Macht: Cosmic Engine 1.1.0.1 (Hotfix)
Thank you for all the reports since the major update. This hotfix closes the critical issues that came out of it, including one that could make planetary landing impossible for an entire session.
Critical fixes
Landing on planets works again
A memory protection latch introduced in the major update could get stuck permanently. Once it triggered, terrain streaming stopped opening new detail levels, so approaching a planet produced no surface at all no matter how slowly you descended. Because the flag lived on the renderer rather than on the planet, it carried over between worlds: a single trigger meant you could not land anywhere for the rest of the session. The latch now resets whenever you travel to a new planet, and it also releases on its own once video memory recovers. The protection itself is unchanged, it simply can no longer become permanent.
Galactic Forge galaxies are now saved
Galaxies created with the Galactic Forge lived only in memory and were never written to the save file. This was most obvious in Void, where you could fill the sky with galaxies and find it empty after restarting. The save format has been extended to version 23. Existing saves still load normally and are not affected.
Star field and motion
Stars no longer teleport into view while travelling
Above a certain speed a large share of the visible stars appeared instantly at full brightness instead of fading in. The cause was that the existing fade scaled a star's luminosity, while what the eye actually registers is flux, which also depends on distance. An intrinsically bright star was therefore still clearly visible even at five percent luminosity, so the fade did nothing for exactly the stars you notice most. Stars now enter at the visibility threshold and open up from there, independent of how bright they are. Measured against an identical build: visible pop-in reduced by 52 percent on entry and 29 percent on exit, with star density unchanged.
Jitter on moving objects
Bodies in motion showed a persistent shake. Measurement traced it to orbital phase aliasing at high simulation speeds, where a body could advance a large fraction of its entire orbit within a single frame. Frame to frame position deltas went from swings of several million kilometres down to a band of roughly four percent.
Planet rotation
Gas giants, rocky planets and asteroids were not rotating. Their procedural surface shaders ignored body rotation completely, so the geometry turned underneath a surface pattern that stayed locked in place.
Chunk preloading
Star field preloading now scales with your travel speed instead of using a fixed look ahead distance.
Supernova
Supernova remnants were being destroyed one frame after they were created, so the aftermath was never visible. Remnants now persist properly, and the initial flash reaches the high dynamic range pipeline, so a detonation reads as an actual burst of light instead of a brief sprite.
Interface and language
- The loading screen, the key list in Options and the lower section of Laws of the Universe could show Turkish text to players using other languages. All of it now goes through localisation in all eleven supported languages.
- Species names in the Universe Forge are now localised.
- Removed duplicate controls in the celestial body panel. Scientific Analysis, Composition and Visualization were reachable twice, once as tabs and again as buttons below them.
- The fly to banner sat too high on screen and overlapped other readouts. It has been repositioned.
- Camera lock now stays engaged after a fly to and releases when you press a movement key, matching how the lock behaves everywhere else.
- The universe reseed shortcut moved from U to Shift+U. It is a development tool and was far too easy to hit by accident, which reshuffled every galaxy in view with no explanation.
Known issues
Performance drops after destroying a planet are still being investigated. The reports describe stuttering while CPU, GPU and memory all sit well below saturation, which points at a stall on the main thread rather than a load problem. A fix is planned for a following update.
Events remain disabled and will return in a 1.1.x update.
Please keep the reports coming. Precise descriptions like the ones we received for this round are what made these root causes findable.