Tidalis:0.854 Beta Release

Notes From The Producer: June 15, 2010

Okay, this is the final release before our PAX 10 submission, which is today. A fair number of little tweaks in here, including a couple of really critical ones for Mac players in particular. Now I've just got to get the installer packages rebuilt and uploaded, and we'll be good to go!

--Christopher M. Park

New & Updated Levels

• A number of small tweaks have been made to the Sampler levels, most notably to their text.

New & Updated Art/Music/Sound

• The Open Plains and Open Plains Cloudy themes have been visually polished and now have a tremendous amount of animation in the grass and flowers, etc.

Misc

• The font sizes on the game over popup have been increased to be more readable like those on the before-level popup.

• Some improvements have been made to the fonts used to increase readability and avoid cutoff of the text in certain circumstances.

• The game no longer allows resolution switching on the Mac, instead having a message explaining how to go about switching the resolution using the Unity dialog on that platform, since the Mac version of Unity currently has a bug that doesn't work correctly with in-game resolution switching.

• The images needed for the core block style selector are now preloaded at the start of the program to avoid the need to run a loading screen when that dropdown is opened.

• Added logic to prevent entering a hidden level if you haven't beaten at least one normal level in the adventure.

• Weather effects are now preloaded at game start to avoid loading screens at inopportune times.

Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug where, on Windows in particular, sometimes the game was using the incorrect folder for reading and writing settings, etc.
  • If this causes your settings to get reset, we apologize for that; but it will also solve your settings seeming to be lost every time you update your game, if you were seeing that issue. You can get the old settings back by looking in the following locations:
    • Vista/Windows 7:
      • C:\Users\(your windows username)\AppData\Local\Tidalis
    • Windows XP:
      • C:\Documents and Settings\(your windows username)\Local Settings\Tidalis
  • If your settings are missing, most likely your savegames are, as well. You can just copy the Save folder and the settings.dat folder over to be inside the RuntimeData inside your Tidalis install folder, and you're all good. The default folders for that are:
    • Vista/Windows 7:
  • C:\Program Files (x86)\Tidalis\RuntimeData
    • Windows XP:
  • C:\Program Files\Tidalis\RuntimeData
  • Again if this bugfix causes you any inconvenience, we do apologize. It's definitely for the best in the long-term.

• The number of worker threads used on the Mac for loading game images/sounds/etc has been dropped from 8 to 4, to prevent issues that were actually causing the game to load slower on Macs because of errors with the excess threads.

• Fixed bug where game style icons would show through to the title screen after the current board had been unloaded.

• Fixed a bug that could sometimes lead to loading screens during cutscenes. Now it only ever does a loading screen at the start of a cutscene, if it needs to load images.

Internal Programming Notes

Tidalis