Hi everyone! We noticed after some changes to how pathfinding works, there have been some significant FPS drops for large groups of units in large open maps (like later stages of caverns mode). These were quite hard to track down since many of them were not reproduceable after saving and loading. We've resolved most of these along with a number of other fixes & improvements.
Patch Notes:
- Performance Drops - In larger maps with vast areas to walk around, units whose target was inaccessible could cause significant FPS drops. Most of these have been resolved as the AI will now either give up or wait a reasonable amount of time before trying again.
- Berserker Trait - Since we introduced this trait we've not been too happy with it. Before this patch, units with the berserker trait would not listen to any orders you give them as long as they're in battle. This effect can be quite irritating in practice, so instead of this they now refuse to equip armour. Currently the only equippable armour is helmets, however more will added to the game in future updates.
- Single Mouse Mode - For touch screen users, such as the windows surface, there were no on-screen buttons to zoom the display, change instruction paint sizes or rotate buildings. We've added {+} and {-} buttons for these actions. The mouse hints near the bottom will also indicate in brackets what building rotation or instruction size you currently have.
- Obstructed Mining Instructions - Miners will now indicate with a pop-up when the path to their mining instruction is obstructed. Most other units were already doing this, however a recent patch stopped miners from digging undesirable walls which in turn altered the miner's logic for obstructions.
- Move Building Instruction - A series of closely related bugs were noticed involving the 'move building' instruction. For example, sometimes a different building would be placed there as well as, or instead of, the intended building.
- All Items - Ghost items would sometimes appear in the all-items list. While we track down exactly what is causing this issue, we've introduced an easy 'clean-up' fix on the user's end. By clicking ghost items in the list, if they don't actually exist in storage, they'll be removed from the list.
- Ballistas - The ballista's projectile was not firing correctly across water. You can now also fire ballistas manually while another unit is delivering ammo to it. As a quick reminder, to fire a ballista manually, select a unit and right click the ballista.
- Loading Issues - We've fixed one or two more bugs that would sometimes crop up after saving and loading a caverns mode game. In rare circumstances, a saved game wouldn't load, even though the save files were fine.
- Auto-Attack - Units will now think twice about auto-attacking enemies if their health is low.
- Defend Zones - Warriors guarding a defend zone will now only go to rest once their hp is less than 60%, or their hp and stamina are both low.
- Mine / Gather Notifications - These 'jobs done' notifications should now only appear once all mining / gathering instructions are completed.
- Removed empty space around the All Items UI, where tiles wouldn't highlight.
Let us know if you run into any issues, or if you have any feedback or suggestions!
That's all for now, have a good weekend!