Lord of Rigel News

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Greetings Lords of Rigel,

Another week and more bug fixes and quality of life enhancements:

This Patch:
• Autocombat report: We’ve added a post-combat breakdown for autoresolve and tactical showing the outcome balance of power bar and status of individual ships.
• Simple mouse input: As some users have reported not having middle mouse buttons or mouse wheels another quality of life feature will be an alternative control scheme that can be toggled. Players can currently change these bindings in settings but this will provide another accessibility option.

We’ve also finished the build queue refactor, which has optimized construction displays and rounding displays for various items in the build queue.

In terms of quality of life features coming next:
• Auto ship design generator: With the optimizations done on ship designer we’ll be adding in an “auto” button to have the AI generate a design of your selected size class.
• Loading and saving build queues: You’ll be able to select various buildings and items to set up a build queue order. Unavailable items will be filtered out. These queues will be tied to your user settings and should be able to be shared between games. Along with the existing auto construction tool this should provide a lot of control for automation for players

As for another deep dive this week: Planet scenes.

We’ll likely do a few on some specific ones that had their own challenges or some interesting pieces. But for this week the often-overlooked swamp planet.

Having planetary scenes was a decision we made very early on in development, as it adds a personal touch to each of your worlds. Over development we had some different versions including 2D backgrounds with 2D images, and a version with 3d buildings over 2D images. When we began the work for the current version of LoR in late 2019, we transitioned to full 3D planet scenes for colony view and ground combat. Each planet needed to keep to a color palette that would match what is seen in orbital view.

Each planet has a 2km x 2km terrain to allow for a horizon. More habitable planets use foliage and instanced meshes to allow for vegetation. These were kept lower detail than you’d see in say a first person shooter since they’re for adding scale in the background for planet buildings. The skyboxes also use a mix of textures and volumetric particles to create fog and clouds. So why pick a swamp as an example? It shows off foliage and the moving mist is also tied to the particle system effects using noise. These effects combined with the ambient sounds on the planet surfaces should all help add little bits of immersion to LoR.

Image 1. Post Combat Summary Display

Image 2. Simplified Mouse Support Option

Image 3. Swamp Planet Matte Image

Image 4. Overview of a swamp planet scene

Image 5. Ground level view of a swamp showing foliage meshes

Image 6. Swamp planet in game

Let us know what further changes you would like to see or if you have encountered any technical issues. Please post on the forums, reach out to us via Discord or send an email: [email protected] Saved games and clear steps to reproduce the bug are critical. It helps us more quickly track down the bug and get it fixed. Additional information on bug reporting tips can be found here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/437440/discussions/.

As always, we appreciate the feedback, conversations, and support from all of you!

• Ticket #1438 QOL – Fleet control vertically scales with content
  
• Ticket #1431 GNN Event Artificial planet delay fix
  
• Ticket #1435 Invalid weapon in Skirmish mode Ship Designer fix
  
• Ticket #1442 Fleet tooltip after scrapping a ship fix
  
• Ticket #1441 Nanophage bomb categorization fix
  
• Ticket #1443 Colony ship not colonizing Artificial planet fix
  
• Ticket #1368 Dyson sphere and ringworld first construction GNN fixes
  
• Ticket #1439 QOL – Anomaly icon added to empire colonies with temporal events
  
• Ticket #1434 Von Neumann Probe GNN Events fix
  
• Ticket #750 QOL = Tactical combat battle outcome screen implemented
  
• Ticket #1445 Colonize cutscene causes black screen and hard lock
  
• Ticket #1363 Sending colony ship from within Planets menu causes resorting fix
  
• Ticket #1444 QOL - Shift click allows for multiple buildings entries in Build Queue menu
  
