Tidalis:0.909 Beta Release

Notes From The Producer: July ??, 2010

--Christopher M. Park

New & Updated Levels

• 4 new brainteasers have been added.

• 5 brainteasers and the third action sampler level have been tweaked.

Gameplay Updates

• The Fast Forward buttons are now always shown if Solitaire mode is selected, regardless of what other modes were selected.

Misc

• When the sim speed changes (+/- keys), or the debug auth changes (F4/F5 keys) are disabled and the player tries to press them, a helpful explanation message pops up as a chat message briefly.

• Players are now allowed to use the sim speed changes (+/- keys) during brainteaser levels.

• The sim speed changes (+/- keys) can now be used during network play (assuming that the other requirements: dev mode, level editor test mode, or brainteaser, are met).

• A new "External Help" button has been added to the Tutorials section of the main menu.
  • This new sub-menu has an "Online Wiki" link that goes to the Tidalis wiki, as well as a "Game Manual (PDF)" button that opens the game manual (or reports that the manual cannot be found, if the manual is missing).

• Spacing has been added to all of the "Freestanding button" menus to make sure they all line up.

• The client and server now exchange pings every 2 seconds, to make sure that they know as quickly as possible when the connection has been dropped.
  • When no ping has been received for 5 seconds, it starts showing a message to the player letting them know this. When 15 seconds have gone by, the connection drops.

• Co-op items are no longer ever shown on the before-level screen.

• The back button on the tutorials sub-menus now always go back to the main tutorials list even if the player is still in the guided tour.

• On the settings screen, and the first-run resolution-setting screen, there are now separate settings for the fullscreen resolution and the windowed resolution.
  • The fullscreen resolution continues to work exactly as before, and the options available are still based upon the resolutions that your OS reports to Unity 3D as being supported by your graphics card and monitor.
  • The windowed resolution is now a pair of textboxes into which you can type any value greater than 800 wide and 600 tall. Thus in windowed mode you can set absolutely any resolution you want, as long as it's not below the minimum allowed size of the game.
  • There is also now a Preferred Fullscreen Refresh Rate slider now, which you can set anywhere between 0 and 200. If 0 or an unsupported refresh rate is selected, Unity 3D instead uses the highest available refresh rate that is supported.
    • Thanks to Hans-Martin Portmann for suggesting.
  • All of these settings are unfortunately still not yet available on Mac OSX computers, because of the bug in the current version of Unity 3D. Next time Unity 3D makes a release, the expectation is that this will also become a workable feature for OSX users.

Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug that had broken the adventure editor in the last prerelease.

• Previously, the visual effect of the wind speed would change due to mouse movement. Fixed.

• Fixed a bug with the "Co-op" label on co-op items showing up offset on screen resolutions that use letterboxing.

• The scrollbar lane was causing the before-level text to look offcentered sometimes. Fixed.

• Previously, special blocks that were in the level directly, but which were not part of the frequency definitions, were not shown in the before-level popup. This only affected a few levels, such as level 75. Fixed.

• Fast Forwarding was previously pretty jerky during network play. Fixed.

• Fixed a bug with the settings menu often not showing the correct resolution that had been selected, though the game was still sized correctly.

• Fixed a bug that was causing a desync whenever players won an adventure level during co-op play. The collectibles won are not meant to be consistent between players, and now they are not.

Internal Programming Notes

Tidalis