Well, this has turned out to be an unexpectedly massive release. Massively changing the game at this stage is, some would say, the work of a man two sandwiches short of a picnic. Well, we’re like that. And, I’ve eaten all the rest of the sandwiches, too. And here it is: Revenge of the Titans 1.80. (1.80? Eh? Something to do with Linux package version numbers. Grrr)
Puppygames customers, get the download here. Our new CDN seems rather better than the old one so there shouldn’t be any cache troubles.
Humble Bundlers will be able to download from their original download links – there may be a tiny delay whilst Humble Bundle Inc. upload the new builds from our servers but by the time you read this announcement I hope this will have been done.
Here’s a summary of the changes, or at least those changes I’ve remembered to document. There are probably more.
Bugs Fixed
- Fixed: Supershield collect has no sound effect
- Fixed: survival mode boss crash at 5m00s
- Fixed: Specify LWJGL library path to fix OpenAL problems
- Fixed: Titans getting stuck on the map so the level doesn’t end
New Features and Enhancements
- Removed strobe from disruptor tower
- Lasers fire through crystals and obstacles
- Allow specifiying alternative player data location: use “home=<dir>” on commandline (pathnames with spaces will need \” quotes around them too)
- Preferences now shadowed to slot.xml file inside game home to allow easily moving game between machines
- Refineries now automatically generate money at a constant rate and no longer need collecting
- Turrets now automatically reload
- Smaller building size for reloader
- Research is now free
- Map size selector on survival mode
- Survival hiscores now across all slots, and show the slot name with the highest score
- New collector building (smaller)
- New reprocessor building (smaller)
- Wraiths and flying gids now get harder with difficulty
- Counters on mines, barricades, and powerups panel
- New building – tangleweb!
- 20 more things to research!
- Any remaining powerups on the ground at the end of the level are automatically collected for you
Balance
- Crystal scavenging now only 20% of remaining crystal value
- Research no longer contributes to game difficulty
- Reduced capacitor ammo slightly from 2seconds to 1.5seconds zap time – enough for wraiths but not so good for gidlets
- Disruptor damage now 48, up from 36
- Laser damage doubled, sweep reduced by 2 degrees
- Buffed droid blaster damage to 2pts
- Increased droid fire rate
- Capacitors now cost $1000
- Droid factories now fixed cost of $1000
- Collectors now cost $250
- Reloaders (were Autoloaders) now cost $250 and have a more pronounced effect on most of the heavier weapons
- Cooling towers now cost $500
- Scanners now cost $1000
- Reprocessors now a fixed cost of $500
- Speed up the rush a little
- Slowed down the Behemoth a bit (and flying gids in general) during the rush
- Survival mode difficulty now no longer influenced by available buildings / research etc
- Tuned survival difficulty to maximum of up to $50000 in play based on world
- Bezerk mode used to double weapon damage – now reverted to normal weapon damage as it made their use against bosses simply too efficacious
- Bosses now have less hitpoints
- Reduced turret ammunition a little
- Batteries now give a little more ammo than before
- More crystals, to pay for more expensive turret upgrades
- Various permabuffs now contribute 0.5 generally to the upgrade
- Difficulty is now open ended, and gidrah hitpoints and speed effectively now infinite
- More money in survival mode to start with – plus more money per world
- Rockets now take a little longer to reload
Internal
- Don’t let gidrahs roar more than once per second
- A tiny bit more variation in gidrah roars
- Gidrahs now ever so slightly cleverer at avoiding turrets
- Gidrahs now only slowly begin to ignore danger after level shuts down
- Gidrah speed now expressed in pixels/second instead of ticks/tile
- Gidrahs stuck in the map somehow now have GRID_BUG attributed to their cause of death
- No longer do angry gidrahs drop powerups when they successfully attack (and die)
- Further improved gidrah AI and anti-clumping behaviour
- Saved game dir now lowercased and spaces replaced with underscores to make shell twiddling a bit easier
- Refactored a bunch of configurable things like building costs research data so it only needs changing in one place. Finally.
