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[K1lo]

Small update because I thought it would be cool to share - I just fixed a regression in my weapon hitbox code. It wasn't immediately apparent what was going on however, but then I came across a debug mode I'd almost forgotten about which I thought I would share as it looks pretty cool. Sadly I can't think how to make it a feature but you never know 

[ITS_Mike]

That is actually pretty cool  I like seeing different debugging techniques that other developers use.

Your experience somewhat reminds me of an unfortunate memory lapse of my own regarding debugging tools: I implemented an artificial lag generator...  And forgot to turn it off. I re-discovered it a few months later while debugging the game's mysteriously bad networking performance

[K1lo]

haha oh no! Still, pretty easy epic performance win

[K1lo]

Ye Gods.. after an epic couple of days of coding, testing and general gamedev-ing (I'm too tired this morning to care whether that's a verb or not  ) I'm really excited to say the first alpha build of Isomer is now available!

It's been a year of work so far - my attempt to keep up with weekly updates on this thread only lasted a few months before it devolved to only more major updates, but it's amazing looking back at some of the early posts to see just how far things have come in that time. I've saved a lot of testing and development screenshots since the beginning, I'd like at some point to create some sort of slideshow because I think that could look good.

There's still a lot to add in the future functionally and content wise (that's why it's called an alpha rather than because Google made the term trendy) so this is only the start! If you would like to try to alpha it's available via the Humble Store widget on the Isomer website. Feedback and suggestions are always welcome!

[K1lo]

Squashed a few bugs and updated the build. It's amazing, you can test all you want but some things will only reveal themselves when you let your game loose to the world 

[Impmaster]

Wish I had Windows so I could try this out. I've been following it for a while.

[K1lo]

The library I use (Allegro) is cross platform so I'm not ruling anything out for the future, but I don't have enough experience developing for other platforms to really say anything for sure currently 

[K1lo]

Another minor update for Isomer, this addresses all reported issues (with the exception of the rare fullscreen bug which is still under investigation).

Aside from fixes and improvements there are six new alien consoles that can be built to decorate structures with.

Here's the full changelist:

• Improvement: Applauncher now closes when it initiates a download of the updated installer.                     
• Improvement: If the applauncher failes to initiate the download a message box now pops up along with logging. 
• Improvement: Only show delete button if there is a saved game in the slot in question.                         
• Improvement: Added alien consoles (large only) to the set of objects that can be player built.                 
• Improvement: Tweaked rare and ordinary mineral dust sprites.                                                   
• Improvement: Fixed automatic MFC dialog behaviour on loss of command focus in launcher.                       
• Bugfix: Reworked side stepping logic to fix edge case where unit is blocking their mining or building task.   
• Bugfix: Fixed FPS drop when a selected entity had a large number of build or mine commands in their queue.     
• Tweak: Made human and alien structure blocks take longer to build.                                             

[John McDonald]

Looks pretty cool man. Keep up the good work.

[K1lo]

Thanks a lot! The next big update is going to focus on combat, there are lots of features that are going in and I'll be writing about them shortly 

[K1lo]

What started out as a minor build to tackle the one remaining bug from the previous build somehow spiraled into quite a big update! There have been a large number of small improvements and a couple of big changes.

So, firstly the big changes. Isomer is now longer constrained to a 1024x768 window, you can now play in whatever fancy resolutions your monitors support which is really awesome. You can fit quite a bit more world onto your screen at 1920x1080  . The other big change is in how you see enemy units, previously if an enemy unit was on terrain you had revealed through exploration they would be visible. I didn't like this because it gives too much of what is happening in the world away. As of this build, only enemies that have been seen by your own units will be visible placing a much greater emphasis on scouts and sentries.

Enemies are now more aggressive and will attack more frequently and in greater numbers. In combination, there are big improvements in how the game notifies you about combat events and now allows you to cycle between units attacking and under fire. Supply ships are less frequent and there is a new type of supply ship that only appears when you have two or fewer units - this ship will offer emergency reinforcements for free, how nice of them is that?

Here's the complete change list:

New: HUD now shows the number of friendly units either in combat or under fire.
New: Added emergency supply ship that offers free reinforcements of Workers when the player is down to two or fewer units.
New: Game is now fully resolution independent! Woohoo!
New: Launcher now remembers options from previous session.
New: Added notification of what resources were looted from crate.
New: Reworked entity visibility code, enemy entities will no longer be visible when they're on a block that is not FoW shrouded. They will only be visible if a player unit has 'seen' them or if they're firing their weapon.
Improvement: Tweaked team resource counter ticking rate and speed.
Improvement: Refactored resource counter drawing code and made counts > 9999 be drawn in a smaller font.
Improvement: Improved AIScanSurroundingsForEnemies method to fix edge case when trying to find unit that was targeting the entity.
Improvement: Reduced lower limit on tick time between spawns for enemy units. Enemy units spawn more quickly (when required).
Improvement: Enemy units now have a minor meandering bias towards moving in the direction of the player dropshup, leads to more frequent attacks.
Improvement: Unit seen mechanics tweaked to reduce timeout until entity regains hidden status.
Improvement: Enemy units will now only continue engaging player units up to twice their perception range (but no further).
Improvement: World creation screen now shows progress on the buildings construction phase.
Improvement: Enemy buildings no longer get created on water.
Improvement: Fixed unit healing behaviour, units of level 3 or above can now loot health from corpses at 5HP * level above 2.
Improvement: Added more variation to resource loot crate.
Improvement: Reduced probability of revealing the whole world from a loot crate.
Bugfix: Addition of OpenGL mode to fix fullscreen bug reported by some users.
Bugfix: Reduced frequency that supply ships appear.
Bugfix: Fixed minor graphical issues with alien ship top tile sprite and human brick sprites.
Bugfix: Fixed entity weapon draw order when they look south.

[K1lo]

So my first weekly update in a while! 

The last few days have mostly consisted of planning what is going to happen next with Isomer and checking in with the forum to see how people are getting on with the changes in the last build. Half the changes were to the engine (only positive) but the other half were to some key combat mechanics so I was eager to make sure that I hadn't made the enemy too aggressive and that no longer being able to see all enemies in the world, only the ones that your units could 'see' was going down well.

Luckily everyone seems happy (the ability to select the resolution was a much requested thing as was fixing a bug in fullscreen mode that appeared to affect only some people) which is good. A few small bugs were found which I've spent the last couple of days fixing but otherwise it looks like the update was well received.

By way of an update, here's that what I plan development wise going forwards. Apart from a small build this week so I can release the bugfixes I've mentioned, there will be no further 8.0 builds. Once the last bugfix is out I can focus entirely on 8.1 work which will be the first big update focusing on combat, weapons and combat mechanics.

[K1lo]

Some screenshots since it is Saturday!

Changes this week have primarily related to the lighting engine to add support for day and night cycles as well as ray tracing for lights so they don't 'leak' out of walls. Probably a good few days more work on this next week, but here are some screenshots showing progress .. warning unfinished features and bugs ahead 

[K1lo]

Work on the line of sight upgrade to the lighting engine is coming along nicely!

[K1lo]

So, this week I finished the changes to the lighting system to support day and night cycles. Each world that is generated has a random day and night length (as they would being random worlds at variable distances from their nearest star). I also finished work on the line of sight calculation upgrade to the lighting engine so light sources no longer 'leak' out of world geometry.

On top of this I've added a game wide 'aggressiveness' factor which is used by the enemy AI routines to determine their actions. It ranges from passive (mill around, look for friendly units to heal + interact with and defend territory) to mildly aggressive (seek out player units and facilities) to very aggressive (charge towards player units and facilities wherever they are detected and attempt to assault the player dropship). At night the overall aggressiveness of the human enemies decreases to give you a bit of break from daytime attacks however the AI can go into very aggressive mode if the player destroys an enemy building or if the enemy decides to launch a night raiding party.

Lastly, I also made water look awesome!

[K1lo]

Happy Halloween fellow TIGians! I just released a big update for Isomer today with the most notable change being the addition of night time (kind of fitting for Halloween don't you think? ) which I've been talking about the last couple of weeks.

During the night it is much easier to hide in the shadows but of course that works both ways with sneaking enemy units being also harder to detect so make sure all your critical areas have lighting! Enemies tend to be more defensive during the night but that will change quickly if you assault one of their facilities. Each generated world has a different length of day and night phase ranging from a just a few to roughly twenty minutes each.

I also spent time upgrading the game editor to make editing building definition files easier. It's something I've been meaning to do for a while, but with the lighting upgrades to the engine it suddenly became quite urgent as the lighting in the buildings wasn't right in some places. As a result, every existing enemy building type has received minor tweaks and small construction changes to improve lighting and geometry. On top of this I got a little over excited yesterday and added six new types of buildings with more to come in the future.

Lastly, water now spreads making deep underground mining more dangerous as to possibility of rupturing and underground river and flooding your tunnel becomes a real possibility.

