planet invasion cooldown
- Antagonist civ reveal events must follow the same rules of invasion events
- Adjust internal event cooldown
- Remove "too close to enemy objects" rule, which is nonsensical now
- Fix some text fitting/scaling issues
Development update 2018-01-09
Version 3.10 is almost ready, with some bugs and testing left to do. A few more features have been implemented to round up the release in the past week.
New antagonist civ variant
Some civs are now a "pure antagonist". Unlike the other civs, antagonists cannot own planets and they will always be hostile to you. Pirates, Robots and Lactians are now antagonists. Their discovery is not galaxy map based. Instead they are triggered by some conditions. For example pirates appear when your bank account reaches certain amount:
And robots appear when you first unlock the robot factory:
Lactians
The Lactians, as the members of the Church of Lactus are called, are a new civ in Galactology. They venerate a mysterious milk god entity, and are more interested on conversion than on slaughter. Here's how their planet invasions look like:
They won't hesitate to fight you if you decide to liberate the planets they convert tho. Lactians will have more content and specific events in 3.11.
Ship skills
Since planet combat is more important than ever, in 3.10 all ships will feature 6 officer slots, so you are not limited by ship crew capacity when assembling a strong force for planet liberation or invasion. But this made ship differentiation even less visible than it already was. To enhance ships and their role in planet exploration ship skills have been introduced:
Ship skills are actions that appear when you select an officer on a planet, which can be used by any officer. They have a global cooldown like the current teleport (indeed, the teleport is now a ship skill and it is standard for all ships). Each ship model has different sets of skills, with the largest and more expensive ships having a large selection of them. The currently implemented skills are:
- Surface teleport: the one already in game
- Orbital bombing: click an area on the map to bomb it from orbit (remember the removed asteroid shower event? It's back as this ship skill, and you can control it!)
- Healing wave: all officers get healed
- Ship dome: a large damage shield is spawned
- Mass hysteria: all enemy units on the map go crazy for a limited time
- Robodrop: a squad of combat robots is spawned
These skills increase in potency with bigger, faster ships. Additional skills will be investigated for future versions, and they may include non-combat abilities too.
QoL fire changes
Fire is the feature many love to hate. Combined with combat it's surely easier to hate than to love, specially in its current state. So for 3.10 some quality of life changes are being introduced with the hope to make fire less dumb overall.
Panic runs for fire are now replaced by "avoiding danger" runs. They are much shorter, and are intended just for that, to step away from the fire area. They are also non-chaining, so you won't get officers or enemies running away for an entire minute because of a fire in some corner.
Fire spawns will also proactively try to assign a nearby officer or robot with the firefighting job from the very moment they spawn. This is an inversion of how the game job system works, but it's certainly appropriate in this case.
Finally fire won't interrupt firefighters. If an officer needs to cross a fire because he's on the way to get some water to extinguish it, the fire won't interrupt the job (fire has a low DPS damage, just walking by inside won't kill a healthy officer).
Development update 2018-01-03
New year, new version almost ready! Work progressed into the main 3.10 feature, planetary invasions, plus some smaller enhacements.
Show ships with autopilot stop
To better tie up the autopilot editing, the planet window will now show a listing of all ships with an autopilot stop at said planet:
Manual forced delivery
An often requested feature, it's now possible to select a valid hauler then right click on a resource stack to try to force its delivery into storage:
Reputation gains when selling products
Selling products in bulk from the Civs interface now also increases the reputation with the buyer civ. This even works with hostile civs (the 3.9 tribute system is now only displayed for civs with the "at war" reputation level).
Reputation gains are inversely proportional to the price of the goods, so if you are looking to be liked it may be worth to take a revenue hit in your sales.
Planetary invasions
Inhabited planets can now be invaded by a different civ. An invaded planet looks like this on the surface:
The native civ camps are in a semi destroyed state, with the invader camps doting the landscape. Native citizens will be hidden in their (remaining) houses.
