Hello generals! June was awesome and I made a ton of progress on the alpha (uploaded 0.1.12, 0.1.13, 0.1.14 and 0.1.15 a few days ago).
The alpha playtest also expanded to a lot more testers in the Discord server, TLG hit 140.000 wishlists on Steam, and some of the Instagram videos finally starting to go a little viral! (follow there if you haven't yet!) I also published some videos showing the progress on the different alpha versions:
And here are a lot of images from the Alpha, captured during the month (by me and by alpha testers):
Here are most of the changes in the alpha during June (probably forgetting a bunch of stuff that I didn't write down):
Brutal improvements on pathfinding. Way better performance and very few path finding failures.
Added ability to convert factories to produce a different resource or unit. Improved the factory panels to show the type of factory and show retooling progress too.
Made new strategic orders create their entire wanted hierarchy, allowing any newly produced units (or units no longer needed by another company) to join them.
Now you can select an existing company and give it hand-drawn strategic orders directly.
Helicopters now join and follow attack heli orders properly, display their current destination and jump between destinations faster and at higher speeds.
Added zoom levels to first/third person cameras and increased them in first person to facilitate aiming.
Made powerful explosions near a tank destroy them too. They were pretty much invulnerable except for direct hits. Later those explosions will disable different parts instead of fully destroying a tank.
Increased player jets spawn rate and reduced the delay before they start bombing marked targets/areas.
Made a script to take pictures of all the units in the game automatically, so I can always have up to date and consistent images of all the units available without having to screenshot them, crop them, photoshop them, etc.
Now hovering over a company shows a line to the strategic order they are assigned to.
Improved thickness of paths and relationship lines in the distance so they are easier to see. Improved dashed lines intervals so they are also visible far away too.
Improved weight distribution and center of mass in some vehicles to prevent them from flipping over too easily.
Improved factory placement so the door where vehicles come out is at/near ground level.
Fixed boarding vehicles where soldiers would sometimes go around it and fail to board.
Fixed vehicles shaking due to exaggerated friction calculations and gravity compensations.
Fixed jet missiles overshooting their targets by making them shoot earlier and increasing missile steering force.
I fixed the game building process on Mac so the alpha updates can include MacOS again.
I debugged and fixed a MipMap streaming problem that was causing a lot of textures to look horribly low resolution. Also fixed an issue when changing between graphics qualities while playing the game, which was causing all textures to become very low quality (using the lowest mip map).
I debugged the LOD crossfade flickering issue and reported it in more detail to the developer of the Latios Frameork and he found the bug in the framework that was causing it! He is awesome!
TLG's music composer Francesco Marrone is now composing another 4 new songs for the game! Wohooo!
We made a lot of progress on the translations, with 56% approved and another 31% awaiting review. Let me know if you want to help and any of these are your native language: Afrikaans, Arabic, Bangla, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalán, Filipino, Greek, Hungarian, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Serbian, Portuguese.
Reduced RAM usage caused by some textures being marked as Read/Write when they shouldn't have.
Added a new fighter jet, the FJ-305!
Made units move to the closest base determined by the “Setup base” strategic orders.
Improved vehicles aiming to be more responsive and precise.
Improved units exiting factories without getting stuck.
Improved some more job and system dependencies, eliminating some gaps between jobs, preventing cpu spikes and improving utilization across all CPU cores.
Improved explosions and dust remaining afterwards, applying higher speeds and drag.
Improved safety checks when artillery shoots rockets/missiles close to obstacles to avoid accidental impacts destroying the launcher and other nearby units.
Improved MRS142 joints and motors to minimize the chances of flipping over.
Optimized most textures and meshes making them read only, added streaming mip maps to a lot more textures, reducing bandwidth and VRAM usage on the GPU.
Debugged and fixed a UI issue caused by some old DLSS upscaling preferences saving and support detection issue, which was messing up newer versions of the game.
Fixed building the game on Linux so Alpha is available on all 3 platforms again (Windows, MacOS and Linux).
Fixed “Bomb target” order bombing only the edge of the target circle instead of inside too.
Now artillery attack random strategic “bomb target” and “bomb area” actions and not only
Made artillery units not try to aim when they are still leaving the factory.
Added smaller factory as buildable too
Fixed artillery line of sight calculations that were sometimes shooting directly at nearby buildings destroying themselves and everything around them.
Added ramps for factories so vehicles can exit them nicely when the factory door is not level with the ground.
Improved AA target locking and line of sight and safety calculations depending on the type of projectile.
Made transitions between third person and first person cameras smooth, including field of view changes.
Improved soldiers animations so that running diagonally is almost as fast as running forward.
Fixed a broken camera frame when taking control of a unit.
Removed unit indicators when in first person.
Started adding some basic target indicators in first/third person for guided weapons. Soon you will be able to rotate between those targets and guided missiles will track the selected one.
Made cockpit screens light up at night for FJ305.
Fixed some collision detection issues causing vehicles to suddenly stop or jump when hitting terrain triangles at strange angles.
PC controlled players now place the same strategic air bomb target orders on enemy cities as the player does, and planes can navigate and shoot at those.
Jets will also lock targets on other ground units and other planes, chase them and shoot at them when possible, creating dogfights.
Now jets don’t return to base immediately after shooting at a target once. They keep attacking targets (units or strategic orders) until they hit their low fuel threshold to return to base.
Displaying all selectable targets for currently selected weapon when in direct control mode using guided missiles. Currently selected target shows in yellow while the other ones show in gray.
Added ability to switch between targets with arrow keys.
Reduced jet speed A LOT, to the subsonic speeds actually used by fighter jets most of the time. Somehow in all the aerodynamic changes I made they ended up flying way too fast. Reduced missiles speeds too.
Prepared 2 FPV drone models and an RC controller model for adding FPV drones and pilots soon(ish)
Re-implemented controls remapping in the new settings menu.
Solved conflicts between keyboard and H.O.T.A.S. throttle stick.
Made throttle and pitch controls invertible.
Improved breakable collisions calculations.
Added quadratic air drag for fast objects to slow them down (linear and angular)
Fixed some small objects going at insane speeds
Added some more breakable objects.
Stabilized mounted weapons for better aiming while moving.
Fixed turrets getting stuck forever in some newly produced units.
Smoothed vehicles engine torque and braking so vehicles don’t shake when transitioning between acceleration and suddenly braking.
Updated languages with all the newly approved translations.