1.1.4.4 Public Beta Update Available

[Primus Pilus]

Hi Everyone,

Our new beta is available to download now.

You can switch to it by going to Distant Worlds 2 in your Steam Library, right-clicking on it, choosing Properties -> Betas -> then choosing the latest beta branch from the drop-down list and allowing Steam to update your game. If it updates correctly, you should see the latest beta version listed as your version in-game on the bottom right.

As of the official 1.0.6.4 update, the Core game engine has been upgraded to use the latest version of Stride. (4.1.0.1 and a newer version of .NET. As of the recent 1.1.0.9 Aurora Update, we now include .NET 7 in the game executable, so no additional external .NET redistributables are required.

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you still experience crashes with 1.0.6.4 or later, especially crashes in battle, please try the new DXVK rendering option in the game settings. This can be found under "Rendering Mode", which can be switched from DirectX 11 to DXVK. DXVK is only guaranteed to work with the SDR (Standard Definition Rendering) option in your game settings. It may work with some HDR (High Definition Rendering) settings, but we do not advise trying those at this time. The DXVK option willl likely resolve many issues caused by driver bugs or incompatibilities.

If you try this setting and the game does not launch, please note the command line option in the changes below to switch back to DirectX 11. (To force DirectX on launch, add --use-dx11 as a command-line argument to DistantWorlds2.exe)

Changes in 1.1.4.4 (May 19th, 2023):

SHIP DESIGN
- fixed dark lighting in design screen when viewing ship or base from below

FACTIONS: IKKURO AND DHAYUT
- corrections for troop values
- corrections for typos in various story events
- model/bundle fixes for the Ikkuro

Changes in 1.1.4.3 (May 17th, 2023):

Please note that for best results, we recommend starting a new game with 1.1.4.3 due to the number of fixes and improvements that won't take full effect without a new start.

CRASH FIXES
- fixed crash when repairing ship or base
- fixed rare crash when selecting random race
- fixed crash when calculating construction yard wait time
- fixed crash when calculating ship retrofit cost
- fixed crash when rendering system badges
- fixed crash when determining default display adapter when running on Linux via Proton

CRASH LOGGING
- improved robustness of session log and exception recording

PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS
- improved general performance
- improved performance for some recent changes relating to fleets and fuel tankers
- improved performance when freighters assign bulk transport missions

MEMORY MANAGEMENT
- added precautionary checks when saving SpaceItems (debris, etc) and Trade Offers
- now more active in removing empty temporary locations after ships and creatures leave them

SHIP AND FLEET BEHAVIOR
- further reduce likelihood of fleets failing to refuel (e.g taking on new attack mission without first refuelling)
- improve fleets sometimes taking on miniscule threats (e.g. civilian ships) when could instead attack major targets (bases & military)
- further extend threat strength evaluations (now including strength of bases, not just 'mobile' strength) to systems (in addition to locations)
- improved fighters boarding carriers when under heavy load, thus improving fleet responsiveness

FUEL TANKERS
- ensure fuel tankers move with fleets even when fleet is travelling to random point in deep space
- reduced number of fuel tankers built

COLONIZATION
- improved selection of build location for new colony ships - more likely to build at colonies with desired race for colonization target (but build colony must still have adequate construction resources)

MIGRATION
- fixed colony migration sometimes using races with suitability below threshold specified in empire policy (Minimum Suitability)
- ensure passenger ships load the most suitable race for migration destination from pickup colony (race at pickup colony must either meet load threshold of 500 million population, or have policy set to Resettle)

NEBULAE AND STORMS
- nebula effects (jump slowdown, damage, etc) no longer apply when a ship is skirting the edge of a nebula cloud. Must now be deeper into nebula before ship will be slowed or damaged
- reenabled Nebula Storm sound effects
- added game setting to disable Nebula Storm scene-wide lightning flashes

RESEARCH
- ensure always honor EnabledByDefault setting on research projects when generating tech trees for each faction, even for pirates
- properly exclude disabled research projects from various situations: random exploration tech breakthroughs, etc