The galaxy screen and planet window will also clearly display which planets are invaded, plus an alert:
Civs that are at war with you will invade planets from civs that are friendly to you, with special predilection for planets where you have extraction going on. The invasion will blockade the planet: no extraction and no product sales will be possible, and tourist from its system won't visit your station. You will need to liberate the planet so things go back to normal:
But it's not only hostile civs doing the invading. You will also have to invade hostile planets if you want to reliably extract resources from them, since attrition damage to your extractors will be much higher on hostile ground now, and your invasion stops it. Landing on any hostile planet now starts the invasion process, and it's your choice if you want to finish it:
Of course, don't expect these civs to just sit idly while you invade their worlds for filthy lucre:
Development update 2017-12-14
Work has stated in 3.10. The main feature of this version will be new systems to make planet gameplay more interesting.
The usual list of small features goes first tho, so here's what been brewing since the release of 3.9.
*EXPERIMENTAL* support for OS rendered glyphs
We want to make our game localizable to the greatest number of languages, but at the same time we are limited by a years old, very simple custom text renderer. In particular we must bundle all fonts with the game. This makes it impossible to support asian languages, since the required fonts are hundreds of MB.
(For the more technically inclined and/or with gamedev localization experience: we could do font minimization to fit a given translation, but we are also allowing players to input arbitrary text in the names of officers. It would suck to remove this feature for the languages where it's not feasible to bundle a full font.)
After some experimenting it's now possible to fallback to the OS font renderer when the game encounters a missing glyph in the font, in any context:
Since the OS has access to its installed fonts, and it's very likely an user wanting to use a translation will also have those OS fonts installed, it means we can support virtually any language, at least at the glyph level. Languages that require specific shaping and layouts will still look bad, but the situation is much improved in any case. This feature is currently inefficient with VRAM so more testing is required to see if it fits in most users setups.
Direct deposit of factory products on nearby pallets
Factories are already capable of directly sourcing ingredients from pallets adjacent to them, and now they are capable of directly depositing their products too:
This means officers won't have to deliver the product themselves, further speeding up manufacturing. This action doesn't lock the pallet so several factories can dump on the same pallet. And the factory will also consider the neighboring tiles for the worker, so the setup in the screenshot will work just fine.
Noise
A new room-wide mechanic has been introduced: noise levels.
Most objects will be silent, but some will produce some noise, indicated in their description. The noise level of a room will be the simple sum of those noise values.
Some vital tasks will be affected by noise. They are, in order from most affected to least: sleeping, reading, eating and drinking (which is not inebriation, your bar can be noisy just fine). Sleep will be disturbed by any level of noise above 0, while eating will tolerate the noise of one kitchen so your initial hall can be simple.
Interrupted tasks show up like this:
And they also add a negative feeling:
Stock charts
What's a management sim without charts?
Translucent docks on mouse hover
"Finally" :)
Version 3.9 is now available!
The new station <--> civ commerce system is the big feature of this release. Cash becomes much more important with a limited amount to start with and the need to produce and sell excess output from your factories to finance your station growth. Check the tutorial in the Civs screen for more details.
Here's the development notes for 3.9, in case you missed our updates.
Room-level aesthetics
Aesthetics refuses to die! I've spin again the idea, this time as a value that gets calculated for whole rooms, and displayed in the building overlay:
It's calculated from the contributions from the room flooring and its objects. Now that this is more visible officers will also require a minimum aesthetic value for their bedroom:
Notice something in the previous screenshot? Yep, graduates do not require a private room anymore. Instead they will just require a basic bed (which now can be made private to an officer) plus an aesthetic value for their bedroom (which is any room the bed is located at). Since basic beds do not assign ownership to their surroundings and can be built in multiples in the same room, this means graduates will happily sleep in barracks, as long as it's a nice barrack. This will solve the issue of having to build huge housing areas for your graduates, which could get quite tedious. Master officers will still demand a private room and will also ask for a high aesthetic value, along with all of their previous demands.
Import limits
Resources that are imported into your station (basically all recipe ingredients) now have a configurable limit:
This means your ships will stop collecting Fruit when your station stock reaches 7500 (this default value is equivalent to 10 stacks). This will alleviate the issues with having to build too much storage areas, and it will be useful when the full import/export economy is in the game.
