Release notes:
http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=The_Last_Federation_Alpha_Release_Notes#Alpha_Version_.819Restart steam to force a quicker update if you like.
This is an extremely exciting version for me. Lots of little things are fixed (and by little, I mean bugs -- so some of them are pretty darn important actually, but they are not marquee features that anyone other than current testers would care about). But in terms of the big new stuff:
1. The entire way you interact with the solar map is different. No more driving around your little ship, trying to keep it in the viewport, etc. Man that was awkward. Less so when you couldn't pan, but now it was just really very awkward. It was a glorified cursor anyhow, and from the very start of the alpha some folks have been confused by that. The new method is a lot lot simpler to understand, no longer fiddly to move around with, and much quicker to interact with the map with. Win all around.
2. The escape pods that you've been collecting with the pilots in them now have an actual purpose. Same as advertised yesterday, although Keith also came up with the cool idea that some of them will volunteer to be goons for you automatically, sometimes. This really adds another level to battles, I feel like, because of all the reasons I listed in .817's release notes. Now that feature is actually complete, anyhow.
3. The solar map has a visual calendar now! This was an awesome suggestion from zharmad earlier this week, and when I gave Blue (our artist) the specs for the tiny amount of space it had to fit in, and the fact that it had to represent months, days, and the seasons, I didn't know how she was going to manage that. I suggested something that would have worked kind of okay, but she took that and really made it look stellar with her usual flair (she's done the entirety of the interface for the game, and all the icons, etc).
4. The dispatch missions now work completely differently from an interface standpoint! You're doing the exact same thing as before, but it no longer puts you in a text-only screen, it no longer FORCES the super-fast-forward on you, and it lets you see all of the solar map in exactly the fashion you would otherwise normally see it. You can pause and fast forward and super-fast-forward at will. More of the dispatch mission types also save your progress when you cancel them, too (and the ability to cancel is now vastly more obvious, too). In general this interface is just a breath of fresh air (if I do say so, I designed this one), rather than feeling cooped up in a DOS prompt on speed.
5. Keith has put in some improvements that should help with the ship movement lines not reaching your cursor. It's not perfect, and it may have some new funkiness. But in our testing it seems to do pretty well in the main. So hopefully that makes it feel more natural for folks. If not, that's something that will have to wait until later in next week, I think, as there are more critical things to address like tutorials, larger balance, the bug list, etc. And this weekend I aim to get things feature complete, which is only a priority because that then lets us (mostly) stop introducing new bugs quite as much, and just go into polish mode. That will mark the start of beta, rather than alpha, and my goal for that is Monday. It's going to be a long weekend...
Caveats (Same as last time):1. All of the Operational abilities are still having their ships slaved to your attacks, and I don't intend for that to remain the case.
2. If you are running into specific mission types that are un-fun slow in the new combat model, then please send us saves. I tested (for instance) dropping off spacefaring tech, and it was a tense 60-second excursion or so.
Enjoy!
