51 thoughts on 'Revenge v1.51 released – you asked for it!'

1. Really liked the new UI, And the medals are really keeping me busy. I’m generally terrible at this game, but my perfectionist instincts are causing me to repeat levels until I can maximize my profit. It’s a really strange feeling, but oddly rewarding…

2. As Recette from Recettear (another indie game I’ve been playing recently) – YAYIFICATIONS!

   BTW – seriously, Valve still giving you a cold shoulder? How can they possibly accept a Japanese doujin title brought over by three Somethingawful goons (they did a good job, granted) and not your stuff? It’s baffling!

   1. Valve may have warmed to us 🙂

3. Maybe I’m doing something wrong but the download link gives 1.5 and not 1.51.

   Great work with the game, mate 🙂 Keep up the good work and nevermind what ever Valve does!

   1. Aye, whenever I attempt to download it I have the same thing happen – given it 3 shots for the PC executable throughout the night, too.

      1. Snag the direct download from the this link: http://www.puppygames.net/downloads/SetupRevengeOfTheTitansDemo.exe

         The link on download.puppygames.net link is from simplecdn.net, our content delivery provider. However, typical of our luck, they went down last night as I did the release. The links in the blog post should point directly at the Puppygames server though.

         Anyway – simplecdn is back now so I’ve purged its caches and it should start returning the correct files now.

4. Nice! Can’t wait to get back to blasting later today

5. The new UI is fantastic and the medals are just great, but some of the medals seems to be out of order though.

   1. Yes, currently they’re sorted by value and then alphabetically which isn’t really right; I need to add a “group” value to them so they are sorted in the right order really. That’ll go in to 1.52, out in 2 weeks, along with any bugs you guys find 🙂

6. first up: AWESOME JOB!
   nice new UI, medals and game-feeling.

   any future plans on new levels? enemies? or other variations?

   1. Yes – there’s a whole new world to do (Titan), which will finally be introducing gidrahs that shoot back (aaargh!) and the smartest gidrahs yet with scheming tactical brains, not to mention a proper nasty boss. Titan is set in a fairly twisty cavern environment though so there should be plenty of opportunity for terrain-based strategical deployment of turrets.

      Before we finish Titan though I’m going to do “Endless mode” (like the current campaign mode, but without the story, just a never-ending series of increasingly hectic levels and one-chance-and-you’re-dead), and “Survival mode”, a single giant level with no scenery, with a constant trickle of increasingly difficult gidrahs and respawning crystals, where you need to research weapons in realtime in any order you see fit, played for points.

      1. Glad to see its out 😀
         As for your survival mode, I think it should take time to research junk, like you buy it, then takes a minute to take effect? Maby varying for different research.

         1. Survival mode research is basically, as soon as you’ve got the money, the relevant HUD icon lights up yellow indicating it’s available for research. You can research whatever you want whenever you want. The intermediary research isn’t used (eg. xenobiology etc). You can see how this will pan out.

            1. any deadline you set for yourself on releasing this mentioned survival-mode?
               would be awesome to get a gamemode, that didn’t end that fast, cause you just know how its played and all levels / planets are cleared.

               any more infos about that mode, how the difficulty scales with the progress myself in this level, so it gets more difficult and not easier cause you just got all the researches done (e.g.)?

               keep up the good work. would be nice to see more different enemies and titans itself, to get more variation (although the whole game at this point rocks) 🙂

               1. Survival mode’s due for release on 21st November. Although I haven’t put too much thought into the design right now, it’s likely that difficulty will constantly increase over time by virtue of selecting ever nastier aliens from the big list of aliens, with quantum jumps as you research things. A survival game’s probably going to last between 5 and 30 minutes from start to base destroyed.

            2. :c not having the research would stink, imho, it should take 30 seconds for the first researches or whatever,and start with refinery and blaster, heck maby remove refinerys in survival

               1. It’s still got the research, it’s just in gametime, and only buildings, and in any order you like.

                  1. oh so you meen gidlts would appear when you got the droids?