Clone insurance
Have this super well equipped master level officer that was in the original 6 and you don't want to lose? There's an object for that now:
First you assign an officer to the clone chamber object (only one officer per chamber, as with any other object ownership association). If the officer dies they will immediately spawn inside the clone chamber, at full health, even if the officer was in a ship or exploring a planet. This will also destroy the clone chamber object, but such is the price of insurance. Speaking of prices, it's also very expensive. If you *really* like your officer you can assign them to any amount of insurance objects, giving them as many lives as your cash allows.
New resource distribution and recipe balance
Raw resources are now limited to one per planet, and are strictly bound in level ranges:
In the same vein all recipes have been reviewed so early research recipes also consume low level resources, instead of the very mixed ingredients they had before.
The research tiers have also been reviewed and the required points have been increased, since the previous amount were too low (but aided in testing the game).
Civ exports
Raw resources are not free anymore. They now cost credits, and the station wallet will pay for them when one of your ships loads them from a planet. This is expressed from the point of view of the civs that allow you to extract raw resources from their planets, so it's called an export:
All raw resources have a fixed standard price, but the more a civ likes you, the cheaper they are willing to sell those resources to you. It can go from 100% of the price at neutral to just 10% of the price at the highest possible reputation level.
Your ships will automatically purchase the resource they load from the planets, as long as you have the money for it. Higher level resources can be quite expensive, specially when purchased from neutral civs. More care will be now required to set up routes, instead of the endless abundance of previous versions.
Civ imports
The export system was clear from early on, but the design ideas for the import were less clear. After some false starts 2 designs extremes were identified:
A) Import happens only to visitor ships (simplest). The player would only be able to sell its products to visiting ships from non-hostile civs. A simple interface would display those ships demands ("We want 10 rations, would you sell them to us?") and an accept/decline prompt.
B) All galaxy planets are available as import receivers and the user distributes to them using the autopilot. All planets in the galaxy have demands for one or more products, and the player can supply them to make money. This requires enhancing the autopilot to a full blown auto trading system. Each planet order would need to include the order kind (buy resources / sell products / load from home) plus the resource subject and amount. This would also require multiple items per order (think about a home visit, it's legitimate to want to load several different products plus unload the raw cargo), smart stocking choices (what happens if there's not enough station stock to satisfy the order? Wait for more production or leave with whatever is available? Then how must the products be distributed for the sell orders, given the defined amount won't be meet?). This is a very deep rabbit hole. The end result would be formidably complex too.
In the end an hybrid solution is being implemented, with some of the complexity of B but crucially removing the auto piloted auto trading aspect.
Unlike the civ exports tab, the import tab will be interactive. Just as with raw resources, civ planets will only crave a single product. Products are also strictly assigned to civs, so for example you'll only be making rations for the humans. First you select the resource you want to sell. Then a list of that civ planets that crave that resource will be displayed, along with a price. That price will reflect the internal demand of the planet, which will be based on a simulated value over time (and it will be disturbed in case you sell to them).
In the right side you'll be able to change the amount of that product you want to sell to that planet, and which ship you want to use to perform the delivery (from the ships currently parked at home). Then you can start the delivery and the ship receive an order to travel to the planet, sell the product and come back home (this will be internal code, not configurable as an autopilot).
The idea is to make this manual action easy enough to perform, but still have some strategy and consequences. You'll be affecting demand in the planet, at least for some time after the delivery, so you can't spam a single planet with your cheap rations. You'll need to have ready to go ships parked at home, and their cargo hold size will be of relevance. But also their speed, since the demand price changes over time. It's not as complex or as "real" as the B option, but it's not the trivial solution either.
The "Avg BOM" value deserves a mention. BOM is for Bill Of Materials. Since you are selling products whose raw ingredients you paid for, this is a very important number to keep in mind when deciding to sell something. You could be selling under cost! But calculating this is very complex, since you can be sourcing the same raw from different civs at the same time. The game will try to keep average purchase tallies from your planet extraction and use those numbers to calculate the products BOM, so you can compare them to the price offered by the simulated demand pricing. That pricing in turn will be based on the product BOM assuming a purely neutral civ, so with some patience it will be possible to score large profit margins in your sales.
As you can see I'm a logistics/systems geek, but I have to exercise some restrain to keep the game playable (and to release at some point before 2025 :)
Smaller changes
- Optional exclusive fullscreen mode
- Inside the object tool alt click will now also copy the settings from the object, valid for objects that are rebuildable after destroy (factories and pallet-like objects)
- Better spawning areas for some non-violent events, including allowing to spawn inside the station. And better area selection for other events, still spawning at the border but now actively choosing a location close to inhabited areas.
