Great new features coming in the Holiday Update!

EMERGENCY Land is getting ready for Winter! The weather forecast predicts snow and everyone is getting the decorations ready.

In the biggest update yet, your EMERGENCY Headquarters will be redecorated and there's lots to do. After all snow and ice pose new challenges.

But your EMERGENCY rescue team is prepared for everything!

Celebrate the winter holiday season with us and lots of new content! The Update will not only bring snow and new decorations. More will be added than in any other expansion before!

EMERGENCY HQ is our free2play mobile game, already available on iPhone, iPad and Android devices.

Download now:

Apple App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/emergency-hq/id859148736

Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sgs.emhq.android

Great new features coming in the Holiday Update!

EMERGENCY Land is getting ready for Winter! The weather forecast predicts snow and everyone is getting the decorations ready.

In the biggest update yet, your EMERGENCY Headquarters will be redecorated and there's lots to do. After all snow and ice pose new challenges.

But your EMERGENCY rescue team is prepared for everything!

Celebrate the winter holiday season with us and lots of new content! The Update will not only bring snow and new decorations. More will be added than in any other expansion before!

EMERGENCY HQ is our free2play mobile game, already available on iPhone, iPad and Android devices.

Download now:

Apple App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/emergency-hq/id859148736

Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sgs.emhq.android

Great new features coming in the Holiday Update!

EMERGENCY Land is getting ready for Winter! The weather forecast predicts snow and everyone is getting the decorations ready.

In the biggest update yet, your EMERGENCY Headquarters will be redecorated and there's lots to do. After all snow and ice pose new challenges.

But your EMERGENCY rescue team is prepared for everything!

Celebrate the winter holiday season with us and lots of new content! The Update will not only bring snow and new decorations. More will be added than in any other expansion before!

EMERGENCY HQ is our free2play mobile game, already available on iPhone, iPad and Android devices.

Download now:

Apple App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/emergency-hq/id859148736

Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sgs.emhq.android

Great new features coming in the Holiday Update!

EMERGENCY Land is getting ready for Winter! The weather forecast predicts snow and everyone is getting the decorations ready.

In the biggest update yet, your EMERGENCY Headquarters will be redecorated and there's lots to do. After all snow and ice pose new challenges.

But your EMERGENCY rescue team is prepared for everything!

Celebrate the winter holiday season with us and lots of new content! The Update will not only bring snow and new decorations. More will be added than in any other expansion before!

EMERGENCY HQ is our free2play mobile game, already available on iPhone, iPad and Android devices.

Download now:

Apple App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/emergency-hq/id859148736

Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sgs.emhq.android

We shared a lot of our plans for the future in our previous blog, and received a large amount of feedback. Most of it was positive, but there were also some critical notes that are good to keep track of. We'd like to thank you for your efforts and encourage you to keep voicing your opinion! We cannot respond to every single comment, but we do read pretty much everything and we keep them in our mind when making decisions.

Most of the time, I start blogs by summarizing what we've done in the past week, and end them with lots of rambling about diverse subjects. This week, we've spent a lot of time dealing with edge cases, and I'd like to start out by rambling about edge cases in general. Edge cases are problems that arise when something is used in a way that it wasn't intended to be used.

Edge cases in programming are often complex and hard to explain, so I'd like to use a clearer example: race tracks. The basics of a race track are pretty simple. I'm thinking of something like the Top Gear Test Track. Put some tarmac in a field and you're done. If you've got the land and the materials, you could probably build a fun race track and use it with your friends within a week.


I've been thinking about using race tracks as an example for a long time, but had a hard time finding decent images. The new Hitman game perfectly suits my needs in regards to visualizing race tracks!

Okay, so you've built your simple race track and had a fun weekend racing on it with friends. It didn't take a lot of effort. Now you want to host some more serious races and invite spectators. Your friends didn't need to prepare their cars, they drove safely, and they brought their own food and water.

