Twilight of the Arnor Beta 2 Change Log

Published on November 9, 2007 By CariElf In GalCiv Journals

At long last, Beta 2 is live! Please make sure that the title screen says beta 2 in the lower part of the screen.

Vista users with the NVidia 8600 may notice graphic corruption and or crashes when starting a new game from within a game. Shutting down the game and restarting it will help. This seems to be a driver issue and we will be contacting NVidia for help debugging it. If you experience this problem, please e-mail your debug.err as an attachment to gc2bugs@stardock.com with the title Vista NVidia Gfx corruption, and make sure to put text in the body of the e-mail so that the bug database doesn't block it.

+ NEW: The tournament "A Rock and Hard Place" is now enabled (scores will take awhile to show up in the list on the TournamentWnd)

Please note that you can only submit Tournament games if you win them, unlike Metaverse games (which are still disabled because I want people to focus on the Tournaments and general gameplay issues rather than trying to rack up points on the metaverse.)

+ NEW: Torians and the Korath are now enabled, along with their tech trees and improvements

+ NEW: Added and implemented new planet textures and height maps from Scott for special habitability planets

+ NEW: Fleet thumbnail icons will now show the top 3 ships.

+ NEW: Human tech tree adds new weapons techs

+ NEW: Weather Control Zenith implemented – improvements can now raise planet quality

+ NEW: 4 new icons/query images
+ DesecrationFactory1 (not implemented, for a factory that lowers planet quality)
+ Market3 (replacement for Trade Center)
+ WarCollege1 (not implemented, for an improvement unlocked by Terran's "Interstellar War College" tech)
+ WeatherControl1 (image for the Arcean's weather control imp)

+ NEW: Images for Wretched Harvester and Aul Incinerator

+ NEW: First batch of LogicSequence's planet textures into the game
+ 4 radioactive
+ 4 barren
+ 2 toxic
+ 3 good
+ 3 poor (that will eventually be in the unimplemented 'Medium Class' texture group)

+ NEW: Tech Tree Screen now displays the ship components that are unlocked by a tech

+ NEW: Tech Tree Screen now has tooltips for the icons in the tech nodes

+ NEW: Ellipsis icon on tech tree screen will display a tooltip that lists all of the items not displayed by the icons

+ UPDATED: Initialize WillingnessToTrade at 50 (0 means they won’t trade, 100 means they love to trade).

+ UPDATED: Arcean Tech Tree updated with Willingness to trade values on their techs

+ UPDATED: Several new ship components for the Arceans

+ UPDATED: New planetary improvements for Drengin

+ UPDATED: Lots of new tech added (too long to list)

+ UPDATED: Tech tree screen: techs that allow colonization of new planet types show icons for that planet type

+ UPDATED: Tech tree screen: techs now show icons for the ship components that they unlock

+ FIXED: Bug in determining height of planet height map from file name

+ FIXED: Bug that caused overlapping techs in tech screen

+ FIXED: Lockup when invading a planet

+ FIXED: Bug where a tech in the Korath tree (that was also in techtree.xml) set to require a new tech that was defined only in the Korath tree. Since the required tech appeared later in the file, the requirement was not found when the tech was loaded, so its requirements were set to None, and it appeared in the wrong place on the tech tree.

+ FIXED: AI evaluates tech trades more intelligently, more use of the Willingness to trade variable.

+ FIXED: Bug where some planets would still have generated textures

+ FIXED: Bug where if you traded for a tech that was in your tech tree, it would not display in the correct location on the tech tree screen

+ FIXED: Bug where empty line would appear in combat viewer battle log after first round if neither fleet/ship had an atlas-type component

+ FIXED: Minor races will now use DefaultTechTree for their tech trees

+ FIXED: Bug where background on tech tree screen did not pan

+ FIXED: Centering of icons on tech tree screen

+ FIXED: Bug where if planet screen was open when you colonize a planet, the planet screen would not update properly and display the wrong map and planet data.

+ FIXED: Bug where minor races would not get unique tech trees

+ FIXED: Graphical bug on tech tree screen when zoomed out. Techs where the line came out the bottom would have disconnected lines.

+ FIXED: Missing tooltips

+ FIXED: Crash when destroying colony with an agent on it

+ FIXED: Navigation Centers

+ FIXED: Incorrect upgrade targets for the Arenas and the Ultimate Energy Feeding Center

+ FIXED: Bug that was causing the negative influence bonuses to be interpreted as really large positive values

+ FIXED: Modified a lot of code to account for possible negative improvement values (huge headache)

+ FIXED: Going to StarportWnd from PlanetWnd via ColonyList

+ FIXED: Bug with removing hardpoint data, which would have caused stuff to hang around in memory too long, and sometimes a crash

+ FIXED: Added code to update race config files if the version doesn't match the current version

+ FIXED: Crash caused by AI not being able to find model for a user designed ship after it takes over a planet that is about to complete a ship

+ FIXED: Seilore's bug where right clicking on a planet to set as a destination didn't do anything, the root cause of which may have also caused the bug where ships lose their destinations or fail to go to rallypoints

+ TWEAK: There are now default thumbnails for the ship components, which makes the loading a little faster.

+ TWEAK: Added warning message to debug.err if loading a saved game from Dread Lords or Dark Avatar

+ TWEAK: Tourism is now worth 10X as much as it was in Dark Avatar.

+ TWEAK: Players now only start out with 3,000 instead of 5,000 (they have lots more money because of the tourism change)

+ TWEAK: The starting game year has been changed to 2227 to match story.

