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Expanding Known Space Beta Change Log

View the beta documentation

• Version 27, last changed on 9/14/2019
  1. Improve reading of the new discovery and encounter stats readout in clipboard copy text.
  2. nearby scan N no longer is limited to function only from your unit's point of view. It now works anywhere and displays anything within two squares of the cursor at the time you press n. It does not show anything that none of your units have detected.
  3. k and shift+k will skip earth if it has been taken over, no more invalid
  
  
  
• Version 26, last changed on 9/10/2019
  1. Mission descriptions added as cut scenes just at the end of startup sequence, directly before initial placement or what ever is appropriate given the mission context. I have tested every combination and am fairly sure it's all good. You can toggle this using a new item in settings, cut scenes. This setting saves to the guidedog account.
  2. lonely universe mission is moved to below far corners mode in configure game menu to improve logical ordering
  3. Rearanged settings menu items for a more logical order.
  4. You can now press space on a menu item in learn sounds to repeat the sound itself, without the spoken description being repeated as with pressing enter instead.
  5. learn game sounds menu added, a completely rewritten version that actually plays the original sound from the sounds folder, and relies on a speech file called demo followed by the exact same name as the sound's name, located in the speech pack. The recording of the speech file can say what ever, e.g. instead of demo cash5, we would say, you have spent credits, or something like that.
  6. planets discovered, static hazards discovered and mobile hazards encountered are now listed in status menu, game over menu and clipboard copy text. Mobile Hazards Encountered has to be tracked throughout the game, so I had to add that to state saver, which means as of this change, future games won't load saved games from earlier versions.
  7. new sounds for successful intelligence gathering, combat on square, you win, and you lost. You win and lost experiences can be skipped by pressing enter. They should come after the victory condition met message is given, but before the voiceover says you have beaten the game, or you have been defeated!
  8. Fix getEconomicPercentageForThisTurn() so that it returns appropriate percentages for enemy when in higher difficulty. Stops the game from beating the player just on economic income alone early on if the difficulty is high.
  9. Fix bug allowing planetary bounty to be given to initial colonizer even when the mission was not planetary bounty mode.
  
  
  
• Version 25, last changed on 9/2/2019
  1. examine square menu added. reports planet or hazard if any at the top, with all detail associated. Then lists the number of each ship types present for both alliances. Friendly ship types are sub menus. Hitting enter on the fleets sub menu opens fleet management menu, hitting enter on any other friendly ship type opens a newly created menu that lists every lonely ship on the square of that type. You can hit enter on a ship therein to select it. When listing the ships on a square this way, the type isn't read out for each item to reduce verbiage. Only the purpose if any, the id, and the efficiency, followed by autonav information if enabled is given here in concise format. You can open examine square menu by holding enter or by pressing ctrl+q. These work in placement phase as well.
  2. EnableMapMode() function now says place with map mode, instead of map exploration mode, if the current phase is placement. Helps understand whether you're in movement phase, or if you're still in place with map mode.
  3. new mission planetary bounty mode added. Get 50 credits for every asteroid belt or space station you colonize, only if the other alliance has not yet colonized it. The spoils of victory credit income is unaffected, but that starts for ice planets and up anyway. Planetary Bounty mode is compatible with existing victory conditions.
  4. new lonely universe mode mission, combines capital planet start only with far corners mode
  5. rename capital planet sound to our capital planet is here, play this when the capital is colonized by player, play a new, their capital planet is here sound, for a capital colonized by other alliance.

  
  
  

• Version 24, last changed on 8/23/2019
  1. * when not activated and you hit escape to continue with demonstration, a new menu appears prompting you to choose lightning game or close quarters mode.
  2. We now have volume keys (f2 f3), and a scroller in settings, for general sound volume. This setting saves to guidedog account and to disk.
  3. * renamed the sound combat to combat phase to aid in understanding the purposes of the sounds for those reviewing folder contents.
  4. Fix sneaky bug that could cause ships within fleets to be thought discovered or not when they were the opposite.
  5. New sounds for enemy ships on square, and capital planet. This only works when announcing the total contents of a square, which for the most part means just in map mode. Certain menus, like nearby, will as well.
  6. New sound for start of placement phase.
  7. A couple new sounds, one for movement phase, and one for a planet being colonized.
  8. New mission matching minimized start. Both alliances have a pair of space station or asteroid belts in addition to their capitals.
  9. Fix y axis inversion inconsistancies when logging with beta enabled with various planet selection methods.
  10. Log the difficulty selected when beta mode is not enabled.
  11. Y axis inversion should be corrected for the location of starting planets when announcing them, and for destination square coordinates when you assign autonav to one or more units via the autonav selector.

