Our November update, "How to Make Enemies and Exorcise People" is now live! Notable changes include:
MAJOR PLAYER-FACING CHANGES
- Building quality mechanics! Add decor to make your workshops & houses more desirable!
- Revamped military AI! Soldiers will consistantly rally and follow orders with our newer, stronger AI infrastructure (with still more upgrades to come)
- Haunting Spectres! They’re spooky.
- Additional opportunities for madness and the occult!
- Point lights! Bring some cheer to those dark, creepy nights.
- Enhanced murder.
- Character memories have been cleaned up, extended, and given a longer-term record in the character UI.
- (Continuing work on Secret Things, deep and dark.)
- (Seriously, no spoilers on that stuff.)
The full change log can be found here, but all of the content that we could fit into an announcement can be found below!
ENGINE & MISC
- FIXED: OS X crashes when cancelling assignment via assignment beacon
- FIXED: OS X crashes when crops are finished being harvested
- FIXED: some leaking memory (what a mess!)
- replaced dynamic allocations for moving tags about in the game space dictionary with a static pool of memory and a large buffer
- replaced dynamic allocations of particle system VBOs and memory during the render frame with a pool of VBO resources to draw from; eliminates a memory leak and General Badness with drivers that do not like you creating/deleting VBOs on the fly all that much, and should also provide a modest speed increase.
SAVE/LOAD
- FIXED: Display of work schedule data is no longer reset on load.
- FIXED: environmental light values now set correctly after save/load
Combat AI / Decision Tree
- added a bunch more code to the decision tree parser, specifically “enough code to make it work” and “enough code to unbreak the editor.”
- replaced all old military logic with military decision tree code (it is smarter! also: should fix rallying)
- FIXED: require_work_party_rally_point not firing consistently
RENDERING & LIGHTING
- added dynamic point lights! they can be attached to a model placer for rigid body and skeletal models
- lights can now be attached to/removed from placers; UPM version 2.9 created
- the renderer now applies interior ambient lighting for objects inside buildings, and tracks it on the interior
- renderer now does lighting in a completely different way for the two existing lights, but this will probably be invisible to the user. It is, however, necessary for everything else.
- things can now cast shadows on farms (and other decal-type zones) increased transparency of semi-transparent building walls.
SPECTRES
- added Haunting Spectres
- added Vengeful Spectres
- added job for Vicar to confront spectre (+ticker message is created when vicar confronts spectre)
- added spectre report event (spectres can be reported once per night)
BUILDING QUALITY & WORKSHOPS
- added Building Quality system! You will now have to balance the ratio of work modules to decor in your buildings. Nicer buildings mean happier colonists!
- added building quality display on UI for workshops/houses buildings now robustly track modules they contain.
- added 14 new decor modules
- appropriate decor has been added to all buildings’ default module lists
- many modules have been renamed
- many modules have new descriptions
- performed reorganization of our workshop edb to be actually legible
- added icons for mounted aurochs/rhino heads
- balance: build costs on all decor have been adjusted
- FIXED: orientation/placement on a number of previously unused models
- FIXED: script error when building clotheslines
- FIXED: issue w/ some decor modules not deconstructing correctly
- FIXED: footprint size on carpets
MADNESS
- balance: added various eldritch means which help sustain madness levels
- added evil book prop
- added madness sustaining memory creation for colonists w/ cult_seed tag
- added madness-sustaining effect for colonists w/ occult_mark_black_magic
- made vermin corpses last longer to encourage Beetle Curses
- Increased weighting on many madness jobs
- balance: contact with Obeliskians made slightly more maddening & for longer (due to rarity)
- FIXED: rare scripterror when attempting to spawn eldritch artifact
CULTS
- added ability to order shrines destroyed
- added attack_object_until_destroyed.fsm
- cultists will become upset if your order shrines destroyed, especially at whoever destroyed the shrine
- balance: slightly increased chance to perform cult recruitment
- added cultist madness-sustaining memories + new icons for some of them
- balance: many more experiences can now trigger “cult seed” depending on
CHARACTER TRAITS
- balance: more strange/terrible events may now provoke cult formation
- FIXED: possible error cases when cultist leader dies
- FIXED: cult leadership now transitions correctly when leader dies
- FIXED: cult group ending due to lack of sufficiently enthusiastic leadership scripterror
- FIXED: cultist preaching was pushing memory to wrong party in conversation
OFFICES (CHAPEL, PUB, BARBER)
- Pub jobs cleaned up to be vastly more efficient at actually stocking and serving drinks
- Barber/Pub/Chapel: if a colonist seeks treatment/confession/a pint of beer and can’t find a barber/vicar/pub worker nearby, they will abort waiting and create an alert
- cleaned up confession to not be a huge mess, and thus
- FIXED: vicars giving confession will no longer permanently paralyze colonists
RELIGION
- colonists will now pray at wall shrines
- added access point to wall shrines
- made praying at wall shrines something both Spiritually Inclined and Staunch Traditionalists can do
MURDER
- made significant improvements to how colonists decide to engage in murder
- added Beetle Curse (murder)
- added Tree Curse (murder)
- added Occult Murder witnessed event
- killing someone for the first time will now record their name in the memory
- cleaned up memories for killing and killing memory creation
- FIXED: murder due to hunger
DEATH
- balance: corpses will only spawn vermin after being left out for a day
- made a ForceDropEverything receiver in ai_agent.go which drops every damn thing being held; all agents now call this upon death
- as such, removed a bunch of extra ForceDropTools calls from all the agent scripts
- therefore FIXED: commodity drops upon character death
- corpses will now only reset their burial job at sunrise rather than every 10 seconds (it was spammy)
The development progress page has also been updated, with exhaustive notes on the status of the project, as well as even more details on the stuff we included above. We kept the new format because David threatened to sell us out to the Stahlmarkians if we did another one the old way. (He has also been eating a lot of sauerkraut lately...)
Feel free to discuss the update right here, over on the Steam discussion page, or on our official forums!