That was a phrase a customer of ours once used to describe our software development ethos (back when I was developing performance management software for local government). He wasn’t being especially kind in this turn of phrase but the irony is, this is exactly what software development is all about.
So with that subtly distracting anecdote out of the way, I bring you another raft of massive changes, in the form of Revenge of the Titans v1.80.5. Update: it’s up now for both Puppygames and Humblebundlers. Humblebundlers please download from your original download location, not Puppygames!
Bugs Fixed
- Fixed: refineries description showed the wrong rate (should have been $10 every 3 seconds, not $10 every 15 seconds!)
- Fixed: collecting barricades in Survival mode didn’t update the HUD counters
- Fixed: gidlets were supposed to not get hit by blaster rounds; now they aren’t
- Fixed: capacitor light beam was at the wrong angle
- Fixed: liquid sodium accidentally buffed reload rate (should have been precision engineering)
- Fixed: window size parameters behaving oddly
- Fixed: smartbombs (and rocket explosions!) weren’t working properly at all (and never have!)
- Fixed: Mars stories about capacitor, which only has Particle Physics as its prerequisite now
Balance
- Reduced building connection range by 1 tile
- All turret upgrades now half price, but also only (roughly) half as effective
- Buffed sergeant droids cause a wee bit of stun and have armour piercing rounds
- Big increase in available crystals in later levels
- Buff Titan gids
- Dropped pickups now last rather less time onscreen
- A slight nerfing to the reload time of spreader and assault cannon
- No more $100 or $250 pickups from angry gidrahs. Well, a lot less anyway.
- Nerfed blast mines down to 16pts damage
New Features and Enhancements
- You can now specify graphics scaling on the commmandline with scale=1.0 etc.
- Online hiscores in Survival mode!
- Saturn and Titan now have variations on Perlin noise for more interesting terrain generation
- Wraiths now take much more damage from armour piercing rounds and blasters buffed with Reactors
- Free to sell buildings when level not started
- Gidrahs now speed up as they approach the base!
- Gidrahs with weapons will now shoot at your base
- Lasers now switch sweep direction for alternate firing
- Blasters now stop firing at gidrahs they are not causing any damage to
Internal
- Hint to clear level of crystals for a bonus not shown till level 5, when it’s actually possible
- Quadtree collision manager replaced by much faster and simpler cell-based collision manager
- Gidrahs now all have consistent model for getting more difficult
Analysis
Well, as far as fundamental changes to gameplay go, this is possibly more significant even than the last big change from 1.7x to 1.8x. The bulk of the tuning and tweaking and enhancement has gone on to make so that a single central base defence of super-buffed-up turrets is now going to be much harder to achieve. Your upgrades now only cost half as much – but they are now only half as effective. And as before they seem to get more significant the more you add of a particular type… this is going to leave you with some tough choices as to how to buff your turrets. With limited space for upgrades now, and them only being half as effective, you’re going to have to buff certain turrets in certain ways to get the best out of them.
The multiblaster has never really gotten much love from people. I suggest you give it another go: it’s far better value for money than three ordinary blasters when it’s been upgraded a bit with a companion or two. And I’ve finally implemented a tiny bit of useful turret AI: if a blaster detects that its shots are simply being deflected from the target, it will stop firing and choose another target! This was the multiblaster’s biggest downfall – emptying a whole clip into an armoured gidrah, doing very little useful.
A final important change is that the gidrahs will speed up when they get close to your base – which means waiting for them to get all the way to the base means they’re going to come at you fast. You might still manage Earth and Moon and most of Mars without changing tactics too much but by Saturn I don’t think you’ll be able to hold them off with a single fat cluster of turrets. You’ll need to pick them off en route. With any luck the new balance should require you to build two or three powerful clusters of turrets.
Other things of note: people who’d like to see loads more of the map might want to try using a custom window size (width & height) on the commandline, followed by a new parameter, scale=xxx, where it normally uses 2.0. You can try 1.0 to get 1:1 pixel scaling, which makes the map very hi-res, but you might need a fairly powerful machine to cope.