• Version 23, last changed on 8/1/2019
  1. up beta expiration date to September. Added cash sound for purchase phase and gun battery sound for combat phase, which only plays if there is actual combat. Will add a volume adjuster, which can also disable the sounds, at a later time.
  2. Add a new setting to allow inverting the y axis. Off by default, this saves to the guidedog account. This broke nearly everything, we may be catching situations where coordinates are either reported incorrectly, or hitting items that take you to a set of coordinates take you to the wrong place. Report everything possible, please.
  3. Now supports alternative speech packs. Place a folder in the program files/ExpandingKnownSpace folder that starts with speech. a speech pack scroller should appear at the top of settings. This scroller's value is saved locally on the system registry, does not cary over with your Guidedog account, for the simple reason that you may not have that pack on your other machine. We will provide at least one alternative speech pack for testing and eventual public distribution.
  4. Auto scout mode management is removed from the autonav menu (hotkey A) in order to stop it conflicting with the scout purpose assignment (hotkey U). The menu still has enable scout mode, and if you hit this it becomes disable scout mode. You can hit it again to toggle scout mode back off. The stop item does not also disable scout mode. The planets or ships options do not disable scout mode. If scout mode is enabled, the existing path if any will continue to be the travel destination. Once reached, then scout mode will assign a new path. If there is no existing path, then scout mode will assign a new path next time autonav runs. To ensure that scout mode will take affect if there is an existing path, turn scout mode on if not already and then choose the stop autonav option at the top. You may also assign autonav either via the selector or by the menu to a scout ship. doing so will clear the current path, whether that be from the scout assignment or not, and send the ship to the specified destination. If scout mode remains on once it reaches its destination, the ship will resume travel from there in scout mode.
  5. Give the purpose along with the fleet name in top level of fleet management menu.
• Version 22, last changed on 7/20/2019
  1. New ships awaiting orders menu, hotkey o. Cash on hand is moved from o to be part of the turn information t. Ships with autonav to this location, and all ships with autonav enabled menus now report the map mode enablement to be consistent with other similar menus when you select a ship or just close the menus out.
  2. Reset in wins and losses menu also resets missions now.
  3. To free up hotkey u for the purpose cycling, cursor location was moved from u to l, and the previous functionality of l to report the location of the last globally selected ship was moved to shift+l.
  4. Player ships can now be given a purpose scout, defense, convoy or attack, or unassigned which is default. Cycle this on a selected ship or fleet with u and shift+u. In fleet management under list ships of fleet sub menu, added a left right scroller to allow setting the fleet purpose there also. Any ship that had a purpose besides unassigned will be set to unassigned when it is added to a fleet, regardless of the fleet purpose - the member's ship never reflects that of the fleet.
     Note that scout purpose is what is used to do autonav scout mode, so a ship that is given that purpose will automatically scout.
     Note also that when reading a count of more than one ship e.g. 3 interceptors, the purposes of any members of that grouping won't be mentioned.
  5. Manual planet selection in startup sequence now gives the planet type after the planet name. It doesn't say type before the type, which it does do elsewhere. Let me know if you prefer it to do so.
• Version 21, last changed on 7/15/2019
  1. fix crash when pressing enter to go to a colony ship or a battle ship from the go to menu or the ships with autonav enabled, or ships with autonav to this location menus.
  2. SAPI selects voice 0 if the saved voice is out of bound e.g. a voice was removed.
  3. Fix bug that caused startup menu sequence to skip select opponent which was introduced when added difficulty menu. Ensured that demo mode appropriately skips to the correct menu when going in without activation as well as when escaping out. If you land in the guidedog login window when the game is prompting for activation and you log in while it is talking, it will interrupt itself when the activation is found.
  4. Automatic combat damage is now on by default, all permutations of game interaction tips setting are now on by default, missed one when I built this in that was still set to off. Starting voiceover volume is now -7 instead of -5, voice is slightly quiet for the first few seconds until settings are loaded, may help when starting the game and wanting to keep quiet on speakers.
• Version 20, last changed on 7/9/2019
  1. M hotkey on the missions in configure game now open the documentation to that section.
  2. You can now save a game using an account that isn't activated. So in theory that would necessarily be a lightning game. You can load that same game with said account. The difference here is that you couldn't load any game at all without an activated game previous to this.
  3. Game prompts for activation slightly differently now when you press enter on start game in order to let you play with only lightning game if you don't have activation or even have an account. If you have an account logged in that has activation, the process is skipped, or if you log into one after the prompt is waiting, the prompt goes away and you continue on. If you log into an account that does not have activation, or you use no account at all, you just press escape to continue in demo mode, which is to say Lightning Game. The default options for this are read out if you hit escape to make it clear what configuration you got without being activated.
  4. In the configure game menu, renamed random to random standard and customize to custom standard.
  5. random mission and or victory condition added to bottom of configure game mode menu. This option litterally selects menu items from the menu choices similar to how a player would do, so to help the player understand what happened, the name of each item selected until the menu closes is read out. If you didn't like the choices it chose, you can press escape to go back to configure game mode menu and try again.
  6. remove internal backend property readouts from the m hotkey for statick hazards in movement phase, it now just reads the name, description and coordinates.
  7. Move the colonization status on the m hotkey for planets in movement phase from the fourth value reported to the second.
  8. Stop unwanted you have no ships to place announcement when you placed your last ship using methods that didn't involve place with map mode.
  9. Move the place with map mode announcement of remaining ships you have to place from being heard after you escape out of the select ships to place menu to when you press enter to open it. It even reports it if the menu doesn't open, so if you can't remember what ships you still have to place, one way to hear that is pressing enter somewhere invalid if you didn't want the menu to open.
  10. Further reorganize game status and game over menus and copy game statistics. Mostly for game over and copy statistics make it more obvious which alliance and faction actually won.
  11. most colonies ever held by each alliance is tracked, saved and loaded in game state, and reported in game status and game over menus and in the clipboard copy text. Games from prior betas won't load anymore.
  12. We now place one colonyship on each capital when mission mode is capital planet start only to stop immediate game over when you do that and have a higher difficulty set.
• Version 19, last changed on 7/3/2019
  1. When placing ships with map mode and you placed the last ship, you land back in map mode and it stays open until you press space or escape. This is because I kept missing opportunities to go ahead and set up fleets and autonav and had to remember what I wanted to do and where until movement phase came up.
  2. Speaking of autonav, you can now assign autonav while in place with map mode, obviously you can't manually move ships or anything like that, and autonav movement doesn't happen until directly after you press space to exit movement phase so this should be safe e.g. doesn't help you get ships to move sooner etc. When you've added ships to autonav selector (shift+a), pressing enter assigns the cursor location as the destination. Otherwise, pressing enter tries to let you place ships at the cursor. If autonav selector has items, pressing escape clears them. Otherwise it closes place with map mode. Additionally, pressing space always closes place with map mode, but you do hear an alert about autonav selection being canceled just as you would when finishing a movement phase and you still had items on the autonav selector. This introduces some room for confusion but I think it should be relatively intuitive.
  3. Now the difficulty levels don't have an affect on the starting ship placement if mission will be revolt or total war. That is, for those two missions, we don't put one or more of every type of ship on the enemy's colonies even if you pick something besides normal. The credit income from planets is however still modified as expected.
  4. Bolivar is now the 21st planet, before Babayaga, instead of the 22nd, after Babayaga. I have feint memories of moving the capitals out from the first slot to make sure the game was stable enough to handle that, but I didn't intend to leave the capitals out of their place as the first planet. Before this change, if you played as IU and you had Babayaga and bolivar both you could not expect your capital to always be the first planet on your list of placement, unlike how Earth was always first if you were SF.
