Invasion Machine News

[h2]I'm testing smaller improvements in the development branch, before moving on to the next major update. Currently in testing - RPGs[/h2]
I'm pushing a small intermediary update to the dev branch ("public testing", you can switch to this branch whenever you want in Steam client settings page for the game, but you need to be aware it's sometimes gonna be broken, more or less. this branch is always updated first) - adding RPG launchers for the enemy units.

The game has a long-standing issue - your units are overpowered in comparison to the enemy's. The 50cal armored transporters, the generally better quality of your weapons, and the CAS - it all adds up and often makes it way too easy to completely dominate the map.

I will keep on implementing ways of mitigating this, from making the enemy setup ambushes and IEDs more often, to giving them some new toys.
Note: weapons are assigned at random, so you might sometimes not get too many enemies equipped with the specific one you wanted to see.

So - meet the new RPG launcher. A couple of thing to know about the RPG, is:
* they are not especially effective at disabling infantry, save for a direct (or almost direct) hit, but are very effective at suppressing them.
* they are very deadly against any of your vehicles, but again - will need to score a direct hit to actually cause damage.
* they damage buildings
* they are notoriously inaccurate, especially against moving targets.
* the game will simulate the basic mechanics of a rocket, as in - arming the rocket at a certain distance
away from the shooter, it's max range, and also - whatever it hits on it's way to the target (which could be an innocent civilan vehicle, or a house on the other side of the map, if the shooter misses badly)



[h2]tl;dr; RPGs are coming to the game soon, to make the enemy units more dangerous. For now the update will only be available in the test branch of the game ("public testing"), until it's somewhat sufficiently tested.[/h2]

[h2]Finally. The saves are in the game.[/h2]
I'm releasing a new build of the game to the default, public branch. From now on you'll be able to save your progress. With the help of community's testing I'm now reasonably sure the mechanisms work as intended. So - you can save the entire state of your gameplay, as long as you don't have any CAS deployed on the map, or the units on map are not engaged.

[h2]Any other changes?[/h2]
Beacuse this development took so long, I've also added countless small fixes to the game. Most of them related to scripts and AI getting lost in it's little plans, but also a bunch of optimizations to game behavior and physics calculations.

version 0.5.1:
* NEW: the game can now be saved/ loaded. You can have any number of saves you want.
* NEW: a summary window for all the people you arrest and transport off the map in your cars. You'll gain/lose relations points depending on if your arrests are legitimate.
* the screen resolution and other display settings were all moved to the settings menu of the game. No more launcher screen.
* optimizations: much less calculations needed for the cars' pathfinding (with exactly the same results as before, wether that's good or bad)
* optimizations: a huge reduction in CPU usage for the actors' actions and the way the actors on map scan their surroundings.
* fixes to the UI windows, sometimes ignoring the ESC key
* fixes to unnecessarily huge memory usage of some of the objects on the map
* switched to a more effective physics calculations solution
* optimizations of the objects' physics calculations
* updated to a more recent game engine version, which will translate into multiple fixes and optimizations under the hood

[h2]So what is next and will it take a year to materialize?[/h2]
Next - I'm gonna add a first batch of persistent, player-buildable structures. I'm thinking of some MG nests, sandbags, watch towers, some better traffic control checkpoints.
No other development in this project should ever take _this_ long to materialize. Saves were horrible to do, but they're now in. I will be adding new features to them every time I update the game in the future, but the bedrock of saving is now here, and thankfully will never have to be re-done again.

[h2]Also, some other changes I will work on[/h2]
The AI is very disappointing, oftentimes. Trying to fight almost face to face, and too weak to really be a threat to your units. I will work on various ways of fixing this, from giving your enemies better weapons, to make sure they hide from you a bit more effectively.

Other priority will be adding political elements to the village management. Local leaders, both aligned or opposed to you, and some more interesting interactions there.

[h2]Saves will only be available as an optional update until January[/h2]
It turns out some of the testers have experienced issues with their savegames, and some of those issues I wasn't yet able to reproduce. Because of this, I need to delay the official launch of the game-saving update, and for now keep them as an optional branch, only available to those of you who would like to test it and maybe help me find any remaining issues there.

[h2]If you want to get involved, you can switch to a beta branch of the game to enable saves.[/h2]
All the issues will get resolved soon, but the more people join in and help me - the sooner this will happen. The update was scheduled to go live today, because I wasn't able to find any major problems in my own tests anymore, until some of the testers started reporting them to me.

[h2]...and if you find any issues, please report them[/h2]
If the game crashes for you, or you save file no longer works - please report it, either in the forum or by emailing me at [email protected], including the player log from the game and the save file itself.

The log files can be found under C:\\Users\\[your user name in windows]\\AppData\\LocalLow\\Pixel Machine\\Invasion Machine\\[any logs that you have here].log

The save file is in the same folder, and has a filename that ends with the extension .sav (for example, 1_12309.sav).

[h2]How to switch the game to a beta branch in Steam?[/h2]
1. Right-click on Invasion Machine in your steam library page.
2. Select "Properties..." from the dropdown menu.
3. In the Properties window that will show up, select "BETAS" in the menu on the left.
4. Switch to the branch named "public-testing - Open testing for the saves feature".
5. That's it. Wait till Steam downloads the new branch and switches to it.
6. Now, when you open the game for the next time - it will be in version 0.5.1, and the load/save buttons will be enabled.

[h2]tl;dr; Saves are delayed till the second week of January, and will for now remain in a test branch, available for any of you who'd like to try it out and maybe help report any bugs. I'm sorry for the delay, but I was made aware of some major issues that slipped through and would corrupt your save files, if left unfixed.[/h2]

[h2]The game's still moving forward as before (just behind the scenes, for now)[/h2]
Once again I went radio-silent on you all (at least all of you who haven't joined the Discord). From my perspective, it always seems like it's better to wait till I have some more major news, but after such a long break - I do understand that the game might look a little bit abandoned. So, to say in two words - it's not.

[h2]Why isn't there an update up, yet?[/h2]
I'm finishing work on the saves. It's about 95% done at this point, but the nature of this update is - so far, when testing with some of the players, we realized that sometimes the game doesn't save correctly and all the player's progress gets lost. There's been no public updates to the game in the past months, but internally - we've tested about four different builds with the community, making progressive changes.

So, until all the little but disastrous bugs are taken care of - I cannot go public with the build. I understand there's nothing more infuriating than saving your game, just to realize later that the save got corrupted and all your progress lost for good.

[h2]Why so long?[/h2]
This was the absolute worst part to develop in the project. The amount of interactions between the actors on the map, their plans and intentions, their state, ... All of these just kept on mounting up, and having them figured out, one by one, just took an enormous amount of time.
The good thing about it, is - it only had to be done once, so there's no reason for the future updates of the game to take this long.

Hello,

The Invasion Machine Team understands that some players would like updates and announcements on steam, as a result, we will be providing more announcements on the steam forums in the future.

Currently, update 0.5 is in the closed testing phase and the Game Development Team is working extremely well in fixing the issues (bugs) our beta testers are providing us. In the near future, we will be releasing an open testing branch for everyone to test the saves and provide feedback on the forums. The Game Development Team has not yet provided any dates for update 0.5 release or the open testing branch.