Hey all, we have been busy working on a big update in the past months.

We prefer smaller updates, but as we overhauled a lot of different vital game systems we decide otherwise. Expect more frequent updates in the future.

Check out all the cool new features and improvements!!

Features

Wizard Incarnation Feature

•  The incarnation spell has to research first in the Laboratory.
• Wizard can be called to a formation or a base without a tower.
• Incarnation costs mana upkeep for the time the wizard is on a formation/base without a tower.
• Having not enough mana break the incarnation.
• Wizards can cast spells when incarnated.
• There is additional research available that brings down the upkeep costs significantly.

New Tutorial

•  The tutorial is now separated from the main campaign and can be played anytime from the main menu.
• There is a complete new Tutorial UI.
• Some tutorial steps are skippable some need to be done to make sure vital controls are understood correctly.
• Story and tutorial text is now separated, this made it much easier to write better tutorial commands/help.
• Sending units, selecting nodes should be much clearer now!

UI overhaul

•  All Icons have been redone.
• All UI screens finally have a consistent look.
• Map Editor UI has been completely revamped.
• All buttons react to mouse-overs with animation and sound, we are not done in that regard.
• UI supports HDR rendering.
• UI is much more vivid and responsive.
• UI uses the correct material for the linear colour scheme.
• Fixed the look of dropdowns.
         

New Dialog System

•  Removed the old portraits from the game. They looked cool but didn't fit the style of the game.
• Added voxel characters (which are not yet polished).
• Characters are now moving in and out in conversations,
• Up to 4 characters in one conversation possible.
• Dialogues can now be narrated with the new system.
• Added sound effects for speaking and narration, character pop-ins etc.
• Lights fade in and out on active characters.
• All over more fluid and fun to read the story.

New Quest System and QuestUI

•  The map editor has a quest editor, trigger and quests action editor with pre-configured trigger types.
• Check out the blog post for more details on the quests editor.
• Added new quests to all demo maps  (this is just a start, expect a lot more here!)
• Quest has progress which is shown in the upper left corner and is frequently updated.
• Clicking on a quest gives you more details on it and you can browse through all open/resolved quests.

New Story Texts

•  Less tell more "show". :)
• Wrote background stories for all characters to have a better understanding of their traits, emotions etc.
• Dialogue text is as short as possible.
• Lots of narration added.
• The story should be much more relatable.

Performance Improvements

•  Draw call reduction between 500-1k depending on the map, which should improve performance on older graphics card significantly.
•  Reduction of draw calls due to wrong light settings.
• Reduction of draw calls due to wrong settings in decal renderer.
• Improved performance of spatial grid when looking for a certain cast position for the wizard.
• Improved performance when updating node data collector.
• Improved performance in worker manager and worker job.  Improved performance when accessing certain wizard data.
• Improved performance of minimap  Improved performance of CasterAI significantly.
• Improved performance of Main Menu Scene.  Improved performance of some particle effects.  Improved performance of projectiles.
• Dozens of other small performance optimizations.

Game Improvements

•  Selection in player input standard can now be locked/unlocked by tutorial.
• Base selection is now much better visible.
• Build slot positioning has improved significantly.
• Improved mouseover decal for bases.
• Added trigger events to the game.
• Fixed some possible crash bug in minimap -> tweens were not correctly killed sometimes
•  Fixed a problem in tutorial manager not finding the correct game objects sometimes.
• Added a new function to building utils for finding research buildings on a base.
• Removed cast ring from wizards, for now, will probably add them back later with some cool effects.
• NPC wizard has finally some animations.
• Added a bunch of new sound effects.
• Fixed all light cullings masks.
•  Game statistics in now also saved in savegame.
• Rebalanced research, buildings and units.
• Improved AI behaviours when attacking an enemy.
• Added new AI personality for "The Jivalon Incident".
• Improved AI behaviour when there are no siege units available.
• Improved how the AI is calculating attack/defence values.
• Quest actions -> spawning units at a random formation gathering position.
• Permanent buffs are now only shown in tooltips, temporary buffs in the overhead UI of the squad when you press CTRL.  Push-back o
• Units look now a little better, though still more room for improvements.
• Report bug button is now slightly moved to allow edge scrolling.
• The Battle of Mount Dinheim map is now slightly easier.
• DialogUI -> characters can now have different scales.
• DialogUI -> dialogue panels have now a blinking indicator when the text is printed, which indicates the player to continue via click.
• DialogUI -> can now be skipped via a new skip button. Story Dialogs are now always shown because they can easily be skipped.

Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug where ground melee attackers would in some cases attack flying enemies.
• Fixed a possible crash bug in HealthBar.
• Fixed a possible crash bug in PlayerInputStandard when pressing the Tab-Key very early after loading.
• Fixed some possible crash bugs in UIPanelFader.
• Fixed IntroUI not showing in DEV_DEBUG is on.
• Fixed a possible crash bug in SettingsUI when a certain resolution does not have a specific Refresh-rate.
• Fixed another possible crash in panel fader.
• Fixed problems in CampaignMenuUI -> would not correctly reset on enable/disable sometimes.
• Fixed bug in bugreportingUI -> discord button was not working correctly.
• Fixed bug in bugreportingUI -> description text had wrong mask set which leads to wrong text formatting.
• Fixed bug in build UI which would sometimes show even though there were no buttons active.
• Fixed a bug in quest details UI and hidden/inactive quests.
• Several bugfixes in DialogUI and StoryManager.
• Several bugfixes in MessageUI.
• Fixed a big bunch of (crash) bugs reported via Trello. Thanks for all the players reporting!
• Map Editor crashes should be hopefully be fixed, this was a Unity Engine bug in TextMeshPro.
• Resources in the campaign menu UI only visible when they are higher than 0.
• Fixed a bug in node UI where bonus icons would not be displayed correctly.
• Fixed icon references in result UI, as some of them were broken due to the new icons.
• Fixed Story load/save. Fixed several problems in DialogUI when the pause menu was triggered via the escape button.
• Fixed a bug in send units UI  where buffs would be shown when there were no buffs available.
• Fixed problem in dialogue UI which would sometimes not fade out correctly when leaving the game.
• Increased squad overhead icon size.
• Added main menu skirmish button to indicate that this will be a mode that will be added soon. (Thanks for the suggestion @Argentum)
• Moved armour/weapon research into blacksmith building again. (Thanks for pointing it out @Argentum)
• Added teleport spots to Whitgarde.
• Unlocked guardhouse for all maps (Thanks for hinting this @oddblade)
• Improved formation UI buttons to have a better visible cooldown.
• Fixed build slot selector in the editor, which had white icons.
• Fixed bug when the wizard is teleported to a base.
• Fixed bug in map editor -> would crash with "Save As" when no level name was set.
• Formation UI now lower, wizard above formation UI.
• Fixed broken NPC wizard animations.
• Fixed AI wizard -> did not cast any attack spells.
• Fixed a bug in DataManager, which caused the AI wizard to get stuck in defence mode sometimes.
• Fixed AI wizard not repairing the tower it stands on when a repair spell is available.
• Fixed AI wizard not using buffs and heals sometimes.
• Fixed some spell minimum distances as they were wrong.
• Fixed a rare crash bug/timing issue when a unit tried to charge a building that was not there anymore.
• Fixed a rare crash bug when enabling props collider.
• Fixed a rare crash bug when reporting a bug via report UI.
• Fixed a rare crash bug/timing issue in research UI, when the UI was updated but the research wasn't valid anymore.
• Fixed a crash bug in settingsUI, when setting the refresh rate.
• Fixed several crash bugs in TutorialManager.
• Fixed a severe bug, which made the game unplayable, happening when the tutorial was played and then the campaign. In some circumstances, the players aren't able to select anything. Only a game restart would fix the problem.
• Fixed a rare crash bug in BuildQueueUI, probably a timing issue.
• Fixed a rare crash bug in FormationUI, which wanted to show the UI of an invalid formation
• Fixed several crash bugs, when loading a saved game.
• Fixed a crash bug in SendUnitsUI when selecting a buff for your army.
• Fixed a crash bug when incarnating a wizard. Sometimes WizardAnimView would be initialized multiple times, which lead to an exception.
• Fixed bug in crash reporting UI, space key would start and stop the game.  Fixed a crash bug in SquadEntryUI -> when clicking on an army tent, sometimes updating the buffs, would access old invalid game data.
• Removed punch scale on button press, as it looked weird in some cases.
• Map editor -> level name input only always alphabetical characters for now.
• Dialogues in "The Jivalon Incident" have been partly moved to the campaign map and partly merged.
• Improved the visibility of the cooldown for wizard UI buttons.
• Fixed a possible crash bug for the wizard when the base incarnation tower got destroyed.
• Fixed incarnation connection, which showed the old one for a second before the new got established.
• Fixed a problem where the wizard would sometimes get stuck inside his tower when using the incarnate feature.
• Fixed a possible crash bug in AI wizard, when the wizard got incarnated.
• Fixed dialogue character in "The Tree of Whitegarde" map, as Sigurd hat the wrong scale and would not show up.
• Fog of war enabled for the map "The Tree of Whitegarde".
• Fixed a possible crash bug when updating an old cooldown, which was already destroyed.
• Fixed a rare crash bug when a unit is charging a building that is already destroyed and tries to get an attack position.
• Fixed a few more crash cases when updating the build-queue UI.
• Fixed a rare crash bug when setting an invalid resolution in settings UI.
• Fixed another rare crash in ResearchUI, when updating the progress overlay.
• Fixed a rare crash bug when recalling a squad with the send dialogue.
• When used "fullscreen window", the game does not minimize anymore. This does only work with one monitor, unfortunately. For two screens or more please use the following start parameters (important for streamers).  HeartOfMuriet.exe -popupwindow -screen-width XXXX -screen-height XXXX.  Fixed a bug where on certain quality settings shadow quality would not be changed correctly.
• Fixed a bug in the worker/army tent, where empty tents were not transparent when the map was loaded from a save file. 
• Fixed a crash bug when fading army tents after a map was loaded from a save file.
• Fixed several crash bugs for player AI.  Fixed a severe problem for units not finding attack targets at their opponents.
• Fixed a bug for the base fog of war, where a "revealer" was not placed high enough, which lead to all kind of different problems.
• Fixed a bug for buildings that have a fog of war "revealer" -> they are now activated when the building is finished.
• Fixed a rare bug where archers could not kill attackers of army tents due to line of sight problems.
• Fixed missing icons in the research tool-tip for fire, poison and ice arrows.
• Fixed the crash in settings UI finally when changing resolution or refresh rate.
• Fixed the auto-attack setting for squads in army tents, which was not working at all.
• Fixed a bug where army tents would not properly update the navigation mesh.
• Fixed several problems with cool-downs on buttons.
• Fixed possible crash bug in building slot placer in the editor.
• Fixed light layer settings for all lights in prefabs.
• Fixed a bug in input where the camera was not activated when the input was started.
• Fixed decal settings that were not correctly excluded from navigation mesh generation, which led to a lot of different navigation problems.
• Fixed formation UI which showed incarnation button, even though the wizard was not at a node standing on a tower.
• Fixed wizard to slowly vanish into the tower when casting a lot of spells
• Fixed tents not updating correctly when they actually where empty -> this could lead to blocking conquering bases.

Thanks for reading,
The HoM Dev Team