Monday March 18 7PM EST, join Chris on Twitch while he takes some time to discuss what is in the works at Gaggle Studios and Goose Goose Duck!

Connect Twitch Drops: https://gaggle.fun/dashboard/account-linking
Tune in Live: https://twitch.tv/canadian_thor

• Updated Core card cycle to "X+1" effects
  
• Restored turn timers in dedicated server matches
  
• Fixed profile creation on non-windows platforms
  
• Added duplicate protection to booster packs in duel mode
  
• Updated main menu and main screen UX
  
• More cleanup for translations
  
• Changed default foil intensity to 70%
  
• Added essence indicators to drafted cards
  
• Changed Explorer card amount to 5 to better fit Explore mechanic
  
• Updated card pack images

Hi!

And here is the new update 0.5.4.

This update has affected most of the game:

• All research trees have been changed. Added depth of relationships.
  
• Now it is necessary to build and develop a base. Many research workbenches and crafting workbenches have been added.
  
• New upgrades for mining lasers have been added.
  
• The game has been localized into new languages: French, German and Turkish (machine translation).
  
• All localized languages have been updated (machine translation).
  
• Servers and the way of server-client interaction have been optimized.
  
• A new weapon has been added.
  
• Numerous changes to the UI.

Research trees
All the development trees are now structured, connected in the correct order.
They have built-in workbenches for research and for creating objects. Read more further :)
Names:

• Workbench for Research - Research Center
  
• Workbench for Crafting - Forge

The importance of your own base
It is extremely necessary to build your own base, because now you can't just create everything anywhere in the universe. To create something, you need to be close, in line of sight with the necessary workbench. Only in this case will you be able to request the creation of an item. But before that, you need to study the subject, as before, but this can only be done by being near the necessary Research Center.


Upgrades for mining lasers
There are not many upgrades : D
The progression of the resource extraction skill has been changed. You will definitely need new upgrades.


Servers
If you do not immerse yourself in technical information, then the optimization of data transmission has increased thousands of times. Really in the thousands..) The most important thing is that the gameplay will become much smoother, although it was almost impossible to notice any lags on the data transfer side before.
In short, the servers are cool now :D


New weapon
Due to the optimization described above, I can now add rapid-fire weapons. This is how the first plasma submachine gun appeared in the game. Plasma SMG. Its advantage was its high rate of fire, and in combination with good damage makes it very interesting.
But things don't get so sweet... This type of weapon has a fairly high horizontal recoil (pulls right-left) and a small vertical one. The spread is also not the most pleasant.


Changes to the UI

• Added a description of each subject, where it is studied, and where it is created.
  
• Added the display of workbenches that are nearby.
  
• Added ammo display.

- Resolution is the main menus should be a bit better
- Added a new speedup button that speeds more up until damage is taken by an enemy. This should help in long maps where the enemy takes ages to get to the middle. The enemy won't gain more speed which was the case in the previous version.
- Fixed typos
- Achievements for hardmode and normalmode + two lanes are now achievable

• Updated Core card cycle to "X+1" effects
  
• Restored turn timers in dedicated server matches
  
• Fixed profile creation on non-windows platforms
  
• Added duplicate protection to booster packs in duel mode
  
• Updated main menu and main screen UX
  
• More cleanup for translations
  
• Changed default foil intensity to 70%
  
• Added essence indicators to drafted cards
  
• Changed Explorer card amount to 5 to better fit Explore mechanic
  
• Updated card pack images

Hey everyone! Quick Update on progress ! We are targeting another experimental in the next few days to address further some bugs/issues. Our goal is to do 24 hour observation periods daily till we deem Experimental stable so we can merge it into the normal branch by Friday at the latest.


To opt into experimental install "Cepheus Protocol Experimental" in your steam library.
It is no longer a beta opt in but an entirely new game granted when you purchase the base game.