Hiscores
Yes, real online hiscores! I want to see those times creeping up. Monkey! Knife! Fight!
Oh yeah nice change list. say is that bug in 1.80.4 with endless level 47 or 57 I think it was with the gids not moving fixed? or is that going to wait for 1.80.6?
anyways time to wait for Rosen to sleep, wake up and update the HIB, ps I am going to give the demo to a friend of mine who has craptastic internet (dialup lol) and see how he likes the game.
Say do you have a gifting system in place? cause that would be REAL handy 🙂
now the countdown begins to HIB updates! and then I back my HIB RoTT to flashdrives ! and yes I back it up to more then one!
WHY? because I am OCD about RoTT.
just so you know.
I must be getting old. I parsed RoTT as “Rise of The Triad”
Yeah I know that feeling I do the same thing sometimes too.
Excellent list of changes – can’t wait to dive into the HIB version!
It was mentioned about a Sandbox mode earlier, is that still in the works or has that fallen off the radar?
Cas said he would add it if there was time. I would assume that there was not enough time.
Yeah, I wanted to get the bugfixes done and balance changes out there for you all to playtest. Please test Mars, Saturn and Titan if you can!
Download page still says it’s .4.
Not going to update it until Jeffrey say’s the HIB version is updated, or he gets hundreds of support emails about it 🙂
Yeah Jeffery takes a bit to update it. but dont worry it will come soon enough! time to finish of that .4 campaign. and Cas is the endless bug fixed?
I think the Endless bug is similar to the bug that caused a level not to end as well. I’m trying to find out what’s stopping gids from moving. Thought I’d got that bug already but it seems to have come back, in rarer circumstances. Fortunately I’ve got someones saved game to look at.
Great update! Do you have any idea when ROTT will make it onto steam, or include an auto-updater so I don’t have to hunt down my humble bundle URL each time a new version comes out? 🙂
Steam: RSN. Not sure if I’m allowed to say exactly when so I’ll keep schtum.
I love that you keep improving things, but the continual flood of new versions with game-play alterations put me off actually playing. I completed the 1.72.1 campaign (gold medal on all levels), which was very challenging and therefore rewarding, but with the 1.8 series that feeling of completion has been kinda tarnished. Basically, I have no desire to install and play through the new versions as long as I feel like you’ll be scrapping my achievements again in another few days.
It’d be great if you could explicitly say what version you’re gonna consider final (modulo bug fixes of course), then I’ll happily wait for that version to roll out before playing through the campaign again.
RoTT is a great game — beautiful art style, great music, great writing, and it’s good that it’s difficult, but since I have limited time to play, it’s kinda sucky feeling like if I beat it it’s just gonna shift beneath my feet again.
put me off -> puts me off
1.8 series -> 1.80 series
etc
You could think of it that way…then again, what do you really gain from beating the game? Bragging rights? a medal? It’s playing the game that’s the fun part. I actually love the frequent patches, since it allows me to play a game that feels completely fresh. Think of it like getting a free sequel, rather than undoing your progress.
Also, you can always just stick to the version you like, until you get bored. There’s not so many bugs that you absolutely have to upgrade….and actually a lot fewer bugs than many games that are past beta stages.
Is there a forum or IRC channel where we can talk tactics, strategies, etc?
I created a forum for just just an occasion. Feel free to post strategies or look them up. Link is below. It’s still pretty new and new members are always welcome.
http://revengeofthetitans.forumotion.com/
I made an irc channel once, and I could again
just reply to this and ill make one
Well first impressions, I think you’ve either over cooked the power up collection time or there’s a bug with it because I’d be watching a fight near some barricades and power ups would literally disappear a split second before I click on them. It’s possible that I missed the icons under all the effects so I think the timer should be increased.
I think the selling animation should be less cpu intensive, when selling my refinery farms all at once the game slows down to a crawl and shakes violently because of all the selling animations. My PC is a couple years old but it’s a decent gaming rig.
