Dear Survivors,

Maintenance has been extended by 2 hours and it's going to finish at 01:00pm CET.
We are really sorry for the inconvenience.

KInd Regards,
CSN:Z Team
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Survivors,

We are going to perform a server maintenance on 17.02.2016 from 07:00am to 01:00pm CET (10:00pm - 04:00am Pacific Time).

During the maintenance we will patch the game client and servers.

Kind Regards,
CSN:Z Team

Dear Survivors,

Maintenance has been extended by 2 hours and it's going to finish at 01:00pm CET.
We are really sorry for the inconvenience.

KInd Regards,
CSN:Z Team
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Survivors,

We are going to perform a server maintenance on 17.02.2016 from 07:00am to 01:00pm CET (10:00pm - 04:00am Pacific Time).

During the maintenance we will patch the game client and servers.

Kind Regards,
CSN:Z Team

Hi everyone,

1.06 is now live on Steam! Full patch notes can be found right here:
http://steamcommunity.com/games/317820/announcements/detail/652263570707205619

I'd love to hear what you think of the revamped Battle Scars system. Does it make each dungeoneer just that little bit different, adding to their story before they inevitably join your graveyard? I hope so!

I've opened another thread for feedback here:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/317820/discussions/0/405691491128288509/

What's next? We are hard at work on Trophy Trial, which we showed at PAX South a few weeks ago for the first time. It's playable and we're now working on all the fun systems that go alongside it (leaderboards, daily challenge, etc etc). We're also making great progress on our phone & tablet version of the game - more news on that when we have some!

If you are into behind-the-scenes info on how the game was made you may enjoy reading some of the devlog thread I kept on TIGSource for the last couple of years. I've just added a big section on our launch & how we fared with streamers:
https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=36421.msg1214774#msg1214774

Finally a MASSIVE thank you for supporting our small team and our quirky little game!
Colm

Hi everyone,

1.06 is now live on Steam! Full patch notes can be found right here:
http://steamcommunity.com/games/317820/announcements/detail/652263570707205619

I'd love to hear what you think of the revamped Battle Scars system. Does it make each dungeoneer just that little bit different, adding to their story before they inevitably join your graveyard? I hope so!

I've opened another thread for feedback here:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/317820/discussions/0/405691491128288509/

What's next? We are hard at work on Trophy Trial, which we showed at PAX South a few weeks ago for the first time. It's playable and we're now working on all the fun systems that go alongside it (leaderboards, daily challenge, etc etc). We're also making great progress on our phone & tablet version of the game - more news on that when we have some!

If you are into behind-the-scenes info on how the game was made you may enjoy reading some of the devlog thread I kept on TIGSource for the last couple of years. I've just added a big section on our launch & how we fared with streamers:
https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=36421.msg1214774#msg1214774

Finally a MASSIVE thank you for supporting our small team and our quirky little game!
Colm

This Valentine's, we’ve wined, dined, and refined Hexels 2. The 2.03 update brings a few fixes for crashes, a failure to install (on Steam), and resolves a bug causing data loss. The complete list of changes is listed below!

New Features:

• Shift-click 'Add Next Key Cel' to add a blank key cel
  
• Improved Hexels-to-Trixels conversion

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed crash bug on Mac when file names contain special characters
  
• Fixed data loss bug caused when deleting a selection
  
• Fixed bugs with the frame count text box
  
• Fixed possible crash with custom shape and image layers
  
• Shape mode-specific scripts will only run in the proper shape mode
  
• Added better support for foreign characters
  
• Fixed various issues with Super Grid
  
• Fixed issue where the Custom Shape preview didn’t always update
  
• Fixed stray outlines in classic mode when Wrapped Canvas and Hafltone are enabled
  
• Timeline should no longer encroach on the main window
  
• Fixed bug with loading image layers
  
• Improved onion skinning when halftone mode is turned on
  
• Gradient and noise tools are now affected by Super Grid
  
• Sub-divide scripts now retain zoom level and saves previous shape-type to the Super Grid when converting from Hexels (or an old Trixels document)

This Valentine's, we’ve wined, dined, and refined Hexels 2. The 2.03 update brings a few fixes for crashes, a failure to install (on Steam), and resolves a bug causing data loss. The complete list of changes is listed below!

