Tidalis:0.901 Beta Release

New & Updated Levels

• Adventure cutscenes 72 and 73 have been added, and 67 has been updated.

New & Updated Art/Music/Sound

• The following themes have been visually updated: Night Marsh Variance, Foothills, Fishing Village.

• New Finale1 and Finale2 music tracks have been added for use in the upcoming adventure ending.

Gameplay Additions

• Added keybinds for setting the direction of the block under the cursor (uses the keyboard cursor if that is visible, the mouse cursor otherwise) to a specific direction, defaulting as follows:
  • W - Up
  • S - Down
  • A - Left
  • D - Right
  • This will work as long as you hold it down, so holding down A (or whatever key you change the bind to) while moving across a row of blocks will make them all point left.

Gameplay Updates

• The logic for when blocks "hard land" after "hard falling" has been tweaked to make more sense with blocks that are rising up in water, or falling more slowly due to eaters or water or similar.

Misc

• Added items to the the pre-level display.

• There are no longer any known desyncs in the game, which means that Network Play is now possible, although there are still a ton of rough edges everywhere (the biggest one being that it doesn't tell you when the other player loses or wins).
  • This functionality took a bit of a backseat over the weekend, as we were working on our new online server listing service and there were a few time-sensitive things we had to get finished with that piece of functionality before it got too close to official release time. Now that is all done, and we're back to working on the rest of the polish for the network play in general.

• Added Find Internet Games button to Network Play Menu, which has the first pass of the online server listing service.
  • There is still a lot we need to finish and refine here, as well, but it's coming along well as of this release, on the new servers that we set up over the weekend to handle the load and extra functionality that this requires (that was a big job).

• The Debug Allowed Turns Increase (F6) and Debug Allowed Turns Infinite (F7) testing hotkeys have been removed. They were less powerful than the F4/F5 testing hotkeys, anyway, and had innate incompatibility with multiplayer play.

Bugfixes

• Fixed bug where pit monsters were chowing down during the initial block settling phase that happens before the board is shown.

• Fixed bug that was letting tooltips show for invisible controls on some windows with scroll areas.

• Fixed bug that that could cause streams to go in between two blocks on the horizontal axis in some cases.
  • Thanks to jkefka for reporting.

• Fixed an issue that sometimes had the Game Over screen buttons hanging off the bottom of the screen on the smallest screen resolutions.

• Fixed a potential unhandled exception error on stream movement.

• Fixed a crash bug in the last prerelease relating to trying to load certain levels in trial mode of the game.

• Fixed a bug in the last prerelease that was preventing quick games from being played at all in trial mode.

• Fixed a bug in the last prerelease that was causing desyncs as soon as the F4/F5 testing hotkeys were used.

• Previously, the game would crash and be unplayable when an anim.dat file was corrupt. Fixed so that it now shows a temporary error, logs the details, and moves on, instead.

Internal Programming Notes

• The Debug Output (F3) now includes a lot more information about the individual boards, helpful for desync hunting.

• The game now has safety-checking code in place to avoid crashing on invalid keybinding definitions in the settings.dat file

Tidalis