RESOURCE LOGISTICS
- now always set default resource stock level values when planet first colonized, regardless of automation settings
- fixed bug where reserved cargo would often not be properly utilized
- tweaked expected Fuel demand level to properly prioritize construction of fuel mining stations and mining ship fuel seeking

DIPLOMACY
- ensure never get negative tribute income from vassals

EXPLORATION
- fixed bug where could investigate ruins multiple times when 'Suppress All Messages' enabled in game settings

SOUND EFFECTS
- split out sound effect volume controls for User Interface and Nebula Storms

MESSAGES
- improved some story messages by highlighting bonuses received from event

VISUAL IMPROVEMENTS
- fixed occasional single-frame flash of full-size ship model and engine exhaust on-screen when ship jumps into currently-viewed location
- ensure deep space locations still have adequate ambient lighting
- fixed ship symbol system to no longer periodically blink

HIVE AND PLANET DESTROYER THREATS
- improved mission selection for Hive and Planet Destroyer ships - thus more performant and more able to find place to self-repair any damage

GAME EDITOR
- ensure Game Editor is properly exited when Exit to Menu

Changes in 1.1.3.9 (May 5th, 2023):

The changes in this update focus on improving fuel shortages in mid-late game that some have experienced as well as fuel tanker issues within fleets. The improvements for this are targeted at several areas:

1. More accurate updating of some critical values in high contention threading scenarios (particularly cargo amounts)
2. Reduced static energy usage for shields and thus much-improved flow-on effects for ship designs (less overall fuel usage, less energy collectors and reactors required, thus more general bays for fuel cells, thus better fuel range)
3. Better fuel tanker behavior within fleets and better coordination between fleets and fuel tankers
4. Better awareness by all fleet ships of event-created threat locations especially with regard to refueling

How should Fuel Tankers work?
- When fuel tankers are low on fuel they will either load fuel from a refueling point or mine fuel from a nearby fuel source
- When assigned to a fleet, fuel tankers will monitor and refuel fleet ships as needed, while attempting to stay clear of any battles
- When not assigned to a fleet, they will refuel any ship in your empire that needs it, starting with fleets, then other military ships, exploration ships, and all other ships
- (New in 1.1.3.9) When fuel tankers are assigned to a fleet: if the fleet detects that it needs to refuel then it will first check whether it's fuel tankers can completely refuel the fleet. If so, and the tankers are within fuel range, and the fleet location is not too dangerous, then the fleet will signal the fuel tankers to top them up. The fleet will wait at it's current location until the tankers finish refueling them

RESOURCE LOGISTICS
- more accurate calculation of some values under high contention threading scenarios
- better handling of resource reservations when cancel refueling or transport missions in high contention threading scenarios

FUEL TANKERS
- improved fleet refuelling - less willing to take on other mission types when fleet ships have low fuel, instead more likely to refuel
- improved fleet usage of Fuel Tankers - automated fleets will now signal their automated Fuel Tankers to refuel them when closer than travelling to fixed refuelling point. Fleet will then wait until tankers refuel them. Fuel Tankers must be idle or mining fuel, within range and able to completely refuel fleet (see further info on Fuel Tankers below)

FLEET BEHAVIOR
- improved fleet troop loading
- fleets and other ships now more careful about going to dangerous locations (refuelling, investigating, etc), especially when considering hostile stationary defenses (bases)
- when adding manually-controlled ships to an automated fleet (Role is not Manual) then also change ship to automated. This is necessary to avoid some edge case issues where reinforcing manual ships were not behaving properly within automated fleets.

SHIELDS
- reduced static energy requirements for Shield components
- added new ShieldRechargeEnergyUsage values for Shield components to replace previous increased static energy usage. This will only use energy when the shield is actually recharging.