- Survival mode spawn points now only 1/3rd as likely to come from the South
- New Molebox shouldn’t trip antivirus tools
- Upgraded entire source base to JDK1.5 and sprinkled it with generics, enums, annotations, and enhanced for loops
- Greatly simplified resource management: it’s now single threaded, always
- Sprite engine is now dynamically sized, saving piles of memory
- Strings now nulled after resource creation, saving another few megs of memory
- Ensure the map generator tries to generate at least one road between the base and a spawnpoint
So What Are The Headlines?
Well, first of all, there’s no more of that frantic clickery. Stop whining right now! It’s better. Much much better. Play a few games to get used to it. You can still manually reload turrets should you feel the need. Refineries produce money constantly anyway.
Secondly, research is totally free, but as you will discover, there are another 20 things to research. This means you’ll not be able to research everything before the end of the campaign. You can go back and replay a few levels to change your path and the research is cumulatively available to you in Survival mode. The new research stuff is fun – much of it is super cool like permabuffs and the like. There’s also a new “building”…
Thirdly, the game balance has changed significantly. Because you’re not spending money on research, you’re expected to spend it on lots of buildings instead. You are expected to lose a few (or even many) buildings every go, but make it through the skin of your teeth. You’re expected to have to try pretty hard to mine crystals. You’re probably going to have to use all those powerups you used to hoard. Although there’s less clickery going on the game is no less frantically manic, somehow.
Autoloaders are now Reloaders, and they speed up the reloading time of turrets, a task which used to be done by Reactors. Reactors now increase damage instead.
Collectors speed up the rate of collection from refineries. Reprocessors slow it down, but produce more money per collect. They’re a nice simple flat rate now, and it should be fairly simple to work out where and how to deploy them to make piles of cash.
As son as someone sees the new version pop up on humble bundle please drop a comment 🙂
I see the pop-up only. ;(
HiB website shows me 404 when i’m trying to download installer.
Uhh, everything on my Humble bumble page 404s when I try to download it.
Great. Still looking forward to this update, but now I’ve got something to worry about.
Doh! Jeffrey’s asleep :/
Tracker still works but there’s v 1.7
Downloaded the demo out of impatience–couldn’t wait for HIB to update–and while it’s definitely a more polished product all around, I was dismayed to find out that the audio stuttering bug, while no longer rendering the game unplayable, still exists at very regular intervals and it’s really annoying. Would there be any way whatsoever to fix this?
Can’t wait to try it out!
Any HIB version?
http://twitter.com/humble
“New Revenge of the Titans builds are propagating through the CDN as we speak. They should go live in about 8 hours from now.”
So, another 6 hours give or take? or am I reading that wrong.
6 hrs.
Oh, No-o-o! I need it now! =)))
I still wonder when the game will be officially, released..
By the looks of it, I would expect at least other 3 months development as a change so big in gameplay is certainly more appropriate to an alpha than a beta product.
Alpha just means “probably full of bugs”. Beta means “shouldn’t have any bugs but we expect you’ll find some.” It’s probably really completely finished now but… you know, doubling the price suddenly might upset people enough not to buy it any more. So perhaps it’ll stay 50% off for a bit longer. At least until it’s out on Steam.
You guys really need a forum by the way!
Yes! Forum please!
OMG the game is so much harder now, had to replay the Earth levels a couple times to tweak my strategy
When you will release the Steam version? 🙁
Very soon – we’re watching this release like hawks for any evidence of buggery. Found 2 already, bah… only little ones though. In fact I’m going to start on the Steam release process ASAP so won’t be too long I hope. We’ve got to get cover art and so on together before we release though and that’s the lengthy part as the codey gamey part is fine for now.
Awesome! 😀
Will you guys add steamworks achievements to the steam version? That would be awesome.
Yes, in a patch. All the medals and ranks were actually designed to be Steam achievements, y’see.
