This is a small update, but necessary as a rather nasty bug was found.

Bug Fix

• Fixed logic that resulted in a particularly icky bug with the function that sorts dead vs alive adventurers in the party, which on rare occasions resulted in empty slots being put in place between alive heroes and dead ones (breaking functionality in certain menus)

Requested Features

• Added command line switches to mute music or sound: --mute-music and --mute-sfx
• Visual feedback : Party HUD now makes subtle up/down/left/right shifting animation when stepping forward/backward or turning left/right in the dungeon

Mini-blog: Notes and musings about the future of Jettatura

Recently I am in the midst of investigating options to re-create Jettatura in one of those "engines-in-a-box", because the nature of the very-very-spaghetti code I've written for the game's current ad-hoc "engine" makes it difficult to gracefully implement the current primary goal of re-structuring the entire GUI system to allow for implementing promised features such as mouse use, gamepad use, and support for printing Unicode fonts (which itself is a prerequisite for being able to support certain requested languages like Japanese/Czech/etc). Earlier this year I have tinkered with Unity for a couple months, but its editor is annoyingly crashy, and the way it interrupts to recompile after making every tiny insignificant change to an element has wrung my last nerve-fibers of patience through a paper shredder. Afterwards, I have recently been investigating Godot 4 as another possible option. I've remade a couple of my previous crappy "weekend sideproject" 2D puzzle games to get a general feel for Godot, and while Godot is far from perfect and has its own unique set of problems, I like it magnitudes more than Unity so far. Opposite of what I can say about Unity, it seems to cooperate with me far more often than it gets in my way. Also, Godot's 3D support is suitable enough for Jettatura's graphical needs. Perhaps most importantly: creating menus, windows, and custom GUIs -- which has been the biggest thorn in my side in Jettatura's native codebase -- is actually a very intuitive and pleasant experience. So, quiet as I have been this year, I haven't forgotten or abandoned Jettatura as a whole. But I have hit a concrete wall, of which I am likely opting to just invest time to plot a lengthy detour around, rather than dig through it with a plastic spoon. I don't have an ETA for how long this will take. Until that planned remake of Jettatura's codebase is done (whenever that may be), I will still prioritize fixing any future bugs that are found or reported to me in this lineage of the game. I also still plan on (eventually) publishing a GPL release of Jettatura's source code that nobody asked for, because why not.

For this year-end update, a handful of small gameplay-oriented tweaks, most (except one) trending in the direction of slightly increased difficulty and/or vexation.

Changes

• Slightly improved attributes & damage for monsters who otherwise tend to be pushovers.
• Slightly increased probabilities of some monsters to have more buddies join 'em in a fight.
• A few dungeon areas are slightly more irksome to traipse through.
• Attribute increases are slightly more likely to occur on a Level-Up.
• Removed COWARD keyword from certain types of monsters who oughtn't flee from battle.

Small update to game's manual

• Added Addendum 1: Crazy Korsakov's Inventory, a chart detailing the properties of the most ordinary and mundane equipment easily purchasable at the store, to the end of the game's manual.

Game Mechanic Fixes

• Characters from parties that were lost to an unrecoverable game-over state (meaning: fallen into a bottomless pit, drowned, or teleported into solid rock) were still Recoverable if current party is standing in that party's general vicinity of their demise. This wasn't intended and has been fixed.
• Feeble-age of Rat-Man race has been increased a little bit, so there should no longer be cases of creating a Rat-Man character and then have him dying of old age the first time he takes a nap at the Inn.
• (???) enemies are now a slightly more bothersome nuisance when using their repertoire of (???)-style attacks.

UI

• In combat, "ATTACK" will now be displayed as "AMBUSH" if selected party member successfully used Hide the previous round.

Renderer

• Some new players are still experiencing graphical glitches stemming from (apparently not as sturdy as I had thought) VBO-based rendering code. This update disables use of VBOs entirely and falls back exclusively on Display Lists. "Deprecated" as display lists may allegedly be, they seem to work just fine on everyone's GPUs.