• Ticket #1406 Empire, Fleet, and Planets menu resorting on click fix
  
• Ticket #1020 Empire, Fleets, and Planets menu remember sort settings
  
• Ticket #1260 Production number display fix for build queue
  
• Ticket #1293 Starvation alert for colonies importing food fix
  
• Ticket #1440 End of Temporal Anomaly not triggering GNN event fix
  
• Ticket #1452 Firing Arc display update in Weapon Designer fix
  
• Ticket #1450 Spy assignment fix
  
• Ticket #1449 AI Expansion fleet “yoyo” after broken alliance fix
  
• Ticket #985 Diplomacy and combat order of operations fix
  
• Ticket #1447 Any planetary shields stop Advanced Terraforming fix
  
• Ticket #1108 Adjusted Hotkeys to support default configurations without middle mouse wheel or button
  
• Ticket #1454 Hotkey tooltip updated
  

Patch Notes:
This patch adjusts settings and keybindings to support simplified mouse options. This may cause issues on some systems with previously saved keybindings.

If you encounter issues with Settings or Keybinding, please try the following steps:
Go to the Settings Menu press reset and close the menu.
If this does not work, close the game reopen it and follow the same step in the main menu.
If that does not resolve the issue, close the game and delete the PersistentSettings and InputMappings save files found in:

C:\Users\ YOURUSER \AppData\Local\LordofRigel\Saved\SaveGames

Greetings Lords of Rigel,

We’re plugging away at reported issues and making headway on our Early Access 1 milestones.

In terms of quality of life features coming down the pipeline:

• Auto ship design generator: With the optimizations done on ship designer we’ll be adding in an “auto” button to have the AI generate a design of your selected size class.
• Loading and saving build queues: You’ll be able to select various buildings and items to set up a build queue order. Unavailable items will be filtered out. These queues will be tied to your user settings and should be able to be shared between games. Along with the existing auto construction tool this should provide a lot of control for automation for players
• Autocombat report: In addition to the existing event ticker we’ll be adding a post-combat breakdown for autoresolve and tactical showing the outcome balance of power bar and status of individual ships.
• Simple mouse input: As some users have reported not having middle mouse buttons or mouse wheels another quality of life feature will be an alternative control scheme that can be toggled. Players can currently change these bindings in settings but this will provide another accessibility option.

There’s also been a number of under-the-hood adjustment to economy and a pass on data fed to the AI. That being said, our emphasis on looking at AI behaviors will be during the next stage of EA to fine tune issues of it either being too aggressive or being too passive depending on the game.

This week we also wanted to give a deep dive on one part of the game: how planet effects are generated.

In Lord of Rigel galaxies can have up to 10,240 individual planets or objects in the largest galaxy sizes. They also need to be distinguishable by climate type but look somewhat unique. To do this we relied on developing master materials for stars and planets that could be adjusted by each type and by lighting.

Stars have colors based on their temperature and other details such as the amount of sunspots is determined by stellar type. Smaller, cooler stars as in real life have more sunspots and more activity. Stars also adjust the lighting in system view so yellow stars have a more natural white light while blue stars or red dwarves tint their systems a particular color.

Planets have set color palettes and detail textures based on their climate type. Some details such as continent layouts are procedural and set during galaxy generation. Other features such as icecaps are determined by if a planet climate has water and distance from the parent star. Planets further out will have larger ice caps, while ones close to the star will have small polar caps or none at all. Other planet types like Toxic worlds and Gas Giants also have lightning storms on their night sides. Planetary rings also have a few base materials, but are also adjusted procedurally so each looks unique. Additionally, planets have city lights with patterns set by where continents are located and height and the amount of cities is scaled by the population amount on your planet. Planets also have cloud shadows that help add more depth. Many of these effects are a bit more subtle than other games to try to aim for a more naturalistic look.

We believe our mix of procedural details, lighting, and planet type detail textures creates a believable and diverse universe.

Image 1. Binary system with sunspots
Image 2. Ocean planet with icecaps

Image 3. Example of Planet Material

Let us know what further changes you would like to see or if you have encountered any technical issues. Please post on the forums, reach out to us via Discord or send an email: [email protected] Saved games and clear steps to reproduce the bug are critical. It helps us more quickly track down the bug and get it fixed. Additional information on bug reporting tips can be found here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/437440/discussions/.

As always, we appreciate the feedback, conversations, and support from all of you!