IMPORTANT
This is a testing release, meaning your saves might break and the game might become unplayable sooner or later. You can enable backups in the options window. I will be watching the bug reports closely and patching often. You shouldn’t play the game right now, if you want a stable experience.
You can find information on joining the testing branch here.
What has changed
Base mechanics
The entire flow of the game has changed, with the intention of making the game a little less chaotic and cryptic and making software more customizable and personal. To accomplish this, difficult to follow feature inter-dependencies have been removed. Software is now clearly split up into specializations and you no longer need to toggle all features to achieve good sales. Furthermore, I’ve added tech levels to replace patentable features, which are much more general and allow the market to run procedurally with no hard limits. Finally, I’ve added submarkets to make each product feel more unique and give the player more of a choice to define their product.
Upgrade to Unity 2017.4
The game has been through Unity 4, 5, (5.6) and now 2017. The major reason for wanting to update once again was to solve a bunch of crash issues and benefitting from Unity’s long-term support. The version of Unity I used for Alpha 10 hasn’t been supported by Unity for almost 2 years.
There are some drawbacks here, of course. Mainly compatibility. You can no longer play the game using DirectX 9, which means Windows XP is out (Minimum requirements have always been Windows 7, to be fair). The game no longer supports 32-bit OSX, i.e. it only supports OSX 10.9+, which deprecated 32-bit. To me, these feel like minor concerns compared to the benefit of getting a game that is a great deal more stable, I hope you agree.
Other cool stuff
The progressbar has returned to the alpha phase! I know this was a big point of contention for many of you, but the changes I’ve made, coupled with the iteration mechanic, has made the progressbar suitable again.
A lot of you also disliked all the physical distribution stuff (I don’t know if this was because you guys thought you were forced to own printers?), but you can now let a publisher handle all that stuff.
The wall curve tool!
Game engines are gone, and you now have software frameworks instead, which work for all software types.
Check the patch notes!
Modding
Old data mods will no longer work. Period. Software has changed completely, both in structure, granularity and file type.
I’ve not yet updated the modding wiki, I’m very sorry. I will get it updated before the official release of Alpha 11, so you have time to check the new stuff out. For now, I’ve uploaded the base game files so you can get an example of how software looks now: https://softwareinc.coredumping.com/wiki/index.php/Modding#In-game_content
All mod files that used XML now use to TyD. Furniture, material and localization XML files will still load, for backwards compatibility. You can read about TyD here: https://github.com/TynanSylvester/TyD/blob/efe423af6569e9c8bd7a2eee4837dd0f04421d51/Readme.md
You can convert your localization XML files to TyD files by using the console command: “CONVERT_LOCALIZATION_TYD YourLanguageNameHere”
Patch notes
Alpha 11.1.8 fixes (2019-10-08)
- Fixed not being able to restore furniture under some circumstances in lease mode
- Employees working in alpha phase with their secondary roles didn't gain programmer or artist skill
- Fixed employees sometimes failing to work in their secondary roles in the alpha phase
- Added missing localizations to founder look customization
- Fixed modded furniture appearing black due to accidentally only supporting hex colors
- Room dirt score wasn't refreshed on load causing cleaners to ignore room until new dirt accumulated
- Fixed specialization progress pop out stuck at 100% for design document iteration 2+
- Employees no longer ignore burglars
- Fixed being able to change leader during meetings
- Not getting any progress done on a contract now also subtracts the up-front income
- Fixed stairs going to basement sometimes not punching a hole through the ground on load
- Improved education error message
- Increased maximum specialization points for leaders to 6
- Decreased max bug count for smaller projects/contracts
- Added warning when guards are not assigned to rooms with door entrances
- Publisher will sue player for funding, if project is released without much progress
Alpha 11.1.7 (2019-10-07)
Changes
- Changed market satisfaction bars in the design document window to be clearer
- Made it clearer when build mode is deactivated due to fire or burglary
- Increased max loan amount to $1,000,000
- Ability to hover over red counters in bottom button panel to get explanation
- Added server status icons (OK, Overloaded, Fallback or Broken)
- Made it a bit easier to make sales in the beginning across all difficulties
- Boosted inital market recoginition gain
- Increased fan gain
- Overhauled marketing deal reputation effect to be easier
Fixes
- Game would break when trying to educate employee with maxed specialization points
- Pure art contracts would skip directly to iteration 4 during design phase
- HR education simulation would break game under specific circumstances
- Specialization level check on software projects didn't account for secondary roles
- Supporting in-dev operating systems had a bug that would break the game on release
- Sinks weren't being repaired as they had no repair interaction defined
- Fixed TyD parser breaking if file ended with a comment and no newline
- Forgot to remove minimum specialization bar from Team window
- Fixed game breaking if assigning security guard to rooms with no main entrance
- Software where it was possible to have 0 market satisfaction (anti-virus) would break game if released as such, due to divide by zero errors
