Greetings, Warmasters and Candidates! This is the newsletter for September 13th, 2022, the first September newsletter. This update is a smaller update, mostly focusing on Steam multiplayer integration, better building information, and the turrets are now useful. And as usual, there are more bug fixes and cleaning.
Quality of Life
Joining a multiplayer game would normally be difficult unless you were familiar with IP addresses, port forwarding and the difference between internal addresses and external ones. This can get complicated for the average user. We have mostly completed the multiplayer wrapper for Steam, that allows players to host a game on their machine. Now a player can startup a server without the server worrying about their IP address or ports. The steam Invite mechanism currently only partially works and we couldn't get it done for this release, however it's 90% there. Once it is, you will be able to just join a friend's game easily via the steam interface or get invites from the server directly. The invites from the server do work in the sense of being able to send invites to friends.
The Navigation screen has always been confusing around the buildings. It can be hard to understand how much longer a building needs before it's completed, or even what it is doing. Some buildings have been updated with more information in the popup information box. For a turret, it will list what weapon it has, and who is it's target if any. Turrets have also been made more powerful and actually effective. This will likely go through a lot more balancing, but the ranges have greatly been increased, as well as damage. Because of the internal changes, expect more diverse set of ground turrets coming.
Artistic Update
Just some turrets firing because they finally have range to hit something.
AI Update
Some minor fixes with the quick designer for the AIs. Mostly fixing issues with ship hull selection and preventing crashes if a required part for a role type hasn't been researched yet.
Short-term RoadMap
The steam wrapper for the integration is mostly complete, at least for the multiplayer. Right now, it is a matter of fixing what happens when an invite reaches the client. The data is good, but there is some minor issues that need to be correct for it to fully work on the client end. The invite integration does work fine, and a lot of effort was put into getting a server seamlessly available to incoming players. We hope that achievements can be added soon.
On the AI front, it was noticed that sometimes AI players would just stop and not finish their base.
That has been corrected. The steam integration and turrets no really working sidetracked the AI progress, but since both are solved, AI progress will resume.
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!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1422270/Rank_Warmaster/