We just pushed a small patch to 18.02.04 which fixes a critical bug that caused the game to crash upon loading and selecting a dwarf. Sorry about that!

We just pushed a small patch to 18.02.04 which fixes a critical bug that caused the game to crash upon loading and selecting a dwarf. Sorry about that!

Hi everybody. I (Matt) just got back from vacation and uploaded some recent changes we made to Steam and itch.io. The new changes fix some critical bugs, and address some usability problems. While I was away, we also started discussing some of the next major steps we will be taking, and new features we want to tackle.

 
We’ve also been experimenting with a couple of new features. One is mine-carts. Dwarves will be able to place minecart tracks, and will automatically ride mine carts along the tracks for a speed boost.

 



The second is equippable dwarf items. At the moment, dwarves are not able to swap out their armor, tools or weapons for other items. We’d like to make it possible to craft and equip certain items. Right now we’re in the early design phases of this feature, and are trying to determine the right amount of complexity that we’re willing to allow. One of our core concerns with this feature is how many new art assets it may require…


Mod support is coming. We’ve been working on a system which can override most of our game assets with modder-supplied ones. It’s coming along and should be available soon. After we’ve completed the mod system, we will be integrating Steam Workshop into it.



We’re also creating a demo version of the game which disables some of the core features. The demo is currently under review by Valve and we expect it to be on the store page soon.

• Fixed common crash that occurred sometimes while building blocks or floors due to race condition introduced in the last update.
• Fixed rare crash while attacking creatures in a trade envoy.
• Fixed common crash caused by opening up employee info and then deselecting a creature.
• Fix serialization issues with Expedition class that were sometimes causing crashes when the game was loaded from a save containing a trade envoy.
• Fix dwarf task loop / freeze caused by cancelling dwarf craft task while he is crafting.
• Fix dwarves shooting up in the air while crafting due to bug in the way their velocity was calculated.
• Correctly calculate bed bounding boxes.
• Fix subtle bug in dwarf priority ordering which was preventing dwarfs from always picking the highest priority tasks.
• Make dwarves prefer to do their own crafting tasks rather than assisting others.
• Lazily spawn cave creatures/plants when they are discovered rather than spawning them at the beginning of the game and merely unhiding them when they are discovered. While fog of war is enabled this should improve memory usage and performance, and should reduce the size of save files.
• Fix bug that was causing caves to spawn in bedrock, exposing undefined voxels underneath.
• Fix bug that was causing wheat to spawn inside dirt.
• Fix the birdsplosion issue by having creatures migrate in and out of the play area if there are too many/few of them.
• Fix some of the game’s sprites being inverted left to right.
• Remove “faults”, “erosion” and “rainfall” from non-debug world generator screen as they are confusing to the player and don’t really provide useful information.
• Minor aesthetic/usability changes to some GUI elements.
• Move employee task filter to employee info widget rather than being its own tab.
• Allow player to switch between selected employees by pushing arrow buttons on top of employee info widget.
• Fix aspect ratio of saved game screenshots.
• Sort save games by date.
• Prevent non-intelligent creatures from gathering meat/bones/corpses of dead dwarves.
• Herbivores no longer randomly attack doors.
• Display game version string on landing page in bottom right corner.
• Quieter native tantrum sound while trading.
• Do not draw small grass sprites when they are above the slice plane (this was sometimes obscuring dwarves underground).

Hi everybody. I (Matt) just got back from vacation and uploaded some recent changes we made to Steam and itch.io. The new changes fix some critical bugs, and address some usability problems. While I was away, we also started discussing some of the next major steps we will be taking, and new features we want to tackle.

 
We’ve also been experimenting with a couple of new features. One is mine-carts. Dwarves will be able to place minecart tracks, and will automatically ride mine carts along the tracks for a speed boost.

 



The second is equippable dwarf items. At the moment, dwarves are not able to swap out their armor, tools or weapons for other items. We’d like to make it possible to craft and equip certain items. Right now we’re in the early design phases of this feature, and are trying to determine the right amount of complexity that we’re willing to allow. One of our core concerns with this feature is how many new art assets it may require…


Mod support is coming. We’ve been working on a system which can override most of our game assets with modder-supplied ones. It’s coming along and should be available soon. After we’ve completed the mod system, we will be integrating Steam Workshop into it.



