In the previous dev update, we delved into the details of a massive technology tree revamp that was in the works for Predestination, including dozens of new ship modules and weapons and the Improvements/Synergies tech tree. We fully tested and deployed the tech tree update last month, and we released five follow-up patches thoughout the month of May to correct new bugs and crashes caused by the update. I'd like to give a huge thanks to everyone sending in bug reports on the Steam Early Access forum and those of you submitting crash reports, it really helped us get on top of this.

This month we've been working hard on some really exciting features! We've developed the key storyline event that causes the Revenant Homeworld to decloak at a certain point during the game, tempting players to plunder it for technology at the risk of waking up the Revenants. If the Revenants awake, they periodically launch fleets out to annihilate populated worlds. We've completed the Galactic Domination, Scientific Victory and Destroy Revenants victory conditions, and have made several big improvements to be released in V0.9.3.0.

Those who like to play a diplomatic game will be excited to hear that we're going to add a UN-style Galactic Council that meets to vote on important issues and that this will tie into a deep Diplomatic victory condition. And everyone will be happy to know that V0.9.3.0 will add some major optimisations on the game. We've managed to reduce RAM usage by over 35%, cut map generation and planet generation times by up to 50%, eliminate over 60% of the startup initialisation time, and reduced End Turn delays by up to 90%!

Read on for a full detailed breakdown of everything that we're currently working on and everything that's coming in V0.9.3.0 (estimated release in about 1 week).



The story of Predestination starts when the United Colonies discover the cloaked Revenant homeworld filled with advanced technology, and when plundering that technology they unwittingly awake the Revenants and unleash them on the galaxy. During the final battle with the Revenants, ships from dozens of different races are flung back in time and scattered over an area of hundreds of lightyears. Many crashland on planets throughout the galaxy, and a few survive to form new civilisations, but the Revenant homeworld is still out there somewhere and it's still cloaked.

Once anyone in the game reaches a certain level of technology, the Revenant homeworld will decloak and appear in a system roughly in the middle of the map. The planet is barren and covered in metal and circuitry, with several ancient ruins and clusters of crashed ships on the surface making it a tempting target for colonisation. When you fully excavate a crashed ship on the Revenant homeworld, you have a chance of finding powerful Revenant ship technologies like the Particle Beam, Damper Field, and Norn Iron armour, some of which you can't even research normally.

Colonising the Revenant homeworld is a risky move, however, as every time you excavate a ruin and every turn that passes with a colony on the surface there's a chance of waking the Revenants. The planet will be taken over and a Revenant fleet launched into orbit to defend it, and every 10-20 turns a new Revenant fleet will launch from the surface toward a populated planet. In the next version we have enabled a switch to turn Revenant attacks on or off from the New Game screen, which will enable/disable both the Revenant homeworld decloak event and Revenant fleets coming out of temporal rifts.



.



While developing the Diplomatic victory condition, we brainstormed on the idea of adding a UN-style Galactic Council. We've previously said that we wanted to do this but also that it might have to wait for an expansion, but recent work on the diplomacy screen makes it a lot more feasible so this feature may take less time than we thought to implement. The Galactic Council will be unlocked in each game once any player researches the Galactic Council technology, and the first race to research it will automatically become the Council leader. Anyone else can opt to join the council at any time once it's discovered.

The council's job is to vote on whether to pass various resolutions tabled by its members, so when you're in the council you can select any resolution from a list and table it for the next vote. Only one resolution can be tabled at a time and once it's tabled it'll be 10 turns before the council meets to vote on the decision. Each resolution is a simple yes/no question that passes by majority vote (with the Council Leader getting the deciding vote in the event of a tie), and while one is tabled you can contact the other races in private diplomatic talks to convince them to vote yes or no. Every council member gains 1 council point per turn and each resolution costs a certain number of council points to table. Council members also pay 10% of their empire's income each turn (as long as it's positive) into a council fund bank. Some example resolutions include:

• Request for Aid (10%, 25%, or 50% of the bank funds)
• Economic Stimulus Package (50%, 100% bank funds divided evenly among all council members)
• Increase / Reduce council tax rate by 5%
• Share Knowledge (+5%, +10%, +15% empire-wide Research bonus for all council members)
• Seed Bank Initiative (+10%, +20%, +30% empire-wide Food/turn bonus for all council members)
• Metallurgy Conference (+10%, +20%, +30% empire-wide Metal/turn bonus for all council members)
• Joint Engineering Projects (+10%, +20%, +30% empire-wide Shipyard capacity bonus for all council members)
• Cultural Exchange (+10, +20, +30 Morale on all planets for all council members)
• Joint Training Exercises (+10, +20, +30 Combat Rating on all planets for all council members)
• Healthcare Agreement (+10, +20, +30 Health Rating on all planets for all council members)
• Vote yourself to become Council Leader
• Ban new Nuclear Power Plants / Fossil Fuel Power Plants from being built
• Ban Stellar Converter / Warp Missiles / Bio-Toxin Bomb / Genesis Device / other weapon or super weapon
• Ceasefire (All wars between council members instantly end and cannot start again for 20 turns)
• Ban Spying (All spy actions cease and can't begin again for 20 turns)
• Add tax on trade routes (+1 BC per trade route)
• Limit Military (-5, -10, -15 Command Points for all council members)
• Share Strategic Resources (All races automatically share all strategic resources with each other)
• Share Sensor Data (All races automatically have sensor treaties with each other)

Many of these resolutions are straight-up strategic benefits for being in the council that are likely to be agreed on by all parties, such as empire-wide bonuses to a stat, but they'll cost quite a few council points to table for vote. Poorer empires can spend a few council points to table the Request for Aid or Economic Stimulus Package to get some money, though you may need to contact the other council members to convince them to vote your way.

Most of the remaining resolutions are strategic limiters that can help level the playing field if an enemy empire is getting ahead. If the enemy is decimating your colonies with biological weapons or the planet-destroying Stellar Converter, just vote to ban them and convince the majority of the council to vote your way. If your fleet has been decimated and you need time to rebuild, table a ceasefire resolution for at least 20 turns of peace. The Galactic Council is also how we're going to implement the Diplomatic victory condition (discussed below).



.



Up until now, the game has been an endless sandbox mode that has no victory conditions, but recently we've been working on adding the four main victory conditions (Galactic Domination, Destroy the Revenants, Scientific Victory, and Diplomatic Victory) as well as a fifth hidden victory condition. The game designs for these victory conditions have had to change a little during implementation, but we're now confident that we have our final design and many of the victory conditions are nearly ready to release:

Every race that's sent back in time has a different plan for how to win against the Revenants and ensure its own race becomes the dominant power in the future. The simplest way to make sure it's your race that gets to enact its plan is to dominate the galaxy. Eliminate all of the other races by either destroying or capturing all of their planets to trigger this victory condition.

If the Revenants awaken during your game (see Revenant homeworld section above), the Galactic Domination victory condition is off the table and you'll need to destroy the Revenants to win. Whoever destroys or captures the Revenant homeworld will get access to the storehouse of ancient technology underground and is sure to dominate the galaxy, so they win the game.



Originally the diplomatic victory was going to be a simple matter of securing universal peace for a certain number of turns or getting everyone to agree to a treaty, but that felt a little underwhelming. We went back to the drawing board and decided to spend some time developing the Galactic Council (discussed above) and we've decided to use that for the victory condition.

The path to diplomatic victory begins in the final tech era when the Revenant planet reveals itself. A new council resolution will appear in the list that anyone can table for a vote -- an agreement to declare the Revenant planet off-limits and avoid risking waking them up. Once this passes, the next resolution in the victory path is to cease all active hostilities between the races, then an Galactic Non-Aggression Pact, and finally the Universal Alliance.

When the Universal Alliance passes and all races not yet eliminated are in the council, this victory condition triggers. If the Revenants are triggered by someone plundering their homeworld, the resolution to declare their planet off-limits will be invalidated and can be skipped if it hasn't been passed yet. You can still secure a diplomatic victory by completing the other resolutions (and so getting all races to join forces against the Revenants), and you'll get a different ending.

While some races want to destroy the Revenants in the past, the more scientifically inclined recognise that this could lead to a predestination paradox and prove ultimately ineffective. These races seek to research advanced weapons and defensive technology and find a way back to the final battle with the Revenants in the future to turn the tide of the war. To do that, they'll need the technology to invert a temporal rift and ride it back home, the knowledge of how to recalibrate the time satellite that caused the rifts in the first place, sensor scans of the battle on the other side of a temporal rift, and a well-researched battle plan.

