Soil is a space real time strategy game inspired by Homeworld and others. You have base, you mine asteroids, build ships and send them to their deaths. Ships are made of subsystems and hardpoints, destroying them removes functions of those subsystems and removes turrets. Debris from damaged or destroyed ships can be mined for more resources. Game features unfinished campaign and somewhat working multiplayer (there may be some desyncs, but if it doesn't happen too often games resyncs automatically) Game is primarily made for windows, but most likely runs on linux with WINE (at least it does on Ubuntu)
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This update finally brings GUI scaling, so you don't need to squint at the tiny UI on your monitor with big resolution.
If this doesn't work correctly for you or you have more ideas what can help, please let me know. This whole thing required
a pretty large rewrite of GUI positioning, sizes, etc., but it also brought in some improvements, like scrollable containers
(so stuff doesn't run out of screen), mouse drag on sliders and minimap, and small improvements like always displaying
resources in your station in screen corner, or total resources in selected asteroids.
In retrospect, I wish I've done GUI this way from the start, because setting it up this way is a lot faster and less painful
(previously I set it all up in C++, now it loads config that is bit like a pathetic version of CSS)
Other than that I've finally fixed a bug that caused downscaled textures look bad (this was some funky compiler bug that decided
to remove load bearing part of resize function in "release" mode...), added textures for large carrier, and some radar doodad. That carrier is featured
in a new campaign no-build mission (you can skip to it by loading "mission 12" save), where you have to prevent enemies from
escaping through your blockade. I also added some more research options, so you have more choices on what to spend your rewards for optional objectives.
These are for example "cheaper ships but slower build speed", "faster build speed but more expensive ships", "starting experience for ships", "faster experience gain".
I also added option to partially refund your research in case you find out you no longer want it, so you're not stuck with it for the rest of the campaign.
I also started to look into desync problems with multiplayer. There are some differences I can reproduce on my old notebook,
but I didn't get around to actually finding the fix, as I had to change saving to also save to XML in order to figure out
what exactly is getting out of sync. Then I created a testing scenario you can launch from options menu, but that ended up
having 700MB in reference saves, so I decided to add compression to save files, meshes and textures (I saved them already with
compression for GPU, but deflating that also helps a bit), which took some time and I wanted to put this update out already.
With any luck, next update will fix some of those multiplayer/determinism issues.
One of the things I would like to add for next update is mission briefings, so there can be better overview for story, at least one new mission,
ability to transport spare crew around needed to build ships (if I add small shipyard for new mission), and I've been also toying with adding
text-to-speech generated audio for dialogs, but maybe that will sound more stupid that it will be helpful...
Basic AI, updated tutorials, and more
NewsNew update of Soil features basic 1vs1 AI, improved tutorials and readability of mission objectives, added autosave and improvements to sensor view, as...
x64 update, or is that an early April 1st joke?
NewsNew release is here, featuring new sounds, performance optimization, increase stability, 1 new campaign mission with hero battleship, and 1 possibly as...
Files
Soil - march 2023
Full VersionThis update brings resizeable GUI, new no-build campaign mission, and more research options
soil - november 2022
Full VersionThis update features basic player AI, improved tutorial, autosave and optimizations
soil april 2022
Full VersionThis new release features 1 new campaign mission with hero battleship, 1 totally not a joke racing scenario, finally an x64 version, and improvements...
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enemy frigateS are very powerful the beams are seriously devastating comparing the damage I do to my enemy is double I know I need research points to access better armament but there is no way to have that extra research that is necessary to unlock the best armament mission 4 is impossible to reach the objectives since it doesn't have resources for mass ships since it takes 3 frigates of mine for 1 of my enemy! I think the research should be added in destroying the enemy's units 1 or 10 research points according to the enemy ship so it would be more reasonable since even destroying the warp beacon I didn't achieve any advantage I tried to do this mission many times but I can't do it I think that the enemy advantage is very big at armament balance level one , the normal frigate should have a reduced cost from 550 to 450 , scout frigate 650 to 600 is one of the best frigates for damage but even so I think maybe a hp buff could help against beams , assault frigate I don't see any advantage during the game since I think it needs more distance and better damage the advantage I have is only speed but nothing weapons miss the target many times and if the target is moving it fails it is very complicated ! I really like the game I wish you good luck and I hope to have more frequent news
Thanks for the feedback! I plan on improving research a bit because now it is really not used that much.
In mission 4 (the one with warp beacon), you are not supposed to fight enemy head on, but make hit and run on transports, but that is failure on my side to communicate it properly (I've done improvements on this for next update). Destroying warp beacon is something I'll make more clear. You should only do that at the end, but objective is added too soon to do it, so that's bit confusing because dialog for that can be easily missed.
There sure is some work left on balancing. My intention was to have assault frigate deal more damage against armored, and the other one against less armored (transports, miners, etc.).
Hello I've unloaded the zip file and accessed the soil.exe but it just freezes im not sure what to do. ive loaded up the game but everything is comming up as error when the command bar is loaded im not sure what to do any chance to help?
Hello, could you please send me the soil.log file that is generated when you launch the game? I cannot help you if I don't know what the actual errors are :)
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so i already downloaded the file so how do i find the game?
Hey, sorry for late reply, somehow I'm not receiving any notifications for these comments...
When you unzip the downloaded zip, there is "bin" folder which contains "soil.exe" if this is the question
Looks amazing, I'm looking forward to hearing more about this project!
Hey, thank you! I hope to keep making new WIP versions at least twice a year