I did a little video to demo some of the new features in the Nemesis Update to The Imperial Realm::Miranda.

The Nemesis Update is now live for all players. Anyone who has purchased any Early Access Edition from the secretlairgames.itch.io store will be able to log in this weekend (GMT) and try out the new features.

Nemesis Mode

I've written about Nemesis Mode before. With a single click, Nemesis Mode pits teams of players against one another in PvP battles. The final version of Nemesis Mode is very much as originally described except that it now supports up to 16 players. Annihilation, the first Nemesis mode, tasks players with destroying the other team's buildings and rewards them with loot and bonus XP. Additional Nemesis modes including Assassination, Slaughter, Claustrophobia and Greed will follow in future updates. To activate Nemesis mode, click the icon in the top right corner of Miranda's HUD. Settings for Nemesis Mode such as chat preferences and game length can be found on the Settings screen off of the main menu (Esc.) Once you are in a Nemesis match, you can click the Nemesis Mode icon to see the other players, and your statistics, or to leave the session.

Mission List

Miranda's Mission List makes it easier to keep track of the player's current objectives. Player-selected missions display on the HUD. At the moment the only objectives that show on the list are ones from Nemesis Mode. Press J on the HUD to display the Mission List or click the icon in the top right menu.

Foundation Extensions

Miranda's rough terrain sometimes makes finding a flat enough spot for buildings difficult. The Foundation Extension is a consumable which can be used when laying out your base to temporarily increase the foundation height of a single building by 25m. Foundation Extensions are stackable which makes it possible to place buildings nearly anywhere. Buildings with taller foundations will be available as standard components for higher level players.



New forces will be given 10 Foundation Extensions. Unfortunately, existing forces will have to buy Foundation Extensions from Vendors and they are a little pricey.

Map

The Map plays an important part in planning your battles. The Nemesis Update greatly increases the performance of the map screen and adds icons for important map features. When playing a Nemesis Annihilation match, the objective locations are now circled on the map. The map will also now show where combat is underway anywhere in the world.

HUD

Many HUD features have been reworked and are now more compact and hide-able, allowing for a clearer view of the battlefield.

Weapon Sound Effects

Sound effects heard in the Early Access trailer have been added to a few of Miranda's weapons.

Resource Shortage

The number of resource fields on the map has been greatly reduced so resources may be more difficult to come by. Unfortunately, resources on rough terrain can be difficult to harvest (there is a pathfinding problem on rough terrain which is on my to do list to fix.) The next update will bring some additional resources to the map.

Bonus Inventory & Design Slots

I made an error when I set up the entitlements for Inventory and Design slots for players. Each player only received the correct number of Inventory and Design slots for a single force (obtained by selecting Redeem Code from the Main Menu.) I have now corrected this and each force should get the correct number of Inventory and Design slots specified for the Edition they purchased when they create a Force. I have decided not to remove the bonus Inventory and Design slots from the Redeem Code menu, so players can redeem that to give one force some bonus Design & Inventory slots. Once the current batch of Secret Lair Codes are all sold, new codes won't include that little bonus.

Vendor Improvements

Vendors now show accurate prices for what they will pay when buying from players. Unfortunately the 3% premium vendors were paying over the standard price has come to an end, and vendor purchase discounts now range from 25% to 85%. Buy Design now shows the correct number of units buildable. Vendors will also no longer accept unsellable components.

Bug Fixes

The game has been running very stable since the May bugfix update. Since then 23 bugs have been fixed, there were also 25 additions and 25 changes and removals. Some of the more important bug fixes in the Nemesis Update are:

• Unit veterancy should now be much easier to obtain.
• Player's Luck now affects their loot find rate.
• XP should now accrue at a much faster rate. An algebra error was resulting in about 7-10x slower XP gain.

This update took a lot longer than I would have liked, I hope everyone enjoys the new features!

It's not too often I get to make a Venn diagram, but here it is:



That outcome is not optimal. To encourage more players to try the Standard Edition, Deluxe Edition, Co-Op Standard Edition, and the Co-Op Deluxe Edition, I'm changing those Editions to offer weekend playtime starting immediately.

Because the server works on GMT, the "weekend" is from 12:00am Saturday morning to Sunday night 12:00pm GMT, so for me in the Pacific time zone, the "weekend" runs from Friday 5pm to Sunday 5pm. Those editions will still receive unlimited playtime at the same time as they did before.

I have always planned to slowly decrease the discount as Early Access went on, so now that the first Early Access update is complete, I'll be taking the first step on that path on Monday September 25 and the 50% discount off of all Miranda Editions will be changed to 40%.

If you've been wanting to check out Miranda, and also want to save a few dollars, you might want to pick up one of the revised packages this weekend.

theimperialrealm.com and the store pages will be updated with these package changes soon.

This really hurts my feelings. I entered the 2017 Intel Level Up Game Developer Contest back in May, fully not expecting to win. Miranda isn't a finished game and its certainly not the prettiest game out there, but I've worked eight years to build The Imperial Realm::Miranda, a one-of-a-kind massively multiplayer seamless open-world real time strategy game, and the contest judges couldn't even be bothered to try it.



I am confident they received my entry because when I asked them about it back in May (because nobody had played it at that point) and they indicated they had received a lot of entries and would get to it soon. And because the system I created to dispense Secret Lair Codes to the judges was used once.

