Major Update - 5 Months in Early Access!

Ahoy again folks!

This week marks 5 Months in Early Access! I couldn't be happier with how things are progressing.

This Major Update focused on improving the project itself from a development standpoint, but a good few improvements, and a bunch of bug fixes are also releasing today.

Major Project Refactor

The last month has been crazy with heat here making it difficult sometimes to focus on heavy implementation tasks, but its given me time to do something that I've wanted for a long time!

The changes done included a large audit and analysis of the project. I won't go into the numbers but there was a huge impact on the project itself that required quite a bit of dredging work! More info on this for those interested is on the #dev-updates channel on the discord.

The refactor was a success & the project is much nicer to work on as a result, with an impact being mostly on ease of use, and speed of upcoming development.

Most of what was done here should be completely invisible to the player with the exception of some performance improvements and stability. I'm hoping some of the work done has eliminated some of the more annoying memory issues that have been reported also.

Steam Integrations

Steam Input integration (Experimental) So this is a huge one. I'm hoping that it'll be nice and stable over the next few updates. There are a few guideline items from steam that I'm missing but I plan on putting those in right away and hopefully we'll have long needed / requested support for gamepads and the like soon. I know some folks were using 3rd party items for this in the past so this should make your lives a lot easier! For those of you on Steam Deck - more improvements are coming on that end as well. I hope to have the Steam Deck implementation working a lot better over the coming Major updates.

Steam Rich Presence will keep your statuses updated with what you're doing. More changes are planned on that for the future but its in a decent state now.

Steam Timeline integration is now available - I know some of you were looking forward to this one :) All major items are now assigned a timeline event.

UI Improvements

Some small improvements to the UI have been made! A lot of scaffolding and prep work for some major screens has been started. Overall - most of what was done was in preparation for a major UI pass later this coming month.

Some of the upcoming items include a Ship details (Glossary) screen, and a Faction Summary with customisation options, buildings and their statuses, wealth, mayor details, etc.

Bug Fixes

A tremendous amount of bugs were fixed this patch - some huge issues, and some of those more annoying items.

A huge amount of reports have come in also, so thank you very much to all sending bug reports & having the patience for me to fix them.

A big thanks to folks as well who jump in and send campaign files and the like. I know that's an annoyance and I really appreciate it. 99% of the time if I can see an error or issue in my development environment, I can fix it. The problem with such a huge project & these gigantic campaigns that can span weeks is that sometimes the issues reported are very hard to recreate. So getting these files sent on is a huge help :) Thank you.

System Reworks

Some major backbone systems in RoP have been improved. Some reworking has been needed in some of them, but for the most part, players should notice an improvement in stability across all stages of gameplay.

This was a huge undertaking and went parallel to the refactor above - most of the items like I mentioned, are invisible changes in terms of gameplay. But in terms of development - I can go full sail ahead on some of the more major items without having to worry about some aspects of the project that made these tasks very technically challenging.

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

New

• Steam Timeline integration

• Steam Rich Presence integration

• Steam Input integration *Experimental!

• Scaffolding for the new "Ship Details" (Glossary) screen on the Main Menu. [Locked until completion in the next Regular Update]

• Ships in Tow are now displayed in the Fleet Summary View

• Scaffolding for Building In Progress Summary / Faction Island Summary.

• Faction influence range / overlays. [Locked until completion in the next 2 Regular Updates]

• Added Treasure Maps as a chance-reward for sink missions or fleet battles.

• A massive audit / refactor of the project has been done to assist in future development & speed up the engine a bit.

• Timescale changes and Day iterations were reworked a bit to improve stability and reliability.

Fixes

• Fixed major issue when players hit RTS mode too early during Tutorial 2 it would lock up forcing player to restart the level.

• Fixed some overlapping UI cases.

• Fixed issue where finding / being given treasure maps would cause double-entries in the captains log.

• Fixed issue where Objectives were showing during Visits.

• Fixed issue where visits would position the player camera in a bad offset position instead of centered on the island.

• Fixed issue with State transitions for the Visit feature.

• Fixed issue with Translations not working on the Main Menu

• Fixed up some overflowing text in the Bottom Bar and Island screen menu.

• Fixed some LOD popping issues at lower bias scales.

• Fixed issue where capturing a settlement would grant a free Governors Mansion.

• Potentially fixed issue with some strange UI issues during alt-tabbing. *I was unable to repro this issue but put in some safety around it.

• Fixed issue where ship limits were off by one - allowing brawler to claim 6 ships in certain situations (one other occurrence caught also)

• Fixed issue where ships would sometimes spawn underground on the campaign map and hopefully some pathing issues.

• Fixed an error happening occasionally on initialisation of a battle map related to objective lists.

• Fixed statistic gathering error caused when the application is unloading unexpectedly.

• Fixed issue where sometimes tooltips would remain after screens were closed.

• Fixed issue where duplicate history items would be added when capturing an island.

• Fixed off-by-one error with claimable ships.

• Fixed incorrect number of ship calc for hovered item status *tricky one, might have a few more cases where it is incorrect.

• Fixed issue with Visited Island being sometimes the wrong date.

• Fixed issue with Manage Settlement sometimes not giving the correct completion date or charging the right amount of gold for upgrades.

• Fixed issue where some fleets would have 0 crew when entering a battle.

• Fixed issue where passive income upgrades would not increase wealth of a settlement.

Changes

• The event system across the whole project has been improved.

• Some major events have been completely reworked & migrated to a new, more reliable system.

• Improved some spawning logic.

• Disabled Achievements during Tutorial (Except for the Complete Tutorial achievement)

• Added new Close button to Diplomatic Overview

• Moving the camera into the water whilst sailing will no longer cause it to go towards the ship center.

Thank you

Huge thank you to everyone helping providing feedback & reporting issues on the Discord and Steam Forums. An incredible amount has arrived over the past month and my upcoming plans have been updated and improved as a result.

We've almost hit 500 reviews also - I can't express how incredible this is. One of the best ways to support the ongoing development is by providing a review so thank you very very much to those of you that have done so. I really appreciate it.

The latest sales and other major pirate games have definitely grown interest in RoP also. Alot of great feedback & ideas have been pouring in from people that have been enjoying the other games. I've always wanted RoP to remain quite unique in its play style and features, but its been very helpful to see what folks are enjoying about other games, and what can be improved on RoP.

Events!

Last month I attended Run for the Border - a fantastic Irish game development event. Its great to see so much emerging talent in Ireland, a lot of interesting projects to look forward to.

In the coming months I'll be headed to Nexus! Hope to see some of ye there :)

Here is the link to the discord where most tracking / communication is happening:

https://discord.gg/Ws9fjmHP5U

Until next time,

John