[quote]

0.600 Hotfix

This post was originally written for 0.599 update. We have since then released a 0.600 hotfix, which adds the following important fixes over original 0.599 post below:

• Steam Integration Fixed: Leaderboards, Achievements should be working as intended again
• Chapter 2: A level bug was causing a wall to remain present, blocking the player

[/quote] Hello dear Fractal Space players! It's been a while - we've been focusing quite a bit on Pocket Edition updates recently, and there were many bugs reported in latest 0.598, so it was a lot of work to get this 0.599 update ready! The goal of this update is mainly to reach a stable point for Chapter 1 in order to update Steam Demo and Demo on other platforms, about a week after this update is live for the Pre-Alpha PC players. Let's talk about the major new changes in this post! If you encounter a major blocking bug that prevents you from finishing the game, please report in-game with ALT+B ;) Thank you for testing and reporting bugs! [quote]IMPORTANT: RESTART CURRENT CHAPTER: If you were playing before this update and do not wish to start a new game / reset your save, please restart current Chapter from the beginning to avoid bugs, prevent softlocks, and ensure the new bugfixes are correctly applied.[/quote]

NEW

The major new changes are discussed here.

CHAPTER 3 | Re-Design

The first room of Chapter 3 has been completely re-designed and re-worked with new rooms:

• You should no longer be able to skip past the first Crows cutscene.

• There is now also new optional/secret area here, but we will let you find it for yourself :)

• You can no longer simply Jetpack to the first platform when getting out of the first room, in NG with Jetpack Level 1 - youll need to deploy additional platforms.
  • These platforms are optional from Jetpack Level 2, or from Jetpack Level 1 + Sprint (intended).

CHAPTER 2 | Even More Freedom

Update 0.598 introduced more freedom for the player to explore the outside of the station, after going out from the first electrified water vent. It has now been improved even more, by giving that same freedom, from the moment the player acquires the Jetpack!
[quote]"With more freedom, comes a great chance of introducing game-breaking bugs. To be tested!"[/quote]

SAW | Sparks

Saws now have new particle effects to show sparks!
They also have physics collisions.

INTERACTION | Fixes

After the major interaction rework, that was then added to Pocket Edition as well, interactions were more precise and most bugs related to them were fixed. In addition, interaction with a specific object when multiple ones were present, was made much easier and more intuitive. However, a consequence was that interacting required the player to look more precisely at objects, even when there was only 1 interactive object available. Some precision is still required when there are multiple interactions available, but most cases will now be much more tolerant of where the player is looking at, than the previous update (more radial interaction):
In addition, the new interaction changes had broken a previous system: preventing picking up / dropping Cubes or Power Cores through Laser Fields and vent grids, etc. This made some previously-impossible softlocks possible again in 0.598. It should now be working as intended again, with some Laser Fields / Vent grids / small bars in vents, now preventing you from dropping/picking up through them again (as it was, prior to 0.598).

LEADERBOARDS | Improved

This update required a FULL RESET of all Leaderboards. This is because new features to leaderboards were added, which made them not retro-compatible. Further changes should not require Leaderboards reset anymore. Not only does leaderboards now fully support MILLISECONDS (even though they are not displayed in-game to avoid distraction of fast ms change), but you can now hover any Leaderboard entry to get more statistics about the players run! Stats are per-Chapter for this run, except for Cycle, in which its the accumulated for the entire Cycle:
Obviously, this is a new feature, and requires some testing to validate all stats are correct (we have tested, they seem OK :) ) Navigation has also been improved on Leaderboards page. In addition to being able to navigate the Leaderboards Page with keyboard / gamepad, you can now also browse through entries / scroll using keyboard arrows to see more info about other players scores. Mouse scroll wheel also works. If you are using a keyboard or gamepad, when changing Chapters, while looking at Top 50 / Top 100, it will automatically select ranks 10 and 50 respectively after loading the scores. This is to avoid scrolling down the first 10/50 scores when looking at Top 50 / Top 100, because these first 10/50 can already be seen in Top 10 / Top 50 respectively.

