Post sentries! (New build 0.8.0.4) news - Isomer

What started out as a minor build to tackle the one remaining bug from the previous build somehow spiraled into quite a big update! There have been a large number of small improvements and a couple of big changes.

So, firstly the big changes. Isomer is now no longer constrained to a 1024x768 window, you can now play in whatever fancy resolutions your monitors support which is really awesome. You can fit quite a bit more world onto your screen at 1920x1080 . The other big change is in how you see enemy units, previously if an enemy unit was on terrain you had revealed through exploration they would be visible. I didn't like this because it gives too much of what is happening in the world away. As of this build, only enemies that have been seen by your own units will be visible placing a much greater emphasis on scouts and sentries.

Enemies are now more aggressive and will attack more frequently and in greater numbers. In combination, there are big improvements in how the game notifies you about combat events and now allows you to cycle between units attacking and under fire. Supply ships are less frequent and there is a new type of supply ship that only appears when you have two or fewer units - this ship will offer emergency reinforcements for free, how nice of them is that?

Here's the complete change list:

• New: HUD now shows the number of friendly units either in combat or under fire.
• New: Added emergency supply ship that offers free reinforcements of Workers when the player is down to two or fewer units.
• New: Game is now fully resolution independent! Woohoo!
• New: Launcher now remembers options from previous session.
• New: Added notification of what resources were looted from crate.
• New: Reworked entity visibility code, enemy entities will no longer be visible when they're on a block that is not FoW shrouded. They will only be visible if a player unit has 'seen' them or if they're firing their weapon.

• Improvement: Tweaked team resource counter ticking rate and speed.
• Improvement: Refactored resource counter drawing code and made counts > 9999 be drawn in a smaller font.
• Improvement: Improved AIScanSurroundingsForEnemies method to fix edge case when trying to find unit that was targeting the entity.
• Improvement: Reduced lower limit on tick time between spawns for enemy units. Enemy units spawn more quickly (when required).
• Improvement: Enemy units now have a minor meandering bias towards moving in the direction of the player dropshup, leads to more frequent attacks.
• Improvement: Unit seen mechanics tweaked to reduce timeout until entity regains hidden status.
• Improvement: Enemy units will now only continue engaging player units up to twice their perception range (but no further).
• Improvement: World creation screen now shows progress on the buildings construction phase.
• Improvement: Enemy buildings no longer get created on water.
• Improvement: Fixed unit healing behaviour, units of level 3 or above can now loot health from corpses at 5HP * level above 2.
• Improvement: Added more variation to resource loot crate.
• Improvement: Reduced probability of revealing the whole world from a loot crate.

• Bugfix: Addition of OpenGL mode to fix fullscreen bug reported by some users.
• Bugfix: Reduced frequency that supply ships appear.
• Bugfix: Fixed minor graphical issues with alien ship top tile sprite and human brick sprites.
• Bugfix: Fixed entity weapon draw order when they look south.

This update can be downloaded via the Isomer launcher!