Bulwark Evolution: Falconeer Chronicles News

[h2]UPDATES[/h2]
I have been doing a few updates the last few days but haven't done an update due to some family things popping up.

So here's the changelist for the last few days. There's quite a bit of new content and content changes.
For those interested in trying out the battle mechanics, the units you gain from commanders should now be more useful and importantly any hostile force you leave activated will make their way to your settlement or ships. This should spice things up a bit.

• added a few more buildings to the Imperial Houseset
  
• changed the Mancer tall citadel
  
• added a few ornamental lightposts to freehouse and imperial sets to get more freespace in the towns with a piazza-esque feel
  
• Added two mancer refugee events
  
• Hostile battle groups now make their way to your settlement after you flee or are defeated (Proto raids!)
  

• improved unit AI so they go aggro faster
  
• made the force that pushes the camera above the terrain softer
  
• show faction in captain selector
  
• changed behaviour of zoom in/out on worldmap
  
• the player verhicle pointer on the worldmap is now pointing in the direction of the vehicle , not the camera.
  
• if you demolish a tower and the nearest tower is far away , the selection goes to the surveyor instead
  
• made some changes to the lighting colors
  
• minor visual tweaks
  
• removed the worst of the nasty mouse jitter in airborne mode
  
• prevented the weird issue where your surveyor would just pop out of existence
  
• 
  

As always issues may arise and bugs are real, please report what you find.;)

[h3]EUROGAMER![/h3]
On a sidenote Eurogamer's Christian Donlan did a deep dive into Bulwark and the result is quite something special to read: Do so here:
https://www.eurogamer.net/bulwark-falconeer-chronicles-further-excavations-from-one-of-the-deepest-imaginations-in-games

[h3]Showcase[/h3]
here's some pretty pictures to showcase the fiddling I've done with some of the visuals the last week.

I've updated the Mancer Citadels (now also available in campaign mode) they were lacking a focalpoint and the empty facade with the dual arch makes for an interesting negative space I found.

Here's a nice 4k wallpaper(click for full image)

[h3]Space elevator[/h3]
On the Discord a player decided to reach the starts by building an infinitely vertical tower.

click here to see a little video of the space elevator ;)

[h3]What's nex?[/h3]
in closing, next up is probably fixed settlements, so the other factions in the game will have their own towns , which can be friendly, neutrol or... hostile. I have no idea how long development of this will take, but its a decent sized addition.

Cheers and enjoy Easter

The last couple of days have seen substantial mechanical changes. First in the organic population manager that is now creating more factional sprawl radiation outward from inhabited command towers and citadels (basically little houses of the controlling faction now spawn further away).

But also a the removal of limitations on building in deep water. You can never build a tower in the deepwater but you can now always connect a walkway or wall, taking away some of the guessing here.

This has lead to it being very easy to wall up your harbors and prevent them from connected. I already had little harbour bridges that could open and close, I worked yesterday to allow ships to pass these without much effort.

Here two harbours are enclosed and the traderoutes pass thru the raised bridges.


To do this I've had to refactor the traderoute pathfinding a bit also leading to "tighter" traderoutes

As seen here also better able to pass narrow gaps.

So this post is to update on the new capabilities, but also to notify this was a deep refactor and it might be rough, be good to hear if any funny business occurs with traderoutes.

here's the changelist.

• Benedict made better sounds for the move swoosh and snap squish
  
• improved trade-route path-finding so that it may path thru bridges and narrow gaps better
  
• prevented trade-route path-finding from going behind the harbors.
  

p.s Benedict Nichols the award winning composer and partner in crime on The Falconeer is back to do the soundtrack and sound design on Bulwark and he's starting work;) So a few first audible changes are appearing in the changelists, expect more the coming months.

For those enjoying the ingame music all the current music is placeholder from the Falconeer OST, which you can buy here on steam, on BandCamp or Spotify or even Vinyl!!:

here's the spotify link so can check it out. https://open.spotify.com/album/4WIJ1qwdkPsZuQeqhMHfdc?si=sb-90Sq8RRSY4XAWJBefJg

• made any deep water traversable, it spawns small bridges, or if its a large stretch a harbor raised bridge(so ships may pass)
  
• resource flow is turned off in menu/photomode
  
• encounters and commanders are now also left mouse clickable
  
• Clouds stop animating in paused mode in photomode
  
• minor lift on the post effect (little brighter)
  
• nights tad darker in the sky
  
• little bit more bloom
  
• turned chromatic aberration back on, (set post fx slider to high to remove).
  
• made AO slightly more precise
  
• made the tower nearest to the cursor selection even more pronounced
  
• reduced some of the tremors in the cursor when using the surveyor
  
• improved the higher tier freehouse houses, and added a few more variations
  
• added a snap sound when you select another tower to make a walkway or wall
  

As always things may break, apologies if they do

The following content is added to freebuild: (campaign mancer stuff is coming soon)

• added Mancer outposts
  
• added Mancer citadels and upgraded outposts
  
• added Mancer foundations
  

General Fixes and changes

• overhauled population system to spawn more organic placement of faction related houses/buildings
  
• fixed the dreaded limited/locked/turn mouse only left/wrong resolution bug.. well resolution can be still borked, but the mouse now always works normally (for one confirmed case,but feels like it is the fix).. finally
  
• added a few more off the fancier house options for along walls
  
• reduced gui plop sound when extending the build-line volume and frequency
  
• added more epic rocks to several of the freebuild locations
  
• faded some small gui elements on the surveyor UI..
  

Known Issues

• A slight tremor has entered the mouse due the fix I guess, on the surveryor, Looking into it. But seems a lesser issue than the mouse being constrained to a weird box
  

• added a preventative extra resolution set when booting the game for the first time, to prevent the weird resolution/mouse issue
  
• changed how the mouse coordinates are calculated in-game to finally (sigh) to prevent the mouse cursor being stuck to the bottom left of the screen for some people (due to weird resolutions at first time boot)
  

Unity is setting the resolution wrong ingame the first time it boots for some users. This causes the ingame mouse to be stuck to a small section of the screen, and the sureveyor to keep rotating one way cuz basically the cursor is always stuck to a corner of the screen.

This is another attempt to fix this, or work around the issue .

If you experience this issue still, changing resolution in the settings immediately fixed it for everyone (but it should now never happen (I pray))