I’m liking the new prices of turrets, making outposts is now actually viable
I liked the old fire rate of the multi blasters, now that support builds are nurfed they just don’t rattle off bullet storms quite as satisfyingly any more (sadface)
I agree on the power up time it needs to be increased at tad (playing the demo at the moment as the HIB is not updated yet)
I dont notice a slow down at all with selling buildings 😐
Okay it’s not my eyes, the power ups do disappear after like 3 seconds and my reaction times aren’t what they used to be
I notice that the laser doesn’t retarget after firing at an enemy it can’t damage if that was the new behaviour for turrets.
Power-ups should not disappear in 3 seconds 🙁
I miss some of them at the current rate.
It’s so hard to tell when the Humble Indie Bundle version updates or if it even does. I wish those guys had an RSS feed or something.
You can follow http://twitter.com/humble to get the info about the latest updates of your HIB.
As for me, I’m with John. I’d like to wait till the dust settles.
You can tell by the filename SetupRevengeOfTheTitansHIB-1805, and Jeffrey sometimes posts to twitter when a new version goes up http://twitter.com/humble
Only sometimes. It’s kind of frustrating. Besides, Twitter isn’t really set up for delivering game update news like an RSS feed (or email if you’re crazy oldschool) does.
Well you should also mention that the HIB links now point to 1.80.5 🙂
I really like this version. Mostly because it’s so different and I’ve had to alter my strategy a bunch (nicely done.) The turret upgrades may possibly be a little too weak but not by much. The power ups do go very quickly, I liked the timing before just fine. I’m using the multi-blaster yay! and as was said, it seems sluggish. So does the bezerk power up. What happened to it?
Maybe have reactors or a new expensive building to boost the effectiveness of the turret upgrades (I’m trying to get the average of both worlds – I like spreading out your defenses but miss the destructive power of the upgrades in allowing you to clutter the base.)
I definitely think you hit the nail on the head in what you were trying to accomplish.
Keep the feedback coming!
Pickups vanishing in 3 seconds: yes, that was the idea – I wanted it so that you had to be concentrating hard on a particular battle to get the benefits of the pickups. 3 seconds is maybe a little harsh (it’s actually 3.3 seconds ;)); I’ll increase that very slightly.
Multiblaster fire rate – is probably a little too slow when fully buffed.
Bezerk fire rate – yes that too is possibly a little too slow now. The bezerk simply puts all your turrets at maximum fire rate – which is now a fair bit slower than it was for most turrets. The problem with bezerks is that it completely unbalanced a boss fight – if you have a bezerk, the boss is toast, because I had to balance the boss for when you don’t have any bezerks. So it needed a little nerfing. I will twiddle a little bit and see how that goes.
The Laser turret is also overkill against bosses, it takes only 3-4 shots to kill the Saturn boss.
Bugger! The Saturn boss is supposed to be laser proof. (Likewise the Titan boss is supposed to be disruptor proof!)
Theoretically, it should toast any boss as their size makes them an easy target.
(Except for the Titan boss – I tried it and failed miserably, thanks to his armor.)
This makes the laser good as a replacement for the multiblaster (12-288 damage should be enough for anything.).
Holy shit. The stuttering audio bug is mostly gone, aside from the odd moment during the research screens when something loads–but even that isn’t a big deal if the rest of the game works fine. Thanks, Cas. Time to roll my sleeves up and get cracking on this thing.
More importantly, I’ve tried the custom window options but it doesn’t seem to look any different, am I doing it wrong? In the Target field now I have:
“D:\Games\Revenge Of The Titans HIB\RevengeOfTheTitans.exe” –width 1680 –height 1050 –scale=1.0
But it doesn’t look any different to me. Is that right? I’m on Windows XP.
Haha, that’s now how it’s meant to look 🙂
Try:
“D:\Games\Revenge Of The Titans HIB\RevengeOfTheTitans.exe” width=1680 height=1050 scale=1.0
Hmm, that wasn’t as easy to look at as I thought. Buttons are pretty small. How would I go about making this fullscreen?
