ALPHA 44A NOW IN EXPERIMENTAL BRANCH

Does the actual structure quality have an effect on Building Quality as well? For example is there a difference between a barracks with 3 cots vs a lower class house with 3 cots vs a middle class house with 3 cots vs a high class house with 3 cots?

 

Played around a bit with the new build tonight and it definitely seems like madness occurs more frequently than before. The building quality could get very interesting when it's more developed and there's more modules, but it's not much to look at now. Some buildings have relatively few decorative modules to pick from and some require materials like cloth or metal ingots which are scarce in the early game.

I saw a few visual hiccups with buildings and modules, but nothing game-breaking. I put an open window module on a carpentry workshop and the holes in the window just displayed the outer wall texture. However, you could see through the window from the inside of the shop. Also, my textile workshop was invisible but I could still see the modules I built inside of it.

Also, another compliment because you guys probably mostly hear about bugs. I love the music and love seeing how it changes with the activity going on in the colony!

 

Now that is quite the dynamic lighting lol
ok I thought it was funny at first. Attempted all game starting variables possible, same effect.
win7-64b
evga gtx650 (before and after driver update)
went into steam and opted out of beta updates, 44 worked normal, reattempted 44A, screenshot result.

 

@Sethiusdraven

Your not the only one, I just wrote up a bug report and was hoping to find others with the same issue.

 

make sure you upload your console.txt to your post, they may find the issue with a good cross reference on which shaders are being loaded / not-loaded. we are running diff vids and systems with same result.

 

The window thing is a old bug. Though I guess now people who never bothered with decorations will now be placing them, they'll be a lot of "New" bugs found that are things that have been about for quite some time.

But the window thing has been around since about the time they made the changes to stop modules placed around edge corners breaking surface visibility.

If you place a loading bay door so that part of it is on a edge corner you often get the same thing, the door frame will show a solid wall through the exterior, and the interior shows it leading outside without problem.

To help avoid wall glitches occurring make sure things like doors, windows, lamps and anything else similar are given clearance space either side of it. Don't place them on corners or next to each other.

Same goes with interior work modules, some objects when placed in the corner still give a single wall 'tile' patch of invisibility.

But it's all stuff that's been about for a month or more but no real biggy providing Gaslamp are aware of it and it's on a list somewhere for when there is free time for minor things to sort out.

Obeliskians were rare?!? All of my 44 colonies have been drowning in the fuckers.

 

Loving the little graphical touches added in 44A, some really nice changes sneaked in it.

A few notes so far:

* Finally having functioning lights is great to hear. But I feel that removing all affordable lights as part of the update was a bit of a weird change. Previously there was basic light options using wood planks. Now all light options require Iron pipes and glass. Which makes any lights in your colony turn into some mid/late game option, which just feels wrong.

* The quality system really helps address some of the hacky work around behaviour that was possible with no down side such as placing cots in work places, or building a single giant sleeping room. Great change.

* However currently it's very easy to push all buildings max quality with little investment needed. So perhaps have some classification system where buildings only benefit from decorations that share a common group family, and then have the gain from the same decorations not stack with repeated instances? Something is still missing to discourage just building one large version of everything and just spamming decorations to balance out spamming productivity modules.

* New job order icon scale is much appreciated. However it seems to have also been applied to a few of the window menus:



* Not pushed forward with madness stuff yet, but already I've noticed a genealogical event trigger a high insanity outcome where the colonist refuses to speak of what they discovered about their genealogy. I don't think the colonist was an antiquarian, nor have they requested a bungalow be constructed on-top remains of long dead ancestor place of dark rituals.... but we'll see how things go. The families doctor is keeping a close eye on their state of being and assures me they're still very much quite there.

 

44A Looking good so far - just a script error on placing Clothesline 2 in barracks. Also a stuck colonist on the outside of same barracks whilst trying to place the wall shield on the inside of said building.

 

Farms still pick any crew to work them rather than the assigned one.

 

I had a fishperson get "stuck" when I went to build a workshop and they were standing where I intended part of the floor to go (I had assumed they would just move out of the way), complete with a script error and everything. However, it seemed to have corrected itself about 2 minutes later when the fishperson spontaneously became unstuck and walked off.

 

that must be me, negazone would be a good place if I was still on my good pain meds
hopefully Jack Nory will be able to as well -- file is in the mydocuments

 

stuck guy, script error and floating guns. Think it's the washing lines as both 1 & 2 cause script errors of not finding in database.

 

Just wanted to mention how beautiful the new lighting is. Love it.

 

That looks purdy. Can't wait to try it out once I get back from my trip

 

A colony building up and only on day 14 yet enough glass, iron ingots -> pipes and such to having all those windows and lights?

Either that's some mighty impressive rush expansion, or a very lucky starting location.

 

I always rush for glass anyway because I like to build a good sized laboratory early on (don't like using the science load out), but yeah, I was lucky with the iron.

Edit: Now that I think of it, labs need copper plates and such too... I guess I do just rush everything

 

Had a rather annoying fishpeople harassment loop happen to one of my colonists.

