And what’s this 2022 date for FF release? Problems so you’ve had to delay getting it into early access? 
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You are doing it wrong, here give me access to it and I will show you.
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And heres your answer Medea…
Zantai killed all the settlers and they have to do more recruiting so there’s toons availible for us to kill off when they ship 
Zantai = no fun indeed! 
Uhh yeah, so about that… really just, you expect everything to take longer than you expect but then it actually takes even longer than that.
Some of it though is we’ve had to totally re-write certain systems because 3rd party solutions we tried to use for stuff like path-finding worked 99.5% of the time but then it turned out, that 0.5% where it failed was unfixable and we needed to find another option.
Then there’s just dumb stuff like, despite multiple adjustments, the stupid deer respawn / behavior system never quite works as expected cuz reasons…
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Damn. Have to restart all over again from the sounds of it.
And shoo big M, long past your bedtime. 
Dropping 3rd party algorithms in favour of your own? My respect, guys!
I know it’s time-consuming, but that’s the way to go.
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Were the creators of those middlewares not interested / able to fix their stuff? Have you considered to branch out and sell not-buggy middleware yourself?
Yeah, they’re either not interested or unable because, in this case, we’re also using Unity and they can’t change some of the fundamental ways Unity works unless they buy the source, which is probably not financially feasible for them. We actually switched to the Unity pathing after they improved it a lot in an update… but it still had it’s own issues and we had to write some work-arounds.
The thing is, these pathing solutions probably work fine for most games and it is probably very low priority for the creators to address an issue affecting only a very small subset of games. We’re doing all sorts of stuff that is probably outside of what’s in most games - randomly generated maps, lots of units moving at once, buildings that change the nav mesh over time, having to find long pathing solutions around walls or bodies of water…
Creating middleware sounds like an absolute nightmare. We’d need to have a dedicated engineering team working with various companies to resolve all the unique problems they experience because of whatever they’re doing in their game. The potential profit off middleware is probably miniscule compared to what we can make off a hit game. God bless the people who do it lol…
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I see I did not think this through to the end. I just imagined you created an equally powerful, but flawless solution, by which you could take the middleware market by storm… Of course you have just focussed on those features you actually need.
This is obviously to late to change and probably a redundant question but have you tried to look into other engines before for how they work for an rts?
Started playing Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom again to get my hand back in for town builders. Makes me ask will FF have a tutorial? Or will it be dive in and learn by trial and error? Most town builders I’ve played do have tutorials.
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We use a hint system that detects common road blocks or issues in your settlement, and gives you a heads up on how to address them. So right off the bat if you don’t know what to do, you should start seeing some hints about what your settlement needs to give you a nudge in a particular direction.
So, for example, if you need wood for constructing a building, but you have none in storage and no trees are marked for harvesting, the game detects that case and displays a message saying that you need to mark resources for harvesting. In addition, you can click the message to expand it and get a more detailed description of how to mark resources for harvesting, using screenshots and stuff.
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Nice. Thanks for the info. 
New screenshots! Hot from the FF discord.
Also
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Hot pants😱 Absolutely the sexiest town builder screenshot i ever seen. Crate, are u guys creating game or arts?!
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those screenshots remind me of anno 1404. i’m liking the farms’ layouts.
Hurry up and put this out so I can start taking screenshots for my DnD campaign. 