It would be really cool if we could use the scale option without the width and height modifiers if possible, or if that is not possible at all what the normal window sizes that the game uses for medium and large window?
Sorted for 1.80.6 – scale parameter now works for fullscreen. Maps quite often don’t fit properly in the screen area if you diddle with it though, so I’m going to have to figure out how to implement fog-of-war at the edges of the map and allow you to scroll past the edge. Sigh.
Great! Another patch! slow down a bit would you? :V
i’m stuck trying to figure out custom window sizes, mainly where i’m suppose to be typing it in. any help would be appreciated. i’m on os x
Currently blazing through Endless on a rather… unorthodox(?) route of mines + explosive buffs, refinery buffs, and lots of droid factories. Level 28 I’m sure I haven’t seen anyone bring this up just yet, but would it be possible to extend the alien research buffs (+1 damage, +1 armour piercing) to the droids, or would that be too overpowered? Their shots don’t seem to be piercing the titans much.
Whoops, that’s a bug. Armour piercing is applied OK but they don’t get the +1 damage from biology research.
The next round of balance tweaks I’m going to do is to try and get it so that particular classes of weapon are more amenable to buffing by particular classes of upgrade.
I’m of the opinion that you should allow the drops from the titans to be collected automatically. Right now with my strategy of drowning the spawn points in mines before frantically applying a dozen refineries all over the map (Endless level 30), collecting the money that drops from the titans seems like an impossible task for humans, or at least people who aren’t 300APM StarCraft players. D:
Okay here we go with a small 1.80.5 overview.
I’ve played through Mars since the release of 1.80.5 and I am loving the new tweeks, but there are still some balance issues and strategy issues.
While turrets now discriminate between targets they can hurt and those they cannot, the droids still do not. In many cases they just sit in one spot as a large armored Titan just runs them over while focusing all their fire power at it. I also noticed the advanced battle droids still cannot hurt the armored titans except by firing literally hundreds of blasts at it. Your update said they had armor piercing rounds, but I’m not really seeing its effect.
There is a weapon balance issue with the disrupters. They are still too powerful. A combination of two or three with a few powerups near the base just destroys everything, which also adds to the legitimacy of swarming the base with guns. Playing through, the best strategy still leans towards cramming your base with guns.
I’ve been thinking about the base guns strategy issue and they only thing I could see that would solve the issue is to decrease turret power further, keep the Titans the same or increase their power, and decrease the price of the turrets further. Make turrets and powerups so weak and so cheap that the only way to damage a Titan enough by the time he gets to your base is fire at him all along the way.
Another issue that needs to be addressed is the end stage mining exploit where you delay the last titan long enough with barricades to mine all the resources. This is a tough issue, but I have a possible solution. How about preventing the addition of turrets, bombs, barricades, etc. after the red bar timer in the upper right hand corner has expired. By the time this timer expires, all the titans are pretty much dead by this point and only a few remain. Any defenses you’ve put up should be sufficient to take care of them and if not you didn’t do a good job anyways, and this would prevent the end stage mining exploit completely.
I love the powerdown of the bezerk powerup. It made boss fights so easy back in earlier versions. The loss of one tile of powerup range has increase the tendency to spread out effectively, but not entirely.
I saw some people are having difficulties with the powerup pickup time, however, I didn’t seem to have any problems and I’ve only missed one to date.
Overall a fantastic update. I love the progress this game has made and I am looking forward to more.
I’m seeing a bug with the droid factory, on some levels the droids will be produced and be literally right next to the titans but not fire at them at all. Also, all these tweaks are making the game incredibly hard to play, especially considering how little money we have – is there any way you could incorporate something so that each killed titan gives you a small amount of money (change the amount depending on how hard it is to kill the titan) or would that set the whole system off?
Yeah, in earlier versions you’d be rewarded minor $$ for killing titans ($10 for the weaker ones and so forth)
This was removed (along with changes to refineries) due to players literally hoarding megabucks…. mind you, the game was way easier back then…. I definately agree with you about some graphical change to upgraded droids just so you can distinguish, even just a colour change (blue for regular, brown for upgraded) !
