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!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1422270/Rank_Warmaster/