Planet stations are here!

The major feature of 3.8 is a new building system to enable player stations to be built on planets. The home station will now be located on the surface of a planet, as opposed to a featureless asteroid. This also comes with new features, like destructable walls with hit points.



Here's a recap of the 3.8 development log.

Full model and tool (re)making for the new build system

The new wall system is now fully integrated into the game, and a new build tool and system for walls has been implemented. A new concept of "room" has been introduced, and a damage model for walls as a mixed tile/object entity.



3.8 rooms are different from former rooms. In 3.8 a room must be 100% composed of:

- Floor tiles over its entire surface
- Entirely delimited by walls or doors

The game checks these conditions on every tile change and auto detects all correct rooms in the map. These are visualized when inside a build tool as green polygons:



This is important because in 3.8 most objects can only be constructed inside a room. The object build tool won't let the player build most objects outside of such a properly formed room.

Since a wall, door or floor tile can be removed at any time, be it from player orders or by damage destruction, a new "environment attrition" system has been introduced:



This is not meant to be a punishing disaster, the damage will be slow, but still annoying enough to make the required repairs to the room structure desirable.

New game options

Since stations are now built on planets, a new game options tab has been introduced. The planet kind selector allows to pick the general planet archetype:



It also allows to disable events from the very start. Once a game has been started they can be re-enabled in a new tab inside the options screen.

Filtering door system

Doors can now filter which entities they allow to pass through:



This is a very often requested feature, and it's finally here. Keep in mind the notes in the UI: enemies don't care about which sign is hanging on a door.

Path finding display

Selected entities will now display an overlay line over the map in case they are in the middle of a pathfind walk. Very useful to see where those pesky enemies are going or to figure out why your officers are ignoring certain route.

Multiselection with rectangular area

The game finally has proper multiselection:



Just drag with the left mouse button and a rectangle will appear, changing the selection live as you drag the rectangle corner.

Multiselection is only enabled for officer entities. The idea is that there's rarely a need to issue mass orders to any other kind of entities, with the exception of robots. I will look into adding robots to multiselection later on.

This is how the right column looks when using multiselection:



All buttons are live with item cooldowns too. The role grouping reflects the currently equipped item by the officer, not their spec.

Actions still work as usual. If you issue a walk order with 30 officers selected, all 30 of them will make a formation around the position you click on. For target orders I'm still deciding what to do, and I will probably introduce 4 separate target actions for each role. For players who want to micromanage their units this will give combat a very RTS flavor, and I believe it's a better fit that my previous designs.

Squads and the squad bar are no more, and combat mode is pending a redesign or a removal too.

RTS-like grouping

In the same vein it's possible to make ad-hoc groups like in any RTS-like game. First make a group, then press Ctrl-1 to store the group. From that point on pressing 1 will select again the same group of entities. Keys 1 to 6 are available for this.

Per-role combat target actions with selection

The player can now instruct their officers AI to focus on a group of targets instead of one, by using a combat target action and then dragging a rectangle over a group of enemies. This even works if the initial selection was a group of officers. So now it's possible, in 2 clicks (or 1 key and 1 click), to order any arbitrary group of officers to attack any arbitrary group of enemies. Quite a difference compared with the older system!

The target action has also been divided into 4 actions that only apply depending on the role of the officer, so you can keep your big heterogenous group of officers and still give target orders only to healers, for example.

Rebuild option for object ruins

One of the most asked for features is finally here. When an object is destroyed, its ruins, instead of being auto flagged as recyclable, now offer an option to rebuild the object. The new object will also remember all the pallet and factory options.

I have to say that I don't fully agree with this feature. I consider it goes against the spirit of a building sim, but I decided to implement it because pallet and factory re-configuration is not fun. What could be next, a tool to autorebuild all rubble without even clicking on it? Or why even a tool, why not a single button to rebuild the entire station? I have to draw a line in the sand. And the line is that this feature won't get any more automatic than it is now, and if anything it may be restricted further (and the future walls won't support it).

Enhanced ship autopilot

The ship autopilot now monitors the vitals of its crew officers and how full its cargo hold is, and decides on its own to visit back home to unload and let the crew satisfy their vital needs. Once they feel refreshed it resumes its orders in the same spot.







This also means it's not necessary anymore to include orders to go back home, and that there's no need to set a stay time in any order. It's both simpler and more efficient!

Also crew members get a new buff (or debuff, depends on how you look at it):



This means that when an officer is part of a crew they will care a lot more for their own vitals and will be much eager to interrupt station work to go have lunch or take a shower. This also means their refresh time while the ship aways to resume the autopilot will be shorter.

Robot inventory

It's finally here! You can check how many robots of each (unlocked) kind you have, and click on them to focus a random one. It will also display the total count, and something new, the max allowed amount. You'll now be limited in how many robots you can have depending on how advanced your research tier is.

