I felt that this week was super productive and I managed to get a number of things accomplished.

I've added a few new models to the game and did a lot of playtesting/cleanup in preparation for the Unfold Games Awards submission deadline on Monday, March 15th.

We are also getting ready to playtest very soon. This week I am going to go over the build with a few people and then plan to playtest with a few people that have shown interest in helping test the game.

I've also started inviting people to the Discord to manage the playtesting selection and feedback. If you are potentially interested in helping with early playtesting join with this link: https://discord.gg/EpmPSmd

I've worked a lot on the initial 30 minutes to an hour of the game, honing in on a good flow for time spent between combat, gathering resources, and the number of items that are unlocked through upgrades or built.


This brings me to the first model to show off, the craft bench.  The craft bench is attached to the Home Base Command Center and is for the manual creation of items. Although you can still queue up items to be built, you cannot retrieve or deposit items to the craft bench with delivery bots. The main purpose is to craft items in small quantities that you may be short on to get to the next upgrade stage.




I've updated the thrust pad and have had some interesting builds with it, one propelling anything that walks through it into the air!



This will work for enemies as well. The ones that take fall damage and that are susceptible to thrust pads will be shot into the air and break to pieces on impact. If they land on other enemies, they will also take damage as well.


A bunch of the panels were updated to be simple 6 sided meshes instead of the previous LOD versions. There will be a lot of floor panels in the scene and this way performance won't take a hit when someone like Josh from "Let's Game It Out" tries to break everything.




I've added force fields to the Home Base Command Center and the player as well. You will have an over-shield that protects from projectiles and other damage. Be careful, once the shield is down you are susceptible to pretty much any kind of damage. If you get shot while your shield is drained, it's game over! But the shield regenerates after being out of combat for a short time.



I've done a lot of work with sound effects in the last week as well. It was fun to design sounds to play along with the force fields, their deflections, and powering up and down.

If you aren't following on social media, I also posted a short video of a bomb trap container on Twitter.

It boosts enemies into the air with a thrust trap, pushes them into a box with another thrust trap. Then, you know, bomb traps. I also did some volume testing with 1000+ enemies at the same time with great results on performance.

Lastly, I've been working on a few new visual effects for explosions and machine functionality, so I will have those complete and ready to share for next week.

That's it for this week, another update on progress next week!
Take care,
-Jake

Hello,

I have been reworking our pathfinding system in the past week.
The old system was quite slow and resulted in mobs freezing in place because they had to wait a long time for a path to be found.
Handeling pathfinding on large maps is generally quite difficult but i found a way to increase the performance massively.
We have 16 million pathfinding nodes on the map. Each node stores a position and whether it is occupied or not. Loading all of these nodes into memory on start would be very inefficient.
That is why i switched to serialization for my new pathfinding system.
Previously i solved this memory issue by storing these nodes in a texture map but that allowed for the system to only find one path at a time. So whenever a group of pigs got scared and wanted to find a path then each one of them had to wait for every other pig to have found a path. Sometimes pigs would wait up to ten sconds until they got their path.

My new system allows for multiple paths to be calculated at the same time. I have set the system to run six pathfinding processes at a time and i run them on seperate threads. Most of Unity‘s classes are not thread-safe but you can run an A* function in a seperate thread without big issues.
Running the calculations on seperate threads is also reducing lag on the main thread which was another limiting factor for the old pathfinding system.

The Results:

Finding a path with a distance of 80 meters took the old system 0.342 seconds or 17 frames (with 60fps).
The new system takes only 0.038 seconds or 2 frames for the same path. That is 10 times faster than the previous system(or an 800% increase in performance)! And since the new system can find six paths at a time it would end up to be more like a 4800% increase.

However when 100 creatures request paths at the same time we would still have some creatures that freeze in position because they need to wait until their path is calculated.
To hide this waiting period I added a neat loop that makes creatures run in a circle when they are waiting for a path. This is way better than having them freeze in place and you might find the same behaviour in mobs of other games.

This patch will come to the staging branch in a couple of days. I already started to work on the android systems but I want this patch out before i continue workin on it.

v0.231 - better flying?

TLDR: "Loading" bug is fixed. Now I will start working on Mirage 0.4 (Importer of custom characters)
===
Longer version:
Guys, we did it! With your help (reporting your PC configurations, sending me crash reports, logs) I was finally able to find and fix that "Loading" bug. It was very difficult to catch because it happened only on specific combinations of hardware + software. The bug prevented asynchronous loading of some in-game assets. I rewrote Mirage source code multiple times during last two weeks, finding all places where the bug could potentially occur and finally, today, after releasing Mirage 0.3.5.4114 Steam users affected by that bug reported that Mirage loads and works on their PCs. What a relief! I can finally continue my work on Mirage 0.4 and when it's ready - you will be able to import any Genesis 3 characters from Daz Studio. Can't wait to release it for you!

Also I updated Roadmap for Mirage in 2021. It's at the bottom of "ABOUT THIS GAME" section on store page.

-M

Last week we announced the winners and first sixteen runners-up of the 2021 Talent Competition. Today, we’d like to announce and showcase seventeen more of the competition's runners-up!

We’d like to thank everyone from our community again for all the amazing submissions! The competition has further shown that our community is filled with very creative and talented people! Congratulations again to all the winners! You can check out the selection of runners-up by clicking here.

- Minimap added
- Select gamemode (Roguelite or Roguelike) on Main Menu->Start

Hey everyone! We are now one week away from launch, and we've been hard at work getting ready for the first public Steam release. Here's what we've been up to...



Version 0.6 is now in testing!
Our biggest update is now available to be tested from our Discord (link below) - this version will be closely tied to the first public Steam release, so if you've wishlisted the game and want to test the game before it comes out, join our Discord!

