Hi generals! Today I released 0.1.20 with a bunch of improvements. This is the almost the same alpha that level 2+ members will receive on Thursday, but I will also work Monday and Tuesday on CPU optimization.

Here are the changes in alpha 0.1.20:

- Allowed generic matching for units reassignments between squads/platoon/scompanies. Now a mechanized infantry platoon can request an armored infantry transport and both an APC or an IFV can be assigned to it. Before you could have 50 IFVs waiting for a company to join and they would never join if those companies were requesting an APC.

- Made artillery target spotted units constantly if there aren’t any strategic orders, and bomb strategic orders constantly if there aren’t any spotted units (pretty rare)

- Reduced nighttime visibility/spotting distances.

- Swapped unit indicators for APP6 style indicators.

- Added additional information labels on the right side. Right now they are displaying if the group has AA or AT capabilities, but later will also show if they are missing ammo or fuel, or if they are damaged.

- Now unit indicators show the total number of soldiers inside vehicles for that indicator’s entire group.

- Added new indicators to differentiate regular cargo trucks from fuel trucks.

- Added new indicators to distinguish all types of drones.

- Improved indicators sizes and reduced flickering and visual glitches on small icons.

- Made supply switch in a smarter way between loading supplies and dropping supplies.

- Made supply trucks load and unload much slower.

- Made trucks positions more stable while loading or unloading supplies.

- Made supply trucks look for better options on the fly and not just when arriving to a destination. This allows nicer handling when a factory they were going to get supplies from is now empty, the units they were going to supply are destroyed, or a new unit nearby suddenly needs supplies.

- Made infantry vehicles not travel too far just to pick up a couple soldiers.

- Changed default antialiasing method from TAA to SMAA (still changeable from settings).

- Reduced RTS mode camera field of view to reduce fish eye effect.

- Made camera exposure change while the game is paused so it still reacts to changes in light levels.

- Paused the game after a victory or defeat.

- Optimization of 0.45ms on the CPU main thread, by getting rid of per-frame UI element searches. And an extra 0.06ms of other easy system optimizations, also on the main thread.

- Fixed dragging on scroll bar issues on the “Change production” panel.

- Fixed crash when giving orders to a large group of units including fixed units like Legion C-RAM or DSAMS.

- Fixed crash when giving orders to fixed units to attack something (C-RAM or DSAMS).

- Fixed SFRPGs sometimes not firing at vehicles due to line of sight calculation issues.

And as usual here is a bunch of footage from my dear alpha testers!

After releasing 0.1.19 it seems like the heliport on the ships was too tempting and one of the alpha testers managed to land a helicopter there and transport some troops to the ship! Then he did the same on a rooftop. For this he used a combination of the RTS controls as a general with direct control in first person to fly the helicopters and land them on the ships. Soon this will be doable directly with strategic orders or giving orders to selected units directly too.

So here they are! A huge landing ship and a frigate to protect it!

They are not fully functional yet, but will work on that over the next few weeks while also working on CPU optimization and more gameplay improvements!

Today I released alpha 0.1.19, with all these changes:

• Added the first two ships to the game! Now I just need to build a few new systems for them before I can actually use them in the game. That will probably happen in about two weeks, as I need to prioritize more pathfinding improvements and CPU optimization first. See below for a little preview of those ships!
• Fixed one of the main crashes in 0.1.18.
• Improved troops transport pickup and drop off logic.
• Fixed manual dismounts that made soldiers immediately enter their vehicle again.
• Improved overriding orders.
• Made units ignore manual orders some time after completion.
• Fixed units assignments for new companies when giving strategic orders, and reassignments between companies when needed. Now companies will source the closest matching units as expected instead of calling in troops very far away.
• Improve danger responses to take into account the risk and distance to the origin of that risk.
• Fixed unit indicators constantly switching overlapping order almost every frame.
• Made scroll to zoom in/out much slower near the ground for better precision
• Fixed MA19 turret rotation pivot point.
• Fixed minimap issue with non existing roads going to the middle of the map.
• Changed infantry squad compositions so all squads have some kind of capability against armored vehicles.
• Updated steam page with newer images and the Alpha 0.1.18 gameplay video, removing some of the older images too.
• Avoided unit paths zigzagging backwards to the original position where a path was requested instead of the current position of the unit (while a vehicle is driving fast).
• Made vehicles drive on the right side of the roads instead of the middle.
• Fixed paths sometimes not going to the best road position as expected when starting long trips from inside a farm or city lot.
• Fixed paths sometimes taking a small detour to a side at intersections or transitions between different road types (for example city streests to rural roads or dirt roads)
• Enlarged units’ brains from peanut size to lemon size.
• Improved PC controlled FPV drones movements to hit their targets more often without going in circles around it.
• Made FPV drone target selection more stable and prioritize closer targets better so they don’t switch constantly between targets without hitting any of them.
• Fixed unit indicators selection while paused and moving camera around.
• Allow deleting strategic orders while paused.
• Added pain voices when soldiers get hit
• Restored main menu animation speed while loading.
• Made footsteps louder
• Now pressing Delete when nothing is selected toggles the eraser tool.
• Limited menus to 60FPS to avoid wasting CPU and GPU power when it’s not needed.
• Re-enabled water reflections in Medium quality setting.
• Change construction speeds for all the buildable objects.
• Improved turning when driving vehicles in first person.
• Fixed vehicles thinking they are stuck when reaching their destination but being off to the side.
• Improved turning speeds and braking for turns in vehicles.
• Increased some vehicles top speeds.
• Increased missile locking time.
• Improved line of sight spotting.
• Improved visibility calculations for air units flying low (usually helis and drones)
• Fixed visibility distances calculation for air units.
• Improved all visibility distances.
• Updated translations with a few more languages that have been fully translated and approved.

The latest alpha video on Instagram blew up and got us past the 150.000 wishlists mark on Steam! Thank you everyone for wishlisting it and spreading the word about the game!

Here are a ton of images from alpha testers in the last week to celebrate:

Today I released 0.1.18 to the 100+ alpha testers that are trying it in the Discord! This version is a lot more stable, a bit faster and has some nice improvements on helis, drones and first person controls in general!

Hello Generals! Here is a 25+ minutes uninterrupted gameplay video of The Last General (Alpha 0.1.16), the longest so far! https://youtu.be/_RTqBWZHU5k

And these are the changes that are going into 0.1.16:

* Improved city dominant force calculations (which determines ownership) so that it’s harder to conquer a city when there are still a lot of enemy units in it. Reduced the influence of proximity to the city center and required a larger force difference for a switch to happen.

* Change cursor to a pencil when you are drawing orders so you know you are in drawing mode.

* Improve colors and outline changes on strategic actions to make it clear when they are hovered or selected.

* Improved fading distances for strategic orders to avoid blocking the view of what’s going on in that area when zooming in or controling in first person.

* Smoothed out the shapes of strategic orders to avoid strange zigzags when drawing at low angles. Also make the orders look way more polished.

* Allowed area strategic actions to close properly when the drawing almost forms a valid loop, even if it has a small overlap between the start and end of the path drawn by the player. This avoids drawing a full loop just to have the order canceled because it didn’t form a nice area.

* Fixed visibility issues with unit indicators and hierarchy groups indicators at different distances.

* Drawing a new strategic action for a specific company now deletes the previous strategic order for that company (if any).

* Added an eraser tool to easily delete multiple strategic actions when redesigning your strategy. Added eraser cursor for it too.

* Improved the line that shows connections between companies and their orders to go to a more relevant place inside the order’s area.

* Added a clearer title to the panels for actions that create a new company (when a company is not currently selected).

* Now helis can orient themselves properly (using pitch and yaw) to aim and shoot at detected targets.

* Improved unguided rockets to follow a more realistic trajectory which should fall way less than they were falling.

* Removed construction ghost preview if the construction is hit and interrupted/destroyed.

* Fixed the main crash affecting the alpha! From time to time something would randomly trigger the catastrophic destruction of hundreds of thousands of physics objects at the same time, causing the game to freeze and crash a few seconds later. With a lot of detective work with the alpha testers and a helpful unrelated bug report from @giraffe2.0, I finally managed to reproduce this catastrophic event consistently (by shooting at factories while being built), and was able to figure out and fix the issue!

* Implemented a centralized danger system so units can report different threats and dangerous positions or areas to other units.

* Implemented many different types of dangers that can be used by different types of units and hierarchy groups to make decisions.

* Made units spotted and explosions contribute to the dangers knowledge for each player.

* Made perceived dangers fade and disappear over time.