                     1. Quite possibly yes. Each building could be linked to the appearance of a particular gidrah. So the basic blaster gives you Earth Gidrah 1, the weedy rank and file. Factories would mean the appearance of Earth Gidrah 2, and so on. Angry gidrahs (the big versions at the head of each column) appear at a frequency depending on the difficulty level, which is calculated based on various factors that will probably need tuning.

7. Nice! Having lots of fun with this release. A few comments:

   1. The new HUD and research views are great – they’re definitely better than the old ones. One thing I would really love though is to be able to browse future research topics. The tree view does a good job of showing you what is required to reach a certain point, but you still can’t see what each tech does until you’re already one step away from it, which means it’s still very difficult to plan a good research path.

   2. Exactly how does the sell button compare to leaving the buildings to be recycled at the end of the level? Do you get more or less money if you sell right before you win the level?

   3. The new sell-undo feature is very nice for cleaning up accidental clicks, but it also currently allows for some cheap tactics. If you build some turrets, let them fire a couple times, then sell them back right away, you get all your money back. Repeatedly buying and selling new turrets basically allows you to fire at enemies anywhere on the map without actually using up any of your cash.

   Overall though, keep up the good work!

   1. 1. Still under consideration… jury’s out, some people like to do a little bit of guessing and discovery. But it’ll all be made a mockery of when I introduce the survival mode anyway, in which everything’s available at any time.

      2. No different at all. The only reason you’d use the sell button is when you’d built a really expensive installation to guard from some particular attack and the aliens switch tactics half way through the level and they’re sat their redundant.

      3. Bah! We’ll soon see about that.

   2. I agree completely with your “1.” That is the only issue I have so far in 1.51. Other than that it has been a bug-free experience. 🙂

8. Hey Cas, sorry to be the bringer of bad news, but I’m still getting sound stuttering 🙁

   I noticed that the game does occasionally jolt so I’m wondering if it’s not strictly a sound issue. I’ll experiment with my video card in case anything is causing it to slow down, if I discover anything I’ll let you know.

   1. Bah 🙁

      1. I’ve just tried disabling a load of stuff on my video card just in case something was causing the jolting but unfortunately it hasn’t changed anything. I also tried running the sound through my on-board Realtek sound card instead of my Creative Audigy 2 and the problem still occurs. I’m not sure if there’s anything else I can do to figure out what could be causing it. Is this particular problem unique to me? 🙁

         Again, sorry to be a nuisance Cas.

         1. Your computer has probably as motherboard with an integrated GPU.

            The game doesn’t use 3, so you may try (as safely as possible) to disable your graphic card completely and check directly through your motherboard gpu.

            You can also simply disable the sound card and play the game without sound to see if this solves the issue.

            1. Here’s Gregg’s system specs:

               Windows XP
               AMD Athlon 64 Processor 3500+ 2.21 GHz
               2GB RAM
               ATI Radeon X1950 Pro 512MB
               Creative Audigy 2 ZS

               Should all be easily powerful enough to run the game at 60fps without much in the way of juddering or crackly sound. Any newer drivers available for that admittedly rather ancient (4 year old) GPU?

               1. Thanks for your suggestions, I disabled my sound card and that caused the game to lock my system up so no progress there! I’m a bit iffy about disabling my graphics card on the off chance that there’s some kind of blackout, I’ve uninstalled video drivers before but I’m not sure if disabling my card will have the same effect?

                  I also downloaded and installed the latest AMD drivers for my processor and that hasn’t done a thing so I’m just wondering if it’s an OpenAL problem as listed under your Known Issues.

                  I will admit my computer is old but it’s still performing well, if a little noisy for my tastes. I hope to get a new rig in the coming months but until then this baby is still kicking!

                  1. The next release (due out a week on Sunday) I’ve tweaked the sound parameters further (increased buffer size basically). Hopefully that’ll cure it.

9. Nice new release! Some bugs & suggestions:

   1. Research tree is inaccurate – see around power reactor for example. I think there’s at least one other error.

   2. Fully upgraded turret medal can be obtained by thousands by hovering the final unbuilt piece (either upgrade or turret, I forget) over the rest of the installation.