Also, the “Buffed sergeant droids” either don’t really have armor piercing rounds or have absurdly weak ones, I can have ~40 droids with the droid upgrade surrounding an armored titan firing away and it will not kill him. There is also no way to tell the difference between a sergeant droid and a regular one, there should be a graphical difference.
WARNING: REFINERIES EVEN MORE USELESS NOW
Tried to start a new campaign (and discovered Tangleweb is pretty good, if you can find a proper way to place them based on the level) and suddenly noticed a new problem:
I’m no longer getting Efficient on earlier levels (except ONE).
I’m starting to stare at the battlefield after the last titan dies and see that entire crystals are approx 1/6th away from being entirely depleted, even with FOUR collectors and refiniries surrounding it. “There wasn’t enough time to mine all the crystals?!”
Then I noticed two things: A) There are significantly more crystals on the moon (“later” now being after the Earth) making it a lot more expensive/harder to get efficient. But also B) Collectors are USELESS.
Seriously, no matter how I try to place them, even four surrounding a single crystal, at least two of my refinieries (can’t spell, too sick :/) will NOT be connected to all of the collectors, because the upgrade building link is far too short now to make even refineries break even.
So now my campaign has been utterly crippled and I’ll have to somehow go all out for a no-refinery run from Earth to Titan. :/
ummm its better to use the collectors on one or two refs and not for every crystal I just have them with the larger crystals and just have pairs for the smaller ones, you really don’t need to use collectors for every deposit.
and the rate was $10/3 seconds was in 1.80.4 and earlier its only the description that was updated as it previously gave the wrong info.
Indeed, I haven’t changed the way refineries and collectors work at all, although it is tricky to get a super-efficient layout. As it should be.
There are a LOT of crystals as you progress through the game. Which is just as well because you’ll need lots of guns to protect the refineries!
I was thinking about a campaign hiscores mode which recorded the highest money for each level. Good idea no?
I think that would good idea, might help track down some the funding problems for future patches.
not implying there are problems but just might help see if any develop.
I would have to agree with LordKane about this idea helping in locating funding problems. It would also help out with perfecting strategies relating to cash flow. In short, I think it’s a good idea.
Wasn’t actually referring to using collectors on every deposit, just how now the (more expensive mind) collectors now suddenly only work on two or so refineries when I could easily have them all (give or take ONE collector -> Refinery link) to bust the largest crystals approx 20 seconds before the threat level goes high.
Without the efficiency medal having refineries seems hugely moot now, so I may as well just not bother researching it and grabbing pickups wherever I find them, and aim for pristine instead hoping that I don’t lose too much money in lost buildings since gaining money was hard enough to do in the first place. Drop the 3 pieces of tech getting collectors to have refinieries be useful in the first place (besides a mission start delay which is only really useful on the small open maps) to instead get a headstart on having effective turrets and barricades.
Oh wait, barricades are pure money drain since they can’t be recycled, and you can’t place them whever you suddenly need them because titans will prevent them from being placed, so if money drops don’t appear frequently enough and in large enough amounts then I’m screwed from dumb luck either way. :/
I also noticed that refinery upgrades seem to be affected by the shorter building connection range, which sucks. No disagreement there.
But the efficient medal gives only 500$, the actual mining gets you thousands. So the conclusion that mining is useless now because efficient is harder to get is plain wrong. Also I doubt that a no refinery run is even possible in 1.80.5 with the changes to towers and the lowered money from powerups.
A refinery costs 250$, and is recycled for 100$. So it needs to make 150$ to break even, which takes 45 seconds without any upgrades. This is a fairly long time, but all later levels take sufficiently long to make a lot of money with refineries. Crystal scavenging gets you 20% of crystal value according to some older blog entry (no idea if that information is still up to date), so it actually takes a little longer to break even, but nevertheless refineries that don’t get attacked will make a lot of profit on later levels. As I said, this is without upgrades.
