Pre-Release Update 0.0.8 - Space Elevator, Byproducts, Overhauls, & QoL

I would first like to thank those of you that have wishlisted the game already. It's extraordinarily helpful for visibility of the game, as well as personally driving me to make Factory Default the best game it can be.

The main goals for 0.0.8 were moving the story forward and more quality of life features. There are quite a few, so let's get into it.

📌 Highlights:

• Byproducts - Most Mines, many farms, and some refined resources now produce byproducts! Just in case there weren't enough materials to manage, now you can do something with those orange peels after making orange juice.

• Ultima Mundi Phase 3 is fully completable. - Supply Uncle Ian with everything he needs to build the world's first and only Space Elevator. This might seem like Uncle Ian's end goal, but it is just a stepping stone

• 6 new items have been added to complete Phase 3 - These items will be needed in high amounts for future phases as well.

• 5 new starting countries have been added. - France, Kenya, Poland, Saudi Arabia, and United Kingdom.

• Finance Screen overhaul

• News Panel overhaul

• Build Menu pricing added

• New Visibility Toggles

• Game Settings Added

• Plus some other additions, changes optimizations, and bug fixes!

Here is a quick video covering the large to medium sized changes in 0.0.7 & 0.0.8:

Full Patch Notes

🏭 ADDITIONS:

Ultima Mundi Phase 3 Complete:

Players can now complete Phase 3: The Space Elevator

There are several new advanced items that need to be supplied along with getting approval from the General Assembly.

Issue 2 of 4 in the General Assembly will allow the player to construct the Space Elevator.

Once the Space Elevator is built you will see what is in store for phase 4. There will be more materials needed, along with another General Assembly Vote.

New Items

Items needed to complete Ultima Mundi Phase 3:

Carbon Fiber

Aerospace Alloy

Rocket Fuel

Docking Gate

Solar Panel

Photovoltaic Cell

New Starting Countries

Added 5 new starting countries:

France, Kenya, Poland, Saudi Arabia, and the United Kingdom - 15 countries didn't seem like enough, but I think that 20 will be a solid number for now.

New Recipe Feature - Byproducts

It has been a long time coming, and recent changes with this update made it super simple. Now many recipes will have multiple outputs. In most cases, you'll probably just want to sell the byproduct, but if you are savvy, you can find a way to put it to good use.

Byproduct profits aren't going to make you billions, but I want the player to get used to handling them, as the regolith from other planets will rely on having multiple outputs.

Gases - All gases

Mined/Drilled - 60+ ores including Gold, Uranium, and Diamonds.

Crops - 20+ crops including Apples, Cinnamon, and Pomegranates.

Marine Products - 20+ marine products including Tuna, Lobster, and Crab.

Processed Foods - Sugar, Orange Juice, Flour, Cheese, and Leather.

Alcohol - All make feed or fertilizer.

Canned Goods - All make Pig Feed

Refined Products - 20+ refined products including Ethylene, Lumber, and Yellow Cake Uranium

💡 QoL ADDITIONS:

Finance Screen Overhaul

Instead of being a mess of numbers compared to the previous 5 months all on one screen. I replaced it with a screen that just shows you the current month, and all the various profits and expenses.

If you want to see previous months, you can go back and see them, but I don't think players will use that part much.

What is great about this new screen is that you can take something like "Wages" and expand it so you can see what countries are costing you the most in wages. Then you can expand it AGAIN to see which resource you are spending the most on.

This applies for every category. This combined with the suppliers screen from the previous update should give the player a very clear idea where their money is coming from or where it is going.

News Panel Overhaul

Since most of the news panel is now obsolete thanks to the new supplier contract menu, as well as the finance screen overhaul, there left only a bit of information that the player would want to be told about, and one bit is market fluctuations.

In the old panel, it would say something like "The price of wheat in New Zealand dropped to 50% of it's value." Which didn't really give the player much of a reason to care.

The new News panel shows market fluctuations tied to a headline, and a very brief article. Newest fluctuations on top. The events are going to be vaguely related to the item (ex. No droughts causing a RAM shortage), but they might read a bit odd grammatically or logically. (ex. "Facility fire in Hellenic Union destroys Butter stockpiles. Prices jump by 10%", or "Rolling blackouts in France halt Steel Ingots facilities. Prices inflate by 300%", or "Germany aggressively subsidizes Thermometer production. Value drops to 10%")

Types of News:

Keep in mind that market flux is determined by the option selected at the creation of a new game. The default option will give a 1% chance daily that there will be a a news worthy market movement, and a 0.01% chance that movement will affect a whole market.

Wasted Output

The other bit of news added is an article is written if one or more of your buildings is producing resources/items that hit 100% warehouse capacity without an assigned manager to sell the overflow. Something along the lines of "Pallets of Limestone flood the streets outside [company name]'s storage facilities. Locals in [country] say "Finder's Keepers!""