   3. Silo and Extractor Beam Tuning descriptions are unclear as to what exactly they do. “Efficiency” is a vague term – does it only mean speed of extraction or does it produce more money from the same amount of crystal or just increase pre-collection storage?

   1. Thanks for spotting error in tree – at least I’ve spotted 1 – missing link between efficiency and extraction tuning. Can you remember what the other one was (or roughly whereabouts) ?

10. I’ve hit a point where I’m pretty much out of luck due to not knowing I would be required to have a certain (expensive) weapon type to hit a target otherwise immune to damage.

    I’ve given it some thought, and why not simply implement an option to respec your tech tree that scales in cost every time you do it? That would prevent the extremely frustrating need to restart an entire game due to dead-ending in the tech tree.

    1. There’s never any need to restart an entire game even if you’ve made some really unfortunate choices in the tech tree. At the very worst you can backtrack a couple of levels and research a different path; or preferably you can simply regenerate the level a few times till it’s easy enough to defeat even without weaponry that makes it easier (though you won’t be getting a gold for it).

       1. Actually I have gotten a gold medal even though I hit new level like 3 times :).

          I have had to three or four levels before (it is not very fun); but you’ll eventually figure out which tech is best to get, like multi-blasters!

11. For some reason my newly-acquired laser refuses to fire. At all. I’ve tried attaching 4 scanners to increase the range, cooling towers, nothing seems to make it want to shoot. Am I doing something wrong or is this a bug?

    1. Mah laz0r, is not firing!

       Well apparently someone else had the same problem, so hopefully you will get it fixed soon Cas 🙂

       Keep up the great work, I’m a fan; hopefully our new game will entertain you back so the cosmic balance is preserved!

12. I dislike how the round begins when you build a refinery or droid factory. I’d like to carefully place my refineries around automated collectors and silos, put down droid factories and still have all the time I want for defenses and mines. YOU, the player, should be able to tell the game when you’re ready. So what I propose is a “set up phase” where refineries don’t mine, titans don’t come, selling gives full cost back, etc. until you press some button that starts the round.

    A bug: I played, I saved, I quit. Then I fired the game back up and hit ‘play’… It asked me if I wanted to load my saved game. I said yes, and nothing happened. It just sat there in the main menu. When I clicked on ‘play’ again, it took me to the level select screen. I selected the level I last played on, the one I had saved, and it loaded, but there were artifacts floating on the screen; An HQ somewhere at the top and random crystal clusters fixed in various locations (they wouldn’t scroll with the rest of the map).

    Some of the hotkeys for buildings are, well, broken. Specifically, I cannot place cooling towers (;) because on my Finnish keyboard that’s Shift + comma, which doesn’t register. Autoloaders are also some obscure tick symbol (`) which doesn’t work either. I’d recommend using only standard latin alphanumeric keys for this, or allow reconfiguration of keys.

    Also, the mouse lag is STILL there. It doesn’t correspond 1:1 with how my cursor moves on the desktop, and it’s REALLY annoying. I’m having trouble clicking on things. Why do we need a mouse speed setting? The operating system already handles that! It’s completely useless and irrelevant when the mouse is used as a pointing device; It’s only useful for first-person shooters where you move angles of a camera instead of pixels.

13. Hey Cas,

    What’s happening with Droid Assault then?

    1. You’re porting it 🙂 I’ll be in touch when things are slightly less busy.

14. I think the Laser is not working anymore, but 2 of them they did fire at all. Tried again same problem. Too bad I wanting to do some drilling :/

15. Sry my last sentence was full of mistake, read “buit 2 of them, they didnt fire at all”

    good night

    1. yes, it appears to be broken 🙁 It’ll be fixed on Sunday!

       1. Hooray! I look forward to lasering Titans in the near future.

16. I have a small question – is it intentional that every time I start the game I need to re-enter my registration email?

    1. Ah, that’s a bug in our registration system. It doesn’t cope with international characters very well in the address field. I’ll generate you a new one without your address – won’t be a minute…

       1. Ah thanks, the problem is gone 🙂

          Unrelated – since I don’t see this reported, err.log file contains the following warning:

          “WARNING: Resource ‘sellMode.soundclip’ not found”

          1. Don’t worry about that, that’s just reminding me there’s some sound effects not done yet. Must get around to finishing the sound.