Reprocessors and collectors are a little more tricky, whether they are worth it depends on how much of the crystals you mine and length of the level respectively. According to another old blog entry small crystals are 2000$, medium 4000$, large ones 6000$. Each reprocessor costs 750$, of which you get 300 back, so 450$ net cost for undamaged reprocessors. If the description is correct and each reprocessor gives +20% money that means a return of -50$ on a completely mined small crystal, +350$ on a medium one and a nice +750$ on a large one. This is per reprocessor, and more importantly assuming all reprocessors affect all refineries involved in mining that crystal. One setup that worked quite well for me is using reprocessors to mine two large crystals with some space between them. Place the reprocessors in the middle, the refineries to both sides between the crystals and the reprocessors, and collectors further out, above and below crystals. If there is space left in the middle place them there of course.
Something about collectors: without any collectors it takes four refineries 450 seconds to fully mine one large crystal. This is a very long time, over 7 minutes. I don’t know how long a typical late level lasts, but it’s usually less than 7 minutes. To see if collectors are worth it in a scenario where your refineries are not in danger of being chopped to bits at any time (fat chance) you need to compare the value of unrefined crystals left at the end of the level without collectors (-20% for scavenging) to the cost of placing collectors.
Getting the efficient medal gets you 500$, which is almost enough to place two collectors (300$ each after recycling). So if you need to place more than two extra collectors to get it it’s definitely not worth it (compared to mining everything before the level ends, and disregarding extra cash from attaining a higher rank).
For a more practical analysis, 3 refineries are usually enough to mine a small crystal before the level ends. This means you need about 9 to fully mine a large one, but you can only place 4. So you’re wasting about 3k, which is enough to pay for four collectors and then some. I usually use 3, which is often enough. I use 4 if the mining operation is in danger of getting attacked at some point during the level so I can sell it when it’s done mining. This wastes some money for the extra collector, but saves money on defenses which is often worth it. If you can affect refineries for more than one crystal this calculation turns even more in favor of using the upgrades (which is good IMO), but with the lower ranges this is often very hard to do.
The problem with using the upgrades is of course that they take a long time to pay for themselves. Your initial defense will be stronger if you don’t mine (at least your defense on the current level, it will probably be weaker on the next one due to losing money over time), and the gids will be weaker (due to you having less money). Plus you might need to place fewer turrets because you don’t have to defend your refineries. I strongly doubt a no refinery playthrough is possible with Titan being harder now (haven’t checked how much harder yet) and the nerfed money drops.
Also it’s really hard to get the pristine or careful medals without barricades. They give 500$ and 250$ respectively, and even if these are out of reach the barricades also make sure your buildings get damaged less for a higher recycling refund. I seriously doubt you will lose money on some well placed concrete blocks. Towers are expensive and barricades are a great way to protect them.
It’s $1000, $2000 and $3000 respectively, though you can nearly double them using reprocessors + efficiency upgrade.
I think I’ve got this bit just right 🙂
Hmm, that means a reprocessor will get me a profit of 150$ (+600-450) from a fully mined big crystal and a loss on medium and small, with an initial investment of 750$ of which I get 300$ back from selling/recycling. Doesn’t really seem worthwhile, especially with the short building connection range. Looks like these things take forever to break even unless you can get them to affect refineries for more than one big crystal. And even then the big initial investment means it’s probably not worth it.
A little comparison: 750$ is a blast cannon or multiblaster. If placing one more of these prevents even one building from getting damaged or saves you 150$ worth of barricades it’s already better than placing a reprocessor on a big crystal.
That’s exactly how they need to work. Rarely well. But when they do work you make a total mint. The only situation where they really work is where you get 2-3 big crystals arranged in such a fashion you can put a pile of refineries in the middle of them all and then buff the hell out of them. You can see the potential for unbalancing the game if I made them trivial to use yes? So what it ultimately comes down to is a balance of using a few valuable research slots and only being able to use the tech occasionally well vs. a different research path and having more money for blasters in the short term. Decisions, decisions 🙂 And who knows who will profit in Survival mode the most eh? That’s where the proof of the pudding lies.
