Dear Lords and Ladies,
The time has come for a new update for Rising Lords. Users of the Beta Branch already could make use of the new features and finally it is about time to unlock the new things for everyone out there. We have been working on extensive changes to the game architecture and pushed a lot of updates to the beta branch over the last weeks. A new Invasion Mode can be set as victory condition. Raiders will spawn every few rounds and become stronger and stronger. And the last surviving player wins the game! But that's not all.
We completely reworked the campaign/scenario draw and how everything is displayed and set everything to 64 bit only. The Idle scenario performance has been drastically improved. We also had to convert a lot of files, including all animations, to fit the latest iteration of the game engine, Steam SDK and Spine. This is another step to enable long time support for Rising Lords.
While these changes don't come with new features per se, they should improve stability and performace noticably and make future changes easier. The season transition has also been reworked and should be more pleasant already. This is still work in progress and should become smoother very soon. Also the clicksystem is now dynamic. This was changed for multiple reasons but the initial reason was to prevent 'soft locking' systems due to a missed set/unset of the global click level. It is now managed dynamically and based on where the mouse is. This also solves a number of click-through bugs and some items reacting to hovers when they shouldn't.
Another thing we've been working on: Tooltips. Like, for real. We've updated the whole tooltip system, it is a complete rework of what we had. The tips are now cleaner, smaller and prettier. Left: Old. Right: New.
In addition to that, the Story Editor got a lot of improvements and new options for the modders and scenario creators out there. And last but not least: You can now also play Rising Lords with Steamdeck or a controller!
Full Changelog
New:
- Raider event and Invasion mode
- Raider strength is dependant on the wealth and strength of the players as well as passed turns
- Steam keyboard support
- Added controller support
- Custom savegame names to make it easier to recognize them
- Rght-click cancels army movement
- 'send food' arrows for FROM region
- Active card (enlarged view) switches sides if blocking units
- Overview 'happiness' outlines red w/ revolt thresholds
- Border dots now render on workplace tiles
- All players item inventory is now saved in a multiplayer game
- Added controller hints to show when certain buttons are pressed on gamepad
- Addition cattle/sheep tutorial cards / added 'pages' to tutorial cards
- Prepared basic game parameters to be modable in the future
- Added more variables to dictionary defintions instead of static variables.
- Added dynamic loading screen at game start
Editor:
- force mountains and trees to properly tile in editor
- Story editor allows placing units
- Story editor can now store values between levels
- Story editor can now change the inventory
- Story editor: waypoints can now be (de)activated
- 'B' toggles region borders in editor
- Proper level editor auto-save w/ crashes / unexpected game close
- Warnings when quitting / loading editor maps w/o saving
- Story tree editor add target so you can add nodes after a specific node
- Enabled changing generals in the story editor
- Enabled hiding the GUI from the story editor
- Enabled reference nodes for navigating and referencing story editor notes
- Option to keep a general through a series of missions
- Story editor enabled node(0) reference to objective values.
- Story editor now allows player without regions
- Story editor allows importing images for the story book
- Other minor story editor improvements and fixes
Fixes:
- fixed some font scaling issues
- fixed some text-input miss-alignments
- fixed castles missing walls due to incorrect neighbor detection
- fixed get conflict crash / minor tile cache changes
- fixed double-worker on construction
- fixed minimap click & drag position / update issues
- fixed minimap click/drag regions not working w/ render opt
- fixed 'yes/no' prompt's title text size
- fixed fields no longer render edge houses
- fixed text / buttons in MP lobbies
- fixed region overview screen hard to click (hitbox off center)
- fixed missing map tile walls in tutorial
- fixed small window where 1-peasant raised more horses than 2
- fixed half-house pop-in w/ season transition
- fixed stuck in loading after escaping mid-reconnect w/ server
- fixed 'Sea Region' tiles not placing correctly in editor
- fixed travelers to check if they are still in the correct region
- fixed changing to/from fullscreen breaking input
- fixed blindfire possibly hitting allies
- fixed crash w/ saving battle map in editor
- fixed wall-build tool-tip missing resource costs
- fixed map tiles not always drawing walls
- fixed walls not rendering correctly after load
- fixed auto-battle on ally/open borders turf gives YOU the region
- fixed numerous season-change pop-in artifacts
- fixed battle card hover not zooming in some cases
- fixed rarely missing player status buttons in multiplayer
- fixed 'fire slot' incapable of killing units in rare cases
- fixed moving dynamic figures crashing game for some players
- fixed a bug with new created army trying to use a battle node
- fixed save map bug in save slot 9
- fixed a few minor house/castle render issues
- fixed minimap bug eating CPU cycles.
- fixed rare conflict handler crash w/ loading game
- fixed distorted 'send error report' screen leading to some players not being able to click "send"
- fixed a user reported scr_isCastle crash due to freed tile
- fixed a user reported ai card crash
- fixed a user reported unit_to_attack crash
- fixed custom battle 'back' not clicking
- Fixed joypad support crashes when no joypad is plugged in.
- Fixed gamepad hints not updating the lower campaign UI hints.