(Click Show details for a full breakdown of the changes)
[expand type=details]

• Fixed Vehicles on the LHA6 not properly being 'counted' by the stern elevator
  
• Also made sure 'ungarrisonable' vehicles cannot be boarded onto any LCACs from the LHA6's stern elevator
  
• Fixed vehicles not being able to move if given a group move command on the LHA6 (though rotation issues remain)
  
• Fixed an 'override focal point' issue with the FormationPositionActors that was breaking ground vehicle movement when they're on the deck of the LHA6
  
• Added some logic to make 'outdated' Formation Move Handlers get deleted instead of staying around
  
• Set up a safety to prevent units from 'walking off' of the LHA6 while on it
  
• Fixed a 'loading issue' from preplaced-actor loading that could erroneously mess with all preplaced/already loaded characters. This also seems to fix an issue with the LHA6 sometimes failing to remember if it was docked when loaded from a save
  
• Increased maximum EvacuatingCivilians from 30 to 45 so civvie evacuation can 'flow' more smoothly (though this may have some performance implications)
  
• increased the Civilian Holding Area capacity from 20 to 30, to smooth out evacuation requirements
  
• Added some improvements to 'boarding the LHA6 elevator from the dock' logic to reduce 'vehicles stacking on one another' instances. Also some minor changes to 'finish lerp' to try to break up 'stuck inside one another' instances when multiple vehicles board from elevator onto deck
  
• Fixed the Springbok (JLTV) erroneously being able to drive without a pilot
  
• Added 'click handling' to borders in the HUD Recruit Popup so clicks won't sometimes 'go through' it and 'close out' the recruit popup incorrectly (by selecting buildings in the world, for example, that happened to be where your mouse was on the popup itself)
  
• Fix to loading of 'collision enabled lerps' for boats causing the Carrier to sometimes load at world zero (won't fix saves before this fix, though)
  
• Another fix for rare crash with proxy movement
  
• Updated ProxyMovementCharacters to be more reliable when other units are 'in the way', allowing moshpits of vehicles (if you put a lot of vehicles on the carrier at once) to be more able to move
  
• Added a minor timer loop to the Proxy Movement Characters to 'slow them down' if they get 'too far ahead' of the units they are tied to
  
• Updated ammo transferring logic to support refilling ammo for garrisoned units, even if ammo cannot be given to the garrison owner (example: MULE transfers ammo to soldiers, but not to vehicles. Previously, due to this, it would fail to refill ammo for units inside a vehicle, where other supply boxes would succeed)
  
• Updated GarrisonCapacity (and some relevant functions) back to int32 from uint8 (since some garrisons may want to hold a lot of people, such as a custom difficulty Evac Merlin)
  
• Fixed some function/BP/conditional references in BP that were still in 'byte' format (despite looking like int32!!) causing the math to fail for beyond-255 values Result: Fixes evac for Evac Merlins that had boosted capacity from custom difficulty
  
• Updated the docking spline for Alcatraz to prevent situations where units on the deck of the LHA6 get 'swept around' by colliding with the Alcatraz pipes while the LHA6 docks-in-reverse
  
• Fixed Rate of fire of some vehicle weapons.

Please note the following going forward (Restart your game/steam to get the update if needed
[/expand]
[expand type=details]
https://youtu.be/GV3YOssGEfs
https://youtu.be/LOdVk1yiuak
https://steamcommunity.com/games/979640/announcements/detail/3718325557390407190
We now have a new system for our community to follow along on development. This website will break down all the major systems that are coming each patch. It will not include hotfixes/bug fixes. Sections inside TBD can be included randomly if we are ahead of schedule
https://www.notion.so/cepheusprotocol/Cepheus-Protocol-31f1b25ce00148d6844825f4a0c0bc08
[/expand]
[expand type=details]
Everything goes towards expanding the team and building a better game!

Experience the outbreak of the Pangu Virus from multiple perspectives across as the brave heroes of the Center for Epidemic Research and Control battle tirelessly to stop the spread of a cataclysmic alien virus that has mutated innocent people into monstrous creatures of unimaginable power
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1707120/Cepheus_Protocol_Anthology_Season_1/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eWbDibGMrU
[/expand]

Celarious' Game File
Celarious allowed me to download a large saved game file, in excess of 4gB. He was curious about why the file was so large. That file flushed out some bugs.

The original file is used more or less like this:

• 5mB of game data, empires, and species.
  
• 4gB of building blueprints, 329 of them.
  
• 300mB of spacecraft blueprints, 32 of them. Nice spaceships!
  
• 30mB of Universe and its atoms.

A big surprise was watching memory usage. As soon as QFile::open is called on the file, 8gB of memory gets consumed. That is without reading any data from the file. The memory does not appear to be released after I close the file. I am continuing to research this feature. Total memory usage only gained 1gB after that, for a final total of 11gB virtual and 8gB resident.