• Version 18, last changed on 7/1/2019
  1. Attempt to stop announcement of successful intelligence gathering that is followed by no information by refusing to stop rolling for bits of intelligence until all items are used. This does have a fallback fail that allows the game to continue if it rolled 100 times without using up all the pieces somehow.
  2. ships that reach their destination either by autonav or because impatient manual movement will be reviewable in the detection review menu.
  3. All the contents of detection review menu are included when saving and loading games. States from games prior to this won't load now. Note I haven't had time to test everything for the detection review menu but I think it's good to go.
  4. The setting of the y and s hotkeys is now included when saving and loading games.
  5. Beta Examine Mode f11 is also included when saving and loading games.
  6. Introduce titles for detection review, consentrations enemy, consentrations friendly, ships with autonav to this location, and all ships with autonav menus. so if you're like me and forgot which key does what and start hitting random buttons hoping you get lucky, you can know if you got lucky in the right menu or not.
  7. Beta log files are now called game log files and work for both beta and non. The game omits most of the messages that aren't critical while in non beta mode. While we discourage sharing of beta logs to anyone besides other testers and developers, obviously this doesn't apply if the gameLog.log file is a non beta version. There is a message at the top of every beta and non beta log that informs about this to hopefully help differentiate if you like holding onto logs. Ideally, we could have kept making betaLog.log versis gameLog.log to make it even more obvious but that just wasn't ridiculously easy.
  8. Encrypted the save files so that save files will only work with the account that created them.
  9. Fixed main menu to only return the person to the main menu, not to other game situations.
  10. Removed AI scout economy and hopefully blocked all crash problems associated with this removal. Please report crashes with the exact type of error, and the stack trace.
  11. Colonize specific planet mission does not always report the victory as having resulted from conquest of Earth.
  12. Revised how battleship ranged combat happens. The upshot is, it should be occurring when and where it should, and it should be combining attack and damage announcements.
  13. A lot of material moved into detection menu including planets discovered and formerly colonized planets taken and colonized by the enemy.
  14. Fixed game over menu so that hitting escape on an item doesn't try to select that item as though you actually hit enter.
  15. Moved intelligence spent to before ships purchased to consolidate casualty numbers better.
  16. check victory condition reports the percentages that the condition is met by appropriately in most places now as in game status menu.
  17. Victory conditions can now combine, i.e. both alliances can meet victory conditions at the same time. This results in a tie, though military and capital control are weighted more heavily than the other two. The hope is that this will force the game to break "ties."
  18. Fixed typos in game status menu to eliminate weird sapi errors.
  19. Fixed k hot key cycling crash that occurred when the player's home planet and current planet were both occupied and colonized by the enemy.
• Version 17, last changed on 6/15/2019
  1. missions are now tracked in addition to the other existing victory conditions in the wins and losses tracker and are reported in wins and losses menu, status menu, game over menu and clipboard copy text along with the existing information. Note that missions are counted along with all of the other existing conditions. So if the game is in a mission that uses existing victory conditions the condition(s) that applied to win or lose the game is updated along with the mission win or loss counter.
  2. Military victory cannot be accidentally realized with a huge number of ships on one side versis almost none, but not actually none, on the other side - the loser must actually be at 0 for the condition to be met.
  3. AI no longer buys ships for scouting purposes. The weights that were allocated for such are all folded into convoy. This should net more convoy purchasing power. You'll still see scout purchasing happening in the log because this isn't fully disabled, just enough to test the game without so testers can tell if this helps any. Is the AI better at colonizing in this version versis previous? Obviously, test using normal mode to be consistent.
  4. place automatically is now better at not placing on planets that have enemy ships on them. Also eliminate potential crashes as a result of not having any planets to choose from, just in case.
  5. reduce ouch that's really not fair difficulty AI credit income modifyer from 3 to 2.5
  6. reduce that's ridiculously not fair difficulty AI credit income modifyer from 6 to 4
  7. Added insanely not fair difficulty, starts with 4 ships on every starting planet and AI credit income is 6 times normal
  8. Moved the not fair missions out into a separate menu that appears immediately after you hit start game. The default option is normal. Once you pick one, the familiar Configure Game menu comes next. This makes the difficulty modes compatible with missions - for instance you can do an insanely not fair lightning mode game.
  9. Added the difficulty to the reportVictoryConditions , so the z hotkey will tell the difficulty.
  10. Added the difficulty to the game status menu (ctrl+t).
  11. Added the difficulty to clipboard copy text in game over menu. I put it on the same line with the mission if there is one.
  12. Missions and difficulty now saves and loads in game state, so this version will not be able to load saved games from previous betas sorry.
  13. New missions added!
      • Colonize All Planets of Specific Type. After you choose your starting planets in the startup sequence with this mission in affect, you are informed which type of planet you need to colonize every one of. Beat the game by colonizing every planet of that type. You can review the number of planets you have of each type out of how many total in the status menu ctrl+t.
      • Colonize Specific Planet. After you choose starting planets with this condition in affect, a random planet that is not already colonized is assigned. To beat it, you need to colonize this planet. The other alliance will need to colonize the same planet first to make you lose.
      • Close Quarters. Exchanges the capital planets with the two nearest planets of opposite factions, which causes the capitals to always be close to each other.
      • Far Corners. Exactly opposite, the planets will always be far away.
• Version 16, last changed on 6/1/2019
  1. Fixed empty concentrations error caused by worm hole jumps.
  2. Fixed error handler to stop repeating itself when copying to clipboard.
  3. Fixed bug where enemy ships reaching their destination was causing announce square to be called in odd places.
  4. Fixed bug where planetary colonization was being announced as if they belonged to interstellar union whether it was them or not.
  5. K and shift K should select capital planet if the currently selected planet is no longer available for some reason.
  6. That's not fair mission added: AI gains one of every type of ship for each of its starting planets, then gains 1.5 its normal number of credits throughout the game.
  7. Ouch that's really not fair added. Enemy gets two of every type of ship on each planet, and gets 3 times its normal number of credits each time.
  8. Ridiculously not fair added. Enemy gains 3 of each type of ship on each of its starting planets, and gains 6 times its normal credits throughout the game. These modes might change names in the final version.
  9. Fixed moving fleet off the edge of the map crash bug. Changed the way fleets and ships move, and set fleets to correctly decrement ship movements for member ships.
  10. S and shift s no longer select member ships within fleets, and y and shift y will now no longer do so as well.
• Version 15, last changed on 5/31/2019
  1. Random victory condition can pick 60, 70, 80 or 90 percent on Colonization and Economic conditions not just 60, and the selected conditions it gives are read out.
  2. F4 works to open change log again.
  3. move speakCurrentDate from ctrl+t to shift+t so that it can work consistently, whether in movement phase or not, in conjunction with ctrl+t for game status and t for current turn info. previously ctrl+t would sometimes speak current date and other times open game status menu.
  4. Fix bug with announcement that a ship has reached its destination. The destination square was being announced, without the has reached its destination at info, even if not a player ship.
  5. Mission Lightning Game added just above Total War Mode. Victory conditions are disabled and game ends at the end of the tenth turn. The winner is the one with the most colonized planets. If tie, winner becomes the one who's max hits of all their ships is the most. If tie, continue until tie of either condition is broken.
  6. * mission capital planet start only added. Both alliances start with their capital only and no initial ships to place. Do to closer similarity to matching optimized start than the other existing missions, I put it directly after Matching Optimized Start. This remains compatible with existing victory conditions.
  7. Correct crash bug with wander on a fleet that contained a battleship and would try to stay organized. It was possible to get a direction that would take the fleet off the map and that resulted in a crash.
