The Resonance Initiative · public · first seen
As you could probably guess from the title, we are excited to announce the release of Early Access for The Resonance Initiative. We have been hard at work the past 2 months fixing bugs and making small tweaks to improve the overall experience of the game. We have also been working on implementing multiplayer for the game so you can play with your friends. This has been a large undertaking, and it is still in beta, so please report any bugs on Discord, our Steam Community, or email [email protected].
We know many users were confused on how to actually get started in the demo with the game, which wasn't helped by certain world generations that would make the gameplay loop unreasonably difficult. To help alleviate some of these issues, we adjusted the biome generation code a bit so we could guarantee grass/dirt and water biomes generate around where you spawn. This should help to remove pressure from enemies and prevent issues where you have to run potentially hundreds of chunks to find a source of water.
Speaking of enemies, those got a small rework as well. To start, the old system caused some problems where you would often times get hit seemingly out of nowhere, which made the melee ability really hard to use without taking damage. To fix this, all the enemies now lunge when attacking the player to give you the opportunity to get out of the way. Enemies will also now lunge at walls and other player buildings if they get agitated, doing extra damage.
In the demo, there were a few cases where the UI left a little to be desired. For Early Access, we worked to improve some UI elements for things like the world creation screen. It will now hide the world map by default for those who like to go in blind. We also redid the world generation settings to clean up the mess that it was before, and you can now see structures on the preview map
We also spent some time optimizing the logic for the UI, as in many cases in-game (specifically with inspecting things), the performance would drop significantly.
In the demo, there were a few issues with saving and loading games. For Early Access, we spent some time both optimizing the logic and changing how autosaves work so they don't flood your save files (there is now a limit of 3 autosaves max). Additionally, there were a handful of systems that didn't get saved properly, so loading a save resulted in a different outcome from what would happen if you just continued the game. These issues have been fixed, and loading a save should properly reload the state of the game.
The demo build had a lot of bugs. Most of them were smaller visual problems, but there were a good chunk that impeded gameplay or the overall gameplay experience. Going over every fix here would be way too wordy, though, so all the changes and bug fixes are listed below. Overall, the experience should be bug-free so you can continue to grow your factory unimpeded.
We're still a long way away from a 1.0 release and have a lot of work ahead of ourselves before we can get there. We don't want to make any concrete promises about the future since plans frequently change, but there are a few updates we plan on working on in the near future to expand the content in the game and make it more accessible.
There are a few changes that are going to be made in the coming weeks to hopefully make the game more accessible to all users. I always find it frustrating to be locked out of a game due to hardware requirements or a language barrier, so in the near future we plan to localize the game in a few languages, add controller support, and improve performance for users on lower-end hardware.
Accessibility changes are cool and all, but what about new content? Most of our focus recently has been on bugs and multiplayer. Now that those things are done, we are going to start working on more game content again. To start, the game is supposed to be focused on generating power, but it can't really do that with only one power-generating building. So to start, our focus is going to be to give meaning to the power, add more steps to getting a functioning power system working, and add more options later in the tech tree. We are also going to work on giving the player more reasons to build large production lines.
The game will always benefit from more diversity from other factory builders. One thing I have always wanted to do is add a layer system so you can build bits of your factory on top of one another. There are already systems in the game to partially handle this, but the performance impact and technical challenge for implementing this means we can't implement this quite yet.
Part of our reason for releasing into Early Access is to get feedback from the community. This is part of the reason the roadmap is so vague. We want to hear what you as a player would like to see added to the game. If you have a recommendation on things to add, please reach out via one of the methods listed at the top of the post and we will try to respond to everyone.
The demo in its current state still contains all of the bugs that were fixed below. We wanted to update the demo to fix these issues, but due to certain limitations with how the multiplayer is set up, we didn't want to also include elements from the Early Access build, as accessing multiplayer elements in the demo could lead to many unintended consequences. For these reasons, we have decided to temporarily not update the demo, but don't worry, we are working to get this resolved so these issues will be fixed with the demo soon.
Added P2P multiplayer to the game.
Reworked how the game is handled under the hood to update object states on a fixed-tick-based system (visuals will be separated to update with frame rate later).
Reworked enemy spawner, separation, and pathing systems to make them deterministic (the enemies should behave more consistently now).
You can now copy, cut, or paste recipes and filters for inserters and crafters.
Inserters now remove items from containers using round robin if the container doesn't have enough items to supply all inserters.