But as you scale up, these things cannot be guaranteed anymore. You need to build pit lanes and garages, and you need to prepare for crashes. You need to build run-off zones, track walls and safe barriers. You need first aiders and firemen.

Spectators bring their own problems. They need places to park. You've got to build stands, and you've got to prevent your spectators from entering them for free. You need security and pay desks, toilets and food stands.



A Formula 1 race only lasts roughly 90 minutes. Most of them don't involve serious crashes. If people didn't crash and if everybody prepared well and perfectly followed the rules, it could've been a very simple event. But that's not how human beings operate, certainly not large groups of them. They do crash. They don't pay if they don't have to. They don't care about the rules. You need to provide them with toilets and food and water. So you have to image and prevent hundreds of edge cases.

That's why hosting a single F1 race costs tens of millions of dollars. Every event is staffed by roughly 150 security officials and 130 medics and doctors. Providing cars with some tarmac is the core of the event, but it is only a very small part of the problems that have to be solved to run a serious event. It's the edge cases that swallow up time and money.


The basics of the happiness system are simple. Certain items should be consumed by colonists and provide happiness. But when actually developing this feature, we ran into a large amount of problems.

• Currently, food is consumed automatically. If certain happiness items are also food items, players will be able to control the diet of their colonists, and provide them with more or less calories. How do we prevent players from 'overfeeding' their colonists? (Solution: food is a separate category with a slider for "total calories")
  
• How do we deal with starvation? Where's the line between "not enough food = unhappiness" and "barely any food = death"?
  
• What if a diet is equally divided between four types but three of them run out? Do colonists consume more of the available food type?
  
• How does Siege Mode work in the new system? (Solution: it's changed entirely and will generate large amounts of unhappiness instead of increasing food consumption)
  
• What if a colonist cannot reach a grocer's shop for his daily "happiness package", including food? Currently, food is instantly teleported into their bellies, so starvation only occurred if there was no food in the stockpile. It should happen for isolated colonists as well now.
  
• Realistically, a colonist that has had double/triple rations for a while should be more resistant to starvation. Does that happen in-game? (Solution: probably not)

These are the kinds of edge cases we're thinking of and trying to solve with good design choices. Individually, they're not very significant problems, but all these cases combined can easily fill a workweek.


Very much work-in-progress

I'd like to end with some relevant quotes from On War, a book from 1832 written by general Von Clausewitz. I am not trying to imply that organizing a Formula 1 race or developing a game is as difficult as war, but he does describe perfectly how things that are theoretically easy are often difficult in practice.

"As long as we have no personal knowledge of War, we cannot conceive where those difficulties lie of which so much is said, and what that genius and those extraordinary mental powers required in a General have really to do. All appears so simple, all the requisite branches of knowledge appear so plain, all the combinations so unimportant, that in comparison with them the easiest problem in higher mathematics impresses us with a certain scientific dignity. But if we have seen War, all becomes intelligible; and still, after all, it is extremely difficult to describe what it is which brings about this change, to specify this invisible and completely efficient factor.

Everything is very simple in War, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction which no man can imagine exactly who has not seen War.

Activity in War is movement in a resistant medium. Just as a man immersed in water is unable to perform with ease and regularity the most natural and simplest movement, that of walking, so in War, with ordinary powers, one cannot keep even the line of mediocrity. This is the reason that the correct theorist is like a swimming master, who teaches on dry land movements which are required in the water, which must appear grotesque and ludicrous to those who forget about the water. This is also why theorists, who have never plunged in themselves, or who cannot deduce any generalities from their experience, are unpractical and even absurd, because they only teach what every one knows—how to walk.

It is therefore this friction, or what is so termed here, which makes that which appears easy in War difficult in reality. As we proceed, we shall often meet with this subject again, and it will hereafter become plain that besides experience and a strong will, there are still many other rare qualities of the mind required to make a man a consummate General."

Bedankt voor het lezen!

Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Who: Rebecca is joined by the usual suspects Geoff, Steve, Sheldon, and Scott!