We’re also creating a demo version of the game which disables some of the core features. The demo is currently under review by Valve and we expect it to be on the store page soon.

• Fixed common crash that occurred sometimes while building blocks or floors due to race condition introduced in the last update.
• Fixed rare crash while attacking creatures in a trade envoy.
• Fixed common crash caused by opening up employee info and then deselecting a creature.
• Fix serialization issues with Expedition class that were sometimes causing crashes when the game was loaded from a save containing a trade envoy.
• Fix dwarf task loop / freeze caused by cancelling dwarf craft task while he is crafting.
• Fix dwarves shooting up in the air while crafting due to bug in the way their velocity was calculated.
• Correctly calculate bed bounding boxes.
• Fix subtle bug in dwarf priority ordering which was preventing dwarfs from always picking the highest priority tasks.
• Make dwarves prefer to do their own crafting tasks rather than assisting others.
• Lazily spawn cave creatures/plants when they are discovered rather than spawning them at the beginning of the game and merely unhiding them when they are discovered. While fog of war is enabled this should improve memory usage and performance, and should reduce the size of save files.
• Fix bug that was causing caves to spawn in bedrock, exposing undefined voxels underneath.
• Fix bug that was causing wheat to spawn inside dirt.
• Fix the birdsplosion issue by having creatures migrate in and out of the play area if there are too many/few of them.
• Fix some of the game’s sprites being inverted left to right.
• Remove “faults”, “erosion” and “rainfall” from non-debug world generator screen as they are confusing to the player and don’t really provide useful information.
• Minor aesthetic/usability changes to some GUI elements.
• Move employee task filter to employee info widget rather than being its own tab.
• Allow player to switch between selected employees by pushing arrow buttons on top of employee info widget.
• Fix aspect ratio of saved game screenshots.
• Sort save games by date.
• Prevent non-intelligent creatures from gathering meat/bones/corpses of dead dwarves.
• Herbivores no longer randomly attack doors.
• Display game version string on landing page in bottom right corner.
• Quieter native tantrum sound while trading.
• Do not draw small grass sprites when they are above the slice plane (this was sometimes obscuring dwarves underground).

Hi everybody! We’re back from the holiday season with a whole bunch of new bugfixes. Over the past few weeks we’ve been doing some cleanup and optimization of some of the underlying task and pathfinding systems. Unfortunately, old saves will not be compatible with the new DwarfCorp version.

• Task manager improvements — dwarves now pull tasks from the task queue when idle rather than getting assigned tasks on a timer. This is more efficient and less prone to errors from corner cases.
• Fixed bug in dwarf task pre-emption that caused dwarfs to try the same task over and over.
• Dwarves now wait up to 60 seconds for a plan to be available. Previously they only waited 1 second. This was causing pathfinding to almost always fail for players with lower-power machines.
• Dwarves now choose whether to use inverse or forward path planning based on the openness of the destination. Previously, they only used inverse pathfinding when forward pathfinding failed. This makes pathfinding much faster when going from above ground to underground destinations.
• Faster pathfinding in general, with quicker tests for whether a path does not exist.
• Fixed several issues with path following that was causing some paths to get cut short or get animated incorrectly.
• Fix bug in audio ambience engine that was causing audio to randomly cut out.
• Fix bug that caused trade envoys to get stuck without leaving the world.
• New dwarf unconsciousness rules. If the dwarf has less than 15 HP, he’ll look for a bed to heal in. If no bed is available and his HP falls below 5, he goes unconscious and heals slowly. If a dwarf falls to 0 HP while unconscious, he dies. Previously, if the HP fell below 15 and no bed was available, the dwarf would freeze.
• Unconscious dwarves can no longer be assigned gather tasks.
• Dwarf status displays whether or not they are unconscious.
• Fix crash while moving ladders and doors.
• Clear log file if it grows larger than 50 MB. (previously the log could grow extremely huge, especially on Linux)
• Fix LD_LIBRARY_PATH on Linux and Mac which was causing saving/loading to fail. Also possibly causing Steam Overlay crash.
• Revert dwarf multi-block building so that they only build one block at a time. This makes wall building much slower, but fixes several corner case bugs that were causing block building to fail. Will have to re-implement this in the future in a smarter way.
• Fix jump animation which was causing dwarf to get stuck in ceiling sometimes.
• Use stipple alpha on block placement designations. This makes them easier to see.