Humble Indie Bundle 2 download for 1.8 seems to be working now!
I would like to announce that the HIB links are all updated!
When do you think you will be able to release your sources?
Contributors could help with bug fixing!
Just got to get the Steam stuff sorted out and then embark on a huge cleanup and license-trawl to find out who owns various little bits in the game. Hopefully get around to releasing it in March, not as a CVS or SVN service though, just as a zip of all the source code for people to monkey with. Should be enough to do some mods if anyone wants, or more likely, have a good laugh at how bad the code is….
Is it me or is it impossible to get all the crystals cleared by the end of the timer on the early levels. I have 4 refineries stacked beside each one and I still miss the deadline. Am I doing something stupid here?
It is pretty much next to impossible yes. By design though. You don’t need to get the huge crystal refining bonus on the early levels, and it might give you food for thought about researching the efficiency stuff…
So, should I consider finishing my old game (I made it to Saturn) before updating to the new version ?
Decisions, decisions!
Nah, new version is orders of magnitude better. Well worth starting over.
I considered the 10-15 first levels of earth to be the hardest part of the game before 1.80 (I finished the game), but now…lol it’s even harder, almost impossible.. I seriously would like to see videos of how you dev play this game lol because this game is a fucking big challenge now o_o
Nice changes though, I suppose the game is better like that 🙂
Hmm yes I really ought to do a play through. You will be horrified how easy I make it look. I don’t even touch the keyboard either (never have used it in fact). In fact I developed the game on a shitty trackpad, not even a mouse! Anyway, you’ll see exactly where you’re going wrong…
So what are those research question marks that say “coming soon”? Please tell me we dont have to wait for the next update to find out D:
I want more robots and those things look like they might be just in the right section 🙂
Well, we say “soon”, actually more like in about 3 months or so 🙂 We were going to release another 4 buildings as v1.90 around Easter to try and drum up a bit of interest as by then we’ll be living off of breadcrumbs under the mattress again.
And yes you’re right, two of those things are droidy related things… the other two are subterfuge related.
I am going to assume the HIB people will get 1.90 too?
Of course.
Did you like our cunning newsletter incentive btw? 😀
very cunning.
Yes the newsletter incentive was nice 😉
But I don’t seem to have gotten the in-game money, maybe because after actually doing the newsletter thing I went and deleted both my current game profiles and started a new one to get a fresh start for 1.8
Or is the money not supposed to show up in campaign mode?
Ah it just applies the bonus to whichever is the current slot when the game starts up… you blew that one eh :/
oh damn, i deleted my profiles aswell after installing and doing the incentive ;_; because i wanted to start over~ oh well
so does the difficulty still go down after a couple tries? sorry if that’s been answered already. can’t wait to play… in like 2 seconds.
Yes, but it takes quite a few tries, and this feature is deliberate. In real life you only get one chance to defeat the Titans so consider yourself lucky 😉
why would i want to defeat them? they are cuddly and cute~
Can you make it an option in the menu instead? I don’t like optimizing my build order and then suddenly finding 5 turrets don’t need to fire at all. Right now it just makes me wanna restart the level a bunch of times just so i waste less money overall.
Disabling the scaling would make it better for me but not for other people – so an option is best.
Bug report or something: The new version shows all the cities I got to before, but clicking any of them takes me to level 1 on earth. Not that I minded. I wanted to start over anyway.
Also, I can’t seem to find a way to delete my progress except deleting my in-game profile. Where the heck are the save files stored?
Oh yes, I never did get around to fixing that quirk – it should have automatically cleared all your progress but I, um, never managed to write that bit of code 🙂
The save files are stored in the Java Preferences service, the location of which varies considerably by operating system, and they’re backed up in your user home directory in prefs.xml. You can specify any location for the settings with the home=xxx commandline parameter, which is sorta handy for Dropbox and the like, and the data is readable on any OS.