17. Hi. First, great game ! Lot of fun playing it and replaying it ! Can’t wait to see the new game mods like survival.
    Also, do you plan to add a multiplayer mod ? It could be awesome 😀

    I’ve a little problem though : since I’m running dualscreen on linux, the window is a bit weird. I need to set it to small in order to see the whole screen but then it’s so small in height…
    I’ve seen in the FAQ that it’s a known problem so I tried to install the game in my laptop, but the game says that I already registered my game.
    Can’t I install the game on more than one pc ?

    Also, I must admit that I’m not a big fan off the thing “you need to be online in order to play offline” that more and more games are doing nowadays, but well I guess it’s not critical 🙂

    Last thing, I agree with people about the research tree being not really clear.

    Keep it up the good work !
    Great game !

    1. Coming first is Endless mode (due in 2 weeks). It’s like campaign mode but will go on forever, creeping forward in difficulty inexorably. Then about a month or so after that Survival mode should give you the short, sharp shock you need when you’re bored of campaigns 🙂 But there’s no plans for multiplayer for RoTT… instead we’re going to work on a completely new multiplayer game which should be lots of fun.

       Linux is always a bit of a fiddle for us, as the configurations it can be found in in the wild are so… well, wild. It depends how you set up your dualscreen. If you set it up so that it’s like one huge monitor RoTT will hopefully do its best to fill them both when you play in fullscreen mode but then the screen break across the middle might be really distracting. Setting it up as two completely separate monitors is probably the best way to go, and the (I think) RoTT will attempt to open on your primary monitor in fullscreen mode.

       Now, last night, I upgraded our registration system to a much newer and more secure system. Your email address now only works once, totally automatically. This covers about 90% of our customers who only ever register the game once. The other 10% register twice, or three times. The old limit was 3, and then it’d send us and yourself an email saying you’d reached the limit, and if you then contacted us and said please help we would reset it. This was to stop your email address — and hence your entire postal address! — escaping into the wild. So though that helped us by stopping kids spreading email addresses on warez sites it did rather mean that a) every time a normal legit customer did one too many reinstalls we had to manually get involved and reset the database for them and b) there were two opportunities for someone who hadn’t bought the game but who just happened to know your email address to both get the game for free without anyone knowing AND harvest your postal address! Which is fine if you don’t care but a famous and influential customer of ours pointed out that being famous and influential he’d had stalkers before and was rather worried they’d find out where he lived just by registering one of our games using his address.

       So….. now what happens is, it works just once, and then if you try it again, it sends you an email with a link in it that does the database unlock for you 🙂 That means it’s almost (but not 100%) completely secure from address-harvesting thieves (they’d have to register as you in between you buying the game and registering yourself, which we figured was highly unlikely and a very reasonable compromise between simplicity and security). It also means that I don’t have to keep resetting database entries for people. I usually have to do a few a month and it’s only going to get busier as we get more customers.

       There’s still a hard limit of 10 uses before it reverts to its old behaviour and emails us to say someone’s being a bit shady with the install count. I mean, we encourage sharing with friends and family, but there’s got to be some moderation. Even then we’ll still unlock it if you ask.

       Also, the release tomorrow of all our titles puts a new failsafe DRM method into all the games. Failsafe means, if it goes wrong, you still have a working game, forever. It’s the best DRM ever made 🙂 More details tomorrow.

       1. The best DRM ever made is none at all.

       2. Looking forward to see what will be your next game 🙂
          I still need to finish the campaign of rott anyway 😀 (waiting for the fix to get the laser working)

          I managed to install the game on my laptop. As you said I received an email automatically when I launched it from my second pc (my laptop) but the game just said to me “follow the instructions” but there was none. I guess, since this is a new account system, the proper message “look at your mail” will appear with the new release 🙂

          I admit that dual screen on linux is a bit weird since there are many way to achieve it but most people on linux will play games windowed so why not let the user set the window height/width ? ROTT UI seems to be window ratio/size independent.

          good job, keep it up ! 🙂

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