Group of 6 Fishpeople surrounded him on the beach as he was going to haul some sand back to the stockpile, formed and circle and got them stuck in a infinite loop of being menaced. Whenever they tried to start fleeing the next fishperson would harass them, and so on. Never ending.



At that point I figured it was a good enough closing point for the colony as any.

So far liking some of the changes in 44A. Some of which seem unmentioned? I'm noticing a few visual/cosmetic improvements that I don't think can entirely be put down to just "New lighting approach".
Other things feel smoother in places, but perhaps I'm just getting more familiar with recent previous changes and just playing more efficiently without realising I am working around things.

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* Immigration of overseers feels much more frequent and with a better balance occurring now even though there's no mention of changes to immigration. But this might be where I now ramp up workshops to keep production on-going to push for the next economic immigration trigger.

After a while my carpentry workshop was set to maintain a stock of 65 planks, ceramics a stock of 65 bricks and 30 glass, metal works a stock of 30 iron/copper bars, and 15 plates/pipes.... so that likely contributed quite a bit to overseer pacing feeling better able to keep with worker immigration. But still it generally felt smoother and more balanced regardless. *shrug*

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* Stockpile behaviour for offices like mines are still slightly annoying in that they don't use the updated behaviour, meaning their turn around from each job is normally stupidly long as colonists leave the mine carrying the raw resources, parade all the way back to the main colony, drop the resource then march all the way back to the mine, regardless to what stockpiles are closer.... but that's something already covered with Nicholas in another thread. So just bringing it up for the sake of properly covering the main things that come to mind from 44A.

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* Performance seems much smoother, pathfinding is hanging up when placing modules a whole lot less. And it wasn't until I hit around 60-70 colonists that performance started to stutter in brief intervals when focusing on the main activity hub of my tightly packed colony.

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* Already covered impressions of the quality system in previous post. But to summarise here, it's a great change, currently still a little too easy to work around. But hopefully with a bit more fleshing out and making it bit more strict it will come together to be a good system to downplay the sheer effectiveness of some of the current hacky tricks possible previously, such as cots in workshops, giant single building dormitories and so forth.

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* Insanity.. or rather having insanity actually mean anything... still not feeling it. Yes there feels like more triggers going on to make my colonists insane, but I'm still just ending up with a shit load of insane colonists that babble for a few days then go back to normal.
I'd even got a naturalist to dissect fishpeople and get the extreme insanity "I have discovered the secret! It's in the <meat/blood/organs>! I must share this secret with others tonight" to trigger 3 times consecutively in the same day, and that night they renamed their naturist office and just stood in their office admiring a desk before calling it a night and going to bed.... 3 days later they're back to being one of the sanest colonists in the group and have renamed their naturalist office to something like the "Fluffy Bunny Huggers" or some such sickeningly cheerful name.

Same with NCO and other colonists. One point the NCO witnessed the brutal murder of 4 of their soldiers at the hands of bandits, followed by the death and butchering of bandits by fishpeople who accidently came to the defence of the colony as they hung around lost and confused (who were then gunned down by other bandits, butchered into fish steak by my colonists and promptly eaten that evening after the remaining bandits fled).
They and a few others were broken wrecks from the whole ordeal. The barracks had been renamed to something along the lines of "The Putrid Slaughterhouse", and this alongside the naturalist who had just discovered some dark amazing secret they just had to share with other colonists, and the last 2 weeks of an arrangement of colonists having strange dreams seemed to have set the stage for something to actually happen......

But nope.

Just a whole lot of crazy, and nothing coming from it. And having a whole lot of crazy going on was never the problem. It has always been having something happen as a result of it.

Same as with 43x and 44.

Will continue to poke things in this area with additional colonies. But so far having reached over 75 colonists at various points and high insanity mixed with assortments of anger/fear.... it seems exactly like it did previously, except there's more making my colonists insane but nothing changed to actually take the already overly abundant insanity to make any of it mean anything.

Adding more insanity to the already overflowing reserve of insanity, but having it still just drain down the plug hole that is the abyss, leads to nothing but insanity for the sake of meaningless insanity.... which admittedly is arguably insane in it's own right, from a purely in-game perspective it isn't really cutting it as far as relaying a sense of actual insanity.

Instead it's like half my colonists have frequently hot flushes of insanity once a week before lying down and fanning themselves for 5 minutes to collect themselves, before looking around at everyone apologetic and getting back to work.. initially you think "Oh! What's happening??!?" And take interest/concern but 5 minutes later you realise it's all much ado about nothing.

And when it keeps happening every week and never leading anywhere eventually you just stop even really acknowledging that "Zora Kiltspitter has had an ominous dream about a sunken city" or "Petrich BunnyBuggerer has discovered the vast underlining twisted secret to the dark powers of the fishpeople whilst staring at their internal organs".... as you become attuned to the fact that it will unlikely have any significance what so ever.

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So overall, great update and some really nice changes... but from the initial session the dam that stops post-madness behaviours is still there. And 44A just seems to throw more insanity fluids at the dam to try brute force its way through the problem rather than doing anything about the dam itself.