Each of those requirements is a technology that unlocks in the Improvements tree once you've researched an advanced technology from the end of each of the four main tech trees. The four technologies required are now Temporal Shields from the Physics tree, Temporal Conduit (previously named Wormhole Generator) from the Construction tree, Temporal Prime Directive (new) from the Sociology tree, and Temporal Accelerator Satellite (new) from the Biology & Geology tree.

Once you've got all four parts of the plan, you can then research the Scientific Victory and you'll win the game. In the future, however, we are considering making this victory condition a bit more involved by asking players to actually build a fleet and fly it to a temporal rift to travel back to the final battle with the Revenants. Victory would then be decided by actually winning this battle, similar to the Attack Antares option in MOO2.



.



We've received a lot of feedback throughout Predestination's time in Early Access, and one thing that comes up quite often is the issue of performance. We've been making steady progress on the game and have already knocked most of the major features off our to-do list, but optimisation has always been put off until later in development. The feedback makes it clear that performance is a very important issue to you, so I decided to take a few weeks out from feature development during May to focus on all of these issues. The results so far have been huge improvements, and we plan to deploy the following optimisations in the next major patch:

• End Turn stall fixed: We've moved the End Turn code over to a second thread so that the game can continue to render smoothly while the End Turn operations are underway. With this implemented, the game no longer feels like it's stalled when you click End Turn. This has introduced a number of new crashes that we've been tackling as we find them, so please understand that there may be some new and unexpected crashes to report.

• End Turn optimisation: End Turn times can easily reach 5-10 seconds when a handful of planets are colonised, so we ran the JetBrains dotTrace profiler on Predestination and discovered several unexpected bottlenecks in the End Turn code (the main one being some code for refreshing the status of roads). After solving the biggest four bottlenecks, most End Turns now typically execute in a fraction of a second if a planet doesn't need to be generated.

• Planet Generation Optimisation: Most of the planet generation time was actually taken up by loading the continent texture files, but there are only a handful of continent files and they were each being re-loaded dozens of times. By batching continents together behind the scenes, we reduced planet generation times by over 50% and were also able to improve the planet graphics at the same time.

• Map Generation Optimisation: Creating a new map was taking longer than expected, so I ran the profiler while generating a map and discovered that it was spending more time generating planets than it should have. We found that all planets with strategic resources were being pre-generated when they didn't need to be, and were able to solve that quickly to reduce map generation time depending on the settings used.

• Ship Model Optimisation: You've probably noticed that when you start the game, it stalls for a few seconds on the "Initialising Ship Models" stage. This happens because it's loading all the high-res ship part textures into memory, so we decided to heavily optimise this to save both on load times and video memory usage. Now the game only pre-loads the low-res textures and loads the high-res textures on demand, discarding them again when they're not being used in order to save on GPU memory. The high-res texture loading happens asynchronously in a separate thread so it doesn't cause the game to stutter, and it takes just a split second so you shouldn't even see the difference in-game.

• RAM Optimisation: The current live build of Predestination takes up about 1.6gb to 2gb of system memory and a lot of gpu memory. A lot of this is in the form of assets that have been loaded into memory multiple times by different parts of the game, as many of our user interfaces share elements and some models are re-used. XNA's ContentManager is supposed to handle this for you, but it's designed to load only XNB files and if we want player modding then we have to load standard .png files. I bit the bullet and implemented a new content manager with all the features I wanted using roonda's ContentTracker V0.2 from 2009 as a starting point. As a result, the game now uses over a third less RAM, now hovering around 1gb to 1.1gb! As an added bonus, the new content manager can load models for the ship designer straight from .X files using SlimDX so modding will be a lot easier.

.



The odd thing about game development is that often you're so used to using debug commands to cheat and quickly test features that you don't get a very good sense of how the game fully plays or what the progression is like. I took a few hours recently to just play though Predestination and found a number of problems that need fixed and little things that could improve the game, many of which correspond to feedback and bug reports we've received from players. In no specific order, here are a few of the bigger changes coming in the next update:

• One-per-planet buildings like Starbases and the Orbital Telescope didn't really make sense to be inside a city. I also kept accidentally clicking on a starbase when trying to zoom into a city. These have now been turned into Infrastructures connected to a city by road, and have their own section in the build menu separate from other infrastructure.
• Feedback suggested that planets felt like they could support another city, and also that terraforming needed to have a bigger payoff. We're going to try out giving each planet a bonus city if it's 100% terraformed to your native environment. This idea was suggested by a fan, and after playing for a while I can really see the merit of the idea.
• It felt like it was feasible to just build cities full of Research Labs everywhere, even without artifacts to boost them. We've reduced the research output of labs, but Artifact Excavations now continue to give a +100% bonus when excavated so they're more necessary. Artifact Excavations can also be re-built if destroyed on excavated ruins and ships.
• Desert planets now have no sea level at all until they begin terraforming into something else.
• The sea graphics on Terran planets have been made brighter and more colourful, because while the dull colour was more accurate it wasn't very appealing.
• Fixed that persistent bug where you get kicked out to orbital view every time the AI scans or colonises a planet. I had no idea how annoying that bug was until I was playing for several hours.
• The Auto Blueprints now use the blueprint upgrade mechanic just like when player blueprints update, so they will no longer demolish buildings for several turns.
• Homeworlds can no longer be destroyed by TimeExpand temporal rifts. Yep, this happened and it was awful.
• Ocean homeworlds have been fixed and will no longer spawn with land under the first colony.
• The crashed ship at the start of the game no longer requires staff. This was a big difference now that we have 500 staff per piece of infrastructure.
• New colonies now start with 2,000 population to help them get started rather than 1,000.
• Some of the Sociology technologies for diplomacy need to be available a lot earlier in the tech tree.

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The next major update is 0.9.3.0, which will be going live within the next week. It will contain:

• All of the optimisations discussed in this dev update (Mostly complete, still a few bugs to fix)
• The Scientific Victory victory condition (Complete pending final testing)
• The Galactic Domination victory condition (Complete pending final testing)
• The Destroy Revenant victory condition (Complete pending final testing)
• The Revenant Planet Decloak event and Revenant Awakening event (Complete pending testing)
• New high-res planet textures and bump maps (Work in progress)
• Finished Diplomacy Text (Mostly complete)
• All of the rebalancing and tweaks discussed in this update (Complete)
• Dozens of bugfixes and quality of life improvements (Mostly complete, still a few bugs to fix)

After that, the next major update is 0.9.4.0 and it will contain the Galactic Council and accompanying UI, new sociology technologies relating to the council, new diplomacy options relating to the council, Diplomatic Victory, the end game points screen, and endgame story sequences for the victory conditions. We also hope to have the United Colonies ship models finished and in-game and a batch of new sound effects to replace the current placeholders.

Cheers,

-- Brendan, Lead Developer

In the previous dev update, we delved into the details of a massive technology tree revamp that was in the works for Predestination, including dozens of new ship modules and weapons and the Improvements/Synergies tech tree. We fully tested and deployed the tech tree update last month, and we released five follow-up patches thoughout the month of May to correct new bugs and crashes caused by the update. I'd like to give a huge thanks to everyone sending in bug reports on the Steam Early Access forum and those of you submitting crash reports, it really helped us get on top of this.

This month we've been working hard on some really exciting features! We've developed the key storyline event that causes the Revenant Homeworld to decloak at a certain point during the game, tempting players to plunder it for technology at the risk of waking up the Revenants. If the Revenants awake, they periodically launch fleets out to annihilate populated worlds. We've completed the Galactic Domination, Scientific Victory and Destroy Revenants victory conditions, and have made several big improvements to be released in V0.9.3.0.

Those who like to play a diplomatic game will be excited to hear that we're going to add a UN-style Galactic Council that meets to vote on important issues and that this will tie into a deep Diplomatic victory condition. And everyone will be happy to know that V0.9.3.0 will add some major optimisations on the game. We've managed to reduce RAM usage by over 35%, cut map generation and planet generation times by up to 50%, eliminate over 60% of the startup initialisation time, and reduced End Turn delays by up to 90%!

Read on for a full detailed breakdown of everything that we're currently working on and everything that's coming in V0.9.3.0 (estimated release in about 1 week).



The story of Predestination starts when the United Colonies discover the cloaked Revenant homeworld filled with advanced technology, and when plundering that technology they unwittingly awake the Revenants and unleash them on the galaxy. During the final battle with the Revenants, ships from dozens of different races are flung back in time and scattered over an area of hundreds of lightyears. Many crashland on planets throughout the galaxy, and a few survive to form new civilisations, but the Revenant homeworld is still out there somewhere and it's still cloaked.

Once anyone in the game reaches a certain level of technology, the Revenant homeworld will decloak and appear in a system roughly in the middle of the map. The planet is barren and covered in metal and circuitry, with several ancient ruins and clusters of crashed ships on the surface making it a tempting target for colonisation. When you fully excavate a crashed ship on the Revenant homeworld, you have a chance of finding powerful Revenant ship technologies like the Particle Beam, Damper Field, and Norn Iron armour, some of which you can't even research normally.

