News
Reset fleet in campaign missions, selection group filtersMay 23rd, 2025
There is a new option during campaign when restarting mission to reset fleet. When used, this will remove all your ships, and replace them with what I had in my own playthrough. This may be useful for when you get stuck on a mission because your starting fleet is too small, is missing some capabilities (e.g. anti-fighter), and you don't have enough time to build up even with extra given resources or reduced enemies. This will only be available when you start a new campaign.
I've added option for selection groups to be "exclusive", so that one object/ship can only be in one selection group at a time. Another addition is selection filters. By pressing buttons in selection panel (or bind hotkeys for it), you can keep only combat ships, ships with destroyed subsystem or hardpoint, or ships with destroyed engines (you can also invert the filter by right-click). There are also new keybindings available for selecting all your ships on screen, or everywhere.
All missions now have some sort of intro camera that tries to help introduce the objectives at least a little bit. These are usually very short, but when they are longer, I've adjusted some of the mission timers. These can be fast-forwarded of course.
There is some improvement in performance, especially in larger maps, sometimes allowing the game to run at 2x speed where it before managed only 1x. This is mostly related to tweaking some physics values so that objects will come to rest and not be reactivated constantly.
This update doesn't have much new content, however there are at least new models for Xanthous cargo ship and depot. There are also some new research options to make your fighters either more durable, or faster to produce. There is also some extra logic that will automatically make orders for cargo ships built from Xanthous miner (unless it has set rally point), so that you don't have to babysit it that much.
There are some minor updates for multiplayer, but there are still desync issues (I identified at least one that happens when objects overlap). These are AI picks a fleet in fleet only battles, unused resources for fleet will be spawned as resource depots, and already started games are also displayed in lobby.
You can grab the current release here
Cinematic camera, abilities autocast, AI in multiplayerMarch 7th, 2025
This update brings a cinematic camera feature, which you can turn on by pressing a button in lower right corner. UI is turned off and script tries to find some interesting shots - results may vary. Cinematic camera is also used in a new scene which now plays in main menu. This script will also be used in future to add some establishing shots in missions once I get to that.
Another new feature is autocast for abilities. This works best for self-targeted abilities like afterburners, but also works for targeted abilities, but currently ships will only use it on their target, and not seek best target around. Autocast works a bit differently for each ability. E.g. afterburners will automatically engage if engine has enough health and ship is attacked, and will turn off before permanently damaging engines. Reactor overload will only engage if ship is low on energy, and turn off before damaging reactor. Weapon overcharge will turn on if this is targeting heavily armored target and hardpoints are healthy, and turn off before damaging hardpoints. And similarly for other abilities (right now, tooltip doesn't show autocast logic).
There are also new researches related to shields. Some increase capacity, some increase recharge speed, add armor to shields, some provide ability to overcharge shields. Overcharged shields go above normal capacity, but slowly decay over time down to regular capacity. This may be useful to get extra HP before entering battle. Shields overcharge can also add shields to otherwise unshielded ships!
Next up is ability to add AI player to multiplayer game. This is the same AI that was used until now in that 1v1 scenario. As such, it may behave unpredictably, not cooperate with allies, etc. One thing I noticed is that AI harass groups tend to concentrate on one place - in my case it was my resource asteroids in 6 player free for all...
Adding AI required some changes in UI and on server side, which created some interesting bugs, but hopefully everything will work correctly. While I was at it I also automated desync reporting, so when some happens it will keep save of every player involved so I can see what was different. I also fixed one particularly stupid desync which happened whenever someone opened ship build menu for the first time... This has a side effect of ships and fighters performing their updates bit differently, so if something doesn't work right, please let me know through that feedback form in game or on discord or whatever.
There were also some smaller changes, small optimizations and bugfixes, but nothing noteworthy. I also added tooltip texts for ship and fighter build menu, which gives a little information about each ship and their intended role.
You can grab the current release here
ShockwavesDecember 5th, 2024
The most visible item in this update are space shockwaves (tm). This is only visual screen distortion
to make explosions look more epic, but has no gameplay impact. And you can turn it off in options.
Another "major" item is improved performance of gas rendering, which got reduced to half the time it took before.
In addition to that, better shadows are also available for gas, at the slightly decreased performance compared to
existing method. This new method replaced the previous high quality shadow option, which just used more samples.
Speaking of gas - for quite some time there was an issue with determinism test, and thus multiplayer sync. I have been able to reproduce it on my home computers, and found out that individual gas parts could be processed in different order, which would lead to slightly different values and desync the gam. With any luck, this will fix at least some part of multiplayer again... Press that determinism test in options to find out!
This update also has several small UI improvements. You can now enable additional icons next to ships that display
damage of ship. There are three icons: first shows if engine is disabled, second and third are colored based on maximum
damage of most damaged subsystem and hardpoint. So e.g. if there is an orange square icon, it means that ship has at least
one subsystem damaged down to critical level.
Another small improvement is that hovering mouse over ship card in bottom selection panel will draw a line that connects it
to ship in space, so you can more easily find the individual ship.
Selection panel can now also change sorting to display enemy or your ships first, and option to put combat ships first.