  8. * replace the move calls to each fleet member in fleet:move with outright place calls instead. This way, if ships get separated from a fleet yet not evicted from it they will rejoin it the next time the fleet moves. This may help with a crash bug we're trying to isolate and may also help with the issue of fleets being not properly selected/selectable on occasion. It may also increase performance slightly.
  9. * add a line ending to the end of the mission mode in copy clipboard text, changed the game is in to the game was in for the same.
• Version 14, last changed on 5/25/2019
  1. Starting work on missions. We have 3 so far.
     • Matching Optimized Start: sets both alliances up with 3 earth type planets including the capital. Compatible with existing victory conditions
     • revolt mode: leaves the player setup unchanged but gives the AI 10 random planets of its own faction including its capital along with one third of a round of credit income from all of its starting planets. Compatible with existing victory conditions.
     • Total War Mode: gives both alliances every planet of their faction with 3 interceptors placed on, and an additional frigate and destroyer on the capitals. Enforces military victory condition.
     These are found at the bottom of what used to be called the select victory conditions menu, which was the first step of startup menu sequence. This menu is renamed to configure game mode, unless a mission which supports victory conditions is enabled then it's called mission xxx enabled now select victory conditions to continue, heh. Basically if you hit total war mode the startup sequence goes to the next step because that enforces military victory. For the other two, which allow you to pick your own victory conditions, the menu remains and asks you to then select the victory conditions.
  2. The Configure Game menu (formerly Select Victory conditions) has two additional new items:
     • long standard: same as standard except colonization and economic victory conditions are set to 90 percent instead of 60
     • random: picks any two conditions randomly. Note that we still need to set this up to randomize the percentages for the conditions where that is applicable - they're always 60 for now.
     missions and the existing
  3. customize in the configure game mode menu is now being called a sub menu appropriately.
  4. Added new reset item to customize victory condition. This item reads the current victory conditions that have already been chosen, and if you hit enter on it the conditions are all cleared making them appear in the menu again so you can select from scratch.
  5. Rewrote the global z hotkey and added the victory percentages assigned that I forgot to include when I originally set this up. Also added the mission selected if any to the beginning of this report.
  6. Changed how AI delays convoy ships so that it doesn't delay at all at beginning of the game, and delays longer and longer upon placement up to about 12 turns in, where delay becomes permanent until the ships get added into a fleet. The hope is that this'll allow AI to take chances and be willing to send out colonyships alone early on when the player most likely can't attack the AI yet.
  7. Rewrote how ships know where they are on their path of travel under autonav directive to perhaps increase reliability. Ships can understand relative positioning on their path if they unexpectedly jump to any point along the path and this includes impatient player manual movement of ships that have autonav assigned. This may solve issues with report of destination being reached, and autonav clearing, when a hazard is hit while very close to the destination.
  8. Improved logging for various activities related to assigning and processing ship autonav.
  9. AI won't purchase a colonyship unless it has at least one colony that doesn't have a ship on it. During placement, it tries working from a list of colonies that currently have no colonyships. If that list comes up empty it reverts to the old behavior of listing all placeable colonies. The further rules related to trying to pick a colony of at least the desired type are still in place and will work against the list of ones lacking colonyships. If all of this fails, it just uses the first placeable colony if has any. In simplified terms, this means AI tries to put colonyships only on planets that don't have any on them yet. This may help AI to spread out better by reducing the situations where it gathers many colonyships in a single place. It will also, if it doesn't purchase a colonyship, naturally result in buying more convoy ships for existing colonyships that have delayed long enough for new ships to place with them.
  10. ctrl+v added to list all ships that have autonav enabled, to any destination, including those with a purpose (scout mode for now, but any others would work), even if no path assigned yet. Press enter on a ship or fleet to select it and move to its square.
  11. shift+v added to show a menu listing all ships and fleets that have autonav to the cursor location.
• Version 13, last changed on 5/12/2019
  1. improve the speakInformation method on planets so that when you press m on a planet the information is easier to understand and has speech files for everything except the description.
  2. * battleships can only fire as many ranged shots as they have current hits. This includes misses, so a battleship with full hits who fires the respective 5 ranged shots could still hit only 1 or even 0 by missing a shit ton.
  3. * fix bug in AI that couldn't find any colonies that were not its own. This I'm fairly sure is responsible both for many colonyships on a single AI colony and AI doing a poor job colonizing other planets. It was skipping all colonization cantidates instead of skipping the ones that were already colonized by it. So saying, it was being forced to go to its own planets.
  4. should solve another iteration of the consentration that had no ships error.
• Version 12, last changed on 5/9/2019
  1. changes in fourth beta 12 release - I hope this is the last one, I don't like non full releases!:
     1. Added the word "ships" after the economy type when reporting how much AI spent on an economy when you receive pieces of intelligence.
     2. AI information that was accidentally excluded from state saver has been introduced. Unfortunately saved games from before this release won't load anymore - Sorry! now AI will remember the playerCapital and not lose all its credits or forget what it was planning to do with them across saved and loaded games.
     3. Rewrote how AI decides whether to attack the player capital. The behavior there will be mostly unchanged however.
     4. Rewrote how AI finds the nearest planet that it could try to colonize, it uses this mostly for what it calls convoy units - colonizers. Each ship or fleet that uses this will get the nearest one no matter how far away - as long as the AI has discovered it. It will also get the one of highest value e.g. earth type over ice planet, if two or more are of the same distance. Lastly, it will now consider intentionally moving to and colonizing a planet that the player has colonized. Previously, it was only taking over player colonies by accident thanks to a bug.
     5. Reworked AIMovement in general. It won't try to set up a destination or process autonav on a ship that has what we call delayAutonav set. Before, it would run autonav after giving a path, and delayAutonav would then decrement any existing delayAutonav values and return without moving yet. The trouble with this was that AI may decide where to send a ship or fleet and then not do so for 6 moves, making the information very out of date. This may explain why the game seemed to get a little easier once I upped delayAutonav on attackers from 3 to 6 a couple full betas ago.
     6. Removed some log messages, combined others, shortened others, added better detail to some, added a few new log messages for things that didn't have any. Mostly these are for AI movement and decisions but a couple are with all ship's' autonav capability.
     7. * eliminate an error message testers were getting where a square was still listed as having consentrations that didn't. It happened when a fleet wandered with the aid of a battleship to keep it together, and then forgetting to move regardless of being out of movement. The fleet did so loyally enough, but members that were out were not being forced, so they got left behind. Afterwards, all sorts of goofy things happened with invisible fleet members moving around and being generally in the wrong places most likely never with their mother fleet.
  2. changes in third beta 12 release:
     1. Handled errors raised in the game via the raiseError menu that you testers are far too familiar with by this point now write their messages also to the log file.
     2. Fix index out of bound crash bug caused by trying to announce the contents of a square improperly during combat.
     3. Dramatically reduce potential for crashes by ships trying to interact with the map when they were not actually on it. This goes hand in hand with silencing some errors testers reported about ships being removed and not being able to find themselves and such. I think these many extra double checks may reduce the performance again slightly but it probably won't be noticeable. And this should solve quite a few crash issues we've been struggling with. I wanted to remove all chances of these situations happening, but it appears just knowing how to deal with being stupid is easier.
     4. Introducing Wormhole mobile hazard. A ship or fleet that hits one of these jumps from 2 to 8 squares further in the same direction, appearing somewhere near the other end of the map in the same row or column if they go off the edge. So if you're going east and hit one 3 squares from the east edge, it may appear closer to the east edge, or somewhere near the west edge, but directly on the same y coordinate. Fleets will stay together if have battleship, otherwise members jump individually and turn up random distances ahead or from the other side of the map if they go off.