BUG REPORTING | Improvements

Various improvements were made to the bug reporting system. It's possible that the first bug reports you send will not appear on the Discord server just yet, because there were changes to the syntax and how they are sent, that will require some changes from the Discord server's side. However, we should be receiving all bug reports correctly even if they do not appear on Discord just yet.
We also made these changes in order to ensure that we would still receive all bug reports even if the Unity side of the system would fail, like it did during approximately 2 months when 0.598 was released. Here's an overview of the new changes to the bug reporting system:

• Categories: Many new categories were added. This will make it much easier for us to filter / prioritize bugs and ensure Nitpicks don't slow down the development's process by requiring to be fixed now as they were same priority as "Gameplay Bugs". Please make sure you select the appropriate category for each reported bug. Thank you!

• Video Link: A new field for Video link was added! Bug reports are always much better with video links if possible :) Whenever you have a video available, please copy/paste the link in the video field, it will make it much easier for us to access it instead of having it directly in the description. Thank you!

• More details: The bug reporting system will now provide more details to the Discord server. Once the Discord server code has been updated to receive the new bug report information, it will be possible to show a few more stats on the bug report entries on the server.

• Longer storage: We used to only have 2 months to fix a reported bug. This was really impractical, because many minor bugs or nitpicks could wait for a future update instead - but if we did wait, we would lose all the data from this bug. We will now be able to keep them for much longer in order to push back minor bugs to future updates.

• More stable: Various edge cases that caused bug reports to fail to upload were fixed. You will still have failures in some cases but the retry should be OK. If after 3 or 4 retries you still can't upload a bug, please temporarily disable your firewall and antivirus and try again.

[quote]Reporting a bug will still take time, and the Discord upload will look like it froze on 0% for a while. This is normal. We are planning to change the Discord screenshot upload server in a future update, to greatly increase the speed of this step in the near future.[/quote]

SAVE BACKUPS

The game now makes backups of the save game regularly, mostly every time the game is paused. If later on, the saved data file gets corrupted or deleted, the player will now be informed when starting the game. A popup will now allow to either start a fresh new save, or use the latest backup (if available):
This is different from save game compatibility after a major game update. There will be a separate system to warn players about their potential saved games incompatibility in the future, encouraging them to restart the current Chapter, if it was affected. [quote] This is only for data corruption of the main save file. If a level checkpoint auto-save or quick-save is corrupted, it should result in automatically restart the Chapter from start. But in case of main save file corruption, this backup popup window system should at least allow players to resume their last checkpoint (if last checkpoint file itself is not corrupted), or resume from the beginning of the Chapter they had reached (which is still better than starting from Chapter 0)[/quote]

CUSTOM | RESOLUTION

[quote]This is only for very specific edge-cases in which players need to use a specific, non-standard resolution, that is not listed in the resolution options list.[/quote] If you wish to use a different resolution than the one officially supported by your monitor, you now can make sure it works by using -allowCustomResolution launch parameter on Steam. If you use this, please make sure you add new add this new -allowCustomResolution as well, when using -screen-height and -screen-width to force a specific resolution. This new parameter will disable all resolution fallbacks and resetting of the game, to avoid overriding your custom resolution, even when requesting to change graphics options. [quote]This means the Resolution popup list will be completely ignored when using this argument![/quote]

CHANGES

Below are described the important changes from this version:

• Dodge: Upgrades were a bit overpowered. Slightly modified the Dodge upgrades. Level 3 is no longer 0.5 seconds, but now 0.8s recharge time.

• Respawn Spam Protection: Increased the respawn spam protection delay to 0.8s. This means that, if you die, with a Quick Save available, the game will ignore SPACE / LMB for 0.8s to prevent reloading the last checkpoint, in case you in fact wish to use F9 to load your Quick Save instead.

• Chests: The newly added chests in 0.598, will now unlock faster after shooting the associated generators. The bug in which they remained in locked state after destroying their generators, could not be reproduced, though. Please keep an eye on it, and report with a video for more specific steps on how to reproduce this bug. Thank you!

• Interaction: New interaction rework made it sometimes hard to pick up / interact with objects if a piece of broken glass was in the way. Broken glass pieces should no longer be a problem for interaction with objects, nor with picking up objects ;) This may have introduced new bugs, to be tested.