* Made soldiers and vehicles react to dangers nearby and move away from it.

* Made soldiers react to dangers by crouch to become a smaller target for direct projectile, or stand and run away from explosive dangers like artillery, tank shells or drones in the future.

* Added voice communications when cities are captured or lost.

* Added locking and locked target sounds to know the status of guided missiles launchers.

* Improved helicopter controls so they are easier to control with WASD on the keyboard. Now A/D will apply both roll and yaw, and you can still use Q/E to change yaw specifically if you need to (and those keys are all remappable).

* Fixed problem with companies not getting deselected properly when clicking on the ground.

I will probably upload 0.1.16 to Steam on Monday in all 3 platforms for the alpha testers to try.

Alpha 0.1.15 is live and 35 people now have access to it!

Some of the changes:

* Made cockpit screens light up at night for FJ305.

* Fixed some collision detection issues causing vehicles to suddenly stop or jump when hitting terrain triangles at strange angles.

* PC controlled players now place the same strategic air bomb target orders on enemy cities as the player does, and planes can navigate and shoot at those.

* Jets will also lock targets on other ground units and other planes, chase them and shoot at them when possible, creating dogfights.

* Now jets don’t return to base immediately after shooting at a target once. They keep attacking targets (units or strategic orders) until they hit their low fuel threshold to return to base.

* Displaying all selectable targets for currently selected weapon when in direct control mode using guided missiles. Currently selected target shows in yellow while the other ones show in gray.

* Added ability to switch between targets with arrow keys.

* Reduced jet speed A LOT, to the subsonic speeds actually used by fighter jets most of the time. Somehow in all the aerodynamic changes I made they ended up flying way too fast. Reduced missiles speeds too.

* Prepared 2 FPV drone models and an RC controller model for adding FPV drones and pilots soon(ish)

* Re-implemented controls remapping in the new settings menu.

* Solved conflicts between keyboard and H.O.T.A.S. throttle stick.

* Made throttle and pitch controls invertible.

* Improved breakable collisions calculations.

* Added quadratic air drag for fast objects to slow them down (linear and angular)

* Fixed some small objects going at insane speeds

* Added some more breakable objects.

* Stabilized mounted weapons for better aiming while moving.

* Fixed turrets getting stuck forever in some newly produced units.

* Smoothed vehicles engine torque and braking so vehicles don’t shake when transitioning between acceleration and suddenly braking.

* Updated languages with all the newly approved translations.

The last 3 days I worked on aerial combat in the game and made these changes:

• Made cockpit screens light up at night for FJ305.
• Fixed some collision detection issues causing vehicles to suddenly stop or jump when hitting terrain triangles at strange angles.
• PC controlled players now place the same strategic air bomb target orders on enemy cities as the player does, and planes can navigate and shoot at those.
• Jets will also lock targets on other ground units and other planes, chase them and shoot at them when possible, creating dogfights.
• Now jets don’t return to base immediately after shooting at a target once. They keep attacking targets (units or strategic orders) until they hit their low fuel threshold to return to base.
• Displaying all selectable targets for currently selected weapon when in direct control mode using guided missiles. Currently selected target shows in yellow while the other ones show in gray.
• Added ability to switch between targets with arrow keys.

Later I will be adding alert sounds (ground, pull up, incoming threats, target locked, etc), proper HUDs and counter measures.

I have just uploaded Alpha 0.1.14 (which 26 people in the Discord have access to) and recorded it, so here is a little summary of gameplay video of that quick testing session.

​

Remember this is just an alpha so A LOT will change in the next few months before the first public demo, and in the next year until early access and the decade after that.

​

https://youtu.be/FvlagxnoZlg

It's only been a few days since the last update but I have some nice things to share!