     5. Reworded the battleship organized retreat message for wander and used the same new variant for wormhole jump on fleets.
     6. Hopefully fixed the error about a square with no ships still being in the consentrations
  3. Changes in second beta 12 release:
     1. fixed main menu so that the normal startup sequence no longer continues if you hit load saved game after choosing any other items, though the change log and help items were fixed a good while back.
     2. Solved crash bug that happened any time a battleship that was on the top or bottom edge of the map tried to search squares off the side of the map for ranged combat purposes and got index out of bound.
     3. * Battleship ranged combat should no longer possibly hit fleet objects. Ranged combat goes in the order of attacker first. E.g. highest initiative gets to go first.
  4. Many changes to how ships are found and removed from squares and from motherFleets. The code side of things is more consistent with how similar concepts are handled elsewhere, but for the most part this change introduces hopefully helpful and informative error messages for screw ups while noticeably increasing performance when processing autonav on many ships for both the player and the AI, and when loading saved games.
  5. Simplified our code that handles keeping track of how many ships are in each square, what we call consentrations. This is more efficient by double and will also contribute to a noticeable performance improvement when processing autonav on many ships in both alliances. This also introduces error messages that should help keep any invalid situations related to this functionality, whether or not they eventually lead down to a crash, transparent enough to backtrack and fix.
  6. Fleets that hit a wander hazard will follow one of the member battleships in a regular move that does not result in fleet disbanding, if it does have a battleship. The battleship that leads is random - it won't always be the first or last one in the list.
  7. Initial stab at battleship ranged combat. Essentially at the start of combat on a square, any battleships there will scan about themselves to a distance of 1 square and try to get in a ranged attack on each ship found. It may be processor intensive as is with multiple battleships surrounded by large numbers of ships. We know how to increase performance considerably with this while reducing the amount of speech output, and may work that in later. Feel free to give your opinion. Should this announce ranged combat, 6 ships destroyed and 1 ship damaged by 12 battleships instead of the way it now works? We do also intend to put a limit on how many attacks each battleship can deal.
  8. The winner of combat now gets one credit per destroyed ship of type greater than interceptor if they have any frigate left. To be clear, two frigates is not more salvage than just one.
  9. Cruisers can now repair themselves and other ships on their square, both alliances get this. It happens silently at the end of the combat phase. The rules that apply are thus. A single round of repairs happens at the end of the entire combat phase, and every cruiser will attempt repairs. No confirmation is given - this is currently intended to happen silently. A cruiser has as many repairs available as it has current hits, so being damaged will reduce the number of repairs it can perform. The first repair always goes to itself if damaged, then any remaining repairs go to other ships in the square, other cruisers included, in the order of most expensive first and 1 per ship. Colonyships always come first after the cruiser repairs itself (when needed). Essentially, damaged cruisers have less repairs available.
  10. Message about a fleet ship reaching its destination at -1 -1 when a ship got destroyed while processing autonav is silenced.
  11. AI Fleets that end up with multiple colonyships in them eject the subsequent ones until they have only one left, possibly disbanding the fleet again in the process. The hope is that this will keep separate colonyships lonely enough to create a separate fleet to guide them. I guess we'll see what happens.
• Version 11, last changed on 4/26/2019
  1. Detection review menu is rewritten. On the backend, this removes some unused code that was a holdover from previous alternative iterations of how to handle detection reporting. On the front end, fleets are now called fleets and actually counted separately, so if you have one or more of each type of new detections on the same square, you hear both e.g. 2 ships and 1 fleets. Also, the ships on the square at the time you opened the menu are reported after the directions to those coordinates are given, so you can determine what's there now. This also removes the ability to say more ships when there were already items there. You can determine that by listening to the detection message and comparing that to the ships listed on the square. You can also still press enter on any item in this menu to jump to those coordinates except the return item obviously.
  2. scout mode is forcably disabled when assigning autonav destinations either with autonav menu or with autonav selector.
  3. sliders are disabled in purchase menu on items that shouldn't have them.
  4. a ship that you move manually which has autonav on will adjust its path according to whether it has moved along it e.g. It will shorten the path automatically if you land the ship manually at any point in the path, up to and including eliminating autonav entirely if you manually put it on its destination, and it will announce that it has reached its destination. Stops a ship that you manually move from automatically going backwards in some situations to the start of its path to traverse the path again. This essentially makes manual and auto navigation more intercompatible.
  5. h for home planet always works now, even if your capital has been taken over it still goes to, say, earth. No more crashing. insidentally, if you both take over each other's capitals and this game doesn't have capital control condition, so the game can continue in this situation, h still takes you to your own capital e.g. earth if you're sf when your capital really now may be bolivar. Think of it as taking you to home planet for your faction not your capital. It's always been worded as home planet so I guess it's just me that confused that.
  6. Place automatically no longer will place player ships on enemy occupied colonies.
  7. Ships should more reliably stop autonav when you hit the option for that in the autonav menu.
  8. you are now informed when AI takes over one of your colonies.
  9. fix bug with military victory condition where the enemy condition was being given the percentage of player ships rather than the percentage of its own. It could still win with it just the information used to report it would be wrong.
  10. Attempt to get military, colonization and economic victory conditions to reset when their conditions are no longer met even if they aren't met in the other direction. Stops the game continually announcing a condition as met if it now actually isn't.
  11. AI fleets with colonyships that colonize a planet now become defense fleets along with all their members except for any additional colonyship. For the most part this means that convoy fleets that find and colonize a planet then become defense fleets and will stay at that planet to try and keep you from taking it over. Additional colonyships that were members of that fleet are ejected from it and become available to join another convoy fleet once it has been created there, or they may move out on their own.
  12. experimenting with AI fleet strength by delaying attack fleets in all modes for 6 turns from point of creation instead of 3, and convoy fleets will wait until they have at least 10 total hits. We want to know if you feel like the AI is doing a better job making powerful enough fleets to give you a challenge.
  13. new place with map mode functionality. Integrated just above place automatically in the placement menu. You can't move ships or mess with autonav while in the place with map mode. You can however do fleet management. To exit place with map mode, press space or escape, the number of ships left to place will be spoken and you can then continue with place automatically or select a planet in the menu as normal. To place a ship, press enter while on a player colony that is not just colonized and which does not have enemy ships on it. You get the select ships to place on planet menu. If you place all remaining ships in this menu the map mode is automatically ended and placement phase automatically finishes. You can use map mode, the menu or place automatically interchangeably except place automatically will most likely place everything and finish the process.
  14. Gather intelligence is able to continuously get pieces of info until it has as many valid ones as the game decided to give. As a result, if you are supposed to get 4 pieces, you'll definitely get 4 pieces none of which will be things the game silently decided you already knew and won't tell you again. It does however still allow for reporting the same type of info twice e.g. it might report the capital and ships on it twice in a row.
  15. fix typo in engaged in illegal cloning turn event that was causing it to miss the speech file.
  16. fleet management menu reports the total condition of the fleet next to each fleet name. added the efficiency next to each ship in add to fleet menu. Took the word "at" that was before the efficiencies in the fleet management and sub menus and replaced it with a pause, less annoying when you don't need that info and are just arrowing through the fleets or ships.
  17. new detections announcement now supports the optional press d to review tip, only if interaction tips enabled.

