Hey guys! So up until now, every patch was posted on the official Gaia forums only. From now on, they'll be posted on Steam as well!
The game will come out in early access with this version, Alpha-1.x.x, with x being some small patches that are going to be happening this month and the one after, including localization and fixing the inevitable bugs that this patch introduced. There will be a new trailer going up sometime at the beginning of May to show off this patch.
Patch notes:
* Implemented some serious UI to the game. No more bland rectangles with random colors on them. This is not just a reskin, but also changed some gui dynamics. All scrolling now supports the mouse wheel correctly, while retaining the old drag and release. Reworked the 'needs' circles to include labels and percentages instead. In the main menu, you don't need to turn your head from left to right and back again every time you want to access a new submenu (My neck muscles will miss this one). Turrets and fueled buildings now have their own UI panel to interact with. Every time you approach something, a little menu pops up that says what you can do with it, such as interact or pick up.
* No more default Arial font. We now have 2 main new fonts.
* Almost all inventories now have a help icon that lets the player know what kind of items it accepts. For example, the generator accepts only items with biomass, so that icon will tell you that when you hover over it.
* Removed the farm, which you can see in the trailer at 01:33, and consequently the 'Farm' tab in the PDA. Now you can actually plant seeds directly on the ground.
* Implemented seeds in accordance with the above point. There is a chance you can get a seed in your inventory whenever you eat a vegetable. No more planting crops out of thin air yay! This also gives an incentive to harvest wild crops in search for seeds.
* All buildings are now considered items. This means that whenever you craft a building, it will appear in your inventory instead of in a magical place. This also means that you can lose them on death and that you can trade them, though trading building items is turned off for Alpha-1.x.x!
* Implemented a small 'How-to-get-started' tutorial that can be turned on or off before you start a new game. This tutorial isn't meant to go in depth about everything and is actually very small and brief. It will only teach you the very basics and also give you an idea of what you should prioritize when you first land.
* Implemented Astral, your PDA assistant. That's right, your PDA will now talk to you. Very similar concept to Subnautica.
* You can no longer click on events when they appear on the right side of the screen to read about them. Instead, you'll have Astral announcing them.
* Implemented a new tab in the PDA, called 'Base', which has 2 submenus: 'Energy' and 'Defenses'.
- In the energy submenu, you have a nice list of buildings that produce or consume electricity. This tab will also tell you how much actual energy is produced by a certain building. For example, a wind mill's max production is 750W, but in reality, it will most likely produce less than that due to the wind factor and this tab will tell you exactly how much it is. In addition, you can press a shiny new button called 'Request Report'. When you do that, Astral will give you a breakdown of how your base is coping with its energy needs. In addition from what you'd expect from such a report, she'll also tell you if your base relies too heavily on a certain type of energy source. So if you have 10 solar panels but only 2 windmills and 2 generators for example, she'll tell you that you run the risk of running out of energy at night.
- In the turrets submenu, you have a list of all of your currently built turrets, along with their remaining HP, ammo, dps etc. In this submenu, the new shiny 'Request Report' button gives you the chances of surviving a ground attack and an air attack. Be warned though. If Astral says you have a 10% chance of surviving a ground attack, she's being overly dramatic. What she really means is that there is a high chance of losing something in the attack, like some building(s), not that you're actually going to have a 90% chance of dying in the next attack.
* Multiple monitors and resolutions are supported now. The resolutions button is now a dropdown menu, so no more cycling through all of your monitor's resolution until you get to the one you want.
* There are now 3 new sound sliders in the options menu: Music volume, SFX voume and Environment volume in addition to the old one 'Master volume'. The names are quite explicit. However, there is no music in the game right now. I hope to be having some OST for Gaia by the time it goes out in Early Access. So far the chances of that happening look quite promising!
* The big battle at the end of the game doesn't occur on the planet anymore, it happens in space now. The main reason for that is performance issues. The battle used to drop your FPS to about 10-20 if you went into XRay mode while on the planet because it had to render every single building you ever placed down transparently, as well as the terrain itself and other props on the planet. Transparency is a very expensive thing to do in games, especially for something of the scale I wanted. In space, this won't be a problem anymore since the only transparent things will be enemy ships and your own ship. So at least now you get to go into space!
* Implemented the decorations you see in the house in the trailer such as art pieces, plants, sofas and desks, as well as walls with windows.
* Added a model for the control drone.
Optimization/bugs:
* Improved the AI quite a bit. The AI used to chase you for a while and then go 'poof' if it went too far from its starting position. Also, if you were trying to kite an AI and then shoot it when it decides to WALK back to its starting position, the AI would bug out and couldn't figure out if it should pursue you even more or just calmly walk back. Now, it will actually RUN back. Some AI also had trouble fighting each other due to height differences. Apparently, an Amarok was too tall for a goat and it couldn't target it so it would just walk up to it and hug it. Sometimes, the AI had some pathfinding issues near rock formations and that's been fixed as well. So all in all, the AI code is more stable now.
* Massive improvement to fire spreading. Previously, the way fire was spreading was in a grid like fashion. So you could have a 10 by 10 (100 squares) grid spawn from a tornado, each square with 1 fire in it and this was a massive performance bottleneck. Now, there are only 4 squares, but the fires themselves are much bigger. The area they cover is even bigger than before and the performance is impeccable, as if the fire wasn't even there. This means that adding a flamethrower in the future will be a breeze.
* Water won't be rendered when you're far away from it anymore, which saves quite a bit of performance on your GPU. This used to be true in Alpha-0.x.x too, but it wasn't very well done and still costed some performance.
* There were quite a few bugs with the end battle, such having environmental sounds play when you're inside the ship. All of those have been fixed.
* When you used to take a drug that said it should last 5 hours... Well it used to last 5 hours in real life. Now it correctly lasts 5 in game hours.
* The default button to access the PDA is now 'TAB' instead of 'P'. Current owners of the game will still have 'P' by default though, so you'll have to manually change it to 'TAB' yourself if you want to.
* Fixed the bug with the farm because there is no more farm :D
* Put some restrictions on where and when you can save the game. You can no longer save when flying, levitating, swimming, diving or when enemies are nearby. The restriction on swimming and diving will be removed when the water package goes live.
* No more lag during autosave.
* Equalized some sounds and introduced some new ones
* And as usual, fixed a bunch more bugs.