Tidalis:1.010 Beta Release

Notes From The Producer: December 14th, 2010

This release has a number of bugfixes in it, for stuff that has been working suboptimally since all the recent upgrades of the Unity engine, our drawing mechanics, etc. This should take care of nearly all the issues we're aware of at the moment (with a question mark on one issue, further testing needed), which is a great feeling.

This one also includes a new settings option which allows for the chain and combo fanfares to be disabled. This is useful for those players who want to hear the regular sound effects, but who don't want the fanfares overlaying the background music. The much-rarer fanfares, such as the line/board clear fanfares, are still played when this option is on.

Also, just as an aside, I'd like to note that the 1.009/1.008 versions had one of the funniest bugs associate with them that I've ever seen. It seems that if you would play for a while, then go back out to the main menu, sometimes the seafaring ship on the title screen would be... flipped upside down, like it had capsized. The technicalities were that some internal pooled texture objects weren't correctly remembering that they had been flipped, so it was entirely a huge coincidence that this could happen, but the end effect was something that looked hilariously intentional. This definitely goes in the annals as one of my favorite bug reports ever.

--Christopher M. Park

Misc

• A new settings option has been added to the game which allows for the chain and combo fanfares to be disabled. This is useful for those players who want to hear the regular sound effects, but who don't want the fanfares overlaying the background music. The much-rarer fanfares, such as the line/board clear fanfares, are still played when this option is on.
  • Thanks to adrive for suggesting.

Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug where using the 2nd-keyboard direction-drag would get stuck in drag mode.
  • Thanks to Maruten for reporting.

• Fixed a bug in the last few versions that could cause uv textures to become accidentally flipped.
  • Thanks to Echo35 for reporting.

• Put in some much more lenient error trapping and handling that now will no longer kill the game's execution when it doesn't have to. This was another thing that we'd later discovered as part of our AI War conversion to Unity, and now it's included on Tidalis, as well. This should avoid a whole host of kinds of problems, but most specifically for the moment it should avoid issues with missing/disabled input devices, etc.
  • Thanks to Echo35 for reporting.

• The new super-paranoid methods for writing data (including errors) to the disk have now been ported from AI War to Tidalis. These should prevent any cascades from errors when the disk can't be written to for whatever reason.

• Fixed a bug where when music tracks were switched-between too quickly after having started (as sometimes happened in multiplayer co-op), an error was thrown. This is doubly fixed, because on the one hand it no longer throws the error, but on the other hand even if it were to, that error would now just be logged as an ErrorsReportedByEngine.txt and would in no way impact the running state of the game.
  • Thanks to Spikey00 and Valeroth for reporting.

Internal Programming Notes

Tidalis