Hi everybody. We just pushed version 17.10.22 to steam.
Changes to development process
Gone are the days when we were just a few (3) developers pushing new features willy-nilly to master. We now have a development branch where we will be updating new features. These will only make it onto Steam or itch.io when they've received sufficient testing. We will be pushing only bug fixes and not new experimental features for a while until new features can be tested. This should improve the stability of future builds.
Here is a list of changes.
Crashes
- Fix crash on load caused by improperly serialized voxel type (was affecting most users in last version).
- Fix crash on save caused by improperly serialized mine designation.
- Fix crash introduced after last version which caused the game to crash while building floors.
- fix crash on load caused by improperly serialized enemy sensor.
- fix crash caused by bullet/arrow spawning without target
- fix several crashes caused by components improperly getting serialized without parents.
Game-breaking bugs
- Fix occasional broken stockpile/treasury caused by miners destroying blocks in vicinity of stockpile being built.
- Dwarves no longer get stuck in walls while trying to craft.
- When a dwarf is interrupted while eating, the object he/she was eating is now correctly dropped and can be picked up later. Before, the object would float in air and be unusuable.
- Bug fixed which caused plants to only be plantable once per tile.
- Do not allow items to be traded more than once with a trader (before you could get infinite items this way).
AI fixes
- Fix dwarves deleting the last move action in path, causing them to always stop 2 blocks away from their target.
- Creatures can no longer attack each other through solid walls, including cave levels.
- Creatures now properly gather items from destroyed objects (including chopped trees) immediately instead of waiting until all items have been destroyed.
- Remove pathfinding precheck from entity killing as it was massively slowing down the game.
- Prevent replanting on top of adult plants.
GUI issues
Enhancements/Balance
- Seedlings are now 3D objects.
- Plants move up and down slopes automatically when blocks are destroyed.
- No longer possible to exploit farming by mining adult plants or putting floors beneath seedlings.
- Massively increase both the time it takes to craft items and the XP gained from doing so.
- Reduce Xp gained from mining.
- Decrease the advantage from trading a rare item or disadvantage from trading a common item from 200%/50% to 125%/75%.
- Decrease the amount of time required to till soil
- Increase training object health by 5x
- Make sure no more than 1 trader comes per day.
- The same faction should never trade twice in a row.
- Increase egg gestation time from 20 minutes to 1 hour.
- Increase performance when there are a large number of entities by doing fewer checks for enemies and disabling performance tracking.
- Increase performance when caves are revealed by revealing them incrementally as dwarfs explore them with line of sight algorithm.
- Announcer larger, with more readable text.
- More flavor text for undead race names.
- Coin piles grow with the amount of money in them.
- Number of coins per pile increased from $64 to $1024
What's next on our list?
We will continue collecting and fixing bugs and pushing them to Steam. On the new feature front we will be focusing on two major changes.
The first is a new Task Pool system that will replace the old RTS style controls with something more familiar to fans of this genre, where tasks are assigned and prioritized directly without having to select dwarfs first.
The second is a new biome called the Haunted Forest that the undead prefer to live in. This biome will contain several spooky halloween-themed creatures and plants.
We expect both of these things to be done around Halloween.