• Version 10, last changed on 4/21/2019
  1. Updated turn event sends to better communicate to the player what was going on, and to remove discussion of mechanics from the sends.
  2. Extensive infrastructure reworks to wander, teleport and squares functions to try and eliminate crash bugs.
  3. Made AI have to complete victory conditions properly.
  4. Fleet management menu now shows the condition of the ship next to the individual ship names. Plans are afoot to do the same for fleets in the final release.
  5. Added split fleet to fleet management menu to use an autoroutine to split a fleet in two.
  6. Added fail messages for intelligence gathering.
  7. Total credits spent on intelligence added to game status and game over menus.
  8. The game now counts total number of games won and lost, how games were won by category, and prints this info in menu form and on the game stats.
  9. B hot key now takes you to the largest concentration of ships you have. Shift+B does the same for the enemy's largest concentration you can see.
  10. Ships on autonav now announce when they reach their destinations.
  11. Moved detection menu from r to d, moved damage report from d to shift+d, r now lists top five concentrations of player ships, shift+r now lists top five concentrations of enemy ships.
  12. New detections announcement at the beginning of movement phase alerts the player when AI ships have appeared within scanner range.
  13. Z hot key added to show currently selected victory conditions. Control+Z now displays wins and losses menu. Control+T added to show current date and time.
  14. Added a toggle in settings menu to turn off verbose mode for menu tips.
  15. Place automatically option added to bottom of placement menu. This allows the player to split his ships up, more or less, evenly among his planets. Uses a similar algorithm to AI's defensive placement.
  16. Silenced enemy colonizations.
  17. Fixed typo in game over menu and in a few other places.
  18. Changed introduction menus to read select planets to read differently. Instead of reading yes or no, they now read select automatically or select manually. The voiced intro to this menu will change once the recording is fixed.
  19. Colonies that are occupied by enemy forces should no longer give full credits.
  20. Spoils of victory added. If a planet is of ice planet category or higher, a conqueror gains 1/3 of that planet's value upon first colonizing the planet.
  21. Updated documentation file to reflect new hot keys and other changes, preparatory to release.
  
