Between builds 148 (0.55) and 191 (0.57)

We're happy to announce Galactic Conquerors 0.57 version. This patch is intended to fix issues that were happening in previous release and to provide the finalized data structure to the game. As always please remember to patch your client before starting online games. Please note that this patch is around 250 megabytes by its size and is thus recommended to be downloaded with broadband connection.

• The game engine has been updated to Unity3D 5.3. This is the last main release we're using developing the game
• Due to engine update we're dropping out the support for running Galactic Conquerors on some systems. The new operating system requirements are Windows XP SP2+, Mac OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion. Linux operating system requirements stay intact.

• The finalized folder structure is here. The changes are for the incoming editor and modding possibilities.
• The load screen now has a load animation.
• The key mapping is now added to the settings, you can now bind your own custom keys from within main menu settings
• It's now possible to toggle VSync from Quality Settings.

• The damage and attack speed stat have been merged within Planetary UI. The new system shows the Damage Per Seconds (DPS) for each Commander and Unit
• The faction selector has new textures for color selection which should be clearer on some screens. The faction selector UI also included indicator of the player's own faction within the faction's list
• The load mechanics have been improved and it should now take signifcantly less time to start the game.
• The game uses now less computer's resources as the systems that provided backwards compability are stripped down.
• The player colors are reworked to provide more clearer looks.
• The players that have not been set as AI or client at the game start no longer show in game menu.
• The factions now have their own backgrounds within the Research UI.
• The icons when multi selecting units are no longer stretched.
• The game data cache is now cleared between released versions automaticly
• Toggling the message composing while chat window is not visible now toggles the full size window as intended.

• Fixed bug that prevented game author changing AI color or faction
• The cursor is no longer rendered above the load screen as intended.
• Fixed bug that caused incorrect rendering within research UI.
• Fixed a bug that prevented Tutorial start correctly in 0.56 build
• Fixed bug that allowed the user to press on portals with secondary mouse button and cause the inpect event occur.
• Fixed bug that glitched the commander animations within Research UI
• Fixed the path draw for the selected moving units. The old system drawed the path to the closest path node but now the path is drawn correctly to the position the unit will be heading with the new move command.
• Fixed a bug that could cause the winning battle army not trigger the planet conquer in some cases
• Fixed bug that prevented the tooltip rendering on the Planetary UI's stat view.
• Fixed incorrect animation rendering within army bar slots when slot has a active recruit command.
• Some of the assets were missing from the last release, the assets are now properly included with the folder structure changes.
• Fixed a potential crash when launching the game on some systems where users would cause their input to hijack the load mechanics at a critical time.
• It's no longer possible to start a server without name.
• Battling armies now correctly shoot each other on roam phase.
• Fixed a bug that caused incorrect animation render within Research UI
• Fixed a bug that would allow player to end turn during critical part of the tutorial using turn accept key
• It's no longer possible for dead units to trigger the skill functionalities.
• Fixed issue where the units would shoot their allied forces if they would be activating skill on their target.
• Fixed a bug that would cause armies to look to the last enemy they were in battle with
• Fixed incorrect Army Inspector Rendering
• Fixed bug that prevented some Army Inspector slots be left to state where the slots were not selectable
• Fixed a bug that prevented Stack UI opening within battle
• Fixed a bug that could cause the stacks within battle have zero units in them.
• Fixed several wrong effect shaders

• One Orbit To Rule: Fixed issue where there was two stars with the same identifier. This could cause incorrect AI and path calculations within the map
• EMP Bolt: The damage is no longer delivered twice, the effects of this skill are now triggered in their correct places
• Tutorial: There's no longer third unit on the blue player when the first battle begins. Removed camera rotation when coming away from the first battle. The secondary army of the blue player now has different unit combination for easier planet access after first battle.

Some systems are unable to use automatic model cache clean up. If your models show incorrectly in game please clear the cache from Main Menu / Settings / Game "Clear Cache"
 

Hi everyone!

First of all we wish everyone happy holidays in advance! Hope your year has gone well. It's been interesting year for us at least, and now we're going to talk more about this year and the next.