Changed how quick transferring out of containers works so it doesn't dump items on the floor anymore.
Changed how abilities work so there are ability slots instead of per-ability keybinds, and added a cap on ability types equipped at a time.
Added a display name field for items so items like the stalagmites all share the same name now.
Reworked how enemy attacks are handled so they now lunge at the player instead of just damaging you based on proximity.
Reworked mining animation so it no longer locks movement while the stand-up animation is playing and properly plays the initial crouch animation.
Reworked how being able to climb is calculated so it should be more accurate now.
Added diagonal climbing sprites.
Updated player belt movement logic so the player flows more smoothly around corners.
Added support for rotating colliders for objects.
Objects that don't have colliders can now be placed under players.
Added a guaranteed water patch that generates near spawn.
Changed how biome generation works to force water and dirt biomes to generate around spawn.
Updated preview map so it can now show structures.
Preview map is now hidden by default.
Cached certain values for biome generation which should speed up generation time significantly.
Added a reset button to world generation settings.
Added a location-based notification system.
Added notifications for when an item is destroyed by enemies.
Added a master volume slider in the audio settings.
Added a UI scale setting that can be used to change how the UI scales to make it bigger or smaller (this setting has some quirks, so if a situation makes something unreachable because of this setting's value, let me know and I will release a hotfix as soon as I can).
Added a scroll bar to the controls page in settings.
Increased scroll speed of controls in settings.
Added settings toggles for FPS, UPS, and Current Tick.
Added an option to rebind the key that disables the HUD.
Added settings options to the gameplay menu to toggle the HUD, and allow HUD toggling.
Improved visuals for new game settings.
Changed visuals for HP bar and mining bar slightly.
Reworked console visuals (it is now used for multiplayer chat).
Changed how autosaves work so it will only keep a max of 3 autosaves at a time instead of 1 autosave per save.
Added rotated variations for modules in equipment grid.
Added powered versions for modules in equipment grid.
You can now shift-click to move modules from the equipment grid back to the inventory.
Redrew the moss sprites (again).
Redrew turret top so it looks closer to the correct perspective when rotating.
Redrew oil well to give it a more proper sprite.
Added normal maps for the following:
Bushes (large & small)
Grass
Walls
Turret
Oil well
Player Corpse
Added various colliders to buildings that were missing them:
Boiler
Blue mushroom
Sine wave generator
Tile now shows up on the map & mini map.
Added ability for SFX to be played on certain animation frames.
Reworked how audio was handled so the setting values map better to the volume heard. (The game can also get louder than what it was previously capped at.)
Added SFX for the following:
Research building active
Repair building
Dash
Teleport (start & end)
Add & remove module from slot
Player hit
Player death
Oil crawler hit
Oil crawler movement
Fixed/added fabricator
Added boiler drop SFX
Added new track for when the player is in combat.
Reduced lookup times for certain object data such as sprites, object names, and object components. (Should vastly improve UI performance and object spawning logic.)
Reworked component system so data that is per object instead of per entity is not stored inside the component and instead cached elsewhere (should drastically reduce memory usage in certain cases).
Optimized logic for calculating which cells are fluids.
Optimized logic for calculating flow field enemies use for pathing.
Optimized the logic for enemy pathing to goal and returning to bases.
Optimized building sound calculations (should remove periodic frame drops when the system updates).
Improved save data load time significantly (on any older save it will still lag the first time you go to load them as it generates the new save.meta file).
Reworked how the crafter UI updates so it only updates when there is a change instead of every frame.
Fixed an issue where crafters could sometimes finish a craft if they were mid-craft when the recipe changed.
Fixed an issue where items would sometimes load on the wrong side of belts when loading a save.
Fixed a bug where if the last module removed was an equipment module it would not remove that ability.
Fixed an issue with the crafting queue where it wouldn't refund the exact items used for the craft if it was cancelled.
Fixed an issue where sine wave generators would not create their fluid containers properly.
Fixed an issue where crafters making fluids could not properly identify output slots.
Fixed an issue with the oil well collider being twice as big as it should be.
Fixed an issue where items could not be dropped if they could be used to repair buildings.
Fixed a bug where when holding a stack of items from a container then closing the inventory, the stack would remain in the container (they are now added to your inventory or dropped on the ground).
Fixed an issue where crafts wouldn't properly be cancelled if it was making more than 1 of an item.
Fixed an issue where two inserters would round robin if one had a full output, it could block the other from working.