Another surprise was the 2,626 sectors, 52,526 solar systems, and 2,383 ringworld arc sections. This led to some improvements to the solar system decay logic, which reduced these numbers to 606 sectors, 13,615 solar systems, and 28 ringworld arc sections.

A small number of obsolete blueprints were deleted automatically.

Some of the decay logic happens in stages. After running the game a few times, the save game file lost about 110mB of size.

Decay Solar Systems
A ringworld prevents the solar system contents from decaying.

This was improved to allow ringworld solar systems to decay when there are no dependencies.

Save Large Game to File Fails
Saving the Current Game to a file fails when the game data is larger than 2gB.

The code to save a game to a single file does about the same thing as zipping the two files together into one. My code to do this is very simplistic, simply loading the entire file into a QByteArray at once. Well a QByteArray is limited to 2gB in size.

This function is not important enough to do the work necessary to overcome this limitation.

Instead a message is presented now, when the file size is too large. The message advises the user to simply zip the files, and it reports the full path to the two files that are needed.

Save Game to File Fails
Saving any game to a file, other than the Current Game, does absolutely nothing.

Fixed file path error.

Save Customizations to Gear
Deantwo suggested that the spacecraft customizations be stored into the avatar's gear, rather than to a disk file.

This was such a good idea that I dug into it right away. It is done.

Terrain Improvement Option
Improvements were made to terrain generation. The changes do not affect worlds that have already been created. Can this be done?

A message now appears when an old version game file is loaded. The message box offers to fix the terrain. After the game is saved, the message does not appear again.

City Lights
Cities do not look like cities at night. There isn't enough light. They should glow more.

Added blobs of light to buildings at night, if they have power.

Greetings everyone!

We are approaching the fourth anniversary since the initial AMS2 Early Access release on Steam - and what a roller coaster these four years have been! Some lows along the way but many highs, with the overall trajectory firmly pointing upwards and leading to our highest peak right after our last catch-up in December.

Great timing then to go over some of the developments we´ve been putting together for 2024 - developments which we are confident will see AMS2 rising to a whole new atmospheric layer.

Most of the team has been working on major new features and some exciting content due to arrive with our next milestone update - Automobilista 2 V1.6 is expected to come sometime in the Summer (or Winter for those of us in the Southern hemisphere) - this will be in many ways the biggest & more important update to AMS2 yet.

We do have a smaller V1.5.6 update to deliver before that however, including some cool content updates and new valuable developments, which we hope to deploy before the end of the month.

Let´s get into it then for a preview of what´s coming not only for this upcoming release but also a glimpse into the big one a few more months down the line!



We are delighted to announce that Automobilista 2 is now an official partner of the International Motorsports Association, the body in charge of several long-running racing series in the US, the premier of which of course being the WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, featuring some of the most traditional Endurance events in the world such as the Daytona 24h, the Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta and the Sebring 12h - the latter taking place just as we write this.

Our goal through this very exciting partnership is to align the remaining agreements required to have the 2024 season - teams, cars and venues - represented in AMS2, a process that is already well under way with direct support from IMSA themselves.

Such agreements don´t always evolve at the same pace, so as with everything else in AMS2 this is a project to be assembled in parts - some of them already feature in the current version of AMS2, and you may expect some major additions to arrive with the release of V1.6. Subsequent updates hopefully will bring most if not all the remaining pieces to complete this very large ensemble.

In our last dev update of 2023 we mentioned that Endurance racing fans were in for an exciting year in 2024, beyond the then imminent release of Le Mans and the initial Endurance pack in December. The partnership with IMSA is a key step to deliver on that promise, with much more to come later this year.


Before the big V1.6 update due to arrive a few months from now, AMS2 will receive a smaller update towards the end of this month, and in it users will get a glimpse into some of the developments we´ve been working on the past few months.

GRAPHICS for both cars and tracks are being boosted by some excellent art & shader developments with minimal to no impact on performance. These include an increasing number of tracks making use of 3D trees in the immediate trackside surroundings (combining with the otherwise perfectly suitable billboard spinning 2D trees which remain in use at longer distances) as well as much nicer water shader making lakes, rivers and sea look signifcantly more life-like - both developments in display below at the picturesque Ibarra circuit, looking better than ever:




Although revision of all tracks for these developments are only expected to be completed in V1.6, several tracks will already feature them in V1.5.6 .