On startup the prefs.xml file is read and imported into the Java Preferences service, which means deleting stuff in the file doesn’t actually delete stuff at all.
Weird. I deleted my C:\Users\valzi\revenge_of_the_titans_1.70 folder, which included prefs.xml and a slots folder, which I assumed was my savegames. I did that before installing 1.80. Anyway, I ignored the savestates and started from the beginning. Seems to be working fine.
Thanks for the patch!
I too see all the levels I was upto before I patched, but selecting my current level (last one in the game) I’m taken back to level 1 on Earth. I read above about how to delete your folder and essentially start again, but what happens if I didn’t want to do this? ie: I want to continue my campaign progress using the new version. Can that be done or with every patch must I lose my progress and restart my game?
great game, keep it up.
I just noticed it’s the same in Endless mode.
While the menu shows my progress upto level 53 which I select, it appears to then start me at level 1 with 550cr and only the regular turret.
My humblest apologies :/ But 1.80 is just totally incompatible with 1.72.1. We have to do this every time we fundamentally change the gameplay or balance massively. However, this is the last time we’re doing so, and all future patches will be compatible with the current game state.
I had my fingers crossed behind my back when I typed that but I certainly hope it’s true 😉
NP! I get to try out all the new research and play it through again, which is exactly what I’d have done right after I’d finished it! Hopefully all the new tweaks will give me better luck with the last big guy! thx!
love the game, it’s taking my personal goal of a pristine metal every time to a whole new (probably impossible) level. how many refineries to a crystal? can we put down more than four per and have it extract faster?
No, 4 refineries max. You won’t get to mine them all on the first few levels and you’ll have to try reasonably hard to on the later levels too.
After playing up to level 20, I agree with Cas that this is definitely better than before – not that it wasn’t pretty dandy before. Thanks for a great game guys! (and Humbly Bundling it.)
Finished the game, excellent as always
Some Bugs:
Saving and loading a game breaks the glows on some gids, e.g. the eye glows on the slug looking ones remain in the position they were when I saved even though the eye stalks have moved. Seems to fix itself when they blink.
Bomb gids get stuck easily, I don’t know if it’s because I’m on a macbook but the do the stop animation when they hit a building but then never explode and just repeatedly stand up and drop down (I used the opportunity to mine all the crystals before killing them lol)
Related to the previous bug, all gids slowly grind to a halt when some of them get stuck, there’d be a pile up near a building or something and then gids out in the open also stop moving after a while, this happens maybe 2 in 5 levels with the bomb guys
Sometimes the laser beam bounces around the inside of an armoured gid, it makes a pretty sparkly ring, only happened once probably so probably a fluke with the direction of the beam and the gid movement
This might be by design but it looks really odd when you fire a laser at flying gids over a mountain then the laser hits the other side of the mountain and stop like you’re firing through the mountain, really the beam should travel its full length and only hit flying gids beyond the mountain
Also, low rocks block lasers but it can fire over mountains? I had my turret position ruined by small rocks on the edge of a mountain blocking all my shots from hitting the flying gids
Not so much a bug but I find the wraiths impossible to deal with, especially on the harder difficulties
Is the x-ray upgrade meant to make wraiths easier to kill? The loss of range seems like an odd decision.
Some more gripes:
Never used any decoys, too expensive
Earth is too hard compared to the rest of the game
Crystals near spawn points are impossible to harvest on the later levels, I end up doing the trapping trick and blocking in the last gid so I can harvest the rest of the crystals in peace
Where would I be without you? 🙂 I think I can address just about everything on that list in the little patch I plan to do at the weekend…
Will the stuttering audio be fixed too or is that a hardware issue? 🙁
That looks very much like an issue with your system in some way. The audio is all mixed in software and just sent to DirectSound, which on Vista and 7 is also software these days. It could be that your system’s not quite powerful enough to render all the graphics and mix the sound as well. Or that there’s some underlying trouble with your sound hardware or drivers.
Do you get stuttering in Droid Assault or Titan Attacks?