UI IMPROVEMENTS
- provide better UI visibility of storm/nebula/location effects (ion damage, direct damage, jump slowdown, etc...): icon and tooltip in system view summary at bottom-center of screen
- added horizontal scrolling for Select Your Race step of Start New Game screen to allow for more than 10 races

GAME EVENTS
- added new GameEventAction condition type to better support story events: EmpireIsPlayer

MUSIC
- added option for when switch music tracks: when scene changes or when track ends

MODDING
- provided better support for static character and race art in Character screen (fixed distortion and ensure have background)

OTHER
- fixed potential bug with Assault Pods when loading savegames
- updated Haakonish ship models with some minor fixes

Changes in 1.1.3.6 (April 28th, 2023):

CRASH FIXES
- fixed some rare list bugs which were caused by performance improvements

GRAPHICAL IMPROVEMENTS
- fixed index issues causing large models to sometimes not load correctly

PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS
- reduced memory usage for nebula path finding

PLANETARY DEFENSE FACILITIES
- fixed fighters at colonies (Fighter Bay facility) not being built or launched
- fixed weapon planetary facilities not updating properly when reload savegame
- fixed weapon planetary facilities so that properly have multiple instances of weapon as defined in PlanetaryFacilityDefinitions.xml

Changes in 1.1.3.5 (April 21st, 2023):

CRASH AND BUG FIXES
- fixed rare crash when evaluating dominant race for a colony population
- fixed rare crash when calculating population attack strength at invaded colonies
- fixed various threading issues causing a variety of strange behavior

INSTALLATION ISSUES
- fixed installation issue with loading DLC models when purchased from different platform to main game (e.g. Steam vs Matrix), this could cause the DLC factions to not show up in some cases even when installed

FLEET BEHAVIOR
- fixed bug where fleets would sometimes attack creatures at distant locations
- tightened fleet formation when most ships in fleet are set to Core (role within fleet)
- fixed fleets sometimes repeatedly attempting to move to home base when most ships in fleet are set to Core (role within fleet)

FIGHTERS AND CARRIERS
- carriers will now slow even further if waiting for slow fighters to board while preparing to jump
- expanded conditions when fighters are considered stranded and are abandoned (e.g. reactor disabled and thus unable to move fast enough to board moving carrier)
- ensure fighters at colonies (Fighter Base facility) are properly removed when empire destroyed

SHIP MISSIONS
- fixed troop transports sometimes failing to find docking point at colony when loading troops

SHIP MODEL LOADING
- fixed issues with loading some ship models

EXPLORATION
- fixed erroneous repeated ruins investigation at colonies when one of the related game events is disabled

RESOURCES
- tweaked resource mining rate when have many resources at a location (more than 5) so that mining rate for each resource remains at reasonable level (not too slow)

UI IMPROVEMENTS
- added larger step increments for numeric up/down controls (shift-click, ctrl-click, shift-ctrl-click) in areas of the interface that support them

IKKURO AND DHAYUT DLC
- Corrected Dhayut Infantry troop strength
- Fixed Dhayut Resort Base issue
- Fixed Ikkuro Cruiser issues

DATA
- Various data tweaks and fixes to components

Changes in 1.1.3.4 (April 6th, 2023):

CRASH FIXES
- fixed rare crash when ship reviews fleet escort
- handle rare exceptions when loading character animations
- fixed crash when lock view on jumping ship while weapon effects are turned off
- fixed rare crash when updating territory map
- fixed rare crash when review fleet escort ships
- fixed crash in Start New Game screen when a playable race has a null description

PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS
- optimized nebula rendering to be more performant
- added configurable nebula rendering density option in game settings, if you still have any performance issues in nebulae, turn this setting down
- fixed some items not being processed in background
- fixed some systems and locations becoming very slow when have very many debris items
- Texture Streaming is now off by default, can reenable in game settings but DW2 generally performs better with this turned off

BACKGROUND STAR FIELD
- fixed up background starfield fade-out
- added configurable background star field density level option in game settings to allow each player to adjust the density of the starfield to their liking
- added configurable background star field opacity option in game settings to allow each player to adjust the brightness of the starfield to their liking

RESEARCH
- fixed duplicate research bonuses from research stations at colonies with ruins

