A week of fixing my own mess

This week was just straight up maintenance. No cool new stuff, just fixing bugs that have been annoying me since the demo dropped.

The ghost building training If you destroyed an enemy building, the unit inside would keep training and just pop out of thin air. It was funny but obviously broken. We realized the game was still telling the building to train units even after it was dead. We added a check so that when health hits zero, it kills the training queue instantly.

The item crash This was a total nightmare. The game crashed if you clicked on a unit that used to have an item but didn't anymore. We were clearing the item list between games but forgetting to clear the unit items registry. Also, we were storing items in a vector but trying to access them with at(itemId) like it was a map, which was just asking for a crash. We switched to a dual system: a vector for fast rendering and an unordered_map for O(1) logic access. No more crashing.

The civilian traffic jam Civilians couldn't reach buildings to start training. It looked like there was space, but the path was blocked. We weren't freeing the tiles when a civilian reached the building, so they just stood on the doorstep and blocked everyone else. We added a fix to force them to let go of the tiles once they start the task.

The accidental base-attacker If you clicked on your own unit, sometimes they would just start attacking your own base. On right click, if the game couldn't find a target, it defaulted the target ID to 0. Since 0 is usually the base, they took it as an order to destroy their own home. We changed the default to -1 so they just do nothing if they don't have a real target.

Fog of War jitter Some of you noticed the fog was jittery. We were trying to optimize by clustering units, but our math for the center of the clusters was making the fog holes jump around. We gave up on the "smart" clustering and just let every unit have its own vision circle. The game handles the extra math just fine and it looks way smoother now.

Balance and other fixes:

• Tech rewards were way too low. You were stuck at level 7 with 17 points and couldn't research anything. We bumped the rewards so you actually have points to spend now.

• Survival mode enemies were dropping 0 experience. Fixed that.

• Corpses were blocking paths. We implemented a unitOccupancyRegistry so now when a unit dies, they are properly unregistered and you can walk over them.

• Units killing stuff near the map edge was crashing the game. We added isAreaFree and inBounds checks.

• Map editor: fixed the HUD blocking placement, added proper removal for decorations, and fixed box selection.

• Version is now in the main menu so you know what you are playing.

The game feels a lot more solid and robust now. We'll do one more week for playtesting and polishing the demo and then we will probably start working on the 01_IMMEDIATE_GAMEPLAY_UPDATES that's in the roadmap. Alright that's it for this update blog, have a great weekend guys!

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Thank you for the support. Let's get to work.