Steam News27 March 20197y ago

Bot Colony Major Update

Sorry it took so long! We’ve made some significant improvements. Please read KNOWN PROBLEMS - we need your feedback! We made the call to give you something NOW, even if not all the polish we wanted is there.

Full notes

Full Bot Colony update

Read the full published notes in a cleaner layout. The original post stays linked below.

What changed

0 fixes1 addition1 change2 removals

Gameplay
Events
Performance

changedSorry it took so long! We’ve made some significant improvements. Please read KNOWN PROBLEMS - we need your feedback! We made the call to give you something NOW, even if not all the polish we wanted is there.

removedNEW FEATURESYou no longer lose your progress in Arrival after 1 - 2 hours of play, which was frustrating. Arrival is now more playable, though it's far from where we want it to be. There are 4 checkpoints ( coded speech here to avoid spoilers): you get your Virtual Assistant, find blue, find green, 20?. This took TONS of work: we needed to save the game state, messages you receive, position of objects, events that happened – before a checkpoint. Several Known Problems come with this feature, please see below.

removedNEW FEATURESBetter question answering performance. Questions about a particular character will no longer return facts about another one if the verb and other words in a fact match your question – the character now takes absolute priority. Usually, Jimmy will assume you’re exploring events in the same time period his last answer was about. Understanding in Arrival still needs a lot of work.

addedKNOWN PROBLEMS (BUGS) AND WORKAROUNDSPlaying through speech is no longer available due to cost! . Supporting Bot Colony ( above ) costs (WAY) more than what the game makes. Microsoft or Google charging by the hour for their speech-to-text doesn't help. PLAN : Make available high-performance speech-to-text through micro-transactions (1, 3, 5 hours for $2, $5 and $8). We're also contemplating a free Intruder level, playable through typing OR SPEECH (that will require micro-transactions). Finally, a bundle including 5 of hours of speech support (time roughly needed to finish the game ) – but that would only work for new players. We need your feedback on this!

Bot Colony changes

removedYou no longer lose your progress in Arrival after 1 - 2 hours of play, which was frustrating. Arrival is now more playable, though it's far from where we want it to be. There are 4 checkpoints ( coded speech here to avoid spoilers): you get your Virtual Assistant, find blue, find green, 20?. This took TONS of work: we needed to save the game state, messages you receive, position of objects, events that happened – before a checkpoint. Several Known Problems come with this feature, please see below.

removedBetter question answering performance. Questions about a particular character will no longer return facts about another one if the verb and other words in a fact match your question – the character now takes absolute priority. Usually, Jimmy will assume you’re exploring events in the same time period his last answer was about. Understanding in Arrival still needs a lot of work.

addedPlaying through speech is no longer available due to cost! . Supporting Bot Colony ( above ) costs (WAY) more than what the game makes. Microsoft or Google charging by the hour for their speech-to-text doesn't help. PLAN : Make available high-performance speech-to-text through micro-transactions (1, 3, 5 hours for $2, $5 and $8). We're also contemplating a free Intruder level, playable through typing OR SPEECH (that will require micro-transactions). Finally, a bundle including 5 of hours of speech support (time roughly needed to finish the game ) – but that would only work for new players. We need your feedback on this!

NEW FEATURES

You no longer lose your progress in Arrival after 1 - 2 hours of play, which was frustrating. Arrival is now more playable, though it's far from where we want it to be. There are 4 checkpoints ( coded speech here to avoid spoilers): you get your Virtual Assistant, find blue, find green, 20?. This took TONS of work: we needed to save the game state, messages you receive, position of objects, events that happened – before a checkpoint. Several Known Problems come with this feature, please see below.
The game is faster, more responsive. However, during checkpoint save you'll think the game is frozen. It's not - wait a few seconds if you typed a command or asked question and nothing happens.
More contents. You can access previous robots’ conversations with passengers in Arrival. You can also investigate the background to something green ending up where it shouldn’t.
How do you know? after a robot answer returns source of knowledge (seeing, hearing, doing, programmed in factory with that knowledge).
Better question answering performance. Questions about a particular character will no longer return facts about another one if the verb and other words in a fact match your question – the character now takes absolute priority. Usually, Jimmy will assume you’re exploring events in the same time period his last answer was about. Understanding in Arrival still needs a lot of work.
Where was X at (Time) (on Date) is supported now, and helps you find key robot memories more easily in Intruder.
The experimental What do you see? question shown in an older YouTube video now works in Intruder, try it!
You can use your own words to refer to objects. For example, go to the scary red chair. You click on it to teach it. You can say Forget the scary red chair.
INTRUDER TIP We recommend you discover the robot memories before you play replacing objects in Intruder, to avoid failing because of the time limit. Find out about who lives there and what happened in the house in the last 48 hours, and discover the 14 Jimmy videos.

KNOWN PROBLEMS (BUGS) AND WORKAROUNDS

Playing through speech is no longer available due to cost!. Supporting Bot Colony ( above ) costs (WAY) more than what the game makes. Microsoft or Google charging by the hour for their speech-to-text doesn't help. PLAN: Make available high-performance speech-to-text through micro-transactions (1, 3, 5 hours for $2, $5 and $8). We're also contemplating a free Intruder level, playable through typing OR SPEECH (that will require micro-transactions). Finally, a bundle including 5 of hours of speech support (time roughly needed to finish the game ) – but that would only work for new players. We need your feedback on this!
You get to a saved game using CONTINUE but it takes 15 - 25 sec to retrieve it and load it, so please be patient if you’ve got a saved game!
After continuing a saved game, some robots can’t move any more (this doesn’t happen if you play Arrival in one shot). Both Charlie the Vacuum Bot and Cindy (the Cute Bot) are unable to move after a checkpoint. As a short term

Source

Steam News / 27 March 2019

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