Per-ship cargo filters

It's now possible to select which cargo resources are allowed to be picked by a ship when it visits a planet. This way you could save your faster ships for food ingredients for example.

Contemplation

Officers will now, from time to time, stop and marvel at your decorations and other higher aesthetics items. They will also prefer owned objects, so they will trek back to their room to look at their fancy possessions.

Shops are actual shops now

A very old issue is visitors just grabbing items from storage areas or pallets, ignoring the shop objects. They are just going there because it's closer or more convenient! But it's not right. The game was working around this issue by charging visitors for the items only once they sat down to consume them. This looked strange.

Now that 3.8 has doors with filtering, we can do the right thing. The game will charge visitors for items when they pick them up, and allow them to get them for free if they somehow manage to find some not stored in a shop (and show the message you see in the screenshot). And how is this right?! Because it's now also possible to enclose your visitor area with doors that don't allow visitors to pass, but allow officers and robots. The player can now build the storage and production areas inaccessible to visitors, while allowing shop stocking tasks to work just fine.

New combat mode

Combat mode is now on a 1 minute timer, and it will disable itself if the officer hasn't participated in combat. Once it engages, or when the player gives the officer a direct manual order, it will bump itself again to 1 minute. This will hopefully stop the problem with forgetting to disable combat mode. It still needs to be toggled manually for the AI to consider to apply it.

Update 3.8.1

- fix: autopilot sometimes gets confused navigating back to home from a non-home star system
- fix: autopilot morale calculation is not properly refreshed
- fix: if player decides to add manual autopilot home orders, do not set old minimum stay of 3 minutes, just apply the new autopilot logic (delete and re-add orders to home if you really want them)
- nerf bernice requests, again. poor bernice
- remove corridor from research
- reduce overall event frequency, increase initial grace period
- the game now properly stores existing built walls/floors when drawing blueprints
- fix: pausing the game, drawing a floor or wall blueprint, then drawing another on top, then erasing the blueprint, immediately built the floor/wall
- fix: over an already built wall, put a blueprint for another kind of wall. then put a blueprint of the same kind over that one, then cancel construction: wall is instantly changed to the new kind
- fix: race condition in DoorSystem entity aspect cache invalidation was making door filters only work half of the time
- steps to make very silly loop with starvation and healers less silly
make healing threshold <90% (was <99.999%)
decrease starvation damage over time intensity
- display an info-level warning when spawning officers/resources on the border area because no dock is available
- pre-select text in input boxes to make input faster
- doors are now buildable over walls, auto destroying the wall on completion, but not refunding any materials
- add warning when adding an autopilot order to go back home, reproduced here:
There's no need to add autopilot orders to go back home, the autopilot will automatically head back when the cargo hold is full or when the crew needs it. Forced home orders will always wait for crew rest, even when there's little need, and will slow down the autopilot schedule.

Update 3.8.2

- fix: repeated blueprint applications still lose original wall information
- fix: door blueprint over walls makes room validation fail

Update 3.8.3

- fix: AI healing threshold for units that have not been attacked by an enemy (or when the healer has not been attacked) in the last 15s is now 50%, otherwise it is 99.9%. manual orders also override this to 99.9%
- fix: clear props on initial spawn area +1 border to avoid some tutorial corner cases
- lower path finding limit
- allow to place object blueprints even if the tile room status is not valid
the building SM will pause the building job and flag it with a warning about room conditions not being valid
then resume it when they become valid
the storage area still requires a fully built room to preserve its special conditions
- add button to open inventory window from factory info panel when factory is set to global queue

Update 3.8.4

- fix: sneaker event can crash the game
- fix: crash when scrapping a ship
- make builder robot capable of repairs
- increase xp rate for healers
- pallets: actively remove stacks that are not of the controlled kind
- make sure keybinding titles are translatable
- fix: changing pallet and shop resource kind must cancel ongoing delivery jobs to that object
- fix: wall destroy, destruct and construct must reset damage flag
- fix: under some conditions the room overlay was visible outside of a build tool

Update 3.8.5

- change labels for icons in some inspector tabs
- fix: properly restore the global flag for factories on rebuild (only applies to newly built ones after updating to 3.8.5)
- fix: clear combat target after equipping a new item
- fix: add actual organic flags at civ level, don't hardcode on load
- fix: projectile weapons were having a hard time hitting some objects
- fix: all other cases of projectile aiming should also be improved
- buff single-target projectile weapon damage (only applies to newly created weapons after 3.8.5)
- fix: game load should not reset away team planet positions
- don't decay the social vital while outside of home station
- fix: toggle tool status is not properly applied on game loading

Update 3.8.6

- fix: ray testing must always include initial/final points, in case ray length is 0
- raise pathfinding limit
- show modal error when loading a corrupted saved game, don't crash
- fix: walkable/buildable tiles go +1 over borders in asteroid maps

2017-09-23 Note: I'm (Carlos) traveling for the next three weeks so I won't be able to put much work in the game. Work will be fully resumed in mid October.