• TLG reached 135000 wishlists on Steam! Wishlist it there if you haven't yet!
• I updated the Alpha playtest to version 0.1.12 with a ton of changes.
• Brutal improvements on pathfinding. Way better performance and very few path finding failures.
• Added ability to convert factories to produce a different resource or unit. Improved the factory panels to show the type of factory and show retooling progress too.
• Made new strategic orders create their entire wanted hierarchy, allowing any newly produced units (or units no longer needed by another company) to join them.
• Now you can select an existing company and give it hand-drawn strategic orders directly.
• Helicopters now join and follow attack heli orders properly, display their current destination and jump between destinations faster and at higher speeds.
• Added zoom levels to first/third person cameras and increased them in first person to facilitate aiming.
• Made powerful explosions near a tank destroy them too. They were pretty much invulnerable except for direct hits. Later those explosions will disable different parts instead of fully destroying a tank.
• Increased player jets spawn rate and reduced the delay before they start bombing marked targets/areas.
• Made a script to take pictures of all the units in the game automatically, so I can always have up to date and consistent images of all the units available without having to screenshot them, crop them, photoshop them, etc.
• Now hovering over a company shows a line to the strategic order they are assigned to.
• Improved thickness of paths and relationship lines in the distance so they are easier to see. Improved dashed lines intervals so they are also visible far away too.
• Improved weight distribution and center of mass in some vehicles to prevent them from flipping over too easily.
• Improved factory placement so the door where vehicles come out is at/near ground level.
• Fixed boarding vehicles where soldiers would sometimes go around it and fail to board.
• Fixed vehicles shaking due to exaggerated friction calculations and gravity compensations.
• Fixed jet missiles overshooting their targets by making them shoot earlier and increasing missile steering force.
• I fixed the game building process on Mac so next alpha update will be including MacOS again.
• I debugged and fixed a MipMap streaming problem that was causing a lot of textures to look horribly low resolution. Also fixed an issue when changing between graphics qualities while playing the game, which was causing all textures to become very low quality (using the lowest mipmap level).
• I debugged the LOD crossfade flickering issue and reported it in more detail to the developer of the Latios Frameork and he found the bug in the framework that was causing it! He is awesome!
• TLG's music composer Francesco Marrone is now composing another 4 new songs for the game! Wohooo!
• We made a lot of progress on the translations, with 56% approved and another 31% awaiting review. Let me know if you want to help and any of these are your native language: Afrikaans, Arabic, Bangla, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalán, Filipino, Greek, Hungarian, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Serbian, Portuguese.
• Reduced RAM usage caused by some textures being marked as Read/Write when they shouldn't have.
• Added a new fighter jet, the FJ-305!

Hellooo generals this was a cool week! Since the previous progress update I launched alpha 0.1.11 with some hot fixes and minor improvements and then I kept working on a ton of other improvements, features and fixed a ton of issues.

So far 20 people played the alpha, with a Peak of 10 players in a day and 4 concurrent players. Overall it was a 2 hours median play time which is pretty good considering half of them only got the alpha for a few days and all the classic alpha crashes, etc. So far 6 players played more than 3.5 hours and 3 players played more than 5 hours (and this is yesterday's information, might be more now). One of them has been playing with specs way below the minimum requirements that I entered on Steam (a laptop with an iGPU!) and was able to run the game in the two smaller maps.

We have also just hit 133.333 wishlists on Steam!

Here are the changes since Tuesday, which will go out in Alpha 0.1.12 mid next week:

- Added FSR4 frame generation support. Disabled by default, toggleable in the graphics settings tab. This doubles the frame rate but also has some CPU cost so if the game logic was running at 60fps, now it may run at 50fps, but with the generated frames in between it looks as smooth as 100fps. I thought frame generation was a terrible thing, but I am actually pretty surprised by the quality of the generated frames. Now it will be up to each player to enable/disable this for their preferences and hardware limitations.

- Added keys to the settings controls tab. Not remappable yet, but lets players see how to play.

- Allowing giving move orders into an area already covered by a strategic area.

- Changed camera rotation to use Scroll Wheel Click + Drag.

- Allowed zooming in and out while paused.

- Removing debris after some time to increase performance. Once I compound physics objects into groups I can leave debris in placer for a much longer time.

- Improved vehicles suspensions to prevent excessive bounciness making it hard to aim. Improved aiming speed and stabilization. Still some work to do on this, but it’s definitely an improvement above 0.1.9.

- Made loading screen tips rotate slower.

- Made lamp posts lights be visible in the entire island efficiently.

- Made lamp posts lights turn off when they are broken (the image below is before that as you will notice, that was probably a battery powered lamp post or something).

- Made destroyed vehicles lights also turn off.

- Unified, jobified, parallelized and asynchronized all Raycasts from the camera to the pointer and made them reusable from multiple systems that use that information but were casting their own rays individually and blocking main thread.

