- Rank: Warmaster Transparency Message for March 5th, 2026 - 5 March 2026
An update to the open and honest letter of where are things and where are they going It has been years since the last update. Someone asked me today if the project is abandoned, and I said no but I realize that no one else knows that. As mentioned previously, a series of other games to feed back into this one was planned. So things have been moving behind the scenes. Short answer: No, it's not abandoned, but from the outside I completely understand why it looks that way. We are building using a far more round about method by releasing feeder games for financial and engine update reasons, and the first of those is about to be released! Long Answer: What actually has been happening: As mentioned in a previous update a few years ago, the idea was to create "smaller" games on the same engine that could feed back into Rank: Warmaster drastically improving it to make it more viable for a mode…
- Rank: Warmaster Transparency Message for December 2nd, 2023 - 3 December 2023
An open and honest letter of where are things and where are they going It’s the 2 year anniversary of the Early Access Release of Rank: Warmaster. This letter is more a transparency of what is happening and what has happened. Short Answer: We aren’t dead (mostly), and more updates will be coming just far less often than updates happened when they happened regularly. Long Answer: The tragedies of the past year or so… As posted in previous updates, there has been a lot of personal tragedy during the development of this project. Of the two programmers who worked on this project, Matt unfortunately died. I am the lead dev, head programmer, and man of many hats running the studio. Matt had been a close personal friend for well over a decade, so his loss hit me hard, and obviously greatly hurt the progress of this project. After the dust settled from that, it was decided that my efforts might…
- Patch Notes for Version Alpha 0.8.11.4183 - 28 May 2023
Pulse Turrets further tweaked (They really are accurate now) Various Fixes
- Rank: Warmaster News and Updates May 28, 2023 - 28 May 2023
Greetings, Warmasters and Candidates! This is the newsletter for May 28th, 2023. Things are still ramping back up from the hiatus from before. In the previous release it was found the turrets weren't as accurate as one had hoped. Testing found some flaws, which are now corrected. Quality of Life The above screen shot more prove that the pulses are finally being accurate. You can see the red trailing hit explosions as there are other shots incoming. The previous release in certain circumstances the turret would not track correctly. Interestingly, this actually ends up making the pulse turrets rather over powered because of the damage model. Admittedly, if a ship is changing course regularly, because there is a lag from when a shot is firing and how long it takes to travel to the target, it can still miss. However, that is the whole point of dodging. Basically, a lot of tweaks are going o…
- Patch Notes for Version Alpha 0.8.11.4182 - 13 May 2023
Pulse Turrets now appropriately lead their targets. Internal sorting routines updated. Various Fixes
- Rank: Warmaster News and Updates May 13, 2023 - 13 May 2023
Greetings, Warmasters and Candidates! This is the newsletter for May 13th, 2023. Things are still ramping back up from the hiatus from before. The main change in this update is the pulse weapon turrets will properly lead their targets. The minor parts have more to do with internal sorting routines having tweaks to make them work better. Quality of Life As things progress, more minor features are being fixed. The big one in this case was the pulse turret AI actually leading their targets. While leading their target has been implemented for the player for ages, the AI never used it. It always just used the "beam" logic, where it simply faced the target directly. When things are flying straight and coming directly at the firing weapon, this was fine, but obviously this isn't the normal circumstance. Pulse weapons have always been more effective when they hit something because they do all t…
- Rank: Warmaster News and Updates April 29, 2023 - 29 April 2023
Greetings, Warmasters and Candidates! This is the newsletter for April 29th, 2023. A progress update has been a long time coming, but it is here. The main significant update is that Admirals can now be ordered to attack other fleets or cities. Also, updates to the load/save system won't force a game restart when then internal structures get changes, so now updates between version shouldn't make your save games crash. AI Updates There has been movement in the AI this release. While it's been a long time coming, this is a BIG part of the AI helper system. The Admirals now know how to attack cities and fleets. Which means the enemy can now do this too. But that means you can simply make an Admiral AI, and tell it to attack a city or ships, and then forget about it. It will start to build ships based on the designs available (if you have any. If not, it will request you design some). It wil…
- Patch Notes for Version Alpha 0.8.11.4176 - 29 April 2023
Admirals now can be ordered to attack fleets and/or Cities. They will build ships (and request designs) and send them to attack once a large enough force is made. Knowing when to stop is still a WIP. Save/Load now handles version changes. So Updated code no longer crashes on older save files. Various Fixes
- Rank: Warmaster News and Updates April 15th, 2023 - 15 April 2023
Greetings, Warmasters and Candidates! This is the newsletter for April 15th, 2023. This is more of a "We are still alive" announcement. Personal issues are settling down but came to a head in the past week, there isn't going to an an update to the code this week, as you can probably tell. However, there has been movement on the Admiral AI so I expect that will be updated in the next update. The next scheduled update will be in a few weeks as normal. See you then! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1422270/Rank_Warmaster/
- Rank: Warmaster News and Updates April 1st, 2023 - 1 April 2023
Greetings, Warmasters and Candidates! This is the newsletter for April 1st, 2023. This is more of a "We are still alive" announcement. Between GDC and personal issues, there isn't going to an an update to the code this week, as you can probably tell. The next scheduled update will be in a few weeks as normal. See you then! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1422270/Rank_Warmaster/
