Tidalis:0.850 Beta Release

New & Updated Levels

• Adventure levels 73-76 have been added to the game.

• Many levels for adventure mode that previously just had numbers now also have names.

• The offsets on a number of the cutscenes have been fixed, and there is now a new cutscene for level 31.

• The difficulty of adventure levels 16 and 22 have been adjusted downward.

• The two advanced tutorials on scoring and combos have been updated.

New & Updated Art/Music/Sound

• The title menu has been updated substantially with new animations and art aspects.

• The game engine has been given a major upgrade to support keyframing of sprites, which lets us do all sorts of cool effects without extra RAM requirements. We'll be making use of this in future Arcen titles, too.

• The scaling down of the game board on monitors that are too small now looks vastly better thanks to Bilinear filtering on those textures instead of the normal Point filtering (that is normally used for the sake of having pixel-perfect sprites).

• The scaling and rotation of sprites in general, and the movement of uv animations, is now noticeably higher quality, also thanks to using Bilinear filtering here instead of Point.

• Other minor art tweaks abound.

New Level Editor Features

• The old Board Name field has been split into new Display Name and File Name fields.
  • The Display Name is what is shown in the application (and can contain special characters, as well as being localizable), and the File Name is what is stored on disk.
  • The old trick of putting underscore (_) at the start of a filename to make it invisible in the levels listing is still alive and well, but now those levels don't appear with an underscore when players actually play those levels via the adventure mode.

• There is now a new Authored By field that allows people to "sign" levels with their name or nickname. When a level has an author filled in, that author is shown directly underneath the name of the level whenever anyone plays that level.

• The Theme Editor now has a Save And Test button that makes it vastly faster to test themes.

• The palette windows for the Theme Editor, Adventure Editor, and Level Editor are now smaller and better positioned from the start to be less obtrusive.

Misc

• Delete saved-adventure function changed from control-left-click to an actual button on the continue adventure interface; to use click the delete button and then click the adventure you want to delete (it will prompt for confirmation).

• Polished Stats window display.

• Polished Credits display a bit (just removing excess scrolling room at the bottom, really).

• Added Achievements tab to the Stats Window; it displays all achievements in the game (only 6 implemented as of this change-log entry), and time of completion (if any).

• Added support for the IsPlushyPile attribute to the Cutscene SpriteDisplay element.

• Split stats window Stats tab into two tabs: Summary Stats and Detailed Stats.

• Split High Scores screen into an All-Time tab and a Daily tab.

• Added level-details tooltips for when the mouse cursor is hovering over an adventure map node (or a level in the Play->Levels menu or the Level Editor level selection menu).

• Theme select on Custom Game and Quick Game now displays the name of the theme in a tooltip when the mouse cursor hovers over a theme.

• The descriptions for a number of the special blocks and game modes have been updated to be more pleasant and less clinical.

• Hitting escape (or pressing the menu button) from the Adventure Editor, Theme Editor, or Level Editor will now bring you back to the menu you were on that brought you into the editor (the adventure selector, the theme selectors, and the select-a-level-within-the-selected-level-set windows, respectively... try it, it makes sense), rather than back to the main menu.

• Combined Continue Adventure and New Adventure buttons from the Play menu, now if you have saved adventure records it will go to Continue Adventure which now has a New Adventure button. If you don't have any saved adventure records or you hit the New Adventure buttons, if there's only one adventure defined in the game data (which is the default case) it will automatically try to start that adventure, otherwise it will bring up the New Adventure menu so you can pick which adventure.

• Added Cancel button to the New Adventure "name your save game" prompt.

• Now pressing the escape key or the menu button (which are the same thing, basically) during a quick game, custom game, or play->Levels game, it will bring you back to the quick game menu, custom game menu, and the pick-a-level-from-the-selected-folder menu, respectively.

• Added scrolling border indicators on the adventure map, when there is room to scroll.

• Added "Skip Cutscene" button when viewing a scene.

• Added "Are You Sure You Want To Quit?" confirmation to the overall Quit button.

• Added "Guided Tour" window for first time you run the game (until you tell it to stop, basically).

• Continuing a saved adventure now automatically scrolls the map as far to the right as possible to save the player the trouble of doing so.

• Added Tutorials phase of guided tour.

• Added "Restart Guided Tour" button to Settings menu.

• Updated achievement images from default apple-collectible to something new.

• Made Quit button use the same "should I be visible" logic as most of the other bottom-of-the-title-screen buttons.

• Added "Back To Tour" button on top-left, similar visibility rules as the Quit button, but only shows it the player has not made the guided tour "Go Away!" and the tour window is not currently being shown.

• Made Sampler set (3 levels, currently, may add 1 or 2 more) playable in trial mode.

• Removed old "do you want to play the tutorials" prompt that would come up the first time you tried to start an adventure.

• Added 3 new achievements.

• Previously it was possible to accumulate statistics (which count towards achievements) and check for achievements on tutorial levels and testing levels in the level editor. Fixed to not count stats or achievements in either of those cases.

• The Game Over / Success message and buttons have been combined with the Rewards section (achievements and collectibles), all on one larger screen that is more user-friendly and allows for players to move back and forth at will between that "Completion Stats" screen and the actual board they were playing.

Bugfixes

• Fixed bug in previous version preventing special blocks from being seeded in the initial block population of a level where the block frequencies were set in the editor.

• Previously the GameLevelSets were all being individually reset whenever the parent list of level sets was reloaded. This was causing some minor inefficiency now, but would have caused linear slowing as more levels and more level sets were added (custom or otherwise). Fixed so that the levels sets don't affect each other, it just matters how many levels are in an individual set.

• Previously if there was a savegame pointing to an invalid adventure (such as an adventure that had been uninstalled), it would not let the player play any adventure savegames. Fixed.

• Fixed a missing localization error in the last version on certain types of special objectives (gaining a certain amount of points).
  • Thanks to RCIX for reporting.

• Fixed several bugs with the handling of dropdown item tooltips with other tooltip-displaying items under the dropdown.

• Fixed bug where scrolled-down dropdowns were not matching the mouse cursor against the right item for mouse-hover events (mainly tooltip display).

• Fixed a bug that was saving the TimeLimit value in the place of NumberOfPlayers in high-score records.

• Fixed a missing localization bug on the keybindings screen and a bug where a few of the buttons were cut by the bottom of the window.

• Previously, the red or green tinting from after a win or loss was carrying through to the menu screens. Fixed.
  • Thanks to RCIX for reporting.

• Fixed a number of minor display glitches with scrolling sections of windows.

Internal Programming Notes

Tidalis