New one:
http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Stars_Beyond_Reach_Beta_Phase_2_Release_Notes#Version_0.872Lots of general fixes in here, and then the tech tree looks really different again. It's now a lot easier to figure out how to make your cities bigger, and how to explore beyond your tiny early area. Kind of important stuff! Anyway, figuring out the organization of that to make it more implicitly obvious is something I prefer to having to tutorialize that bit, so hopefully now it will be pretty quickly obvious to new folks. Before it was quite obscure, no question.
The new flow for letting you get into attack mode, which was suggested by Shrugging Khan, is in and is pretty darn awesome.
Litter-based crime death spirals should be a thing of the past, at least in the normal cases. Destroying a couple of dumps that previously would have led to thousands of deaths only led to a few hundred in the test cases I have now.
Races won't all be going gonzo in terms of joining up in incidents so much.
Auto-scouting now fully functions again, which is really nice obviously.
And the text doesn't go crazy on the diseases window anymore, either.
Work continues on the stuff to make buildings clearer and cleaner, and to do the race-specific roads. It's now set up to the point that it's pretty much an artist-only thing and doesn't require more code on my part. Overall this has also shaved 400+ MB off of the ram usage of the game without having to do any actual visual changes or extra compression, and it loads up a bit faster at first run, too.
There's other stuff that I wish was already done, but hopefully quite soon. There has been progress on the design front there, but I still have to figure out the rest on that and then we need to get it implemented between Keith and I. I'm bouncing between feeling optimistic and like I want to kill myself. I just have to get over this current hurdle to the point where I can then focus on GUI polish, clarity, tooltips, tutorials, balance, and testing. Once I'm to that stage of working on things I'll be able to really relax a lot. We're getting there, but the fact that it's now the 4th of June and we are not there yet bothers me immensely. All things in time, and that's probably TMI -- bad marketing at the very least -- but I just needed a moment to vent.
Cheers guys, and again thanks for all your help! This is shaping up amazingly better thanks to you than it would have.
UPDATE: http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Stars_Beyond_Reach_Beta_Phase_2_Release_Notes#Version_0.873This one has a fix for scouting not working last time unless you had interior ballistics unlocked, and it also has the second of four atmospheric tracks from Pablo. Overall there will be a total of four atmospheric tracks and four suites, so that's some nice symmetry.
