Patch Notes for V0.9.8.1 (Build ID: 1867189)

Patch V0.9.8.0 has just been released, completing all but one of the remaining dropdown menu tabs and implementing custom player-designed starbases. This update also overhauls some of the graphics and existing user interfaces, adds several new technologies and minor features, and fixes a ton of bugs. A full fleshed-out breakdown of the update (with screenshots) will be posted very soon along with details of the next major patch and what's still to come in Predestination as we close in on the big V 1.0 release. Thank you to everyone who has supported Predestination and helped to test the game so far, and a special thanks everyone who has sent in bug reports or crash reports and provided feedback. Below is the patch notes for this update:

Major Feature: New Dropdown Menus:

Implemented the Your Empire panel on the Planets dropdown menu. This shows details on all the core stats of all planets in your empire (population, food, energy, metal, net tax, research, and morale/health/security). This will let you know if anything is wrong in our empire and let you quickly find out things like which planets are producing the most metal or which ones have excess food etc.

Implemented the Exploration panel on the Planets dropdown menu. This shows details on all planets in systems you've visited, and will help you explore the galaxy and select targets for colonisation etc. It shows important stats such as organic rating (affects food bonus deposits), mineral density, ancient artifacts, etc, and you can arrange the list by any stat if you want to find something specific. This panel also has shortcuts to send survey ships and colony ships to planets if available.

Implemented the Planet Leader panel on the Planets dropdown menu. This displays stats on all of the Planet Leaders you've hired and allow you to dismiss them.

Implemented the Ship Captain panel on the Fleets dropdown menu. This displays stats on all of the Ship Captains you've hired and allow you to dismiss them.

Added code to update the new Planet Leader, Ship Captain, Planet Empire and Planet Explore tabs any time certain actions take place such as visiting a star system or colonising a planet. This ensures that the menu doesn't have to update every time you open it, so it should be nice and fast.

Major Feature: Custom Starbases:

Implemented player-designed shipyards using the new Starbase hull, and added that hull to the 3D Ship Designer

Added a new Starbase hull type and modified all Starbases to use it instead of Frigate Hull

Rebalanced Starbase power grid.

Starbase designs are now generated with 60% power used for weapons. 70% for races with a Military leader, and 50% for races with a Balanced / Agricultural leader.

Implemented mechanics for updating built starbases across your empire by editing the design.

Implemented mechanics for switching starbases across your empire back to standard designs when you delete its special design.

The War Room is now called Battlestations and simply adds +1 command point. The module now uses power grid rather than providing additional power grid.

The Command Module is now called Command Processor and adds +1 command point and 50% damage to all fleet members. The module now uses power grid rather than providing additional power grid.

The Auxilliary Power Core module now works on starbases. It still increases the cost of the starbase.

Feature: 3D Ship Designer UI Improvements

Added separate tabs in the Ship Designer part window for Weapons, Modules, and Cosmetic parts

Ship Parts in each tab are now displayed in lists e.g. Beam Weapons, Projectile Weapons etc.

Added a new Attached tab that shows a list of all parts used in the current design. This allows you to highlight and select individual parts and is useful for removing all weapons and modules from a ship to upgrade the design.

Feature: Enhanced Graphics:

Overhauled the method used to draw ships in 2D on the UI. It now draws using a rendertarget and always draws from the same angle and with the same lighting regardless of position on the screen. This has significantly improved the quality of the ship graphics on the UI and eliminated the strange orientation and lighting bugs they suffered.

Overhauled the method used to draw buildings and infrastructure in 2D on the UI to use a rendertarget just like the new ship drawing method. This has greatly improved the quality of the building graphics on the UI.

The Research Panel now shows a preview of Ship parts and buildings in the technology in the bottom left part of the screen. This screen will be improved a bit in a later patch, we'll move the lock icon somewhere else and possibly add some more details of the ship part / building.

Improved the FXAA implementation to also work on smaller scale textures such as the rendertargets for 2d ships and buildings. The ships and buildings drawn to the UI should now look a little better with FXAA turned on.

The lighting on planets is now tinted more heavily based on the parent star and distance of the planet to the star.

The lighting used for buildings and infrastructure now more closely matches the lighting used for the terrain.

The lighting used for buildings and infrastructure now has an additional component based on the atmosphere of the planet (e.g. purple on a toxic planet) so buildings and infrastructure look better in-place.

Switching to the ShipyardScreen now causes a momentary black fade-in effect to make it consistent with other screens in the game.

Misc Changes:

Structural Mount now also increases weapon ammo by 100%

Re-arranged several Sociology technologies.

Added the Peacekeeping Navy technology in the Sociology tree that provides a flat +5 command points and the Ministry of War that gives +10

Xeno Psychology now improves the value of diplomatic and scientific offers by 50%

Subvertive Psychology now improves the value of military offers by 50%

Strategic Resources are now smaller on the diplomacy screen

Implemented new half height tooltip popup (used for some things on the new planet dropdowns)

Changed the Orbital Cannon Bay to a new infrastructure that creates two cannons in orbit.

Buildings can now spawn more than one ship in Fleet Combat (used for the new Orbital Cannon infrastructure)

Implemented new shortcut option to send a spy to a planet

Revenant attacks now have a 10% chance to attack player #3 in military order in addition to the 25% chance to hit #2

The Habitation Module is now a Starbase only module and provides 2000 population, 4 money per turn, and 20 morale. If destroyed, all planets throughout your empire suffer a 20% morale penalty instantly.