Notification Bubbles for Contracts and News

Notification bubbles have been added to the News button, if you see this, that means either you have an article written about your wasted output, or there has been a market shift in a country you are operating in. Either way, you should take a look.

They have also been added to the Contracts button. If you see this, it means that you are incurring a penalty on one or more contract. If you see this, you should drop everything and take care of it, because that means you are losing value on your contract payout DAILY!

Build Menu Price Panel

A small panel will pop up next to build menu buttons as you hover over them. You no longer have to guess and check every building's price. The panel shows the name of the building, the global average price, as well as your currently selected country's price.

Note that this is the construction price only. Land costs extra, and has a different price based on tile type and proximity to a shore.

Country Resource Generation (with toggle)

You can now get an at-a-glance look at what is happening within a country simply by hovering your mouse over it. It will show you what is being produced - what is used. Basically just showing you what you have in excess and what you need more of.

This panel will only show if you are far enough away from the globe that the build menu is not visible. (This because there is little reason to have both this and the storage panel open together.)

Anything that adds up to a net zero will not be shown. Any inventory that is not being produced or used will not be shown.

Transport Vehicle Info Panel (with toggle)

Transport vehicles now come with a togglable panel above them that tell you what type they are, where they are coming from, where they are going, and what it has in its cargo.

Simply something nice to have, and I made it togglable because I could see it getting overwhelming deeper into the game.

Transport Vehicle Visibility Toggle

I added a toggle specifically for the visibility of transport vehicles. All the vehicles zooming around can get noisy and distracting. So if you don't like to see them, now you can hide them.

Building Levels at-a-glance

When using the Upgrade, or Paint/Eyedropper tool, the building's level will show above the building. This should allow you to spot any weak links from afar within a large swath of land. Or help you maximize your land use in a smaller country.

Contract Research Warning

Contracts will now show a red exclamation mark over them if you do not have the research necessary to produce the item asked for.

Research from the Library

Previously, the research button in the Library was disabled if an item’s prerequisites hadn't been met yet. This forced you to manually search the Research Tree to find and purchase the missing parent research. The button now does this for you. If prerequisites are missing, it will calculate the total cost and let you unlock the entire chain with a single click without ever leaving the Library menu.

⚙️ GAME SETTINGS ADDITIONS:

FOV Slider

90 degrees is my ideal, but any given player's might be different.

FPS Limit Slider

If you have vsync disabled, you can set your FPS limit. I only did this because running 600fps on a 240hz monitor in a simulation game sounded silly.

Rotation Sensitivity and Zoom Sensitivity

Should help players find the sweet spot for their specific desired sensitivity.

🔹 SMALL ADDITIONS:

• Relative difficulty rating given to the various starting countries in the new game menu. Signified by one out of 5 bars.

• Added audio to build menu buttons and errors

• More questions added to the Report-A-Bug/Give-Feedback form for the sake of organization.

• Added the map for the Solar System. This is a “Small” addition because none of the planets/moons are available yet, but this is how the player will swap quickly between planets/moons in the future.

• Discord Integration

🏗️ CHANGES

Ultima Mundi prerequisites have been adjusted.

The prereq for the player to build 10 Seaports in order for Uncle Ian to talk to you seemed a bit arbitrary on it's own, so I adjusted some things. Basically to make sure that the player is ready for the monumental task that Uncle Ian is going to ask of them.

Environmental Impact Buildings now require research

There are now 6 new researches that are prerequisites for the various EIU buildings in the game. The "Environmental Stewardship" is unlocked at the start of the game, and allows the player to build a "Protected Forest". All other EIU needs to be unlocked.

Management in Tile Popup

Recipe Display Changes and Consolidation

Tutorial Subsidies Are Repaid

During the beginning of the tutorial, the player’s bank account always has enough money to continue the tutorial. All that money is now pooled and reclaimed once the player is directed to the loans tab.

🧹 SMALL CHANGES

• I adjusted the colors of the Land, Mountain, Snowy Mountain, and Desert tiles, as well as the color of the ocean to be a bit more closer to reality. This was a last minute change, so none of the images in this change log will match the slightly new style, but this is what it looks like: Old vs New

• Purchased tiles will no longer be a different color than un-purchased tiles. Instead the player will notice either a building occupying the tile, or some land survey markers on empty land that they own.This will hopefully help with those like me that struggled to tell the difference between owned-green, and unowned-green.

• Negative money in the bank will now show as red in the UI.

• Changed the default volume of everything for more balance.

• Adjusted the research requirements for various items.

• Swapped the tutorial destination country from France to Ireland due to the addition of France as a starting country.

• The little popup above buildings that show how much of a resource is being produced now has proper number abbreviations. (ex. "+1.12M t" vs "+1124335.43 t")

• Changed the appearance of the Library slightly to make it a bit more readable.