- fixed general place & card apply highlight not working
- fixed region waypoint crash in some map designs
- fixed several text alignments for tutorial cards
- fixed 'region beliongs to' incorrect alignment
- fixed broken/glitchy mouse-edge scroll (top / down mostly)
- fixed loading spinner overlap
- fixed tile highlight particles not destroying
- other minor graphical fixes
- fixed event card text alignment / size issues w/ BREE
- fixed tool-tips not following font settings
- fixed harbours not highlighting w/ drag / tile highlight timing bug
- fixed broken tokenized harbour water render
- fixed 'save as' menu not properly forcing click level
- fixed event card broken spacing
- fixed fast-scroll (shift) unusably fast
- fixed incorrectly printing 'the people' in region ownership in some languages
- fixed some events triggering both event cards & notification scrolls
- fixed merchant 'off-center' & hover render shift
- fixed HUD not updating after tile upgrade
- fixed peasant count updates not updating tokenized tiles 100% of the time
- fixed cleared tiles not re-rendering during MP 'wait for player'
- Fix disband to region bug
- force proper token update w/ animal set/get
- regression where 'custom battle' wouldn't load tile textures
- fixed unit death by fire soft-lock in some cases
- fixed card backs not displaying correctly w/ skill tree confirm
- fixed some story tree / custom battle situations not loading correct season tiles
- fixed incorrect retaliation prediction
- workaround loading save games not prefetching correct seasons
- fixed tile upgrade starting pop incorrect
- fixed loading campaign only loads needed tile textures, not all seasons
- fixed numerous font-align inconsistencies between different fonts
- fixed animals not loading w/ tutorial loaD
- fixed some unit / general / flag / shield depth issues
- fixed regression causing units to appear above blur filter
- workaround incorrect avatar (if custom) w/ diplomacy & cards
- fixed crash on game restart
- fixed glitchy map edge tiling system
- fixed potential tile-update failure w/ end turn
- fixed draw_text_boxed causing performance degredation
- fixed severe render lag w/ editor 'save menu'
- fixed wall & house issues w/ new chunked render
- fixed rare tooltip system crash
- fixed regression causing a rare crash w/ battle start
- fixed rare crash w/ battle end
- fixed some tile highlights rendering in incorrect places w/ battle
- fixed edge marker rendering issues w/ new system
- fixed event card 'effect' text extremely small in some cases
- fixed incorrect turn number in some situations
- fixed fisherman facing incorrect direction / missing outline
- fixed crash with second tutorial battle
- fixed numerous render bugs w/ chunked render
- Walls not rendering right after placement near chunk edges
- Chunk 'tile deletion' not refreshing render list
- Map tiles not properly being set to 'multilayer' causing half-houses
- Season transitions not fading towers & walls correctly
- Fixed region arrows not working
- Fixed region arrows not lighting up
- Fixed a crash after morale victory
- Fix a raider end turn crash
- fixed potential crash due to missing army instance
- fixed battle cards not working correctly depending on deck position
Changes:
- scenario map draw overhaul
- reworked tooltip visuals
- click detection manager overhaul
- season transition rework
- adjusted everything for 64bit only
- smoother transition from battle bacl to scenario
- concerted scripts and animations to be usable with newest game engine, steam sdk and spine
- menu 'button hover' volume cut by 60%
- notification scrolls now behind mission story
- alignment tweak to tutorial tips
- removed 'tutorial screenshot' loading image that confused some players
- Challange mode is now permadeath/ironman mode
- player 'connection' scrolls now auto-dismiss
- Battle AI improvements concering camps
- challenge island save speedup
- Removed excessive 'waiting for player' messages since campaign state displays this
- Moved 'spectate' button above fade-out loading screen
- camera pans to army when opening edit menu
- reduced volume of "the apostle" song
- Adjusted the animation to slide smoothly in/out from the right
- small german language adjustment
- sped up battle by removing unnecessary tile updates
- Adjust story tree read when looping to speed things up
- Adjust end turn profiler
- changed max zoom from 2x in to 1x in (scenario)
- changed font defaults to BREE upon first load
- disabled steam 'invite' button when not applicable
- spawn point 'bases' for custom starting positions follow player colors
- changed pikeman move sound switched to match peasant
- Custom slot fire damage
- changed sped up 'tool tip setup' (from ~4-5% frame time to ~1%)
- changed merchant 'hold increase/decrease' contextually snaps to 1s, 10s, 100s
- improved stutter w/ wall & tile placement
- Added restriction to gamepad bumper buttons to not show when pressed, while in states other than over map + over HUD.
- Added gamepad start + select to let army unit amounts be finely tweaked.
- better vRAM management w/ 'loading screen' textures
- dded L + R gamepad triggers to cycle through regions
- Added prevention to cycle regions with gamepad triggers to only happen with over map + over HUD states.
- Added merchant 10 + 100 increases for gamepad with right west and right north buttons.
- Steam Workshop maps are now snyced on the client
Known Issues (Hotfix incoming):
- Loading bigger maps in an advanced save state might cause some stuttering right now
- Some buildings have display issues with the walls