Changes

• Fix: crash when sleeping at Inn at very high to maximum levels (20-30)
• Fix: properly increment a character's KILLS counter when vanquishing a monster with a magic spell
• Fix: certain uncommon weapons/armor/accessories, sold back to the store, were sorted at the tail-end of the item list in Korsakov's stockpile
• Fix: incorrect text displayed for magical "Use Item"-type items during battle

Math Fix

• Fixed bug in which the act of leveling up a character who already had any base attributes above a score of 18 caused those attribute(s) to go back down to 18

Crash fix

• Fix UI-related crash when selecting a spell while on an Anti-Magic square and dropping back to the Battle choices menu. The ability to (C)ast Magic at all on such squares is now greyed-out entirely.

Serious Fixes

• Players who were previously experiencing graphics with scrambled, garbled polygons on certain GPUs can now try running the game by passing the --opengl-display-lists command line switch via Properties->General->LAUNCH OPTIONS in Steam Library for the game.
• Fix crash that happened when character with astronomically high Perception score rolls initiative during battle.

Minor UI Input Improvements

• A few menus and other UI elements which operate via arrow key input didn't accept the equivalent arrow keys on the Numpad. They do now.
• After being prompted for party member action choices at the start of each battle round, at that 'Accept these choices? (Yes / No)' style dialog window, you can now also press Enter to confirm just as if you hit 'Y'

Serious fixes

- Fix crash that would sometimes happen when a 0-damage physical attack occurs

Derp

- Fix error log filenames having the wrong month

Regarding garbled 3D graphics a few players have reported

A small percentage of players report 3D graphics with garbled polygons on their GPU. If you are reading this and this occurs on your hardware, you are encouraged to opt-in to the beta branch called 'amdtroubleshoot' using the Beta code theamdrx560bug, and from there run the game by adding the command line parameter called --opengl-display-lists under (Steam Library->Jettatura->Properties->General->LAUNCH OPTIONS), and please let me know if that alleviates the problem for you. One person has already reported this works, so after a few more affected users confirm just as such in the Bug Report thread, I will push this fix to the main build.

Bug fix

Fixes a game-mechanic regression with Disarm Trap command introduced in the Disarm crash fix from 1.0.6

Serious Bug fixes:

- When disarming certain treasure traps, it should no longer crash due to trying to manipulate the state of a non-existant UI window

Cosmetic Bug fixes:

- Fix battle verbalizer not indicating text to denote when a physical attack successfully inflicts a status effect on a target. - Also, fix it not playing the *THWACK!* sound when that same type of status-inflicting physical attack happens.

Misc:

- More game-state and UI-state information when generating an error log upon crash

Notes:

- As usual, please send error logs from %APPDATA%\Jettatura\error-logs to contact@jettatura.com if further crashes occur.

Technical feature: Error logs

This is a small update for purposes of bugfixing: Now, if the game crashes, it should capture the error message and a function backtrace to an error log file. These crash-log files should help me better understand the cause of certain crashes so I can fix any remaining ones as they happen. In Windows, these files may be found in: %APPDATA%\Jettatura\error-logs\ (this update will be pushed out to the Linux platform later today) From now on, please attach all such error log files to me in bug reports sent to contact@jettatura.com

Note on ongoing issue: Graphic glitches

I am also currently aware of some users encountering glitched/garbled 3D graphics appearing. This is a slightly harder problem to comprehend the cause of, but I suspect it might have something to do with how OpenGL Vertex Buffer Objects (or related concepts like Attributes) behave on certain hardware and/or GPU drivers. This week I will begin work on a beta branch where the rendering code will get reverted to using its previous style which was based on display lists (deprecated, but perhaps much less prone to surprise GPU-specific idiosyncratic gotchas). Details on how to opt-in to this beta branch will be published in the forums once a build is ready for it.

Patch notes for version 1.0.4

(Oct 16 2022 8:15AM)

• Fixed crash when creating a Samurai character
• Expunged SCROLL OF RUHAI from Korsakov's shop and item drop tables

Note: If you currently have a SCROLL OF RUHAI in your inventory, do not use it! Drop it or sell it back to the shop!