Colonising the Revenant homeworld is a risky move, however, as every time you excavate a ruin and every turn that passes with a colony on the surface there's a chance of waking the Revenants. The planet will be taken over and a Revenant fleet launched into orbit to defend it, and every 10-20 turns a new Revenant fleet will launch from the surface toward a populated planet. In the next version we have enabled a switch to turn Revenant attacks on or off from the New Game screen, which will enable/disable both the Revenant homeworld decloak event and Revenant fleets coming out of temporal rifts.



.



While developing the Diplomatic victory condition, we brainstormed on the idea of adding a UN-style Galactic Council. We've previously said that we wanted to do this but also that it might have to wait for an expansion, but recent work on the diplomacy screen makes it a lot more feasible so this feature may take less time than we thought to implement. The Galactic Council will be unlocked in each game once any player researches the Galactic Council technology, and the first race to research it will automatically become the Council leader. Anyone else can opt to join the council at any time once it's discovered.

The council's job is to vote on whether to pass various resolutions tabled by its members, so when you're in the council you can select any resolution from a list and table it for the next vote. Only one resolution can be tabled at a time and once it's tabled it'll be 10 turns before the council meets to vote on the decision. Each resolution is a simple yes/no question that passes by majority vote (with the Council Leader getting the deciding vote in the event of a tie), and while one is tabled you can contact the other races in private diplomatic talks to convince them to vote yes or no. Every council member gains 1 council point per turn and each resolution costs a certain number of council points to table. Council members also pay 10% of their empire's income each turn (as long as it's positive) into a council fund bank. Some example resolutions include:

• Request for Aid (10%, 25%, or 50% of the bank funds)
• Economic Stimulus Package (50%, 100% bank funds divided evenly among all council members)
• Increase / Reduce council tax rate by 5%
• Share Knowledge (+5%, +10%, +15% empire-wide Research bonus for all council members)
• Seed Bank Initiative (+10%, +20%, +30% empire-wide Food/turn bonus for all council members)
• Metallurgy Conference (+10%, +20%, +30% empire-wide Metal/turn bonus for all council members)
• Joint Engineering Projects (+10%, +20%, +30% empire-wide Shipyard capacity bonus for all council members)
• Cultural Exchange (+10, +20, +30 Morale on all planets for all council members)
• Joint Training Exercises (+10, +20, +30 Combat Rating on all planets for all council members)
• Healthcare Agreement (+10, +20, +30 Health Rating on all planets for all council members)
• Vote yourself to become Council Leader
• Ban new Nuclear Power Plants / Fossil Fuel Power Plants from being built
• Ban Stellar Converter / Warp Missiles / Bio-Toxin Bomb / Genesis Device / other weapon or super weapon
• Ceasefire (All wars between council members instantly end and cannot start again for 20 turns)
• Ban Spying (All spy actions cease and can't begin again for 20 turns)
• Add tax on trade routes (+1 BC per trade route)
• Limit Military (-5, -10, -15 Command Points for all council members)
• Share Strategic Resources (All races automatically share all strategic resources with each other)
• Share Sensor Data (All races automatically have sensor treaties with each other)

Many of these resolutions are straight-up strategic benefits for being in the council that are likely to be agreed on by all parties, such as empire-wide bonuses to a stat, but they'll cost quite a few council points to table for vote. Poorer empires can spend a few council points to table the Request for Aid or Economic Stimulus Package to get some money, though you may need to contact the other council members to convince them to vote your way.

Most of the remaining resolutions are strategic limiters that can help level the playing field if an enemy empire is getting ahead. If the enemy is decimating your colonies with biological weapons or the planet-destroying Stellar Converter, just vote to ban them and convince the majority of the council to vote your way. If your fleet has been decimated and you need time to rebuild, table a ceasefire resolution for at least 20 turns of peace. The Galactic Council is also how we're going to implement the Diplomatic victory condition (discussed below).



.



Up until now, the game has been an endless sandbox mode that has no victory conditions, but recently we've been working on adding the four main victory conditions (Galactic Domination, Destroy the Revenants, Scientific Victory, and Diplomatic Victory) as well as a fifth hidden victory condition. The game designs for these victory conditions have had to change a little during implementation, but we're now confident that we have our final design and many of the victory conditions are nearly ready to release:

Every race that's sent back in time has a different plan for how to win against the Revenants and ensure its own race becomes the dominant power in the future. The simplest way to make sure it's your race that gets to enact its plan is to dominate the galaxy. Eliminate all of the other races by either destroying or capturing all of their planets to trigger this victory condition.

If the Revenants awaken during your game (see Revenant homeworld section above), the Galactic Domination victory condition is off the table and you'll need to destroy the Revenants to win. Whoever destroys or captures the Revenant homeworld will get access to the storehouse of ancient technology underground and is sure to dominate the galaxy, so they win the game.



Originally the diplomatic victory was going to be a simple matter of securing universal peace for a certain number of turns or getting everyone to agree to a treaty, but that felt a little underwhelming. We went back to the drawing board and decided to spend some time developing the Galactic Council (discussed above) and we've decided to use that for the victory condition.

The path to diplomatic victory begins in the final tech era when the Revenant planet reveals itself. A new council resolution will appear in the list that anyone can table for a vote -- an agreement to declare the Revenant planet off-limits and avoid risking waking them up. Once this passes, the next resolution in the victory path is to cease all active hostilities between the races, then an Galactic Non-Aggression Pact, and finally the Universal Alliance.

When the Universal Alliance passes and all races not yet eliminated are in the council, this victory condition triggers. If the Revenants are triggered by someone plundering their homeworld, the resolution to declare their planet off-limits will be invalidated and can be skipped if it hasn't been passed yet. You can still secure a diplomatic victory by completing the other resolutions (and so getting all races to join forces against the Revenants), and you'll get a different ending.

While some races want to destroy the Revenants in the past, the more scientifically inclined recognise that this could lead to a predestination paradox and prove ultimately ineffective. These races seek to research advanced weapons and defensive technology and find a way back to the final battle with the Revenants in the future to turn the tide of the war. To do that, they'll need the technology to invert a temporal rift and ride it back home, the knowledge of how to recalibrate the time satellite that caused the rifts in the first place, sensor scans of the battle on the other side of a temporal rift, and a well-researched battle plan.

Each of those requirements is a technology that unlocks in the Improvements tree once you've researched an advanced technology from the end of each of the four main tech trees. The four technologies required are now Temporal Shields from the Physics tree, Temporal Conduit (previously named Wormhole Generator) from the Construction tree, Temporal Prime Directive (new) from the Sociology tree, and Temporal Accelerator Satellite (new) from the Biology & Geology tree.

Once you've got all four parts of the plan, you can then research the Scientific Victory and you'll win the game. In the future, however, we are considering making this victory condition a bit more involved by asking players to actually build a fleet and fly it to a temporal rift to travel back to the final battle with the Revenants. Victory would then be decided by actually winning this battle, similar to the Attack Antares option in MOO2.



.



We've received a lot of feedback throughout Predestination's time in Early Access, and one thing that comes up quite often is the issue of performance. We've been making steady progress on the game and have already knocked most of the major features off our to-do list, but optimisation has always been put off until later in development. The feedback makes it clear that performance is a very important issue to you, so I decided to take a few weeks out from feature development during May to focus on all of these issues. The results so far have been huge improvements, and we plan to deploy the following optimisations in the next major patch:

• End Turn stall fixed: We've moved the End Turn code over to a second thread so that the game can continue to render smoothly while the End Turn operations are underway. With this implemented, the game no longer feels like it's stalled when you click End Turn. This has introduced a number of new crashes that we've been tackling as we find them, so please understand that there may be some new and unexpected crashes to report.

• End Turn optimisation: End Turn times can easily reach 5-10 seconds when a handful of planets are colonised, so we ran the JetBrains dotTrace profiler on Predestination and discovered several unexpected bottlenecks in the End Turn code (the main one being some code for refreshing the status of roads). After solving the biggest four bottlenecks, most End Turns now typically execute in a fraction of a second if a planet doesn't need to be generated.

• Planet Generation Optimisation: Most of the planet generation time was actually taken up by loading the continent texture files, but there are only a handful of continent files and they were each being re-loaded dozens of times. By batching continents together behind the scenes, we reduced planet generation times by over 50% and were also able to improve the planet graphics at the same time.

• Map Generation Optimisation: Creating a new map was taking longer than expected, so I ran the profiler while generating a map and discovered that it was spending more time generating planets than it should have. We found that all planets with strategic resources were being pre-generated when they didn't need to be, and were able to solve that quickly to reduce map generation time depending on the settings used.