  
  
• Version 9, last changed on 4/7/2019
  1. A lot of changes to attempt and stop crashes. We think we have this licked, but it took a lot of testing, and a lot of detective work on the part of Aaron. Please report weirdness.
  2. Some performance upgrades as a result of the above reorganization and infrastructure work.
  3. As a result of the above, we fixed a major teleport related crash bug.
  4. Several crash bugs related to cycling through ships appear to be eliminated as well.
  5. A number of fleet related bugs with phantom ships appear to be eliminated.
  6. Massive reworks to autonav. This eliminates several issues including ships moving off a planet once they had reached their destination.
  7. Random turn events introduced. These are currently without sound recordings, and in a rough state. This will reveal some of the background mechanics, and if players have suggestions on better ways to handle this, or other worthwhile suggestions about the code, our events, and where to stick them, they are appreciated as usual.
  8. Tried to squash bug where the game announces the current square and its contents, or the capital planet, and its contents while announcing other items.
  9. Tried to fix inaccuracy bugs with final game statistics and percentages during the game. Please report weirdness with these as well. Examples include AI having a percentage of galactic economy when its planets are eliminated, your economy not being adjusted properly, etc. We think we have it licked, but this might still need work.
  10. Just colonized planets do not detect nearby ships.
  11. Added a merge fleets option to fleet management menu. This allows you to combine fleets more easily.
  12. Added new announcements of victory conditions leading to the end of a game. The game should now announce victory conditions and the number of turns they have been in effect.
  13. Changed how ship costs were calculated to enable turn events.
  14. Created source code infrastructure specifically to enable items in EKS, but which we will use in future games. This infrastructure deals with strings and numbers and how they are manipulated.
  15. Fixed how GDG stores some values, and the game should save more reliably now.
  16. Game now uses seasons in places where it should rather than turns. It still uses turns for game turn counts and the like within the game itself, such as with the T hot key.
  17. Attempted to eliminate random square announcements appearing during AI movement due to old discovery checks.
  18. You are now notified at the beginning of movement phase about new planets discovered.
  19. We've eliminated the interceptor damaged announcements during combat.
  20. You should be able to press enter on any planet, ship, fleet, etc in a menu and be taken to those coordinates immediately while in movement phase.
  21. Intelligence gathering now reports AI's income correctly, while intelligence assessment hot key I is still inaccurate.
  22. Fixed disappearing gather intelligence option in purchase menu.
  23. Reworked how the AI spends its credits making it somewhat smarter.
  24. AI now delays fleets a few rounds to build larger AI fleets. This change also makes the AI slightly smarter.