SOUNDS
- fixed star and black hole sounds not honoring sound effect volume

CONSTRUCTION
- fixed inability to build another spaceport at a colony if scrap existing spaceport while under construction
- ensure properly acquire all ships in construction queues when take ownership of ship, base or colony

OTHER
- fixed home colony quality sometimes dropping slightly soon after game start when use Republic or Monarchy government types
- reduced default victory condition threshold for new games to 60%

Changes in 1.1.3.2 (March 30th, 2023)

IMPORTANT NOTES: This is the first of a new series of experimental "performance" betas. We've been working behind the scenes for months to try to fix the most significant performance issues with Distant Worlds 2, which involved making quite a few low level changes which affected just about every area of the game. You will find that as a result, performance is vastly improved in this new build. However, despite many weeks of stabilization testing, we expect there will be more new bugs than in most betas because of the magnitude of changes (months of work) that are now going out to the public for the first time. Thanks in advance for helping us test this out. Please let us know how you find the performance and any new bugs you may encounter.

We recommend starting a new game for testing this build. Old saves will load, but could have some unique issues.

Known Issues: This build can sometimes generate additional duplicate messages for the same event. There could be issues with items missing from lists occasionally or with ships or stations not appearing where they should. Saves for these issues will help us solve them in future beta builds.

Changes in this build:

CRASH FIXES
- fixed crash when ship evaluates collision avoidance
- fixed rare crash when ship is destroyed
- fixed crash when change camera view from Top Down to Free Form, then to Low/Med/High Angle
- fixed crash when base processes its docking queue
- fixed crash when determining empire fuel resources
- fixed crash when determining excess resources at a location for bulk cargo transport
- fixed crash when updating map overlays
- fixed rare crashes when adding or removing character skills or traits

PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS
- Massive performance improvements in all areas
- Includes support for new x8 speed, though we do not advise using this if you are experiencing any performance lag at all
- Expanded the Shift-Tilde performance overlay to provide much more information about game performance
- Draw overhead reduced by 75% in worst case scenarios
- Main thread drawing is now rarely or never blocked
- .Net Garbage Collection occurrence on main thread is significantly reduced
- .Net Garbage generation is significantly reduced
- CPU 0 is targeted for drawing, all other work is pushed to other CPU cores except particle effects
- Hitching due to various components of the UI (cashflow, colony approval) are reduced or eliminated
- Background simulation rate significantly increased, potentially more parallelized on higher core counts
- Various improvements to multithreading

COMPATIBILITY AND GAME SETTINGS
- added Maximum FPS setting in game settings, allowing you to limit GPU usage
- added Vsync as a game setting (enabled by default) which means DW2 will try to match your monitor's refresh rate in terms of actual displayed FPS
- added System Load Target setting in game settings, allowing you to limit CPU usage
- additional settings to disable texture streaming, particle effects, weapon effects and unit damage overlay are available for players with ongoing performance issues to test to see which may help on a given system
- fixed some display values not being properly remembered in game settings

DISPLAY IMPROVEMENTS
- tweaked appearance of background starfield, which should eliminate a bad visual effect that was only visible on some kinds of monitors

INSTALLATION ISSUES
- more gracefully handle missing shiphulls or bundles (models) and warn player about need to fix installation

[Ax4711]

Thanky yous! As there are no changes to game events etc mentioned, can we continue a save or should we start new?

[rahonbass]

Wow nice update in the works. Will give this a test :) especially excited for the 8x speed.

[ERutins]

Originally posted by Ax4711:

Thanky yous! As there are no changes to game events etc mentioned, can we continue a save or should we start new?

For troubleshooting issues with this update, it's better to start a new game. However, it will load and play older saves and you should see a pretty significant performance improvement on those.

[iGi]

Thanks!
I tried it quickly and it seems to be much better.
300 Stars, half the memory usage from before (4GB before, now less than 2GB), much smoother ship movement (on galaxy map).

will have to see how this performs after 2,3,4 hours of gameplay.

