Hi all!
We hope you have been enjoying this summer so far, and had the chance to enjoy a nice vacation. On our side, after a quick week of studio shut down, we have resumed our work of game polishing for Endless Space 2! We have taken a closer look at all the issues you faced, especially with the blocking bugs that some of you reported.
The biggest one was the case of some saved games which became corrupted. We have fixed some of the issues, and made this available in the current preview patch, and since then we have also fixed other saved game issues, available in the next patch. But the real issue was a case of memory corruption on large game sessions, happening inside of Unity (the technology which ES2 uses). Unity staff have been very helpful, and they have delivered a special version of Unity fixing the problem. Hopefully, all saved games issues will be fixed with the upcoming patch.
There has also been a lot of effort put on more optimizations, like savegame duration, AI decision-making, as well as on core gameplay execution. This is a touchy subject and it is closely monitored.
There are still some issues on the Mac and we are closely looking at what you have reported. The biggest problem is that none of the issues you reported can be reproduced on the iMac and MacBook Pro that we use to develop the Mac version. Even our QA does not manage to reproduce some specific issue. So it is a tedious work of guessing what is going on (hardware? OS version? Other software?) on problematic machines and fixing it. We may dig deeper and contact some of you to perform some tests.
We have also been working on the smaller issues: text typos, UI irrelevance, incorrect AI behaviors, rare failure cases for quests or silent errors which could cause issues later in the game. Those were not the worst issues, but we want to put all this behind before we move forward on to the next steps of ES2.
In parallel to this polishing activity, we have continued working on the Fighter / Bombers feature, with all the aspects surrounding it: tech tree, quests, modules / slots etc. We still hope to deliver this by the end of the summer. More info on Fighters / Bombers soon! We have also started working on the Ideas you suggested through the Games2Gether, even though we prioritized bug fixing first. I hope we can soon accelerate the development of these excellent suggestions and give you an update on their state ASAP.
Obviously, there is more coming, and as bug fixing involves mostly programmers and some game designers, the artists had more time to work on cool future stuff, after the fighter / bombers have been released. But obviously I will not spoil the surprise just yet.
We plan on delivering a new preview patch next week with all the improvements / bug fixes detailed above, followed quickly by an official release of the patch. Stay tuned!
Cheers,
The Amplitude Team