• Ship Model Optimisation: You've probably noticed that when you start the game, it stalls for a few seconds on the "Initialising Ship Models" stage. This happens because it's loading all the high-res ship part textures into memory, so we decided to heavily optimise this to save both on load times and video memory usage. Now the game only pre-loads the low-res textures and loads the high-res textures on demand, discarding them again when they're not being used in order to save on GPU memory. The high-res texture loading happens asynchronously in a separate thread so it doesn't cause the game to stutter, and it takes just a split second so you shouldn't even see the difference in-game.

• RAM Optimisation: The current live build of Predestination takes up about 1.6gb to 2gb of system memory and a lot of gpu memory. A lot of this is in the form of assets that have been loaded into memory multiple times by different parts of the game, as many of our user interfaces share elements and some models are re-used. XNA's ContentManager is supposed to handle this for you, but it's designed to load only XNB files and if we want player modding then we have to load standard .png files. I bit the bullet and implemented a new content manager with all the features I wanted using roonda's ContentTracker V0.2 from 2009 as a starting point. As a result, the game now uses over a third less RAM, now hovering around 1gb to 1.1gb! As an added bonus, the new content manager can load models for the ship designer straight from .X files using SlimDX so modding will be a lot easier.

.



The odd thing about game development is that often you're so used to using debug commands to cheat and quickly test features that you don't get a very good sense of how the game fully plays or what the progression is like. I took a few hours recently to just play though Predestination and found a number of problems that need fixed and little things that could improve the game, many of which correspond to feedback and bug reports we've received from players. In no specific order, here are a few of the bigger changes coming in the next update:

• One-per-planet buildings like Starbases and the Orbital Telescope didn't really make sense to be inside a city. I also kept accidentally clicking on a starbase when trying to zoom into a city. These have now been turned into Infrastructures connected to a city by road, and have their own section in the build menu separate from other infrastructure.
• Feedback suggested that planets felt like they could support another city, and also that terraforming needed to have a bigger payoff. We're going to try out giving each planet a bonus city if it's 100% terraformed to your native environment. This idea was suggested by a fan, and after playing for a while I can really see the merit of the idea.
• It felt like it was feasible to just build cities full of Research Labs everywhere, even without artifacts to boost them. We've reduced the research output of labs, but Artifact Excavations now continue to give a +100% bonus when excavated so they're more necessary. Artifact Excavations can also be re-built if destroyed on excavated ruins and ships.
• Desert planets now have no sea level at all until they begin terraforming into something else.
• The sea graphics on Terran planets have been made brighter and more colourful, because while the dull colour was more accurate it wasn't very appealing.
• Fixed that persistent bug where you get kicked out to orbital view every time the AI scans or colonises a planet. I had no idea how annoying that bug was until I was playing for several hours.
• The Auto Blueprints now use the blueprint upgrade mechanic just like when player blueprints update, so they will no longer demolish buildings for several turns.
• Homeworlds can no longer be destroyed by TimeExpand temporal rifts. Yep, this happened and it was awful.
• Ocean homeworlds have been fixed and will no longer spawn with land under the first colony.
• The crashed ship at the start of the game no longer requires staff. This was a big difference now that we have 500 staff per piece of infrastructure.
• New colonies now start with 2,000 population to help them get started rather than 1,000.
• Some of the Sociology technologies for diplomacy need to be available a lot earlier in the tech tree.

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The next major update is 0.9.3.0, which will be going live within the next week. It will contain:

• All of the optimisations discussed in this dev update (Mostly complete, still a few bugs to fix)
• The Scientific Victory victory condition (Complete pending final testing)
• The Galactic Domination victory condition (Complete pending final testing)
• The Destroy Revenant victory condition (Complete pending final testing)
• The Revenant Planet Decloak event and Revenant Awakening event (Complete pending testing)
• New high-res planet textures and bump maps (Work in progress)
• Finished Diplomacy Text (Mostly complete)
• All of the rebalancing and tweaks discussed in this update (Complete)
• Dozens of bugfixes and quality of life improvements (Mostly complete, still a few bugs to fix)

After that, the next major update is 0.9.4.0 and it will contain the Galactic Council and accompanying UI, new sociology technologies relating to the council, new diplomacy options relating to the council, Diplomatic Victory, the end game points screen, and endgame story sequences for the victory conditions. We also hope to have the United Colonies ship models finished and in-game and a batch of new sound effects to replace the current placeholders.

Cheers,

-- Brendan, Lead Developer

In last month’s dev update, I discussed the new ship crew XP and salvage system, Temporal Rift investigations, diplomacy AI improvements, and details of a complete overhaul of the galaxy generation code and planet distributions. A lot has happened since that patch went live, and overall it’s definitely been a productive month. We had some disappointment when Predestination was unfortunately rejected by GOG, but we made great progress on the tech trees, iterated on several features based on feedback, and laid the ground work for victory conditions.

We also had some internal discussions about the increased competition in the 4X genre and spent some time writing a report on Predestination for NI Screen (a company who gave us a small business loan last year). And there was some really happy news too as our Project Manager Tina Lauro and our Art Director Steven Pollock got married (to each other!).

Read on for a preview of the tech trees as they will be in the next major update and details of new weapons technologies in addition to changes to terraforming, shield facing, weapon mods, and more. We’ll also take a brief look at work on the start sequence and victory screen that will let us tell the story of Predestination.





The next big update (V0.9.2.0) was originally going to add victory conditions to the game as well the Revenant Planet event, and in order to do this we were going to add tech era 4 with mostly placeholder technologies. We then planned to add the rest of the technologies and do a balance pass over the tech trees in a future patch. When we started working on this, however, we found it made more sense to fully revamp the tech trees first and add the victory conditions after even though the tech trees are a monumental task that requires a lot more work.

As part of this work, we’ve implemented and balanced dozens of new weapons, ship modules and other technologies. We’ve also implemented the Synergies and Improvements tech tree, which contains small improvements on some weapons and bonus technologies for combining sets of two technologies from different tech trees. The new technologies need a fair amount of bug-fixing and testing before we can deploy them in a patch, but you can get a preview in this post and we expect the patch to land very soon as patch V0.9.2.0. Below are the finished tech trees. Note that there are a few placeholder technologies still to fill, some racial variants still to design, and room for more techs in the Sociology tree if we decide to add more:


The introduction of the fourth tech era means we had to rebalance the progression of technology research costs. Research costs now follow the curve below, with tech eras 1 and 2 requiring a bit less research to acquire and the technologies in era 3 and 4 rising more steeply to take into account the expansion rate of a growing empire. This era contains all of the advanced weapons and endgame technologies such as the Stellar Converter, Damper Field, Titan and Dread Star ship hulls, Phasors, Stasis Field and Temporal Shields.  Most of the technology arms race will happen in the third and fourth eras, when the game will really start to heat up as borders meet.

Head over to the official Predestination blog for more information that would not fit in this post

To put together the final tech trees, we needed to flesh out the number of weapons and modules available in the game in a way that introduces them periodically and makes them fairly easy to balance. To do this, we created five of each type of  Beam Weapon, Projectile Weapon, Bomb, Missile, Ship Drive, Sensor, Rifle, Shield, and Armour, and divided them into five broad tiers staggered evenly throughout the game’s four technology eras. Each technology’s tier was used when calculating its damage, power grid usage, hit points and other stats, and many of the tier 5 technologies are reserved for the Revenants or might be given by rare commanders and events. We put together a spreadsheet to figure out stats and settled on stats that resulted in clear progression (example section below):



Once we figured out stats and a progression model that worked on paper, we ran the numbers on a theoretical Frigate, Cruiser, Battleship, Titan, and Dreadnought ship of each tier and worked out how many shots each ship would have to fire at an identical ship in order to destroy it. According to our calculations, a balanced ship using 50% of its power grid for weapons and 50% for defenses should be able to survive an average of 5 full attacks from identical ships of the same size and tech level before it’s destroyed. Players may choose to add more weapons or more defenses as they see fit to modify this balance, and tactics will of course have a large impact on the outcome. This setup appears to be balanced on paper, and of course we’ll have to see what happens when it goes into testing and will pay close attention to your feedback.

In addition to each weapon tier having increased damage, many weapons have special effects that make them more unique. For example, the Graviton Beam has a chance of detonating unfired missiles and bombs on the enemy ship and the Phasor beam partially cuts through shields. We also use Improvements to add bonus effects to weapons and make the most advanced weapons even more powerful:

Head over to the official Predestination blog for more information that would not fit in this post

.



