The second major stage of Alpha 9 is progressing nicely. Everything's planned out, and all the individual pieces are built. Time to stitch them all together to create the new map and plot events coming in the next release. You'll get to see what's up with Warlord, up close and personal.
Alpha 9 will be out some time next week, and you can expect the usual feature preview before then, maybe the weekend.
The most recent non-spoiler visual improvement I can share is this, nearby explosions vibrating console windows independently:
The duration of the effect varies based on the strength of the explosive force and the distance between its origin and your position. This isn't the same as screenshake, which is applied uniformly across the entire screen and denotes core damage. Both are controlled by the same options menu setting, and therefore optional--just an immersion feature you can turn off if it bothers you. It doesn't shake the map, just the windows around it. (The gif can't capture it at high enough FPS to show the true effect--it looks better in game, but you get the idea
)
If you're a mouse user, I put out a patch for a bug that prevents drag-drop interaction when your core integrity is low. The patch and more information are available
here. I still can't believe a bug like that has gone unreported for so long! Many thanks to seafrank for letting me know.
Last week out of the blue an LPer with 300k subs picked up Cogmind to do a quick intro (
). Apparently they're interested in doing a full series on it at some point, which would be pretty neat
