Patch Notes for V0.9.3.0 (hotfixed to V0.9.3.1) (Build ID: 1171612)
Read more about this update in our latest announcement: https://steamcommunity.com/games/340210/announcements/detail/957392279211628292
Starbases / Orbitals:
Added new models for starbases
Orbital satellites and starbases are all now infrastructures rather than buildings, and there are now separate sections in the planet UI for both.
The Orbital Telescope is now an observatory infrastructure that spawns a satellite in orbit of the planet. As it takes up an infrastructure slot, it has been buffed to provide +10 RP/turn in addition to its 40ly sensor range bonus.
The Weather Control Satellite is now an orbital infrastructure just like the Orbital Telescope, with an observatory building and a satellite in orbit.
Added a new Temporal Acceleration Satellite that causes the planet to experience permanent Temporal Acceleration (executes two turns every turn, very powerful effect!)
The Services menu no longer lets you launch a weather control satellite but does show the satellite's status and progress and now also shows the temporal satellite's status and progress too.
If you have multiple satellites or ships in orbit of a planet, each now occupies a slightly different orbital band around the equator.
Removed Shipyard city blueprints since they aren't buildings any more.
Adjusted the Planet AI to build a starbase as your last piece of infrastructure.Victory Conditions:
Replaced the endgame placeholder techs with their finalised versions.
Eliminated races now cause a diplomacy screen popup informing the player that the race has been eliminated and who did it.
The Diplomacy dropdown now shows eliminated races.
Eliminated races are no longer considered by various parts of the galaxy AI, so a race will no longer compare itself with an eliminated race.
Implemented and tested the Galactic Domination victory condition
Implemented and tested the Destroy Revenants victory condition
Implemented and tested the Scientific victory condition
Added a placeholder victory end sequence for each victory condition, to be fleshed out later.Optimisations:
Optimised generation of planets and homeworlds.
Significantly optimised the end turn code. It turned out that the AI has been executing a very expensive road recalibration process every single turn but it's not necessary. This caused the game to slow down to several seconds per turn after about 5-6 planets are colonised.
Optimised processing speed, I/O time and memory use when generating planets by batching continents together and loading each file only once.
Optimised several parts of the planet code by coming up with a new quick method of determining which hex the mouse is over on the planet screen based on camera position. This was only used a few times in the code but had a high processing overhead, and now it's incredibly efficient.
Developed an entirely new content loader system which smartly loads models and textures from files, both those compiled using the XNA framework and flat files (.png for textures, .X for models). This new loader caches files in many cases where the old system couldn't, reducing RAM usage by over 35%.
We've moved the End Turn code over to a second thread so that the game can continue to render smoothly while the End Turn operations are underway, eliminating the end turn stall.
Implemented a new highly optimised range RecursiveHexList algorithm for finding large circular arcs on the fleet combat and planet hex grids. Now it finds three extended arcs and merges them, eliminating the exponential recursion growth due to graph cycles.
Ship models now load only the low-res 256x256 textures by default, reducing initialisation times and reducing RAM and VRAM usage. The high-res textures are loaded on request in a separate thread and disposed of when the Planet or Shipyard screen is closed or the fleet/system window is closed.Revenant Planet Event:
Gave Revenants Ancient buildings technologies
Ancient buildings are now all small sized to prevent them from suddenly getting bigger
Added revenant planet decloak event, which can also optionally spawn a guardian ship at the planet. Currently the guardian is disabled, but we may add a chance of the revenant planet being revealed early and use the guardian to stop players from getting access to the planet too early.
Fixed bug where the Revenant homeworld could sometimes attract a temporal rift, and hilariously then the Revenants could emerge and attack themselves.
Added a new Revenant awaken event that can be triggered to wake up the Revenants. Event causes the planet to be captured by the Revenants, and one city to be destroyed and replaced with new technology.
Once revenants are the revealed, a new counter launches a new fleet every 10-20 turns toward a random planet and Revenant fleets increase in speed from 2ly/turn to 8ly/turn.
Added new Revenant type planet with new textures and a new bump map.
Implemented Recenant awaken event trigger. 1% chance per turn the planet is colonised, 25% chance every time a crashed ship is excavated on the planet, and 100% chance if all crashed ships are excavated.
When you excavate a crashed ship on the revenant homeworld, you now have a chance of getting a Revenant technology like the particle beam.