What: Devstream #119 brings you a mysterious new silhouette… could it be the next Warframe!? Join us as we talk about the Fortuna launch on PC and what’s coming in Part II! We’ll also go over our Console release plans for all things Fortuna!

Prizes? Why yes, we will be giving away 3 x 1000 Platinum Prizes during the Livestream as well as a Chroma Prime Access Pack and Prime Vault Packs! And.. what’s this? 2x Nintendo Switches to giveaway!?

Where: Find us at: twitch.tv/Warframe

When: Today, November 16th, at 2 p.m. ET!
See you there, Tenno!

Our second update for Elemental War is arriving today and we have some cool stuff in it.


Version 0.9.2 contains two big new features and several smaller ones that will improve gameplay. The highlights will focus on the big ones, see the full changelog at the bottom for the rest.


In Hero Mode you will now have at least one special event per environment. Swamp and Grassland already got two. The events can be both positive and negative for the player and will add some more variety.

Such special events can be everything. For example in grassland a Griffon can fly across the map and catch any monster as its prey and fly away with it. In swamp enemies can get stuck for a short time randomly.

So there are already 8 of them implemented and we have some more ideas. If you also have ideas or opinions about this feature, let us know in our discussions.


We already announced it a few weeks ago, now the first step is done. In 0.9.2 you can found an own alliance or join an existing one. So far you just can browse your alliance members, color your own name and as alliance admin the one of the alliance and see the alliance name in the leaderboard for your scores and those of other alliance members.
This is the base for the upcoming alliance features because 0.9.3 will then introduce the alliance challenges that will allow you to challenge other alliances (obvious, isn't it?). Such a challenge will be e.g. to reach the highest score in a specified time frame in a specified game configuration (game mode, difficulty, random or chosen elements, map). You will also be able to buy modifiers to make the challenge more difficult for your opponent.

So stay tuned, this will become a really nice addition and you can already prepare for the challenges by founding and joining alliances and group up with your friends.


Enhancements:

• introduced new statistic: Solved Quests
  
• build menu isn't closed anymore when building tower while Left Shift is pressed
  
• tower upgrades now show a difference to the current tower for damage, range, attack speed and damage per second
  
• culture info now is configurable
  
• normal maps now are also unlocked for Hero Mode, random generated maps for Classic and Survival Mode
  
• added possibility to directly restart a game without needing to go back to main menu
  
• added dices on Gambling tower showing the bonus damage
  
• introduced profile page
  
• added alliance system: you now can found and join alliances and get the alliance tag added to your leaderboard entries
  
• added first special events in Hero Mode
  
• it is visible now that post processing settings are disabled when post processing itself is disabled
  
• unlocked a new quest
  
• in the profile you can now select your country to filter leaderboards for this country and only show scores of players from there
  
• enable background music in tutorials as there is no dubbing yet

Fixes:

• upgrade menu now can be closed via right click and same shortcut as it is opened with
  
• towers now can also be upgraded when selected via selection rectangle in case it's just one tower or all towers are the same type
  
• zooming on Linux might be better now
  
• hp in monster info screen now are scaled now if text is too long
  
• message "Crystal Received" doesn't appear twice anymore in Hero Mode

We hope you enjoy the new update. Feel free to leave your opinions and ideas either as comment, in the forums or ingame using the feedback button. The next update will be available in two weeks.

We continue working on the big update which is going to add revolutionary improvements to already great Leagues Editor.

Today, I want to tell you about one more feature which we started working on.

Soon, you will be able to edit weather in any country. Do you want to create eternal winter? Want to change the frequency of heavy rains? Want to change an existing country with an average weather on a new one with hot weather?

It will be possible soon:



Eventually, we want to give you the same possibilities we have ourselves when editing leagues. But at the same moment, we want to create a very useful interface. Also, we are changing the data structure so the game can take the outer data from the modifications.

At the moment, we are still developing the new features I have told you the last week.
In around 1-2 weeks we are going to update the Beta with these two features.

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