Starward Rogue:Post-1.0 Release Notes

Version 1.010

(This isn't done yet, we're still working on it.)

• The way that the completion percentage is calculated has been massively updated to now include your perfections against bosses, your wins with incredibilities, and so on.

• The full 7-floor runs now unlock after 3 runs rather than 10.
  • We originally did it as 10 because another popular game in the genre does that. But lately we've been getting frustrated at how long it takes before players are even able to see that awesome content that comes after beating The Warden three times. For a youtuber or a twitch streamer it's really quite a time investment to even consider it.
  • Thanks to dfinlay for giving us the kick in the pants to actually make the shift, though. :)

• Fixed a scripting mistake on Cheapskate.
  • Thanks to sherpajack for reporting.

• Added an attribute to entity nodes: frequency_in_enemy_seeding (int, default 100)
  • this is actually an alias to frequency_in_item_pools, which now also impacts normal enemy seeding frequencies, but this name would make more sense in the xml for enemies

• Fixed a bug where the "win run having held incredibility X since Floor 1" achievements weren't working because they were requiring you to pick the item up on Floor Zero... um, yea, sorry.
  • Thanks to Soupinator for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the statistics window wouldn't respond to the Cancel or OpenMenu keybinds, and thus couldn't be closed via controller.
  • Thanks to Reath for reporting.

• Now if you somehow get stuck completely outside the room's boundary rectangle it will gradually bump you into it, to avoid it being a bricked run.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where in the rare cases that floor generation just couldn't come up with something after a hundred tries, you could get a partial run generated but not the whole thing. Now in those cases it just rerolls the whole dungeon, and keeps jolly well doing so until it finishes one properly.

• Fixed a bug where floorgen would sometimes allow mismatched door connections, which could leave you stuck in a wall if you went through one. Now it throws those floors back.

• Now when you use a mysterious circuit you didn't know about yet it displays a message in the upper-left with the name and description of the now-known circuit.

• Setting a bullet pattern loop's iterations to zero just has it never execute its body now, instead of acting like iterations="1".
  • Thanks to ptarth for suggesting.

• Halved the frequency at which Tiny Transport seeds.

• Now when the game is loading xml content, it checks afterward to see if there's any data (specifically, attributes) it didn't use, and if it finds any it fusses in a short message in the upper-right message log and dumps the details to UnrequestedXMLAttributes.txt
  • Bear in mind that the message log doesn't show on the title screen, but does show on the file select screen.
  • Thanks to ptarth, zharmad, Misery, and many others for inspiring this change.

Version 1.009

(Released January 28th, 2016)

• Expanded the new "does not block sight even though it blocks pathing" thing to a bunch more room features; the enemies may not actually be able to _hit_ you while you're hiding behind that laser emitter, but they can try. And have a much better chance than if you were actually behind a solid wall.

• Added new attribute to the bullet pattern "loop" node: take_pants_off_head (bool)
  • This suppresses, for this loop tag, the longstanding (all the way back to TLF) bug where on iterations after the first it would often skip the first action in the loop.
  • For the less sarcastic content contributors, you can use an alias for this new attribute: suppress_loop_bug
  • This defaults to false because many of the existing loop tags would cause infinite-loop behavior if the bug were fixed for them.
  • Thanks to ptarth, Misery, and others for reporting.

• Added stats for how many runs until you unlock 7-floor runs, and for which incredibilities you've won a run while holding.

• Energized Glass Hull is now disabled (likely to be removed unless it it re-worked).
  • New Incredibility - Corrupting Power : Gain a high amount of max energy and you will regenerate energy over time... but at what cost? ;)

• A new "metal grinder" deadly pursuer enemy has been added to the game.
  • Credit to community member ptarth for yet another awesome creation.

• A new "Tiny Transport" enemy has been added to the game.
  • Tiny Transport. These are kind of like the health and potion gnomes from Golden Axe; the more hits you can get in on them before they explode, the more drops you get.