Fixed an issue where player crafting would not work if the UI was disabled.
Fixed an issue where quick transferring items out of containers could cause issues.
Fixed an issue with enemy save data that would result in inconsistent behavior with the enemies or cause them to despawn.
Fixed a bug where enemies were attacking twice as fast as they were supposed to.
Fixed an issue with the enemy attack system where it was running 2 loops, 1 for player and 1 for buildings, causing various issues.
Fixed an issue where enemy groups would get stuck on damage-immune objects.
Fixed an issue where certain damage sources would not update HP bars.
Fixed an issue where the enemy vision system threw errors on the main menu.
Fixed a bug where the player could be damaged while in the start sequence or loading screen.
Fixed an issue where enemy groups would get stuck on damage-immune objects.
Fixed a visual issue with biomes in certain cells where more than 2 biomes meet.
Fixed biome colliders for certain tiles where more than 2 biomes meet.
Fixed an issue where wired cells were going onto water (still happens in some cases as a result of another bug).
Fixed an issue with cliff collision when generating over liquids.
Fixed an issue with sub-biome blending when generating over/near other biomes.
Fixed a bug where world generation would sometimes try to add new structures for chunks that had already been generated when loading a save.
Fixed an issue where if biome generation was taking longer than 4 frames it would recalculate that biome and never complete the original call (causing a memory leak and hurting biome generation performance).
Fixed an issue where certain parts of a chunk's mesh weren't unloaded when the rest of the chunk was.
Fixed an issue where the blue mushroom didn't have collision.
Fixed an issue with the biome lights that forced them to be convex and caused lights to pop in when exploring.
Fixed an issue where the Continue button would show up even if there were no saves for you to load.
Fixed an issue where the inspected entity icon would get warped or stretched in some cases.
Fixed an issue where notifications for items being added to your inventory were moving when the camera was zoomed.
Fixed an issue where the limit for notifications was allowing a burst of notifications through (they should be more evenly spaced now).
Fixed an issue where minimap zoom in was set to rebind camera zoom in the settings.
Fixed an issue where all inputs didn't have spaces between the words.
Fixed an issue where the HP bar and mining bar would show up while the tech tree was open.
Fixed a handful of issues where the UI scale slider would cause UI to break.
Fixed an issue where preview entities would sometimes get destroyed before placement mode was exited.
Fixed an issue where the old power tile sprite was showing in the tech tree.
Fixed an issue where the crafter UI was updating way more often than it should be (was updating every frame, now only updates when there is a change).
Fixed an issue with the player climb prompt that would lag the game when the player was on a cliff.
Fixed an issue where closing the pause menu when trying to quit or save the game would break everything (and sometimes crash the game).
Fixed an issue where the sliders that displayed a value like MAX or similar would return a value of float.max instead of the max value of the slider.
Fixed an issue where typing in the console inputs were not properly disabled.
Fixed an issue with the controls list where mousing over certain objects would update every frame, causing performance to drop.
Fixed an issue where removing an entity while it was being inspected would leave the UI in a half-broken state.
Fixed an issue where tooltips were not hidden when tabbing out of the game.
Fixed an issue with the furnace ramp-up animation where the normal map wasn't set.
Fixed an issue with lava border sprites where they were too opaque at the bottom.
Fixed an issue with the normal maps on the fabricator.
Fixed an issue with the normal maps on the pipes.
Fixed an issue where the right and left sprites for the teleport module had incorrect cable placements.
Fixed an issue where SFX were not paused when entering the pause menu.
Fixed an issue where building SFX were not paused when pausing the game.
Fixed an issue where normal maps would make shadows very bright when viewed at certain angles for the following sprites:
Wave Generator
Stalagmites (all versions)
Pipes
Added missing data to enemy & spawner save state so when loading a save enemies will be in the same state they were when the game was saved.
Fixed a couple of null references thrown in the first update loop after loading a save.
Fixed an issue where the Continue button would show up even if there were no saves for you to load.
Fixed memory leaks in power handling code for getting and setting powered cells.
Fixed a memory leak that would appear when non-square colliders were destroyed.
Fixed a memory leak that would occur when power network history was updated.
Fixed a memory leak where the container's item list was not disposed when quitting the game.
Fixed a memory leak where item and recipe types for crafter were not disposed when quitting the game.
| Depot | New manifest | Previous manifest |
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| 4658011 | 8567031635916854436 | — |
| 4658012 | 8546974472263864406 | — |