[p]Peace After Brutality is the first Tier 3 goal that is fully complete on the beta branch, and it's best described as "what if we just did all the war crimes?" I would definitely appreciate folks testing it out on the beta, but do note that it's only in English for now (the betas always are).
For everyone in this build, there's a major set of performance improvements targeting increased framerates. On my dev machine, my average of 90fps is up to closer to my target of 144fps. On older or weaker machines, it should put more of them at a solid 60fps. There's more that I want to do in January now that I've delved into this, but it will need to wait until after the current content sprint that I'm doing.
In general, I wanted to get this existing performance buff out to everyone just so that people can enjoy it, but also so that I have more time to fix anything that might go amiss with it. I've tested it thoroughly myself, but it's just me on that. There's some really substantial code surgery in here, so there's more of a risk of temporary issues than usual. If there's anything super problematic, then two things: 1) I'll fix that tomorrow or whatever day it's reported; 2) there is a beta called older_but_stable that allows you do opt out of this if you need to. Honestly I don't expect any real giant problems (famous last words), but I also do believe in being prepared for any given eventuality.
Other than fixing anything that comes up, I'm going to be working on the next Tier 3 goal coming up this next week, which is a much more sunny and nice path -- Cybercratic City-State.
If you’ve spent time with
Heart of the Machine and want to leave a review, that’d be appreciated. No need to say more than you mean, but if you’ve been meaning to write one, I’d be grateful. Steam reviews carry weight. For a project like this — developed by a single person over many years, every review makes a difference.[/p][p]Honest thoughts are what matter. Whatever your experience has been, sharing it helps. It’s a powerful way to have your voice heard and contributes to how future patches are prioritized and addressed.[/p][p]Thanks for reading and for playing.
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[h2]Update 55 Changelog[/h2]
[h3]Clarity[/h3]
- Systems Disruption Does What?: On the Systems Disruption Power tooltip on units, as well as on the Pinpoint Systems ability on units, it now says "This is largely electrical and nanite damage; if you can get past enemy armor at all, then the full amount of systems disruption is dealt."
- Too Many Health Bars!: A bunch of unit stances no longer draw their health bars at all times. That was patently unnecessary, and just made the game view hard to understand./*]
- Common Battle Questions: New handbook entries now unlock when you get bulk units. One of them explains the Order Of Combat, and the other explains how to use bulks (and captured units) defensively.
- Step Aside, Citizen: If the PMC contemplations are forced to be on a spot where there is already an enemy unit because there are simply no other options (it already tries to avoid this, and usually can), then it now deletes the enemy that is there to avoid confusing new players.
[h3]Balance[/h3]
- Firewall Probes Are More Gentle: Adjusted the firewall probe attacks to be far weaker than they were before, as a number of people discussed those feeling over-tuned.
- Latent Difficulty Application: If you start a new timeline in hard mode or extreme mode, then the game doesn't actually act as if it's in that mode until the dooms start. This means that if you replay the prologue or chapter one for example, enemies won't be buffed. Also, until you finish the setup phase if you start in the chapter 2+ style, enemies won't be buffed. This is not fully retroactively applied to existing saves if they were already in the more-difficult mode too early, but it is partially applied.
[h3]Performance Optimizations[/h3]
- Main-Thread Calculation Efficiency: This game uses a lot of CPU threads, but the only one that affects framerate is the "main thread." That's true of any game. I've done a lot of work to isolate some hotspots that cropped up on the main thread, and smoothed those out. Occasional frame-spikes that were happening are now gone.
- Additional LOD System: This game already used a "Level Of Detail" (LOD) system for characters, but for various misguided reasons I wasn't using one with buildings. This actually was good for a while, because it made me optimize the building rendering like crazy. But I hit my limit with what I could do without LODs on buildings, and so I've added that in now. I have more to do in January on this, but it is already a 33% reduction in GPU load on the highest levels of zoom.
- No More Sub-Cells: I had implemented a sub-cellular rendering system that... actually cost more performance than it saved. That has been there for a solid two years, but I've stripped it out now. Usually this sort of thing helps rather than hinders, but the additional LOD system in this build removes any possible use for it.
- New LOD Levels On Certain Characters: Nickelbots, Predators, etc, can be super numerous. When you're zoomed out far from them, they now use a lot fewer polygons even than before. This is in the older character-based LOD system that was already in the game, I just extended it a bit.
- Invisible Breaching Pods Slowed Things: This is a thing that nobody has even seen, because it was before the NextFest demo the last time it was visible. However, there were still breaching pods being fired for purposes of some sound effects, and it turns out that they were still (invisibly) simulating and slowing things down. Sigh. I've stripped that out, with the sound effects still being there as you're used to. There were some frame spikes coming from this, too, I think.
- Tree Draw Distance: There's now a slider in the performance settings which allows you to adjust how far away trees draw. They will shrink as they go into the distance from the camera, or grow as the camera gets closer. The default is set up for a midrange computer, but the performance presets have different values that apply specific targets. This mostly impacts the farthest zoom levels, but it helps on all zooms.
[h3]Bugfixes[/h3]
- Bees Before Cats: Fixed an issue where if you did the Pollinators contemplation before Slum Cats, then Slum Cats would disappear. This was an issue with the flags for these events that has been there ever since they existed, it turns out.
- A Moment Of Tormented Weakness: Low-Visibility Mode for torment vessels no longer has a window where enemies can spawn in on loading a savegame.
- Invisible Super-Stats: Fixed an issue where unit stats that were over 10 million were not showing up in tooltips.
- Police Cruisers No Longer Afraid Of Gang Members: Fixed an issue where the cruisers would not appear properly if you still had a lot of gang arsonist kiosks and the suburbs were a certain amount small. The cruisers were not allowed to spawn too close to you, which was an error.
- Peace After Brutality Fixes: For folks who were testing the prior version on the beta branch, there are various fixes in this build.
[h3]Beta Branch: Peace After Brutality[/h3]
- Two Game Endings: These were originally meant to be the "lame" ending in a lot of respects, but they turned out really cool and involved. Go figure. There's no "bad" ending in this game, but this was meant to be the least impressive. Instead it has a lot of my favorite stuff, especially with the Nickelbots.
[/expand][p]Full notes
here.
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Connect with the Machine[/h3][hr][/hr][p]Want to stay in the loop or share your thoughts? Join the conversation across these platforms:
💬
Discord – Best place to share feedback, get direct responses, and to talk about Heart of the Machine.
📜
Reddit – Discuss strategies, share ideas, and exchange tips with the community.[/p]