- Shift click with the info tool now allows to add officers to the selection
- New officer sorting option: seniority. Sorts officers by how long they have been part of your staff.
- New officer sorting option: average item level. Sorts officers by their average equipped item level in increasing order.
Development update 2017-11-16
For the past two weeks work has been focused on the new commerce civ import/export (AKA sell/buy) feature in 3.9.
New resource distribution and recipe balance
But before the new export system was possible, a mass rebalancing was required for raw resources and recipes.
Raw resources are now limited to one per planet, and are strictly bound in level ranges:
In the same vein all recipes have been reviewed so early research recipes also consume low level resources, instead of the very mixed ingredients they had before.
The research tiers have also been reviewed and the required points have been increased, since the previous amount were too low (but aided in testing the game).
Civ exports
Raw resources are not free anymore. They now cost credits, and the station wallet will pay for them when one of your ships loads them from a planet. This is expressed from the point of view of the civs that allow you to extract raw resources from their planets, so it's called an export:
All raw resources have a fixed standard price, but the more a civ likes you, the cheaper they are willing to sell those resources to you. It can go from 100% of the price at neutral to just 10% of the price at the highest possible reputation level.
Your ships will automatically purchase the resource they load from the planets, as long as you have the money for it. Higher level resources can be quite expensive, specially when purchased from neutral civs. More care will be now required to set up routes, instead of the endless abundance of previous versions.
Civ imports
The export system was clear from early on, but the design ideas for the import were less clear. After some false starts 2 designs extremes were identified:
A) Import happens only to visitor ships (simplest). The player would only be able to sell its products to visiting ships from non-hostile civs. A simple interface would display those ships demands ("We want 10 rations, would you sell them to us?") and an accept/decline prompt.
B) All galaxy planets are available as import receivers and the user distributes to them using the autopilot. All planets in the galaxy have demands for one or more products, and the player can supply them to make money. This requires enhancing the autopilot to a full blown auto trading system. Each planet order would need to include the order kind (buy resources / sell products / load from home) plus the resource subject and amount. This would also require multiple items per order (think about a home visit, it's legitimate to want to load several different products plus unload the raw cargo), smart stocking choices (what happens if there's not enough station stock to satisfy the order? Wait for more production or leave with whatever is available? Then how must the products be distributed for the sell orders, given the defined amount won't be meet?). This is a very deep rabbit hole. The end result would be formidably complex too.
In the end an hybrid solution is being implemented, with some of the complexity of B but crucially removing the auto piloted auto trading aspect.
Unlike the civ exports tab, the import tab will be interactive. Just as with raw resources, civ planets will only crave a single product. Products are also strictly assigned to civs, so for example you'll only be making rations for the humans. First you select the resource you want to sell. Then a list of that civ planets that crave that resource will be displayed, along with a price. That price will reflect the internal demand of the planet, which will be based on a simulated value over time (and it will be disturbed in case you sell to them).
In the right side you'll be able to change the amount of that product you want to sell to that planet, and which ship you want to use to perform the delivery (from the ships currently parked at home). Then you can start the delivery and the ship receive an order to travel to the planet, sell the product and come back home (this will be internal code, not configurable as an autopilot).
The idea is to make this manual action easy enough to perform, but still have some strategy and consequences. You'll be affecting demand in the planet, at least for some time after the delivery, so you can't spam a single planet with your cheap rations. You'll need to have ready to go ships parked at home, and their cargo hold size will be of relevance. But also their speed, since the demand price changes over time. It's not as complex or as "real" as the B option, but it's not the trivial solution either.
The (still not ready) "Avg BOM" value deserves a mention. BOM is for Bill Of Materials. Since you are selling products whose raw ingredients you paid for, this is a very important number to keep in mind when deciding to sell something. You could be selling under cost! But calculating this is very complex, since you can be sourcing the same raw from different civs at the same time. The game will try to keep average purchase tallies from your planet extraction and use those numbers to calculate the products BOM, so you can compare them to the price offered by the simulated demand pricing. That pricing in turn will be based on the product BOM assuming a purely neutral civ, so with some patience it will be possible to score large profit margins in your sales.
