Distant Worlds 2 - State of the Game and Update Roadmap
Posted: Mon Mar 28, 2022 5:12 pm
As of March 28th, 2022 v1.0.2.8
Hello to everyone in the Distant Worlds 2 community,
First, Elliot and I would like to thank all of our customers for your patience and your support since Distant Worlds 2 was released. For those who have experienced serious issues, we apologize and especially appreciate your understanding as we work to resolve these.
(TLDR: We are prioritizing Critical Issues, Performance Issues and Gameplay issues in that order. We will be putting more time into testing beta updates before they go official to avoid introducing new save or other problems. We will be switching to a slower update schedule to make additional testing possible and to improve the stability of official updates going forward.)
It’s clear, in hindsight, that while we had over 300 testers and DW2 was in alpha and beta testing for a year, we did not have a large enough testing pool to catch all critical issues related to hardware configurations. It’s also clear that despite the best efforts of a lot of very good volunteer testers, we didn’t achieve the level of polish that many of you expected at release.
Since release, we have been working overtime to address those issues preventing gameplay for some customers, while also addressing other serious issues affecting a wider range of players. This has resulted in fourteen new updates in the two or so weeks since release. These updates have fixed many crashes, performance issues and gameplay issues for many players.
Unfortunately, not all the critical issues are resolved (though many have been) and the pace of the updates has also created some serious new issues from time to time, including some save file problems in 1.0.2.2 and 1.0.2.6 that should not have made it to a public release.
While the urgency of getting DW2 working for everyone has been driving us to investigate and iterate as quickly as possible, it’s clear that we can’t maintain the pace of an update every day or two and it’s also clear that in that rush we have not allowed time for enough testing between releases. This is going to change going forward as I’ll explain below.
Priority #1 - Issues Preventing Gameplay
Our first priority remains resolving critical issues preventing gameplay for some customers. The most common of these remain frequent crashes (especially in battle) or crashes on startup or black screens on startup. In addition, we have issues where some very high end GPUs are trying to run DW2 while remaining in some kind of power-saving mode, thus causing much worse than expected performance, or where dual GPU systems are trying to run DW2 on the integrated rather than dedicated GPU to some degree, causing slowdowns and crashes.
We are working on all of these and have brought in Matrix/Slitherine’s Technical Director to work together with Elliot on some of these issues, especially those which appear to be at a lower level than most of the game code.
The main challenge and delay in resolving these has been the great difficulty in reproducing them. We are proceeding in two main directions right now. :
First, we are re-engineering how DW2 creates and manages vertex buffers, which appear to be at the core of many of the issues, especially with AMD GPUs and their drivers. The first iteration of vertex buffer changes is in 1.0.2.8 and we hope this will help many customers.
Second, we are working to improve the low level GPU identification and selection code to make sure that on systems with dual GPUs DW2 is always running on the correct one and that very high end GPUs no longer try to take a nap while DW2 is running. We expect efforts in this area to reach the public within about a week after this roadmap is posted.
Priority #2 - Performance
Our second priority has been performance and while this remains a high priority, we have already made major performance improvements for many systems in the last two weeks and we hope that resolving the remaining low level GPU issues will resolve most of the remaining performance concerns, where systems are above our minimum specifications and playing a reasonable galaxy size and resolution for their hardware.
It’s important to note that we also have seen instances where customers are running maximum size 2000 star galaxies on minimum specification hardware, which will likely never result in good performance, but performance across the board has seen significant improvements and that will continue. We also plan in the future to add more guidance in galaxy setup as to which galaxy sizes are recommended for systems closer to the lower end of the hardware specification and which are suitable for systems at the higher end.
There are also some concerns on certain systems regarding performance in nebulas, with certain map overlays and with the research screen which will need additional work if the low level fixes do not resolve these on all systems. If needed, we will address these more specific performance concerns after the general performance issues are resolved.
Priority #3 - Gameplay
Our third priority has been addressing major gameplay concerns, such as some espionage balance issues, some diplomacy issues and most recently fleet and ship coordination issues. We will be continuing to fit these in as we can and we expect the immediate priorities in this area to be as follows:
1. Further fleet and ship behavior polish, especially relating to interactions with manual orders and fuel tankers. This should be coming in the first beta update this week and hopefully be finished in the next official update.