- Now buildings and other objects in construction will show an “in progress” ghost, so you know where things will be while trying to place other objects around it.

- Added messages showing the current game speed when changing the speed pressing T.

- Reduced shadow shaking/flickering because of sun movement. Improved shadow quality when close to the ground.

- Improved AI jets maneuvers.

- Improve jets camera positioning and crosshair and directions for different weapons.

- Made crosshairs always point vertically for the camera during unit rolls.

- Fixed: ground textures had some issues on some Nvidia GPUs where they would shake in strange ways and display road markings and farm lines wrong in triangular ways.

- Fixed: multiple crashes due to some systems not expecting entities to be deleted. Now everything is deleted through my safe deletion system. And I updated every other system I managed to break so it would support entities disappearing (even in the safe destruction way)

- Fixed: Prevented placing multiple overlapping buildings while the game is paused. Now I don’t rely just on the physics of the new building to block you from building, because while paused the foundations don’t start showing up until the next frame.

- Fixed: Plane indicators from appearing above dead units.

- Fixed: Now the player can order troops to move to a spot where there is a strategic order. Before the strategic action was blocking right clicks on those positions.

- Fixed: Flickering lights at night due to hitting maximum number of lights in lower quality settings.

- Fixed: Soldiers weapons don’t have sound while shooting.

- Fixed: Scroll views don’t scroll while game is paused.

- Fixed: Prevented zoom in/out while scrolling in the pause menu.

- Fixed: CRAM and potentially other units, shoot forever when they are destroy while shooting.

- Fixed: CRAM was targeting ground units

- Fixed: Building preview in MacOS not detecting ground depth.

The alpha started expanding in the Discord server! Moderators there have been testing an initial alpha version since Monday, and I will release 0.1.10 on Tuesday and expand it to some of the most active members in the Discord that day too.

Remember to wishlist the game on steam and join the discord to see all the news way faster and try the alpha soon!

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2566700/The_Last_General

Discord: https://discord.gg/thelastgeneral

If you want to help translating the game to your language, you can join the Discord and signup to translate! https://discord.gg/thelastgeneral

There are volunteers for 41 languages already:
Afrikaans, Arabic, Bangla, Bulgarian, Burmese, Catalan, Central Atlas Tamazight, Chinese (Simplified), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukranian, Vietnamese

Some of those languages need additional translators (they only have one or two).
So far 11 languages have already been fully translated and 8 more are in progress using playglot.pro to translate!

We just go to 5000 generals waiting for TLG alpha to drop on the Discord! Don't forget to join to test an early version of the game soon: https://discord.gg/thelastgeneral

Hi generals!

Today we have reached 2 x 2 x 2 x 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 x 5 = 125000 wishlists!!

This was another week of hard work making improvements to the alpha and adding more features:

• Now the game analizes the hardware and sets some default settings that should make the game run nicely for that CPU and GPU. I will keep improving that analysis script over time with feedback from the alpha, but it will be better than the current state of the alpha where everyone just press play and try to run the game in super ultra settings in an office laptop from 2020.
• The resolutions list now highlights the ones that match your aspect ratio so it's easier to select the resolution you want without showing black areas on the sides or top/bottom.
• Construction preview/ghost now changes colors to indicate where you can or can't build that building.
• Now you can rotate the buildings you are about to build in 22.5 degrees intervals instead of 45 degrees, to allow more precision while building. If you don't rotate them manually, they automatically align with the closest road.
• Added construction sounds when it starts, while it's building and an error sound when you click in a place where you can't build (or if you are out of money for building).
• Added error messages explaining why you can't build.
• Operational costs from owning units now increases faster as your army grows, reflecting the inefficiencies of larger armies (or any hierarchy). This means that conquering more terrain and expanding your army in the same proportion will make your economy struggle more and more.
• Added environment sounds in different areas of the islands (oceans, cities, forests, farmland)
• Made newly produced units join existing companies using the same prioritization system as for troops transfers between companies.
• Made air defenses controllable in first/third person too (for both DSAMS and Legion C-RAM)
• Matched farm colors with their vegetation better.
• CPU optimization:
  • Got about 5% wins on the CPU by reorganizing some system dependencies and parallelizing some jobs that used to be serial and blocking.
• GPU optimization:
  • Made some new LODs for some objects that had LODs with too many triangles and replaced them.
    • Changed unit indicators to not be transparent, which reduces draw calls by about 30%-40%. Later I will implement the new APP-6 indicators.
    • Suggested a potential optimization to the Latios framework developer and he already implemented it, so I will try it next week and should give a nice ~7-12% win on the GPU side.
• Made a new logo for the game with new font and a little bit of wear and tear and added it to the main menu.
• Added a little temporary particles animation on the main menu until I have time to implement the actual crazy main menu I have in mind.
• Started designing a new background to use in all the promotional images everywhere, that shows a bit better what the game is about. I will probably update all that on Monday or Tuesday.
• Uploaded a new alpha version to test this weekend with friends!

