Hey guys,
here is a final EA update. It was ready for more than a year but had to postpone due to war.

This is not the last update for this game. Just a milestone to move forward.
This game probably will not get more content updates - just fixes and QoL updates.

You can reach me at my discord anytime: https://discord.gg/j5e7fYd

The Shelter changes every day. Sometimes the changes are tiny, while at other times they're huge, substantial. We're very grateful that you've stayed with us and watch us grow ever stronger with each passing day. Just like all of your Champions and Workers, we work for you to improve the game and your experience with it. Here's what we have done so far!







And this is just the start! We've got so many more ideas to develop Shelter 69, so stay with us and let us expand the Shelter together!

Check out our social media:

Facebook JNTGames
Facebook INTERMARUM
Twitter INTERMARUM
Instagram INTERMARUM

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1905950/Shelter_69/

Hello KARDS players!

We are thrilled to bring you the second episode of the official 1939 Games podcast - The Frontline: A KARDS Podcast! Join us and get an exclusive insight on the exciting future of KARDS in a discussion with the developers.

The KARDS Podcast is a monthly podcast featuring different KARDS developers in every episode. This is where you’ll hear about all the latest things in KARDS and get a closer look at the team behind KARDS, as we explore developers’ varied work and contributions to the constant development of the game. The podcast is conveniently available on Spotify, Apple and Google Podcasts, as well as on the KARDS YouTube channel.


In this second episode, KARDS Community Manager Elín welcomes Lead Game Designer Keli and Chief Creative Officer Gummi to discuss the recently announced future cycle of KARDS. Join us as we discuss the upcoming summer expansion, new content cycle, restructuring of existing content, and answer some community questions regarding the upcoming changes.


Tune in to The Frontline podcast on the following platforms:

YouTube
Anchor
Spotify
Google Podcasts
Apple Podcasts

Let us know what you think of this second podcast episode and if there are any particular questions or topics you’d like us to cover in the future.

Sip on a refreshing Mojito and let the cool breeze bring you bliss.

Tina's New Skin: Mojito will be available on February 27th!

A special forces helicopter originating from the commercial model offers mind-blowing agility and a lethal arsenal of weapons!

Features:

• Perfect handling and speed
  
• Thermal vision
  
• Hellfire II missiles
  
• Very vulnerable

AH-6M is a new attack helicopter that will land in the US hangars with the release of the upcoming major update. The mean Little Bird with its perfect handling and excellent armament will definitely become the new favorite of the most skilled War Thunder pilots!

The AH-6M will be one of the lightest and most compact helicopters in the game. With a take-off weight of just over 2 tons, the machine has a very powerful Allison T63-A series engine with a 650 hp thrust. The helicopter smoothly and quickly accelerates to the speed of over 240 km/h, maneuvers perfectly and is able to instantly hide behind trees and buildings or duck in the terrains.




Right out of the box, the pilot will have at their disposal, rifle-caliber “miniguns” and Hydra unguided rockets in 2x19 pods. This weapon is enough to start mastering close-range combat in mixed battles and hone any piloting skill. After several battles, pilots will be able to improve the engine and rotor, research thermal vision devices, high-caliber machine gun pods and small APKWS II missiles that can be used against light targets from distances up to 5 km. The pinnacle of the AH-6M arsenal will be the excellent Hellfire II ATGMs with a tandem warhead, capable of wiping out any tank in the battlefield. Hellfires will allow pilots to try new tactics with flanking an enemy group, hunting for enemy helicopters, and so on. All in all, Little Bird offers a really good variety of combat tactics poured with liters of adrenaline!




The disadvantages of the helicopter are obvious from its design - huge windshield and light weight with no any armor either for the pilots or for the engine and tanks. Researchable body armor might protect the brave crew only from a pair of rifle-caliber bullets. Any burst towards the helicopter from a heavy machine gun or autocannon almost always means a quick return to the hangar.

The AH-6M Little Bird and other amazing new vehicles are waiting for you in the first War Thunder major update of 2023. Follow the news and be the first to know about the most interesting content from the update! Stay tuned!

Want to get the most out of your gear? Now’s your chance to make it even better! Look forward to the following upgrade event between 24/02 and 27/02 (11 AM CET):

• 50% higher chance to successfully change the rarity. Increases the chance to change a weapon or equipment item’s rarity level up to max. level 7 (or level 8 for champion gear). This reduces the risk of the item being destroyed on a failed attempt.

Seize your chance – we wish you all the best of luck upgrading your gear!
The NosTale Team

Gladiators, have time to compete for rewards in the new anniversary LXXX Arena season!

The most courageous warriors will discover new skills, the PvP-skills “Arena Warden’s Assistance” and “Wrath of the Gladiator”, and will also replenish their collection with the unique “Furious Berserker” costume (only available for winning the anniversary season)! This season only, the prize-winning gladiators will receive 2 times more “Imperials of Greatness”!