We’ve got some new features and optimizations under the hood that we’re still testing. These include a revamped animation system that is faster and uses less memory, and (looking more into the future), a minecart system.

FYI, I (Matt) will be unavailable from January 13th through January 27th. We’ll be back in action after that.

Hi everybody! We’re back from the holiday season with a whole bunch of new bugfixes. Over the past few weeks we’ve been doing some cleanup and optimization of some of the underlying task and pathfinding systems. Unfortunately, old saves will not be compatible with the new DwarfCorp version.

• Task manager improvements — dwarves now pull tasks from the task queue when idle rather than getting assigned tasks on a timer. This is more efficient and less prone to errors from corner cases.
• Fixed bug in dwarf task pre-emption that caused dwarfs to try the same task over and over.
• Dwarves now wait up to 60 seconds for a plan to be available. Previously they only waited 1 second. This was causing pathfinding to almost always fail for players with lower-power machines.
• Dwarves now choose whether to use inverse or forward path planning based on the openness of the destination. Previously, they only used inverse pathfinding when forward pathfinding failed. This makes pathfinding much faster when going from above ground to underground destinations.
• Faster pathfinding in general, with quicker tests for whether a path does not exist.
• Fixed several issues with path following that was causing some paths to get cut short or get animated incorrectly.
• Fix bug in audio ambience engine that was causing audio to randomly cut out.
• Fix bug that caused trade envoys to get stuck without leaving the world.
• New dwarf unconsciousness rules. If the dwarf has less than 15 HP, he’ll look for a bed to heal in. If no bed is available and his HP falls below 5, he goes unconscious and heals slowly. If a dwarf falls to 0 HP while unconscious, he dies. Previously, if the HP fell below 15 and no bed was available, the dwarf would freeze.
• Unconscious dwarves can no longer be assigned gather tasks.
• Dwarf status displays whether or not they are unconscious.
• Fix crash while moving ladders and doors.
• Clear log file if it grows larger than 50 MB. (previously the log could grow extremely huge, especially on Linux)
• Fix LD_LIBRARY_PATH on Linux and Mac which was causing saving/loading to fail. Also possibly causing Steam Overlay crash.
• Revert dwarf multi-block building so that they only build one block at a time. This makes wall building much slower, but fixes several corner case bugs that were causing block building to fail. Will have to re-implement this in the future in a smarter way.
• Fix jump animation which was causing dwarf to get stuck in ceiling sometimes.
• Use stipple alpha on block placement designations. This makes them easier to see.

We’ve got some new features and optimizations under the hood that we’re still testing. These include a revamped animation system that is faster and uses less memory, and (looking more into the future), a minecart system.

FYI, I (Matt) will be unavailable from January 13th through January 27th. We’ll be back in action after that.

Hi everybody and happy holidays! We just pushed an update to Steam and itch.io with more bugfixes and new Christmas-themed assets.


There is now a new biome called the Jolly Forest which springs up wherever elves are in control of regions with cold climates. The Jolly Forest features edible candy-cane trees that drop peppermints, dangerous Snow Golems and penguins.

 

• Added penguin, snowman, candy-canes, peppermints and ice resources.
• Player can now build ice walls/floors.
• Synchronized voxel textures in the GUI (they’ve been inconsistent for a while).
• Fix memory leak in Astar planning service.
• Fix memory leak in kill-entity task assignment.
• Reduce rate at which creatures check for threats to once per second.
• Throttle Astar planning thread so that it doesn’t take up so much CPU.
• Civilizations start with random love/hate of the player rather than all being neutral.
• Add display to the world generator that shows the active civilizations and biomes in the selected region.

Hi everybody and happy holidays! We just pushed an update to Steam and itch.io with more bugfixes and new Christmas-themed assets.


There is now a new biome called the Jolly Forest which springs up wherever elves are in control of regions with cold climates. The Jolly Forest features edible candy-cane trees that drop peppermints, dangerous Snow Golems and penguins.

