Its finally here, a few days later than planned, however v0.2.9 Beta is now released.

For those that want a quick overview of whats been done in this version please check the planned release features document over on google docks at  https://docs.google.com/document/d/11LHItYM7h4Eez1FwYkLlYbk4h2HMrVkoKoJN9WPnWO0/edit?usp=sharing

Green = complete, yellow = mostly complete and red = for next build

As you can see there are some extra things that had to be added to this build, a couple of things where harder than expected to fix too. As some of those in the list might not be clear to understand, will give some of the highlights of the new build.

Saves - this now works, the major issue before this build was there was no way to differentiate between caps and lowercase and caused issues having saves looking the same so had left this in a semi working state, but it now all works, as well as adjusting how often the autosave saves and making sure the autosave works too.

UI fixes include stuff like the text being incorrect in places and searching for buildings by resource type wasn't giving the correct result, should all now be fixed, this also includes a lot of fix's and updates to the colonists UI where the statistics 90% work now.

More work to those repair ships, as requested in some feedback from beta testers, when repair ships now fix a building that was shut down due to damage, it will automatically re-activate it, plus they should now not ever go to the same target - a small problem I have seen with these though (yep even more issues) was one point I saw them fly to their target and then change target instead of repairing the current target, I cant see how this was possible and need further testing to uncover the issue however it should be a very rare issue. + they are more efficient in rendering, changing from a particle effect to a mesh so you should have a higher frame rate than before. - all of this performance saves means that I am easily getting 500+ FPS on the lowest settings and 150+ FPS on the highest setting using a 8 year old quad core CPU and a nVidia gtx 570, a 5 year old graphics card - it all means that you should have less issues playing the game and more fun!

Fixed many issues with maps, they all now have a re-worked resource overlays that give greater variation on resource amount in different areas of a map, plus other fixes like maps being flipped left to right and overlays not corresponding to the correct map.

A fair few fixes with the building info menu, it now mostly works (doesnt show the more information stats yet) and fixes issues with activating and de-activating buildings giving a better indication of why something didnt do as you requested + a grate benefit to you now is you can reclaim aprox 60% of the buildings resources when demolishing them, however will cost energy to demolish them now.

Finally, the main UI has had an update in the top right corner, this is the introduction to the story of the game and the main objective of the career mode where you will need to provide earth with energy.

Along with the fixes are a couple of new features, in the debug menu you now have a slider to increase and decrease the amount of resource income, this increases to 200% of your total bases income but keeps the outcome the same, this is intended for balancing so I can star getting feedback on if at any stage of the game you are in desperate need of more resources, or have too much

The second new feature is the ability to change UI size, it worked fine in the editor however initial testing wasn't too conclusive in the release build, however this means a couple of things, you can now change the UI size to suite your needs and will limit you to a min and max size so you will not be able to overlay UI menus - on the flip side this will then help those that are using low resolution screens, the game is intended to work at 1280 x 720 and above, however if you have a lower resolution it will now automatically scale the UI making it smaller so it all fits on the screen - though it may be a bit harder to read the text - doing some research it appears that this low resolution will effect less than 5% of users.

So onto the red marks - why where these not complete?

While most are green and yellow there are a few red and uncompleted items on the list. I wanted to get this build out asap to try and keep on target and a couple of items where going to take too long to fix and others just made more sense doing it whilst doing other parts in a future update.

Whats next?

Well the next release, planned for the 30th October, will be a major update with a lot of content added, this will be where the game will look a lot better and hopefully bring it to life (over time as you get more colonists and buildings) along with improvements to the UI, making them look a little better and interesting (started that in this build with a couple of the new menus) also I hope to have the tutorials fixed too!

If you have any questions or feedback, please as usual use the comments section below, forums over at http://spacesimcentral.com/community/colonisation-moonbase  or by submitting bugs with the bug report button.