Patch Notes for the Beta Release Update (V1.0 Build ID 2435796)

Core Engine Overhauls:

We switched the underlying tech in the Predestination engine from XNA 3.1 to Monogame and .NET 3.5 to .NET 4.5.2. This was a massive job, but allowed us to add 64-bit compatibility and take advantage of some new memory management tools. At the same time, we overhauled large parts of the game engine to fix recurring bugs, clean up a lot of technical debt from all the features we've adding during alpha, and optimise performance and memory usage.

Switched from a 32-bit executable to a 64-bit compatible one. Players on 32-bit operating systems should not notice any difference, while those on 64-bit operating systems will have more memory to work with. This will let us expand the game more in the future, and if we expand it to the point that it causes memory problems for 32-bit users we'll put in some low-memory options.

Replaced the fragile old XNA spritebatch code with a new more fault-tolerant system. Instead of crashing when things happen out of order, the worst case is now a graphical glitch and most of the time there's no problem at all. This was pretty necessary in order to switch to MonoGame.

Replaced all of the old graphics state code throughout the game with a robust new GraphicsState system. We've pre-defined a series of common renderstates, depth states, stencil buffer states etc and now switch between them before rendering each element. This was a massive task but required to switch from XNA 3.1 to MonoGame.

Overhauled all screens to have multiple rendering layers: Pre-Rendering (rendertargets etc), Under UI Rendering, UI Rendering, and Overlay Rendering. This fixed a number of display bugs all throughout the game, and makes adding new UI a lot easier.

Wrote a new texture loader that results in an overall smaller memory footprint.

Wrote an entirely new runtime model loader for .X files that's compatible with Monogame and supports both pre-scaled models and our custom automatic scaling to optimise it for use in our 3D ship designer. Added scaling and rotation data to all of the Renegade and Kazzir ships, fixing a load of broken designs after the switch to Monogame.

Removed FXAA code as it proved to be incompatible with the new setup, but we plan to add a new FXAA module at some point in future if we get the time.

Removed the visible star from Fleet Combat as it was only seen if you happened to turn the board upside down, and there's no reason to do that. The code for the star and lens flare had some problems and it wasn't really worth fixing, so we removed it.

Fixed incompatibility of planet continent heightmaps and other images with XNA 4.0 / Monogame.

Overhauled all of the existing shaders in the game for compatibility with Monogame and Shader Model 4.0 specifications. Also used this opportunity to tweak some of the existing shaders and add new effects for each class of shield.

Overhauled the System window's rendering code. The planet code was taking far too long to render and has been replaced with simpler textured spheres. The old star rendering code turned out to be a MASSIVE memory hog and performance killer, so we replaced the entire thing with a much more efficient one based on rotating fake cameras around a pre-generated nebula. Star size is now correctly shown on the system window and bebulae are more visible.

Wrote a system for handling the dynamic loading and unloading of voice files while preventing memory fragmentation, and a system for playing voice files. The Diplomacy voices have been unavoidably delayed as the person who is processing them has been unavailable.

Drastically reduced the runtime overhead of loading in some UI elements by checking whether each image has a separate mouseover component before loading rather than handling load errors.

Improved memory management and resolved fragmentation of the Large Object Heap.

Quad and QuadBatch rendering is now more efficient.

Fleet Combat Overhauls

New State System: We added a whole new Fleet Combat State system with a built-in action queue and timer system. This was a lot of work, but has eliminated a ton of bugs and odd behaviours in Fleet Combat. The game now constructs actions such as movement and firing as separate state objects and adds them to a queue, and processes that queue in order. Certain actions such as Reactive Strikes can skip to the head of the queue in order to interrupt a player's move as expected, and impossible actions are now automatically pruned from the queue (such as moving a ship that has been destroyed by a reactive strike). Overall, Fleet Combat feels a lot more solid and polished since we made this change.

Fleet Combat In Space: You can now intercept enemy fleets in a system outside orbit of your planets by clicking on the race icon in the Enemy Ships tab of the System Window. This lets you break blockades, destroy unwelcome enemy scouts that wander into your star systems, defend an ally in war whose planet is being sieged, and kill non-combat ships. Of course, if your enemy owns a planet in the system then you'll have to attack the planet and can't intercept the fleet in space.

Ammo Rework: Previously, all bombs and missiles had limited ammo and had to be resupplied by visiting a starbase. This was frankly not fun and not a very big strategic element, so we've redesigned how ammo works. Missiles and Fighters now automatically re-fill at the start of Fleet Combat so you have 5 shots each battle, and Bombs now refill each turn so you can bomb a planet into the stone age over several turns without refueling. We may need to go back and look at bomb balance in a future update, but this ammo system feels much better.