We’ve implemented the Synergies and Improvements system discussed in the previous dev update, which contains special bonus technologies that you can unlock depending on your choices in the four main trees. The left hand side of the new tech tree contains Improvement technologies (highlighted as light blue stars) which are simple improvements of existing tech. For example, if you research Laser Beam then you can select from the three improvements Heavy Laser Beam, Point Defense Laser Beam, and High-Focus Laser Beam. Creative races can pick multiple improvements, and you can trade for improvements you don’t have if another race picked it up.

The right hand side of the tree contains Synergies (highlighted as purple stars), which unlock only once you research both requirements. These are special bonuses gained by combining research in different fields together, such as combining the Mass Driver and Tritanium Armour technologies together to make armour-piercing mass drivers. Synergies are occasionally used to reward players for selecting a slightly underpowered choice in one of the main tech trees, and we’ve left a little room for more in there if we feel some technologies are underpowered later.

The final tech era in this tech tree contains the research path that leads to the scientific victory condition. This requires you to research four different technologies (one from the end of each of the tech trees) and then research a series of technologies that let you come up with a way to get back to the future and a battle plan to beat the Revenants. Once you have all of this in place, you can research the Scientific Victory to win the game. The actual victory condition will be activated in V0.9.3.0 but the technologies are going in now.

.



We developed a new animated slideshow system that will be used in the splash screen, start sequence, and victory screen. We’re starting off with just some logos on the splash screen in the next update, and we’ll add the storyline start sequence once we get a chance to put the artwork together for it. We’ll also be using this system on the Victory screen to tell a story of what happens after the game ends, which will depend on which victory condition you meet (Galactic Domination, Destroy the Revenants, Scientific Victory, Diplomatic Victory, and a fifth secret ending). The Credits screen was also developed this month, which will be finished off and activated when we get a chance to put together a list of all of our Kickstarter backers etc for credits. There are a lot of people to thank in there!



.

Bonus photo from Steven and Tina’s wedding:



.

Thanks to everyone who has supported Predestination so far, and a special thanks to those who have been recommending Predestination to 4X fans online who are looking for a game that follows in the spirit and design intent of classics like Master of Orion II. Patch V0.9.2.0 will be out soon with all of the new technologies, and victory conditions will be released shortly after.

— Brendan, Lead Developer

In last month’s dev update, I discussed the new ship crew XP and salvage system, Temporal Rift investigations, diplomacy AI improvements, and details of a complete overhaul of the galaxy generation code and planet distributions. A lot has happened since that patch went live, and overall it’s definitely been a productive month. We had some disappointment when Predestination was unfortunately rejected by GOG, but we made great progress on the tech trees, iterated on several features based on feedback, and laid the ground work for victory conditions.

We also had some internal discussions about the increased competition in the 4X genre and spent some time writing a report on Predestination for NI Screen (a company who gave us a small business loan last year). And there was some really happy news too as our Project Manager Tina Lauro and our Art Director Steven Pollock got married (to each other!).

Read on for a preview of the tech trees as they will be in the next major update and details of new weapons technologies in addition to changes to terraforming, shield facing, weapon mods, and more. We’ll also take a brief look at work on the start sequence and victory screen that will let us tell the story of Predestination.





The next big update (V0.9.2.0) was originally going to add victory conditions to the game as well the Revenant Planet event, and in order to do this we were going to add tech era 4 with mostly placeholder technologies. We then planned to add the rest of the technologies and do a balance pass over the tech trees in a future patch. When we started working on this, however, we found it made more sense to fully revamp the tech trees first and add the victory conditions after even though the tech trees are a monumental task that requires a lot more work.

As part of this work, we’ve implemented and balanced dozens of new weapons, ship modules and other technologies. We’ve also implemented the Synergies and Improvements tech tree, which contains small improvements on some weapons and bonus technologies for combining sets of two technologies from different tech trees. The new technologies need a fair amount of bug-fixing and testing before we can deploy them in a patch, but you can get a preview in this post and we expect the patch to land very soon as patch V0.9.2.0. Below are the finished tech trees. Note that there are a few placeholder technologies still to fill, some racial variants still to design, and room for more techs in the Sociology tree if we decide to add more:


The introduction of the fourth tech era means we had to rebalance the progression of technology research costs. Research costs now follow the curve below, with tech eras 1 and 2 requiring a bit less research to acquire and the technologies in era 3 and 4 rising more steeply to take into account the expansion rate of a growing empire. This era contains all of the advanced weapons and endgame technologies such as the Stellar Converter, Damper Field, Titan and Dread Star ship hulls, Phasors, Stasis Field and Temporal Shields.  Most of the technology arms race will happen in the third and fourth eras, when the game will really start to heat up as borders meet.

Head over to the official Predestination blog for more information that would not fit in this post

To put together the final tech trees, we needed to flesh out the number of weapons and modules available in the game in a way that introduces them periodically and makes them fairly easy to balance. To do this, we created five of each type of  Beam Weapon, Projectile Weapon, Bomb, Missile, Ship Drive, Sensor, Rifle, Shield, and Armour, and divided them into five broad tiers staggered evenly throughout the game’s four technology eras. Each technology’s tier was used when calculating its damage, power grid usage, hit points and other stats, and many of the tier 5 technologies are reserved for the Revenants or might be given by rare commanders and events. We put together a spreadsheet to figure out stats and settled on stats that resulted in clear progression (example section below):



Once we figured out stats and a progression model that worked on paper, we ran the numbers on a theoretical Frigate, Cruiser, Battleship, Titan, and Dreadnought ship of each tier and worked out how many shots each ship would have to fire at an identical ship in order to destroy it. According to our calculations, a balanced ship using 50% of its power grid for weapons and 50% for defenses should be able to survive an average of 5 full attacks from identical ships of the same size and tech level before it’s destroyed. Players may choose to add more weapons or more defenses as they see fit to modify this balance, and tactics will of course have a large impact on the outcome. This setup appears to be balanced on paper, and of course we’ll have to see what happens when it goes into testing and will pay close attention to your feedback.

In addition to each weapon tier having increased damage, many weapons have special effects that make them more unique. For example, the Graviton Beam has a chance of detonating unfired missiles and bombs on the enemy ship and the Phasor beam partially cuts through shields. We also use Improvements to add bonus effects to weapons and make the most advanced weapons even more powerful:

Head over to the official Predestination blog for more information that would not fit in this post

.



We’ve implemented the Synergies and Improvements system discussed in the previous dev update, which contains special bonus technologies that you can unlock depending on your choices in the four main trees. The left hand side of the new tech tree contains Improvement technologies (highlighted as light blue stars) which are simple improvements of existing tech. For example, if you research Laser Beam then you can select from the three improvements Heavy Laser Beam, Point Defense Laser Beam, and High-Focus Laser Beam. Creative races can pick multiple improvements, and you can trade for improvements you don’t have if another race picked it up.

The right hand side of the tree contains Synergies (highlighted as purple stars), which unlock only once you research both requirements. These are special bonuses gained by combining research in different fields together, such as combining the Mass Driver and Tritanium Armour technologies together to make armour-piercing mass drivers. Synergies are occasionally used to reward players for selecting a slightly underpowered choice in one of the main tech trees, and we’ve left a little room for more in there if we feel some technologies are underpowered later.

The final tech era in this tech tree contains the research path that leads to the scientific victory condition. This requires you to research four different technologies (one from the end of each of the tech trees) and then research a series of technologies that let you come up with a way to get back to the future and a battle plan to beat the Revenants. Once you have all of this in place, you can research the Scientific Victory to win the game. The actual victory condition will be activated in V0.9.3.0 but the technologies are going in now.

.



We developed a new animated slideshow system that will be used in the splash screen, start sequence, and victory screen. We’re starting off with just some logos on the splash screen in the next update, and we’ll add the storyline start sequence once we get a chance to put the artwork together for it. We’ll also be using this system on the Victory screen to tell a story of what happens after the game ends, which will depend on which victory condition you meet (Galactic Domination, Destroy the Revenants, Scientific Victory, Diplomatic Victory, and a fifth secret ending). The Credits screen was also developed this month, which will be finished off and activated when we get a chance to put together a list of all of our Kickstarter backers etc for credits. There are a lot of people to thank in there!



.

Bonus photo from Steven and Tina’s wedding:



.

Thanks to everyone who has supported Predestination so far, and a special thanks to those who have been recommending Predestination to 4X fans online who are looking for a game that follows in the spirit and design intent of classics like Master of Orion II. Patch V0.9.2.0 will be out soon with all of the new technologies, and victory conditions will be released shortly after.