During last February we started to have everything together for the Galactic Conquerors. The gameplay started to look as it should and the networking code functioned quite well with our test machines. The first public demo (0.35) was released on January and we started to receive valuable feedback from out users; You. With slow but steady process, we started to iron out the game and finally released the 0.4 version public in the Spring. We saw a lot of active players with the demo launch and started a real discussion about releasing the game on Steam. Up till that point the discussion had been more with "if" than with "when". We went to Nordic Game Conference on May to pitch the game to publishers and got contacts, possible publishers and a project that would bring us food to the table (which we're going to talk about later on). At the same time with the NGC, the good fellows from BSM contacted us during the time, and we saw an opportunity with them as a publisher for Galactic Conquerors. With the list of publishers we had in our hands at that time, we thought BSM would be closest to Indie Game Developers than any other. We signed the deal early summer, got to Steam and launch was this September, and it's been a pleasure to see all the videos and feedback from the game this far!

But as mentioned we got a project from the NGC we attended to and signed the work start on July as employees in the company that had ordered the product. How has this affected our development process? Quite much actually. We negotiated the project leads to give us an opportunity to spend 50% of the time on GC and 50% on the other game, so we could do both at the same time, but with less resources. And as we're committed to everything we start, and want to see the projects to the finish line, we've now worked around six months creating an educational game for Finnish enterpreneurs. Now the project's done and the employeer is looking for a good home for the project next year.

What the end of the contract project has and will mean to us:

• We secured some income for our team members 2015
• We learned mobile development, which we had some plans of our own for to begin with
• It was a nice change to do something else than galaxies (we were starting to cough up stardust)
• We're each financially secured for at least the next six months to continue with GC, which was honestly our biggest worry most of the time

TL DR; We're going to delay the release, for reasons below

Even if the past year has been exciting time for us, it's also been rough, and a bit of a disappointment. We didn't get as much done as we had hoped. We thought we could push ourselves to the limits for six months and work around the clock if needed. We were proven wrong rather quickly. Slowly the schedules started to be delayed and our team began to show some symptoms of a burnout. Some members have left, some don't work full-time on this project anymore. Everyone has had personal issues of their own, and are still dealing with them. Unfortunately in a team as small as ours, it does affect the progress. We're still continuing the development with the resources we have and are determined to see this through properly, though; 1 person working with the level editor (+ modding tools after the release (high possibility), 2 people working on graphics and effects and 1 working on the code. So due to these reason we're going to delay the release 1.0 to July 30 2016. This gives us the time to do the following things:

• Galactic Conquerors:
  • Current status: Nyad faction units are done, all the gameplay mechanics are there but we're still testing if the Diplomacy feature is good enough to be implemented into the game. We've started sketching out the next UI version from ground up, though it isn't a top priority right now.
  • We're looking into the possibility to do a network overhaul from legacy Unity network code to the newer one, which might help with connection issues.
  • Improving the visuals with the new 5.3 Engine version.
  • Mercenaries, Achievements, cloud support all of which are under progress.
• Artificial intelligence overhaul as all the gameplay components are finally in the game
  • Concepts are done, we're seeing about implementing a modding tool for players to create their own AI behaviours. The possibility exists, but requires some work from us and the overhaul would be the best chance to implement those changes.
• Dedicated servers
  • Current status: Control panel started, server code integrated from Galactic Conquerors.
• Game Editor
  • Current status: Levels can be edited and created, working with the UI problems and missing special events the levels can have. The faction editor is functional and can handle the upcoming planetary defenses already, but still needs an editor for unit skills. Whether or not we'll actually make skill modding possible is yet to be decided, as it might prove problematic.
  • We've not started the language editor yet, but it should be easy enough to add later

• 0.57 is released as soon as possible, we've run into technical difficulties with it on Steam
• We're looking to open the project tools early next year
• We'll take a week or two "off" (quation marks equal that we don't actually are off, off. Still lurking on forums and other social media)

Happy holidays to all of you out there!

Regards,
Kinahmi Games Team


 

We're happy to introduce 0.55 version with a lot of bug fixes and improvements. This patch paves the way for 0.6 release to be launched later on, which will introduce more content and balancing to the game. For the preparations of 0.6 we've already included most of the new model files within the data, so the 0.6 patch size'll be as minimal as possible. As always, please download the latest version before launching multiplayer games. We'd like to thank the feedback we've received with the Early Access launch, it has been a valuable for us and we've done our best to accommodate to your suggestions and critique, though not all of it could be done by this middle patch.