• A number of OSX controller incompatibilities (and linux ones as well) should now be solved. We had not noticed that were were a preponderance of preprocessor compiler directives in the InControl code, rather than using Application.platform. Given we compile on windows, this created a problem. We've shifted everything over to be compile-computer-agnostic, so presumably those issues (they were actually missing bindings) should be fixed.
  • Please do let us know if this doesn't do it, though. We haven't actually had a chance to test it out in the situations that were an issue before. It's been a... trying... day.
  • Thanks to Sounds, Sounds of Silence, beatnikbedlam, lessster, and RuySan for reporting.

Version 1.008

(Released January 27th, 2016)

• Kill tracking for multi-stage entities now only happens when the final stage dies, and it tracks under the first stage's name.
  • This avoids a problem where you got "credit" for killing a boss when you'd only killed the first stage, even if you then died before winning the fight.
  • Thanks to Danjuro for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where the difficulty of the tutorial was being set according to the last run of the test chamber (which is basically just for devs and modders), and since the tutorial is the first thing that runs when you start a new file it could result in all your new files being set to Misery difficulty without you realizing it.
  • This may have only impacted a certain developer who was wondering why he was suddenly so bad at this game.

• The game is now way more aggressive about using different room scripts for rooms of the same general type, until it runs out of "new" ones and then it just starts over.

• The energy bar in the lower-left now shows your actual current and max amount of energy.
  • Thanks to Ljas for suggesting.

• Now any inventory item type (missiles, energy, etc) that has a maximum cannot have that maximum modified below 1. Otherwise when it hit zero it just becomes "no max" and doesn't work right.
  • Thanks to Nargasse for reporting.

• The minimap now doesn't show icons for missiles or credits left in a room if you're at max capacity for those items.
  • Thanks to Apathetic for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where weapons with shots_per_salvo > 1 and placed in a system offset would not properly offset the secondary shots.
  • Thanks to ptarth for reporting.

• There's now a short "Victory!" display after you win a run, followed by a fade to black, rather than dumping you straight to the menu when the last floor boss dies.
  • You are invincible during this time.
  • Thanks to Ljas and zharmad for inspiring this change

• Keyprentice is now on level 3 instead of level 9, and it now only gives you 5 keys instead of 10.
  • Keymaster is now on level 8 instead of level 10, and now only gives you 20 keys instead of 50.
  • Thanks to zharmad for suggesting.

• When we updated the game to the new version of Unity, apparently it switched our fullscreen mode into windowed borderless instead of true fullscreen mode, which performs worse. It now runs in true fullscreen mode again.
  • Thanks to Soupinator for reporting.
  • Also thanks to his workaround for v1.007: "Current workaround: use -force-opengl in the command line, since fullscreen is only broken in the Direct3D renderer, but this makes the graphics a bit fuzzy."

• In an effort to make sure you actually see the various items we worked so hard to make, and to make getting loot more exciting:
  • Your base chance to get loot after winning a room is the same, but each time you fail the roll it goes up for next time until it succeeds.
  • When room-win loot would give you a consumable item (as opposed to a minor item), at various intervals it will instead give you a main-weapon, energy-weapon, or power-up item. Those intervals are randomized but controlled to ensure some rate of each.
  • When seeding from many of the significant item pools, the game's now fairly aggressive about not seeding the same thing more than once when there are still things that haven't been seeded. When it runs out of choices under this rule it starts over for that (group of) pools.
  • When you open an unlocked chest, you have a small chance of getting loot from the locked-chest pool. If this roll fails the chance goes up for next time until it succeeds.
  • The game is now much more aggressive at making sure it seeds all of the available reward/shop rooms before it goes back to ones it's already seeded in that run.
  • Thanks to Misery, Wingflier, evilution, zharmad, Matruchus, and others for inspiring these changes.

• The max-health reduction from losing a condemned room or from buying an item with health are now applied after the difficulty-based health multipliers, so they don't cause greater-than-expected losses on lower difficulties.
  • Thanks to Jacic for reporting.