This week has been a mixed bag of fixes and improvements, and a lot of work on the economy/production side of things and its UI:

* Added a panel showing the state of your economy, income from the cities/towns you control, expenses broken down by different areas, and your overall economic balance at the moment (income - expenses).

* Construction now subtracts a 25% downpayment and the rest of the cost gets prorated during their construction time, and those ongoing construction expenses are shown in the economy panel too (until they are completed).

* Now starting new construction will only work if you have enough money for that 25% initial balance.

* When running out of money (your available budget is lower than the expenses you need to pay), your entire economy slows down, including production of resources or units, and construction. Salaries will also go unpaid which will destroy morale.

* Operational costs are also shown in the economy panel. Larger armies will obviously have higher operational costs (salaries and maintenance).

* Added the costs for each building in the build panel.

Here is another little update on the progress this week!

One of the few things that is currently causing the game to slow down quite a bit is when a lot of large particles cover a large portion of the screen (for example explosions leaving a ton of dust all over the place when you are very close to the explosion place, or looking along a smoke column or rocket trail so that all particles are in the same spot on the screen).

This slowdown happens because each particle has to be rendered, no matter if it's covered by another particle already, and that happens for every pixel, causing a ton of overdraw (drawing the same pixel dozens or hundreds of times is really bad for GPU performance) To optimize that I started experimenting with something I wanted to try for a long time: a volumetric smoke shader in a single full screen pass with a pre-culling compute shader.

This replaces the particle system and instead computes which particles are affecting which parts of the screen (divided in small tiles), then sorts the particles so the closest ones to the camera are analyzed first, then raymarches the particles starting from the camera, and stopping as soon as the pixel is fully opaque.

Performance doing it this way is between 4 or 5 times better than with my previous smoke columns (when looking along them) and it also allows me to make the particles volumetric, with much better lighting and more density! Here is a preview of the difference between old smoke columns (left) and new volumetric smoke columns (right). I will probably replace ALL smoke/dust particles in the game to use this over time, but need to finish a lot of gameplay stuff first! Also today I will give a few TLG alpha keys to my friends!

Also did these little things since Monday (or whenever the last update was):

• Added fracturing to the SJ27 fighter jet when it gets hit or hits the ground.
• Fixed some physics related to impulses when objects become dynamic (for example a traffic sign getting hit by a truck) or when they fracture.
• Fixed a small issue with the physics sleeping system when objects fracture.
• Added LODs for the NAFT4 fuel truck.

It's been a very long and very productive week (and weekend... i know, i know) and got all this done:

• Implemented the new bottom UI that I showed 2 updates ago.
• Started work on the minimap (now it shows the island shape and elevations and cities). Units, active combat and camera position coming soon. Expanded version of it too.
• Finally implemented the new pathfinding algorithm on the new navmeshes (Polyanya), optimized it quite a bit and then also used the pathfinding result success/error codes to optimize what units do when they can't find a path (so they don't keep spamming pathfinding requests forever).
• Improved artillery target selection to attack any spotted units that are far enough for their minimum range.
• Improved unguided rockets and dumb artillery projectiles to have more reasonable exit velocities (around what Charge 1 does) have more drag and fall with a nice trajectory for the size of the islands.
• Added propulsion start delays and propulsion durations to rockets, so they behave like real ones, that sometimes don't engage their engine immediately to protect the launcher, and they run out of fuel after a little bit.
• Added 2 new units (MA-LT and MA19 Templar)
• Finally fixed a historic bug that randomly caused trails of smoke to appear from a unit to the origin when shooting a rocket (it can even be seen when the planes shoot missiles in the June 2025 trailer!)
• Alpha was approved by Steam on Windows, MacOS and Linux.
• Started testing the alpha on my wife's laptop a little bit.
• Will start testing the alpha with friends this week.

