Alpha build 37: base icons fixed, and the game now tunes itself to your machine
Build 37 is live, and the server changed with it, so this one is not optional. Let Steam update, and if it does not show up, exit Steam completely and start it again.
The base building icons are fixed
They were drawing a rough, faceted placeholder instead of the actual building. The cause was that each icon was rendered exactly once, before the model had finished loading, and nothing ever drew it again. They also refresh properly now when you switch faction, instead of showing the architecture of the faction you left.
If you saw the construction panel crawling yesterday morning, that was us too - an attempt at this same fix that made every icon wait almost a second. That is gone.
The game tunes itself to your machine
On first launch the game now measures your hardware and picks a graphics quality level to match, instead of starting everyone on the same settings. If your machine was struggling, it should be noticeably better without you touching anything. You can still set it yourself in Settings, and once you do, the game will not override your choice.
We now collect your hardware details
Worth stating plainly rather than leaving in a patch note. When you sign in, the game now sends us your graphics card, driver version, CPU, memory and screen resolution.
It is hardware information only. Nothing about you, and nothing about what you do in the game.
The reason is a specific one. A tester could not start the game at all, and everything we knew about their machine was the phrase "basic Intel graphics card, 128mb of memory" - which is not enough to tell one Intel chip from another, and not enough to help them. We also had no way to know how many other people are in the same position. Now we do, and we can make decisions about what hardware to support based on what you actually play on rather than guesswork.
Also in this build
Special module types in the Forge read as words instead of the internal code, so you get "Shield Recharge Rate" rather than ShieldRechargeRate.
As ever: if something looks wrong, say so. Both of yesterday's icon bugs were found by testers reporting them in chat, and the second one was a fault we introduced while fixing the first.