• XP yield from depositing credits at a console is now multiplied by floor number, as with other XP gain.
  • Thanks to Apathetic for suggesting.

• Added a button to the test chamber screen that tries to open the Starward Rogue wiki in your browser.

• Now when you have the steam overlay active, the game pauses in the same way as when the escape menu is open.
  • Thanks to Apathetic for reporting.

• Now when a room script is flipped on either the x axis or the y axis (but not both), any entities with passive_rotation_speed in the room act as if that value's sign were flipped.
  • Thanks to Tornis and Pepisolo for reporting.

• The visuals for caltrops and floating debris have been updated to be a lot more visible, since some folks were having trouble seeing them.

• The normal enemy health bar is now at the top where the boss health bar is (if both are shown, the non-boss one goes lower).
  • This also means the normal enemy health bar doesn't block other tooltip info from showing, and vice versa.
  • Thanks to Castruccio and zharmad for inspiring this change.

• Brute now only grants a 10% bonus to attack power, not a 20% bonus. That was getting to be a bit overpowered.

• The costs of items in the health sacrifice shops are now much more substantial, since the overall amounts of health players have these days is a lot higher and thus these were way too cheap to get.
  • Anything that cost 3 before now costs 7, things that cost 2 before now cost 5, and things that cost 1 before now cost 3.

• Sideshot no longer seeds until you are two floors down.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

• The term "reload time" has uniformly been changed to be "fire rate." Before both terms were used, which was confusing.
  • Thanks to Tornis for suggesting.

• In recent builds, Terror Bubbles were just sitting there on Normal difficulty and down, because they had no weapons on those difficulties. Fixed!
  • Thanks to Cinth and Nova225 for reporting.

• The impassable glass blocks that you can shoot through now no longer block line of sight.
  • Note: this won't help with rooms you've already entered, because the data is set up when the block is spawned.
  • Thanks to crazyroosterman and Misery for reporting.

• Now if you've picked up an incredibility, and you pick up another, the first is dropped on the ground.
  • Thanks to Misery for suggesting.

• The fire left by your mech when you have a hotrod system is now much larger, thus looking more interesting.

• The game now uses a scaled radial dead zone of 0.25 for all analog input thumbsticks, which means that they should all "just work" now.
  • This is the same as they had prior to us moving to the more recent InControl asset, which was using 0.2 instead and was using an inferior algorithm.
  • This in particular should patch up the XBox 360 controllers that are a little worn. If any of them still have trouble, then there are now sliders inside the main Game tab of the settings window that allow you to adjust these to the needs of your particular controller.
  • Thanks to [ES.GR] Ziltoid Le Muet (Cpl), Sounds, lessster, Invader Xom, Rhakyr, Castruccio, beatnikbedlam, and Apathetic for reporting.

Version 1.007

(Released January 26th, 2016)

• Fixed a bug where bouncing mines had a different damage type (Ballistic) than stationary mines (Explosive), and thus stuff that gave immunity to explosive damage didn't protect you from bouncing mines.
  • Thanks to waylon531 for reporting.

• Now when you press E to level up, if there are any more of those big central screen messages still showing they're cleared so they don't get in the way of the level up display.
  • Thanks to Moonshine Fox for inspiring this change.

• Made the glass pots no longer shootable by enemies.

• There will no longer ever be more than one Sideshot seeded per room, thanks to a new never_seed_more_than_one_per_room flag on it.
  • This flag is ignored on Misery difficulty, so you can run into really brutal groups of enemies there still.
  • Thanks to nas1m for suggesting.

• The game now properly uses aliases for some of the common center-gamepad buttons so that they all map the same way across gamepads. Aka the Menu button on the XBox One controller is the same as Start on the 360. And the View button on the XB1 is the same as the Back on the 360. That way you don't have to change your default mappings around to get those to work. Start and Select also map to those, respectively, for usage on PS3 controllers and similar.
  • In the past this was set up for the 360, but with the prior version we inadvertently set this up for the XB1 so that the 360 then required a remapping to a control icon that looked identical. No longer!

