Tidalis:1.008 Beta Release

Notes From The Producer: December 9th, 2010

--Christopher M. Park

Gameplay Additions

• Added support for 2nd keyboard player, on 2-well local play the input will go to the mouse-controlled board. The defualt bindings are KeyPad 8/5/4/6 for up/down/left/right (respectively), KeyPad0 for emit, KeyPadPlus for drag. A few other of the 2nd-keyboard binds also have defaults, but most do not; if you're actually using this you'll probably need to think through which keys go where anyway.

Misc

• Upgraded the game from Unity 3D 2.61 to Unity 3D 3.1. This leads to many performance benefits, most notably with things like reading text files, etc. Tidalis is a fairly light load anyhow, so this is less of a noticeable upgrade than with AI War, but it's still nice. It makes the loading of the adventure map pretty instantaneous, for instance.

• Full in-game resolution switching is now supported on OSX, thanks to the upgrade from 2.61 to 3.1. This is a lot more convenient and functional, and the ability to use the external Unity 3D resolution-configuration tool has been removed.

• Upgraded to the new Unity 3.x font placement logic, from the old Unity 2x logic. This fixes a number of issues with fonts having some letters on the edges sometimes inexplicably cut off when rendered in paragraphs (like half the lowercase "l" character, commonly). It also creates some new font positioning issues that we need to clean up before the next official release.

• Upgraded the game to the new GameObject-less graphic rendering style that we developed for AI War. This is vastly faster particularly when there are a lot of moving objects on the screen, or a lot of particles or things that are getting created and disappearing, etc. On some of the themes, this literally quadruples the framerate on our test machines, and in cases of extreme load with a lot going on we're now able to get 200fps where we were previously lucky to get 10 or 15 fps.
  • This may also fix some various small bugs with the image rendering for things like theme animations getting out of sync sometimes, but that remains to be seen for sure.

• Upgraded the game to the new sound playback system that we developed for AI War. This preemptively prevents any crashing issues over time that might have come up with the new version of Unity (as happened with AI War), and it also puts less load on the disk IO during general gameplay, also contributing to a higher framerate when a lot is going on, especially on computers with slower hard disks.

• Updated the updater to use the new more flexible style of updating that AI War uses, that allows us to better load-balance updates to the game.

• Since people are having lots of trouble with shift getting "stuck" and that sort of thing, remapped LeftClickActsAsRightClick from LeftShift to Z.
  • The in-game tutorials, and the game manual, have both been updated to note this.

Bugfixes

• Previously the "multiply objective magnitude by number of active boards" logic could be performed twice, thus resulting in 4x objectives instead of 2x objectives in co-op mode. Fixed to be very sure to not do this.
  • Thanks to Valeroth and Andyroo for reporting.

• Previously the "continue adventure" menu's entry for the save being played would not update to reflect progress unless the app had been restarted since the progress, and continuing from that save without a restart would thus lead to that progress being lost. Fixed to force-update the continue-adventure menu whenever it is shown.
  • Thanks to Valeroth for reporting.

• Fixed a bug that would crash on startup if the settings.dat contained stray newlines.
  • Thanks to Engelbrekt for the report.

• Put in a bugfix to an issue that could cause a very rare crash on first run of the game.
  • Thanks to TheMachineIsSentient for reporting.

Internal Programming Notes

Tidalis