Oct 24, 2019

Skyforge - Fayne

The spookiest holiday on Aelion is starting –– put on your scary costumes, play tricks on people, have fun, and earn rewards. Evil Pumpkin Festival will run from October 24 to November 7!

New items in the Market

You will find many seasonal items that can be purchased with candies. Take a look at the Holidays section: we have spooky costumes, mysterious and scary headwear, incredible fireworks, unique emotes, and even a new vehicle!

Flapping Wings Pack

Collect candies and exchange them for the new Flapping Wings Pack. Equip this unusual costume and join the masquerade. In the Warden of Element Attire, you will certainly be noticed!

Don’t know where to get candies? It’s easy –– just have fun and don't be afraid!

Candy bandits and their caches

In your adventures, you may run into Candy Bandits. While the name is hardly scary, a Candy Bandit may turn out to be a formidable enemy. Defeat them, and you will receive candies and candy wrappers –– fragments of a map that will lead you to the treasure hidden in the park.

Pumpkin Horror!

Want to get a whole lot of candy at once? Just go to the city park — it doesn’t get easier than that!

Every day from 12:00 to 13:00 and from 18:00 to 22:00, one riding broom and several pumpkins will appear in the park. You know where to find the pumpkins, but not the broom. Look for Pumpkin Festival Vision in Candy Bandits' caches –– it will highlight the broom’s location when you activate it. The effect will disappear once you mount the broom. To get it again, you will have to find another Pumpkin Festival Vision.

Rules
As soon as the broom appears, all players in the park will receive a dedicated notification. Your objective will be to be the first to find the broom, mount it and make off to a safe place, evading the crowds of competitors. Additionally, mounted heroes will be able to throw special pumpkins that add a fear effect on their targets. Fun like no other!

Didn't manage to reach the precious objective? Then let no one else have it! Grab the first pumpkin you can lay your hands on and throw it at the cocky immortal that dared steal the broom that is yours by law. After all, you saw it first! A couple of well-aimed shots and that upstart is back on the ground, and the broom is free once more!

You will receive 25 pieces of candy for every 5 seconds you spend on the broom. And if you manage to hold on to it for more than a minute, you will also be rewarded for completing the daily quest. Another way to receive that reward is to hit the broom rider with five pumpkins.

Let us point out that you will receive more rewards for riding the broom than for throwing pumpkins. After all, you receive rewards both for the daily quest and a bonus for holding on to your "mount."

By the way, all players that completed any of the daily quests will not be able to ride the broom until next day. But they will be able to pellet the broom riders as much as they want. Isn't that nice?

Trick or Treat!

The Trick or Treat Page returns this year with a chance to get rewards every day! If you are not easily scared, knock on the doors and see if you get a treat or get tricked! Some doors could spook the godly halo from your head!

The Skyforge Trick or Treat page will be online from today until November 7. You will be able to open one door per day.

Symphony of the Night Pack

Want to scare your friends and stand out from the crowd? Purchase the Symphony of the Night Collector's Pack! Get a unique costume, new emote, and Victor's Medals! Dress like a dark lord or a dark lady and scare your friends!

Oct 24, 2019

Stellaris Dev Diary #157 - Things That Rock

Stellaris - Harlot

Hi everyone!

I’m Eladrin, Game Designer on Stellaris, and I’m one of the newer members of the Stellaris team. I joined the team during the development of Ancient Relics, and it’s been a blast. It was awesome meeting so many of you at PDXCON, and getting to hear so many ideas and excellent stories directly from you.

Back in Diary 152 and Dev Diary 153, Grekulf mentioned some of the Summer Experimentation that we did - but in today’s dev diary I wanted to talk about one of the things I worked on during the summer - game mechanics for the Lithoids.