- Patch Notes for Version Alpha 0.8.11.4141 - 17 March 2023
Fixed issue with newer turret showing up correctly in building menu Fix loading of some text lists Fixed text scaling as well as centering on both horizontal and vertical (no longer a hack) Various Fixes
- Rank: Warmaster News and Updates March 15, 2023 - 16 March 2023
Greetings, Warmasters and Candidates! This is the newsletter for March 15th, 2023. This is more a maintenance update since we are preparing for GDC and hopefully a new announcement. Most of the change this time is some text polish to get the autoscaling and position working finally. GDC Travel We will be at GDC! We'll have a booth #308 at Game Connection (which is in a different place than GDC) while we are there, so if you happen to be at GDC, please reach out! Quality of Life The update to make sure the turrets are displayed properly in the building menu has been important. Also the main change is the text engine in the game has been updated to finally autoscale and center properly. It's been a "good enough" situation for a long time, but a lot of the things going on in the background made it needed to finally address it. Short-term RoadMap What we are doing for GDC has put a lot of t…
- Patch Notes for Version Alpha 0.8.11.4126 - 1 March 2023
The new turret design is now implemented! Fixed how ground turrets fire (ie. beams no longer come from the middle but the barrels) Ground based Pulse turrets work again. (They seemed to like to fire straight into the ground before) The Navigation screen now has the Atmospheric Shader running it (more to come). This really improves the look. Various Fixes
- Rank: Warmaster News and Updates March 1, 2023 - 1 March 2023
Greetings, Warmasters and Candidates! This is the newsletter for March 1st, 2023. Two significant updates this time. The newer turret is finally in the system, with all the fixes that brings, and the Navigation/RTS screen now sports better effects with the atmospheric shader being used. Also a bigger hint of up and coming announcements. GDC Travel We will be at GDC! We'll have a booth #308 at Game Connection (which is in a different place than GDC) while we are there, so if you happen to be at GDC, please reach out! Artistic Update For the longest time, the RTS/Navigation screen hasn't had most of the graphical improvement that the main simulation/piloting screen does. This is mostly because the shader that does the pretty atmospheric effects doesn't play well with UI elements. This isn't too much of a problem on the piloting screen, but made the RTS screen ugly to unusable in how it or…
- Patch Notes for Version Alpha 0.8.11.4104 - 15 February 2023
Admiral AI can now be ordered to attack a Fleet or city via the Nav screen (WIP) Fixed loading issue where turrets were involved with the save. Fixed possible issue when viewing the Admiral from the Navigation screen. Various Fixes
- Rank: Warmaster News and Updates February 15, 2023 - 15 February 2023
Greetings, Warmasters and Candidates! This is the newsletter for February 15th, 2023. More minor updates and fixes preparing for a major news announcement in the coming weeks, so stay tuned! Most of the updates this time revolve around adding some functionality to the Admiral AI. Quality of Life The Admiral AI is a feature that has been getting slow progress on. In this case, the update is around being able to tell the Admiral to attack a fleet or a city. While this is still a work in progress, what this means is, the Admiral will start building ships to attack the selected target group with what they are able to build. The end idea is if the main player doesn't want to micro-manage taking on a fleet or city, they can order an Admiral to do it. This can be useful if too many battles are happening at once, or the player is simply busy with something else and doesn't want to be bothered.…
- Patch Notes for Version Alpha 0.8.11.4092 - 1 February 2023
Further memory over allocation issues resolved from older terrain code, as well as the picker/mouse over code Fixed issue with loading of games because of a fix with the ground turrets Fixed coloring issues with some special effects. Main Campaign no longer refers to the Campaign as a simulation. Various Fixes
- Rank: Warmaster News and Updates February 1, 2023 - 1 February 2023
Greetings, Warmasters and Candidates! This is the newsletter for February 1st, 2023. More minor updates and fixes preparing for a major news announcement in the coming weeks, so stay tuned! Most of the updates this time revolve around bug fixing and memory. Quality of Life A lot of memory cleanup has been done, but one of the main critical bugs that was introduced last update was a load/save issue. The save is fine, but when loading, some updates to the turrets causes issues with loading games. So your old saves should work again, sorry about that. Some long standing bugs were found about colors not being properly updated for certain special effects, as well as some other under the hood updates. On a more minor note, the main campaign no longer refers to the campaign as a simulation, since it's the main campaign. That was left over from a while ago. Short-term RoadMap Work is still bein…
- Patch Notes for Version Alpha 0.8.11.4089 - 18 January 2023
Fixed Major issue with memory allocation on AMD systems (CPU not GPU) Rewrote memory allocation system and fixed minor issues Memory Cache more used in system to speed up and stabilize the system. Fixed Nav Points trigger out of order Various Fixes
- Rank: Warmaster News and Updates January 18, 2023 - 18 January 2023
Greetings, Warmasters and Candidates! This is the newsletter for January 18th, 2023, and the second update for year 2023. The holidays are winding down, so more minor updates this time. Most of the updates revolve around bug fixing and memory. Quality of Life For whatever reason, the way the Windows system allocates memory seems to be different for Intel and AMD CPUs, and this caused a serious issue on AMD systems. This has now been handled, so should work again on AMD systems. Short-term RoadMap Work is being done on the Terrain system, to make it more interesting, but this is just a first draft of the changes, and not ready for release. Everyone is getting back into the swing of development, so there hasn't been as many updates. Work is being done on some of the models, especially the turrets, so look for an update on those in the future! That's all for this update, stay tuned for mor…