• I adjusted the generated contract lengths to favor shorter contracts.

• Selecting "Exclusive Fullscreen" in the settings menu will now trap the mouse to the game. All other options allow the mouse to escape like before.

• Moved a number of Chemical Plant recipes to the Oil Refinery.

• Changed the sound effect for completing a tutorial task, as the one before it was a bit intense.

• Added a sound effect for receiving a message in the communications menu. (There was none before.)

• Moved the Main Menu button from the bottom left of the UI to the bottom right. This was to make the solar system map make a bit more sense with its placement.

• Added some splash logos to the initial loading screen of the game. Representing myself, MicroProse, as well as the Godot Engine.

• Added Animations to Drill and Mine. These two buildings seemed pretty static, so I made them more active by animating them.

⏱️ OPTIMIZATION

Tiles

I made a small change to the way tiles are set up, so the game runs significantly smoother. ~50% more fps on average. ~600% more fps in some areas that were problems before.

Essentially, whenever a new country was hovered, all the tiles in that country would override their shader to have that hex outline. Now, I have made them all invisible, with the shader already assigned, and am just showing them when the larger country mesh is entered by the cursor. Then for larger, sprawling countries, it falls back to the old way of only showing tiles that are close to the camera.

Transport Vehicles

Removed movement from the process of transport vehicles, and replaced it with tweens. Now the only process calculation is orienting the Y from (0,0,0). Much lighter!

A side effect is that the movement is much smoother!

Before the current version, my export_manager was spawning all daily delivery vehicles on the same tick. So if you have 20 trucks being sent out daily, they were all spawning on the same tick. Not great for minimum fps. I have staggered spawns, and if there are more than the staggering can handle, or if you are running at a higher game-speed, the rest will not spawn. The trades will still happen, but the spawn queue will clear and start over.

I also added a safety net. If the fps is below 60, the export manager will skip spawning a vehicle as well. The trade will still happen, it will just skip the mesh and pathing.

Nav mesh for ships was recreated. This time taking more care to avoid going straight through tiles. (Clipping will still happen, but much less.) The actual goal however was to get rid of the weird zig-zag that would happen in the middle of the ocean in seemingly random places.

Resource Generation Sprites

Previously, no matter how many tiles were built on in the active (selected) country, every single one would fire their resource sprite (icon +40t) on the same frame. If you have a few hundred tiles all doing that, you can get frame dips. I simply staggered it so that there are a max of 5 sprites per frame that are allowed to spawn. Anything that doesn’t spawn before the next trigger is lost. So at the slowest game speed you can get 600 sprites, and the max speed you can get 100. (Note: No actual resources are lost, this is just the sprite we are talking about.)

Above is an example of what is happening. (With the max reduced to 2 sprites per process frame so you can really see it in motion.)

Number Converting

Optimized the way numbers are converted. Got rid of some unneeded calculations.

⚖️ BALANCE

• I changed the Ultima Mundi Phase 0 “Fill” requirement for Basalt. Instead of a more realistic 200 billion tons, I lowered it to a much more attainable 5 billion tons. Everything is going to be a challenge for the player to acquire, no use making them wait around.

• I removed "Byproduct Extraction" from the research tree. This was for a couple of reasons. Due to a self-imposed limitation, I wasn't able to add byproducts to earlier versions of the game, that has been fixed. Another reason is because it makes little to no sense, and the final reason is because there were only two items that use that research, one of which made absolutely no sense at all.

• Indium Ore research was changed to "Electrochemical Processing", and Thorium was changed to "Solution Mining"

• Adjusted prices for Concrete and Cement so that they can operate at a profit.

• Corrected Orange juice recipe turning 15 tons of Oranges into 25 tons of Orange Juice.

• Added missed “Marine Products” fertilities for Central American Union:

  • Expert: Lobster

  • Advanced: Shrimp, and Yellowfish Tuna

  • Standard: Snapper, and Pearls

🛠️ BUG FIXES

• Fixed issue with Company Value calculation not taking debt into consideration.

• Fixed issue with starting buildings not having an upgrade cost after the first one.

• Fixed issue with ambient sounds playing forever. (Say goodbye to the rooster call every 30 seconds after building a farm.)

• Fixed issue with buying land on its own not costing any influence.

• Fixed issue with Contracts Menu taking a while to update when you first opened it.

• Fixed issue with Auctions not understanding how units work.

• Fixed the text on the management screen, as the information was out of date.

• Fixed issue with item description not showing up on the tile_info_popop.

• Fixed flickering hex border on shore tiles.

• Fixed issue with painted off-shore drills being placed as desert drills. This bug also would place desert drills in place of off-shore drills when loading a saved game.

There is a lot more in the works, and I can't wait to share it with you!

Until then, take care.

-Chett Fitzgerald