Hive Time turns 2, and v1.2-95, v1.2-96 changelog

This patch initially had a possible crash when starting a new hive with a new Queen with Royal Decrees. This has been hotfixed in v1.2-96. Apologies to anybody affected!

Greetings, fellow bee friends!

Hive Time had its second birthday on Sunday, and to celebrate, I've been working on a little patch and a new trailer.

The biggest changes in today's patch focus on Defence and Foraging management.

The Upgraded Map Room now unlocks a foraging priority slider that allows you to influence whether Worker and Forager bees will collect more pollen or nectar. In addition to offering another tool for responding to or pre-empting mid-game resource surplusses and shortfalls, this also makes the Foraging screen to more useful to players who aren't interested in engaging with the pollination mechanic. As with most of Hive Time's management system, it's entirely optional.

Defender deployment has been overhauled to now control how many Defenders should be deployed *per Barracks cell.* This allows deployment to automatically scale alongside a hive's growth (providing more Barracks cells are constructed) and makes behaviour more predictable. My core philosophy for Hive Time's management systems has always been to make things as optional as possible, allowing for as little or as much micromanagement as a player appreciated, and the old deplyoment behaviour required too much attention and fiddling to really align with that. Previously, the slider set a fixed number that was a percentage of the Defender population *at the time the slider value was changed,* which could often leave players overestimating the number of deployed Defenders and thinking they'd responded to an emergency when the game was still expecting them to go poke a slider.

Defenders are now automatically deployed or recalled when the slider is adjusted, and the deploy all/recall all buttons have been turned into toggles that can be treated as alert statuses which override the slider's deployment target. This makes Defence management feel a lot more responsive and readable. Good times!

As part of these changes, I also removed all of the instructional text from both management screens. The result is that both screens have more functionality, but feel less cluttered. Each screen now has more tooltips, and the Beepedia still exists as a more comprehensive and directed explanation of the management systems, so the amount of information available to players hasn't been meaningfully diminished.

Under the hood, Hive Time has been upgraded to Godot 3.4, taking advantage of some upstream improvements. Alongside this, I've also made optimisations to the Defence screen, input processing, cell processing, bee processing, and audio processing that should improve the behaviour of very large hives.

Very large hives are now a little easier to grow thanks to an overhaul of how Hive Time's "birth debt" is calculated. Previously, this was limited to three bee spawns' worth of Beesitter labour that could be accumulated in reserve so that when at the population limit, new bees could be spawned immediately when old bees died. The limit meant that birth debt couldn't be accrued faster than three bees' worth every game tick, which put a hypothetical limit on how fast bees could spawn. In reality, the game slowing down on larger hives meant that game could take longer, which further reduced how quickly large populations could grow. Upgraded Nurseries now increase the birth debt limit, and birth debt accrual is now less subject to game tick speed.

It's still possible to make hives big enough to slow the game down, but I'm hoping that in most cases, the thereshold has been raised.

Today's patch brings a number of small quality-of-life improvements. The Twilight Years event that triggers when a Queen is one minute out from dying will now extend the Queen's life span if there is enough available Jelly storage and current Jelly levels are close to 600 - no more Queen deaths while last 10 Jelly is on its way to storage!

Large scale disaster events will now automatically move the camera to affected cells. This makes damage from events like failed Wax Repairs or Bad Science much easier to identify and understand. It also means that it's a lot harder to miss Old Bitey's paw coming into the hive.

Construction options that have been researched, but have unmet cell dependencies are now displayed as disabled items in radial menus, with their cost panel showing the name of a cell that's required but not present. This makes it clearer why some construction options are not immediately available after moving to a new hive or having all of your workshops blown up.

Last, but not least, there are a bunch of miscellaneous fixes and tweaks. New Queens spawned after loading a saved game while an existing game ws in progress no longer have a chance to lose their name. Pressing back and then returning to the New Hive screen no longer breaks custon Queen names. Management screens now use the correct theme for tooltips, bee hats that had transparency in them prior to bee wings being made opaque are transparent again now, chat bee messages are no longer processed when the game isn't visible, and Nurseries and Workshops no longer start with their progress rings half filled.

As Hive Time turns 2, I want to give a very special thank-you to everybody who took the time to say something nice about our little bee game. It's very heartening to know that it means so much to so many people. Although they are not included in the trailer, I'm thankful to everybody who left a review here on Itch (user reviews on Itch are not public, and so it didn't feel right to quote them).

At the time of writing, over 70% of Hive Time's 182 Itch user reviews think the game is worth 5 stars, and a further 20% give it 4. If this was Steam and assuming the 3 stars or higher is a thumbs up, that would equate to a Very Positive rank (only because Overwhelmingly Positive requires at least 500 reviews).

You are all lovely, and I'm very happy to have shared a nice game about bees with you

Enjoy!

