This is another pay-no-attention-to-the-man-behind-the-curtain release. It's largely 1/ code rewrites to support Book of Hours; 2/ teeny extra features which I like or am trying out pre-Book of Hours; 3/ tweaks for which modders have politely pleaded; 4/ bug fixes because 1/ or 2/ or 3/ have broken other things. I'll talk more vividly about some examples. The banner feature of this release is that IT'S NOW POSSIBLE TO STACK DECAYING CARDS!!!!! as long as they're all within one second of different remaining lifetime values, so you can put your 21.4s Contentment card on your 20.8s Contentment card and well done, you've extended the lifetime by 0.6 seconds, ekeing out happiness' embers a sliver more effectively. This is possibly a Statement about Life. Did I mention I turned 50? 'Would you like me to stick my head in a bucket of water? I've got one here.' Anyway this feature is genuinely a feature but the reason it's in is this. One of our more helpful beta-testers pointed out that card stacks split weirdly under two exotic circumstances; one of which is if you tried to drop a whole stack in a slot, and the other was which (deep breath) if a recipe created a stack of 3 or more lifetimed/decaying cards, like Contentment. The second one doesn't happen at all in the base game! But it does in some mods, so I have to support it, and to be fair I might some day decide to add it to CS DLC (no announcements here, but you never know) or to Book of Hours. And more generally, weird exotic rare case bugs can sometimes come back to wreak havoc if you don't fix them early. (If you need convincing, read about the Yellowstone Zone of Death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_Death_(Yellowstone) It won't really allow anyone to get away with murder, but it will probably give a judge a bad migraine some day. ) 'Split weirdly' means that a stack of n cards would split to two stacks of n-1 cards. This doesn't matter with a stack of 2 cards. It matters a lot with a stack of, say, 5 cards:
So I had to fix this. In the process I found that there was no provision in the codebase for splitting (or creating) decaying card stacks. The assumption is you'd never have a stack of decaying cards. And I remember flagging this with Martin, the contractor I got to help with the game back in 2017, and him pointing out quite reasonably that it wouldn't make sense to need to combine them, because you'd never have two decaying cards with the exact same lifetime, right? And sure, back then it made sense. This is the thing about four-year-old code bases where the designer keeps having more ideas and then modders keep having MORE more ideas. But now I had to fix it. And the fix was easy. So you lucky people have a new feature for free. Sorry it's not a very exciting one. I am sometimes[1] asked: AK, why all the penny-ante technical releases? Why not more content? That's what everyone's here for. The answer is simple: localisation. Any content I add has to be localised into Chinese, Russian, Japanese and German, now that the game is available in those languages. And the actual translation of a teeny bit of content takes little time, but talking to loc partners, providing translation notes, chasing, finding mistakes, and following up when our fan base find mistakes[2]. And this is probably a good thing. Or I would still be working on adding more material to original CS and Book of Hours would literally never happen. But localisation continues to be an ongoing Thing, especially now we have people eager to support fan localisations. I've learnt more than I ever expected to about Unicode, fonts, and text in Unity. ('Would you like me to stick my head in a big bucket of Unicode?') I have had plaintive mails over the last year from Polish and Hungarian players asking me to add better Latin-2/Latin-A support for the special characters in those languages, and I kept thinking, I thought I'd added that? It turns out there was a bug in the fontscript selection, and a problem with the font asset I'd set up in Unity, none of which I'd ever have noticed without being hassled about it. Your attention is waning, isn't it. I don't blame you. Let me win it back with this trivium: Unicode has a code page specifically for the (never-deciphered) characters found only on a disc of fired clay dug up in the Minoan palace of Phaistos on Crete. https://unicode-table.com/en/blocks/phaistos-disc/
(By C messier - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38737955) More in the actual patch notes if you're interested. In theory this is a second release candidate for the main branch: I think it'll go to a third release candidate while I turn up leftover irritations like persistent card ghosts ('oooooo SHUFFLE oooo') and exotic save conversion bugs. But we're almost there. -- [1] constantly [2] or just take exception to a particular translation. And then I have to make a call on whether to go with the translator or the player. Because we have unusually engaged and thoughtful players, this is possible, but often quite involved. Here's an example from 2020. -- [From: redacted] Hello, on some occassions the word "Forst" is used for "Wood", like in 'Way: The Wood' (see screenshot). "Forst" is most of the time used for a managed and/or commercial wood with forestry and foresters and selling trees and such. Depending on the lore this might or might not be the correct for 'The Wood'. ;-) ...but in case it is not, the normal, common word for Wood is "Wald", (like it is used in the entry screen). ==== [From: me] Thanks! Can I dig into this a bit? We should pick and stick to one term, and it sounds like 'Wald' is probably better, but (1) Our cognate in English, 'forest', originally meant an area set aside for hunting; but because these areas were large and uncultivated, 'forest' took on the colloquial meaning of 'especially large, wild woodland area' and that's how most English speakers would now understand it. Do you think the same applies in German with 'Forst', or is it explicitly managed woodland? (2) I chose 'Wood' because of the connection with 'wildwood', which has a particular resonance in the UK particularly with the mythic and primal, but also with children's stories. Does 'Wald' have any similar connections or overlaps? I'd welcome your thoughts. (and thanks for all your feedback: I've just added you to the Special Thanks section) ==== [From: redacted] Sorry for the long answer. Since the answer has potentially big implications if the term is changed everywhere, I did some research and thought about it in detail to be able to give as precise answers as possible. (1) "Forst" in the 7th century was unowned, unused land. Later the term was used at times to distinguish large areas of woods from smaller ones ("Forst": larger, "Wald": smaller). But the term changed the meaning again in the Middle Ages, when landlords began restricting free use of the resources of the "Wald", i.e. banned hunting and harvesting wood for everyone but themselves. Such a restricted wood would then be called "Forst". Today the term "Forst" is generally associated with some kind of management and restriction and is often a less wild, 'cleaner' version of "Wald" because of it's commercial usage. (2) I am a little bit older, so unfortunately I cannot say anything about the associations children today have with forests or what stories or myths they know about it. As an adult I have some direct associations with the term "Wald", which is probably the direction you are looking for: - forest burials [a] (getting more and more popular here) - a historical and mythical battle - germanic paganism [c] - use in classical fairy tales [d] (where the forest is dangerous/mythical/a place for transformation) - home of mythical creatures like forest ghosts, forest goblins, fairies, elves, trolls Long story short: Yes, I think there are mythical and primeval connections to the word "Wald". [a] https://www.dw.com/en/the-green-way-of-death/a-19527764 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Teutoburg_Forest [c] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_trees_and_groves_in_Germanic_paganism_and_mythology [d] Brothers Grimm: Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, Town Musicians of Bremen, Snow White (3) Another theoretical option: If you really want to emphasize that the forest is untouched by humans, you could also use the word "Urwald" ('primeval forest'). However, "Urwald" is often associated with the Amazon rainforest or any jungle in german. So aside from the artistic choice, the less ambiguous variant would be "Wald". ==== From: [me] Thank you very much for this lengthy and thoughtful response! I've made the change and I'll roll it into the next patch.