Hi ! We've released an updated game build on the beta branch of Helium Rain. This new build does not affect the game itself, but brings an updated Unreal Engine version and a new release process on our side. Let's see what changed !

Linux support

We've updated our release process to ensure the game work seamlessly on more Linux distributions. Supporting Linux can be quite an involved process, because everyone is free to build his own Linux system from the ground up with unique combinations of software components. We used to build Linux versions of Helium Rain on a regular Linux desktop, and this worked on most distributions ; but we suspect that this caused issues to a few users with uncommon systems. We moved to a new process called cross-compilation, where Linux releases are built on a Windows machine using a controlled environment provided with Unreal Engine. On top of this environment change, the new Unreal Engine 4.19 should bring updated Linux support.

Crash reporting

We updated the game on Windows a few weeks ago with an automatic crash reporter that is now enabled across all platforms. For around 200 specific failure conditions across the entire game code, the game will upload a very small (< 1KB) crash report to our servers, before actually crashing. The reason we are doing this is twofold :

• the Windows Fall Creators update broke our existing crash reporter, and crash reports from this OS version are now useless to us, in a way we can't fix ;
• while manual crash reports from players are always more valuable than an automatic report, many people don't have the patience and time to register on our bug tracker and provide detailed information.

This is a fully anonymous process, as it does not upload any personal data. We're just sending a call stack - the conditions in which a crash did occur. To be clear, we do not store or report any data from your computer. The entire report is also shown to you when it's sent. Here is a full report as an example, in case you're wondering.
Feel free to discuss this with us if this is unclear. Helium Rain doesn't feature networking support outside of this, and we know people can be passionate about telemetry features.

Crash on travel / skipping days

We're currently facing a outbreak of crashes that we fail to explain, and we'd love to solve this issue. We hope that this updated build will at least make it easier for us to track down the issue, though it is unlikely to fix it directly.

How to use the beta

The Helium Rain beta is always compatible with your game save, and can be switched to or from whenever you want. Some pitfalls always...

• This is a channel for work-in-progress builds that may be updated on a different schedule than the main branch (more often, with less testing).
• We can't promise that this version is as stable as the main branch - some features could be broken, performance could be bad, hardware could be unsupported, etc.

To enable the beta channel, right-click the game in Steam, go to the Properties menu and the Beta tab. Select the "Beta - Helium Rain Beta" entry and confirm the change. Thank you for playing Helium Rain, and please tell us of any issue !

[ 2018-02-20 19:30:23 CET ] [ Original post ]