That. Made…. No sense!
What? o.O
Lets simplify it. For the sake of the point lets say there are three paths through the game. Each path has its perks and its failings, but is unique from the others. Each path must be individually roughly equal or one path will be favored above another. Focusing heavily on refinery upgrades to amass lots of money was a path that was better than another path. So that path had to be equalized with the other paths to prevent players from heavily favoring one path over the others. The paths have to be equal or effort put into the other paths, and subsequently the rest of the game, will go to waste. The other paths have to exist to fully flesh out the game and make it a unique and interesting experience. The refinery upgrades were too cheap and effective at their current state and as result created an imbalance in the game and as such favored one path over another.
Hope that explains it. 🙂
Don’t place your support buildings next to the crystal, place the refineries in a 2X2 block above or below the crystal and then place the support buildings around the refineries. You can easily have 4 fully upgraded refineries all harvesting the same crystal this way.
Update made game unplayable.
Every one of my saves load with buildings that slide around the screen with the curser.
I deleted all my saves and started a new one only to find the same thing.
Help.
🙁
Oh, I fixed it.
I had to delete all my saves close it then reopen it.
Just played a 56 minute Survival in… 2 hours. There was a serious problem with the game clock. Everything played very slow and took a few seconds to move up 1 second with the in-game clock.
I just played a 1 hr 20 minute Survival game (gave up since after 1 hr since the titans stop moving and just stand still on the edge of the map). Also… how do I take a screenshot? Using Print Screen gives me a black screenshot. (Windows)
Sounds like your CPU or RAM have maxed out. Can you give me some system specs and maybe tell me the figures in Task Manager (or whatever OS equivalent is) for RAM usage, CPU usage, etc?
…I’m not sure that is the case, but here is some of the info you requested:
Operating System:
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit (6.1, Build 7600)
Processor:
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 960 @ 3.20GHz (8 CPUs), ~3.2GHz
RAM: 12GB
Card name:
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470
Memory: 1250 MB
BTW: I forgot to mention that the 1 hr 20 min game I played (which actually ended up being 1 hr 30 min before I ended the game on my own) had no problems with speed 1 second = 1 second the entire time. The only difference I could figure was that in the first game I used 3 Droid Factories while in the second one I didn’t.
Your system is slightly more awesome than mine, which leads me to suspect there is something inefficient in droids that caused the slowdown. I’ll investigate forthwith.
I will try to do another game later today (using Droid Factories) and see if it happens again.
On a different note… after the 1 hr mark on Survival (after the Ultratitan) the Titans behave differently… as in they stop caring! The normal titans, 1 Leviathan, and 1 Monster titan appear, but they all just hang out at the edge of the screen… every now and then one of the smaller ones will head toward the base and some of the move 1 pixel every few seconds towards the base.
Is this intentional or a bug?
Also, I didn’t notice any of the following even thought I was playing on the Titan World map:
– Regina Ixodidae
– Pteropodidre Chiroptera
– Malus Malus
– Gidrus Titanus
– Termes Malus
– Titanus Chiroptera
– Xenarthra Minor
– Malus Rex
– Maximus Titanus
– Termes Rex
– Mortus Chiroptera
– Xenarthra Major
Again, intentional or a bug?
Found the bug with droids – every single droid scans every single map entity (buildings, bullets, gidrahs, turrets, crystals – the lot) every single game tick for a new target while not in range to shoot at the one they’ve chosen. Whoops. Doesn’t take long before droids use all the CPU up!
Also found the bug with aliens hanging around off the edge of the screen – it also causes levels never to end – when the difficulty gets high enough they move so fast they… stop moving. If you get me. Fixed in 1.80.6, which will be out at the weekend I hope.
The aliens are unlocked by shooting earlier aliens. You have to shoot quite a lot of them to unlock the later ones.
Thanks for the droid fix 🙂
Ah, makes sense. Approaching the speed of infinity they appear to not be moving at all… maybe they are moving backward in time!!! LOL!