As you can see I'm a logistics/systems geek, but I have to exercise some restrain to keep the game playable (and to release at some point before 2025 :)
Development update 2017-10-30
It took some time to get to full speed after the holidays, but here we are! 3.9 is well underway. This version will be smaller than previous ones, since October was not very productive and I don't want to make it too long between releases. The big new feature of 3.9 will be import/export commerce, but as usual the work started with smaller enhancements.
Room-level aesthetics
Aesthetics refuses to die! I've spin again the idea, this time as a value that gets calculated for whole rooms, and displayed in the building overlay:
It's calculated from the contributions from the room flooring and its objects. Now that this is more visible officers will also require a minimum aesthetic value for their bedroom:
Notice something in the previous screenshot? Yep, graduates do not require a private room anymore. Instead they will just require a basic bed (which now can be made private to an officer) plus an aesthetic value for their bedroom (which is any room the bed is located at). Since basic beds do not assign ownership to their surroundings and can be built in multiples in the same room, this means graduates will happily sleep in barracks, as long as it's a nice barrack. This will solve the issue of having to build huge housing areas for your graduates, which could get quite tedious. Master officers will still demand a private room and will also ask for a high aesthetic value, along with all of their previous demands.
Import limits
Resources that are imported into your station (basically all recipe ingredients) now have a configurable limit:
This means your ships will stop collecting Fruit when your station stock reaches 7500 (this default value is equivalent to 10 stacks). This will alleviate the issues with having to build too much storage areas, and it will be useful when the full import/export economy is in the game.
Clone insurance
Have this super well equipped master level officer that was in the original 6 and you don't want to lose? There's an object for that now:
First you assign an officer to the clone chamber object (only one officer per chamber, as with any other object ownership association). If the officer dies they will immediately spawn inside the clone chamber, at full health, even if the officer was in a ship or exploring a planet. This will also destroy the clone chamber object, but such is the price of insurance. Speaking of prices, it's also very expensive. If you *really* like your officer you can assign them to any amount of insurance objects, giving them as many lives as your cash allows.
Smaller changes
- Optional exclusive fullscreen mode
- Inside the object tool alt click will now also copy the settings from the object, valid for objects that are rebuildable after destroy (factories and pallet-like objects)
- Better spawning areas for some non-violent events, including allowing to spawn inside the station. And better area selection for other events, still spawning at the border but now actively choosing a location close to inhabited areas.
- Shift click with the info tool now allows to add officers to the selection
- New officer sorting option: seniority. Sorts officers by how long they have been part of your staff.
- New officer sorting option: average item level. Sorts officers by their average equipped item level in increasing order.
Version 3.8 is now available!
Planet stations are here!
The major feature of 3.8 is a new building system to enable player stations to be built on planets. The home station will now be located on the surface of a planet, as opposed to a featureless asteroid. This also comes with new features, like destructable walls with hit points.
Here's a recap of the 3.8 development log.
Full model and tool (re)making for the new build system
The new wall system is now fully integrated into the game, and a new build tool and system for walls has been implemented. A new concept of "room" has been introduced, and a damage model for walls as a mixed tile/object entity.
3.8 rooms are different from former rooms. In 3.8 a room must be 100% composed of:
- Floor tiles over its entire surface
- Entirely delimited by walls or doors
The game checks these conditions on every tile change and auto detects all correct rooms in the map. These are visualized when inside a build tool as green polygons:
This is important because in 3.8 most objects can only be constructed inside a room. The object build tool won't let the player build most objects outside of such a properly formed room.
Since a wall, door or floor tile can be removed at any time, be it from player orders or by damage destruction, a new "environment attrition" system has been introduced:
This is not meant to be a punishing disaster, the damage will be slow, but still annoying enough to make the required repairs to the room structure desirable.
New game options
Since stations are now built on planets, a new game options tab has been introduced. The planet kind selector allows to pick the general planet archetype:
It also allows to disable events from the very start. Once a game has been started they can be re-enabled in a new tab inside the options screen.