• Chapter 3 Double Cubes / Timed Boxes: At the beginning of Chapter 3, once you had placed both Cubes on the Pressure Plates to open the horizontally-placed door by taking Cubes from the Timer Boxes, it used to lock the Pressure Plates to Red state, and the door you come down from would close:

• This was originally designed to avoid various bugs in earlier versions of the game. It has now been changed to not do any of these things. You can then continue having fun opening the door / timed boxes as much as you want, before activating the platform with the far-away large button, and no bugs should occur. There will later on be an achievement planned here for some fun action to do, but its not implemented yet. This change should be tested for bugs :)

• Chapter 3 Large Button / Fast Platform: The big button to shoot for the fast Transport platform, just after the area mentioned above, has now been changed for you to be able to return to it after reaching the other side of the Transport. It will no longer relocate you. There is no purpose in backtracking here at this time, but this change was simply made to allow curious players to return there safely without encountering weird bugs ;) In addition, there is no longer a relocation if you fall from the transport platform - death is upon you in this case (intended). If you jetpack out of the level bounds, you will no longer relocate at the end of the Transport platform path (it was a skip). If you miss the Transport platform path (by jumping off it), you will need to reach the other side using the Jetpack (its possible by landing on the pipes on the wall in front). You cannot backtrack to that area again, once you have approached the Tower area (intended, like before)

• Chapter 3 Musical Hack - Hard of Hearing: In case some players might have missed that in an earlier changelog, or if I forgot to mention it: This puzzle was too hard for most players, and couldnt find the combination once it was changed to not fail on every mistake (it was only doing so with Hard of Hearing enabled). So, it was changed back to always fail on the first mistake. This was changed because of too many reports of players not finding the solution. It will maybe be re-introduced later, but only if the player selects a harder difficulty setting. Then, the Hard of Hearing option, will override this specific puzzle to keep current behavior even on Hard difficulty (and other potential / future audio puzzles will be adjusted too). So, it means that currently, Hard of Hearing option no longer has any effect (intended).

• Jetpack Balancing: Jetpack regular cooldown before recharging fuel has increased from 0.3s to 0.5s. If Jetpack fuel becomes empty, penalty Jetpack cooldown before recharging has increased from 1s to 1.2s. This is to compensate for the fact that from recent updates, Jetpack is now much faster to provide the first 3s rise - so it became much easier to exploit it and remain for a very long time in-air, without having to worry about Fuel. Zero-G boost remains unaffected by these changes and is faster to recharge, and has no empty penalty cooldown (intended). If this change breaks too many speedrun strats, please report a suggestion with a video of the strat, well see if we can fine tune it to still keep it.

• Relocation: It is fully intended that you cannot drop your current object, or pickup any other item, while the Relocation is active. This is to make the game safer, and avoid the player dropping important objects inside a non-reachable area. It also prevents the player from picking up items that should not be obtainable at this moment in the game. However, trying to pickup an object during relocation would display Cannot Drop Here. It now shows the appropriate message.

• Dropping Objects: Changed to have higher velocity from the player, when dropping objects while moving. This reduces the chances to bump into the Tablet / Power Core dropped while moving forward. However, when you are moving slowly, or stopped actively requesting movement, velocity transferred is now reduced, to avoid throwing the dropped object forward while you are currently stopping (could be irritating). You can still do so if you request to drop while still requesting movement, and stop requesting movement just after the drop request. But this is acceptable, as you are, in fact, moving, so it is natural that the object is thrown forward. It simply happens less frequently by mistake.

• Power Cores: Now held a bit further away from the player. This is to avoid bumping too much into it when dropping it while moving. You may still bump it while high-velocity sprints, but thats acceptable.

• Power Core Slots: Power Cores are now inserted further away inside Power Core Slots. This is intended to ensure they dont stick out too much from the front. They are now less problematic to the player, as they will no longer push the player backwards when inserting them while being very close to the Power Core Slot. Or when it still happens, its only slightly (while in Zero-G) and acceptable. In addition, this now makes it harder to climb on them while inserted (intended):

• Thresholds: Chapter 2 leaderboard threshold is now 3:00

• Destructible Walls: Broken pieces of Destructible Walls had very fully-black edges & borders. They should now look more normal and react more normally to lighting changes.