But the code they received was never redeemed.

All I really wanted from the contest was for someone to check out my game.

The winners were announced this morning. I look forward to checking out their games.

Debugging finally started going a little faster this week. Iteration time - the time it takes to make a change and then test it - has been terrible with Nemesis mode. Typically, iteration time with Miranda is about a minute which isn't bad, but with the new server for Nemesis mode acting up, I was constantly having to shut down and restart everything which takes at least 10 minutes and really chews through a work day. As of Friday I can finally play several Nemesis matches in a row without having to restart everything.



The last thing I worked on this week was penalties for players who disconnect during a match. I thought it was interesting because it illustrates how even simple features sometimes have to evolve through a number of iterations before a workable solution is found.

Things move a little slower in the heat of the summer. I've been reading The Art of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. What really surprised me about the production of that movie is how many years they went working on it with no idea what sort of movie it was going to be. It's nice to know that not everything has to be planned perfectly from the start.

I had a nice little vacation. Now I'm back, working to finish up the first Nemesis Mode: Annihilation. Nothing much really happened on that this week because it was too hot to work in my office where all the PC's for testing are. Instead I worked in the air-conditioned part of the house on stuff I could do with just my laptop. Once the core of Nemesis mode is working, I'm going to be putting it on the back burner for a while. There's still a lot to do before Nemesis Mode is complete and I don't want to hold up the other new features and fixes I've been doing along the way any longer.

In a word, scope creep.

My plan of monthly updates during Early Access isn't working out so well with this first update I'm doing. I'm on week 4 of development on Nemesis Mode. The matchmaker is coded, the game session manager is coded, all the network messages to hook everything together are coded, and since late last week I've been working on adding new features to the HUD and the new UI screens to the client. Today I wired up the code to generate loot for the winners and upped the max players to 16. Even with all that done, I still have to finish the UI screens, get all of that debugged, add all the game modes, do some new graphics, and polish it all to a shine.

I originally intended to implement three or so game modes and then come back later and add more. That strategy hasn't really worked out super well before because half-finished features are nobody's favourite. So I'm planning to implement "all" of the game modes now (where "all" means the coolest subset of the modes mentioned previously and maybe some others.)

Miranda's map also needs some new features to support Nemesis mode. You may not have noticed, but frame rates with the map are not as good as they should be. Also, some cool things the map is supposed to do just don't happen because the map is currently software rendered and it doesn't have time to do them. So I'm going to convert the map to hardware rendering while I add the new features for Nemesis Mode.

The update after Nemesis Mode is looking to be similarly gigantic and will also require new things of the map, and I just don't see the current map rendering holding up under that added weight.

When I started working on an online-only RTS, one of my biggest worries was that I had heard from a few sources that only around 5% of RTS players play online. What could I do to attract players when I don't have a single-player campaign or AI skirmish to rely on to bring in that other 95% of players?



The games I worked on at EA had online player percentages significantly higher than 5%. Yet we constantly struggled with people who wanted to cut online entirely because they didn't think it was worth the investment for "so few players." I talked to a friend this week who works on AAA shooters and their multiplayer numbers make 5% look pitiable.



So how did we get to a place where 95% of RTS players ignore multiplayer and most RTS games have deathmatch and that's it?

This Friday June 9 from noon to 8pm Pacific time I'd really appreciate it if players could log in and pick a fight with another player. ATV's, tanks, superweapons, do your worst. Miranda has been running super-stable since the last patch, so I need you guys to hammer on it a bit. I'll be using the feedback from this playtest during the next monthly update when I'm going to be doing some work to improve Miranda's combat experience. If you don't already have an account, Early Access packages are available here.



If you have the time, you might want to consider logging in early to build up some extra forces to play with on Friday.

To find other players, after you log in when the game asks you "would you like to place your buildings at their previous locations" choose "no" then find a map square with a red flag in it and place your base nearby (you may have to zoom out with the mouse to find one.) Note that both Empire and Independent players can attack Independents, although only Independents can attack Empire. (One of the things I'll be changing next month is that the map flag will be the faction color so players will be able to tell from the base layout map what faction a player is.)

If you have a base you love and don't want to see it wiped from the face of Miranda, you may want to leave it logged off at that time.

I'll be online the whole time taking notes. Thanks for your help, and have fun!

I've been working on Nemesis Mode, Miranda's new multiplayer matchmaking system for the next Early Access monthly update. (Learn more about Early Access and support Miranda's development here.) I had a bunch of ideas for the kind of multiplayer I wanted to have in Miranda, but I hadn't played much RTS multiplayer for quite a while so to figure out what modes and features I might have missed, I looked at all the RTS games that people rave about. And some others. I got a couple good ideas about features, but I was pretty shocked at what I discovered:

• Command & Conquer 3: Deathmatch
• Starcraft II: Deathmatch
• Supreme Commander 2: Deathmatch
• Grey Goo: Deathmatch
• Act of Agression: Deathmatch.
• Homeworld Deserts of Kharak: Deathmatch, Capture the Flag
• Ashes of the Singularity: Capture the Flag
• Company of Heroes 2: Deathmatch, Capture the Flag

Deathmatch and Capture the Flag. That's it. Wait, what? Are you kidding me?