Filtering door system
Doors can now filter which entities they allow to pass through:
This is a very often requested feature, and it's finally here. Keep in mind the notes in the UI: enemies don't care about which sign is hanging on a door.
Path finding display
Selected entities will now display an overlay line over the map in case they are in the middle of a pathfind walk. Very useful to see where those pesky enemies are going or to figure out why your officers are ignoring certain route.
Multiselection with rectangular area
The game finally has proper multiselection:
Just drag with the left mouse button and a rectangle will appear, changing the selection live as you drag the rectangle corner.
Multiselection is only enabled for officer entities. The idea is that there's rarely a need to issue mass orders to any other kind of entities, with the exception of robots. I will look into adding robots to multiselection later on.
This is how the right column looks when using multiselection:
All buttons are live with item cooldowns too. The role grouping reflects the currently equipped item by the officer, not their spec.
Actions still work as usual. If you issue a walk order with 30 officers selected, all 30 of them will make a formation around the position you click on. For target orders I'm still deciding what to do, and I will probably introduce 4 separate target actions for each role. For players who want to micromanage their units this will give combat a very RTS flavor, and I believe it's a better fit that my previous designs.
Squads and the squad bar are no more, and combat mode is pending a redesign or a removal too.
RTS-like grouping
In the same vein it's possible to make ad-hoc groups like in any RTS-like game. First make a group, then press Ctrl-1 to store the group. From that point on pressing 1 will select again the same group of entities. Keys 1 to 6 are available for this.
Per-role combat target actions with selection
The player can now instruct their officers AI to focus on a group of targets instead of one, by using a combat target action and then dragging a rectangle over a group of enemies. This even works if the initial selection was a group of officers. So now it's possible, in 2 clicks (or 1 key and 1 click), to order any arbitrary group of officers to attack any arbitrary group of enemies. Quite a difference compared with the older system!
The target action has also been divided into 4 actions that only apply depending on the role of the officer, so you can keep your big heterogenous group of officers and still give target orders only to healers, for example.
Rebuild option for object ruins
One of the most asked for features is finally here. When an object is destroyed, its ruins, instead of being auto flagged as recyclable, now offer an option to rebuild the object. The new object will also remember all the pallet and factory options.
I have to say that I don't fully agree with this feature. I consider it goes against the spirit of a building sim, but I decided to implement it because pallet and factory re-configuration is not fun. What could be next, a tool to autorebuild all rubble without even clicking on it? Or why even a tool, why not a single button to rebuild the entire station? I have to draw a line in the sand. And the line is that this feature won't get any more automatic than it is now, and if anything it may be restricted further (and the future walls won't support it).
Enhanced ship autopilot
The ship autopilot now monitors the vitals of its crew officers and how full its cargo hold is, and decides on its own to visit back home to unload and let the crew satisfy their vital needs. Once they feel refreshed it resumes its orders in the same spot.
This also means it's not necessary anymore to include orders to go back home, and that there's no need to set a stay time in any order. It's both simpler and more efficient!
Also crew members get a new buff (or debuff, depends on how you look at it):
This means that when an officer is part of a crew they will care a lot more for their own vitals and will be much eager to interrupt station work to go have lunch or take a shower. This also means their refresh time while the ship aways to resume the autopilot will be shorter.
Robot inventory
It's finally here! You can check how many robots of each (unlocked) kind you have, and click on them to focus a random one. It will also display the total count, and something new, the max allowed amount. You'll now be limited in how many robots you can have depending on how advanced your research tier is.
Per-ship cargo filters
It's now possible to select which cargo resources are allowed to be picked by a ship when it visits a planet. This way you could save your faster ships for food ingredients for example.
Contemplation
Officers will now, from time to time, stop and marvel at your decorations and other higher aesthetics items. They will also prefer owned objects, so they will trek back to their room to look at their fancy possessions.
Shops are actual shops now
A very old issue is visitors just grabbing items from storage areas or pallets, ignoring the shop objects. They are just going there because it's closer or more convenient! But it's not right. The game was working around this issue by charging visitors for the items only once they sat down to consume them. This looked strange.
