These past few weeks have seen an absolutely massive increase in the number of people playing Cosmoteer! There used to be less than a hundred players per day, but now there are more than ten thousand! That's amazing!
What's not so amazing are all the bugs that people are now finding in the game. (It turns out that when ten thousand people play your game, they find all the bugs...)
And so I present to you Cosmoteer version 0.12.9, which is just chock full of fixes for many of those bugs that people have found in the past couple of weeks.
Also, the number of bugs that have been caused by new updates has convinced me that from now on I should do more testing before I release updates to everyone. To that end, I am planning, for most updates, to first release what I'm calling "unstable release candidates" that any interested players can opt-in to playing, with the understanding that these unstable versions are likely to be more buggy than the "official" stable updates. As 0.12.9 you can opt-in to unstable updates in the settings under the "Misc" tab. Hopefully this extra testing by the community will make the official updates much more stable.
Wednesday, July 26, 2017
Sunday, July 16, 2017
Cosmoteer 0.12.8 - Bug fixed and balance tweaks
Cosmoteer 0.12.8 is out! This update has a ton of important bug fixes, but it also makes a few balance changes, including making FTL jumps use less fuel and reducing the effectiveness of Electro-Bolts. You can read the full changelog here.
Tuesday, July 11, 2017
Cosmoteer 0.12.7
Cosmoteer 0.12.7 has been released with a variety of unrelated improvements.
The most important change that everyone should know about is that the location in which saved games and ships are stored has been moved from Saved Games\Cosmoteer (the old location) to Documents\My Games\Cosmoteer (the new location). I made this change because some players for some reason didn't have a Saved Games folder on their computer and thus were unable to play the game. When you run Cosmoteer for the first time after updating to 0.12.7, the game will attempt to automatically move all of your existing saved games and ships to the new location, but if that fails for some reason then you'll have to move them manually.
0.12.7 also has a few balance changes, most notably being a "fix" to a deliberate flaw in the ship A.I. that prevented it from properly staying at the desired distance from the enemy. This has the effect of making "kiter" ships (ships with long-range weapons like missiles and a lot of reverse thrust) much more viable. I'm not sure that's actually a good thing for the game's current balance, but the proper counter to kiters certainly should not be a gimped A.I. (I'm considering adding tractor beams as a way of countering fast ships.)
Lastly, I have paid off the "internet mafia" (my word, not theirs) to get what's called a "digital signing certificate" that I can use to "prove" to Windows that I, a real person named Walter Destler, am the author of Cosmoteer. So now, when you run the installer, you'll get a dialog prompt that looks something like this:
The real reason for doing this is that, in theory, anti-virus programs are more trusting of applications that have digital signatures. I'm hoping this will reduce the number of problems that overly-aggressive anti-virus programs cause with Cosmoteer. Only time will tell!
The most important change that everyone should know about is that the location in which saved games and ships are stored has been moved from Saved Games\Cosmoteer (the old location) to Documents\My Games\Cosmoteer (the new location). I made this change because some players for some reason didn't have a Saved Games folder on their computer and thus were unable to play the game. When you run Cosmoteer for the first time after updating to 0.12.7, the game will attempt to automatically move all of your existing saved games and ships to the new location, but if that fails for some reason then you'll have to move them manually.
0.12.7 also has a few balance changes, most notably being a "fix" to a deliberate flaw in the ship A.I. that prevented it from properly staying at the desired distance from the enemy. This has the effect of making "kiter" ships (ships with long-range weapons like missiles and a lot of reverse thrust) much more viable. I'm not sure that's actually a good thing for the game's current balance, but the proper counter to kiters certainly should not be a gimped A.I. (I'm considering adding tractor beams as a way of countering fast ships.)
Lastly, I have paid off the "internet mafia" (my word, not theirs) to get what's called a "digital signing certificate" that I can use to "prove" to Windows that I, a real person named Walter Destler, am the author of Cosmoteer. So now, when you run the installer, you'll get a dialog prompt that looks something like this:
The real reason for doing this is that, in theory, anti-virus programs are more trusting of applications that have digital signatures. I'm hoping this will reduce the number of problems that overly-aggressive anti-virus programs cause with Cosmoteer. Only time will tell!
Monday, July 10, 2017
Cosmoteer 0.12.6 - Balance and bug fixes
I just released version 0.12.6 of Cosmoteer. It's mostly bug fixes, but it does reduce the cost of the FTL Drive to 10,000 (to make sure players can afford to buy one after completing the first sector) and tweaks missile balance and physics.
See the changelog to get the full details.
See the changelog to get the full details.
Friday, July 7, 2017
Cosmoteer 0.12.5 - A.I. tweaks and bug fixes
Cosmoteer 0.12.5 has been released. This is a minor update that makes the A.I. smarter about choosing which targets to attack and also has a handful of bug fixes.
The full changelog is available here.
The full changelog is available here.
Thursday, July 6, 2017
Cosmoteer 0.12.4 - Harder A.I.
Cosmoteer 0.12.4 is out!
The big feature is a much smarter version of the "BountyBrain" ship A.I. (called "BountyBrainHard") that will actually target and focus its fire on specific enemy weapons and systems. This A.I. will be used for all enemy ships in Bounty Hunter except for the enemies in Amateur sectors.
This release also has a bunch of bug and crash fixes, and it also reduces memory usage significantly (by about 150-200 MB).
The full changelog is available here.
The big feature is a much smarter version of the "BountyBrain" ship A.I. (called "BountyBrainHard") that will actually target and focus its fire on specific enemy weapons and systems. This A.I. will be used for all enemy ships in Bounty Hunter except for the enemies in Amateur sectors.
This release also has a bunch of bug and crash fixes, and it also reduces memory usage significantly (by about 150-200 MB).
The full changelog is available here.
Sunday, July 2, 2017
Cosmoteer 0.12.3 - A.I. tweaks and bug fixes.
Cosmoteer 0.12.3 has been released! It has several improvements to the ship A.I. that should make A.I. versus A.I. battles and tournaments more competitive. It also has a variety of bug and crash fixes.
Read the full changelog to get all the details.
Read the full changelog to get all the details.
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