PTE Build 82098-pte is now up!

Can't tell that yet. So far, I only know that the SAO filter chain produces an biased output on AMD GPUs.


I'm not exactly sure why, though. Someone made a pretty specific assumption about the value range of the depth map. If that value wasn't actually in the range [0.0, 1.0], then we would probably get precisely the effect we have right now. Might be something else though, there are quite a lot of intermediate results which could be wrong.

I think there's a good chance that Nvidia automatically normalizes some values, and @bgolus fell for that trap.

The techs at Nvidia love doing that. Fixing possible user made errors behind the scene even though it's not part of the specification, and then laughing when it breaks on other vendors hardware because a dev accidentally relied on that Nvidia specific behavior.


Either way: Rearranging the shaders means that the multiplicand applied by the HDR shader will now cover for the bias introduced by SAO. So with the fixed post.json, the AMD brightness bug is gone.

Great to see the Linux fixes landing in, keep them coming!

Yes, very nice indeed! Thank you very much, I'm going to test it right now.
This seems especially promising for the future:
"-Game should now crash with an explanatory error if the UI crashes, rather than just freezing."

Tested the Linux fixes:

Testing with the Intel HD4000 without --software-ui showed same corruption:

The menus will appear correctly once the mouse has passed over them.

Works, yay!

Works too, also yay!

Great job!
However, I cannot stress enough that we really need a fix for the eco tab after the game ended. Is that fix really that hard to do? Or is it just on very low priority?

That is exactly why I just can't trust Nvidia; they have a disgusting marketing behavior...

Grenadiers can hit the broad side of a tank now. Blobs are kind of scary again; I assume there are easy counters (the AI boom bots worked quite well) but they can wreck an AI without too much trouble, at least given a fairly close start.

Hmm... seems there is some crashes in the local server: several times I had a connection lost to the server and then a endless building planets screen, playing the galactic war. Launching in a terminal resulted is this automatic bug report (well, this time I could saw it...):
Crash uploaded, link developer to http://crashes.uberent.com/report/index/bp-ac5e9c5c-d1f6-4932-8196-be8652150523

@mikeyh Seems to have found that some of his lobby changing mods no longer work in the PTE i hope this is just a bug. Since limiting mods like this is not a good thing.

Firstly - Smashing patch so far Uber peoples! Having a great time with the new stuff, and rewinding decisions is something I see much playing with. Great work!

Oh right, so minor one - worth a quick mention. Created a system, didn't notice until ran that the planets where in a crash course with one another. Watched as planets clipped one another into half.

Problem was that the 1st spawn point was destroyed when it clipped. After the auto 2 mins spawn in, it sent me down to the now destroyed 1st spawn section on that planet and... yeah.... - small but its a thing ^_^

Yeah, don't break mods plz, the community is hanging on by a thread as it is! Just take a look and see how many of your kickstarter/alpha/beta/gamma backers are still playing. the numbers don't look good :/ The modding community has helped keep the rest of the PA community active this long, and mikeyh has done some awesome stuff along with Cola_Colin and many others

Also one 1 patch note point, twitch integration removed! why? they will continue to support existing integrations "Also just to be clear, while we won't be offering the PC SDK for new integrations, we will continue to support existing integrations. Also if you have a unique/creative idea for an integration we would still like to hear from you." http://discuss.dev.twitch.tv/t/twitch-pc-sdk-no-longer-supported/1267

It would be a shame to literally start pulling our game apart. having twitch integrated chat is a must for being able to communicate and show off just how badass PA is and can be.

This looks really good! I really like that there are a lot of AI fixes! Now they may player more player like!
Also, will the idle function be added to the AI? just curious since it seems like a cool idea.

simply a matter of mods being outdated since they were made for the previous versions, so modders would have to update their stuff to the current version .. not realy that big a deal i think ..

I think the Twitch SDK was responsible for some incompatibilities with other screencap / overlay software. Loosing the chat is an undesired side effect, but kicking it out of the graphics pipeline by default may have solved problems for various users.

Also you have no clue what they mean by "continued support". It might mean that they will still provide enhancements for the shared library, but it also might mean that they will merely keep the API stable enough not to break the library, without ever providing any new features or bug fixes.

The mod issue isn't a typical out-of-date. The particular method PAMM was using to enable server scene mods is fundamentally invalidated by the PTE changes.

PAMM would make a server shadow of ui_mod_list.js. This file has now been included in the "boot bundle" which is built once on program startup, embedding and locking down the client-only version. Unless someone comes up with a creative workaround, server mods that want to do lobby (Display Ranks and all of mikeyh's other stuff) or in game code effects (Puppetmaster, Com Regen) would have to go back to piecemeal, version-dependent (fragile) shadowing of game files.

I've not had a chance to check the PTE code, why was this done? Sounds like a disaster for the finally solved issue of not being able to shadow free load server mod js.

I think the transition in the architecture is incomplete.

There is that scene_mod_list which appears to be *actually* intended for that task, with all enlisted mods executed by loadSceneMods(), but I can't see how to fill it any more.

By the way, far too many locations are not using loadSceneMods(), but are accessing scene_mod_list directly. That appears to be a bug.


I think there is something missing about mods. A bootstrapper script for each single mod, which has permission to add itself to scene_mod_list and all other required locations.

That ui_mod_list.js approach was never really smart to begin with. A single file which was supposed to have knowledge about the inner structure of all loaded mods? Yeah, not a smart idea.

The addition of the unit cannon has at least made the AI somewhat batter at multi-planet play.

loadSceneMods() was added partially maybe a few month ago, before that all mods used the scene_mod_list directly. My impression was that the transition was cancelled and loadSceneMods() is doing the exact same thing as the copy paste code to access the scene mod list anyway. In fact my impression was that loadSceneMods() just was the attempt to have less copy paste code.
the ui_mod_list approach certainly is a quick hack, however it is a pretty nice hack that has lived for years.
It was meant as a quick temporary solution. Those always live the longest

I fully agree the modding APIs and hooking systems need more work. PA's architecture clearly is very mod friendly, but at the same time key things are still missing or based on workarounds that are unknown to Uber, leading to things like the ui_mod_list file now being unshadowable, breaking our workaround.