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[Kaje]

From what I've gathered over at the gaslamp forums, saving was close to working fine on some test systems back before the earliest access was announced, but a loophole cropped up in a test case last-minute (windows 7 32-bit, IIRC) that exposed a flaw with the whole thing and they decided to plug that, redoing a big chunk of the save code in the process or some such. One of the coders is spending 100% of his time working on saves right now.

As for buildings... deleting the interior modules probably wouldn't be that big of a deal. Deleting the punch-through-walls exterior modules will be a Very Big Deal. I'm guessing it was a choice between doing the easy part first and leaving out the second, doing both with prolonged internal testing that would have delayed the game by quite a bit and still likely had problems on release (which they'd have to re-code), or waiting on it til the game was stable and letting a large group of voluntary testers poke at the system to save development time for other things (like making sure the game doesn't catch on fire and explode while drinking all the good beer).

A much better answer than anything offered previously (or since) - thank you for being informative and clarifying the issues in a well structured post, without feeling the need to attempt (and fail) to belittle. 

[Citizen Daniel]

The first update is now available!  Saves are not in yet, as we're still working to get them into a stable state.

https://community.gaslampgames.com/threads/revision-28-up.8755/#post-88034

Edit: I guess "first update" is a bit of a misnomer.  It's the 28th version of the code we were testing internally, and the 3rd version, counting the hotfix, to be a part of "earliest access"

[Darkmere]

Welp. I came over to post that and I was ninja'd by a dev. Not a bad problem to have, I suppose.

[Kaje]

Is there a way to assign a rifle to a soldier or colonist, or are they simply 'tools' that are used during hunting orders?

[Darkmere]

Soldiers will pick up guns on the way to rally point orders, so it's a good idea to rally them to the starting stockpile before a threat actually shows up. I've never seen colonists use guns, but I've also only given hunting orders to military squads just to keep everyone else on-task.

[Citizen Daniel]

New blog post up, Steam date, some general rambling inspired by tiredness, and a changelog.

https://www.gaslampgames.com/2014/07/30/clockwork-empires-is-coming-to-steam-early-access/

[Citizen Daniel]

We posted another update today.  Notably resources can be selected with a "click and drag" interface, which reduces the amount of micromanagement *tremendously*.  Now that we've freed up a bunch of the players' time, we can start adding some more Fun Stuff.  There are a few glitches with it visually, but nothing known that's actually an issue with the game.  We also put up a "pause" icon, a button for different viewing modes for buildings, and fixed an issue where characters would only ever sleep once.

[Citizen Daniel]

Regarding the soldiers question, you can't explicitly assign them their equipment right now, and we need to spend a little bit of time on that system.

Currently, guns are regarded as tools by the characters to fulfill actions they may want to do.  Soldiers know they need guns to shoot fish people, and work crews know they need guns to hunt aurochs and dodos.

We had the makings of a more sophisticated system for equipment in the game earlier, but we realized that we were putting the cart before the horse, so we have disabled it temporarily.  I suspect some light level of character equipment management will make its way back in, but if i were to guess, I'd say we won't start thinking about that for a month or two.

[Twi]

Regarding the soldiers question, you can't explicitly assign them their equipment right now, and we need to spend a little bit of time on that system.

Currently, guns are regarded as tools by the characters to fulfill actions they may want to do.  Soldiers know they need guns to shoot fish people, and work crews know they need guns to hunt aurochs and dodos.

We had the makings of a more sophisticated system for equipment in the game earlier, but we realized that we were putting the cart before the horse, so we have disabled it temporarily.  I suspect some light level of character equipment management will make its way back in, but if i were to guess, I'd say we won't start thinking about that for a month or two.

I had a response to this and then realized I didn't remember how the military does work and/or should work.  I was thinking that 'carry your gun with you, soldier' could be a background 'job', but I also could be thinking out of my rear end.

[Baijiu]

Woo! I'm really liking this game so far as it's pretty playable as far as Alphas go. One thing I -love- is the work teams, simple concept but it has a huge effect on gameplay. I wish Dwarf Fortress had something similar.

[Citizen Daniel]

I had a response to this and then realized I didn't remember how the military does work and/or should work.  I was thinking that 'carry your gun with you, soldier' could be a background 'job', but I also could be thinking out of my rear end.

A character can only do one "job" at a time, so if they were doing the "carry your gun" job, they'd be standing there staring at their gun in their hands forever, which might be amazing some of the time, but they'd be a little less productive

We did leave in some of the equipment code that should mean that the soldiers don't drop their guns after they've finished shooting things, but they should start with weapons.  Right now, if you hunt some animals before your military has needed to shoot anything, they may not have enough weapons to go around.

Woo! I'm really liking this game so far as it's pretty playable as far as Alphas go. One thing I -love- is the work teams, simple concept but it has a huge effect on gameplay. I wish Dwarf Fortress had something similar.

Awesome!   It's still a little wonky: the work crews should be hanging out in their workshops while they're not busy instead of wandering the countryside, and the UI isn't super clear, but that's great to hear

[Citizen Daniel]

New update!  Changelog on the blog post that just went up.  The focus for the last couple of updates has been on getting the first tier of player interaction responsive and interesting.  We've had to do a bit of balancing as players started doing things that were 1: really weird (awesome), and 2: probably not actually fun (not awesome). 

Having a fully functional little town where people do their jobs and nothing exciting happens should be, at the very least, much harder now.

We also dropped support for the intel HD3000 and HD4000.  I'm not happy about needing to do it, but we just couldn't come up with a way that we could support it to the level that we'd be comfortable with.  (This is totally why everyone uses Unity now).  Details for this are on the forum and our blog, and if you got the earliest access and are affected, send us an email to our contact address.

As mentioned in the blog post, saves work, but loading them doesn't quite work yet (lol).  We're on the home stretch!

(Edit: Link!  https://www.gaslampgames.com/2014/08/13/ripe-for-harvest-and-the-ce-rev30-update/ )

[Darkmere]

Ah the farming changes sound much more interesting, and doors punching holes is good. I will miss Angry David the Grenade Launcher Icon, though. 'Tis a sad day.

[Citizen Daniel]

The game is now on Steam Early Access!  (It's still Early Access, but the hardware compatibility and the first level of the player interactions were at the level we were waiting for.)

The save game functionality will be pushed to the "internal test" branch of the steam version this afternoon.  It's going to be buggy, it might break, and we're aware that broken saves are Not Fun, so we're going to test it thoroughly before we put it out.  Still anticipating getting it in the default branch early next week.

Spending a good chunk of today just wandering forums and answering questions.  Just wanted to say thanks to everyone here for being interested in the game and what we're up to.  Software development is so much easier when people are interested and engaged

[thepodger]

Anyone have impressions to post?  Is this too early to get a real bang out of playing yet?