Thanks for all the reviews lately! We're well on our way to that goal, and I'm well on the way to delivering Beta 6 :D
With achievements completely out of the way it's mostly done, just needs another 2-3 days of polishing. With a normal release at this stage I'd be okay to put it out next week, but this one's particularly big with a lot of new moving parts so I'm going to hold it in pre-release testing longer than usual to ensure no easily avoidable bugs are passed along to you all.
Unless something goes horribly wrong it'll be out the week after next and you can achieve all you want ;)
Exterminator
As usual when approaching a new major release, the top priority is to take care of any new bugs/issues/minor tweak requests that have popped up since last time. But first, because it's nice to have something exciting to show for the week, check this out:
Yep, manually activated object labels (hostiles/allies/parts) will continue appearing automatically as you pan the map. These additional labels will also obey the item filters added in Beta 5.
While adding and testing that feature I discovered that robot labels for those not in view have been completely broken for the past couple versions (no one reported this because I guess they're not needed as frequently?), so I fixed that:
Impact weapons display damage values properly modified by current momentum. Other melee weapons were doing it right, but a typo left out the impact category...
AOE traps give their salvage modifier in their description.
Items with description info (e.g. traps) will still show it even when the Show Supporter Items option is on.
Removing an active Particle Charger, or having it destroyed, immediately updates damage for the weapon(s) it was affecting.
Explicit Arc stat for forced spread weapons and clearer multi-explosive indicator
Added Disruption stat to melee weapon info, for the couple of late-game impact weapons that use it.
Saved!
Cogmind already includes a couple of autosave mechanisms, the first which automatically saves your current run's progress at an adjustable interval, and another which makes a backup copy of the current save and all settings once per day. But this doesn't quite cover all the possibilities--what if something bad happens to your computer at precisely the wrong time and your save file is corrupted? If you have a long run in progress you'll still be able to restore it to wherever it was on the previous day, but any progress on the current day would be lost. Not anymore come Beta 6!
The autosave system has been expanded to also save an adjustable number of sequential backups at a designated interval, so even if the current save doesn't work, there's a backup not long before that :)
Note that this system is not accessible in game--you'll still have to manually copy and rename an old file if you really need it, but it should be extremely rare that this is necessary anyway. Just a precaution. That and probably one of its more useful benefits is making it much easier to track down a subtype of bug which can otherwise be elusive if the issue already happened before the current save. Most bugs can be solved fairly easily given existing tools, but there are a few that are extremely difficult to track without knowing the game state prior to where something went wrong.
Pretty Stats
One of Cogmind's new players, Ape, has put together a great python script for analyzing all your score sheets produced by the game across multiple runs.
There are lots of interesting insights that can be derived from the graphs we've been looking at on Discord.
Ape posted their own first batch here and I've collected some examples on the forums. Some excerpts:
GJ is the only player to have collected absolutely everything in the game, and specific to this graph you can see where I was still adding new lore in late Alpha :)
Score sheet collections submitted by other players can be browsed here for tons more types of data.
Community
Cogmind expert Valguris has written up a quick spoiler-free guide to the early game. Kind of a supplementary follow-up to the Survival Tips in the manual. As he puts it:
Play a few games first. Then read the Survival Tips section of the manual. Then play a few more games. Only then I grant you permission to read this guide (:P), so that you have an idea of what I'm talking about and why is it that good to know/use.
Check it out if you need to up your game!
Over on the Discord, SeanMirrsen shared some cool impressions of Cogmind in various forms:
We also have a Let's Player who's just picked up Cogmind, Joselillo PDL, if you'd like to tune in to some Cogmind discussion in Spanish. Good luck to Joselillo :D
Bigmind
This week I also finally released what might be the final update for POLYBOT-7, the free Cogmind de/remake-spinoff-thing. You can check out what the update's all about here.
Explodey P7 gif for fun:
As usual, even just the little time spent working on that also ended up benefiting Cogmind (via the engine): As of Beta 6 if you have any letterboxing in your Cogmind display setup, the screenshot system will trim it out. This isn't usually much of an issue with Cogmind since it will never have more than a few pixels of letterboxing, and only on some displays, but with P7 it was a more important feature because the latter intentionally uses significant horizontal letterboxing by design.
Man I can't wait until Cogmind Beta 6 is done so I can start working on Beta 7 :P
There may be other relevant discussion of this SITREP on the GSG forums.