• Version 8, last changed on 3/5/2019
  1. The game now properly takes 4 turns to beat any of the full year conditions as intended in beta 7 but somebody messed up.
  2. Merchant in distress mobile hazard no longer moves ships that it hits - they just get credits on the spot, bug fixing simplicity, that.
  3. Hazards encountered are now listed at the bottom of the detection review menu (r). Press enter on a hazard listed to go to its square. This may help rebuilding fleets that got scattered, but we may end up still having to add something to help deal with that. Tester feedback on this would be super!
  4. Intelligence assessment feature, hotkey i (works anywhere, not just in map mode), added. It reports similar information to the x and t hotkeys but for the enemy, with possible inaccuracies do to lack of good intel. This function costs nothing but is wildly inaccurate at times.
  5. Intelligence gathering can be purchased from the bottom of the purchase menu. You can buy one run of it per turn. When you have it, it runs after purchase menu closes. This reports a number of potentially useful tidbits of info about the enemy about 60 percent of the time, but it can report as many as four pieces of info if you're having a really good day. The cost to purchase is 5. This is not related to intelligence assessment. Intelligence gathering is usually more accurate and can provide info that intelligence assessment does not.
  6. reorganized the AI's economic divisioning for the, well, fourth time kinda. The mode the AI is in (aggressive, defensive, etc) will have a more profound impact on the ships it purchases.
  7. Introduced fleets to the AI. It has already thanked us for the new smarts and happily begun making good use of them. It's just a start- we do have plans to make this better, but we want feedback.
  8. Use shift+c to report composition of all enemy fleets on a square, only detected ones of course.
  9. Fixed bugs with automatic combat damage which may possibly not have been present in beta 7 but I haven't been able to figure out how it hasn't been around ever since autodamage was introduced. It was difficult to spot and resulted in less damage being dealt out than was supposed to be.
  10. We know there are some odd issues that have appeared with relation to damage announcements, but headache has me not trying to fix that before this release. Feel free to go ahead and give feedback on weirdness with damage anouncements anyway, especially if it's something other than the game claiming the enemy took damage on an interceptor, instead of just saying it got destroyed.
• Version 7, last changed on 2/25/2019
  1. Note that saved games from prior betas won't load in beta 7. If you've got an important game saved, send it to us and we'll convert it.
  2. Ship losses by each alliance are reported in the copied game statistics to clipboard in the game over menu. This is why games no longer load, the new beta needs to load a saved list of destroyed ships.
  3. The planets colonized by each alliance are reported in the copied game statistics to clipboard in the game over menu.
  4. Ship damages and distructions are combined by alliance and ship type and announced only after the final round of combat on the square if autodamage is enabled.
  5. Introducing new error handler that employs our VGA Menu system, uses SAPI to speak the error context, and offers various options to continue game (if it's not a fatal error), save and exit game, end game, and copy the error to clipboard so you can share it with the developers. Fatal errors are handled exceptions that would cause a crash or catch a situation that's too invalid for game play to work as intended, so those errors will not allow to continue playing. The save game option is intended so you may share the state file with the developers for hopeful reproducing. The switch over to the new system is hardly started though, so you'll likely never see this yet. Once the switch over is complete, it shouldn't be such a big deal to put your screen reader to sleep.
  6. New hotkeys, Y, and shift+Y, added to cycle through the desired ship type that you want the S and shift+S hotkeys to go by. This is set to all ships not members of fleets by default, and that is the previous behavior before this change. If you want to cycle through destroyers only, use Y or shift+Y until you hear destroyers, then press s or shift+s to cycle globally through only your destroyers. Ships that you have none of are not available to select with Y and shift+Y.
  7. The wrap to end and wrap to start sounds that testers will recognize from the planet cycling keys P and shift+P in previous betas are now also heard for cycle wrapping for S and shift+S, Y and shift+Y, F and shift+F, K and shift+K. If it gets in the way we'll think about how to be less obtrusive or have an option to turn it off or something, especially because hopefully this will be added to the VGA menu system later too and so might eventually get pretty old.
  8. When picking customized victory conditions, there is now a name for each condition spoken before the explanation thereof. Also, as per the next change log entry, the ones that used to say for a full season now say for a full year.
  9. The victory conditions that took some amount of time more than a single turn used to take 3 turns (3 months for a full season), and each turn was thought of as a single month. Now they take 4 turns (a full year), and each turn is thought of as 3 months (a full season by itself). The most obvious difference this makes is that the victories that require things to be held for 3 turns now have to be held for 4 turns instead. This brings how the game thinks of time in line what how it was already reading properly in the copied game statistics to clipboard in the game over menu.
  10. New hotkey, V, added to announce the autonav configuration of the currently selected ship on the square the cursor is on. For now if you enable scout mode and then press v before the ship has been asked to check it's autonav situation (in other words, before you advance past the current movement phase), it will report that scout mode is indeed enabled, but also that autonav is not enabled. This is litterally true, but may be a little confusing. Once the next movement phase occurs, if you press v on that ship, it will report the autonav destination that scout mode has currently assigned.
  11. Beta 7 has extended the deadline beyond which it can't be played in beta mode from march to April 2019.
• Version 6, last changed on 2/18/2019
  1. Way more auditing and rework of AI placement code to try and really fix the crash bugs. This one change log entry really could be split into about 5 entries but they'd all say the same thing.
  2. Saved games now remember the mode the player set the AI to. Previously saved games from beta 5 and earlier won't load anymore. If you have an important save, notify the coders and we can rescue it.
  3. Fixed bug where pressing enter on open help or change log, and then hitting load saved game would behave as though you really hit start game
  4. Installer for beta 4 is replaced with beta6. If you need to grab the installer and you have a link for 4, replace the number 4 with the number 6 in your link and it'll work. The auto updater works though so most likely this won't be needed.
• Version 5, last changed on 2/13/2019
  1. Fixed bug where fleets could not be selected properly if you created a fleet, created another fleet in the same place, then selected the first fleet in fleet management menu, then used q or shift+q to select the second fleet manually.
  2. Massive auditing and rework of AI's placement code that hopefully fixes bugs allowing it to place ships on planets it didn't have colonized.
  3. Improved performance a good bit by avoiding saving of beta log to disk nearly as often
  4. Autonav to Planet, Go to Planet, and Select Planet for Ship Placement menus now announce ships on the listed planets after the planet's name.
  5. Fixed issue where scrollers were partially implemented accidentally in Select Planet for Ship Placement menu and you could right and left arrow to change numbers that actually did nothing. The left and right arrows do nothing as intended.
  6. Ship purchase menu remembers the currently selected item when you press enter, and should be less verbose on subsequent loads if you didn't spend all your credits yet, with the exception that the already purchased ships are announced each time
  7. Ship placement menus, both Select Planet for Ship Placement and Select Ships to Place At, also remember the selection when you press enter, and are less verbose for subsequent loads similar to the purchase menu above. The ships purchased so far are announced when you add more.
  8. Select Ship To Place At menu during ship placement contains an item you can press on to back out to the list of planets, just in case someone didn't think of hitting escape to do the same thing.
  9. Renamed "return to main menu" in the settings menu to just "return". Hold over from another game that calls it that.
  10. Removed the coordinates from the list of planets on the Select Initial Planets Manually menu you get during startup sequence if you select to pick them manually, so that you can't note their locations and then be able to easily find them without having to first discover them once game starts.
  11. M hotkey in map mode for more info while on a planet gives more friendly information rather than just a bunch of numbers.

  
  
  

• Version 4, last changed on 2/11/2019
  1. Initial Beta