Lord of Rigel News

While this past week has seen a multitude of releases, we are about to hit a lull due to some extended code refactoring which currently has the game in a state where ground combat and orbital bombardment are not functional. Once we have those systems refactored, we will work on a push and making some visual refreshes to those menus. I am sure you all have noticed that it has taken several weeks to update these systems. We want to provide to more information in this week’s update on what is taking so long with these systems and other work we already have completed and ready for release.

Orbital combat and ground combat have been undergoing very extensive “brain surgery” that will give players a more optimized, consistent, and fully feature implemented experience (universal antidote working with bio-bombs, etc). These changes have also led us to rethink how we are calculating data in the game overall. This is no small thing - LoR (and really any 4x game) at its core is a massive stat calculator with all species traits and technology being modifiers to those calculations. A lot of things were being calculating by code functions within widgets rather than a centralized system of functions. Often how something was calculated for the player and the AI were different as the AI does not need to deal with player input or additional information from the UI. We are now consolidating these player and AI functions, checking functionality, and optimizing code. The optimizing is what has taken additional time because we have also moved from dynamic calculations in some places to have some data be more static and centralized and then using it to be displayed or used for additional dynamic data generation.

In the midst of this process it became clear that the AI was not calculating research correctly in a number of games nor was it doing so very efficiently. While going through logs to troubleshoot ground combat stats for the AI, it became clear that the AI was sometimes not getting the research that it was selecting and the process it used to select research was not efficient. Some benign functions were causing over 10,000 pieces of information to be checked by the time the AI had made research selections for all species. This is now down to a couple hundred loops and the AI is getting the research it is completing. In the process we also developed some tools to help us get logs from the game to better understand what the AI is doing to troubleshoot when and why good or bad decisions are made.

All of this to say that it will be maybe a week before we can release another update that is in a state we feel comfortable releasing. That release will invalidate all previous saves – players will need to start new games because their old saves will not work. We will also be asking for players to send saved games to us for analysis when they are experiencing a weak AI opponent(s).

Lastly we have been working on some other fixes this week that we are excited to be releasing on the next update. This will include a tactical log (see below) for players to see specific data in tactical. We also will be working on a chase camera that should help with player management of ships and add some immersion to tactical in coming updates.



Again, we encourage all of you to report your experience with the game both good and bad as well as provide feedback on hotfixes and quality of life improvements. Please let us know if there are specific technologies or systems not working or unclear which can help us focus on systems to work on.

Thank you for your continued support and feedback and we continue our journey through EA!

Lord of Rigel has twelve full fleets of ships and stations ranging from frigates to planet destroying behemoths. Each of these models involves building meshes, textures, materials and debris. The amount of effort that goes into each ship seen in tactical is staggering and our artist designed each ship at scale with thought on details such as the bridge, reactor, locations of each weapon type, and escape pod locations. These details were then used to help place the firing points for different weapon types and firing arcs used in the game.

For those interested in the “guts” of how models one in the game, one master pixel shader is used for the ships and solid body objects in LoR. Individual “material instances” get used for each object that can be adjusted on the fly in game for things such as ship speeds or engaging cloaking devices.

Ships in LoR use a few techniques such as detail maps for hull “Aztecing” a term coined by the details used on the Enterprise model for Star Trek the Motion Picture. Each species in LoR has its own aztec pattern. Parallax occlusion mapping is also used so individual hull places look raised. Engine glows are also dynamic and tied to ship speeds in tactical combat and engine pulsing varies depending on the species. Less technologically savvy species such as the Katraxi and Tharrn are larger more visible and varied engine pulses.


Image 1. Katraxi Destroyer in Editor


Image 2. Parallax occlusion and normal maps only


Image 3. Example of Starship Material


Image 4. Katraxi Destroyers in tactical firing missiles


Image 5. Katraxi Destroyer wireframe model.


Image 6. Katraxi Destroyer clean model.


Image 7. Katraxi Destroyer full model.

That's it from us! Let us know if there's anything you'd like to see a devlog on in the future.

• Ticket #1230 System/Planet View cycle button refactor
  
• Ticket #1229 Diplomacy AI counter offers treated as player demands fix
  
• Ticket #1037, 1038 & 1217 Colony Base build queue filter implemented
  
• Ticket #1226 Improved Energy Weapons technology calculation fix
  
• Ticket #934 Tactical auto retreat fix
  
• Ticket #1017 Ship design deletion build queue freeze
  
• Ticket #1045 Fleet travel text fix
  
• Ticket #1227 Building event ticker includes next item queued
  
• Ticket #892 Tutorial outpost fix
  
• Ticket #1018 Tutorial build queue text clarification
  
• Ticket #1052 Tutorial stuck on planet screen fix
  
• Ticket #887 Tutorial Explore goal text clarification
  
• Ticket #1232 Citadel data fix
  
• Ticket #1079 Tutorial Information screen hotkey fix
  
• Ticket #837 End turn key closing fleet combat if under AI attack fix
  
• Ticket #1218 No first contact window fix
  
• Ticket #1130 Hyperspace flux GNN trigger and duration fix
  
• Ticket #1225 Fleet disappear on arrival fix
  
• Ticket #1228 Research screen key panning implemented
  
• Ticket #1220 Build queue deletion fix
  
• Ticket #1224 Custom faction color for ship widgets fix
  
• Ticket #1219 Build queue filters for Starbase, Battlestation and Citadel
  
• Ticket #1222 Engage and autocombat with empty enemy fleets fix
  
• Ticket #1217 Colony base filter fix
  

Known Issues:
Tutorial has critical error that prevents completion.

Hello Lords of Rigel,

This has been a slow week for updates, but that is both good and bad. We released an update on Saturday and another on Sunday to address some immediate fixes that were needed. These changes should fix a number of issues players have been experiencing as well as making some incremental updates to the orbital bombardment system and ground combat stats. Players should be seeing changes in how stats are calculated – for instance ground combat bonus traits are no longer percentages, but positive/negative bonuses. This should make for an easier system to calculate consistently. Additionally, we added another quality-of-life request from players – the ability to move between owned systems from system view. Players should now see arrows at the top of their screen to move back and forth between different star systems.



While probably not noticeable to players, one change this week was a big change in code - moving our turn system towards being centralized in an Unreal Engine actor. This is the first step in a longer process of restructuring the turn system in the game and we believe this will provide fewer bugs, a better player experience through a centralized system to process all player UI interactions generated from a turn such as audience screens, research menu, etc. and we will be focusing on optimizing the code which should provide faster turns for players. Our goal is to get turn running as fast as we can. This will be especially important in larger and longer games where more data is running through turn.

This week we will continue to focus on bug fixes as they come in, quality of life improvements and an ongoing refactor of orbital combat/ground combat. We should be getting the defensive forces refactored and then transitioning that code to the invasion level for visuals to play through for the player.

Again, we encourage all of you to report your experience with the game both good and bad as well as provide feedback on hotfixes and quality of life improvements. Please let us know if there are specific technologies or systems not working or unclear which can help us focus on systems to work on.

Thank you for your continued support and feedback and we continue our journey through EA!