Greetings, galactic despots!
Sven and I would like to extend our sincere thanks to all the participants in our Early Access program. We've already received lots of good feedback and useful suggestions (not to mention bug reports), and we encourage you to keep them coming as we continue along our journey towards release.
Patch Notes for 21 September 2016 (ver. 17120)
As you might expect, the first week of development in Early Access was more of a bug hunt than a stand-up fight. Here's a summary of the changes for today's build as well as the numerous hotfixes over the past week:
New Features
- Updated frames and layouts for the Options pane.
- Added a new gameplay option: "Assign New Transports to Trade". When activated, this will automatically send newly constructed Transports to the Trade Pool.
- Added a sound level control for ambient background effects, so that the volume of ambient sounds can be changed independently of music and sound effects.
Bug Fixes
- Fix for a bug that was preventing many minor races from suffering the full consequences of low morale.
- Better handling of starvation events on planets where a portion of the population does not require food.
- Using a mouse configuration that switches the meaning of the left and right buttons should no longer cause UI bugs.
- Fix for a bug that could cause an AI faction to be marked as "destroyed" after absorbing a splinter colony.
- Successful revolts will now destroy any planetary defenses on the rebel planet.
- Spice Mongers are now better able to farm Arid worlds.
- Creating an outpost an a planet with natives should no longer cause that world to join your empire.
- Fix for a bug in the AI logic that could cause the game to throw an exception, instead of advancing to the next turn.
- Fix for a bug in the planet bombardment logic that could cause the game to hang.
- Deleting a ship design while an example of that design is being built should no longer cause an error.
- Fix for a bug that could cause primitive races to sometimes crew colony ships.
(Click here to view the complete development changelogs.)
In the Works: Strategic Map Zoom
The feature that Sven and I are working on now is to add multiple zoom settings to the strategic map. This is one of our most often-requested features, and something we've wanted to get to for some time. The current map has only a single display mode, which is scaled to fit the entire map on screen, and it can get a bit crowded when multiple fleets are active around the same star system.
We are adding new zoom in and zoom out modes for the strategic map. Our current target is for for a max zoom in of 200% and a max zoom out of 50%. Here's a mockup of max zoom out below:
Zoom can be triggered with explicit clicks on the zoom buttons or via the mousewheel. Our plan is to add multiple intermediate steps between normal, max and min zoom, but we'll see how that goes.
One of the things that adding zoom levels allows us to do is to increase the spacing between stars at normal zoom level, which should reduce clutter even at the normal zoom level.
That's all for now. Happy conquering!