MACHT 1.1.0.0: THE LIVING GALAXY UPDATE
This is the largest update Macht has ever received. Since 1.0.1.14 the engine has taken on 385 changes, and most of them are not tweaks. They are entire systems that did not exist before.
Civilizations now have people in them. Fleets cross the galaxy through a stargate network instead of crawling at sub-light forever. Battles are fought by a real combat AI and end with a winner. Planets die in a staged, cinematic collapse driven by Houdini pyro simulation. And you can now walk on Earth.
Thank you to everyone who reported bugs, posted screenshots, and kept telling us what was broken. A very large share of this changelog exists because a player pointed at something and said "that's wrong."
CHARACTER ACTIONS
Civilizations are no longer faceless statistics. They are populated by independent characters who live, act, marry, scheme and die on their own timeline.
Characters
- Independent character simulation: characters tick on their own, separate from the civilization layer
- Character Creator: build your own character and drop them into the living galaxy
- Real 3D character heads: sculpted busts with parametric morph targets and a live lit 3D viewport, not flat portraits
- AAA portrait rendering: subsurface scattering, dual-lobe skin shading, strand-based hair shading and ACES tone mapping
- Deep appearance customization: 8 categorized hair variants, derived beard styles, 16-colour luminance-preserving hair recolouring, reworked eyes, colour zones, micro-relief detail and soft eyelashes
- Clothing: a fully reworked modern robe with 4K textures and meander collar detailing
Actions & behaviour
- Actions Node Editor: a visual editor with a chain engine for authoring what characters do
- Reputation and fame, driving personal actions that ripple outward
Clans, diplomacy & succession
- Clans with their own panel, depth systems and mega-projects: treasury spending, construction and permanent lasting effects
- Marriage and inheritance: royal and commoner marriage, marriage proposals from custom characters, and heirs that actually inherit
- Non-Aggression Pacts with an input-weighted signing threshold that reads war history and foreign policy
- Directional relations: A's opinion of B is no longer forced to match B's opinion of A
Knowledge
- Knowledge core: who knows what, and a fog-of-war information lens on the galaxy map that consumes it
UNIVERSE FORGE
- Procedural universe and civilization generator as an in-game panel
- Galaxy Forge: generate real galaxy morphology, including a void mode that grows a galaxy from nothing
- Procedural civilization seeding with full race pools, neighbour/scattered placement modes and live system counters
- The colony ceiling has been removed and replaced with a Kardashev-based era table
THE GALAXY MAP
- Territory labels now lie flat on the galactic plane instead of turning to face the camera, with mirror-correct text and border-proportional scaling
- World map visual overhaul across two passes: palette separation, selection pulse rings, larger tool buttons, "You Are Here" fix
- Map name filtering with substring matching
STARGATES: THE GALAXY IS NAVIGABLE NOW
This was the single biggest structural problem in the game: light speed does not work at intergalactic scale, so fleets effectively never arrived. That is fixed.
- A real stargate network. It previously had 2 nodes. It now builds hundreds
- Single-ended wormhole travel. A gate is required to depart, but not at the destination. Requiring a gate at both ends made interstellar travel almost impossible, since not every system can have one
- Gates are anchored to systems rather than floating free in open space
- Construction ships build gates where none exist, so expeditions can get home
- One routing engine. Gate routing used to be scattered across nine call sites that silently skipped the gate list entirely
- Escort behaviour and enemy gate transit are live
- Fleets that end up without a gate now head for one instead of crawling toward a distant target forever
- Fixed a "tried once" stamp that permanently locked fleets out of gate routing for the rest of their lives
- Fixed the war AI shredding gate routes it had just built and cancelling warps halfway
WAR ACTUALLY HAPPENS
- Natural, unscripted wars now break out and resolve. The stargate network is what carries armies to the front
- Invasions transfer colonies. Territory genuinely changes hands
- Battles end with a winner instead of stalemating forever; combat mode exits cleanly unless you retreat
- War declaration notifications when a conflict breaks out, plus SPACE tap-to-pause
- Fixed ghost-position families across invasion, fleet and trade logic
- Fixed a modal chain that could freeze the simulation behind a confirmation window
COMBAT ARENA & SHIP AI
Ship combat was previously decorative. It is now simulated.
