Turing Complete — patch notes and updates
Stored observation / content update:
Dated developer announcements recorded from Steam. Open the source for the complete update.
| Update | Date | Excerpt / source |
|---|---|---|
| Turing Complete 2.0 status update | 2025-02-24 | I have been holding out on writing a new post until the 2.0 patch was finished, but it has been too long, so here is a status update. The good news is that you can play the 2.0 alpha already. Right click on the game in your steam library, click on properties and then channels and select "save_breaker". Do note though that there are A LOT of breaking changes, so you might want to back up your saves and start over (in the future there will be an upgrade guide and the game will try to upgrade things automatically as well as possible). Also be aware that there might be some progression breaking bugs in the new campaign. You can find a list of som |
| Where is the patch? | 2023-08-01 | A lot of really hard work has gone into the next upcoming patch. It has taken a long time to get this one ready though (and it still isn't done yet), so some new players are asking if the game is abandoned. It certainly isn't! Here is a quick preview of what is going on behind the scenes: |
| Verilog export added | 2022-09-09 | This update brings a verilog exporter to the game. Verilog is an industry standard hardware description language. With your favorite architecture exported to verilog format, you can theoretically simulate it with other simulators, simulate it on an FPGA (basically circuit simulation hardware) and presumably even get it produced as a chip if you can afford it. However if you are excited to try this out but don't have experience with industry tools, be warned that they are far from as polished from an ease of use perspective, as games like this are. Things can be painful to set up sometimes. In other news, here are some of the things that were |
| Update note | 2022-07-19 | Color blind mode was finally added. The red "OFF" color is replaced by purple, since green / purple should be differentiable for all major forms of colorblindness. Also the purple is brighter so it can be distinguished from contrast as well. Color blind mode can be enabled it in the options menu. If you have colorblindness, let me know how well it works! |
| The schematic hub is live | 2022-07-11 | Check out the schematic hub, it is finally live and there are already a few really cool things uploaded. Players who have 10 total upvotes or more between all their uploads on the 10th of August will get a badge on their profile. |
| Upcoming new feature - Schematics hub | 2022-06-23 | It is finally time to add the feature that I have earlier referred to as "sharing". This will be in the form of an in game interface called the Schematics Hub, where players will be able to upload architectures or custom components and explore what others have uploaded. Players will be able to upvote, downvote or comment on other architectures and custom components. You can expect this update within 1 or 2 weeks. After it has released, there will be a limited time opportunity to earn a new badge, more about that here: I originally announced that I would be working on this new feature a couple of months ago, but the preparations for it ended u |
| New soundtrack! | 2022-05-26 | New music Turing Complete now has a new synthwave soundtrack. As with all music, not everyone is going to like it but I personally can't stop listening to it! You can also find it on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/1NV5KxX785RrwA5RWIz0j8?si=LlUK4wveTpaMeBT9Mh8r1g Progress towards sharing Meanwhile work towards in-game sharing is continuing. Mostly I have been tying up loose ends (like translation) and trying to get to a stable set of components in the game. The goal is to get components stable enough so that shared schematics will never have to be broken by a new update. After finishing these things, actually adding the sharing functi |
| Patch notes | 2022-04-20 | The following was done since the realism patch 3 weeks ago: - Fixed levels, scores, achievements and other things that were broken as a result of the realism patch. - 16 bit and 32 bit components were introduced, as well as a 2 bit decoder and word sized NAND, NOR and XNOR. - The component menu was reworked which was needed to accommodate all the new components. Custom components in the menu are now nested according to the players save folder structure. - The old 64 bit RAM was replaced by 3 new RAM components, which all have their cost scale with their configurable size. The first RAM has a high gate cost, the second has a high delay cost. T |
| Embracing realism and short term roadmap | 2022-03-18 | For a while now I have been working on removing some of the common critiques people had regarding the realism of the game. The main changes have been adding latches and the big change you can watch explained in this video. It is in a video format, because I wanted to explain the changes thoroughly and I fear the blog post would have been too long. Because I wanted to announce this large change properly and not have players guess it ahead of time, I wasn't able to really let players know I was working towards this goal of realism and why. But since the cat is now out of the bag, I am excited to once again be able to share the short term roadma |
