Woof! You sure have to do a lot of programming to get a game into Early Access on Steam, on August 15th, for $29.99. (Hint, hint.) But I wonder what this sad little JIRA ticket is…?

I’m just a change, yes, I’m only a change,
And I’m sitting here at Gaslamp Games,
Well, it’s a long, long journey, to get onto Steam,
It’s a long long wait, but a change can have dreams,
But I hope someday I’ll be a patch,
Or else we’ll have to write this code from scratch!

Gee, change! You certainly have a lot of patience and courage!

Well, I got this far. When I started, I wasn’t even an idea! Some folks playing the Earliest Access build decided that they wanted a new feature, so they bugged the developers on the forums until the developers said “Yup, that’s probably something we should fix,” then they wrote me a JIRA ticket and I languished in another pile of JIRA tickets until somebody got around to it. And I became a change, and I’ll stay a change until they decide to push me out in a patch.

Well, okay, enough of that. So let’s look at a couple of changes that we have made that are coming out in Revision 29 that are a direct result of player feedback?

First off: we have added stockpile viewing and filtering. You can now click on a stockpile to see an overview of its contents, and you can now broadly specify what goods are placed in a stockpile by setting filters. The actual filters will probably change a lot, depending on how people end up using the stockpiles; right now, we use the same filters as the commodity page.

In terms of interacting with the world, we’ve added a few useful changes. By request, we have now added a button to globally affect the view mode for buildings. You can now see “only building exteriors”, “only building interiors”, or retain the current view mode where a building interior is only visible when you mouse over it. Interaction with the building creator has changed subtly, but in a fairly important way. Clicking and dragging a region now designates and snaps to tiles, and not individual vertices.

Probably the largest interactivity change in the current revision is that you can now click and drag to select multiple objects. This is a bit of a fussy operation, because you can end up with a lot of stuff in a region – trees, aurochs, fishpeople, whatever. The game now looks at all the stuff you selected and provides you with a context-sensitive list of things you can do, and then creates a new assignment for a work party based on your selection. This makes tasks like “chopping every tree for progress” radically easier.

Listen to all those people on our forums arguing, Changelog! Is that really all about you?

Yeah, I’m one of the lucky ones! Most of the changes that people suggest never get done, for a variety of reasons that we won’t go into here! I hope that the forums report on me favorably, or else I’m gonna die! Oh, but it looks like I’m going to live! Now I go on the whiteboard and Nicholas ignores me until somebody makes more cute animals to get him interested in actually doing things, or until after he’s had his coffee. Then after I’m coded, I’ve gotta get approved during the testing process or else I’ll get held back until the next patch.

But I hope that I won’t cause the build to burst into flames,
’cause today, I am still just a change!

Good news, change! We’re releasing you to the wild! You’re in Revision 29 which is up now, along with all your buddies:

Changelog for Revision 29:

As always, please feel free to comment on our forums, and to post your bugs, feedback, and crashes.

The 3 Elephants:

• Intel HD4000 support. This should now work on *some* Intel HD4000 cards; the issue we have right now is that the driver space for these cards is so fragmented that we don’t know how good a job we’re doing, as depending on how old your laptop is, the manufacturer might have stopped issuing you new certified drivers.  If you have already purchased the game and you have a HD4000, please give it a shot again and let us know if you still have problems, and if you do, what sort of laptop you’ve got.
• Save games: We’re still, still, working on these. Once they are done, there will be a hotfix consisting of just save games.  Suffice it to say, we are making good progress, and can now serialize all of the game state and the LUA scripting system. The major problems are now on the renderer, which are my priority right now.
• Unicode Systems: Top Men are working on it, but this involves a lot of search and replace.  (There’s a hacky workaround where if you create a username with only ascii characters in it then the issue is circumvented, but we’re working on fixing it properly regardless.)