LEVEL FIXES

Below are mentioned the important level bug fixes:

• Chapter 1: Fixed pure black borders on obstacle crates in the Camera room at the end of the Chapter.

• Chapter 1: Fixed OOB when being pushed towards the wall using the moving platform in the room with the very first Camera ever. It should now be harder to get pushed through the wall, and if it happens, the player will die (intended, appropriately squashed).

• Chapter 1: Fixed some purely black moving platforms, and some platforms that were being rendered incorrectly and too dark.

• Chapter 2: Fixed a few pipe collisions with the new Cozy Den area of the first electrified water room.

• Chapter 2: Fixed various bugs related to the more freedom approach of Chapter 2, which included missing objects and not-yet active traps.

• Chapter 2: Fixed a possible trigger skip in the first Shooting Cameras room, when entering, that could cause multiple other bugs. Should not be skippable anymore by hugging the wall.

• Chapter 2: Roof slow inoffensive smasher will now close down much faster, to prevent you from squeezing through while its closing. It will also now only close behind you a bit later, as you get past the second laser field.

• Chapter 2: Fixed OOB by backtracking and seeing the door still open if you skipped a trigger, where you press the initializeRoom.cpp button (thanks Latte).

• Chapter 4: Fixed some cases in which the Set all Solar Panels in Sunlight would not accomplish correctly even if the puzzle was completed.

• Chapter 4: Fixed some misplaced buttons in some vents

• Chapter 4: Fixed some missing mines towards the end, that seemed to have been triggered by a ghost :)

• Chapter 4: Fixed a bug when you were standing on a retractable, you could get pushed through the ceiling of the vent. Player character should now be killed, as intended.

• Chapter 4: Some optimizations were made to texts in all Chapters in 0.598. This broke some Timers screens in Chapter 4 that were now displayed too big.

• Chapter 4: Train area: fixed a bug that caused a Power Core to be respawned when removed or re-inserted in the Power Core Slot.

• Chapter 4: Fixed various visual glitches (blinking walls, blinking vent entrances, etc.)

• Chapter 4: Fixed various softlocks in the very last room. Laser Fields in the last room now respawns Power Cores to prevent softlocks.

• Chapter 4: The Processing Center could have strange, deadly respawn points for some checkpoints in specific cases. Should now be fixed.

• Chapter 4: Processing Center giant crushers should now kill the player more often, when squashed against vents, like the one towards generators / maintenance, etc. In addition, lower FPS now has much less chances to push the player to clip into the Bonus area / outside (will die more often instead)

BUG FIXES

Below are described the important general bug fixes (many more in the full changelog below):

• Buttons: Fixed a rare bug that could cause button states to become invalid and break some areas, thanks to Lattes discovery

• Pressure Plates: Fixed a Game Error when dropping Power Cores / Tablets on Pressure Plates

• Pressure Plates (Player Activated): Will now correctly push up / down the objects dropped on them, as they move up and down (objects used to clip through them).

• Cameras: A new bug allowed Cameras to revive after being destroyed. This was fun, honestly, should probably have remained - but should be fixed :D

• Vibration: Many fixes were done to gamepad vibration: sudden vibrations stop while using jetpack should now be fixed, and Sprint vibration should now resume correctly after jetpacking. In addition, sprint vibration should be paused while jumping and resume when on the ground again (intended)

• Heal / Damage Effects: Fixed a bug that caused them not to be displayed correctly during Chapter 1, after coming from Chapter 0.

• Hover: Fixed a new bug with latest changes, that caused to fall down rapidly for 1s, if you were to engage Hover instantly after requesting a vertically-upwards Dodge (without prior Jump / Jetpack in the sequence). Hover engagement should feel smooth and working as expected in all combinations.

• Sprint: Fixed bugs that allowed Sprinting in mid-air, if the key was sprint was pending before falling while in crouched stance, or if key was held while jumping in place from a crouched stance.