Here's the complete change list:

New: Added day/night cycle with variable phase lengths determined by world seed.
New: Units that are now hiding in the shadows not doing anything are no longer undetectable.
New: Units that are in the shadows are now detected normally, however to be spotted the opposing unit needs to be at least 40% closer than usual.
New: Added variable levels of enemy aggressiveness based on time of day and player actions.
New: Added better feedback when unit cycle buttons yield no result.
New: Water now spreads.
New: Game now plays a random music track each time from the loaded pool.
New: Added different music modes depending on whether the world is in the day or night phase.
New: Any units caught on a block that has flooded will drown.
New: Bumped save game version (and added upgrade support for existing saves) to 8 to support day/night cycle changes.
New: Big realtime line of sight upgrade to lighting engine.
Improvement: Numerous improvements to save file loading.
Improvement: Added extra safety code to pathfinding code.
Improvement: Optimised drawing precalculations and added support for transparent water blocks.
Improvement: Fixed bug in fog of war calculations relating to transparent blocks.
Improvement: World generator makes caves less frequently.
Improvement: Now fades out current track on game-over and returning to main menu rather than just stopping it abruptly.
Bugfix: Fixed bug with slow/non-building at some angles on the bottom of the world.
Bugfix: Fixed adjacent light calculations to use correct ambient light level.
Bugfix: Fixed bug in lighting calculations resulting in light bleeding through world due to incomplete geometry with loaded games.

This update can be downloaded via the Isomer launcher!

[K1lo]

Just a quick note, I had intended to release 0.8.2.1 today however I'm not entirely happy with the way pathfinding works with long range transportation.. in some circumstances units currently ignore transport pads and try to go the long way round which isn't optimal. I've a fairly good idea how to fix it but I'm going to have to rewrite part of the pathfinding code which I've run out of time to do this evening. With any luck this will only delay the build until tomorrow, I want to get it right

Here's a preview of what's coming!

[K1lo]

Foof.. one busy morning completely re-coding the transportation support in the pathfinding code later and we're done with a new build available.   

It wasn't until I compiled the changes list that I realised how much has actually gone into this, so without further ado - here's the run down.

Firstly, a big change. There is a new block type called the portable power core, as the name suggests this is a mini version of the important block in the middle of your dropship that you need to guard. There are some structures now that can only be built on top of one of these: the healing totem, mutation pad and transporter pads. Any existing healing totems you have in any existing worlds will continue to work normally, but you won't be able to build any others unless they are on top of a portable power core. Another change - you can now only mutate your workers when they are sat on top of a mutation pad. This feels more realistic as it never felt right to me that you could perform a mutation anywhere in the world no matter how far you were from your nearest base, although all distance is now relative thanks to the next big change which is .. transporter pads!!

Yes! Transport pads, something that has been requested on the forum for a while now make an appearance. These useful items can be built anywhere (as long as they are on top of a portable power core) and allow you to beam your units around the world quickly and easily. Warping to the nearest healing totem or throwing reinforcements to the site of a enemy building assault has never been easier!

There are also a large number of minor changes like new glass blocks for both aliens and enemies, a number of new building types to encounter in the world (twenty in total now!) as well as new world items. Enemy AI has received some attention also to make it less consistently aggressive and reduce the number of units assaulting player bases (I made things too hard accidentally in the last build).

Lastly a cautionary word - guard your portable power cores

Here's the complete list of changes:

• New: Added new sprites for ice blocks.
• New: Added new blocks for human and alien glass.
• New: Added human banner, transporter and mutation pad sprites.
• New: Made Alien glass block buildable.
• New: Added a number of new building prefabs (now 20 different variations of buildings that can be encountered)
• New: Healing totem can only be build now on a portable power core.
• New: Added transporter and mutation pads which can only be built on a portable power core.
• New: Added portable power core block.
• New: Enemy AI now looks for portable power cores to attack just like the primary power core (although the latter always takes priority if both are detected).
• New: Sprites on top of blocks will also flash when that block is being mined.
• New: Units can only be mutated now when on mutation pads.
• New: Added transporter animation effect.
• New: Build menu now displays name of each build option.

• Improved: Updated LoS function to include considerations of transparency for lighting.
• Improved: Improved diagnostic logging around pathfinding and entity logic.
• Improved: Modified a number of prefabs to improve lighting, add glass or optimise geometry.
• Improved: Made healing totem slightly more expensive.
• Improved: Reordered build list to group similar items better.
• Improved: Minor entity movement refactoring.
• Improved: Changed entity aggressiveness weighting and adding two extra levels of aggression.
• Improved: Changed enemy aggressiveness level calculations.
• Improved: Lengthened day/night transition time.
• Improved: Unit stats HUD segment only displayed if a unit is selected.
• Improved: Added distinction between night time and day time music and added night time music track.
• Improved: Added event notification when an enemy build becomes disabled.

• Bugfix: Fixed potential crash in logging of invalid movement position deregistration.
• Bugfix: Made enemy units spawn less frequently.
• Bugfix: Tweaked building prefabs to reduce enemy unit traffic on lifts in temples.

[ananasblau]

Wow, you're busy as hell, I should get into that same mode. Are you doing Isomer full-time?

[Mr Speaker]

Man, this game looks rad! Any chance of a port to Mac?