Cars are likewise receiving similar material and texture updates especially inside the cockpit - the Corvette C8 below being one of the prime examples:


LiveTrack is also getting some valuable new developments not only to its various intertwined dynamics, but also to how these dynamics are represented in-game. These include a more distinctive-looking rubbered-in racing line in the dry and a likewise more distinctive line outside that rubber in the wet; the dustier edges of the road will also appear more distinctively lower grip, with clouds of dust being kicked up as cars run over them.


Last but never least, we have further PHYSICS development incoming - even though the V1.6 revisions won´t be as profound as last year´s V1.5 overhaul, there are still significant improvements with the focus once again on tire development - more specifically tire thermodynamics, wear & hysteresis.

While these updates will only arrive wholesale with V1.6, two classes will already feature v1.6 physics in V1.5.6 later this month.


Physics developer Tom Tessmer is leading the charge with these new tire developments - below is his summary of what the hysteresis developments entail:

"There are two aspects of hysteresis - the first and operative way we are using it simulates how rubber naturally compresses and rebounds from compression, allowing (and hindering) how deep a specific rubber compound can sink into the asperities (cracks and crevasses) of the track surface. A soft compound sinks into the cracks more quickly than harder one, with more rubber in the cracks adding friction / grip. The same rubber compound can compress and rebound at different rates as well, generally allowing for quicker compression, but once the rubber is free of the track surface, the rubber rebounds (of flexes) back to its original shape slower.

The second aspect of hysteresis is basically related to how heat is generated in the tire as this constant compression and rebounding on a molecular level generates energy.

Effectively with STM, hysteresis helps us simulate the falloff of grip caused by the lack of time the rubber has a chance to "sink" into the asperities of the track as slip / slide velocity of the tire grows higher. Simply put, the more the tire slides, the less time the rubber has to sink back into the cracks and crevasses of the track. Less rubber sinking into the track yields less friction, leading to less grip from that sliding tire."

The work on hysteresis directly relate to the thermo / wear / damage revisions also incoming with v1.6, but we´ll get to those in a later dev update.

Read on below to learn the two classes already receiving these V1.6 developments with V1.5.6 later this month!



A new year means a new season for our longest running-partner, the premier Brazilian racing series back for the last season in this generation of cars before completely new cars are introduced in 2025.

The 2024 cars aren´t completely unchanged however - they are slightly heavier, have slightly longer wheelbase and new Push-to-Pass rules bringing a bigger number of shorter boosts, with no activation delays between them. Upon release the cars of the 2024 season will also feature the latest v1.6 physics developments.

For those users who may feel they already have more legacy Stock Car seasons than they might wish, some good news - V1.6 will feature a content manager which will allow them to customize the game to feature only the classes and tracks they are interested in.




The top-level formula class in AMS2 is getting a big overhaul in V1.5.6. Initially released alongside the new real-life regulations of the 2022 season, the F-Ultimate Gen2 has since become somewhat outdated by both the developments of the real-life series as well as the improving quality standards within the sim. With this overhaul the F-Ultimate Gen2 gets a sexy new 3D model, updated sounds and new technical features to better simulate a modern GP car, the latest DRS rules - all wrapped with the latest V1.6 physics revisions which are a big step-up for this particular car.

Livery modders looking to get a jump start with the new toy please feel free to reach out to @Coanda for the template!



Or is the the Fall Sale? That obviously depends on whether you are in Northern or Southern hemispheres, but what is true for everyone is that AMS2 and all DLCS are on sale with 50% off, making it a great time to complete your collection of any missing items which you can then enjoy it with both Spring and Autumn foliage in-game :)




AMS2 development is not expected to slow down any time soon - quite the contrary in fact as the influx of new partnerships and demands for further and more complex features means it´s going to speed up even more in the coming months.

We are thus looking to expand the team with new talent - C++ code engineers, car & environment 3D artists in particular are in high demand. A new sticky thread in the forum will come up shortly listing the current positions and their requirements.

If you are passionate and talented developer with the skills to contribute in any area of development beyond the listed positions we still welcome your application - please feel free to submit it to jobs@reizastudios.com for evaluation.


That covers it all we had for this update! The wait for the next one won´t be as long this time - as the V1.6 update packs a far bigger punch beyond what has been previewed here, we need a few more of these articles to cover all of it so I´ll be pushing to have one every month from now until its release to cover all of it.

Until then we hope you enjoy the new goodies in the V1.5.6 update - shouldn´t be a long wait!

-Tower choices now stay the same after rebirth
-Floating numbers (damage and gold texts) are now always shown.