Tidalis:0.908 Beta Release

Notes From The Producer: July ??, 2010

--Christopher M. Park

New & Updated Levels

• Adventure cutscenes 115 and 116 are now complete.
  • This marks the completion of the main story for the adventure mode!

• 15 new brainteasers have been added to the game.

• Basic tutorial 9 has been tweaked.

• 1 new hidden cutscene has been added, 1 hidden cutscene has been updated.

New & Updated Art/Music/Sound

• The heat glow effect for a couple of themes has gone back to the old (better) visuals, but without the bugs. It turns out this is hardly the CPU/GPU load we initially thought it might, as well.

• Now that the bugs are fixed in the heat glow, the heat glow once again works properly with the Volcano theme.

• The combo fanfare sound effects have been updated to be more pleasant.
  • Thanks to yllamana for suggesting.

• The combo numbers are now quite translucent, which makes them not get in the way as they previously were.

• The visual effects of the red, blue, and magenta streams have been improved.

• The visual effect of the combo text looks significantly nicer now.

Gameplay Updates

• Pressing the middle mouse button now sets a "manual mark 4" that is something only the mouse can control (if both the keyboard and mouse are present, then the other three manual marks are controlled by the keyboard instead of the mouse). This makes it both fast and easy for the mouse player to make manual marks at any time.
  • There is also a new hotkey (H) that lets the keyboard player jump to the block that was marked by the mouse player. This adds to the potential co-op activities in that the mouse player can leave a mark for the keyboard player to then quickly jump to.

• The score bonus for fewer moves in brainteasers has been removed.

• Blocks in hard-fall will now hard-hit blocks in the process of being cleared.

• Flood chains now only 4-fork on matching-color blocks.

• When there are 400 or more streams on a single board, the game now does a "Stream Implosion," which clears all the streams immediately and scores them at that time. It's quite a challenge to actually get it to the level of 400 streams at once, but this prevents runaway slowdowns as well as exploitative tactics.
  • When there are 100 or more streams on a single board, the game now stops drawing stream trails in those situations, which will make it less of a performance hit in those extreme situations.

Misc

• Added paging controls to find-internet-games window for when more than 100 hosts are found.

• Improved host grid table display of skill level matchmaking data, spacing of column headers, etc.

• If you have an item loaded into the mouse cursor and either click one of your palette slots with the same item type, it will now unload the item from the cursor.

• If you have an item loaded into the active cursor (the keyboard cursor if active, the mouse cursor otherwise) and press the 1-5 key corresponding to the slot that the item came from, it will now unload the item from the cursor.

• Added tooltip for LMB = RMB keybind on the keybinding settings screen.

• The Key Bindings screen has undergone some more refinement.

• It is no longer possible to make the game go into a literal paused state when the game is already over. This prevents players from being forced into the menus by other players during network play.

• Scores from chains now pop up briefly when chains are completed.

• A new "Disable Score and Combo Popups" has been added to the settings screen.

• The mouse/keyboard "assigned to left board" options have been moved from the main Settings screen to the Player Settings screen. The Settings screen has thus been readjusted to look slightly less overwhelming this way.

• When players try to right-click and drag on a direction-locked block, there is now a visual shake effect on the lock in addition to the sound effect.

• When players try to emit a stream from a block, but cannot for some reason (usually that block not being a stream-emitting kind of block, or there already being streams on the board and this not being frenzy mode), the entire block shakes to show that this is intentionally not able to emit a stream. This should avoid any possible confusion with players wondering if their click was simply not registered or similar.

• Added story achievements.

• Added non-placeholder achievement icons.

• The list of adventure savegames now shows what percentage complete each savegame is through the main story levels, and through that adventure overall.

• When network server or client error messages are received, a chat message now pops up on the machine that had the error. These errors are usually non-fatal to the game, but it is good to know when they are happening.

• Added Report Inappropriate Player Name function to Find Internet Games grid.

Bugfixes

• Fixed a very obscure crash bug relating to stream movement in general, but which was most likely to be brought out with emission statues.
  • Thanks to Purogia for reporting.

• Previously a block getting eaten by an Eater block would sometimes result in the block above the Eater hard-falling and emitting; fixed to not do that.

• Fixed bug that was enabling the "Claim Victory" button in the wrong cases.

• Previously on low resolutions the level-preview tooltip would draw under the play->levels menu, fixed.

Internal Programming Notes

Tidalis