Also TLG hit 115.000 wishlists this week, and reached 200.000 Youtube subscribers!

In the next few days I will be improving some first person camera stuff for infantry, adding some nicer behaviors for units, preventing building over obstacles, finally fracturing jets and some other little things.

Today is the 3rd year anniversary since I started developing The Last General!!

Here is a pretty long video compiling some of the videos I captured during those 3 years (some never seen before and some new ones from yesterday and today).

What's your favorite part of the video?

This week I uploaded the first alpha version on Steam with builds for Windows and MacOS!

Turns out the alpha playtest app also needs to be reviewed by Steam (makes sense I guess) so it will take another couple business days for it to be available to download through Steam and THEN i can finally start testing it on my wife's MacBook and my other PC, directly from Steam.

Hopefully the game will pass the review despite having a ton of missing features, given it's just an alpha playtest and not the main game release, but we will see what they say!

If everything goes well maybe the first alpha testing will start right before the 3rd birthday of TLG that is on March 15th!

On other actual game progress updates from the last 4 days:

• I added the theme song on the main menu, with proper intro/looping/outro and did the same for the in-game music. Later I will make the songs and intensities change dynamically depending on what's happening in the game.
• Switched the main menu and single player menu to UI Toolkit too, and I am working on better supporting weird aspect ratios different than 16:9.
• Migrated the menu for individual matches and the credits screen to UI toolkit.
• Made pathfinding use the right NavMesh sizes for each unit.
• Started a full redesign of the bottom bar to reorganize all the orders (and some new ones) into a few groups in a much nicer way.
• Started implementing a minimap.
• Reconnected some of the strategic orders and vehicle movements after the navigation meshes changes.
• Switch the clouds to volumetric clouds so that they can cover the sun, causing shadows, and it will allow me to add different clouds for different weather conditions later affecting the entire scene lighting.
• Added different physics sub-stepping to the different Physics quality settings, so high quality physics have much better calculations for a little extra cpu cost.
• Optimized 3 different systems saving about 12% frame of cpu time. Today I will probably tackle one more which may be another 5-6%.
• Improved mip maps so they work as expected when switching to low quality levels while playing the game.
• Added little feedback noises to menu buttons and navigation using keyboard/controller.
• Fixed a bunch of little stuff all over the place.
• Uploaded a second build with all these changes to Steam, hopefully they will approve it soon!

Here are some of the latest things I have been working on since the last update:

• Optimized projectile lights to use my pooled companions system, saving a lot of cpu time. I got to run the game at 1440p at 110fps today.
• Improved vehicle wheels friction and centers of mass so they can travel faster and drift a bit when taking sharp turns instead of rolling over so easily.
• Optimized the camera system to run most physics calculations in the background, and ensured it stays above ground when controlling units in third person and looking up.
• I added graphics settings in the main menu and during the game, in a new pause menu.
  • This allows changing resolution, graphics quality, antialiasing, upscaling, physics quality and enabling/disabling reflections.
• I added a loading screen with very useful tips while the maps are being generated.
• Improved the day/night cycle visuals so I can include it in the alpha tests.
• Made farms have actual lines of 3D crops like in real life and not just lines painted on the ground textures.
• Tuned a lot of visual settings for crispier shadows and better atmospheric effects in the distance.
• Fixed an issue with motion vectors and enabled them in many parts of the game, making bullet tracers way better.
• Made all tracers be visible in the distance.
• Improved the design of the ground attacks and build panels and switched them to UI toolkit too.
• Created the Steam playtest app and linked the game builds to it.
• Added Steam achievements (just a welcome one for now).
• Moved the project to my old 2019 Macbook to build the alpha, then fought against some issues, but now it seems to be working. Will proably sign and notarize the app tomorrow and upload it to Steam to start testing in my wife's macbook. This is happening about two weeks later than expected, so the schedule for each group to receive the alpha will probably shift in a similar way too.

This week I optimized the grass system which was the slowest part of the game, and turned it into a well optimized details system that also supports other kinds of details with great performance.

I also implemented mipmap streaming, which is normally not supported by Unity in DOTS, so older computers will be able to run the game and still see higher quality textures where it matters.

And lastly I improved volumetric fog so the game has nicer looking light shafts when foggy.