Cogmind Roadmap Complete, Beta 11's Gonna be Wild (Patreon)

Congratulations and yay! We've finally made it to the end of Cogmind's roadmap!

If you didn't know, ever since March 2015 I've been maintaining a public roadmap that's updated on the FAQ to share progress on various aspects of the project. Here's the very first one from over five years ago :P

As per the latest version on the FAQ, Beta 10 brings us to 100% completion--all that was "missing" since Beta 9 was the ambient audio--so in that respect yeah it's basically something we could consider a 1.0. I've certainly put off this milestone for quite some time by inserting lots of new intermediate goals along the way, but it's resulted in a bigger and better game anyway, so all good. (A big part of needing to delay the audio was my earlier head injury and subsequent hearing issues that made working with audio problematic.)

Anyway, at this point 1.0 is more of a technical thing, and I'm in no rush to get there. Despite all these years of work, there is still a massive amount of stuff on my personal list of things I'd like to see in Cogmind, much of it able to reasonably come either before or after 1.0. I think the Merchants Guild expansion is best to come after 1.0, if only to ensure there's a nice juicy expansion after we do hit 1.0.

Looking at the more immediate future, the next major release is definitely Beta 11...

Beta... 11 (1.1?!)

Major releases normally have some sort of flagship feature, but Beta 11 will probably be different in that its flagship is... that there is no flagship :P

Years ago we talked on the forums about a so-called Great Utility Update to eventually come, in which we could review all the utilities and decide what needed removal or tweaking. Well in the past it hasn't quite taken priority as major systems were still being added and we could in the meantime collect data on how players interact with various parts and systems, but now is the time.

Also it's not just utilities, but parts in general. There's been a fair amount of adjustments already in some cases (especially propulsion which underwent multiple overhauls and expansions), but more are likely. Utilities just tend to be more a focus of balance comments in the past since they have the greatest variety and... utility. (For a recent example of design reworking in action, see the Field Recycling Unit overhaul in Beta 10.1!)

This process has somewhat begun already on the forums, where you can find discussion in this thread (although that thread is actually more focused on other mechanics balance changes we're working on rather than individual parts). And of course related discussion is also happening on Discord across the various Cogmind channels, though extended discussion of this sort of thing is sometimes more suitable for forums rather than chat, or at least forums serve as a somewhat better way to keep a record and summary of relevant discussions.

On the table for discussion so far are topics like:

• nerfing resource containers
• giving legs a unique tactical mechanics (this is essentially confirmed already)
• simplifying cave-in mechanics and further nerfing digging tactics
• reworking storage units to generally shrink ballooning inventory capacities

Regarding the last one, I actually plan to put out one or more very experimental versions of Cogmind here were we can test out how some alternative approaches really play. This was going to take place during Beta 10, but there was too much else going on so it got delayed. So expect some truly experimental mechanics that will not necessarily all make it into the final release!

Other stuff planned for Beta 11:

• Exoskeletons!
• Revisiting some Exiles tech to bring it in line with the YOLO theme (okay not all *that* nasty :P)
• Kinetic cannon overhaul (good stuff!)
• A brand new class of common 0b10 combat bot
• Expanded description details in part info
• Hopefully more status indicators for robot hacks that don't have any
• Some more leaderboard features
• Of course you'll also be voting on which feature from an updated list you'd like to see in Beta 11. This time if it looks like it'll work with the potential feature list I'll be further improving the voting system by weighting the difficulty of each and possibly do more than one depending on the results of the voting. More on that when the time comes.

Oh my, now that I write it all out... this Beta 11 thing is... kinda huge xD

Anyway, we'll get there. I'm extremely eager to get working on all this stuff. So eager, in fact, that I'm afraid I might have trouble slowing down to do all the other things that also need my attention. But this stuff is gonna be too cool. Probably just gets cooler the further "past" 1.0 we get, really--those parts of the TODO list are always more interesting ;)

Thanks for your support, everyone :)

REXPaint

This week I was also somewhat occupied by adding customizable Unicode code points and glyph mirroring to REXPaint, along with some other enhancements. Those aren't available in the main release yet, but instead as patches on the forums.

Doing that required updating the REX engine font loading and management, which even impacted Cogmind to some degree.

But now extended and custom fonts offer support for user-defined mirroring, yay :D

Blog

If you've been having trouble accessing the blog at all (some legit visitors got temporarily IP blocked xD), that problem is now fixed...

In recent weeks I'd been receiving an unusual number of emails informing me about potential bots or hackers being locked out of the site, and the backend had a few oddities when I logged in, but I didn't think much of it at the time (too busy with Beta 10 anyway!). With Beta 10 out of the way I could take a closer look and there were a crazy number of internal 404 errors being generated by the blog trying to repeatedly access files that didn't exist. One of my plugins was blocking people for that (basically looking at too many pages, ha...), and later I noticed a lot of the special functionality on the blog was also simply not working.

Anyway, I spent a while trying to figure it out, and it turns out my host had simply changed my directory on the server without telling me, which broke some paths. Genius. Quite surprisingly it didn't break absolutely everything, just a little bit of stuff as far as the website was concerned, most importantly many of the plugins expanding the blog's functionality.