Cosmonarchy mod for StarCraft

This week's devlog holds some very exciting developments, including the arrival of two new units, the resolution of common desyncs, the deployment of a bespoke networking alternative, and nifty new community features for our Discord server!

We'll also cover a lot of what next week will hold, with many new Cosmonarchs joining the forthcoming May Royal Invitational, and additions to the Protoss arsenal now in our sights.

As always, you are free to join us on Discord and pledge support on ko-fi if you enjoy Cosmonarchy. Onward!

Welcome the latest Terran infantry unit, the Hypnagogue! This bad boy was supposed to be deployed months ago, but some technical issues regarding his custom ability blocked his development. Well, that's a problem for exactly zero more days -- he's currently available for testing on the Prerelease game build, and will see some audiovisual polish before this major update ships to Release.

The custom ability Through the Looking Glass teleports allies within 2 range to the target location, and has a maximum travel range of 6. This allows for cliff scaling and combat repositioning of even the most immobile Terran units, and we cannot wait to see what crazy strategies players come up with! The Hypnagogue is currently trainable at the Apothecary.

The other new unit to see deployment in the last week is the Zerg Sasyrvoleth, a utilitarian detector strain that grants lifesteal to all allied combatants within a modest 5 range. You can expect to see this flyer in tier 3, after the Zerg mutate an Axtoth Axis. This unit was originally commissioned (perhaps in jest?) by donator Lucifirius, but lead designer Pr0nogo saw an opportunity to fit in a new utility strain, and so thus came the Sasyrvoleth!

With interest in Cosmonarchy continuing to snowball, and our active player list blossoming, clans have begun to take shape! It's still early-days, but our most active members have already signed up for the three presently-available clans, and have begun organizing matches against one another in what will undoubtedly turn into very memorable rivalries.

Currently, you must have three members in your clan to get a public listing, but that hasn't stopped the ambitious newcomer and clan leader HitEmUp from recruiting five others into Clan Oops - that's more than one recruit per day so far! Let's see how these develop...

With the increased communal activity, it seemed like a good idea to add roles for countries, and allow our playerbase to self-assign if they so desired. Discord's UI isn't great for this, but it's nothing we couldn't manage! If nothing else, this feature will be useful for organizing games based on timezones, and handling promotional material for competitive events, where knowing the country of origin for our competitors is helpful.

And no, we don't have Middle-East / Africa listed there... yet... Check back when we actually have community members from that neck of the woods!

Relative newcomer JujiK has been cranking out 1v1 and 2v2 maps as of late, and we even played one of them during the most recent community event! Their most recent focus has been on a new 1v1 map, and it's quite heartening to see a fresh face jump straight into mapmaking.

More established names in The Shambler and Btyb haven't taken their foot off the gas, either, with the former working on a nonstandard 2-spawn layout and the latter adapting Dante's Peak into Cosmonarchy. So far, the results are quite promising, and we can't wait to reveal the map pool for our upcoming weekend event!

This last week saw the deployment of CrownLink, a new connection method written by donator (and now, project contributor!) Juniper, with some assistance from lead programmer Veeq7 and contributor X405. Work on this utility is ongoing, but will eventually fully supplant Radmin, a network utility we have hitherto relied on as a LAN emulator.

CrownLink boasts improved performance over Radmin and even Blizzard's own Battle.net, and will prove to be as good as or better than ShieldBattery's Starcraft Remastered networking, in terms of turn rate / latency. A hearty thanks to Juniper for his work on this, as it represents a significant improvement for all multiplayer matches! Expect it to ship with fresh Cosmonarchy installations relatively soon.

Following this past Saturday's for-fun event, dubbed 'Fraudarchy', Pr0nogo was able to use recent desync tracking added by Veeq7 to triage and resolve a significant contributor to game desyncs. Work by X405 has also begun on resolving replay breakages caused by faulty Blizzard code when many actions were serialized on the same frame. All in all, these changes will make Cosmonarchy more stable and competitive-ready, and we couldn't be more excited about them!

The few desyncs that do remain are best debugged by enabling log-randoms in your Cosmonarchy config, accessible through the Fraud Launcher. You can then submit the Sync Random and Critical logs to Pr0nogo for investigation. Shout out to our great community for their consistent reports!

Through the combined efforts of X405, Veeq7, and Pr0nogo, the iscript extender - the largest blocker of the fourth race's development - has nearly been achieved. All necessary functions have been reverse-engineered, and all relevant code has been adapted to Cosmonarchy's environment. This means that we have entered into the bug-hunting phase, and will also need to write new logic for loading extra iscript files -- but we have never been closer to being rid of this longstanding limitation, and we cannot wait to show off some Askosi units!

Once the iscript extender is shipped, the next big ticket item will be the weapons.dat extender, allowing us to go from 255 entries to 65535 -- more than we'd ever need to complete the fourth race and all racial factions! We're a ways off from hitting that limit, but it will certainly be necessary for the Askosi, and it, too, will be achieved in time.

With the implementation of the Hypnagogue and the Sasyrvoleth in the rear-view mirror, time opens up to work on three new units for the Protoss, all being sourced from the forthcoming Unitary Union. This structure and its creations fill in some missing design space in the Robotics branch, allowing for a tech reshuffle for a few tier 2 and tier 4 units, and providing some much-needed crowd-control and anti-air options for the sublime race.

With May's Royal Invitational set to start this coming weekend, we are dead-set on deploying the remaining balance changes and ability reworks, putting to rest the lessons learned from Acropolis #1. This includes final adjustments to the Optecton and the two Scrapyard units, an overhaul of Reclamation, and the Mind Tyrant and Empress revisions.

With those balance adjustments taking center stage for this week's development, and more maps, clan battles, and competitive events coming in the near future, Cosmonarchy's community just keeps winning!

And that's not to mention that banger after banger shows up on the daily over at Pr0nogo's youtube channel! Here are some choice matches:

• Neblime vs ECalipso - ZvP on Blackwater Bastion!
• The Shambler vs Hupsaiya - ZvP on Sideshow!
• HitEmUp vs Eud64 - PvT on Derelict and Impetus!