• In windows, the game now uses XInput rather than the default wrappered unity input. This fixes a few lingering issues with the triggers on the xbox one controller in windows only (they were fine in other OSes as of last version).

• The game now allows you to back out of most windows using the menu button as well as the cancel button. This has been requested for a while, actually, and isn't related to the new input interface.

• Fixed up the way that the hitting escape/B/cancel to get out of the game at the main menu was not working properly in the prior version.

• Fixed a number of bugs relating to the virtual gamepad cursor in the escape menu selecting the wrong thing.

Version 1.006

(Released January 26th, 2016)

• Added new toggle to extras tab of settings window: Always Use OS Cursor
  • If this is on, the game never uses the gamepad "virtual cursor" even if the gamepad is in use.
  • Thanks to Saphirahk and nas1m for inspiring this change.

• Now if the revealed minimap is so big that it overruns its borders on the escape menu, it is scaled down to at least roughly fit within it.
  • Thanks to Tolc for reporting.

• New "Gemini siblings" enemies from community member zharmad!

• Fixed a bug where shopkeeper kills were not checked for achievements because it never did the room-win logic for shops.
  • Thanks to Matruchus for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where one of the three code-branches that checks for waking the shopkeeper was checking the thing doing the damage rather than the shopkeeper for the waking-immunity to stuff not directly fired by the player.
  • Thanks to Reinhark, Cinth, and Matruchus for reporting.

• Fixed a null exception that could occur shortly after loading a save.
  • Thanks to Danjuro for reporting.

• Changed the logic of using keycards to unlock all doors in the room on the other side, rather than just the door facing you.
  • Otherwise a shop/item-room/etc that was locked could take two keys to get "through" to the other side, and if there was literally only one available and that was between you and the boss, well...
  • Also changed mapgen logic so that the next-to-start item room which often spawns cannot be locked, as that can cut off other areas of the map.
  • Thanks to SourKiwi for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the cryofreeze and other aoe effects would try to affect invincible stuff like caltrops.
  • In the case of cryofreeze, this could mean a lot of unnecessary sound effects.
  • Thanks to dumpsterKEEPER for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the "if you destroy a health shard block in a room adjacent to an unknown secret room, reveal that secret room instead of spawning the health shard" logic was instead checking for _known_ secret rooms. Cute.
  • Also, now when you enter a room bordering an unknown secret room, and the room you're entering has no heath-shard blocks (that normally reveal the secret when you blow them up, if there is one to reveal), it tries to convert a normal bombable block to one of those.
    • If it fails to do that, it just reveals the secret room(s).
  • Thanks to nas1m, Watashiwa, and many others for reporting the frustration with secret rooms not being revealed.

• Now when the game is seeding pickups that go in your main gun, energy, missile, or attachment slots it will never pick what you've already got equipped at the time of the seeding.
  • Thanks to TheVampire100 for inspiring this change.

• New enemy "Demesne" added
  • This is another "Fearsome" type of foe... be careful around this guy!

• Fixed a potential null exception bug when starting up the game.
  • Thanks to mrhanman for reporting.

• Backfire now always uses BOTH of it's phases instead of randomly skipping to the second one.
  • It also now has more HP in both phases

• Now the game tracks when you pick up multiples of the same powerup (for instance, level up perks that may be picked multiple times) and displays x2, x3, etc to show that.
  • This won't show that for powerups picked up multiple times in older saves because it wasn't tracked.
  • Thanks to Kevin Feederline, FroBrodine, and waylon531 for suggesting.

• Fixed an issue accidentally introduced in version 1.005 where you could only pick up perks of each type one time, which would lead to blank perk selection screens on later levels.
  • Thanks to Reinhark for reporting.

