May 2018 Week 4: Welcome To Elytrose.

Welcome to Elytrose. This Weekly Release adds our brand new procedural world generator capable of generating landscapes and Peacenet sentience nodes, making the game feel more lively. Now, The Peacenet as a world exists.

So what's changed in this build? Quite a bit, actually.

  1. Green text in Prologue no longer moves. The position of the text is pre-calculated, it'll still look like it is being typed in but it is now much easier to read.
  2. Removed the background music from the Prologue cutscene and replaced it with lovely sine beeps akin to ShiftOS that are far less ear-owning than the ShiftOS ones. We thought that although Anders Jensen - Don't Sleep is a good mission theme, it is not fitting for the prologue and is instead very distracting. Hopefully this change fixes that.
  3. "thelma" has been replaced by "kernel" in the Tutorial. It felt better to have Peacegate teach you how to use Peacegate instead of having an AI who can't see your screen or what you're doing teach you how to use Peacegate.
  4. "The Terminal" mission has been shortened and moved into Tutorial. You now learn the basics of Peacegate's command interpreter within the Tutorial instead of a separate mission.
  5. Re-added "World Map" program. Right now it just shows you the terrain of your current Peacenet country, but soon it will show all NPCs, yourself, and other players (in Multiplayer) on the map. You'll be able to scroll, zoom, pan, etc, mission markers will show up here, and so will Country Challenges and the ability to switch Countries.
  6. Current country now displays in Peacegate Status Bar so you know where the heck you are in the game at all times.
  7. Emails can now embed missions allowing you to start a mission from an email message, much like in Hacknet.
  8. Added a new "System Upgrades" mechanic. This is part of the upcoming Package Management updates, and gives you the ability to upgrade your skills and abilities using Skill Levels, much like a typical RPG. Careful, though. You can only have a certain amount of upgrades enabled at once.
  9. "Mission Complete" screen now displays Objective Medals. It also tells you if you got a new Skill Level for completing the mission. Not sure if that was in Week 3 or not, but it's in here now. Also I fixed a LOT of animation issues in the Mission Complete screen.
  10. Discord Rich Presence support is updated. Now your friends can see your Skill Level and Government Alert Level, and any mission you happen to be playing right now. Support for joining multiplayer sessions may be added in the future, if we get around to implementing the new MP server.
  11. Fixed a bug where double-clicking "Continue" in the Singleplayer menu would crash the game. Sometimes these bugs are just Peacenet doing what it's supposed to and us not coding the UI to conform to it. This is one of those times, because you're not allowed to start a game session while one is already active - and that's what double-clicking the button does...until now.
  12. Added a diagnostic mission you can use to test out our objective system and Discord Rich Presence. Can't remember if it made it into the release builds though.

Some further info

Since the game procedurally generates the world and NPCs in Singleplayer, things get a little...heated...when it comes to CPU usage. As such, each country's terrain and NPC definition table are only generated once per save file and only when you enter the country for the first time. Thus, if we add a new mission throughout these in-dev builds as well as Alpha and Beta, which will happen a lot, or if we tweak the world generation algorithms, we add a new NPC type, we change what story NPCs are in the game, etc, etc, (which again may happen a lot during development), you WILL have to start a new save file to see the new features and enhancements take effect.  This is not a bug, it's intended behaviour. We're saving your CPU some extra pain and suffering. :)

Next on the roadmap is to actually generate NPCs based on a country's definition table, and finish work on the Packet Injection minigame - then we'll have some cool hacking stuff to show ya's.

Files 78 MB
Version 9 May 27, 2018

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