What's new in 0.6?

• Added the difficulty selector menu
  
• Added new turret, Flamethrower
  
• Added new turret, Minigun
  
• Added new turret, Sunbeam
  
• Added new building, Engineer
  
• Added new building, Solar Panel (placeholder art)
  
• Added new building, Area Cooler
  
• Added new building, Energizer
  
• Added new building, Gold Storage
  
• Added new building, Essence Container (placeholder art)
  
• Added new building, Iridium Purifier
  
• Added new building, Iridium drill
  
• Added new enemy, Speeder
  
• Added optional tutorial sequence
  
• Implemented new hit detection system
  
• Implemented new enemy movement system
  
• Implemented new bullet movement system
  
• Added custom difficulty support
  
• Added unlimited save support
  
• Added multi-engineering support
  
• And more!

Resource Storages
In order to try and counter AFKing for long periods of time, we've implemented the new (somewhat controversial) storage system. You'll need to continue expanding your storage array to hold more of each resource. We're trying to find a good balance between keeping Vectorio a somewhat idle game but also making sure that idling isn't extremely overpowered, especially in the mid - late game portion.

Iridium Refinement
This update also adds in iridium refinement. Iridium is used in the engineer to unlock and apply experimental modifications to defences and buildings.



New hit detection (experimental)
We're introducing a new hit detection and enemy movement system this update. This update removes physics based components from enemies and bullets, and instead replaces it with our own system that handles the movement and collision detection of each individual object through a master script. This system is FAR more optimized, which should lower the lag issues some players were experiencing in the mid - late game portion of the game. This also gives us more control over how we want enemies and bullets to behave on an object-to-object basis.



Engineering Modifications
We've just added support for multi-engineering modifications, essentially allowing for experimental modifications of pre-existing turrets. We can also use this in the future to allow players to create their own turrets, and possibly share them on the community workshop! (but more on this later)

Additional plans
Below is a list of the other plans we have for the game, some of which may even be implemented into the first public Steam version!

• Different modes beyond just Survival and Creative
  
• Multiplayer PvP (this will most likely be 1.0)
  
• Adding bosses to survival as a transitioning stage between enemy variants
  
• Workshop support for custom maps, challenges, and buildings
  
• And more!

Want to get in on development?
Vectorio is meant to be a collaborative projects not only between the devs, but the community as well. The goal is to work together to create a fun simple game to pass the time on for fans of the base-building / survival genre. If you have ideas, want to help test out dev builds, or just want to chat with the community, join our Discord! This is where all of our main discussions take place.

Discord link: https://discord.com/invite/auDgRJqtT9

Don't have Discord?
We now also have a Reddit page and Fandom page! Links below to both

Reddit page: https://www.reddit.com/r/Vectorio/
Fandom page: https://vectorio.fandom.com/wiki/Vectorio_Wiki

That's all we have for this update. Next week we'll have our first major update that will detail everything in the game (as well as a trailer) when the game releases to the public.

Thanks for reading!
~ Ben

We've been processing a lot of feedback and making improvements and fixes over the past few weeks. Come join our Playtest, which is running until the end of March.



During the Playtest, we are regularly releasing updates based on feedback and bug reports. Your feedback can make a real difference!

Hello, Captains,

We are happy to announce new features and a few fixes.

New Features
- Objectives tab: Now you can track your quests and have hints where to go next
- Auto save: Every 10 seconds your gameplay autosaves

Adjustments
- Pirates speed and attack range: Pirates now a bit more aggressive and have 2x faster speed
- Submarine reverse speed: Now it is a bit slower to swim backwards
- Pirate boss cave: got a new better look
- Scurvy Dogs quest description: has a better hints what to do next
- Pirate ships got names: Cannoneer and Rocketeer
- More enemies spawn points

Fixes
- No sound bug: Fixed
- Terrain fixes between Paris and Pirate city
- Grass and terrain that caused lag in northern part of Paris
- Terrain fix in Athens territory near the Pirate boss cave

If you have feedback about the game or want to report bugs feel free to contact us via discord channel - https://discord.gg/CSuqGs65Ad

Hi everyone,

V1.22 is dropping here in a couple of minutes so here are the things you need to know about this update. Before we get started, we want to thank you all for getting The Unreal Story as soon as it went free. For the people who got the game for buying, we will try our best to give away a free achievement for free or something else. We'll give more updates on that but for right now, thank you all for the amazing support and the increase of the game's population. Now on to the news.

• Update Size: 17.4 MB
  
• Online System
  
• *Hopefully* improved the servers for when the host leaves, it updates the session.
  
• Speaking of online
  
• Do you see the border that blocks the Multiplayer button doing weird things? It's slowly fading away. Maybe Multiplayer may be available soon.
  
• New Things Added
  
• Outbreak
  
• In Homebase, there is a new area unlocked where the door used to be at.
  
• Changes
  
• Outbreak
  
• We nerfed the Healing ability by increasing the time for cooldown from 30 seconds to 2 minutes.
  
• Here in a couple of days, we will remove the queue center in Homebase due to a serious bug that is causing.
  
• Fixes
  
• We fixed an issue in The Maze where at some parts of the map, you can fall through the floor.
  
• Fixed an issue in The House of Doom where when you completed the story quest, you don't get an achievement.
  
• Fixed an exploit after you enter the secret ending room, you can shoot through the invisible wall to skip the talking sequence and end the game early. We also fixed an issue where you can shoot at the ending trigger multiple times to the point that the Story Complete UI pops up multiple times.

If there's any issues that we haven't listed above, please email us to our support team or join our discord server to report a bug at the #report-bugs channel.

-Thanks For Playing The Unreal Story
The Phoenix Limit Team