Larger Battlefields: The size of the fleet combat battlefields has been increased and ships now start slightly further apart. This will allow players to execute more strategies based on getting ships into position (e.g. hiding in nebulae) or firing missiles while running away into the corner. Ships also now start further apart to stop them getting stuck behind each other.

Nebula and Explosion Optimisation: We used to have a serious problem with memory leakage caused by nebulae and explosions in Fleet Combat, and if too many explosions happened at the same time then your game could crash with an out of memory error. This has now been fixed as we now pre-generate a small set of nebulae and explosions and handle their positions and animations on the GPU.

Nebula Overhaul: We've added a few new types of nebula to Fleet Combat and changed their bonuses, it now goes like this: Cloaking Field (ships inside count as cloaked), Ion Storm (damages ships inside each turn), Ice Cloud (Halves Missile and Projectile damage), Dust Cloud (Halves Beam and Fighter Damage), Graviton Field (Slows and damages ships each turn), and Hydrogen Plasma (doubles missile explosion and area-effect damage).

Nebula Distribution: When fighting in a star system that's inside a nebula, there will now be pockets of nebular gas in the fleet combat. Blue nebulae have Ice Clouds and Ion Storms, Green have Cloaking Fields and Ice Clouds, Orange have Dust Clouds and Hydrogen Plasma Purple have Ion Storms and Gravity Wells, and Red have Hydrogen Plasma and Dust Clouds. This can be used very strategically if you colonise a planet inside a nebula.

Smooth Animations: Ships now turn smoothly as they move rather than turning sharply in a single frame, and ship movement animation times are now based on the ship's size class and speed. Movement in general feels much smoother and more polished now.

New Shield Graphics: Each class of shield (Electron, Magnetic, Graviton, and Temporal) now has its own unique corresponding model and shader, all of which are moddable. The Electron and Magnetic shields have a similar hex-based design to the previous shield model, while the Graviton and Temporal shields are more circular.

Projectile Weapon Overhaul: Projectile shots now draw as bullets based on specified 2D images rather than all of them just firing a tiny asteroid at the enemy. Every projectile weapon now has its own moddable weapon texture and a specified Bullet Pattern that lets you make it appear to be rapid fire, single-shot, charge-up, etc.

Beam Weapon Overhaul Beams now draw as lines based on input 2D images rather than simple coloured hardware lines. Every Beam weapon and beam-type Special weapon now has its own weapon texture in the files, and these can be modded too.

Weapon Audio Overhaul: Every weapon now has its own moddable Audio File specified in the weapons data file. Weapons are also now timed by the audio, so you can have slow-firing weapons or weapons with long charge-up times if you want for effect.

Missile and Fighter Pathing: Missiles and fighters no longer follow ship-like paths to their targets. They now pick a hex closer to the enemy and move straight there without passing through intervening hexes. They can still be shot down by reactive strikes on reaching their target and before firing, so the balance hasn't changed, but they will no longer accidentally generate crazy long paths to their targets and will no longer be blocked by targets in between.

Missile Rebalance: Missiles have now been increased in speed to increase their utility. Nuclear Missiles are 1 speed faster than your fastest frigate, Fusion and Gravimetric are 2 faster, Anti-Matter Torpedo is 4 faster, and Quantum Torpedo is 6 faster. Missiles and fighters also now draw dotted lines toward their targets to give you an idea of where they are going.

Fighter Rebalance: Removed the Ammo Regeneration from the Fighter Bay and Heavy Fighter Bay and gave both 2 Fighters total to launch during Fleet Combat instead. Fighters now fire 2 shots returning to the ship that launched them, and heavy fighters can fire 4 before returning. On returning, they are refueled and ready to be launched again.

Dauntless Guidance: Missiles and Fighters now automatically pick new targets when their assigned targets are destroyed, so it's no longer a total waste to fire too many missiles at the same target.

Engine Disabling: Shooting a ship in the rear now has a chance of disabling its engines for up to 3 turns as long as the damage penetrates the target's shields.

Utility Improvements: The Anti-Missile Beam now has a 100% chance of destroying a missile on contact, increased from 50%. The chance-based nature of this just made it unsatisfying, even if it does only cost 15MW to fit. The Stasis Field, Tractor Beam, Transporters, and Graviton Field Emitter also all now have circular firing arcs. Previously they had extended arcs that made it difficult to use them strategically (e.g. to fly past an enemy ship and tractor it from behind).

Plasma Field: The Plasma Field area-effect weapon has been re-added as we've solved the memory issues it was causing. Its power grid usage has been increased from 25MW to 50MW as it was a bit ridiculous against larger ships when tested.

