Pre-patch note summation of P18.

Rooms

It should be noted that the Rooms are a major, MAJOR change to the feel of FortressCraft. I hope for the better, but NOW is the time for you to weigh in with your opinion. I'm still sore from Patch16, which introduced major changes, I spent weeks showing pictures, videos and talking about the changes and the moment it comes out, everyone descends on the review section telling me how much they hated it. Your opinion is important, and I absolutely do listen - even if I don't always agree! ;)

Room limitations!

Inner Airlocks connect room to Outer airlocks, which connect rooms to the outside. The outside can be covered up. This is the only supported paradigm. The airlock->airlock area should be covered, or vis will break. This is Your Responsibility.(Think of Rooms and Buildings - you aren't forced to have all your rooms as little 'sheds' out in the wilderness)



Room controllers can share multiple segments, and multiple room controller can share a single segment. Really tho, I'd spread it out a little bit.



You CAN leave holes in the floor and the ceiling. If you do this, it'll look stupid. I don't care. Don't build it so it looks stupid. The MAIN thrust of this feature is a player-controlled portalling and occlusion system. This is Your Responsibility. I've erred on the side of allowing the room to work whilst looking broken, as opposed to forcing the player to exactly adhere to every single little sub-requirement.



You cannot put machines into the walls. The exception is the Induction Charger on the floor.

A PSB touching a Power Grommet will transfer power to any power-receiving machine directly opposite it.



A Generator (PTG, Solar) touching a Power Grommet will transfer power to any power-receiving machine directly opposite.



A conveyor touching and facing a Logistics Grommet will transfer any items to any machine that normally accepts items from conveyors. Conveyor and Storage Hopper are favourites. This is infinite speed, so you can essentially build room walls straight through existing Conveyor runs without affecting your logistics.



MineCarts can go through walls. It looks stupid and I'd like to address it in the future.

Medbay and Health changes

Hydroponics and plants

There are 7 types of plants, and 7 colours, for a total of 49 possible combinations of final plant.



Plants are currently locked to their spawn colours. Future work will introduce breeding of plants from the current 7 types to the total of 49.



The player cannot plant plants outside, but CAN Harvest them with RMB. Plants outside grow/regrow very very very slowly.



If you want to harvest plants quickly and automatedly, then use the new Herbicors. They will pull in any plants within approximately 256m. Tests have shown that this will net you approx 8k plants (yes, and will speed the game up a bit). The disadvantage is that Herbicors destroy the plants that they harvest, so this is not renewable.



The player can place plants into a Hydroponics Bay, or an Advanced Hydroponics Bay. The plant will then grow much faster, and can be harvested and re-harvested regularly.



As of P18, there is no fully-automated way to renewably obtain more plant material. The ConstructoBots in the Adventures Pack will cover this. There may be other methods implemented to do so.

What effects or uses would you like to see? With 49 plants, I'm not likely to run out!