General

• New resources structure introduced. The new mechanics provide the editor (coming later as well) a way to download the assets the game uses within the editor. This enables more possibilities for user modifications and makes it easier.
• Selection system has been changed based on the feedback received! In the earlier version, due to performance design, army and stack selections happened by clicking the player indicator beneath the army/unit, even if it was invisible. We've changed the system to model based, which now allows clicking the objects below armies. Frustration when clicking the portal should be gone now!
• The selection system events have been changed to a new version. This fixes the issues where the objects could be clicked through UI elements, such as clicking a portal through the UI of planetary view.
• Stacks now save the original unit amounts, healts and shields at the start of a battle. This improves the healing skill effects, since the total healing is no longer clamped against the current unit amount, but against the original unit amount.

Added

• Players are now able to ping to the allied members with left control + primary mouse button.
• Languge keys now support syntax to display key bindings within the language key strings.
• Inspectors for armies, stacks and planets have now been added. You can display them by holding down the left control key. It will display additional information on the roam map, and shows enlarged unit icons more clearly in battle (should make selecting units easier if they've clustered up or you've zoomed out).
• Army Inspector UI now has elements to select the slots you want to edit. It's also possible to save the default attitudes per unit slot.
• A new UI Element for multiselecting within battle is added. This allows you to inspect the selected units and change their attitudes.
• Attitude modifiers enabled.
  
  • Aggressive attitude: +20% Movement speed, +20% damage taken,
  • Normal attitude: no modifiers
  • Defensive attitude: -20% damage taken, -20% movement speed
• Stacks can now be deleted from the army when the army's not within battle, by selecting the slot and pressing the delete button.
• New UI Animations when certain events trigger.
• 0.6 data has been prepared for the release to some extent, though this version needs work.
• Shield and health bars are now visible on each side of the player indicator, beneath an army/unit stack.
• New shield effects on units are now added! As long as a stack of units has shields left, their model will glow blue. The shields and their effect wear off when the stack's shield reaches zero.
• Battle backgrounds can now be toggled on and off again from the settings. The backgrounds now spawn when the setting is enabled.
• Users can now clear the model and texture caches from Game Settings.

Improvements

• Damage delivers no longer happen instantly when stack reaches its attack radius. Projectiles now have flight time and do their damage as they hit the units, instead of it being calculated immediately at the beginning of an attack.
• Projectiles no longer move to the targeted position when execution end. Instead they remain still until the next execution begins, as though time would have frozen.
• When moving stacks between the army slots, you're now able to see the selected unit when moving the mouse.
• Planet UI now shows unit stat points as relative meters instead of just numbers. For example a unit's damage can be 200 out of 800 max. This gives you an idea how powerful a unit is compared to another one. Units are compared among themselves, and commanders among themselves. So while any normal unit's max attack can be 800, a commander's starting attack value can be higher than that, as they're stronger by default.
• When moving stacks between army slots, the units actually move to the new positions instead of teleporting to the new position.
• Due to change with the selection mechanics, the armies now orbit on top of the planet. This prevents wrong calculations with client / server pathfinders that were happening in some cases.
• New visuals for movement command lines and orbits are added. The lines should be more visible in less bright screens.
• Player indicators now use Unity3D Canvas system instead of meshes.
• Skill popups no longer stack when multiple skill events were triggered per second.
• Quite a few game logic calculations are moved to secondary threads, this improves the performance in some situations.
• Units now attack the closest threat in battle if no move command is set to them.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed bug that caused click and hover mouse events to be triggered on the objects behind UI elements.
• Tooltip UI elements were scaled incorrectly with different aspect ratios and resolutions. This is now fixed and the tooltips are prevented from moving outside the screen position.
• Unit attitudes are now correctly synchronized between server and clients. This fixes some of the issues with the battle execution phase, where client side's units sometimes behaved incorrectly.
• Users hosting a game without a NAT couldn't be connected. This is now fixed and the clients now use the public IP that the server is sending for connection process.
• Fog of war is no longer visible when Army inspector is open.
• Fixed a bug that prevented the camera from moving to the needed position that was triggered for example from event lister.
• Fixed a bug that caused the Army Destroyed event to show incorrect description in it.
• Fixed a bug that could cause the last hovered object to be left on a select state when camera effects were triggered to move to a battle. This fixes some issues where the camera effects messed up movement commands.
• Game auto launch is now synced to the connecting players correctly.
• Fixed a bug that caused the end turn to be triggered multiple times when return key was pressed.
• Fixed a bug that caused popups to render below other objects.
• Fixed a bug that rendered tooltips with wrong scale
• Fixed a bug that caused orbit indicators to remain in their earlier positions for a frame, which caused flickering when moving to the wanted position.
• The event window button no longer blinks to indicate new events when player's moving to active battle.