I guess I will have to wait for the hanging Titans bug fix in 1.80.6 before I can shoot me some Malus Rex. Looking forward to it!
If you want me to send you a complete DXdiag output, just let me know where to send it.
nm… printscreen worked this time. I wanted to save a screenshot of my uberbase 🙂
Have been consistently harvesting all crystals as of late but the game fails to register it and award me an Efficient medal, with something like a 50% chance of it happening–it’s real depressing to see the congratulatory message but a lack of a medal staring at me. On Endless mode. Is this a bug or intentional?
Are you sure you mined them before the timer bar on the right runs out? It’s not enough to just mine everything before the level ends.
Exactly – it’s a very difficult thing to do! Just mining all the crystals in a level is no great achievement. It is likely not particularly cost effective to try and do it on every level because of the amount of collectors you’ll have to put down. You will find it works best when the stars are right and crystals are spaced in a cunning way to allow you to mine loads of small crystals with just a few factories.
Here’s my little feature request for future versions : an improved update system which doesn’t require me to download 60MB of data anytime a new release is out, while most improvements probably are in the code 🙂
Cas, we love you!
I would have to agree. 🙂
What have I done to deserve all the love suddenly?
It isn’t all of a sudden and I’m sure we’re not the only ones. Cal just had urge to announce it.
You seem to be one of the few developers who actually significantly interacts with the audience of your game. You work hard to keep the game updated and release new versions quickly. You listen to feedback and have a great attitude the entire time. Its a pleasure to talk with you and to play your games. This fosters lots of love from the community and you deserve it. 🙂
That or Revenge of the Titans all make us secretly gay for British indie game devs.
No has to be the great interaction.
Yeah we definitely love ya, Titan Attacks is awesome, and Revenge of the Titans is just amazingly great. I try to save every build to replay it someday 😀 But i guess i missed some, can i ask you to make an archive with every beta included? This would be great.
Anyway, thanks for your job. Moscow can’t wait to see the final version.
Cheers.
To be honest I had actually dug up an old interview of Cas done by a game review site (I don’t recall which one). At the time of the interview Cas seemed quite a bit down about the indie gaming scene and it’s future. I got into RotT from the Humble Bundle #2 so everything was sunshine and rainbows when I showed up. After my research I felt satisfaction in having contributed to a developer that sticks things out and pushes for greater and greater work. The interview crept into my mind the other day and I was glad that Cas has persevered and I thought I’d just a little more momentum to what seems to have become a better situation for Cas and for us! Much love from North California, but uh, not the kind Lord Kane was mentioning…
Its just a theory, based on a) the rabid and sudden fanboyism I have developed for RotT b) the fact that my game time now consists of 1) Minecraft 2) RotT and now 3) Bulletstorm.
So I did some experiments and viola that was one of the results the other was something related to pudding and the number 4.
On Saturn Stage 34, I noticed a really bad bug. For background info, I had ~25K before I noticed it. All my defenses were set up by my base.
At some point the Titans sped up way more so than usual. I know the Titans get faster as they approach your base and when your funds are excessive, but their speed was far beyond the normal acceleration. In addition, a group of Malus Malus and Malus Rex were stuck at the bottom of the screen. Interestingly enough when I shot them by placing a turret near them they immediately shot forward and stopped again. Each shot moved them closer to the turret which once they reached it, they destroyed it. After destroying the turret, they stopped moving again. They still bobbed in place, but did not advance in any direction. I was able to destroy the rest of them and after doing so the stage did end.
Hope this description was useful. 🙂
great patch! Not only does the game feel much faster on my wimpy netbook running 64 bit linux, but the balance is much improved.
I feel like I can play a bit fast and loose now, not having to worry about pinching every penny on each level. I’m also feeling like the different guns have different purposes. I was playing with the multi-blaster before, but to get any use out of it, I needed 3 reactors on it, so it could get through shields….now it just aims for the small guys like it should. All around a great patch, leaves a lot more options as far as play style and feels more polished all around.