Now that 3.8 has doors with filtering, we can do the right thing. The game will charge visitors for items when they pick them up, and allow them to get them for free if they somehow manage to find some not stored in a shop (and show the message you see in the screenshot). And how is this right?! Because it's now also possible to enclose your visitor area with doors that don't allow visitors to pass, but allow officers and robots. The player can now build the storage and production areas inaccessible to visitors, while allowing shop stocking tasks to work just fine.
New combat mode
Combat mode is now on a 1 minute timer, and it will disable itself if the officer hasn't participated in combat. Once it engages, or when the player gives the officer a direct manual order, it will bump itself again to 1 minute. This will hopefully stop the problem with forgetting to disable combat mode. It still needs to be toggled manually for the AI to consider to apply it.
Update 3.8.1
- fix: autopilot sometimes gets confused navigating back to home from a non-home star system
- fix: autopilot morale calculation is not properly refreshed
- fix: if player decides to add manual autopilot home orders, do not set old minimum stay of 3 minutes, just apply the new autopilot logic (delete and re-add orders to home if you really want them)
- nerf bernice requests, again. poor bernice
- remove corridor from research
- reduce overall event frequency, increase initial grace period
- the game now properly stores existing built walls/floors when drawing blueprints
- fix: pausing the game, drawing a floor or wall blueprint, then drawing another on top, then erasing the blueprint, immediately built the floor/wall
- fix: over an already built wall, put a blueprint for another kind of wall. then put a blueprint of the same kind over that one, then cancel construction: wall is instantly changed to the new kind
- fix: race condition in DoorSystem entity aspect cache invalidation was making door filters only work half of the time
- steps to make very silly loop with starvation and healers less silly
make healing threshold <90% (was <99.999%)
decrease starvation damage over time intensity
- display an info-level warning when spawning officers/resources on the border area because no dock is available
- pre-select text in input boxes to make input faster
- doors are now buildable over walls, auto destroying the wall on completion, but not refunding any materials
- add warning when adding an autopilot order to go back home, reproduced here:
There's no need to add autopilot orders to go back home, the autopilot will automatically head back when the cargo hold is full or when the crew needs it. Forced home orders will always wait for crew rest, even when there's little need, and will slow down the autopilot schedule.
Update 3.8.2
- fix: repeated blueprint applications still lose original wall information
- fix: door blueprint over walls makes room validation fail
Update 3.8.3
- fix: AI healing threshold for units that have not been attacked by an enemy (or when the healer has not been attacked) in the last 15s is now 50%, otherwise it is 99.9%. manual orders also override this to 99.9%
- fix: clear props on initial spawn area +1 border to avoid some tutorial corner cases
- lower path finding limit
- allow to place object blueprints even if the tile room status is not valid
the building SM will pause the building job and flag it with a warning about room conditions not being valid
then resume it when they become valid
the storage area still requires a fully built room to preserve its special conditions
- add button to open inventory window from factory info panel when factory is set to global queue
Update 3.8.4
- fix: sneaker event can crash the game
- fix: crash when scrapping a ship
- make builder robot capable of repairs
- increase xp rate for healers
- pallets: actively remove stacks that are not of the controlled kind
- make sure keybinding titles are translatable
- fix: changing pallet and shop resource kind must cancel ongoing delivery jobs to that object
- fix: wall destroy, destruct and construct must reset damage flag
- fix: under some conditions the room overlay was visible outside of a build tool
Update 3.8.5
- change labels for icons in some inspector tabs
- fix: properly restore the global flag for factories on rebuild (only applies to newly built ones after updating to 3.8.5)
- fix: clear combat target after equipping a new item
- fix: add actual organic flags at civ level, don't hardcode on load
- fix: projectile weapons were having a hard time hitting some objects
- fix: all other cases of projectile aiming should also be improved
- buff single-target projectile weapon damage (only applies to newly created weapons after 3.8.5)
- fix: game load should not reset away team planet positions
- don't decay the social vital while outside of home station
- fix: toggle tool status is not properly applied on game loading
Update 3.8.6
- fix: ray testing must always include initial/final points, in case ray length is 0
- raise pathfinding limit
- show modal error when loading a corrupted saved game, don't crash
- fix: walkable/buildable tiles go +1 over borders in asteroid maps
2017-09-23 Note: I'm (Carlos) traveling for the next three weeks so I won't be able to put much work in the game. Work will be fully resumed in mid October.