Known issues

• Moving units can still have their rotations set multiple times per second causing them to change rotation rapidly. In other words they're kinda spazzing out on the occasion. We're still trying to find the best solution both aesthetics and performance wise.
• Total data file sizes have risen with this release due to the editor adaption. We need to keep the models, for example, within the asset bundles in EXECUTABLE/Resources, and within the game data files. The files will be moved away from the game data files during 0.6 version.

 

We're happy to announce the 0.51 version of Galactic Conquerors is now available. This version fixes most of the found bugs since the release and is designed to find the rest bugs. As always please make sure you have the latest version of the game before starting multiplayer game

General

• New quality options menu added! This option menu allows you more control on the graphical settings. The new options menu also adds the possibility to change quality and resoultion options.
  
• Options menu have been prepared for the 0.6 release. The options also now include buttons options where you can at the moment go through the available buttons. Later on the buttons can be changed through this.
  
• Some tweaks to graphical quality settings have been made to improve overall looks

Improvements

• It's no longer possible to launch tutorial map through Skirmish or Quick Play options (nor use the map in multiplayer games).
  
• The Action Center now fades the disabled buttons more clearly.
  
• New hints have been added to the language file
  
• Added scene notifications when state was invalid for example for recruits or for selections.
  
• Users are now able to turn NAT Punchthrough on and off based on their preferences. It's adviced to leave this option intact as the sytem recommends should you use or not use NAT
  
• Units now have a experimental obstacle avoidance to prevent some situations where units would stack up on top of each other.
  
• New popups are added to treasure chest / mine conquers and planet lost or conquer situations.

Bug fixes

• The armies should no longer flicker when moving close to obstalces such as meteors when target was set.
  
• The popups that are used in skills for example are now correctly on top of the other objects.
  
• Fixed bug where the system would sometimes loose damages that were dealt in battle
  
• Opening either Council or Research UI now correctly hides Planetary UI as intended.
  
• Fixed bug in Council Trade where Galactic Tokens would give incorrect max amounts when trading to other resources.

Following the Steam launch, we'll be having a Twitch stream the today, on Saturday 22nd of August, 9pm GMT(+2) time ( 2 PM East cost time). We'll play the multiplayer on various maps within our little team, and hopefully with some of you guys as well! We'll be answering your questions during the event! You can find our Twitch channels at:

http://www.twitch.tv/winkiller0

http://www.twitch.tv/kinahmigames

Looking forward playing with you!

About this update

This update is one of the biggest done to Galactic Conquerors, and brings a lot of performance improvements, visual effects and bug fixes. This update is launched with the Steam release, August 21st. For further inquiries, please contact us through in-game feedback form or via email contact@kinahmigames.com.[kinahmigames.com.] This version also enables basic Steam possibilities: username and portrait fetching.

General

• Performance improvements are here! The performance has increased roughly by 200%, creating a solid 60 frames per second, even with slower machines. The updates are still halfway through, though, so you might experience FPS hick-ups. Fixing these would have required changing some of the core-mechanics, so we decided to leave those changes for the next patch.
• Improved tutorial! It now explains the game's mechanics more clearly. The tutorial will get more improvements during the development based on your feedback.
• More effects and animations! All the units and commanders have got their idle animations, some attack and skill animations might follow later on. Projectiles were previously missing their hit effects, which have now been added. Most skill visuals have also been fixed.