| Patch notes | 2022-01-30 | Components now have to be connected to an input to simulate. Watched state had a major upgrade. In the component factory, use a "Watchable state" component to decide what state should be exposed on the custom component. This also adds a state indicator visually on the component. With this you can watch multiple different states inside a custom component or watch deeply nested state. You will have to reconnect your watched state the first time you play this patch. Rendering was made a lot smoother, supporting large circuits. The max zoom level was increased. The buildable area of the architecture map was increased 4x. Save files compressed by |
| Console and FileRom have been added | 2022-01-02 | This patch brings the file rom, while the console was added a few days ago. The console is the first of a couple of display components that are planned. It allows you to print colored characters to a 80x24 display. You can use this for displaying text, creating games or video. https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/851327200736444446/925886627056873562/Screen_Shot_2021-12-30_at_00.02.41.png The file ROM loads bytes from any file on your computer. This can for example be used for importing large amounts of data, building file format parsers or using an external assembler. Both components are unlocked in the sandbox level. |
| Introducing the Delay Buffer | 2021-12-27 | A new idea was suggested which was just too good not to adopt. Instead of having the 1 bit memory be the basis for all memory, it is now a new delay buffer component. All the delay buffer does is take an input and output it the next tick. First of all, this is a good candidate for the simplest possible memory component, which is where we should start. Secondly, it lets the game introduce memory and related concepts in a more intuitive way. And lastly, it makes pipelining architectures easier and score optimizing more interesting. 2 new early game levels were added to introduce the concept. |
| Refactoring patch complete | 2021-12-23 | This patch completely reworks how simulation of schematics work. This should increase simulation speed, fix random crashes from a memory leak and a race condition and make UI components work in fast simulation mode. This might not sound too exciting, but soon I will add more screen components (the old one doesn't work now and will be removed), a new keyboard component, file and networking components. You may notice that your watched state has been disconnected after upgrading to this patch. |
| A debrief and the road ahead | 2021-11-20 | Debrief The original plan to have a "soft launch" of this game and scale up the player base slowly completely failed. Believing that games don't become popular without at least a bit of marketing, I thought I was well prepared when the game launched. With a handful of active beta testers, I wasn't aware of any bugs or anything I urgently needed to change, but with a high launch discount 500 players joined on launch day and I had to scramble to keep up with. That said I am of course very happy people are interested in the game. Besides a ton of bug fixes the most noteworthy changes in the 6 weeks since launch are: - 5(?) new levels - A few new |
| New save system and how to fix missing IO components | 2021-11-07 | The save menu has been upgraded with the following features: - Folder support - Use filenames up to 45 characters - Add descriptions to your schematics - Rename custom components without having them disappear in your architectures - Get a warning before deleting custom components that are also in architectures Soon to come will be allowing nested components in the component factory. Also a bug was fixed that might have caused your input or output component to get deleted. If you are stuck on a level with messed up IO components, do the following: 1. Go to the save menu and create a new schematic 2. Copy paste your work to the schematic 3. Del |
| 0.158 Beta | 2021-10-14 | WASD movement New Byte Expander and Byte Compressor that shows signed 8th bit A bunch of minor improvements to make the early game more accessible And a few bug fixes |
| Fixes performance drops in long play sessions | 2021-10-13 | Some of you have been building large circuits and have been complaining that frame rates started to drop after playing for a while. This patch should fix that. |
| Custom component link moved | 2021-10-10 | This patch contains lots of little updates I want to get out there, but I wanted to give a heads up about the following: The link from architectures to custom components is now found in the custom component panel. So click on the custom component you want to edit, then click on the wrench in the upper right corner. (Note it doesn't actually take you to the same schematic as the custom component you clicked on, but it will soon) |
| Moved decoder level | 2021-10-07 | In this patch the decoder level was changed and moved to an earlier more natural place. Your old decoder solution will still work but some of it might be outside the level boundaries. If this bothers you, just create a new circuit and solve it again. Also I apologize for deleting the byte subtractor component the other day without a prior heads up, since it must have broken some players circuits. That wont happen again without notice. |
| Changes to the level map | 2021-10-05 | The player base grew by 100x over night so lately there has been a lot quick hot fixes for game breaking bugs. Those were uploaded as soon as I could. In this patch though, you will likely notice that layout of the level map has changed in the following ways: - The level architecture level "Output Bit" was removed - The early game level "Double Trouble" was added to make "Counting Signals" easier - "Bigger AND gate" and "Bigger OR gate" were moved to the early game There has been a bunch of typo fixes and a few level specific quality of life improvements. Next short term fix is to the incompatibility with certain Linux distros. |