— Brendan, Lead Developer

In our previous dev update, we added the Revenant faction and talked about Temporal Rifts that can open throughout the game and spit out Revenant ships to attack. This month we activated that feature and expanded on it with a whole series of new Temporal Rift events and and an entirely new Rift Investigation mechanic that spawns the rift inside fleet combat. As part of this system, we’ve re-activated the salvage gameplay on the Fleet Combat Victory Screen and added ship crew XP to this screen. We’ve also made a number of improvements and optimisations to the Galaxy generation code and galaxy graphics, and fixed a ton of bugs and crashes.

As expected, we lost some dev time recently due to boring but necessary parts of running a business such as putting together our corporation tax return and documentation for the British Film Institute to get the game accredited as a British video game. We also took a weekend out to attend the 2016 global game jam, which was a ton of fun! Now that we’re through all that, we’re ramping things up and moving on to develop victory conditions, the Revenant Planet event, the Synergies tech tree, and start on tech era 4. This will take us considerably closer to the big version 1.0 release, so we hope you like it and continue to follow our development this month.

Read on for a brief breakdown of what we’ve added since the last dev update. Head over to the official Predestination blog for a more detailed summary and a preview of the victory conditions and other features we’re currently working on




We’ve now implemented the salvage system and added in the crew XP system to this screen so you can see your ship captains and crew gaining XP and levelling up. When a ship or structure is blown up in fleet combat, it will be completely obliterated, disabled or shipwrecked. After each battle, the winner can salvage any ships that weren’t completely obliterated and can gain a number of things:

• Nothing (Common)
• Money (Common) – A fraction of the BC cost of the ship.
• Data Disk (Uncommon) – A data disk gives bonus research points.
• Technology (Rare) – A weapon or ship module can sometimes survive the battle in-tact.

Rift Investigation: When you send ships to investigate a rift, it now spawns a Fleet Combat scenario filled with asteroids, nebular gas, ion storms, and one central temporal rift. The rift will open within 2-3 full fleet combat rounds, giving you very little time to get your ships in place to deal with whatever comes through. You can hide ships in the nebular gas to cloak them, for example, or move your ships to surround the rift. Rift types are:

• Nothing – Nothing comes through.
• Asteroids (Common) – A few asteroids come through.
• Unexploded Mine (Common) – A space mine comes through and explodes.
• Salvage (Common) – Shipwrecks to salvage for money, research, and technologies.
• Commander (Uncommon) – An escape pof with a free Ship Captain or Planet Leader.
• Friendly Ships (Uncommon) – Free ships for your empire.
• Enemy Ships (Uncommon) – Ships belonging to another race in the game.
• Computer Virus (Uncommon) – Destroys research progress.
• Ancient Ruins (Rare) – Adds 2 ancient ruins to a planet.
• Temporal Freeze (Rare) – A planet is frozen in time for 10-20 turns.
• Temporal Acceleration (Rare) – A planet takes double turns for 10-20 turns!
• Temporal Bubble (Rare) – Fast-forwards a planet in time by 100,000 years. The Civilization is wiped out, but all cities on the planet to turn into clusters of ancient ruins.

In patch V0.9.0.6, we deployed a new planet balancing algorithm based on your feedback. Some players pointed out that stars could generate with illogical planet setups such as Red Giants with Ice planets right next to the star. We worked out a completely new map generation algorithm that will produce more realistic results and which has been designed with game balance in mind. Each planet type was given a habitability index for each race archetype (for example, Reptiles really like Desert planets), and that was used to work out balanced planet percentages. A spreadsheet with the new data and analysis can be found here. This will also allow us to work out different star probabilities for different galaxy ages in a future update while maintaining the game balance.



After overhauling planet distribution, we overhauled the galaxy map in V0.9.1.0 with a new galaxy generation algorithm that produces nicer maps. We’ve also improved the nebulas and reduced the brightness of the stellar gas, as we found it washed out the graphics a bit.

Head over to the official Predestination blog for a full listing of all the Galaxy changes.

In response to your feedback and some footage from let’s plays of Predestination, we tackled some problems with the Diplomacy AI in patch V0.9.0.6. The main change is that there is no longer any diminishing returns on diplomatic offers, as this often worked out to be quite confusing for people making offers in diplomacy. The scores the AI assigns to things like technologies and money have also been rebalanced, and the penalty for making an offensive offer have been reduced significantly as they were far too punishing. This is something we can potentially use in future for the harder difficulty modes.

Head over to the official Predestination blog for a full listing of all the Diplomacy AI changes.

A big thanks to everyone for reading this massive development update, and a special thanks to all of our new players who bought into the Early Access over the recent Steam sales, and everyone who has been putting in bug and crash reports and leaving reviews for the game on Steam. As always, please feel free to give us any feedback you have on this month’s dev update either here or on the Steam forum, or you can send your feedback directly to us in private by emailing it to brendan@brainandnerd.com

Cheers,

— Brendan, Lead Developer

In our previous dev update, we added the Revenant faction and talked about Temporal Rifts that can open throughout the game and spit out Revenant ships to attack. This month we activated that feature and expanded on it with a whole series of new Temporal Rift events and and an entirely new Rift Investigation mechanic that spawns the rift inside fleet combat. As part of this system, we’ve re-activated the salvage gameplay on the Fleet Combat Victory Screen and added ship crew XP to this screen. We’ve also made a number of improvements and optimisations to the Galaxy generation code and galaxy graphics, and fixed a ton of bugs and crashes.

As expected, we lost some dev time recently due to boring but necessary parts of running a business such as putting together our corporation tax return and documentation for the British Film Institute to get the game accredited as a British video game. We also took a weekend out to attend the 2016 global game jam, which was a ton of fun! Now that we’re through all that, we’re ramping things up and moving on to develop victory conditions, the Revenant Planet event, the Synergies tech tree, and start on tech era 4. This will take us considerably closer to the big version 1.0 release, so we hope you like it and continue to follow our development this month.

Read on for a brief breakdown of what we’ve added since the last dev update. Head over to the official Predestination blog for a more detailed summary and a preview of the victory conditions and other features we’re currently working on




We’ve now implemented the salvage system and added in the crew XP system to this screen so you can see your ship captains and crew gaining XP and levelling up. When a ship or structure is blown up in fleet combat, it will be completely obliterated, disabled or shipwrecked. After each battle, the winner can salvage any ships that weren’t completely obliterated and can gain a number of things:

• Nothing (Common)
• Money (Common) – A fraction of the BC cost of the ship.
• Data Disk (Uncommon) – A data disk gives bonus research points.
• Technology (Rare) – A weapon or ship module can sometimes survive the battle in-tact.

Rift Investigation: When you send ships to investigate a rift, it now spawns a Fleet Combat scenario filled with asteroids, nebular gas, ion storms, and one central temporal rift. The rift will open within 2-3 full fleet combat rounds, giving you very little time to get your ships in place to deal with whatever comes through. You can hide ships in the nebular gas to cloak them, for example, or move your ships to surround the rift. Rift types are:

• Nothing – Nothing comes through.
• Asteroids (Common) – A few asteroids come through.
• Unexploded Mine (Common) – A space mine comes through and explodes.
• Salvage (Common) – Shipwrecks to salvage for money, research, and technologies.
• Commander (Uncommon) – An escape pof with a free Ship Captain or Planet Leader.
• Friendly Ships (Uncommon) – Free ships for your empire.
• Enemy Ships (Uncommon) – Ships belonging to another race in the game.
• Computer Virus (Uncommon) – Destroys research progress.
• Ancient Ruins (Rare) – Adds 2 ancient ruins to a planet.
• Temporal Freeze (Rare) – A planet is frozen in time for 10-20 turns.
• Temporal Acceleration (Rare) – A planet takes double turns for 10-20 turns!
• Temporal Bubble (Rare) – Fast-forwards a planet in time by 100,000 years. The Civilization is wiped out, but all cities on the planet to turn into clusters of ancient ruins.

In patch V0.9.0.6, we deployed a new planet balancing algorithm based on your feedback. Some players pointed out that stars could generate with illogical planet setups such as Red Giants with Ice planets right next to the star. We worked out a completely new map generation algorithm that will produce more realistic results and which has been designed with game balance in mind. Each planet type was given a habitability index for each race archetype (for example, Reptiles really like Desert planets), and that was used to work out balanced planet percentages. A spreadsheet with the new data and analysis can be found here. This will also allow us to work out different star probabilities for different galaxy ages in a future update while maintaining the game balance.



After overhauling planet distribution, we overhauled the galaxy map in V0.9.1.0 with a new galaxy generation algorithm that produces nicer maps. We’ve also improved the nebulas and reduced the brightness of the stellar gas, as we found it washed out the graphics a bit.

Head over to the official Predestination blog for a full listing of all the Galaxy changes.

