The Cosmonarch's Compass - April, Week 1 news - Cosmonarchy mod for StarCraft

This second installment of Cosmonarchy's weekly roundup examines the first Gauntlet stage of Acropolis #1, our premiere 1v1 tournament. Following that competitive focus, there's discussion of the Zerg tutorial, Autophagy, and a foray into the tileset additions that the game has seen in the past week of development!

We also spend a bit of time discussing the technical progress made on desync tracking, iscript extension, and the cloaking visual update we previewed last week, before closing on the next week's preview of what is likely to come.

Acropolis #1's qualification phase, known as the Gauntlet stage, is coming to a close this week. We've seen four competitors already reach the next phase of the tournament, now called the Battlements stage, and we have two more spots on offer! The remaining six slots are planned to be taken by the top six players from Ascension #7, the last premiere 1v1 tournament of 2023.

The qualified players are...

Newt -- Terran, USA

A very strong Terran player with plenty of recent practice, feared even by reigning champion Neblime!

Art_Of_Turtle -- Zerg, USA

A Brood War veteran with decades of RTS experience, discovering Cosmonarchy for the first time... How threatening will he be in the end?

3crow -- Protoss, USA

A bona fide Cosmonarch who's been enjoying the project nearly since its inception! Can he polish his skills enough to do damage in the next stage?

jakulangski -- Zerg, Philippines

A rising competitor, in his first year of playing Cosmonarchy, making it to 2024's first main stage after impressive showings!

The second qualifier, Gauntlet B, has already started as of Saturday the 6th. Top billing is claimed by the two players who almost qualified from Gauntlet A - GeneralAnakin (Protoss, USA) and Tacocake (Zerg, Sweden).

They are joined by fearsome newcomer TopRamen (Terran, USA), as well as TheBeaver99 (Terran, USA) and benno (Protoss, Germany) -- a pair of veterans who have looked good in recent history. With only two spots to fight over, Gauntlet B is likely to be even more cutthroat than its predecessor!

Lead designer Pr0nogo continues to work on much-needed educational content for Cosmonarchy -- and while it's not the only informational work he's been up to, as you'll read about at the end of this article, the Zerg tutorial is paramount to tick yet another box for the project.

The current status of Autophagy, the Zerg tutorial, is looking promising! The AI is exceptionally aggressive early-on, before switching to a more macro-oriented approach, should the player survive. The layout is more or less complete, with the potential for better visuals as the tilesets continue to expand.

Efforts have primarily revolved around dialogue, with the mission script slowly taking shape. Pr0nogo's development streams have seen acceptable rates of progress for this critical element, with a lot of thought being placed into exactly how the revised lore and command structure of the Zerg will be communicated to players -- all the while organically explicating all the important bits and bobs that you need a tutorial for in the first place!

So far, so good, but a lot more work to do. You'll see more yummy details about this mission in next week's installment!

This section will be brief: thanks to the work of Pr0nogo, there are now a much larger variety of blends available for the Platform tileset. This includes Solar Array blending with all manner of Plating and Platform, as well as the two Solar Array doodads being blended with many other tile variants, allowing for more interesting decor, and more function for marking low and high ground as unbuildable.

These are the kinds of things that really help mapmakers create more interesting and varied battlegrounds, and the game always benefits from more eye candy! You'll see more tileset additions next week, including some much-needed support for doodads on the highest height level.

The most pressing technical issues that Cosmonarchy currently contends with come in the form of desyncs -- code instability that breaks live games -- and the iscript size limit that prevents us from adding more graphics to the game.

Desyncs are notoriously difficult to track, but in our tireless pursuit of fixing these nasty errors, we've overhauled a number of internal systems and fixed a number of relevant bugs. This has resulted in less desyncs overall, but we haven't fully tracked down the root cause of all of them. Co-developer Veeq7 and project contributor DarkenedFantasies often join Pr0nogo in triaging what might be the root cause of any given desync, and improving the code responsible.

Even though we aren't out of the woods regarding this significant issue, the reports of them have been sporadically useful -- kind of like finding a needle in a haystack. Thanks to our growing playerbase, and the contributions of players on our Discord server, we're getting closer and closer to ridding Cosmonarchy of these pernicious problems. Time will heal this wound!

With regards to the iscript size limit, project contributor X405 has resumed work on a bona fide solution to this problem, by writing his own iscript interpreter. This is an important step towards reverse-engineering and reimplementing animation code handling and parsing, and will eventually result in us being able to leave that limit behind.

This is the single greatest hurdle preventing us from entering into full-scale development of the Askosi, Cosmonarchy's fourth race. We always knew it would be a requirement, as we've brushed up against this size limit already, even before fully-implementing the techtrees of the base three races. It's heartening to see movement on it after so long, and soon, that size limit will be a thing of the past!

We're revisiting the cloaking visual overhaul here, because it has not yet arrived! However, as of the time of writing, its implementation is well underway, thanks to the handiwork of DarkenedFantasies. Showcased above is a WIP version of the cloaking fade applying to our player-colored warp anchors -- a feature that was hitherto thought impossible!

We didn't cover the audiovisual updates to things like Zerg birth animations and weapon and death SFX, but even though we made good progress on those this past week, we plan to make even more progress this week! Sound effects are always enjoyable to stitch together and refurbish, so there's a chance we upgrade some existing ones in addition to providing new SFX for the units that require them.

As mentioned in the content progress section, Autophagy, the Zerg tutorial, will continue to see work done on its script, AI, and layout. The goal of next week's developments is to begin draft voice acting for the mission, which would come just before the triggering and end-stage testing -- that is to say, soon after the tutorial's voice acting is completed, you can expect to see it shipped very soon!

Our competitive focus remains clear for this week, as Acropolis #1's second qualifier must come to a head before this weekend. The Battlements stage is slated for the 13th of April -- that's this Saturday! We had better get a move on if we want to meet that deadline.

Next week should also see quality progress made on the first Roster Profile of 2024. This educational video will do a deep dive on the infantry units trained from the Stockade, and help players understand the capabilities of Terran bio compositions. The video's script is already complete, so it will only take a bit of work to get the narration recorded, and the video itself edited together. Stay tuned!

Daily match casts continue, and you can check out the following videos if you're interested in the top picks of the past week:

• Neblime vs The Shambler - ZvT on Sideshow
• Art_Of_Turtle vs jakulangski - ZvZ to qualify to Battlements!