In addition, in the first two weeks, the number of Imperials of Greatness received in daily rewards will be increased by 2 times:
- from 23.02 23:00 CET to 02.03 23:00 CET in "Temple of Seals 4x4" mode;
- from 02.03 23:00 CET to 09.03 23:00 CET in "Arena 5x5" mode.

In this season, 24.02 11:00 CET - 24.03 11:00 CET, the following modes will become available:
- Arena 2x2;
- Arena 3х3;
- Temple of Seals 4x4;
- Arena 5x5.

A complete list of awards can be found in the Arena menu in the game.

Stay strong!
AIGRIND

• AI spawn seed not randomised properly
  
• Base buildpart textures too bright
  
• Stone furnace light not turning off
  
• No Footsteps on some building stairs

• Turned off shadows for a bunch of small things that don’t need them

What's happening / TLDR: Developer diaries introduce details of Espiocracy - Cold War strategy game in which you play as an intelligence agency. You can catch up with the most important dev diary (The Vision) and find out more on Steam page.

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Actors - influential individuals and organizations, capable of changing history - are the main building block of historical simulation in Espiocracy. Today we'll explore their AI.

This is a fascinating engineering problem! We want:

• Believable, interesting, sometimes cunning behavior
  
• via ~50 adjustable and moddable actions
  
• for 1500-2500 (!) actors active at any point
  
• in the real-time-ish game with very limited computational budget per actor
  
• without employing a team of AI programmers to craft and maintain large behavior trees or complex state machines

Playing to our strengths, we have:

• Many historical samples. One of the best sources is CIA archive of Presidential Daily Briefs, counting thousands of reports on precisely described political activities.
  
• Unlimited ability to run millions of simulations offline (= during development, before the release), to collect rich statistical data on the effects of any behavior in the game world.
  
• Audience of players in 2023. Most of them do have not bad GPUs, 60% have 6+ CPU cores, 93% clock them at 2.3+ GHz, 69% use 16+ GB RAM.

If you've been anywhere near computer science in the last few years, you know where this leads to: machine learning. The game does not have computational budget for glamorous deep neural networks, but it has enough for two efficient models (regression & gradient boosting) at the heart of actor behavior, which do all the heavy lifting (training) before the game is installed on your computer and then use this compressed knowledge (inference) to control decisions of actors in gameplay.

Naturally, these models are embedded into a wider solution that starts off at an unusual place.


All living organisms have to maintain homeostasis, an internal balance of parameters such as temperature, otherwise, they will die. Peter Sterling and Joseph Eyer proposed that evolution invented brains to switch from reactive to predictive homeostasis (allostasis). After all, organisms cannot react to fatal disruptions - but they can try to predict them. This point of view was picked up in the last decade by the theory of constructed emotion in which Lisa Feldman Barrett posits that human emotions are predictions, not reactions. Instead of mere emotional response to external stimuli, our brains may build internal models of the future and give it a meaning that is perceived, i.a., as emotions. Returning to the example of temperature regulation, we evolved from cells that simply swim away from the cold, into cavemen who can be happy at the end of severe winter, while it's still cold, because we understand seasons and know that soon we'll be embraced by warm spring.

Remarkably, this approach to cognition is inversely mirrored by the critique of AI in games. AI is stupid when it can be easily duped (cheesed) with any ploy to which it will be too late to merely react, when it does not have a sense of self-preservation, cannot predict the consequences of its actions, remains predictable instead of predictive, or does not creatively prepare for the future.

Therefore, actors in Espiocracy are first and foremost allostatic forecasters.

(To be clear, we are not discussing AI of players competing with a human player, to be described in a different dev diary. This one is solely about actors, autonomous NPC-like entities.)

On the most basic level (lizard brain), actor behavior is guided by three needs and goals:

• Survival - staying alive or not dissolved
  
• Growth - increasing influence (which factors in wealth, number of members, etc.)
  
• Impact - changing the world according to ideologies, views, traits, opportunities, etc.

These are precisely and consistently quantifiable parameters. For instance, the need for survival increases when an actor's life is threatened by enemies, diseases, or the possibility of imprisonment followed by execution. The three parameters together (squared and multiplied by personal weights) contribute to the overall level of motivation of the actor. High enough motivation pushes the actor to launch actions that will meet needs and goals which caused motivation to increase. If you see here remnants of a perceptron, you're dead right.


Actions available to actors range from universal (such as fleeing the country) to type-specific (e.g. armed organizations able to raid a place) or even role-specific (a member of government defined in the constitution able to propose launching a war). The first example, running away, is easy to understand in the context of motivation. An actor highly worried about survival may flee the country. Once the actor is away from the threat, the need for survival does indeed decrease. Note that actions do not directly satisfy needs or goals, fleeing didn't give straight +20 to own survival, and instead, it worked through decoupled mechanics that underly the calculation of survival. (This is the critical ingredient that allows the mechanisms described below to work.)

Many actions, however, are more complicated than fight-or-flight response.