• ItemGainChanceOnEnemyKill and ItemGainOnEnemyKill modifiers now only proc against Ship entities; so not shots or obstacles.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

Keyboard / Gamepad Controls Updates

• Updated the game engine to Unity 4.7 instead of 4.6.7.
  • We generally try to avoid doing engine updates unless there are benefits or bugfixes that actually impact us. Past experience has taught us that new engine bugs appear unannounced, and we prefer to avoid those when possible by staying on known-stable versions until we need to not.
  • That said, this new version seems to be stable, and also is required in order to support the new InControl plugin.

• We have completely gutted the underlying gamepad support and rebuilt it from the ground up with the InControl asset store plugin as the underlying basis for it.
  • This solves the XBox One controller compatibility issues, as well as making default bindings for the playstation 4 controller and many other main controllers now automatically kick into place.

• The "Fire Up" and "Fire Up (Alt)" keybinds (and their down, left, and right counterparts) now cause your energy and missile weapons to target that direction too, even if normally they would target the mouse cursor.
  • Thanks to dfinlay for inspiring this change.

• There is a new Debug: Show Gamepad Raw Inputs option in the extras tab of the settings menu.
  • If this is on, then any detected raw input from your gamepads will be shown on the left side of the screen. Useful for debugging but not much else.

• The confirm popup now supports gamepad left-right (on either the dpad or the analog stick) to switch between the buttons, and the execute button to simulate a click on the highlighted button.
  • Thanks to Cyprene for inspiring this change.

• Note: these changes have caused us to need to reset all of the existing key bindings to their defaults. If you had custom mappings you will need to remap those. Apologies!

Version 1.005

(Released January 25th, 2016)

• Now when you use the in-game delete function on a file slot, it actually replaces that file with a very small file (just containing the text "deleted") which the game treats as an empty slot.
  • This way, steam cloud will not "helpfully" immediately repopulate the save file.
  • Thanks to ProfessorPaul1290 for reporting.

• Now if you get a corrupt save message you have the option (again, removed late in alpha) to keep or delete.
  • If you delete, it actually copies it to a backup location and overwrites the slot with a small file that the game will treat as empty but the steam cloud will not automatically copy back over.

• The perk screen now continues showing the previous HUD (for stat info).
  • Thanks to robdon for suggesting.

• The knockback_resistance stat now also applies to weapon kickback.

• The RedShift mech now has full immunity to both kickback and knockback.
  • Thanks to Apathetic for inspiring this change.

• set disappears_if_room_left to true on the antigravitate blockage shards
  • Thanks to Apathetic for inspiring this change.

• The boss "Backfire" is now active!
  • This has been completely redone from the ground up from what it used to be in the alpha. Be ready to deal with it's minions!

• The Warden no longer falls asleep during phase 4 of it's attack

• Fixed a bug where the recently added "missiles destroy shootables without them morphing into their more-damaged states" logic was causing the pathfinding-block on shootable-A and shootable-B objects to not be cleared when they died (because it was only being cleared when the C stage died, and that was being skipped).

• Fixed a bug where OnRoomSwitch effects could fire when switching from an old run to a new run.

• Fixed a bug where OnRoomSwitch effects that reduced hull health on the player would not actually do any damage due to the "invincible until leaves the doorway" logic.

• The Medical Emergency pickup now only does its damage when you enter a room for the first time, not every time you switch rooms.
  • Thanks to The Hunter for inspiring this change.

• The Impatience level-up perk now won't show up on the perk menu if you are already on the last floor of the run.
  • Thanks to Apathetic for suggesting.

• The minimap icon for major item rooms and health storage rooms now disappears if you've entered the room and there are no pickups on the floor.
  • Thanks to Apathetic for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug with QuadEE/ZMC_GlassPipes. It was possible to get a Pearl trapped inside of Glass Unbreakable blocks, which made it not shoot or be killable, making the room unexitable.

• Pearls now wake on being shot.
  • Thanks to Apathetic, Cinth, Paladinlord10, and Watashiwa for reporting.

Version 1.004

(Released January 23rd, 2016)

• The minimap on the escape menu now has mouseover tooltips on the individual rooms.
  • The tooltip also lists any items on the ground in that room, if you've been there before.