The Lithoids Species Pack is very sedimental to me. When I wanted to dig deeper into the systems and get my hands dirty in the code, I looked at the “wouldn’t it be cool if…” list, and saw “...Lithoids ate minerals instead of food?” up near the top. This seemed like a solid foundation to start with, and a gneiss stepping stone to get my feet on the ground that fit my apatite - it seemed like a pretty simple change after all.

Okay, I’ll stop with the rock puns.

There are fifteen Lithoid portraits (and one new machine portrait), some of which have appearances that resemble some of the other phenotypes so you can do some interesting things with Syncretic Evolution.

Look at me! I'm a sparkly space unicorn!

The ships use a beautiful asymmetrical crystal design. Remember that the colors of your ships reflect your flag. You can use this to your advantage to make a pretty sweet looking fleet.

This is my favorite Titan in the game.

There’s also a Lithoid Advisor Voice. I may have stopped with the puns for now, but there’s no force in the universe that can stop the Lithoid Advisor.

Changing the Lithoids to consume minerals was simple enough, but we also wanted to embrace the sci-fi trope of slow growing rock beings living in inhospitable climates. We started by giving them a massive boost to habitability which they still retain today, and a much larger pop growth penalty than they eventually ended up with. For flavor they receive a bonus to Army Health, and we increased their leader lifespans (but have their leaders start somewhat older as well).

Every little change leads to several more, however. If a species eats minerals instead of food, their homeworld should start with extra mining districts and no agricultural districts built. In fact, if a species evolved to eat rocks, their homeworld should probably by mineral rich and food poor. But wait, what about if they’re a Syncretic Evolution species, or if a Rogue Servitor wants to start with pet rocks? What about if they want to be a Devouring Swarm?

Many minor changes came along with what started as a simple economic change. Just a few examples include the Lithoids being tragically unable to be declared the most delicious species in the galaxy if there are any alternatives, loosening restrictions a bit on Bio-Reactors, modifying the Fleeting trait to be -25 years for Lithoids instead of -10, and a handful of Tradition changes. We also added a few Lithoid specific traits that allow them to generate small amounts of special resources every month.

After many rounds of qualitative feedback and a huge number of playdays, we ended up with the following as the Lithoid species trait:

The large habitability boost that Lithoids receive allow them to colonize worlds that would be marginal for other species, allowing them to work around their slower pop growth speed. Empires with a Lithoid primary species also begin with Lithoid Monolith blockers on their homeworld that can be removed at a large mineral cost for an additional Lithoid pop. (A Lithoid specific Origin in Federations modifies these a bit, and… we’ll talk more about that in another Dev Diary.)

So very sleepy.

The Lithoid trait is automatically applied to any species that uses a Lithoid portrait. For the Xenophiles out there, Half-Lithoids generated by Xeno-Compatibility follow this rule as well, so if the portrait is a Lithoid it will consume minerals instead of food, produce minerals when purged, and so on.

We’ve exposed this ability so modders should be able to similarly add phenotype forced traits to species they create by adding trait = "trait_lithoid" to the species class entry. (Replacing the Lithoid trait with their own custom species trait, of course.) I look forward to seeing what you do with it.

As for the Lithoid Devouring Swarm… They don’t have precisely the same motivations as a regular Devouring Swarm. While they will still press organics inhabiting the worlds they take into nutritive paste for the Bio-Reactors, their hunger is a bit more ambitious. Renamed Terravores, they operate largely the same way as a regular Devouring Swarm, but once off their homeworld they have an additional planetary decision to consume the habitable worlds of the galaxy, leaving devastated husks in their wake:

Are you going to eat that?

Terravores are barred from Terraforming (and thus do not have access to Hive Worlds) and cannot clear the devastation they leave behind, but other empires can clean up after them, though it takes a major effort.

Modders will now be able to change the name and description of a civic out for another based on species class, similar to how traditions can be swapped.

I’m quite pleased with how the Lithoids turned out, I think they're a real gem. I hope that you all enjoy it just as much.

In a few hours the free 2.5.0 patch will be up and the Lithoids Species Pack will be available for shale, so pick it up, rock out, and leave the galaxy gravelling at your feet!

