Our first update of June is crazy huge. It's one of those "touches every player's experience" releases.
First of all, the tooltips have gotten some major upgrades. Here's an example of one that is showing the new smallest-version of information. NR SirLimbo has condensed things, organized things, and in general added a ton of variation and clarity on there. I also made it possible to have ship icons in the tooltips finally, and boy is it nice being able to see the art that way:
Still on the subject of tooltips, and this might seem silly, but essentially in a ton of menus the tooltips are now better at staying out of your way. Having the tooltip adapt to the position of your cursor and what you are mousing over, and be near to your normal line of vision but not actually blocking it is surprisingly challenging. But I'm really glad how that has turned out, and how much easier it makes the lobby and settings experiences:
Oh, and the final thing about tooltips -- they now are more responsive in general. In particular, they go away much faster after you stop mousing over something, which just makes everything feel more smooth. We also added options in the settings window for configuring a tooltip delay before they show if you want that (for units and planets in the main game view, not for UI elements), but it's off by default.
So far all we've talked about is tooltips, but honestly that's one of the more central bits of the game.
Quick diversion, then. There's various new art, including some updated and added shaders, and the new Dark Mirror and Darker Mirror in DLC2 (Zenith Onslaught), among others:
I like them even better in motion.
Oh, wow. Certain things I think "that wasn't already released?" This build has been inwork for a few days.
- Zombie Ping Pong is now harder to play for long periods with the AI, if that means anything to you (if you are a Botnet Golem fan, then it most certainly does).
- You can scale the text size of the contents of the big popup windows, finally.
- You can press F4 to immediately switch between player factions, if there are multiple. This is great if you're playing MP and need to help a friend. It's also great if you want to play multiple factions at once, by yourself, for various reasons we can think of.
- There's a whole new Tips sidebar, and Tips and Journal Entries are now visually differentiated, on separate tabs, clearly marked, etc.
- Specifically, you can press F1 to view the new tips tab, and it even has nice categories for each tip. When these tips are added, it gives you a 3-second center-screen banner to let you know, too (which you can turn off if you prefer, but I actually really like it even though I know how to play; it serves as an early warning system of finding certain enemies in particular).
Turns out there's still quite a bit more to this release. There were a number of balance adjustments, including some buffs to some not-scary-enough AI guardians.
There's also now three Cruiser Construction Facilities per galaxy in DLC2, rather than one. More options for cruisers to be relevant earlier rather than later.
A lot of the most annoying bugs that folks have reported are also now fixed. The list is long! The Spire Railgun Shop mod also got an update.