Full Changelog

Upgraded to Godot 3.4
Added lock icon to population screen instruction text
Added slider state button to defence screen
Added foraging priority slider to foraging screen
Added foraging priority slider unlock activity notification
Added pause icon to pause research button
Added zoom_to_cell effect property
Added zoom_to_bee effect property
Added sequenced actions for trailer 6
Added custom theme for management screen charts and diagrams
Added Player::get_next_building_requirement_name() and Player::get_building_research_category()
Added tooltips to management screen close buttons
Added tooltips to management screen beepedia buttons
Added tooltips to event screen beepedia button
Added tooltips to population lock buttons
Added tooltips to bee list icons and buttons
Added tooltips to cell list icons and buttons
Added tooltips to defence screen legend icons and labels
Added tooltips to foraging screen legend icons and labels
Added activity notification when defence screen is unlocked
Added pre-instancing for all main menu tyile types
Added explicit pre-instancing for construction progress material
Added menu bees setting
Added description to old bitey effect
Added queen_life_boost effect
Added min_storage and max_storage event conditions
Added variant for 'Twilight years' event to give the current Queen a 5 minute lifespan boost if jelly is within 20 units of 600
Updated deploy slider to be target per barracks
Updated deploy button to act as a persistent override
Updated recall button to act as a persistent override
Updated deploy slider to disable when override is in effect
Updated defence screen instruction text
Updated defence screen instruction text to process substitutions
Updated defence screen layout
Updated defenders with deploy status changed by overrides to rush
Updated defence screen to only update labels when visible
Updated Player::import() to correct deployTarget value from saves older than 1.2-88
Updated FYOF processing to remove 'Queen ' from the start of custom queen names
Updated Beepedia defence and foraging topic images
Updated load_game() to allow silent loading without success confirmation
Updated ordering of community settings options to better surface prefill buttons
Updated Player::check_building_requirements() to allow category to not be specified
Updated RadialMenuItem to show unmet building requirements on cost panel
Updated quit handler to close Beepedia instead of quitting if Beepedia is open
Updated show_radial_menu() to display actions with unmet building requirements
Updated defence Beepedia description to mention new deployment slider and override button behaviour
Updated destroy_cells_bear, destroy_cells_defenders_bear, vinehopper_boom, vinehopper_big_boom, wax_structural_failure, and wax_partial_repairs effects to automatically zoom to affected cell
Updated old_queen_gone effect to automatically zoom to departing queen
Updated paused research icon to be more visible and match already researched icon size and position
Updated destroy_hex() to adjust defender deployment if a barracks is destroyed
Updated finish_building() to adjust defender deployment if a new barracks is built
Updated Player::convert_bee() to deploy or undeploy defenders as needed
Updated tooltips on deployment override buttons
Updated cell list to dim cell types that haven't yet been constructed
Updated forager role description to make wrapping around icons less likely
Updated Bee::get_return_to_hive_target() to respect foraging priority slider for non-bloom resources
Updated unselected foraging tile description to explain where foraging allocations come from if no spare allocations are available
Updated game pre-instance anchor to more reliably be within the frustum
Updated birth debt calculation to increase with upgraded nursery count
Updated lifespan_offset effect processing to display activity summary in minutes
Updated supporter credits
Refactored birth debt processing
Refactored queen name assignment
Refactored menu bee instancing/freeing
Optimised input processing for bees (reduces overheads when bee count is huge)
Optimised input processing for cells (reduces overheads when cell count is huge)
Optimised input processing for event UI slightly
Optimised get_parent().get_parent() calls in HexCommon
Optimised sound processing so that a given sound can't be played more than once per frame (reduces overheads when frame times are long)
Optimised defence screen slightly
Optimised updating of positioned hud elements slightly
Optimised throne processing slightly
Removed foraging screen instruction text
Removed some unused code
Removed some extraneous logging
Fixed possible edge case where a pooled bee might not have its audio fade tween freed
Fixed custom Queen name not being preserved properly when returning to the New Hive screen from the main menu after previously entering a custom Queen name
Fixed lastAction, lastCell, and lastBee not being cleared in clear_existing_data()
Fixed pluralisation for damaged/destroyed cell activity notifications
Fixed defenders returning from outside not using exits properly
Fixed deployed defenders returning to hive picking up foraged resources
Fixed management screens not using hex theme tooltips
Fixed management screen shortcut (Ctrl) not working for production facilities
Fixed typo in map room info beepedia link
Fixed possible crash when using load startup shortcut (Ctrl) and mousing over pre-instanced cells before their scripts are removed
Fixed typo in destruction tip text
Fixed typo in 'Wasp attack' event's protected variant
Fixed first workshop progress shader starting at 0.5
Fixed first nursery progress shader starting at 0.5
Fixed throne indicator sometimes being visible when it shouldn't be
Fixed chat messages being processed when in the main menu
Fixed chat messages being processed when in the beepedia
Fixed bad user agent being sent along with version check for test builds
Fixed beekeeper hat not using MiscTransparent material
Fixed firey hat not using MiscTransparent material
Fixed foraging screen displaying wrong Defender deployment target
Fixed foraging priority activity notification appearing when foraging priority slider is already enabled
Fixed possible crash when starting a new hive with royal decrees
Fixed role's population slider locks being deactivated whenever a relevant upgraded role cell completes construction
Fixed foraging screen deployment target not updating when construction on a new barracks finishes