- Per-ship combat AI: six modules plus an orchestrator, replacing canned motion
- The arena brain is live. Engagements now run on real kinematics instead of pre-baked motion paths
- Damage layers and subsystems are bound to ship kinematics, so hits mean something
- Dogfighting with role bands, so ship classes behave differently in a fight
- dt-correct damage with real hit/miss resolution and calibrated engagement duration
- Steering rig on three axes. Every moving ship now actually banks and turns, with a turn-radius ceiling
- Ships face the direction they are travelling; heavy ships no longer wobble or spin in place
- Formation interpenetration fixed, with overlapping fleet pairs eliminated
- Fixed battles taking place inside planets
- Team labels so you can read whose fleet is whose
- Fake teleport ("single-gate no-op") removed
SHIPS
- SR Starships pack: 8 new ships with full PBR materials and a preserved turret node hierarchy
- Turrets rotate and track with a slow, readable sweep
- Volumetric ray-marched engine plumes with throttle response, idle falloff and proper exhaust geometry per hull
- Real environment lighting (IBL-lite) via analytic SH-L2
- Specular anti-aliasing (Tokuyoshi-Kaplanyan)
- Dedicated ship PBR pipeline with correct star-radius-based lighting
PLANET DEATH & EXPLOSION VFX
Planet destruction has been rebuilt from scratch as a staged, cinematic event.
- Houdini pyro simulation pipeline, end-to-end, with volumetric fire actually rendered in-engine
- Staged planetary death. Roughly nine seconds of chronology: an ash front, followed by lava veins that open along real fracture lines computed from a spherical Voronoi field, so the planet breaks apart exactly where it cracked
- True sphere fracture with interlocking, notched archetype mesh fragments, lava textures and heating
- GPU micro-debris with a 262k particle pool, plus dust and ash shell layers
- Fire colour derived from Planck's law rather than an artist gradient, with additive/absorptive separation
- Volumetric fire self-shadowing and a three-tier volume quality system tied to your graphics settings
- Power-law fragment size distribution with real kinematics
- Impact ejecta fixed, so meteor strikes now throw debris
- Fixed explosion animations appearing frozen at high simulation speeds
THE GALAXY: NEBULAE, DUST & A REAL SKY
Nebulae, rewritten
- Nebulae were rewritten from scratch on a Schneider cloud model, abandoning the old value-noise fog
- Three distinct nebula classes: opaque, cavitied and mist
- Colour now comes from ionization, not from tinted noise, which removes the old "marbled paper" look
- Real volume, with hollow shells with genuine cavities, limb-driven emission and n² emissivity
- Dust scattering, ambient occlusion, external key lighting and lobe overlap
- Fixed direction-dependent jitter that made nebulae shimmer
Interstellar medium
- Richer ISM band colour, layering and haze quality, including a fourth dark brown/red dust family
- Dust now genuinely occludes stars (draw-order root fix)
- Radial brightness ramp, star-depth contrast and in-band stars
- Scale-normalized ISM banding so bands form at every zoom level
A real sky
- The real Milky Way, with a favourite-galaxies tab
- 109,000 real stars from the HYG v4.4 catalogue, mapped to native assets by spectral class. They now spawn real systems
- The real Sun, Earth and Moon placed inside the Milky Way with NASA 8K textures; the Sun is now a procedural G-type star rather than a flat photograph
- Constellations (Shift+Y)
- Solar corona rework in angular space, with a full conic metric and correct off-axis behaviour
EARTH & PLANETARY SURFACES
- Earth is landable. Voxel surface with real land and snow masks
- 16K/32K Earth texture pipeline: BC-compressed bake tool, hardware BC support and DDS loading
- Earth's atmosphere wired to the real planet, with a per-channel night curve so city lights read warm instead of blowing out white
- Clouds move. Drift is bound to the simulation clock
- Earth is placeable from the inventory
- Planets scorch when they get too close to a star, and a scorched planet loses its atmosphere
- Crater and ejecta fixes, including voxel backfill on natural collisions
- Debris proportions corrected, so size and volume now scale with the actual impact
- Auto-orbit and real-physics moon capture via Hill sphere / SOI stealing
CITIES & SURFACE LIGHTING
- CITYGEN2 modular road kit: 11 road and 8 sidewalk modules on a Manhattan lattice with analytically guaranteed continuity, replacing procedural strips
- Zone architecture: tower, residential, industrial and plaza districts with concentric parcels
- Rule-driven props: street lamps, traffic signals, parked vehicles aligned to the kerb, facade props on three height bands, and back-alley clutter
- Road paint: lane markings, crosswalks and stop lines as pivot-aligned decals on a separate plane, so z-fighting is structurally impossible
