attached the new features:






Have fun with the new update.
https://trello.com/b/FbC1a19w/devboard-summer-islands

• Added Tower Fall (Attractions)
  
• Added Fairy Garden (Parks)
  
• Added Brasserie (Shopping)

• FONT made rounder
  
• FIX Cars removed after added
  
• FIX Scrollcontainer positions after click

Fixed landscape texture
Fixed Distance culling issue in Lake Town

I've written a lot about the upcoming diplomacy update for Airships, but have so far refused to commit to a release date. Estimating how long software takes to write is hard, and I didn't want to produce a string of broken promises. Now I'm finally close enough to everything being ready that I can do so:

The diplomacy update will come out in August 2022. It's tentatively called "Airships: Conquer Together".

So that's in about five months, nicely two years after the 1.0 release. It will be a free update revamping conquest mode and adding a large number of features. A more financially savvy person would be selling this as an expansion pack or calling it "Airships 2". But it's free, because it's where I want the game to be at. After the release, any future major features will come in the form of expansion packs.

Why another five months? I want to make sure I have enough time to test, polish, and balance the game.



What does the update contain?

Co-op combat and conquest: You will be able to fight with any number of players and AIs to each side, each controlling your own ships. You can set up individual multiplayer combats with multiple players on both sides. And if you're allied in multiplayer conquest mode, you can fight alongside each other.

Full diplomatic system: You can conduct diplomacy to determine war, peace, and a number of levels of alliance and cooperation. You can send ultimatums to demand diplomatic concessions. And the AI is able to do all of this too, including a detailed numerical explanation for why it accepts or rejects a deal.

City upgrades: You can now upgrade your towns and cities with shipyards, factories, police stations, pleasure palaces, labs, and more. Balance your expenditures between building up your empire and conquering more of it.

World ages: As the game progresses, the world enters different ages that change the rules and balance of the game. An age of storms can make it harder for airships to navigate. An age of piety will see empires racing to control holy sites. An age of exploration lets you send out your ships to seek out strange new lifeforms to study and, er, plunder.

Fleet supply system: Logistics are a very important part of warfare. Yes, you can still assemble a doom stack of dozens of ships, but it will be a lot more cumbersome than a careful deployment of forces.

Reputation system: Breaking treaties and committing atrocities will decrease your standing, while defeating pirates and slaughtering monsters increases it.

New additional victory conditions: Instead of conquering every city, you can also amass enough power and reputation to have yourself declared emperor - though other players may interfere with your coronation going ahead. Or you can forge an alliance strong enough to dominate the world. Or, if you're a cultist, you can make worms erupt from everyone's eyes. That's a kind of victory, too.

New espionage system: An entirely new set of spy actions and mechanics that reward long-term planning and produce more interesting results.

A prettier map: Inspired by renaissance maps, featuring landmarks and marginalia drawings, and a clearer presentation of information.

Revamped tech tree: Based on player feedback, and adding in new technologies for city upgrades.

Revamped coat of arms bonuses: Also based on player feedback, and taking advantage of the new features in the game.

Various other balance and user interface improvements: Too many to number here individually.



So what's left to do in those five months?

Networking: This is the big show-stopper right now. Multiplayer games still have weird lag problems and failures. I really really really want to fix those before releasing an update that's about co-op combat and diplomacy. So right now, I'm doing regular test games and updates to figure out those problems and fix them. If you have had network problems with the game such as crashes or failed reconnects, please get in touch and volunteer for those test games, so I can figure out what's wrong.

Refining AI logic and performance: The new AI code for diplomacy is mostly complete now, but it simply needs more testing as well as some performance enhancements. Turns out that considering every single treaty you could sign with every single other empire in the game is kind of time-consuming!

Updating tutorials: Because the game - and especially conquest - has changed, I need to update the tutorials. As an existing player, you may not care about this, but the game needs to be accessible to new players as well.

User experience polish: With all those new features come a lot more user interfaces that have to be made usable.

Testing and balancing: Finally, an update this big simply requires a lot of testing to make sure it actually works and is reasonably balanced! There will probably be a closed beta followed by an open beta in the months leading up to the release.

And a hundred other small things. :)

FEATURES

• The current music track is saved with the current game and will resume when choosing to continue.
  
• Game will now automatically pause and resume when leaving and entering the game window.

FIXES

• Fixed an issue with option to limit frame rate.
  
• Fixed a bug with continuing saved games if they were made when quitting from the victory screen.

During this event, which usually lasts 6-7 days, with daily replenishment, you will accumulate stars, for these stars in the Star Pack column you can receive bonus rewards.


Don't miss your chance to get one of the strongest units for 26 stars.

also, bonus rewards will be for 4 | 8 | 16 stars and for 26


Best regards,JTGGame Team!

Bear's Restaurant has added Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese!

Hi !