I also plan some filters (e.g. remove non-combat from selection, select damaged) and quick selections (e.g. all on screen, all army) for future.
Another thing I added is a slight distinction between mission critical and optional objectives in campaign.
In objective list they are differenced by slightly different color and optional objectives don't start with "-" but "+".
There are also other small improvements, like ability to bind mouse buttons (for now, excluding left/right buttons),
and with it key bindings for camera pan and rotation. So if you want, you can rotate your camera with mouse when
holding ctrl+alt+shift+F9 if that is what you desire (or just bind it to some mouse button without needing to hold alt, like a normal person).
Another added binding is for quick save/load, which nobody asked for, but I thought could be useful.
Last but not least, game should now automatically run on dedicated GPU if you have system with another GPU on CPU.
This is usually the case with notebooks as far as I know, and trying it on two, it seems to work.
There is one last change that should be invisible for now, and that is that game should now be able to properly render unicode characters (provided the font has them). Previously I only used ASCII, which would be a bit limiting for localizations. Which leads me to another invisible change, and that is localization. For now it only works for UI and whatever is hardcoded in a game, should now be read from "language/english.language" file. I still have to decide how to best handle language in mission files, as some of it may affect game itself (e.g. timing some event based on how long a text is).
You can grab the current release here
Campaign difficultyAugust 21st, 2024
The highlight of this update campaign is difficulty setting. I've did some balancing for "medium" difficulty, which is default, and eyeballed other difficulties. If you hit any weird difficulty spikes or bugs on very easy/easy/hard/very hard, please let me know. Difficulty adds/removes enemy starting ships, uses different coefficients when making dynamic scaling for enemies, changes mission timers, enemy doesn't harass your miners at easy, and stuff like this. You don't take extra damage, enemy doesn't get unlimited money, or anything of that sort.
Another bigger change for this update are "order groups". When dragging over multiple targets, instead of adding them to
order list in order, they are added as a single group. The ship then picks the best target from this group, in some cases
can also switch between them. This includes e.g. repair - ships picks nearest target, attack - ship picks most suitable and near
target (e.g. destroyer prefer frigate targets to battleship targets), ability transfer energy - ship cycles between targets to keep
them all from falling between some threshold.
Some of these were already working before in some half-assed way, but this should make it easier to implement more behaviors,
or change existing ones (and it also creates less of a nightmare of icons in some cases when ordering a lot of ships)
Last but not least, there was a visual update for selected ships, which now have silhouettes instead of old health bars, and when single object is selected, UI gives you more information with icons instead of text labels. (and everything should have tooltip of course)
There isn't much else unless I didn't document some changes. There are of course some bug fixes here and there, and I've added automatic crash reporting, previously crash reports were only saved locally (no idea how often does that happen, but I guess I'll find out!). I also changed determinism test format to something where I can easily see differences, so please hit that determinism test and send results if that fails. I somehow broke multiplayer again, so it would be nice to fix it again.
You can grab the current release here
Gas updateApril 13th, 2024
This update introduces gas. This is another layer of "debris" that damaged/destroyed ships leave behind. The initial motivation for adding this was to provide motivation for player to not harvest one group of asteroids only, and instead spread their harvesters to multiple locations, which would create motivation to fight in multiple locations. As such, the first effect of gas is that any resource asteroid inside a gas gets reduced mining rate. This will go up to 95%, but that only really happens if multiple resourcers mine the same asteroid. I've also changed harvester AI to spread out between nearby asteroids, so you don't have to micromanage them.
There are also other gas effects, such as slightly lowered armor efficiency, repair beam rate reduction, so ship getting pummeled cannot be kept alive by repair beams indefinitely. Ships inside gas also get reduced damage they take from using abilities, so you can use gas cloud to get more juice out of that reactor overload or weapon overcharge.
Gas is created when some object takes damage, and then spread to nearby area, and eventually completely disappears (this can take several minutes). Damage to asteroids caused by mining creates more gas than by regular damage. Gas is additionally created whenever resources are "lost", such as when destroyed cargo hold is losing resources, ship is destroyed with not enough storage left in jettisoned containers, cargo transport (fighter type) is destroyed, or when resource asteroid is damaged and mineable resources are lowered.
The performance of rendering of gas is right now not very good. You might want to lower the details on it, and if you're using high resolution monitor, perhaps lowering gas resolution to quarter will still look acceptable.
This update also brings a slight visual improvement to UI. This includes changed UI textures and colors (still not final), basic animations, and UI sounds. There is still a problem that UI is updated in a thread that runs at 20 FPS, so animations won't look very smooth (this also makes their speed dependent on game speed, which is less than ideal). I'll hopefully fix this in next update.
Lastly, you can now financially support development of Soil on Ko-fi (in page navigation, or link at the bottom of page) if you wish so, and have nothing better to waste your money on.
You can of course still download and play the game for free, and you will get nothing in return for your money,
except for a big thank you and a "supporter" role on discord if you wish so, which also won't give you any benefit.
(you can probably guess I don't work in sales or marketing)
You can grab the current release here