 

• Added penguin, snowman, candy-canes, peppermints and ice resources.
• Player can now build ice walls/floors.
• Synchronized voxel textures in the GUI (they’ve been inconsistent for a while).
• Fix memory leak in Astar planning service.
• Fix memory leak in kill-entity task assignment.
• Reduce rate at which creatures check for threats to once per second.
• Throttle Astar planning thread so that it doesn’t take up so much CPU.
• Civilizations start with random love/hate of the player rather than all being neutral.
• Add display to the world generator that shows the active civilizations and biomes in the selected region.

Hi everybody. We just pushed version 17.12.17 to Steam and itch.io. This patch is compatible with saves from 17.12.02 or later. We fixed some critical issues on Mac/Linux, solved a couple of usability/AI bugs, and started taking a crack at memory leaks and performance issues that crop up late game. Those are really the most pressing issues to solve at the moment. We’ve written a few simple tests to help us track down memory leaks and performance degradation that occurs after playing the game for a few hours, and have already found and fixed a couple of problems.

One of the well known problems we hope to solve soon is the bird population explosion, which we have definitely verified is real! After a few hours birds tend to cluster in low areas with hundreds of eggs.



 

Meanwhile, we’re hoping to get one more content update out by Christmas. Our artist has been pixelling away at various jolly creatures and resources for the candy-cane forest — the elf equivalent to the undead’s haunted forest.

• Fix critical crash on startup for Linux/Mac caused by incorrect file path syntax while loading tutorial and tilesheet data.
• Upgrade SDL for Linux/Mac to the latest version.
• Ensure that on Red-hat and other Linux distributions, system SDL can be used.
• Fix cave mushrooms/fungus not spawning or becoming invisible.
• Fix moving beds using the move tool causing them to appear 1 block higher than they should.
• Fix somewhat rare crash caused by water mesh not allocating enough space.
• When a dwarf dies, ensure most tasks get reassigned to another dwarf.
• Fix selection buffer issue which was causing some objects to not be selectable when above the current slice.
• Turn off rainfall producing water — this was causing major performance degradation over time. Rain will still fill blocks that already have water in them to full height, but no longer produce water blocks in thin air.
• Fix memory leak caused by creatures trying to restock items when there was no stockpile (for example, carnivores trying to restock meat)
• Fix memory leak caused by autosave not cleaning up type caches.

Hi everybody. We just pushed version 17.12.17 to Steam and itch.io. This patch is compatible with saves from 17.12.02 or later. We fixed some critical issues on Mac/Linux, solved a couple of usability/AI bugs, and started taking a crack at memory leaks and performance issues that crop up late game. Those are really the most pressing issues to solve at the moment. We’ve written a few simple tests to help us track down memory leaks and performance degradation that occurs after playing the game for a few hours, and have already found and fixed a couple of problems.

One of the well known problems we hope to solve soon is the bird population explosion, which we have definitely verified is real! After a few hours birds tend to cluster in low areas with hundreds of eggs.



 

Meanwhile, we’re hoping to get one more content update out by Christmas. Our artist has been pixelling away at various jolly creatures and resources for the candy-cane forest — the elf equivalent to the undead’s haunted forest.

• Fix critical crash on startup for Linux/Mac caused by incorrect file path syntax while loading tutorial and tilesheet data.
• Upgrade SDL for Linux/Mac to the latest version.
• Ensure that on Red-hat and other Linux distributions, system SDL can be used.
• Fix cave mushrooms/fungus not spawning or becoming invisible.
• Fix moving beds using the move tool causing them to appear 1 block higher than they should.
• Fix somewhat rare crash caused by water mesh not allocating enough space.
• When a dwarf dies, ensure most tasks get reassigned to another dwarf.
• Fix selection buffer issue which was causing some objects to not be selectable when above the current slice.
• Turn off rainfall producing water — this was causing major performance degradation over time. Rain will still fill blocks that already have water in them to full height, but no longer produce water blocks in thin air.
• Fix memory leak caused by creatures trying to restock items when there was no stockpile (for example, carnivores trying to restock meat)
• Fix memory leak caused by autosave not cleaning up type caches.