The time has come!
The major v0.2 update is now available on live for all platforms. It has taken a tremendous amount of effort to get here, and while there's still a long ways to go this has been and will always be one of the biggest and most important steps for the game as a whole!
Watch the trailer:
This update is simply too large to try and cover all the changes, but here's a breakdown of the footnotes with the most notable changes and new additions...
Gameplay Enhancements (new to live release):
A list of some of the gameplay enhancements coming in this update. These are changes or additions to the game you'll notice and interact with directly. (the below list is new to the live release)
- New region, Phantom Plains, with an entirely new tech tree. Challenge of this region mainly revolves around scanning, as there's a thick haze covering the region making the enemies in it hidden.
- Decoration tiles that can help you spice up your base and add a level of uniqueness to it.
- New strategic outpost mechanics, including internal simulations for each outpost. (for example, attacking the resource supply chain to it's generator array will shut the outpost offline)
- Variety of new resources with more complex recipes, requiring efficient drone networks.
- New miscellaneous buildings to help with designing your base, such as beacons.
- A plethora of balance changes across the board, altering pretty much all building stats and costs.
- New settings menu, with many more settings to tweak the game to your liking.
- 50+ new stat modifiers to adjust, and a few new modifier presets to try and tackle.
- New route designer, with built-in filter settings and route previewing utility.
Gameplay Enhancements (previously mentioned):
A list of some of the gameplay enhancements coming in this update. These are changes or additions to the game you'll notice and interact with directly. (the below list has been mentioned previously)
- Multiplayer, join forces with friends on a shared world with up to 10 other players.
- New control scheme with dedicated control modes. Supports click to drag camera movement.
- Improved drone logic, with better conditional checks and far more logical decision making.
- Drone route connection previewing, showing the specific route a drone will take.
- Redesigns on most of the UI, for better clarity & more intuitive navigation.
- Predictive aiming for turrets, letting them lead shots to be far more accurate on moving targets.
- Refactor of the resource storage & management system, removing resource restrictions in place of a locally shared repositories, as well as removing resource tier restrictions.
- New defenses that require ammunition in order to fire. Used on stronger defenses.
- Numerous shader improvements that will help overall clarity, notably on regional boosters.
- Variety of new sound effects to give your base more life (i.e. drone ports opening & closing)
- New resource x-ray utility, allowing you to see the resources stored in each building at a glance.
- And a variety of other smaller improvements, too many to list!
Technical Enhancements:
A list of all the technical enhancements to the back end of the game. These won't be directly visible, but will be felt through general performance improvements and a far better development stream.
- New database & library system, replacing the old clunky library system. Whilst the old library system had it's benefits, it was very prone to errors and very inefficient.
- Component refactor; a complete overhaul to how entity logic is defined and applied. Will speed up the development of new content exponentially, and offer extensive modding support in the future.
- Vastly improved entity simulation, with the removal of the dynamic update rate in place of much more aggressive logic culling on certain entities. Reduces the active entity count substantially.
- New metadata system, which can capture entity metadata globally or locally. This will be useful when producing entity clusters (i.e. outposts) and be used heavily in the copy + paste utility.
- Update save system with better save-state capturing, storing entity conditions which were not previously stored in the old system (i.e. drone positions & action state)
- New sound system, creating more localized sound instances & interactivity by utilizing a simulated 3D environment based on spatial blending.
- New model animation system, for defining animation groups which can be interacted with from each entities script. Currently used by turrets, and will be expanded on in upcoming versions.
- Pretty much all reported bugs on the v0.1 branch have been fixed, either by addressing them directly or fixing them indirectly through other technical improvements.
- Upgraded engine from 2021 LTS to 2022 LTS. This was mainly done as Unity has dropped support for 2021 LTS, and I plan to continue supporting Vectorio well into the future, even after full release.
Thank you to everyone who has been patient during this time, letting me do this right and make the changes to core foundation of the game that are needed to support all future content. I know this has been a long wait, but moving forward you can expect updates on a more regular basis.
Finally, while this update has added, changed, and fixed a lot, I know there are still issues lingering from the transition to 0.2. I am working through these as quick as possible.
As per usual, if you want to get in touch the best place to do so is our Discord server. I respond to pretty much all messages and constantly review the bug reports / suggestions feedback channels. I do my best to keep up with Steam discussions, but Discord is still the best place to communicate with me.
Discord: https://discord.gg/Vectorio
Hope you enjoy the update!
~ Ben