2. Improve quality of live for manual players with regard to multi-selection of ships and the available orders and automation settings
3. Additional guidance in the UI on the cost of low suitability colonization and support costs for existing and new colonies
4. Improve pathing issues related to nebula storms as well as home systems being generated within nebulas This should also improve pathfinding issues that could in rare cases result in ridiculous paths around the galaxy.
5. Improve auto-design at certain tech levels and ship hull levels for certain ships, especially small troop transports, colony ships and fuel tankers, to make sure they have the necessary ion defenses, speed and range for their missions.
6. Address rare issues with messaging that could cause rapidly repeating/looping messages especially relating to story events and threats like the Hive and Planet Destroyer. Also improve message handling, especially regarding attack notification messages in the late game.
7. Resolve issues relating to some cases where the wrong race is chosen suitability-wise for colonization or migration
8. Polish Espionage and Diplomacy further. Adjust the Espionage difficulties to the desired range and to investigate and fix reported issues with some higher end treaty types.
9. Investigate the reports of issues with either automated stock maintain levels or freighter and passenger ship construction for the Private Sector to ensure all is working as intended. Some progress on this may already have been made in the 1.0.2.8 update.
10. Adjust the corruption scaling to avoid the situation, especially at difficulty settings above Normal, where large colony income could decrease as the colony approached maximum population.
There are also other reported gameplay issues beyond these top 10 which we will also address as we go forward, this is by no means an exhaustive list, but there are our initial goals.
Finally, let me discuss the new update schedule. This week we are releasing 1.0.2.8 as an official update today. Going forward, we plan to release beta updates on Thursdays on Steam and GOG and official update on all stores on certain Tuesdays. That may shift to a once every two week schedule as the most critical issues are resolved. This will not slow down our development, but it will allow us more time to test each beta update and make sure that as much as humanly possible, we’re only taking steps forward and no more steps back.
For those customers still affected by critical issues after 1.0.2.8, we’re sorry we couldn’t get every critical issue resolved yet with our quick updates to date, but know that you remain our highest priority and we won’t stop until we make sure every system within our minimum specifications is able to play DW2 as it was intended.
Thank you again if you took the time to read all of this and for those who have been unhappy with how DW2 has worked on their systems, please check in at least at the end of each week going forward and try the newest update to let us know if things have improved for you.
Sincerely,
Erik Rutins and Elliot Gibbs
Matrix Games and CodeForce
Hello to everyone in the Distant Worlds 2 community,
First, Elliot and I would like to thank all of our customers for your patience and your support since Distant Worlds 2 was released. For those who have experienced serious issues, we apologize and especially appreciate your understanding as we work to resolve these.
(TLDR: We are prioritizing Critical Issues, Performance Issues and Gameplay issues in that order. We will be putting more time into testing beta updates before they go official to avoid introducing new save or other problems. We will be switching to a slower update schedule to make additional testing possible and to improve the stability of official updates going forward.)
It’s clear, in hindsight, that while we had over 300 testers and DW2 was in alpha and beta testing for a year, we did not have a large enough testing pool to catch all critical issues related to hardware configurations. It’s also clear that despite the best efforts of a lot of very good volunteer testers, we didn’t achieve the level of polish that many of you expected at release.
Since release, we have been working overtime to address those issues preventing gameplay for some customers, while also addressing other serious issues affecting a wider range of players. This has resulted in fourteen new updates in the two or so weeks since release. These updates have fixed many crashes, performance issues and gameplay issues for many players.
Unfortunately, not all the critical issues are resolved (though many have been) and the pace of the updates has also created some serious new issues from time to time, including some save file problems in 1.0.2.2 and 1.0.2.6 that should not have made it to a public release.
While the urgency of getting DW2 working for everyone has been driving us to investigate and iterate as quickly as possible, it’s clear that we can’t maintain the pace of an update every day or two and it’s also clear that in that rush we have not allowed time for enough testing between releases. This is going to change going forward as I’ll explain below.
Priority #1 - Issues Preventing Gameplay
Our first priority remains resolving critical issues preventing gameplay for some customers. The most common of these remain frequent crashes (especially in battle) or crashes on startup or black screens on startup. In addition, we have issues where some very high end GPUs are trying to run DW2 while remaining in some kind of power-saving mode, thus causing much worse than expected performance, or where dual GPU systems are trying to run DW2 on the integrated rather than dedicated GPU to some degree, causing slowdowns and crashes.
We are working on all of these and have brought in Matrix/Slitherine’s Technical Director to work together with Elliot on some of these issues, especially those which appear to be at a lower level than most of the game code.