Improvements

• Radius indicators now have an effect when the units are selected and deselected.
• The User Interace (UI) is now more consistent throughout the game and has a finalized look. Some usability additions and possible animations will be added as development continues.
• All the units and commander models have got new level of detail models (LOD's). This improves performance at longer camera distances.
• Move commands are no longer cleared when the battle is continuing on next roam turn.
• New planets have been added. New textures that have shading enabled are set to some of the planets.
• More calculations are now done in threads, this improves the gameplay as more precise calculations can now be done without affecting gameplay.
• After planetary armies are destroyed, the planet is no longer lost straight away if allied players are within the same battle. This improves the allied gameplay.
• When Unit stack or a commander stack misses its target, the projectiles now get randomized position behind the targeted enemy, making the miss more visual.
• The projectile end effects are no longer spawned if the projectile end position is too far away from the camera.
• Main menu User Interface (UI) and Planet UI have received huge performance boost.
• It's now possible to add Commander Upgrades to the map file, which makes some skills available to players from the start of the game.
• Removing settings.xml now resets the settings and copies new settings.xml to data folder. We're introducing this feature to other files later on.
• Buildings and units now have their descriptions correctly loaded from language file. Updated language file with these descriptions.
• Some VERY basic balancing. Still, don't expect a balanced combat experience just yet. Further improvements will be done along the way.
• Camera can now be rotated with Q and E keys when nothing is selected.
• When server synchronizes army positions, the armies are moved smoothly to the position instead of just "teleporting" to the new position. There's a fail safe mechanic included: if the synchronize isn't done in two seconds, the armies are forced into their new positions by the server.
• Changing sector or moving to battle is now a lot faster in levels that have a lot of particles.
• Chat window is now minimized at the start of the game when playing against an AI.

Added

• Players can now adjust the effect culling distances through Quality settings.
• Players can now disable and enable analytic data through Game settings.
• Players can now save army formations within army inspector. The formations are saved and can be used in any map after saved.
• Gramos Bladewing commander has received its skill effects.
• User Interface (UI) has received new animations.
• New skyboxes
• Notifications are added when other players have ongoing battles and player stays in roam phase.
• End turn button now has more state messages to tell players what's happening at the moment (executing, ongoing battles etc.)
• New User Interface icons and graphics.
• Error messages when losing a connection or failing to join the server are added.
• Chat messages are now displayed when a client disconnects or is kicked from the server.
• A confirm message is now shown to the server if the host tries to disconnect, and there are players active within the server.
• The host can now check some of the server information through the server lobby "info" button (you know, in case you forget or need the info).
• Server/game name is now displayed correctly in the game lobby
• A single Steam achievement has been added, mainly for test purposes.
• UI sounds have been added to several places, though many are still missing in this version. Expect more in the future.

Bug fixes

• Skills correctly reset when army is no longer in battle.
• Music no longer pauses when too many sounds are active simultaneously.
• When multiple armies attack one planet, a battle wouldn't be correctly started with those armies. This is now fixed and also more situations are now taken into account when planetary battles are resolved.
• It's no longer possible to hijack a planet that was lost, by using the Events Window.
• Incorrect models should no longer be spawned on the map. This was caused by game object pool, which would accept one model multiple times to the free game object list.
• Movement lines are now correctly updated when an army that has been given a move command is selected.
• Chat messages are no longer cleared when the game starts.
• Fog of War vision now works correctly with allied players. So if your ally can see an enemy army, so can you.
• Attack effects of units and commanders are now properly hidden when returning to roam map from battle. No more stray effects on the map!
• If multiple unit stacks or commanders in the same army use the same skill, only one is used and both go on cooldown (Say, two stacks of Flashfuries use Lightning Beam at the same time. Only one is used, both go on cooldown). This is to prevent skill spamming in battles.
• Clicking "build" button on planet ui now correctly shows the right window for the buildings.
• Retreating from battle while orbiting a planet loses the planet to the enemy, if no allied forces remain on planet or in the battle.
• It's no longer possible to cheat the AI by ending the turn as soon as the end turn button is interactable.
• Planets' maximum and remaining resources are now shown correctly.
• When a player is defeated, the scoreboard is shown accordingly.
• Commanding a unit stack or commander to attack a different target now correctly updates the skill target or cancels the skill use.
• It's no longer possible to start a game if all players are in the same alliance.

Known issues

• Battle background objects are not spawned in this version (planets, asteroids etc). The system is still there, but disabled, as the background objects caused problems during gameplay with the new visibility mechanics. We're looking to enable the background objects in the next update.
• When an enemy army is set to station on a planet, the army might be visible for a short period of time, even if the planet and the army are out of view range.
• Players can click objects that are behind the user interface.
• You might get a Victory end screen after defeated in some situations. It's also possible that when your alliance wins game the victory screen won't correctly open.