I’m running a Geforce 5700 and a Sound Blaster 5.1, model number SB1071–both should meet the minimum requirements, no? Am downloading Titan Attacks and Droid Assault to see if they’ll run fine, at any rate. Will let you know about it ASAP.
Just tried Titan Attacks and Droid Assault, they run perfectly fine on this PC. Odd.
That’s narrowed it down then: you’ve basically got a nice simple performance problem – your PC just ain’t fast enough to draw everything and render the sound out in a timely fashion. 90% of the code is common to all our games – the only difference is that Revenge of the Titans draws about 5x as many sprites and has about 10x as many things wandering around in it to keep track of. I’m not sure why sound stutters as a result, mind you; this could be down to some arcane configuration – as the sound is actually run at a higher priority than the graphics!
Couple of further comments about this feedback –
Hey just wanted to say thanks for the update !
I got one little complain about the game and that’s the variance of the money drops (not by monsters), because I find myself playing most levels over and over again to get 500 $ instead of 50 $, could you adjust this to be less variant let’s say reaching from 150 $ to 300 $? A multiple of 10 is really a huge difference and it’s annoying that you “have to” replay a level just because you got 50$ most of the time.
On a related note (it has been mentioned before) I would like to not have the difficulty get adjusted after a couple of restarts by default. Could you please include an option (turn it on by default ofcourse), but I prefer to optimize my builds and it’s really annoying that at some point there aren’t as much enemies anymore.
Thank you.
“edit” also Survival crashed for me at the 40 minuit mark (on Earth, small, no obstacles)
yeah just tested again … crashes around 38 minuits right after “extreme danger”
I’ll get right on to the Survival crash. An option to make the game easier or not if you keep getting it wrong is probably easy to do, might get it in for the weekend though my brother’s just been taken seriously ill so might be busy elsewhere.
Also, you’re fooling yourself about the frequency of drops, which is actually fixed. They’re all dropped into a shuffle bag at the start of the game and picked out one by one until it’s empty. In other words, waiting for a $500 to appear on one level just means waiting an awfully long time for the next one, which is not really in the spirit of things.
Okay now I really feel stupid about the money drops 😛
Is the metaphorical bag reset every level, because I can remember me replaying level after level (at least during the early stages) to always get me that 500 $ each time.
Doh, just realised that the $500 ones aren’t in the bag. Still, will have that fixed on Friday…
The bug with the campain being already finished is a bit annoying. I removed every savedir I could find, even uninstalled/reinstalled java but no way, I still have every levels available.
A campaign system would be cool, where you can create (restart from scratch) and store your campaigns. Also it could be cool to freeze the campaign so you can only replay the last level you completed. It’ll not necessarily make the game harder 🙂
Atm, the possibility to replay a part of the campaign from a random level is a bit strange and weird to manage once you do that because you have to remember the last level you played when you quit since every levels are available, no matter what you do.
Also, options to specify window size somehow doesn’t work properly. I can’t make the window bigger than 1024*768.
I restarted earth 6 times with variables tactics but I still can’t do it .. xD I don’t understand how this game need to be played now lol though I finished the game with 1.72.
good job anyway keep it up.
i find that if i overbuild at all i get screwed, more so than the previous version. i go for the money, slow on the guns – outfits make you look good…at winning
right clicking on a building to build another freezes the highlighted connections between original building and outfit until you’re finished building. not sure if there’s a reason for this or bug.
i swore i saw power ups with little numbers by them that were dimmed/unavailable. could have been sleep depravation.
i love the destructive hordishness of the titans! it feels so much more like a victory when you’re still standing after half your defenses have been chewed away.
“i swore i saw power ups with little numbers by them that were dimmed/unavailable. could have been sleep depravation.”
Yes I did too it’s definitly a bug. But I’m not really sure how exactly it appends though.
More precision about the window bug :
Here is my command line : ./revenge.sh height=1024 width=1280 (or 1024×768, or 1280×960)
Here is what I see in the out.log :
[..]