Orbital Minefield: The Orbital Minefield technology now automatically starts all enemy ships on 50% armour instead of spawning mines on the battlefield.

Score Screen:

Added a new score screen that appears at the end of every sandbox game, singleplayer mission and challenge map. It gives you points for things like number of planets colonised, technologies researched, different victory types, eliminated races, etc. There are also bonus points for things like rifts investigated and peace treaties mediated, and a speed bonus depending on how quickly you win the game and what size the galaxy is.

Singleplayer missions can now give points for each objective, and the score screen now shows how many Objective points and Bonus Objective options (from optional missions) you achieved.

Singleplayer missions now have star ratings (Bronze, Silver, and Gold) depending on the points you gained during the mission. The rating thresholds and which points are available are determined by the individual mission. The maximum achieved medal is now saved to your game data directory.

Missions / Challenge Map:

The first Challenge Map has been implemented: The Time Trap, original design by kickstarter backer Lee Newsum. This mission takes place in an alternate ending to the main game, where scientists from the United Colonies have captured the Revenant homeworld and begun searching for technologies. The excavation team accidentally triggers a planetary security system that traps the star system in an energy bubble and begins spawning regular Temporal Rifts full of Revenant ships. Cut off from the rest of the empire and most of your technology blueprints, all you have left is a selection of ship technologies, a few Ancient Ion Cannons found on the planet, and a powerful Ancient Starbase in orbit. You must use your limited resources to rebuild their fleet and fend off waves of Revenant ships that grow in intensity throughout the mission. You can research the ancient structures on the planet to improve their effectiveness, unlock powerful Revenant technologies, design new ships to try out unorthadox strategies, and maybe even capture a few Revenant ships.

Added new galaxy map options for missions for if we want to move the race's homeworld to the Revenant planet and delete its original homeworld. This is used in the first challenge map.

Added new galaxy map options to make Revenant fleets to escalate over time by a specified amount (in terms of military score). Without this option set, Revenant fleets will always be proportional to the military strength of the race being attacked.

Missions can now select to either completely overwrite the default tech trees with new ones instead of merging the new ones into the old ones. This is used in the new Challenge Map to create completely custom tech trees with all-new techs and even new names, and this will be available to modders.

Mission objectives can now be instructed to hide their progress from the player on the info dropdown. This is used in the new Challenge Map to provide a countdown to when the next Revenant Attack is going to happen without having it display a confusing Progress indicator.

The mission info on the left hand side of the screen now draws on top of whatever screen you're on, and fades out on the Conversation screen.

Game Options Improvements:

Added the ability to switch between bordered and borderless mode in the options. The device will automatically reset when you click the checkbox so there's no need to restart.

The screen resolution is now set when you launch the game for the first time, but changes to the resolution in the ini files will be preserved, so you can finally change the resolution. There is not currently a dropdown for screen resolution in the options panel, though, and if you change screen resolution after first launching the game then you'll need to edit the ini file to change to your new resolution. We're working on getting a resolution selector into the game as soon as we can.

Cut out and replaced the system that blurs behind the user interface with a much better system that now automatically catches UI elements and has far less rendering overhead. Everything is also now drawn to rendertargets before final rendering, opening up further potential for post-processing effects.

Cleaned up a load of unused game options in the ini file.

Renamed many of the game options in the ini file to make their purposes more clear (e.g. by adding PlanetScreen or GalaxyScreen before options that affect a particular screen).

Added a new bakc-end system that allows me to specify whether an update should overwrite the existing ini file with default values the first time it runs. This is neccessary to prevent crashes when we make changes to the ini file other than just adding new options, and if we want to change the default options.

Added an option slider for Voice Volume separate from Sound and Music volume.

Minor Features:

Races and technologies can now have bonuses specifically to Ground Cannon damage in fleet combat in addition to bonuses to Beam weapons. This is used in the new challenge map.

The game now keeps track of how many Temporal Rifts you investigate and how many Revenant Attacks you survive, for use in awarding bonus points or tracking during missions.

Switched the main game font from Verdana to Xolonium.

Added the ability to make the Volume sliders exponential rather than linear in the ini file.

Added GroundCannonDamagePercentage and ShipyardBuildRate as Technology Stats, so we can now make generic stacking bonuses to those as technologies. Used in the new mission.

Added models for Factory (Tier 1, 2, and 3), Research Lab (Tier 1, 2, and 3), Food Processor (Tier 1, 2, and 3), Industrial Market, Military Barracks, Reptilian City (Hatcheries), Robotic City (The Forge), Robot Fuel Factory

Added model for Support Centre (robotic)

Updated the tutorial to remove a few references to "upcoming" gameplay that is now in the game, and reflect the fact that we've entered beta.

