We made it to 1.94. We continue to do most of our work "beneath the hood", polishing the inner workings of our engine. Thanks to the help of the community reporting bugs and helping us test new stuff, we have managed to locate and fix a number of odd bits of code that were causing unexpected behavior or/and crashes.
We also managed to rework portions of our steam client (part of our engine that implements Steam features like stats, lobbies...), untangling it from parts of the network engine that was also calling steam functions. We are very happy with the results since our code is now much more streamlined and will allow us to implement new features and polish existing ones much faster.
Another thing we were concentrating on (and will continue to prioritize for the time being) is network packet optimization. We have identified and fixed a number of packets that were unnecessarily large, and/or being sent unnecessarily often, causing lag in certain situations. Game should be running a bit smoother now, specially on machines with slower connections.
We have included one notable new feature, combat readiness. It is our thinking that soldiers get more efficient on the battlefield as they continually face live engagements, and "loose their edge" a bit if they sit in barracks for too long. To simulate that fact, each successful engagement will grant your marine a small percentage of battle readiness (going up to 120% maximum) and each day spent without even the shortest engagement will reduce it a bit (up to 80% minimum). Readiness boosts energy recharge, with 80% giving it no bonus (meaning having it at 80% your regeneration stays as it was prior to patch) and each percent above 80 gives you 1% boost to energy recharge. New players (those with xp under 5000) will never have their readiness drop below 100. Of course, those numbers are not set in stone. This system will probably be further expanded as we gather some feedback from the players.
It is also worth noting that our artists did some work on the GUI, switching some temporary "placeholder buttons" with something a bit nicer and more user friendly. You can expect much more work on ironing out the GUI more properly once most of the features get implemented and GUI requirements stop changing so rapidly.
Other minor fixes include more information on mining cone damage being added, fixed specialty ranks (rank 10 now properly gets stats superior to rank 9), dead marines get shown on the map, leaders get an in game icon...
We continue working as hard as we are able and hope to be able to gave more goodies for you soon.
Now go and enjoy your game, marines, that's an order!