Added a new environment type (Revenant) for the Revenant planet.Bug fixes and other updates:
Fixed bug with Biomorphic Fungi causing it to generate too much food/turn for aquatic races and not working in non-habitable environments.
The crashed ship at the start of the pre-warp period no longer requires staff.
Changed 100% Desert planets to have sea levels of 0m.
Fixed bug with the continent graphics that caused squares on terrain at low sea levels
New colonies now start with 2000 population instead of 1000 to help them get established.
Fixed bug with Aquatic races tech tree (Infrastructure Biospheres didn't unlock the next techs correctly)
All Artifact Excavations now continue to provide +100% research bonus after they complete, and all ancient buildings now provide +100% research bonus.
Fixed bug with the tooltip on the research hex
Fixed text alignment bug in research screen
Fixed serious bug with Ocean homeworld planet generation where land could spawn under the starting colony
Improved the efficiency of the planet generation code. Note: This necessitated making the new version incompatible with the old one.
Fixed bug where you get kicked out to orbital view when the AI colonises a planet while you're zoomed in.
Planets with strategic resources are now generated when explored rather than during map generation time. This significantly reduces map generation time.
The blueprint creator and AI will no longer over-estimate power requirements of a city. Now they assume each city has a 100MW power station attached and 5 other pieces of infrastructure. Aquatic races have adjusted power expectations since teh fishing coral reef uses no power.
Fixed water colour problem with partially Desert planets. Desert water now looks clearer and as the planet is terraformed away from Desert it gets deeper and bluer.
Fixed a crash caused by sharing sensor ranges with a sensor treaty
Laid ground work for switching End Turn code to a separate thread, and fixed numerous thread-safety crashes. This option has been switched off for now while we test more for other edge cases and to make debugging new features more straight-forward.
Fixed bug with display of tooltips on infrastructure that can use more than 4 types of resource (e.g. ore refinery)
Auto-updating blueprints now use the new upgrade mechanics to update, so they will no longer demolish a building for several turns.
Planet graphics improved a little on Terran worlds
Switched the Research Icon mouseover and non-mouseover text. Now it displays number of turns normally and RP amount on mouseover.
Fixed a bug where explosions would try to play on the planet screen if bombs were dropped on other planets.
Fixed bug where the Engage Enemy Forces button could be clicked even if it wasn't being displayed.
Fixed bug with the diplomacy window first contact and revenant threats sometimes having the left and right windows blur effect even though the windows themselves don't show.
Fixed a rare fleet combat AI crash
Fixed bugs causing all ground cannons and fighters to use prototype tier 1 weapons instead of your best weapon when fired from a planet.
Homeworlds can no longer be destroyed by TimeExpand temporal rifts.
Fixed bug causing the AI to sometimes build cities on top of existing roads
Some Infrastructures now require a specific race archetype to function. For example, Robot fuel factories require robotic inhabitants. This only matters if you annhilate all cities on a planet and then re-colonise it. Captured colonies retain the original race's abilities and requirements.
Fixed bug causing a "Planet" item to be in the ship designer cosmetic item list. This was supposed to be a dummy item used in the game engine to identify planets in fleet combat.
Replaced Algae Silo with Food Silo for aquatic races
In diplomacy, improvements and synergies are now worth the maximum value.
Fixed "satelite" typo in multiple places in the game
Fixed bug causing player designed ships to be saved in blank files, in some cases saving over each other.
Fixed a bug where the wrong infrastructure details could appear on the popup when you excavated an ancient ruin that turned into a building.
All planets now have +1 city when fully terraformed to your race's ideal environment. The "Terraforming Complete" popup now explains this.
Fixed a bug causing all fighters and starbases to spawn with prototype beams
Fixed a shipdesigner crash caused by losing a reference to the currently picked up part
Added Diplomacy text responses for all of the races.
Fixed bug with Reptilian races having two Brood Hatchery buildings and no Research Lab
Fixed bug with Titan Hull technology unlocking randomly
Moved Reptilian Scientist Hatchery further along in the tech tree so you can choose it and another hatchery type
Fixed bug with Robotic races not having a Research lab sometimes
Increased Slave Conscription technology for Reptiles from +5 combat rating to +10 since it applies on the city level and +5 was quite small.Update: We've deployed a hotfix as patch 0.9.3.1 to solve a deployment bug with the patch where people could try to load save games and it would crash due to major changes between this version and older versions. Older save game files will now simply fail to load.
Cheers,
-- Brendan, Lead Developer