In the real life, this is where we would do the thinking - use domain knowledge and an internal model of the world to predict what a particular action would achieve. Generally, AI programmers replicate this process in the code but Espiocracy approaches it already in reconciliation with Sutton's bitter lesson and throws a lot of cheap compute at the problem: data about consequences of actions are collected from many simulation runs (with actions or action combinations paired with corresponding changes of goals and context vector), then these are used to train simple regression models (one per action), which regularly infer predicted values of need-goal satisfaction for every available action.



For the simplest example of action, we're essentially gathering data on how often/much fleeing the country actually saves an actor's life. Things get interesting when we start to compare actions (as a kind of internal model of the world!), for instance in this case an actor fighting for survival may plead for help, attack head-on the perceived threat, or resign from the role. This choice is influenced by availability (closed and well-guarded borders make fleeing much harder), traits (some actors will never flee), personal weights of needs and goals, competence parameter (less competent actors make less optimal decisions), and a small injection of randomness.

Computationally, a lot depends on the context vector and frequency of inference. Currently, these are tied to a regional level (a few countries), which means that action-need predictions are recalculated when, i.a., a war erupts in the region. I would worry more about it (and massage features in the vector or build a tree of models tailored to actor types) if I wouldn't have two other major components of the predictive AI.


Our brains can play out not only the consequences of an action - we can also predict what will happen without our interventions. More than simple extrapolation, we can sense dramatic shifts such as the consequences of losing an election.

The game regularly prepares simplified simulations of the future at different levels of detail in four timescales: 2 weeks forward, 2 months, 2 years, and 2 decades. Simulations focus only on the most important events (such as political changes) and approximate their influence on actor goals. Then, individual actors, depending on their influence, competence, position, and access to knowledge can tap into the information about changes to their future needs and goals. This creates lovely emergent motivation, for instance, a political leader anticipating his future loss, and prompted to prioritize growth over impact or even survival before an election.



Of course, the difference between natural prediction and clairvoyant cheating AI depends on the details of implementation. For this reason, simulations are generally about the overt world (e.g. no equivalent of intelligence mechanic from OpenXcom), and "tapping in" slowly grows into a complex algorithm (but it's more interesting to write code about access to information in an intelligence game than about directly scripted behavior!).


It's no coincidence that there are three goals and three predictive components. They were aligned in their developmental origin: survival-satisfaction, growth-simulation, and now it's time for impact - deep actions.

Actors intentionally change (impact) the history via actions-target pairs chosen by the second model, trained to spot changes in alternate history (instead of changes to needs and goals). Collected data about actions (enriched by flexible vectorized targets) is paired with influence on State Power Index, both short-term and long-term. In search for directional parameter that widely grasps all the significant events from writing influential books to winning the space race, it turned out that SPI is a robust-enough approximation, that also ties this more complex model (at the moment it's gradient boosting machine) to the logical attempt at making the actors try to improve the position of their country relative to other countries (it's not all roses, subverting another country also increases your SPI).



Not all actors will prioritize this kind of impact due to the weighted nature of needs and goals. Expanding on the tailored approach of all the other shallow actions (which takes into account traits or competence), here the model chooses actions from a list generated by the actor's ideologies, views, past experiences, or friendships and conflicts with other actors.


After staring into the abyss of predictive AI, in the next dev diary we'll look into other avenues of actor activity (such as reactions and storytelling features) on March 10th.

If you're not already wishlisting Espiocracy, consider doing it:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1670650/Espiocracy/

There is also a small community around Espiocracy:



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"Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however they may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way to open the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all of the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations." - Albert Einstein & Leopold Infeld, 1938

Hello amazing Agonize fans!

Today is a special day, we're thrilled to FINALLY release the long awaited "The Nightmare" update!

From the 24th of February AEST 8pm the new update will be playable so jump in to enjoy a brand new map and monster with your mates or just by yourself if a solo spook is what you fancy.

Incase you haven't already seen it, checkout "The Nightmare" update cinematic trailer here:



Story

"The Nightmare" update delves deeper into the Agonize story and the character of Charles, offering insight into his troubling past and the haunting memories that plague his mind. Engage in a challenging series of puzzles to overcome Charles' demonic nightmare, or succumb to the horrifying creations of his psyche - the decision is yours.


Below we've included a full change log our V2.0 update!


Major Features

• New "The Nightmare" Map
  
• New monster
  
• New Playable Characters
  
• Medium difficulty mode

Small Features

• Message to help players drop notes on the ground after reading them
  
• Redesigned revive system (Don't have to pull out a syringe anymore)

Bug Fixes

• Mary swapping focus on players in multiplayer through walls.
  
• Serums being deleted via the serum machine when players attempt to place them in at the same time.
  
• Examine bug after death
  
• Other smaller minor bugs to enhance gameplay experience.

Again we want to thank everyone who has purchased Agonize, followed us on our socials and spreaded the word of our game! This is our first release and we're excited to see what the future holds.

Sincerely
The Vault Interactive Team