“Set viewport to org.lwjgl.util.Rectangle[x=0,y=0,width=1804,height=640]”
“Window sized to 1804 x 640 x 0 @0Hz”
[..]
“Window sized to 800 x 640 x 0 @0Hz”
[..]
“Begin new game”
Wtf ? xD
I think I’ll give up on this game anyway, too hard for me now :d
Funny things happen when you use cheat engine to change your cash now: if you do it before placing a refinery then all titans (except megatitans) get stuck at their entry-points and become extra tough to kill, if you do it after placing a refinery all titans gain super speed and the aforementioned epic health (this includes the megatitans making them effectively unbeatable)…I don’t know if these are a coincidence or not but if not I’d like this to not be fixed since it’s a scenario of “Cheating eh? Well two can play that game!”, even though this effectively means I’ll never complete this game. :B
You shouldn’t need to cheat! Difficultly is now directly, linearly, and simply linked to the amount of money you have in play. So adding $10k as a cheat is just going to make it insane. Just play and enjoy. You’ll complete it. You can always try Endless mode instead, which is more relaxed, and learn the ropes that way.
Oh also – just generate easier levels! ESC menu -> New Level. Keep generating them until you can complete the level.
Yeah but gold medals are so shiny! I can’t help but covet that shiny shiny gold even if I’m woefully outclassed!
also I wasn’t adding 10k, I was adding 9 million :B
Seems like there is alot less (helpfull) terrain debris generated in the maps now (like broken buildings), is that right?
Nope, that’s just luck o’ the draw, haven’t changed the terrain renderer except to draw another road.
Awesome, can hardly wait to play it! 😀
I waited for entire weeks for this release, and I have to say, the game changed drastically indeed!
This game is now -ÜBER HARD-!
I was having a tough time moving through Mars on the last version; now I can barely make it out of Earth’s first couple of levels.
There is some buggy-ness on Saturn, sometimes the bomb titans get stuck at the end of the round on a building or piece of barrier and just sit there hoping up and down like they are gonna explode, but they dont.
I’ve found that placing a building directly on them usually makes them disappear.
And one more thing (you guys should seriously have a forum for stuff like this) Can you guys think about maybe taking away the friendly fire damage on the Rockets? Either I put it near my base and it kills half my own defenses or I put it by itself where it gets quickly overrun.
Haven’t found an effective way to use it yet.
Keep up the good work, 1.80 has made this a great game.
Use walls and bottlenecks to trap the gids far away from the rocket launcher and other buildings, rockets don’t harm walls, also use the shotgun towers to stun them so that they stand still longer between shots
Hey guys?
Couldn’t find anywhere else to ask for prompt help on this.
I received an option to subscribed to the newsletter in-game for 5000 game bucks. My other half also has the game but he has not received this offer and there is nowhere in-game he can find for him to apply it. Help?
I think that would make you the lucky one and he not so lucky, yes? 🙂 Special offers don’t grow on trees!
I like the new version!
However, my main computer has recently died and I’ve started re-downloading the game from Desura (since I have it registered there from the Bundle), but it’s still on 1.71. Perhaps you should update it with the new build, eh?
Nothin’ to do with us, guv… I think Jeffrey’s supposed to be doing that. Er. Possibly. I have no idea exactly what relationship Puppygames has with Desura at the moment so I think I’d probably best sort that out next week…
Bugs (probably already reported):
[Mac version]
1. Game crashes when I collect 10 powerups (noticed with the repair powerup)
2. The little 1 hp gids get stuck in Tanglewebs. Have to release them by placing a building over the tanglewebs, then deleting the building. I could exploit the game by harvesting minerals while the little gids were stuck.
3. Bomber gids don’t explode sometimes–on concrete, on doodads, on buildings even
4. Flying gids are more deadly when they head south, less deadly when they head north. The bombs they release fall down several pixels, making them much harder to defend from certain angles.
Cheers!