0.9.6 🔥 Combat system, gameplay, engine, graphics, and performance improvements

Hello everyone!

While the Steam strategy festival was underway, featuring Oasis Mission, I was hard at work developing this major update!

It consists of three parts:

• Combat system improvements
• General gameplay improvements
• Engine, graphics, and performance enhancements

I apologize for not being able to respond to everyone in the discussions yet. I really wanted to release this patch, as it significantly improves the game's feel, especially in combat. ❤️

Combat System

Ship Control

• Added missile range display.
• Holding the right mouse button allows you to set the ship's desired rotation, displaying the missile range if applicable.
• Ships now automatically turn toward their target to increase missile hit chances.

Projectile Improvements

• Added smoke effects for projectiles.
• Projectiles will now fire if an enemy is within the damage area.
• New destruction animation for buildings.
• New destruction animation for ships.

New animation of projectiles

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New destruction animation

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Other Combat System Enhancements

• Increased the number of enemy waves by 20% and accelerated the arrival of initial waves. In existing games, previously generated waves (those shown in the timeline at the top) will retain the old timer, while new waves will generate faster.
• Clicking on an enemy ship makes your ship turn toward and attack it.
• Clicking on a friendly ship orders it to be repaired (if a repair module is available).
• Clicking on a friendly structure orders it to be repaired (if a repair module is available).

General Gameplay Improvements

Adaptive Events

Now, events depend on the state of your colony. Only events that impact the colony’s economy will occur. Additionally, the cost of a positive resolution now depends on the event's economic impact.

Other Gameplay Enhancements

• Fixed Mouse Pan getting stuck after interacting with a ship.
• Improved sound design for scene objects.
• Enhanced ship engine animations and sounds.
• A blackout now pauses ship activity without resetting all tasks. The ship resumes operations once protection is restored.
• Fixed incorrect ship destruction during resource gathering or construction.
• Proper destruction of residences—now engineers CORRECTLY (haha) die and STOP WORKING AFTER DEATH (haha) in factories.

Engine Improvements

Rendering Speed and Performance Boosts

• Reduced freezes by 90%.
• Improved rendering responsiveness.
• Reduced rendering latency.
• Smoother animations.
• Eliminated freezes when selecting a building location.
• Added LODs for terrain, reducing polygon count when zooming out or rendering shadows outside the main field of view.
• Replaced the landscape shader with a more universal projection shader, supporting more decorative variations in the future.
• Increased GPU performance.
• Fixed various rendering artifacts.
• Improved terrain loading, modification, and rendering performance.
• Enhanced shadow rendering quality by increasing the VRAM buffer size.
• Fixed incorrect terrain deformations at landscape chunk junctions.
• Landscape collision calculations are now 15 times faster.

Instance Scene Composer

• Enabled multithreading for the 3D scene instance composer.
• Optimized and accelerated the instance composer.

I hope you enjoy the update and encounter minimal bugs! Either way, I’ll be actively monitoring feedback and promptly fixing any issues, as well as reviewing the errors you reported this week.

Thank you all so much for your support! ❤️