Patches 1024, 1026 and 1028 now available. news

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The latest three patches to Star Ruler add randomized personalities to AI Empires; the personalities will see improvement and become more broad-spectrum over time. In addition, we have added a minimap to the game which allows you to keep an eye on your critical systems. In line with the minimap, we have also introduced the ability to see the relative strength of forces occupying a system. In modding news, this update contains some new and interesting finds (in addition to the modability of the AI Empires through personalities): There can now be up to 200 AIs if modded, we have exposed numerous facets of the game to modding, This update also contains a lot of bug fixes and changes, speeding up the game and increasing its stability and overall performance in the later hours of the game.

We look forward to participating in this year's Indie of the Year on ModDB and hope you'll support us by voting for us! To all the other indie devs out there on ModDB also competing for the title: Best of luck and see you at the finish line! :)

Patch 1.0.3.0 is on the horizon and we're gaining speed. Some long awaited features will be thrown into the game, and we're pursuing some beautification here and there. New menu art is on the way along with a couple of new options in the menus (playlist management, the ability to modify your quickstart profile, common multiplayer settings, and more!) and new game art in the form of ship-sets and nebulae and space flecks (see: Windows Stars Screensaver) are being currently pursued!

Fixes:

• Fixed a major bug in single threaded mode that prevented ships from leaving systems.
• Object icons were messing up in Medium & Low texture quality.
• Fixed some minor issues with the tutorial.
• Crash when selecting a shipset.
• Remnants no longer run out of fuel.
• Changed order for movement updates to prevent a one-frame delay in motion prediction.
• Clients in multiplayer were shown the victory message before joining an empire.
• Governors no longer build structures that are not unlocked yet.
• Layout scales are now rounded to 3 decimal places to prevent floating point errors from showing up.
• Pirates with money troubles weren't buying pillagers because marauders were cheaper.
• Joining a multiplayer game after going back to the main menu from another game would not load the map correctly.
• The fighter hull had a 5% flat dodge chance instead of it being based on relative velocity.
• Changing the max number of selectable AIs in main_menu.xml did not work. The default still goes up to 10, but it's moddable up to 200 AIs.*
• Fixed various issues with updating hulls (SubSystem modifiers not working when a hull is updated). Designs in previous saves should be able to benefit from being updated, depending on the type of modifier used.
• Fixed fleet icon not showing after load and not disappearing when docked.
• Ship owner was being set after effect activation, leading to certain effects (notably Research) crashing on ships.
• Structures with non-natural levels (farms) could not be renovated manually.
• Zoom to cursor checkbox was saving incorrectly.
• Planet orbits were sometimes stopping after loading a save.
• Undocking sometimes hurled ships across the vast expanses of space at insane speeds.
• Damage order based on sub system position wasn't taking the size of the sub system into account. Now, a large sub system can protect little sub systems 'inside' it.
• The music now instantly stops playing upon exiting, rather than when the game finishes cleaning itself up.
• Treaties would randomly crash in multiplayer.
• Objects thought they had far higher acceleration than they really did (due to not taking mass into account). Should significantly improve movement patterns, especially when it comes to planets.
• Our custom GUI elements were not being properly deleted, causing a memory leak in the GUI.
• Goto object orders weren't being saved/loaded.
• Order lists were being loaded in reverse.
• The dim2di for the blueprint window's tab buttons was using 2 px less than it should have, resulting in part of the button being cut off in the window.
• Sending chat messages with the # character in them no longer causes weirdness.
• Fixed a common crash we introduced in the last patch, sorry.
• Script contexts were being prepared on demand. They are now cached, producing dramatic speed ups in our tests (~45 fps becomes ~150 fps).
• Fixed a rare crash upon creating/updating a hull.
• Sounds no longer play at all with master volume at 0.
• Docked ships would cause a system to report the wrong number of ships in the system when the save was loaded. (Fixes white ring/empty system bug in saved games)
• Single thread mode caused issues in multiplayer.
• Cargo ships could occasionally reach negative cargo, causing weirdness.
• Missile rack range now increases with size like other weapons.
• Improved performance when large numbers of objects are in the galaxy/attempting to interact with the galaxy.
• Fixed various crashes.
• At times, saves will become invalid because hull names will become mis-matched. We're still investigating the cause, but for now you will be informed if a save is invalid. If this happens, you should go back to a previous autosave to hopefully avoid the issue. Further, I've added a check that may correct this error for some saves.

Changed:

• Commonly created/removed orders are now pooled to improve performance.
• Pirates use pillagers less often.
• Defend orders are more proactive about target picking.
• Timed game effects are now allocated on a pool. Improves performance in combat.
• Various game data files (PlanetTypes.xml, build_queues.xml, ...) can now be overwritten by mods.
• Script data loading now falls back to the default files (mods no longer have to copy the Script Data directory).
• Empire names and colors are now moddable the same way system names are.
• Changed the standard maps to use a single copy of object descriptors, rather than making a new one for each object. Significantly speeds up map generation for common map sizes.
• Removed unnecessary window generation and resource loading during script testing.
• The tutorial can now be localized.
• An auto-colonize order can now be removed by right-clicking on the planet and unticking it.
• The AI now periodically retrofits its obsolete ships.
• Slightly sped up locking in general, and reduced overhead related to creating those locks.
• AIs obsolete their old designs and retrofit their old designs to larger versions. (Cruisers go up to scale 24 over time).
• Planet orbits were much slower than intended. Planets now orbit at faster speeds, and their speed is based on the size of the star.
• Changed various memory allocations over to a pooled system. Slight gains when setting the game up, but far more dramatic gains when exiting.
• Objects now register themselves instantly during map creation, significantly improving map generation speeds.
• Empty strings no longer allocate themselves on the heap.
• Star Ruler's icon has been replaced with a higher resolution version.
• Mods can now add their own Locales that are loaded after and can override the base game's.
• Weapon effect graphics are now allocated in a pool, significantly improving performance when watching combat.
• Updated French, Russian and German translations.
• While updating the blueprint window to the planet window's style, reduced the image size, saving a slight bit of memory.
• Objects are destroyed on-demand when the game exits, speeding up game exit times.
• Planetary rings now have ambient lighting.
• Planetary rings are now more common.

Added:

• An optional toggle in the system window to display stored resources for planets in the list.
• Ships can now be scuttled at planets for resources. They provide 50% of their cost to the planet.
• Added support for ttf fonts and locale-specific fonts.
• Added basic per-system minimaps.
• Add Require:Tag to restrict subsystems to blueprints that have that tag.
• Script bindings for Irrlicht's quaternion.
• Relative military strength bars for pinned systems/stars and systems in the system window's system list.
• "Zoom to object" buttons in planet window, pinned list and the system window's planet list.
• The clusters map now has separate options for flattening the overall map and the clusters themselves.
• Added AI personalities. AIs now choose from a few personalities which control many things about their behavior. We will add more in the coming weeks.

Removed:

• Removed duplicate ship designs from the tutorial mod.