Tidalis:1.001 Beta Release

Notes From The Producer: July 26, 2010

The official release of Tidalis has come and gone, and the game has now been officially in the hands of players and reviews for a week now. Overall things are looking great, but there are a few things that players have found or have suggested that we wanted to take care of. This beta update marks the first steps toward our first free DLC update for Tidalis (which will also include fixes for the various post-release reported bugs, most of which are thankfully pretty minor). The official release of this DLC update is expected to be sometime this week or next week, but for now this is the first of at least two or three beta updates to come out in the meantime.

--Christopher M. Park

IMPORTANT - Direct Download Links

Unfortunately, after the 1.001 version was released it was discovered that the 1.000 version of the game has a broken download mechanism for its installer. We ran into this one other time, all the way back at 0.401, so fortunately we have a simple mechanism for dealing with that. If you simply download and run the manual patch program below for your operating system (Windows or Mac), then you'll be all set and future automatic updates should work just fine.

• Windows 1.005 Patch
• Mac OSX 1.005 Patch

We apologize for the inconvenience of this—the 1.000 version fixed a problem with the Mac version of the updater, and unintentionally introduced this larger problem to both the Windows and Mac versions of the game.

New & Updated Levels

• The objectives for level 39 were confusing to many players. This level has been updated to include the following explanation text:
  • The difference between "a combo of 3 chains and 2 depth" and "a combo of 3 chains and 3 depth" is the difference between "having two children" and "having one child and one grandchild".
  • So, in this specific level you want three different combos with each having two children, while avoiding having three combos with any grandchildren.
  • Thanks to Hans-Martin Portmann for reporting the confusion first.

New & Updated Art/Music/Sound

• The fullscreen screen resolutions dropdown normally just includes whatever resolutions Unity 3D and the OS report as being supported by the graphics card. However, this was a problem for some players for whatever reason with their OS/drivers combination.
  • So now the fullscreen resolutions dropdown includes a forced list of at least the following listed resolutions, with any other reported resolutions from the OS being added to this list. Resolutions that are noted as supported from Unity 3D are starred in the dropdown.
  • The list of resolutions that will always appear in the list regardless of what the OS reports as supported are:
    • 800x600
    • 1024x600, 1024x768
    • 1280x600, 1280x720, 1280x768, 1280x960, 1280x1024
    • 1400x1050
    • 1680x1050
  • Thanks to Ancestral, kout, and orzelek for suggesting 1680X1050.
  • Thanks to CautiousChaos for suggesting 1024x600.
  • Thanks to Alex22 for suggesting 1280x1024.

Gameplay Updates

• The "Clear Blocks" objectives no longer consider the two wall blocks as being blocks for purposes of their calculations.

• When a single chain is next to multiple cured blocks, there is only one x10 score bonus now applied, rather than one bonus per cured block.

Misc

• Added a new "post-release suggestions" section to the in-game credits so that bug reports and suggestions made after the game's official release can now be noted.

• When one player connects to another, it now always puts up a prompt confirming that both players wish to connect. It also plays the chat message tone.
  • Thanks to Hans-Martin Portmann for suggesting the popup message.
  • Thanks to Joshua Yu for suggesting the audible tone.

• The "Start Adventure" button in the guided tour window has been renamed to simply "Adventure," and now functions the same as the "Adventure" button in the Play menu does. This was formerly causing some confusion.

• The "Main Menu" text on the guided tour window has been adjusted as follows:
  • Right now you're just looking at the tour! There's a lot more options available from the actual Main Menu.

• The "Go Away" text on the guided tour window has been adjusted as follows:
  • Normally when you go to the Main Menu, it leaves the Guided Tour active. If you're done with the tour, click here.

• Previously, when achievements were unlocked it was sending an onscreen chat message to the player as well as actually showing the unlocked achievements. Now it just shows the unlocked achievements, keeping the chat log clear.

Bugfixes

• Fixed a rather evil bug wherein an adventure savegame could become unable-to-be-saved-to after used in a network co-op play session if the player who was supplying the savegame was not the game host.
  • Thanks to Hans-Martin Portmann for reporting.

• Fixed a bug that was causing block direction changes to not always be recorded correctly in the stats screens.

• Fixed a couple of minor bugs and possibly one desync relating to block animations (and particularly the dying animation).

Internal Programming Notes

Tidalis