Elite Ship Crew now automatically start at level 3 (300% XP) instead of 150% and can reach a maximum level of 10

The Shipyard Efficiency technology now decreases both metal and money cost of ships by 10%

Re-designed the Building list when zoomed into a city. It now uses the same square icon and style as the Infrastructure buttons.

Split the Building list into three categories: Core Buildings for large tiered buildings, Service Buildings for buildings you can only build one of per city/planet/system, and Small Buildings for everything else.

Added "No Captain On-board" text to the Ship Captain button on the ship info panel when the ship belongs to another race and has no captain.

Moved Power Usage, Metal Cost and Money Cost from ship part data files to the modules and weapons data files.

Modified hull parts to still contribute Power Usage, Metal Cost and Money Cost

Bug-fixes:

Fixed a bug where dismissed ship captains wouldn't be removed from their assigned ship

Fixed a bug where dismissing a ship captain wouldn't update the ship info window

Fixed a bug where dismissing a planet leader wouldn't update the planet screen if it's open

Text now draws with a smaller border on smaller resolutions than 1920 x 1080

Text that is resized to fit a smaller resolution can now reach a smaller minimum, though this realistically only affects people playing on tiny resolutions like 1024x768

Fixed a bug where ships captured while immobilised wouldn't reset their immobilisation status and would continue to be immobilised in future combat.

Captured ships now also capture the ship captain on the ship

Implemented the Survival Pod mechanics. Destroyed ships now kill the ship captain unless you have one.

Implemented the Neural Interface ship module's double captain bonus.

Fixed a bug where you could delete a starbase and open it in the ShipyardScreen using the same mouse click if there was an overlap between the model and the delete button

Fixed a bug with the radial menus on the PlanetScreen not closing when you zoom into or out of a city.

Fixed the zoom distance for zooming into cities on different terrain heights and in different screen resolutions, particularly on Tiny planets.

Fixed a crash that could happen if the Revenants are dispatched to attack a planet and that colony has been destroyed before it gets there.

Fixed a bug on the DiplomacyScreen when a council vote is happening with two races involved. The placement of the race images and tick icons didn't agree.

Fixed a bug with diplomacy where races would respond with the "Gift" response when accepting any deal.

Fixed a bug where the ship designer mistook the Command Processor for the Starbase Sensor Array

Fixed a bug with the Planet AI where it could crash when there are more orbitals than shipyards

Fixed a bug where bombs that kill population show the "Immune to Bio-Toxin" message when the race is immune to biological warfare. This now correctly shows when using biological weapons that kill troops rather than population.

Fixed dozens of UI scaling bugs with ships and building graphics all over the UI

Fixed a camera bug on the Victory popup when auto-resolving combat.

Fixed various scaling bugs with combat rating icons on various parts of the UI.

Fixed several instances of the wrong combat rating icon being used for captains and crew

Fixed spacing issues on several tooltips

Fixed scaling and spacing issues in the Tax window

Fixed text position of the Long Range Scans information on small screen resolutions

Fixed the size of the clickable area around planets on the system window not resizing based on UI scale.

You can no longer assign a ship captain to a warp missile.

Fixed a few scaling issues with scroll bars on parts of the UI

Fixed a scaling issue with the Race headers on the New Game screen.

Fixed a bug where starting a new game after exiting to the main menu wouldn't reset some Level variables

Fixed a bug where the Galactic Council, fleet list, and some other things didn't reset if you exited the game and started a new singleplayer mission

Fixed a bug causing AI fleets in an enemy star system to attack a planet twice in the same round

Fixed a bug where races could end up over 100 favour or under 0 after a diplomatic exchange

Fixed a major bug with the screenshake in Fleet Combat that could cause the camera to go far offscreen and never stop shaking.

Default ship designs are now correctly priced. Previously they didn't charge for the cost of the modules and weapons attached.

Fixed all structure based ships to include a Structural Mount when updating their stats.

Fixed several bugs and crashes with the ship design panel

Fixed popup windows drawing wrong when the dropdown menus are open

Fixed multiple weapons and modules not being available on the right type of ship hulls (part of starbase changes)

Fixed a bug with tooltips not opening and closing correctly

Fixed bug with ship designer where you could copy a ship part to bypass the one per ship limit

Fixed display bug with the green area on the resource window on the planet screen. It should now be easier to see

Fixed bug with popup boxes where the Yes button could get stuck grayed out

Fixed display bugs in the ShipyardScreen with the hex grid

Fixed ship designer bug when attaching parts with the stats not updating

Fixed shipyard screen crash when you deleted a ship design and had the last one in the list selected

Fixed a bug causing Planet Leaders with Energy Percentage bonuses to add 100 times the bonus (whoops!)

Fixed a bug causing the Planet Leader ground weapon bonus to not apply

Fixed a bug causing the AI to underestimate the damage of ground cannons when you have Phasors

Fixed a bug with planetary shields in planets with multiple cities with shields and planets with no city shields but that have cannons.

Fixed a bug with the planetary shield efficiency bonus

Fixed a bug causing the scroll bar on the Ship Captain dropdown panel to be too small

Disabled the Solar Flare disaster as it crashes the game A full detailed breakdown of everything in this update with screenshots will be posted very soon, along with details of what you can expect from the next major update (0.9.9.0). As always, we'll be monitoring the Bug Report thread and crash reports sent using the in-game crash report tool and will be deploying minor bugfix patches as quickly as we can. We'll also be deploying a series of small patches before 0.9.9.0 to add new content that didn't quite make it into this update such as new sound effects and some of the missing buildings. Any feedback on this update would be greatly appreciated! Cheers, -- Brendan, Lead Developer