The main challenge and delay in resolving these has been the great difficulty in reproducing them. We are proceeding in two main directions right now. :
First, we are re-engineering how DW2 creates and manages vertex buffers, which appear to be at the core of many of the issues, especially with AMD GPUs and their drivers. The first iteration of vertex buffer changes is in 1.0.2.8 and we hope this will help many customers.
Second, we are working to improve the low level GPU identification and selection code to make sure that on systems with dual GPUs DW2 is always running on the correct one and that very high end GPUs no longer try to take a nap while DW2 is running. We expect efforts in this area to reach the public within about a week after this roadmap is posted.
Priority #2 - Performance
Our second priority has been performance and while this remains a high priority, we have already made major performance improvements for many systems in the last two weeks and we hope that resolving the remaining low level GPU issues will resolve most of the remaining performance concerns, where systems are above our minimum specifications and playing a reasonable galaxy size and resolution for their hardware.
It’s important to note that we also have seen instances where customers are running maximum size 2000 star galaxies on minimum specification hardware, which will likely never result in good performance, but performance across the board has seen significant improvements and that will continue. We also plan in the future to add more guidance in galaxy setup as to which galaxy sizes are recommended for systems closer to the lower end of the hardware specification and which are suitable for systems at the higher end.
There are also some concerns on certain systems regarding performance in nebulas, with certain map overlays and with the research screen which will need additional work if the low level fixes do not resolve these on all systems. If needed, we will address these more specific performance concerns after the general performance issues are resolved.
Priority #3 - Gameplay
Our third priority has been addressing major gameplay concerns, such as some espionage balance issues, some diplomacy issues and most recently fleet and ship coordination issues. We will be continuing to fit these in as we can and we expect the immediate priorities in this area to be as follows:
1. Further fleet and ship behavior polish, especially relating to interactions with manual orders and fuel tankers. This should be coming in the first beta update this week and hopefully be finished in the next official update.
2. Improve quality of live for manual players with regard to multi-selection of ships and the available orders and automation settings
3. Additional guidance in the UI on the cost of low suitability colonization and support costs for existing and new colonies
4. Improve pathing issues related to nebula storms as well as home systems being generated within nebulas This should also improve pathfinding issues that could in rare cases result in ridiculous paths around the galaxy.
5. Improve auto-design at certain tech levels and ship hull levels for certain ships, especially small troop transports, colony ships and fuel tankers, to make sure they have the necessary ion defenses, speed and range for their missions.
6. Address rare issues with messaging that could cause rapidly repeating/looping messages especially relating to story events and threats like the Hive and Planet Destroyer. Also improve message handling, especially regarding attack notification messages in the late game.
7. Resolve issues relating to some cases where the wrong race is chosen suitability-wise for colonization or migration
8. Polish Espionage and Diplomacy further. Adjust the Espionage difficulties to the desired range and to investigate and fix reported issues with some higher end treaty types.
9. Investigate the reports of issues with either automated stock maintain levels or freighter and passenger ship construction for the Private Sector to ensure all is working as intended. Some progress on this may already have been made in the 1.0.2.8 update.
10. Adjust the corruption scaling to avoid the situation, especially at difficulty settings above Normal, where large colony income could decrease as the colony approached maximum population.
There are also other reported gameplay issues beyond these top 10 which we will also address as we go forward, this is by no means an exhaustive list, but there are our initial goals.
Finally, let me discuss the new update schedule. This week we are releasing 1.0.2.8 as an official update today. Going forward, we plan to release beta updates on Thursdays on Steam and GOG and official update on all stores on certain Tuesdays. That may shift to a once every two week schedule as the most critical issues are resolved. This will not slow down our development, but it will allow us more time to test each beta update and make sure that as much as humanly possible, we’re only taking steps forward and no more steps back.
For those customers still affected by critical issues after 1.0.2.8, we’re sorry we couldn’t get every critical issue resolved yet with our quick updates to date, but know that you remain our highest priority and we won’t stop until we make sure every system within our minimum specifications is able to play DW2 as it was intended.
Thank you again if you took the time to read all of this and for those who have been unhappy with how DW2 has worked on their systems, please check in at least at the end of each week going forward and try the newest update to let us know if things have improved for you.
Sincerely,
Erik Rutins and Elliot Gibbs
Matrix Games and CodeForce