[Mr.Freud]

Can you pls make it possible to adjust the number of background stars? It was an option in DW1. While new stars look much better on an HDR capable screen, its still too many of them.

[Mr.Freud]

they look very intrusive.

[EddyVegas]

game crashes on startup. 5 seconds of splash screen, then silent crash

[ERutins]

Originally posted by EddyVegas:

game crashes on startup. 5 seconds of splash screen, then silent crash

Assuming this wasn't happening for you before this version, could you try deleting the gamesettings and gamestartsettings files in the /data sub-folder of your installation, then restart to see if that helps? If it does not, please share the sessionlog.txt from your /data/logs sub-folder with us in the Tech Support sub-forum.

[EddyVegas]

Originally posted by ERutins:

Originally posted by EddyVegas:

game crashes on startup. 5 seconds of splash screen, then silent crash

Assuming this wasn't happening for you before this version, could you try deleting the gamesettings and gamestartsettings files in the /data sub-folder of your installation, then restart to see if that helps? If it does not, please share the sessionlog.txt from your /data/logs sub-folder with us in the Tech Support sub-forum.

it still crashes, but sessionlog is too big? it won't post. sorry

[Primus Pilus]

Originally posted by EddyVegas:

Originally posted by ERutins:

Assuming this wasn't happening for you before this version, could you try deleting the gamesettings and gamestartsettings files in the /data sub-folder of your installation, then restart to see if that helps? If it does not, please share the sessionlog.txt from your /data/logs sub-folder with us in the Tech Support sub-forum.

it still crashes, but sessionlog is too big? it won't post. sorry

Hey thanks for the report! You can zip up and send the session log and any crash dumps you may have to the following email: [e-mail] or by sharing a link through a file-sharing service such as WeTransfer (https://wetransfer.com/)

[EddyVegas]

This comment is awaiting analysis by our automated content check system. It will be temporarily hidden until we verify that it does not contain harmful content (e.g. links to websites that attempt to steal information).

[TheMac]

A few seconds into the game I quit playing and filed a bug report. My race did not receive any of the starting tech. Bug report is on the forum along with a save game.

[Anocyn]

Originally posted by Primus Pilus:

Originally posted by EddyVegas:

it still crashes, but sessionlog is too big? it won't post. sorry

Hey thanks for the report! You can zip up and send the session log and any crash dumps you may have to the following email: [e-mail] or by sharing a link through a file-sharing service such as WeTransfer (https://wetransfer.com/)

no crash dump, but this is the sessionlog:
-----
Distant Worlds 2, version 1.1.3.2 : Starting Game Session 30-03-2023 23-36-09.244
Stride version 4.1.38.0-CodeForce
Total System Memory: 16296MB
Available System Memory (at start): 53280MB
Process ID:268
30-03-2023 23-36-11.955: Loading file: /data/ColonyEventDefinitions.xml
30-03-2023 23-36-11.957: Successfully loaded file: /data/ColonyEventDefinitions.xml
30-03-2023 23-36-11.958: Loading file: /data/ColonyEventDefinitions_Dhayut.xml
30-03-2023 23-36-11.958: Successfully loaded file: /data/ColonyEventDefinitions_Dhayut.xml
30-03-2023 23-36-11.958: Loading file: /data/ColonyEventDefinitions_Ikkuro.xml
30-03-2023 23-36-11.959: Successfully loaded file: /data/ColonyEventDefinitions_Ikkuro.xml
-----

no issues before this version, tried dx11 and dxvk2.
dxvk2 doesn't even get past the process id line in the log,
tried running as admin, no difference

tried again with deleting extra files in the data folder, had files named deletegamesettings and deletegamestartsettings, once those are gone the log indicates it crashes during or after loading the sound effects

[ERutins]

Originally posted by TheMac:

A few seconds into the game I quit playing and filed a bug report. My race did not receive any of the starting tech. Bug report is on the forum along with a save game.

I think you just need to wait a bit longer.

[Hawk]

this fixed my vega 56 launch crash issues ..thanks