45 Regular Update, Overhaul of Spawn System, Save System Changes, QOL and Fixes

Ahoy Mateys!

I returned from TwitchCon earlier this week and after a fantastic break away from RoP, I was eager to get stuck back in! Just before the convention - I had began a giant rework of the Spawning system. This has been a potential problem area since before Early Access and had I decided a rework was due.

Spawn System Overhaul

Since before the Early Access release, there has been multiple entry points to the battle maps that have caused some heartache at times. I've now standardized this section of the code base and improved it in every way. No more race conditions or annoying timing problems - a much simpler and easier to modify / maintain system is now in place.

Because of this rework, we now have access to tackle some of the more exciting Roadmap items, as well as improving what was in place, and squishing many issues in the process.

Shipless Battles and inland ground fights are now possible - these are mentioned in the Roadmap and something that I wanted to include for a while. Defending your islands against enemy assaults and much more limited engagements in-land without the support of your fleet will bring a new dynamic to some of the battles along with more variety and exploration possibilities.

Save System enhancements & QOL

I've heard you folks! As time goes on, your save folders are getting huge! The deletion process is tedious & the amount of save games generated are causing ye problems.

Auto-Save is now a togglable feature in General Options.

Enabled by default, you can now toggle off the auto-save feature. Every campaign has 4 slots that the game will auto-save into. 4 files per campaign. You can now turn that feature off if you'd rather use Quick Saves, or create your own saves.

Save Games are now overridden if named the same.

If you try to save a game with the same name that you've previously used, you'll receive a prompt stating that the save file already exists and asking if you'd like to overwrite it.

Delete All From Campaign

This addition to the Load Game screen will allow you to delete all save games from an entire campaign. You may notice some Tutorial campaigns showing up in the Load Game screen also but this is a legacy issue that I'll handle next patch.

Overall very happy with these changes and looking forward to your feedback on them.

Battle Intros & Stability

Depending on the type of battle, and the size of your fleet, you'll now get different introductions to the battle. This was a direct result of the above improvements to Spawning - an overview/intro sequence was required so this is what we have now. Before, the intro to each battle was identical regardless of battle type / size of fleet. There's been some great ideas shared with me around this over the past few days and I'm looking forward to improving it over the coming weeks.

Performance Improvements

Render improvements and some optimizations should show some gains during Battles. Most of these changes will be hard to feel until you're engaging in larger scale battles. I have some more ideas on optimizing late-game fleet and island battles that I plan on implementing over the summer.

Manage Settlement

The Construction tab has received some more attention - I was able to design the systems that I'll be implementing over the coming weeks! I'm hoping to have this function ready for the Major Update for June.

Here' a full list of the items completed since the last Major Update.

New

• Holding Shift will now allow you to increase the game speed by 0.5 each time. Without Shift, its 0.1.

• Intros for battles are now different depending on what type of battle you'll play. Fleet overview, single ship previews and Island displays.

• Added AutoSave enabled flag to prevent auto-saves from being generated. This is a setting under General - Autosaves are enabled by default.

• Allowed overwriting of Save Games. Now you'll get a prompt asking if you wish to overwrite games with the same name for the current campaign.

• Added new alternative hotkey for increasing/decreasing battle time - Equals / Minus (For folks without Numpads or Keanu-mode keyboards)

Fixes

• Fixed issue with overflowing text when upgrades had small floating point inaccuracies.

• Fixed issue where sometimes ships would become invincible when upgrades reduce the damage dealt by cannonballs, and the difficulty option for reduced surrendered ship damage is enabled.

• Fixed issue where sometimes your ships would spawn with some enemy ships during island invasions.

• Fixed issue with Visit Mode being unleavable with new spawn sequences.

• Fixed pathing issues with The Windless Haven sometimes allowing units to spawn as swimmers instead of ground troops.

• Fixed issue with Telescope activation during End battle screen causing locks.

• Fixed issue with Cursor states not fully resetting in Menus.

• Fixed spawning/initialising issue in Invasion Tutorial

• Fixed issue where player spawn points would sometimes target incorrect enemy positions.

Changes

• Redone the entire spawn mechanism and allowed for ship-less battles and other upcoming Roadmap items.

• Lowered the maximum game speed increase to 3x in battles due to reported Physics issues.

• Improved some Tutorial aspects, items & spawns.

• Windmills are now destroyable.

Thank you!

This patch required quite a bit of testing, so thank you for everyone trying the game on the Test Branch & keeping me posted with issues. I really appreciate the time and effort.

Here is the link to the discord where most tracking / communication is happening: https://discord.gg/Ws9fjmHP5U

See ye in about a week!,

John