In response to your feedback and some footage from let’s plays of Predestination, we tackled some problems with the Diplomacy AI in patch V0.9.0.6. The main change is that there is no longer any diminishing returns on diplomatic offers, as this often worked out to be quite confusing for people making offers in diplomacy. The scores the AI assigns to things like technologies and money have also been rebalanced, and the penalty for making an offensive offer have been reduced significantly as they were far too punishing. This is something we can potentially use in future for the harder difficulty modes.

Head over to the official Predestination blog for a full listing of all the Diplomacy AI changes.

A big thanks to everyone for reading this massive development update, and a special thanks to all of our new players who bought into the Early Access over the recent Steam sales, and everyone who has been putting in bug and crash reports and leaving reviews for the game on Steam. As always, please feel free to give us any feedback you have on this month’s dev update either here or on the Steam forum, or you can send your feedback directly to us in private by emailing it to brendan@brainandnerd.com

Cheers,

— Brendan, Lead Developer

It’s been a busy month of work on Predestination! We’ve fixed dozens of bugs and crashes since releasing the tutorial, and have been working hard on our last remaining big features before launch. We’re now at Version 0.9.0.0 and making solid regular progress toward release. This month we developed some big core features like the evil Revenant race, temporal rifts that appear throughout the game and spit out ships, and of course the first release of our building models. We’ve also revamped the Space Exploration era technology trees, added several new ship modules and weapons, implemented warp-capable missiles and customisable probes, and laid the ground work for fully customisable player-designed space stations.

Head over to the full dev update post on our official website for a detailed breakdown of this month’s biggest developments on Predestination, or read on for a brief summary and some screenshots of this month's work.

Throughout the game, new temporal rifts will continue to open and deposit more ships, debris, and technology from the battle with the Revenants into your galaxy. If you’re lucky, they will deposit working ships belonging to your race, pieces of advanced technology, or escape pods containing legendary ship captains. If you’re not so lucky, enemy ships could emerge or even a few of the Revenants themselves, who will head to the nearest planet and attack.

Rifts will begin to appear in the Space Exploration era and can only be seen when they’re in sensor range of your colonies. If you have the Astonomical Survey technology, you’ll be able to detect a temporal rift a few turns before it opens, giving you the opportunity to send your own ships to investigate. Whoever has ships at a rift when it opens will investigate it abd get all of the rewards from it, but also shoulders all of the risk. This feature has been completed, but has been temporarily disabled while we test balance and add some more positive outcomes for investigating rifts. We expect to re-activate it in about a week.



We have added the Revenants as a race in the game along with a series of Revenant-only technologies. Once we enable the temporal rifts feature, fleets of powerful Revenant ships will sometimes emerge and attack the nearest habitable planet. If that happens to be your planet, you’ll get a transmission from the Revenants warning that they’re coming to destroy you. We decided to preserve the mystery of the revenants by keeping them as shadowy figures, and their background graphics are filled with lightning and obscured by static and darkness.


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One of the questions we get asked most frequently is when the building models will be added. We’ve been using coloured hexes (like the one in the center of the screenshot below) as placeholders to represent our buildings for most of development while our 3D modeler and art director have been getting the models made. While we haven’t completed all of the buildings yet, we decided to release those that we’ve already finished in order to collect feedback as early as possible. Some important buildings like the Factory, Metal Silo and Research lab are being finished off as I write this, and we’ll be deploying each new model as it’s finished.


.
With the addition of the new weapons in this patch, we streamlined the Ground Cannon, Missile Base and Fighter Garrison buildings to always use your best available weapons. Below is a screnshot of a military city with a Class II City Shield, missile bases, ground cannons, a fighter garrison and a lot of energy batteries to power them all.


.
One of the big tactical weapons we had originally designed for Predestination was a series of warp-capable missiles that can fly to an enemy planet and bombard it if the planet is unprotected. We have now implemented this in a more friendly way by adding the “Warp Missile” hull in the 3D ship designer so that players can now design their own warp-capable missiles. Each missile can carry up to 50MW of weaponry and are limited to using only bombs, and they die immediately on bombing an enemy planet. Warp Missiles cost money and metal to build but don’t take up any command points so there’s no limit to how many you can stockpile. You can also design unmanned probes for exploration.


.
We added a series of new weapons and technologies to the game with this update, which is too long to go into in this announcement. Head over to the full blog post on our official website for a full run-down of the new tech.
.
We plan to add player-designed starbases in the near future, so to prepare for this we’ve revamped the Construction tech tree. We've replaced the specialised Shipyard Starbase, Mining Starbase and Research Starbase with a series of starbase bay modules that can only be added to starbases.

You shouldn’t notice much of a difference in gameplay, but under the hood it’s all working differently. All of the stats that used to be part of the starbase’s building are now provided by separate modules, which means we can introduce player-designed starbases pretty easily in a future update. Head over to the full blog post on our official website for a full rundown of the new starbase modules.
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I'd like to give a huge thanks to everyone for reading this development update, and as usual please do give us your feedback on everything here and feedback from playing Version 0.9.0.0, which is now live on Steam Early Access. We’ve promised to take a few days off over the holidays to relax, but we still plan to release minor patches to add new building models and fix any bugs that pop up. We’ll be keeping a close eye on the crash reports, so please keep sending those in! Development will ramp up yet again as we head into the new year, and 2016 will be the year of Predestination!

— Brendan, Lead Developer

It’s been a busy month of work on Predestination! We’ve fixed dozens of bugs and crashes since releasing the tutorial, and have been working hard on our last remaining big features before launch. We’re now at Version 0.9.0.0 and making solid regular progress toward release. This month we developed some big core features like the evil Revenant race, temporal rifts that appear throughout the game and spit out ships, and of course the first release of our building models. We’ve also revamped the Space Exploration era technology trees, added several new ship modules and weapons, implemented warp-capable missiles and customisable probes, and laid the ground work for fully customisable player-designed space stations.

Head over to the full dev update post on our official website for a detailed breakdown of this month’s biggest developments on Predestination, or read on for a brief summary and some screenshots of this month's work.

Throughout the game, new temporal rifts will continue to open and deposit more ships, debris, and technology from the battle with the Revenants into your galaxy. If you’re lucky, they will deposit working ships belonging to your race, pieces of advanced technology, or escape pods containing legendary ship captains. If you’re not so lucky, enemy ships could emerge or even a few of the Revenants themselves, who will head to the nearest planet and attack.

Rifts will begin to appear in the Space Exploration era and can only be seen when they’re in sensor range of your colonies. If you have the Astonomical Survey technology, you’ll be able to detect a temporal rift a few turns before it opens, giving you the opportunity to send your own ships to investigate. Whoever has ships at a rift when it opens will investigate it abd get all of the rewards from it, but also shoulders all of the risk. This feature has been completed, but has been temporarily disabled while we test balance and add some more positive outcomes for investigating rifts. We expect to re-activate it in about a week.



We have added the Revenants as a race in the game along with a series of Revenant-only technologies. Once we enable the temporal rifts feature, fleets of powerful Revenant ships will sometimes emerge and attack the nearest habitable planet. If that happens to be your planet, you’ll get a transmission from the Revenants warning that they’re coming to destroy you. We decided to preserve the mystery of the revenants by keeping them as shadowy figures, and their background graphics are filled with lightning and obscured by static and darkness.


.
One of the questions we get asked most frequently is when the building models will be added. We’ve been using coloured hexes (like the one in the center of the screenshot below) as placeholders to represent our buildings for most of development while our 3D modeler and art director have been getting the models made. While we haven’t completed all of the buildings yet, we decided to release those that we’ve already finished in order to collect feedback as early as possible. Some important buildings like the Factory, Metal Silo and Research lab are being finished off as I write this, and we’ll be deploying each new model as it’s finished.


.
With the addition of the new weapons in this patch, we streamlined the Ground Cannon, Missile Base and Fighter Garrison buildings to always use your best available weapons. Below is a screnshot of a military city with a Class II City Shield, missile bases, ground cannons, a fighter garrison and a lot of energy batteries to power them all.


.
One of the big tactical weapons we had originally designed for Predestination was a series of warp-capable missiles that can fly to an enemy planet and bombard it if the planet is unprotected. We have now implemented this in a more friendly way by adding the “Warp Missile” hull in the 3D ship designer so that players can now design their own warp-capable missiles. Each missile can carry up to 50MW of weaponry and are limited to using only bombs, and they die immediately on bombing an enemy planet. Warp Missiles cost money and metal to build but don’t take up any command points so there’s no limit to how many you can stockpile. You can also design unmanned probes for exploration.


.
We added a series of new weapons and technologies to the game with this update, which is too long to go into in this announcement. Head over to the full blog post on our official website for a full run-down of the new tech.
.
We plan to add player-designed starbases in the near future, so to prepare for this we’ve revamped the Construction tech tree. We've replaced the specialised Shipyard Starbase, Mining Starbase and Research Starbase with a series of starbase bay modules that can only be added to starbases.