Base Monitoring

Low Tier Lenses

T0 - 1.16 PPS with Emerald was 1.5 PPS



T0 - 1.16 PPS with Emerald is now 31.5 PPS



T3 - 320 PPS with Emerald was 416



T3 - 320 PPS with Emerald is now 360 PPS

Diamond is 15 PPS bonus



Emerald is 30 PPS bonus



Ruby is 60 PPS bonus



Sapphire is 100 PPS bonus

Remember, after the patch is live is TOO LATE for major feedback. This post should sum up the majority of the changes to Patch 18.I'll be adding pictures and formatting to this before the official release of these notes, which is planned for approximately 2 weeks time.As FortressCraft has grown and grown, I spend large amounts of my time optimising the game. Sadly, the main effect of 'doubling the speed of the game' is 'people build bases twice as large', so to a degree it's a losing battle. At a rough guess, FortressCraft can maintain a base 25 times large in P17 than it could when it left Early Access at the same framerate. However, despite some horribly complex vis systems, people still manage to beat the frame rate into submission. So, what's the solution?There's a few. One of them is a cascading segment-based view system, but that is quite a lot of work, and the end result doesn't change or improve the game, barring the framerate. I plan to move to Unity 5.6 before too long, and that will give access to DX12 and Vulkan, both of which should substantially improve the drawcall overhead without much work from me.The solution I've moved towards, and have implemented the first pass for P18, is that of Rooms. A room is defined as a rectangular area, encased in walls, a floor, a ceiling, a Room Controller, one or more Inner Airlocks, each of which is connected to an Outer Airlock. Inner and Outer Airlocks must have a gap of exactly 3 metres between them.Once established, a room has one major, MAJOR technical advantage over randomly covering stuff up with walls - if you're outside the room, the inside of the room doesn't render, and if you're inside the room, the outside doesn't render!Now, sadly, I find that giving players tools to help themselves doesn't always work. To that end, I hope to move FC towards a much more Room and building-based layout, but for this patch, players will be required to build rooms only for the new Hydroponics and Medbays.So, in short; Room advantages - they look cool, they have predictable lighting, they speed the game up, and if you're on the surface, they also make the air warmer.Do not attempt to enclose your CPH in Rooms. Also be a little wary of making skyscrapers diagonally too close to your CPH. If Rooms take off, I will be revisiting the concept and implementation of the surface attacks.To get things in and out of the room, use Room Grommets. These are supported by PSBs and Conveyors.Suggested uses, initially, are for segmenting your base into logical groups; Smelting, Research, Assembly Lines, Sorting, Storage, etc. Putting all of your base into these rooms WILL MASSIVELY IMPROVE YOUR FRAMERATE.Note : Putting all of your base into one massive room won't achieve anything. This is obvious - right? The current maximum size of a room is +-64m from the room controller, so about 129x129x129 metres. I won't stop you doing this, but if you do, you might have slightly missed the point.One of the changes to P18 includes stopping players using the 'deathport' exploit. Players aren't bothering with logistics, lifts or teleporters, and are just dropping down a shaft, grabbing ore, and killing themselves to teleport back to the surface. To this end, the health system has changed. If you take small amounts of damage, you won't see any difference whatsoever. If you receive major damage, it will take quite a while to sell-heal; it's about 10 minutes to recover to 100% health from 1% health, but it's only about 20 seconds to heal from 90% to 100%.To combat this, the player has a couple of current options. The first of which is the MedBay - this is a cheap machine that MUST be built in a room, and heals you if you stand near it, it heals you. Secondly, there's the Ampules. These work very much like the Power Boosters - stick it in your hotbar and left-click to use it. Different grades of Ampules will give you a different level of healing boost. Right now, the Ampule Dispenser machine must also be built inside a room, and will generate 1 Ampule per 10 seconds. This is planned to change, but I'm not sure if it'll make it into P18.Back in Patch 16, I completely re-did the surface rendering and generation, taking advantage of Unity's new Instanced Rendering system. New for Unity, that is - FortressCraft used Instanced Rendering on the Xbox 360...The main upshot of that were plants. A lot of plants. Patch 18 adds in the very first start of being able to use the plants.As of P18,, Plants have no use. The Ampules are planned to rely on specific plants, and I plan to add more effects than 'Faster Health Regen' in the future.As well as rendering, part of the advantage of Rooms is that I know the player's PC will have plenty of spare grunt to do more complex things. (An example would be shadows-on-lights-in-rooms)As part of my bid to teach players to be more brilliant at playing FortressCraft, I've implemented extensive monitoring of every ore, bar and all of the power generation of a player's base. The first 45 days of play is recorded (Haven't decided if I'll just write-over the data or stop recording at that point yet). The player is able to analyse this data by placing Base Scanners (name pending) inside rooms. Placing ore, bars or a PSB inside the hopper will then let you monitor only those ores/bars or power.The Base Efficiency rating is feedback to the player about their relative Ore/Bar production. If your Base Efficiency is less than 100%, this means you are extracting more Ore than you're dealing with (This includes manual schlepping of ore!) - I hope to use this metric to hint back to the player that having collected 30,000 ore really isn't helping them progress.If your Base Efficiency is OVER 100%, that means you're burning through your ore reserves making bars, and will eventually run out. Balancing this number to 100% means you're making the most efficient use of your automation time.Currently the first 4 tiers of Lens (Diamond, Sapphire, Topaz and Emerald) are mostly available to the player whilst they have T0/1/2 lasers. As these lasers provide very low PPS, a percentage-based increase doesn't give much difference. As an example, a T0 laser with an Emerald in it gains 30%. 30% bonus to 1.16 PPS is 1.508 PPS. In larger Tier lasers, all Crystals provide a wonderful boost - but by the time the player get T2/T3 lasers, the Organic Lenses have far outstripped the lower-tier Crystal ones, and thus are pointless.This should make early-lenses more useful, and means that a T0 Laser with a Sapphire Lens is now a massive 101 PPS - but you will have to put in some manual time searching to get that reward.I reserve the right to re-balance these in the future. ;-)As ever, I will be making a snapshot of P17 for people, so you will not be forced to run P18 with all the new exciting toys. Uh. If you want.