- Local light pools: lamps, neon, shop windows and wall sources cast tier-limited local lighting across city, road, building, terrain, grass and tree shaders
- L1 lighting layer: analytic exposure, an independent sun/moon rig with star ambient, Nishita sky SH ambient, cascaded shadow maps with blending and IGN PCF, and half-resolution GTAO
- City ground and roads receive shadows, which was the biggest cause of the "the city has no shadows" feeling
- Grass no longer punches through asphalt and pavement
- Fixed road and ground disappearing at certain distances
- New tree set and canopy lighting enabled by default
HUMAN MODE
- First-person avatar (INSERT). Walk the surface as a physical participant in the simulation
- Walk jitter fixed (leaf boiling and ground LOD noise)
INTERFACE, MENU & TUTORIAL
- New main menu: reworked logo, new typography, live ISM colour layers, refreshed item glow and a Cosmic Engine badge
- Main menu music (Starlight Sonata) on loop
- 4K-class loading screen
- Saved Games panel rebuilt in Ultralight
- Tutorial rework. Steps now target specific elements inside panels, with a dynamic camera that moves to what is being explained
- A dedicated VOID tour. The tutorial no longer tells you to select bodies in an empty universe
- Developer console (F11), including a new world_tech_era command that can grow cities on a selected world even with no civilization present (era 4 = cyberpunk)
- Live 3D preview bridge for celestial bodies, with true equirectangular maps instead of flat colour
- Favourites panel, Discovery Atlas and Galactic History in Ultralight
- 11-language localization pass across new panels
SANDBOX
- Status-quo wars, AAA weapon set and a broad sandbox feature package
- Live composition map and water, Kelvin colour temperature, an explosives panel (Shift+G) and event-free deletion
- God tools revived with a crosshair and left-click fire
- Composition values unified to a single source, so every panel reports the same number
- Inventory: the Structures tab is temporarily limited to the Dyson Sphere while ship placement is reworked. This does not affect combat ships in any way
VR
- The OpenXR build has been refreshed and now ships current with the desktop build
- VR grab and hand-collision regression package (telemetry-verified): dead-pose recovery, grace/latch handling and popup guarding
- Launching the VR executable without a headset connected now falls back to desktop cleanly instead of hanging
PERFORMANCE & STABILITY
A large amount of this update went into finding root causes rather than moving thresholds.
- Fixed a hard freeze traced from a live process: a nearby-star query was running up to 70 billion iterations when an object ended up at an extreme distance. Now bounded
- Fixed the surface descent crash. An access violation in the mesh worker, reproduced 3/3 and then eliminated 0/2, followed by seven 240-second stress runs across four planet types with zero crashes
- Fixed stutter when approaching objects. The real cause was star-field streaming stalling the main thread for 80-110ms at 4Hz. Frame-time p99 dropped from 88ms to 24ms
- Fixed retarget cost from 272ms to 4.6ms, with a per-type LRU texture cache and hysteresis to stop retarget ping-ponging
- Fixed a 30 FPS structural cap caused by explosion spray emitting 6.77 million triangles per frame
- Fixed a hitch when loading ship meshes synchronously
- Fixed the RTX 5090 "freeze". It was a precision lock, not a hang, and recovery is now built in
- Fixed inventory panel raster storms that re-rasterized the whole 4K surface on every push
- Fixed a ship-mesh loading stall, star-birth precision errors, memory growth in cell tracking, and multiple fleet and celestial precision root causes
- Numerous fixes to fireball culling, smoke layering, tier scaling and device-limit guards
TEMPORARILY DISABLED
- Events are switched off in this build. The event system is written and working, but every event title and story is currently authored in a single language, so players on the other 10 supported languages were being shown text they could not read. Rather than ship that, we have turned events off and are moving the whole event script into the localization pipeline. Events return in a 1.1.x update, fully translated into all 11 languages.
- Ship placement from the inventory Structures tab is temporarily disabled while it is reworked
KNOWN ISSUES
We would rather tell you than let you find out:
- Some camera movement near large objects can still show residual stutter in specific situations. The largest cause has been fixed; we are still chasing the remainder and it will be addressed in a hotfix
- Rare long frame spikes have been observed during heavy streaming
If you hit a crash, please send us the files named _startup_error.txt or crash_stack.txt from your game folder. They tell us exactly where it happened.
Thank you for playing Macht.