Another week, another batch of robot hacks for Beta 7 :)
Pretty much every bot has at least some function relevant to their job, as you can see above with the map_earth hack. Same thing below in tiles mode.
As one might expect, there are quite a few hacks that target Operators, given their access to so many systems...
Almost any combat bot can be hacked to find emergency access doors over a pretty wide range.
In general I haven't been working on combat bot hacks yet--I'm mainly going straight down my internal list, on which non-combat hacks come first, but based on some code I was working on it was more efficient to jump ahead and do a few search-based hacks like this one at the same time.
Back to non-combat hacks, how about forcing Haulers to both drop their inventory and safely identify all the contents for you?
And normally a Mechanic's special inventory of backup parts can't be accessed/retrieved, but there's also a hack to decompress those if you really want to :P
Lastly, a fun still shot from a very WIP animation that's a bit more involved.
More on that one next week.
A lot of these robot hacks also tie into AI behavior in some way, so I've been messing around in that bit of the code and making occasional related updates.
For example you may have noticed that a group of Engineers repairing lots of walls in close proximity might end up getting stuck, and the cluster of Engineers can grow larger and larger as there are incomplete projects in the queue but they're all waiting for each other to get out of the way. I left it that way since it's not too common, not all that important, and kinda funny when it happens (stupid Unaware!), but an easy fix popped into my head with the new behavior update that probably won't happen anymore.
Here you can see a group of very eager Engineers, unperturbed even by an eventual Scatter Rocket Array :P
Green for Cogmind
I didn't get quite as far along with robot hacks I would've liked this week, because an entire day's worth of work was spent switching the website over to HTTPS. For a basic website there are pretty simple ways of going about this, but my site includes a separate blog, wiki, and forums, all with content dating back years, so altogether it was a time-consuming operation.
There weren't any major hitches, it just took a while to go through all the different settings and required file updates to avoid "mixed content" warnings from browsers (where you are set up for HTTPS but still have bits of content that aren't secure).
In the end we're green across the board :D
The main mistake was forgetting that the game itself targets an HTTP address to upload scores, but that address no longer existed after the update, so until our Discord community pointed this out and I fixed it we lost a few leaderboard uploads--sorry about that xD
The r/Cogmind responses to the news this week were pretty amusing :)
Amphouse: Wow, I had no idea the "hacking update" would be this thorough. :P
Outrunning Projectiles FTW
The past few weeks there's been a new community activity among the active Discord players: Malthusis is hosting seeded speedruns (by turn count), with most everyone also playing at the same time and reporting their rate of progress to the surface. These have been a pretty fun challenge, and force you to approach the game quite differently.
The speedrunning match records so far, recording the number of turns for each player to reach their final depth (or win):
As you can see it takes around 2,000 turns to win, or closer to 1,000 if you really know what you're doing (and/or also get really lucky :P). This is more or less in line with the relevant achievements, Speedrunner and Expert Speedrunner at 2k and 1k, respectively.
I've only joined in twice so far, the first time practically oblivious to proper speedrunning strategy (as a combat player, to me wheels are "fast," haha) so I got trashed. But at least reached the surface on my second attempt. I did a full writeup with images on the forums. The matches will continue off and on in the future (there are more planned for this weekend), so stop by the Discord if you're interested.
In other community news, I've decided to stop weekly seeds for now. There's more about this in the forums announcement, though since it is relevant to game design, I'll copy some of the discussion here:
It's worth noting that Weekly Seeds are fun in a lot of roguelikes but I don't think the straight up "everyone play the same seed and do whatever you want" approach works very well for Cogmind. Where in other seeded roguelike runs players will generally be up against a lot of the same opponents on the same small maps with the same set of tools at their disposal, Cogmind maps are huge, not to mention all the different routes one can take through the world, and access to completely different strategies, so instead of players being forced to compete on a fairly level playing field, what you come up against can vary greatly depending on a lot of factors. (And that's even before we start adding in the effects of a rising alert level!) In that light, we can why weekly seeds won't have all that much appeal, and how Cogmind is more suited to special/focused challenges with greater restrictions. We'll have to keep that in mind when thinking about how to approach any future activities :)
Wallhacks
ChromaticGray has put together a cool Cogmind wallpaper for Wallpaper Engine:
I made it for a ultrawide 2560x1080 monitor, but it should work fine on 1080 also. Background map moves in parallax with the mouse, the Cogmind flickers and the weapons lights up in color on mouse over (that's why you only see top right colored).
Pretty awesome! Wallpaper Engine users can get it here.
I'd really like to put together some more wallpapers myself, but despite all the ideas and potential resources to draw from, I just don't have the time right now. So many other higher priorities and it's just little old me doing everything xD. The current wallpaper set on the website is the same I introduced over three years ago with the first public alpha!
There may be other relevant discussion of this SITREP on the GSG forums.