#################################################################
######################### VERSION 2.5.0 ############################
#################################################################

###################
# Balance
###################
* The Pop Growth Reduction for Bio-Trophies now actually reduces their growth rate. Driven Assimilators now apply their organic growth penalty as a multiplier the same way as Rogue Servitors do, and is now also 50%
* Defensive Platforms placed on Outposts now provide 2 points of Piracy Suppression for their system. The Great Game tradition from the Supremacy tree now also reduces the cost to build Defensive Platforms by 33%

###################
# UI
###################
* Shift+clicking on ship count in the Fleet Manager now adds ships up to the nearest unit of ten, using ctrl fills up to the template max size (for realzies this time)
* The Shared Burdens civic will no longer appear by itself in the civics list when you select Gestalt Consciousness ethics but have not yet selected Machine Intelligence or Hive Minded authority
* Added a notification when one empire guarantees the independence of another

###################
# AI
###################
* Automated building now checks that upkeep cost is covered by income

###################
# Bugfixes
###################
* Fixed wrong save file being loaded from the resume button in the launcher, caused by a conflict between local and cloud saves
* Fixed the game complaining about mods not being in UTF8-BOM3 for no good reason
* Fixed a potential crash in AI when evaluating market values
* Fixed cases where planetary events could fire multiple notifications
* Odd Factories no longer sometimes block pops from getting purged, because you monsters should be free to purge whatever you want
* Mod load order is now the same as the order in which the mods are displayed

You can also read this Dev Diary and comment on our forums, here.

Oct 24, 2019

PC Patch (24.10.2019)

Conan Exiles - Ignasis (Community Team)

Greetings Exiles!

We’re releasing a new patch with fixes to many of the performance issues introduced in the latest patch. These should solve many of the low FPS and abnormally long load times you’ve been sending us feedback about.
We have also bulked up in cough syrup and distributed it to thralls and player characters to stop the pneumonia outbreak when they were idling, as well as fine-tuned the running stop animation.
Many of the issues regarding altered item stats (such as different temperature protections) should also be tackled in this patch, along with some other bugfixes.

Thank you for your continued support and for your invaluable feedback.

Please remember that updates can mess with your installed mods. We suggest taking a backup of your current database before updating to any new patch if you have mods installed.

Currently Known Issues

We’re aware of an issue with missing SFX for NPCs and player characters, particularly during combat situations. We’re working on that and it’ll be fixed in the next update.

Optimized some material and texture sizes to generally improve performance.
Optimized current assets to improve performance.
Fixed a number of crashes related to asset conflicts.
Optimized files by deleting outdated and invalid assets.
Additional file size optimizations to improve performance across the board.
Increased the amount of logs in case of blueprint Virtual Machine crashes.
Fixed incompatibility with upcoming Windows 10 20H1 update (currently Insider Preview).

Fixed an exploit regarding infinite stamina
Battle Standards can no longer be used to prevent players from placing objects around their base.
Fixed an exploit regarding undermeshing.

Fixed an issue where some equipment would grant you double the amount of attribute points.
Blood and Sand equipment had their temperature resistances swapped by mistake. This is now fixed.
Particles for the end-boss fight in the Wine-cellar should now work as intended.
Pit of Yog and Rift of Yog (and their placement brushes) can no longer be used to kill NPCs and players.
Fixed a couple of issues with the Debaucheries of Derketo DLC emotes.

Tweaked the male stopping animation to make it much less extreme; it will no longer look like your character has a stomach-ache when movement ends.

Distributed cough syrup in the Exiled lands, which effectively removed the groans and moans from idle animations.

Trello Report Board

We have a public bug tracking board here! You can check this to track the issues that get brought up by the community the most. In the “For prioritization” column you can vote for the issues you would like us to prioritize and we will make sure it gets moved into development asap. You can read the full details on how it works on the forum post here.