DwarfCorp News

Good afternoon stockholders,

Negotiations with the dwarven unions went even better than anticipated. This update brings some changes to the way dwarves are paid.

• Management's big victory - pay cuts across the board.
  
• Unfortunately, they won the right to severance pay. So it's not always as simple as firing them.
  
  
  
  
• You'll need proper management to hire more dwarves.
  
  
  
  Your current supervision level appears in the bottom bar
  
  Yes, you will start a default game without enough supervision. You won't be able to hire anyone except a supervisor until you have enough.
  
  

Outside union negotiations, corporate restructuring is under way. All individual branches will now be merged under one megacorp. After generating a world, you'll select which area to launch a colony on - and when you load a world, you'll return to this screen, where you can create a new colony or load a new one. We're still lobbying congress to get all the proper regulations in place, but once we ram through our corporatist agenda branches will be able to share resources.



Other changes:

• A new hairstyle is sweeping the dwarf world! The "Skywalker":
  
  
  
  
• Dwarves will no longer pursue an enemy that is fleeing unless you've explicitly ordered them to attack. This works both ways, and fleeing dwarves will not be chased.
  
• Some massive payments against technical debt were made in the last few weeks.
  

The unstable branch is available for Linux and Mac as well. As this is back to a one man operation, and I don't actually have access to a Linux or Mac machine to test, I do appreciate everyone who plays on unstable.

Both unstable branches have been updated. if you are on Linux or Mac, don't use the WindowsFNA branch. You'll just get the stable version if you do.

Some of the changes in this version:

• Fixed a bunch of bugs.
  
• Rebalanced dwarf pay and levels. Now, it takes far more experience to level up, so dwarves won't demand promotions quite as soon. Also, implemented across the board paycuts. That's what they deserve for trying to unionize.
  
• Tweaked the attacks of some hostile creatures.
  
• A slime draws near!
  
  Okay. A lot of slimes draw near. Slimes will spawn in every biome. Aren't they adorable?
  
• Treasuries have been robbed. You won't be needing them anymore.
  
• Added new bugs to fix later.
  

The current plan is for the next stable release in July, however we are leaning towards delaying that because it will absolutely break all save games. Until then, and whatever decision we make, the unstable branches remain available.

The unstable branch has been updated.

Most of what's included in this update is performance improvements, as discussed in the previous update. You won't necessarily see changes unless you push the limits - That being said, these changes do allow the generation of much larger worlds.

Do not use the Windows FNA branch unless you are actually on Windows, as it includes the stable builds for Linux and Mac.

In the last release of the unstable branch, a world size (called 'ram killer') was added without an announcement. This size is 80*80 chunks, or (at a default depth of 64) 104 million voxels. It's not actually possible to load that size world in the unstable branch because the memory needs of the geometry buffers used for rendering exceeds the limits of a 32 bit process.

Well, that's no longer the case, and these worlds will be available in the unstable branch soon - and are expected to make it into the next official release. A bit of work we couldn't get done for the official release has finally paid off and now we can discard geometry for chunks not in view as needed, bringing the memory usage in the shot below back under 1 GB.



We've also been experimenting with fog of war, and the possibility of not revealing the surface. This works quite well and has for a while, but was left out so far because it doesn't play well with slicing as you can see below. Also, it's a bit odd for a full 3d camera. Does this even make sense when, presumably, dwarves could see what's a fair distance away?

The unstable branch has been updated to version 19.4.11.

There is also an additional FNA unstable branch available for windows only (Linux and OSX already use FNA on the main branch). The FNA version is, all around, just plain better - but may not run on older systems. Users who can run it should, as they will enjoy improved performance and less issues with windows 10 randomly dropping their graphics device context.

So what's in this update?

First - deeper worlds! A change in the way chunks are stored on disc allowed us to make the depth of the world variable. When creating a new world you can choose to make it up to 128 levels deep. Honestly, it might be a bit too much!



Next, elevators. Dwarves use these to move quickly up and down, but each elevator can only carry one dwarf at a time. Dwarves can be quite lazy, so be careful where you put these as they might just line up waiting for them and take longer to get places. If you want to try these out, use the god menu (press g) and find 'elevator shaft' under 'spawn'. Their front end integration isn't done yet.



Other changes:

• The pause menu was upside down. Now it's not.
  
• Prompt before quitting a game.
  
• AutoScale wasn't being applied to all GUI elements.
  
• Fixed memory leak that slowly filled up video ram every time the game was saved.
  
• Fixed the wrong rail tiles appearing when laying an S curve across an S curve in a way that, honestly, nobody would ever do because it's completely silly.
  
• Fixed a crash involving necrophiliac animals (No seriously. Sometimes, two animals would choose to mate right before one died, and...)
  
• Lamps now grant a status buff.
  
• Active buffs can be viewed from employee screen (click the stats)
  
• Dwarves get debuffs for being hungry, tired, etc.