• Fixed a bug where a familiar that was supposed to only be for that room would respawn if you spawned it, left before it died, and deployed another familiar.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Put in further logic to prevent shopkeepers from being aggroed (or damaged) from sleep by anything other than a player-directed shot.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where chests and other animated "special objects" spawned after room completion were not having their animators set up and thus were invisible (until opened, in the chest case).
  • Thanks to Apathetic for reporting.

• Enemy Spawners now explode when the room is cleared.
  • Thanks to ptarth for inspiring this change.

• The width of columns on the Statistics screen has been broadened to accommodate some of the item names being longer than they were when that screen was set up.
  • This also prevents the close button from overlapping the next page button.
  • Thanks to robdon for reporting.

• Added a "Fire Main Gun" key bind, replacing the hardcoded "hold down left mouse to fire main gun" logic.
  • Thanks to Cyborg for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug where the 5-familiar achievement was counting some familiars twice (or after they died).
  • Thanks to Apathetic for the report and save.

• Fixed a bug where occasionally a direct-fire shot would be fired as if it were "leading" the target.
  • Thanks to Misery for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where the logic for resetting your position after dying in the tutorial was not reopening the doors, and thus causing you to be stuck there on the threshold of the door, if you entered through one.
  • Thanks to Arnos for reporting.

• The game is now set to internally use the en-US format, so that hopefully those using other languages on the linux platform won't have to use the workaround of launching the game with the LC_ALL=C %command% or LANG=en_US %command launch option on.
  • Thanks to lessster for reporting.

• Now the boss intro only has the boss go halfway across the screen, and then scale up to dominate the screen before fading out.
  • Thanks to Omgaar for inspiring this change.

• The default Steam controller recommendation should is now 'Gamepad' instead of "Gamepad with high precision camera/aiming"
  • Thanks to death2cupbots for reporting.

Version 1.003

(Released January 22nd, 2016)

• Fixed a rather serious bug in the last version that was causing the player to not be able to move upon entering rooms. Err... yeah, not sure how that slipped past us. Real sorry about that. We are very tired and clearly should not be making major changes right now. Thanks for understanding!
  • Thanks to Isaac, Cyprene, waylon531, Apathetic, and tupelocase for reporting.

• The banshee now is more aggressive with its counterattacks again. Not so much as pre-1.0, but still a lot more than in 1.0.

Version 1.002

(Released January 22nd, 2016)

• Fixed a bug where you could fire your weapons during just-entered-room invincibility.
  • Thanks to Moonshine Fox and others for reporting.

• The text list of powerups at the bottom right of the escape menu is now a row/grid of icons with mouseovers for the names/descriptions.
  • Thanks to Apathetic and donblas for inspiring this change.

• A new music track has been composed for the game! FTB 629

Version 1.001

(Released January 22nd, 2016)

• The game will no longer seed secret rooms "from" shop, item, miniboss, secret, starting, or condemned rooms to avoid doors that look like they go to nowhere, or cannot be revealed.

• Fixed a longstanding bug where secret rooms were requiring a 2x2 free space on the grid instead of 1x1.

• Extended the destroy-enemy-shots-on-room-clear logic to continue clearing enemy shots from the room afterward instead of just once, as there are a few things that can continue to emit shots.
  • Thanks to Cinth for reporting.

• Updated the changelog to point to this new page.

• Fixed up a mouse input issue that was a recent consequence of a perhaps-foolish major fix to some really unusual gamepads last night, which then broke mouse support for some folks with trackpads. The new system should work for everyone, as it is more unified and gets rid of some of the legacy input code that has been weighing down the button clicking for some time now.
  • Basically unity has an "input" way of handling clicks and such, and a "gui" way of doing it. We used to do a hybrid of both. Now it's all the "input" type, which is better for a lot of reasons.
  • Thanks to nas1m for reporting.

Previous Release Notes

Starward Rogue:Early Alpha Release Notes

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Starward Rogue Main Page