You shouldn’t notice much of a difference in gameplay, but under the hood it’s all working differently. All of the stats that used to be part of the starbase’s building are now provided by separate modules, which means we can introduce player-designed starbases pretty easily in a future update. Head over to the full blog post on our official website for a full rundown of the new starbase modules.
.

I'd like to give a huge thanks to everyone for reading this development update, and as usual please do give us your feedback on everything here and feedback from playing Version 0.9.0.0, which is now live on Steam Early Access. We’ve promised to take a few days off over the holidays to relax, but we still plan to release minor patches to add new building models and fix any bugs that pop up. We’ll be keeping a close eye on the crash reports, so please keep sending those in! Development will ramp up yet again as we head into the new year, and 2016 will be the year of Predestination!

— Brendan, Lead Developer

This patch modifies the tax and economy systems to make it easier to generate money in a way that mirrors your empire's design. All empires now start with 20 BC per turn by default, and can now tax their citizens and industry separately. The Tax window has been expanded and two sliders let you modify the citizen tax rate (as a % of GDP) and the industry tax rate (as % of metal production). The system has been designed so that you can colonise your entire homeworld with zero tax, but by the time you have a few planets you'll need to settle on a money-making strategy. As always, the numbers are subject to balancing.

This patch also contains a new Music Jingle system that lets us made the music to play short jingles. We've added jingles to a few events and to completing research, and to hear them you have to have the music enabled. The patch also fixes a number of stubborn bugs that had been accumulating in the code over the past few months of feature updates.
Note: Old save games will not work with the new version.

Tax System & Economy Iteration:

• Morale is now capped at 100%. Bonus morale above this is now wasted instead of giving a bonus to metal production.
  
• Morale has been fully decoupled from metal production.
  
• The Tax Window has had a new Slider added for Tax Industry that diverts a percentage of your metal production empire-wide into producing money. Money produced is 1BC per 10 metal/turn and the slider is a percentage from 0% to 100%.
  
• Each city now has a GDP rating based on the following formula: (Population/1000) * 6 BC/turn. +25% for shipyard, +50% for comemrce station, -x% for security below 100%
  
• Tax from population has been changed to a percentage of each planet's "GDP" from 0% to 100%.
  
• Morale decrease from tax rate is now the percentage of the planet's GDP that is being taxed.
  
• The Tax Office is a one per city building that generates +25% GDP in the city but -5% morale.
  
• Entertainment Centre is a building that generates +5% planetary morale.
  
• A city's GDP is now displayed in its stats window along with how much of that is being taxed.
  
• Every race now starts with +20 BC per turn base finances to work with before tax. This gives plenty of money until you get to multiple planets, at which point you'll need to have figured out a way to make money (taxing population, taxing industry, farming energy markets etc).
  
  Other Changes:
  
• Science Station RP bonus reduced from 20 to 12, as it is effected by the research bonus
  
• Increased the cost of Survey Probes by 250 metal and 25 money.
  
• Morale is now capped at 100% on all planets.
  
• The AI will now build scout ships and survey probes if required before building a colony ship
  
• The AI will no longer queue up loads of combat ships. It will now build a maximum of 1 warship at a time.
  
• The Capitol City now starts with 2 research labs (increased from 1), a Tier 1 Food Processor (if available), 2 energy batteries and 8 metal silos.
  
• Homeworlds now start out with a slightly larger area pre-scanned and starting resources spread out a little.
  
• The area around the first colony on the homeworld is now forcibly set to to the owner's native habitat so you can access all the starting resources even if there visually appear to be other environments there.
  
• Robotic race AI now start with the Science Vessel instead of a colony ship as they only colonise 100% scanned planets and this delays them a bit.
  
• Increased the speed of the basic Orbital Scanner module from 50 hexes per turn to 100 hexes per turn.
  
• Nebulae are 1/3 smaller on 2D maps now to accomodate the fact they're always plane-aligned
  
• On small and tiny maps, the game will sometimes be unable to place some strategic resources. Rather than stalling or accidentally overwriting a home system (leading to a crash), the game will now start without that resource if it can't find a viable star to place it at after several attempts.
  
• Changed number of stars per map size (Tiny: 32, Small: 64, Medium: 96, Large: 128, Huge: 156
  
• Tweaked starmap plane size and nebula size based on map size.
  
• AI races that aren't creative now select only one path through the tech tree at random.
  
• When starting a game in the Space Exploration era and you aren't creative, a path through the tech tree is chosen for you at random.
  
• Added a music jingle system that fades the music out temporarily and plays a short musical jingle for various events.
  
• Implemented jingles for some random events, discovery events, and research complete events.
  
  Bug fixes:
  For full list of bug fixes, see the development tracker thread.
  
  Cheers,
  -- Brendan, Lead Developer

This patch modifies the tax and economy systems to make it easier to generate money in a way that mirrors your empire's design. All empires now start with 20 BC per turn by default, and can now tax their citizens and industry separately. The Tax window has been expanded and two sliders let you modify the citizen tax rate (as a % of GDP) and the industry tax rate (as % of metal production). The system has been designed so that you can colonise your entire homeworld with zero tax, but by the time you have a few planets you'll need to settle on a money-making strategy. As always, the numbers are subject to balancing.

This patch also contains a new Music Jingle system that lets us made the music to play short jingles. We've added jingles to a few events and to completing research, and to hear them you have to have the music enabled. The patch also fixes a number of stubborn bugs that had been accumulating in the code over the past few months of feature updates.
Note: Old save games will not work with the new version.

Tax System & Economy Iteration:

• Morale is now capped at 100%. Bonus morale above this is now wasted instead of giving a bonus to metal production.
  
• Morale has been fully decoupled from metal production.
  
• The Tax Window has had a new Slider added for Tax Industry that diverts a percentage of your metal production empire-wide into producing money. Money produced is 1BC per 10 metal/turn and the slider is a percentage from 0% to 100%.
  
• Each city now has a GDP rating based on the following formula: (Population/1000) * 6 BC/turn. +25% for shipyard, +50% for comemrce station, -x% for security below 100%
  
• Tax from population has been changed to a percentage of each planet's "GDP" from 0% to 100%.
  
• Morale decrease from tax rate is now the percentage of the planet's GDP that is being taxed.
  
• The Tax Office is a one per city building that generates +25% GDP in the city but -5% morale.
  
• Entertainment Centre is a building that generates +5% planetary morale.
  
• A city's GDP is now displayed in its stats window along with how much of that is being taxed.
  
• Every race now starts with +20 BC per turn base finances to work with before tax. This gives plenty of money until you get to multiple planets, at which point you'll need to have figured out a way to make money (taxing population, taxing industry, farming energy markets etc).
  
  Other Changes:
  
• Science Station RP bonus reduced from 20 to 12, as it is effected by the research bonus
  
• Increased the cost of Survey Probes by 250 metal and 25 money.
  
• Morale is now capped at 100% on all planets.
  
• The AI will now build scout ships and survey probes if required before building a colony ship
  
• The AI will no longer queue up loads of combat ships. It will now build a maximum of 1 warship at a time.
  
• The Capitol City now starts with 2 research labs (increased from 1), a Tier 1 Food Processor (if available), 2 energy batteries and 8 metal silos.
  
• Homeworlds now start out with a slightly larger area pre-scanned and starting resources spread out a little.
  
• The area around the first colony on the homeworld is now forcibly set to to the owner's native habitat so you can access all the starting resources even if there visually appear to be other environments there.
  
• Robotic race AI now start with the Science Vessel instead of a colony ship as they only colonise 100% scanned planets and this delays them a bit.
  
• Increased the speed of the basic Orbital Scanner module from 50 hexes per turn to 100 hexes per turn.
  
• Nebulae are 1/3 smaller on 2D maps now to accomodate the fact they're always plane-aligned
  
• On small and tiny maps, the game will sometimes be unable to place some strategic resources. Rather than stalling or accidentally overwriting a home system (leading to a crash), the game will now start without that resource if it can't find a viable star to place it at after several attempts.
  
• Changed number of stars per map size (Tiny: 32, Small: 64, Medium: 96, Large: 128, Huge: 156
  
• Tweaked starmap plane size and nebula size based on map size.
  
• AI races that aren't creative now select only one path through the tech tree at random.
  
• When starting a game in the Space Exploration era and you aren't creative, a path through the tech tree is chosen for you at random.
  
• Added a music jingle system that fades the music out temporarily and plays a short musical jingle for various events.
  
• Implemented jingles for some random events, discovery events, and research complete events.
  
  Bug fixes:
  For full list of bug fixes, see the development tracker thread.
  
  Cheers,
  -- Brendan, Lead Developer