• Bug Reporting: Fixed a bug that caused the bug reporting window to not react to user input, when reporting a bug in Chapter 1, after coming from Chapter 0.

• Propellers: Fans could be bugged after quick load / quick save and could be incorrectly stopped / turned on when they shouldnt be after loading. Audio could sometimes continue when they were off.

• Encryption Keys: Changing language should now properly update the Encryption Keys language instantly.

• Dodge: Fixed exploit which allowed to have infinite Dodge when trigger cutscenes after Dodging (while still in-air). To be tested for potential new bugs related to this fix.

• Mines: A new bug from 0.598 was causing Mines to react as if you had detonated them by direct contact, when you pushed a Power Core to the Mine Beam. This bug could cause you to be damaged from very far away when pushing Power Cores into the beam from a distance. Should now work as intended again.

• Power Cores / Cubes: A new bug allowed the player to drop and pick up Cubes / Power Cores behind areas that shouldnt allow it (through Laser Fields, vent grids, small gaps, etc). It should now work as intended.

• Power Core Slots: New interaction rework changes introduced a new bug that allowed the insertion of Power Cores / Tablets through walls** and windows. Should now be fixed.

• Power Cores: Inserting in Zero-G could provoke Power Cores to flip 180 degrees visually before inserting. This should now be fixed in 99% of cases. It could still happen, but if you manage to, please report the repro steps as visual bug, as it should now be rare and considered minor or nitpick, and would need precise reproduction steps to be fixed. Thanks!

• Saws: Most of the time, Cubes and Power Cores are pushed away correctly by Saws. Only very fast moving saws, while Hyper-Speed is disabled, can cause strange bugs when pushing them. From now on, some very-fast moving saws will selectively respawn Cubes and Power Cores, when Hyper-Speed is disabled.

• Damage: Lasers and Saws will now have the same delay between hits, when Hyper-Speed is ON or OFF. It used to allow longer invincibility time between hits in Hyper-Speed.

• Terminals: Will now react and glitch when shot at with the Taser :)

• Timers: Fixed an exploit that could reset speedrun timers to 0 when quick loading during the final end of chapter fade-out.

• Power Cores: They should no longer go through windows when thrown fast vertically from above (using Hyper-Speed + Dodge downwards, kinda Lattes trick :) )

• Screenshot Mode: Enabling Screenshot Mode with either the Options menu or F4 Shortcut, will now hide the FPS counter, and display it again it was meant to be ON originally

• Screenshot Mode: Its state is now saved when using the Shortcut, to be kept in sync with the checkbox in the Options

• Audio: A new bug could cause undesired sound effects to be played upon respawning (electrified water sound, for example).

• Audio: Colored Pressure Plate wont make the pressed down sound if you walk on it multiple times while its already being pressed down with Hyper-Speed enabled (thanks Latte & ChrisLP!)

• Audio: Fixed a bug that could cause music to play, when music volume was set to 0. This might still occur in some remaining rare cases. Please report as Audio bug, if it occurs again, with as much info as possible on what happened previously, as these are generally very specific.

• Screens: Fixed various bugs with signs / screens, which could cause some screens to not show their associated texts after quickload sometimes, or vice-versa, showing them when they should be OFF. Keep an eye out for new bugs with them, though ;)

• Taser: Fixed a bug that showed Switch on the Taser screen, while in fact, aiming at a regular non-interactive Laser.

• Taser: Shooting at buttons would make the shots shadows show some incorrect shadowing (lighting was going through the button). It is now more accurate. It can still happen in some angles, but its now much more rare.

• Menu: Fixed a tiny crack in the Main Menu area

• Cables: Collision bugs with the new hanging cables prevented you from shooting through them. Now fixed and working as intended ;)

• Return to Menu: Quick loading while the game is returning to the main menu (after completing Chapter 4) is no longer possible.

• Performance Guide: Button now correctly localized

• Reported Bugs: Many more in-game reported bugs and suggestions implemented.

Thank you for testing! We'll continue working on the various remaining bugs, and re-update over the next few weeks for the next bugs ;)

[ 2023-04-19 16:37:38 CET ] [ Original post ]