Happy april first! (April 1st edition of transcendence)

[Aury]

The original post:

http://www.neurohack.com/downloads/Trans106.zip

I am proud to present the Officially Patched version of Transcendence version 1.05; version 1.06 (alpha)! Its not a mod, its added directly into the TDB through the magic of hex-editors. (We only just got the actual go-head from George yesterday, even though I had been toying around with fully integrating the mod into the tdb for quite some time, so he had no time to give us the TDB-compiling capable version of transdata. Since I've already studied the TDB, I was able to make the modifications easily.)
Its actually just a very early alpha of the official patch version, and contains only the following changes:
-gaian cannon now has 80 charges, uses 10MW of power, and does and additional 32 HP of damage on average
-lazarus now has 72HP, enough to not fall to the iocrym disintegration, and uses 750MW of power - in a future version, we're hoping to have George set things up so that the idle power draw will be much less than half of 750MW, which is the current idle power for all shields at the moment.
-Teratons will buy high level military shields now, (level 8+), but at their usual low buy margins.
-Ares plasma cannon now has more range (~90ls from my calculations). It also accepts the speedloader, and uses 250MW.
-Worldship plate is now disintegration-immune.
-A number of small balance tweaks to the following: Tritium cannon, behemoth cannon, IM90, longzhu, uranium rod,

We also added a very simple framework tutorial system to the beginning of the game: the tutorial is still completely absent, and its really just an experiment; it may not even be present in the final version of 1.06. For now I just stuck in a version of the old Heretic from .99c, but without the radiation field & ICS [It has a centauri raider instead guarding the gate]. Use a helium 3 fuel rod to activate the gate. Yeah, I was lazy.

In the upcoming releases, expect to see an actual tutorial in the tutorial system, as well as other balance fixes. For now though, I'd just like to get people's input on the balance changes.

Also, next release, Ttech has requested that I pre-pack a settings file containing the config for sending stats to his stats server.

(on second thought, we need to get a better naming scheme that doesn't interfere with George's, so as to differentiate actual engine-improvement releases from our xml-improvement releases. like 1.05.1 or something.)

So yes, as a number of you suspected, this was indeed an april fool's day release.

Its not actually the first time this happened on April 1st- someone did a fake .99 release way back when, but it was just a dead download link.

[Ttech]

Sweet work! Very nice job on getting it done so quickly.

Quite glad about the stats part, I can finally start graphing the data for my leader / graph board.

[sdw195]

awesome Thanks wolfy

[digdug]

LOL, nice April's fool Wolfy

[Aury]

I'll get the version up with the V300 armor description fix in a couple days, since I didn't have it in this one. I'll also take care of a few other assorted balance issues, mostly related to weapons.

If you guys want, I can also take a look into implementing george's fuel mass/cost/value curve in the next one as well.

[Amilir]

I'm actually interested, how DID you make the tbd?

[Aury]

The magic of hex-editors!

[erik dela cruz]

I was about to boast about KICKING VENTARI BUTT yesterday (after 3 painful months) and now here comes 1.06 alpha?

Wolfy you are the man!!! Wow you're fast. Awesome dude!

[Ttech]

We had to tone down the festivities this year though, kinda afraid of total anarchy and chaos. Next year though. hahaha

Though regarding the 1.06, it was a joint effort. Meaning I came up with the idea, and Wolfy did 99% of the work.

[skaianDestiny]

You guys were lucky, over at Data Realms, the makers of Cortex Command, some Russian hacker took over.

[Ttech]

You guys were lucky, over at Data Realms, the makers of Cortex Command, some Russian hacker took over.

So they say it was a hacker.

[skaianDestiny]

I'm not joking.

Alright everyone, here's the lowdown on what happened today.
Long story short, we did a pretty lame April Fools and then it happened for real.

Early today, TLB backed up the entire forum, then wiped it clean of topics and posts as our April Fool's prank for the year.
This lasted until around 6PM EST, when a Russian hacker interfered with TLB's backup restore and corrupted the primary backup. We didn't know it at the time, so TLB attempted to fix it thinking it was a minor data corruption problem.

From there, things started to get out of hand with posters being changed, and messages from the hacker being edited in to messages. He also compromised the accounts of several admins and moderators (mine included) and began posting as us (most notably as Data for his ultimatum).

As far as we can tell, his only goal was to take over the forum and cause as much chaos as possible, though he could have been serious about remaking the forum in his image (this was stated in his ultimatum).

However, right around 8:30 EST, TLB managed to wrest control from him and shut down the forum, as well as temporarily ban his IP from contacting the DRL server. I then contacted the Russian police with his IP, which they were able to track further. I'm still on the phone with them as I type this, but they're investigating the apartment the attack originated from after they shut off his internet connection.
TLB thankfully kept backups on his local machine, and just restored them.

I'll post more as it comes to me, but it sounds like it'll take a while to get anything more, they've put me on hold.

Update (9:30 EST): The Russian police have made an arrest but promptly hung up on me, so that's the end of that I suppose.

[Aury]

Happy April 1st everyone!

So a bit of backstory about this whole thing:
The version of transcendence with those changes? It really does exist, just on my machine. I did it as something of a personal tech-demo, and something of an experiment with working with the TDB, as was this April Fools Day edition of transcendence. I've learned quite a bit about how the TDB is set up & compiled/decompiled as a result of all my playing around.
While it is technically possible to do the patch mods like this, and would be really cool to be able to do a 'vanilla no-mods playthrough' with the patch in effect, development of the official patch will proceed as originally planned, as a mod. If George ok's a release with a version that has the mod implemented as a tdb (He did OK the April 1st edition we made here ), that would only occur after the patch mod is completed, because its rather hard to conduct development on the mod when its being done all TDB-side.

Also of note, I discovered a crash bug in the process of making this; the old heretic particle radiation field will crash the game if interacted with.

[Ttech]

Why did you break your first post though?

[Aury]

It was about 24 hours, more or less