Optimised the tech tree loading process. Previously there was a lot of error handling happening that could cause the game to slow down when initialising the game or loading a mission.

The explosion graphics have been modified to be a bit more rendering-friendly and visually appealing. They're now a bit more random, more spread out on the planet screen, and the game no longer omits explosions when there are too many already on screen as we fixed the memory issues it was causing.

Added support for races having buildings that belong to another race, so we can have a Revenant space station in the first challenge map and it'll use Revenant technology (particle beams etc).

When loading a Building, Weapon or Module that is already loaded (e.g. through mission files), the existing item in the pool is replaced instead of the game crashing.

Total overhaul of animation code and transitions all throughout the game to use a more accurate delta time system. You should now notice smoother animation and transitions on slower computers.

Overhauled the screenshake code to a more tightly controlled variant so it will no longer sometimes jerk way off-screen for a split second if you blow up a ship with a missile. Also took the opportunity to add rotation to the screen shake and extract some new screen shake options into the ini file.

Added a half-size tooltip for some smaller items

Improved the way the game fades to black and back out again when switching screens, saving, loading etc. This is now consistent across all screens and much smoother.

Individual races may now use the ModelProcessOverride.txt file to specify that their ship part models have already been pre-scaled to the correct size. This is used now for the Renegades ships as they were designed before we came up with our new auto-scaling model loader.

Bug-fixes:

Dozens of minor bugs have been fixed as a result of the Fleet Combat overhaul and the engine changeover, but they haven't all been documented. Below are those that have been documented:

Fixed a bug causing Revenant fleets to automatically attack the player if they don't find a military threat worth attacking.

Fixed a bug causing the tutorial to sometimes not reset fully if you exited during the times where you have no popup on the screen to prevent you from quitting.

Fixed a bug causing the map options to get stuck to weird defaults after you launch or load a singleplayetr mission or the tutorial. This now correctly only saves the options for your Sandbox games.

Fixed a tutorial bug causing the game to sometimes skip over the check to see if you have a colony ship if your game was running slowly enough.

Fixed a bug causing the music to get stuck on if you set the volume from full to zero inside one frame.

Fixed a Fleet Combat bug causing the Plasma Mine Layer to lay mines off to the side of your ship instead of where the firing pattern shows it should be.

Fixed a bug making Kazzir missiles invisible.

Fixed the scale of asteroids in Temporal Rift investigations

Fixed a missing United Colonies satellite model that could rarely cause a crash

Fixed a text bug in the first Kazzir mission - It said to build a Scout ship but really you select what ship to build.

Fixed a number of text mistakes in the technology files. All of the ship hull technologies were displaying the wrong amount of power grid.

Fixed a number of new bugs with the tutorial that only started happening on our test rigs after we switched to Monogame. These bugs may have affected a number of other players, causing the tutorial to get stuck at various points.

Fixed a certain tooltip staying open when you enter fleet combat.

Fixed a scrolling defect on the Research panel.

Fixed a major bug with the research panel that allowed tech trees to be held over from one game to the next, causing problems with missions like the new challenge map that have unique tech trees.

Fixed several rendering bugs with the 3D ship designer and with 2D representations of ships on the UI.

Ships now correctly re-cloak when starting a new fleet combat with a cloaking device active or ending turn inside a Cloaking Field.

Bonuses from Planet Leaders that affect Fleet Combat now correctly apply during Fleet Combat. Previously, a few bonuses applied 100 times larger than they were supposed to or didn't apply at all.

The game should no longer sometimes crash when a planet switches owners or is destroyed while the Planet Screen is open.

Fixed the game accidentally designing some ships with multiple copies of "One Per Ship" technologies.

Fixed several bugs with the totalling up and display of research points in the top right of the screen not matching the actual output of your empire.

Fixed the display of tax stats from planets sometimes not matching up with the amount of net tax being made.

Fixed a bug in the ship designer when editing a starbase designt hat was in use elsewhere in the galaxy. It previously wouldn't work out the cost to upgrade all of them correctly.

Fixed a few display bugs resulting from the font switch

Fixed the lighting graphics on the Recycling Plant, Apartment Complex, Humanoid City, Energy Market, Industrial Market etc. We'd like to give everyone a huge thank-you for waiting for this update! The patch was ready just before the holidays but we found a stubborn engine-level crash right as we intended to release it. It's taken us until now to get all the bugs resulting from that fixed and last night we completed a full test series that came back successful. As always, please let us know if you experience any problems with this update! Note: This update will make all of your old saves no longer work, and will reset your game options the first time you start up. It will also go through the first time setup on Steam when you launch it to install new dependencies. Cheers, -- Brendan, Lead Developer