New Features:

• Shift-click 'Add Next Key Cel' to add a blank key cel
  
• Improved Hexels-to-Trixels conversion

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed crash bug on Mac when file names contain special characters
  
• Fixed data loss bug caused when deleting a selection
  
• Fixed bugs with the frame count text box
  
• Fixed possible crash with custom shape and image layers
  
• Shape mode-specific scripts will only run in the proper shape mode
  
• Added better support for foreign characters
  
• Fixed various issues with Super Grid
  
• Fixed issue where the Custom Shape preview didn’t always update
  
• Fixed stray outlines in classic mode when Wrapped Canvas and Hafltone are enabled
  
• Timeline should no longer encroach on the main window
  
• Fixed bug with loading image layers
  
• Improved onion skinning when halftone mode is turned on
  
• Gradient and noise tools are now affected by Super Grid
  
• Sub-divide scripts now retain zoom level and saves previous shape-type to the Super Grid when converting from Hexels (or an old Trixels document)

IRVINE, Calif. and STOCKHOLM — Feb. 16, 2016 — Obsidian Entertainment and Paradox Interactive today released the second part of their expansion to Pillars of Eternity, the award-winning title backed by dedicated fans of classic role-playing games (RPGs). The second part of the expansion, titled The White March – Part 2, concludes the epic story of Pillars of Eternity, and brings closure to one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns of all time. With both parts of the expansion now released, Obsidian Entertainment has completed their record-setting crowdfunding campaign alongside backers who pledged millions of dollars to create the award-winning title. The White March – Part 2 is available today on Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs from digital retailers everywhere.

See what awaits players at the end of their journey with a launch trailer for The White March – Part 2:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBiH30qcUDE


“We launched the Kickstarter campaign for what we were calling ‘Project Eternity’ three and a half years ago. It’s surreal to think about just how much this game has meant to us at Obsidian, and how much it’s changed us as a developer,” said Feargus Urquhart, CEO of Obsidian Entertainment. “Working so closely with our backer community was a major part of the process, and helped us understand precisely what our fans wanted. Now, with Pillars of Eternity winning awards and standing as one of the biggest RPG releases of 2015, I’m proud to say we fulfilled our promise to our backers, and then some. Best of all, we’ve got plenty more stories we plan to tell within the world of Pillars of Eternity.”

Pillars of Eternity, created by industry veterans also known for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, Fallout: New Vegas, and South Park: The Stick of Truth, is an RPG inspired by classic titles such as Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, and Planescape: Torment. Created thanks to over 75,000 crowdfunding backers, Pillars of Eternity has sold over 700,000 units, was released to critical acclaim in March 2015, and is among Metacritic’s 10 Best PC Games of 2015.

Pick up your copy here:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/373740/

IRVINE, Calif. and STOCKHOLM — Feb. 16, 2016 — Obsidian Entertainment and Paradox Interactive today released the second part of their expansion to Pillars of Eternity, the award-winning title backed by dedicated fans of classic role-playing games (RPGs). The second part of the expansion, titled The White March – Part 2, concludes the epic story of Pillars of Eternity, and brings closure to one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns of all time. With both parts of the expansion now released, Obsidian Entertainment has completed their record-setting crowdfunding campaign alongside backers who pledged millions of dollars to create the award-winning title. The White March – Part 2 is available today on Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs from digital retailers everywhere.

See what awaits players at the end of their journey with a launch trailer for The White March – Part 2:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBiH30qcUDE


“We launched the Kickstarter campaign for what we were calling ‘Project Eternity’ three and a half years ago. It’s surreal to think about just how much this game has meant to us at Obsidian, and how much it’s changed us as a developer,” said Feargus Urquhart, CEO of Obsidian Entertainment. “Working so closely with our backer community was a major part of the process, and helped us understand precisely what our fans wanted. Now, with Pillars of Eternity winning awards and standing as one of the biggest RPG releases of 2015, I’m proud to say we fulfilled our promise to our backers, and then some. Best of all, we’ve got plenty more stories we plan to tell within the world of Pillars of Eternity.”

Pillars of Eternity, created by industry veterans also known for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, Fallout: New Vegas, and South Park: The Stick of Truth, is an RPG inspired by classic titles such as Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, and Planescape: Torment. Created thanks to over 75,000 crowdfunding backers, Pillars of Eternity has sold over 700,000 units, was released to critical acclaim in March 2015, and is among Metacritic’s 10 Best PC Games of 2015.

Pick up your copy here:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/373740/

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