The Deployment - Pre-Release Update (1.0.0.084)

Endless Tactics: Trial Run time at Steam Next Fest has just ended, and to wrap this up, here's one of the biggest Updates of recent! Unlike the likes of the Apex Update, this one's complexity lies a lot more beneath where the naked eye can see, but you'll more than surely feel the difference nonetheless. To start with, the "Trial Run" (aka first operation, aka tutorial) has been reworked from the ground up! New players should (and statistically are, as player retention has thankfully greatly increased since I dropped it) have a much better experience. I of course couldn't begin without mentioning how much of a relief it is to see all known memory leak AND shred of performance degradation squashed away from Endless Tactics; for good this time. Due to a bunch of tiny little "oddities" lying around old code (and obscure engine interactions/issues), the object count of the game was essentially rising at every time you went from screen to screen, so in practice, after a few hours of consecutive play, it'd lag even in the main menu - and that felt horrible of course. So after spending 10h a few days in a row investigating upon it and refactoring code, I've been finally able to stop worrying about these, and actually get on with juicer stuff such as the Tutorial Rework above (more similar reworks to come soon btw). Without beating around the bush anymore, here are the actual...

CHANGES

• Tutorial Rework - Previously a major point of contention amongst new players... now featuring a pretty cool (imo) pre-scripted event, Mechs, a boss (Apex) battle, and a much more climatic ending (all while being lore friendly and maybe setting some stuff up for a certain post launch update). Missions and Dialogues have of course being properly rearranged to accomodate for these, making the beginner progression also feel much more natural.

• FINAL FIX to Performance Degradation - Expanding upon last Update's very important fixes/improvements to Multithreading, I have now completely reworked the game's resource-loading, to a much more scalable and bootup-time friendly lazy-loading architecture! Cyclic references are a thing of the past now, at last, and overall the game should be much more efficient at loading only what's actually necessary from the start. You can now finally play Endless Tactics endlessly and not feel like your PC is slowly dying. Base performance has also, by the way, been greatly increased by adjacent optimizations done with the bunch; all in all the game should feel much lighter and stable (performance wise) on all systems and circumstances. An FPS counter has also been added in the Options Menu for those who wanna see it for themselves.

• Countless Text Revisions - To Dialogue, Missions, Upgrades, UI, Abilities, etc... Also including font properties, and all kinds of tweaks to make it all more readable, intuitive, and natural for the eye... And furthermore, Dialogue-logic has also been greatly improved (queueing, anti-repeat measures, etc.).

• New Legendary Artifact Cornucopia - Makes Destroyable Obstacles have a chance to drop random Crates rather than Resources! (affected by drop-chance upgrades)... plus a minor reworks/cleanups to destroyable objects logic to make it more scalable.

• MAJOR General Fixes (too many for me to list them, really).

• More Upgrade UX Improvements.

• CosmeticInternal Rework to Drops/Part of the optimizations and cleanups mentioned above; also meaning several improvements to drops-picking/spawning logic.

• Corrupted Cores for both Surge and Spawn-Blocking!

• Glitchy Text effect toggle (For those who get visually annoyed by it anyhow).

• MORE MAJOR Improvements