- Fixed not being able to restore some furniture in some circumstances after fire and burglary in the same room (Only PC addons broke for vanilla game)
Alpha 11.1.6 fixes (2019-10-04)
- Cancelling a project with a publishing deal would break the game
- Publishing deal would get removed after design phase and cause publisher to not complete printing and marketing tasks
- Buggy price evalution during reviews caused it to always say product is overpriced
- Fixed bug where lonely employees would end up sitting next to a water cooler and working in the air
- Increased required distance before computers are considered in ear-range for social boost
Alpha 11.1.5 fixes (2019-10-04)
- A long-standing bug in the save system would break the game when saving/loading with an active alpha work item that was either an Operating System or had an active iteration task. This will fix broken saves, unless they've been saved over more than once after the bug first appeared
- Having a publishing deal with marketing would completely break the game and stop the market from simulating. This will fix broken saves
- Contents insurance slider didn't update after reload
- Having active porting tasks would stop game from loading. This will fix broken saves
- Moving company to the town map would fail to generate map and plots
- Updated education error message to clarify that employees need XP
- Burglar spawn rate has been modified to scale with company inventory value
Alpha 11.1.4 fixes (2019-10-03)
- Roads would flicker on OSX
- Some geometry became black when looking in top-down mode (Z)
- Having SSAA disabled would break mouse projection when toggling top-down mode (Z)
- Design tutorial will now continue when marketing window is closed, instead of requiring a press release, to avoid getting temporarily stuck
- Having food go bad could break game under certain circumstances
- You can now change operating system support in the design document after adding an OS exclusivity publishing deal, to avoid going back and fourth
- Publisher wasn't registered properly for printing or marketing, so they never did any
- Added publisher information to player release window and product detail window
- You can no longer toggle build mode while a modal window is open
Alpha 11.1.3 fixes (2019-10-03)
- Game would fail to load if non-existing language was set in the settings file
- Save game would faild to load due to (Clone) name sticking around from Unity, saves broken due to this bug should work again
- Moving company does not retain leasing mode status in new building
Alpha 11.1.2 fixes (2019-10-03)
- Game sometimes failed rebuilding all furniture after fires and burglaries
- Error message when clicking on empty areas in specialization star chart
- Crash dump and log file location was wrong in Windows build
- New default buildings weren't updated
Major changes
- Overhauled feature system, with special scripted features
- Added submarkets
- Added tech levels
- Overhauled skill and specialization system
- Added iteration mechanic to development phases, removing over-design mechanic and adding back progress bar to alpha phase
- Added publishing deals, currently only offered by AI to player
- Added software frameworks
- Overhauled marketing -> service role and added lawyers and lawsuits
- Added wall curve tool
- Employee salaries are now evaluated on an hourly basis, which enables part-time employees and adds a monetary penalty for working them for longer than usual
- Upgraded to Unity 2017
Minor changes
- Added bathroom sinks and germs
- Added fires and burglaries
- Added contents insurance
- Overhauled software peer reviews
- Computer price and performance scales dynamically based on available computers on the market
- Sitting near other employees with no cubicles or walls in-between will now affect how quickly social need deplete, depending on compatibility
- Employees now dislike working at night, but can be compensated for it to increase their mood
- Added lakes that will be spread around maps and block plot purchases
- Overhauled sun position and color and made it affect skybox and fog
- Software needs are licensed monthly during development and operating systems are bought per employee during development
- Removed delay phase during development
- Added different animals to each biome
UX
- Overhauled design document window to be multi paged
- Print ordering window now starts out with a suggested value
- You can now add and remove operating systems from a porting job and the entire task won't get stuck on an in-development operating system
- Added new tip speech bubble that will replace some hints
- Changed hiring window compatibility rating to be least compatible person on team, rather than average
- Overhauled console to have almost unlimited history and be height adjustable
- Added color blindness UI colors
Modding
- Added new atlas material for modded furniture, allowing having multiple textures for one piece of furniture that can be mixed and matched by the player
- Data mods and localizations are moving from XML to TyD
- All mod types can have a Localization folder with relevant localizations and they will be appended to the main localization files
- Base features no longer exist
- Implemented a compiler/interpreter from scratch to allow custom scripts in software feature definitions
Fixes
- Employee skill when hiring is now based on benefits rather than company reputation
- Fixed not being able to mod roof and path materials
- Fixed furniture interaction sound effects not playing since updating to Unity 5.6
- Roofs are now offset based on surrounding rooms, making it easier to build roofs up against rooms
- Fixed longstanding bug where the clock would never actually hit 59 seconds, effectively skipping an in-game minute every hour adding up to almost 5 hours in a year