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Our January update is now up on Steam! Whoa, that's a lot of monthly updates. Highlights of today's patch include:
- Dustier Dust!
- Mines and module maintenance!
- Lots of UI/UX improvements!
- A multitude of fixes, listed below, which embody a perhaps semi-successful attempt to make the “theme”, if you will, of this monthly update the fact that we didn’t focus on one easy-to-describe feature!
Engine
- FIXED: rendering errors on particle systems
- job system performance improvement
- FIXED: save game crash caused by having dirty objects in the rendInteractiveObjectClassHandler cleanup list when you save (we think)
- FIXED: rendering errors on particle systems
Events
- starting supplies now drop from the sky (look out!)
- balance: immigration and favour events fire less often
- FIXED: supply drop event will no longer inform you that you’ve requested zero items when you forgo a supply drop
- balance: made colonists less hungry on gamestart (unless they’re criminals)
- FIXED: when you call a Naturalist via favour, you actually get a naturalist now rather than an artisan
Human Characters
- FIXED: Rewrote memory utility code to correctly update and set moods from memories without having half-crazed, volatile mood swings.
- FIXED: starvation was checking a value 10x what it should have been
- FIXED: soldiers now actually move to rally beacons
- FIXED: colonists no longer believe that raw coconuts are a cooked food
- added Zzz particles to sleeping
- balance: removed starting naturalist (you must earn one via favour)
- removed extra pouches from the Scientist models (with apologies to Rob Liefeld)
- FIXED: “forage due to starvation” job wasn’t triggering
- started overhaul of job balance
- (added new internal tool for balancing job requirements and utilities; this is super cool for us and will ultimately mean a better-balanced game experience for you).
- FIXED: disappearing hair bug
- cleanup of character hair models & model defs (more varieties of hair will show up)
- unique macroscope use animations added
- FIXED: de-assigned science workers wouldn’t give up their uniforms
- FIXED incorrect icons for eating human flesh
- FIXED: hunger no longer goes negative after character eats when not very hungry
- Rewrote memory utility code to correctly update and set moods from memories without having half-crazed, volatile mood swings.
- made artisans less interested in doing paperwork at night
- removed “idle in chair” so that there will be free chairs for people to eat in, ever
- Naturalists will form work crews (though labourers assigned to naturalist work crew don’t do anything special yet)
Combat & Military
- All work crew filters are disabled when a unit becomes conscripted. Filters are then reset to the default when conscripting a unit.
- soldiers do pushups
- FIXED: colonists would beat up dead bandits, calling it a “melee counterattack”
Animals, Monsters
- balance: made animals less hungry on gamestart
- (started on burrowing animals but it’s not player-visible)
Buildings, Zones, Modules, Jobs
- FIXED: lag when placing buildings or creating modules.
- FIXED: civilization maps now computed correctly
- FIXED: Doors now render 1OU above the building footprint as ghosts, so they won’t clip through the building any more.
- FIXED: we now check whether we are in the same connected component (or not) as items when using them to fill gameSimRequireGameObject requests (this helps fix the case where individual units go nuts not being able to get to materials)
- FIXED: typo in “Make Gunpowder” job
- added sounds to airdrop crate
- renamed some modules to show clear progression of materials ( eg. stone oven -> iron oven )
- added bamboo farming (for timber)
- added module damage: after a module is used a number of times it will become damaged and require repair using a random material used to build the module
- if a damaged module is used enough, it will become inoperative and require repair before it can be used
- FIXED: “not enough logs to build gabions despite having lots of logs” bug
- added “walls down” building display mode
- FIXED: current building display mode now apply to newly created buildings
Biomes & Terrain
- FIXED: bamboo (in the wild) wasn’t using “small” variation
- balance: added more timber to tropical biome
- balance: reduced clumping of ore nodes in certain jungle biome
Multiplayer / Scripting System
- Ownership: objects can now be marked (internally) as being “owned” or “not owned” by a player ( or other group, i.e. bandits )
- FIXED: Slowdown with large numbers of characters testing for interrupts, caused by round trips to and from Lua system code
UI/UX
- added loading screen.
- Right-clicking a stockpile filter will enable ONLY that filter.
- Right-clicking a work crew filter will enable ONLY that filter.
- Added debug messages to try and catch more save game issues
- Q and E now rotate the camera left and right
- SHIFT-Click now places multiple modules at once.
- clicking workshop icons in workshop window now zooms to workshop location
- FIXED: work crew panel slowdown, take II (the work crew UI should not slow down the game anymore)
- FIXED: colonist panel slowdown (related to above)
- FIXED: building grid disappears when switching between two building types
- FIXED: “Show all commodities” filter now toggles to “Hide All Commodities” as well
- FIXED: UI gets cut off in work party menu switching from all workers to military sometimes
- Right-clicking a stockpile filter will enable ONLY that filter.
- Right-clicking a work crew filter will enable ONLY that filter.
Other Art
- dust particles effects made more dusty
- fix-up pass through particle effects done
You can find the full changelog on the dev blog.
The development progress page has also been updated, with exhaustive notes on the status of the project, as well as more details on the stuff we included above.
Feel free to discuss the update here, over on the Steam discussion page, on our official forums, or in the comments of the latest blog post!