I got report that people were experiencing lags, and I finally found what was causing them. There were a problem with Steam Cloud save happening multiple time per second, and I wasn't able to see it in my development environment. So, changes in this update:

- Fix #1406 - Slow FPS on Steam Version
- Fix #1404 - Cannot change Music volume more than once (side effect from previous patch)

Check out roadmap for next updates: https://bugs.dysnomia.studio/projects/alchemistry/roadmap

Hello everyone! This devlog has 2 parts. The first one is about our general progress since our last devlog, focusing on eye candy, then the second one is a bit more technical and focuses on our modular AI.

The last barrier to testing how all the new things worked was to teach the AI to make sense of it. The AI possible options increased by quite a lot, as now it not only needed to decide what the current character should do but to which character is the best to activate at any given moment. This, in turn, increased its thinking time to around 0.05 seconds in our developer machine. This doesn't sound too bad, but because so far the game only ran on 1 core, it blocked the drawing of a new frame by that amount. So every time the AI turn started, we had a jitter. Example:



This was unacceptable, so it was time for me to separate the AI calculations to a different core, and thanks to that, the jitter is no more.

Another new feature that got added is the standard attack of opportunity system. If a unit leaves a tile that is on an enemy zone of control, then the enemy will get a free basic attack against that unit before it would leave it.



The enemy has learned to use the teleporter as well, enemy reinforcements will arrive by the use of their own teleporter. The player can see where they will arrive 1 round before their arrival.


The new animation system worked perfectly in the testing. In my opinion, it really enhanced the presentation.



Then we did a lot of small improvements as we realized problems while testing. One big thing was that I wanted the player to be able to see at a glance which units have already activated and which ones did not, while not being too obtrusive. We found that the character outlines could relay this information to the player without too much of a problem. So characters that have not activated yet will have their outlines, while those who did do not.



Another thing that I wanted to have a bigger emphasis on is the seeable enemy counter. Especially when it changes! So we moved it to a more prominent location on the UI and gave it an animation when it changes.



I talked a lot about modularity and modability of skill in our 13. devlog and these points are super important for our AI as well. I want to give modders the tools to not only create new skills but to be able to teach the AI how to use them as well. To reach these goals, the core of our system is a so-called Utility AI. For those who want a more in-depth explanation of what that is, I can recommend this great GDC video which I think is a great introduction to the topic here!

In very simple layman's terms, it works like this: The AI has possible actions, and every action gets a value between 0-1, which tells the AI how desirable that action is. Then the AI chooses the highest-rated action to execute. In our case, these actions will be the skills(plus their input) the AI can use.

All right, so we can add/remove actions(skills) to the AI so that is great. But how do those actions get evaluated? We are adding a behavior to the action (which is basically a set of considerations) which will calculate it for us. What are these considerations? These are parts of my code that check something in the current game state and return a value between 0-1. For example, there is a health_damage_dealing consideration, which will check how much % of their current health the target would lose by the skill average damage, and it will return that. So if the enemy would lose 100% of their health, this would return 1.

These considerations are the building blocks of the AI. Sadly, modders will not be able to add new considerations to the game but will be able to freely add or remove which considerations are used creating new AI behaviors plus change how to interpret the value coming out of these considerations by redefining the curve which the value goes through before being used.

These behaviors are being defined in JSON files the same way as skills, so they are easily readable and editable. The behavior of the previous example looks like this in practice:



The linear curve defined there basically just there to say to use the consideration value. But if you wanted the AI to target the unit that would have the most remaining health after the attack, you can just reverse the slope of the curve, and that would mean if the consideration return 0, the real value returned by this will be 1.

So that's how our modular AI works in a nutshell. I will of course need to provide documentation of all the possible considerations, curves, and their inputs, but after that, the community will be able to create and modify the game AI to their hearth content. Plus of course, this modularity makes it possible for us to iterate faster on the AI as well.

So that's it for today's devlog! A lot of progress has been made, and I hope we will be able to give you something to not only read but to try out as well in a not-so-distant future!

Multiplayer is here!

-multiplayer will be a bi-weekly competition with every THE BUTTON player (if they would like to join)

-A "booster" will be given to people that participate (1% boost for autoclicks in multi and solo)

-boosters have a set pool of 500, rewards will be given based on how much you participated.

-Some bug fixes have also been made :)

-And if you haven't already, join the discord server for updates and talk with others!

https://discord.gg/P9T5uWNk3v

Hello everyone,

here a few additions to the game in today´s smaller update.

The update contains:

• 2 new stages in world 3 (featuring new enemies and a new pet)
  
• Enhancements of some boss fights
  
• A new achievement
  
• Balance adjustments
  
• Bug fixes

There are two more planned updates, the main focus will be to implement the final boss, the story (which is already in the making), as well as the actual implementation of the scrolls.