+ TWEAK: Slight increase in ship maintenance cost because money in Twilight is more plentiful.

+ TWEAK: Time to initialize planet surfaces has been reduced

+ TWEAK: Planets now choose their textures using a new height map system. There is still a data/height maps/ folder. In this folder there are .raw files with one of the following naming formats: (in all of these, the first # is a number. And the #s after the w and h represent the width and height of the height map (respectively)

PlanetQualGood_#_w#_h#.raw (Good planets, class 6 and up. )

PlanetQualPoor_#_w#_h#.raw (Poor planets, class 1 – 5 )

PlanetBarren_#_w#_h#.raw ( barren planets )

PlanetRadioactive_#_w#_h#.raw ( radioactive planets )

PlanetOceanic_#_w#_h#.raw ( oceanic planets )

PlanetToxic_#_w#_h#.raw ( toxic planets )

PlanetHeavyGravity_#_w#_h#.raw ( heavy gravity planets )

+ TWEAK: For each of the raw files, there is a corresponding .png in \gfx\planets. The .png however only has the first part of the name (up to the _w ) For example if the raw file was PlanetQualGood_24_w512_h256.raw, the png would be PlanetQualGood_24.png

+ TWEAK: There are other raw files there that are used for home planets or specific planets (like mars) which are specified in CustomPlanets.xml

+ TWEAK: Fixed typo in "First Time Colonization" event text

+ TWEAK: Added code to make sure that the ship that needs to be skipped gets selected

Comments (Page 2)

Minor Race

on Nov 09, 2007

Agreed with the person who mentioned the tournaments. How do I access them?

DivineWrath

on Nov 09, 2007

Curious is the weather control tech is retroactive yet, but not a big deal if not; we're still in early beta.

As I understand, the tech now comes with a planet structure that improves PQ.

dagger

on Nov 09, 2007

The tournament suddenly became available late Friday night. They were unavailable when the beta was released. (I don't know why)

SIR NASTY OF TANG

on Nov 09, 2007

And, to give credit where it's due...I only did a handful of the planet textures you'll be seeing....most were done by Logic Sequence (the guy that made the original High-Res Texture Pack).
We'll have more to put in for Beta 3, but this should give you a nice sample of what to expect from the new planet engine (sans randomization code).

WTG Logic and stardock team !!!

CoReD

on Nov 09, 2007

Cool, overnight downloading it now! (dial up

)

CoReD

on Nov 09, 2007

Dang it only took an hour and a halfish, guess I'll be able to try it tonight.

thehandofzarquon

on Nov 09, 2007

Too bad the Yor didn't make it into the beta

Oh well, still two new races to check out.

The Yor certainly do look interesting from the XML peeking I just did... can't wait for them to be enabled.

Suralle

on Nov 09, 2007

Played the tournament game, "Between a Rock and a Hard Place".

Critical path that I frequently blow off is Sensors, not here, lots of asteroids, lots of survey-type objects. So, once I had enough ships to stop the Drengin from taking advantage of me, I researched the entire sensor line and got two survey ships roaming around. I believe, that is the key in this play. Well worked for me anyways.

First time I have ever watched the battle in Cinematic also, was mucho grande cool.

Thank you Stardock!

Suralle Straykat
Kat Lord @ Large

shadur

on Nov 10, 2007

I always work the Sensor path as soon as I can afford it. It's not very expensive and it has the Eyes of the Universe project attached to the end. Instant 15pc sensor range for everything.

deos

on Nov 10, 2007

+ TWEAK: Tourism is now worth 10X as much as it was in Dark Avatar.

It's really a tweak? and not a bug?
It breaks the game for me. With Torian, I have so much money that I don't know what to do with. Even in early colonization, I always have more income than expense (even with 0 tax and 100% spending rate). It ruins the fun of balancing production and income.

The rest is fun and good, specific tech add more soul to this game!

Yandeer

on Nov 10, 2007

The tournament map was nice, but it seems the game defaulted my computer opponents intelligence very low as i was able to steamroll through them without any resistance. I even got the message that their AI was too dumb to counter the troop transports i had parked next to the Drengin worlds. Got only 7700 for score.

drrider

on Nov 11, 2007

+ TWEAK: The starting game year has been changed to 2227 to match story.

This has never made sense to me, not even for basic GalCiv2 vs orig GalCiv. Shouldn't the starting year of the sandbox game always be the year that all races started dashing around with Hyperdrive, regardless of where the current campaign story has progressed to?

Of course, the CAMPAIGN scenarios should start at the appropriate story year, but for the sandbox "We've never been out in the galaxy before" situation, a later start year is a nonsequitur.

drrider

crow_t_robot

on Nov 11, 2007

I think you guys messed up/overlooked on the drengin economy tree. They still have those boring and bland banking centres and those stock markets. Give us some evil things!

Oh, and I think a part of their research branch is messed up.

Besides that, I think planet quality needs to be looked at. If you have a big polluting factory, how is it going to lower the quality if all of the tiles are filled with buildings? I think it needs to be like it was in GalcivI, in the sense that quality determined a number of factors such as population growth. Quality could be uppgraded overtime in that game, just not when the planet is colonized. So this might be an issue in the future....

Sir_On_The_Edge

on Nov 11, 2007

Banking Centres of Death & Stock Markets of Doom perhaps?

Arnt Banks and Stockmarkets evil enough in real life already?

Edit: I still think (if it hasn't been changed) that the usage of spys needs to be expanded on. (special missions and such)

Chipwich

on Nov 13, 2007

+ TWEAK: The starting game year has been changed to 2227 to match story.

I thought precisely this too.

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