New version is now available with bugfixes - redownload on the main page!

There were a few bug reports for the current Phase 1 release, and while testing the reported bugs I actually found a few additional ones. Normally I'd give it a little while, maybe a week to get a wide range of bugs and fix them in a major bugfix update, but one of the reported issues is a potential gamebreaker, so a quick fix is essential.

Now, I'm not 100% sure if this will fix it, but I've targeted the most likely culprits, so we'll see...

Bugfixes

• Game crashes while loading levels (major bug)
• Takedowns were a bit flaky
• Jumping and going into freecam was lethal
• Distance widget missing in Open Forest
• Items hard to find
• Ability to drop rocks from the sky in World Map

Game crashes while changing level

This is the gamebreaker.

The main change is the implementation of loading screens. This is partially to give the game time to load, but also to hide what it's loading. One big cause was infinite loops when randomising terrain placement causing a crash after about 150k attempts. The issue is it looped through all 150k times in less than a few seconds.

The way the Open Forest works, is it's a huge landscape broken into 256 chunks. It starts loading at the default player start, but to introduce randomness, it then picks a new valid location for the start and builds the terrain around it. The issue happens when the game is being a bit too slow, so it does the 150k loops trying to find a valid location that isn't water or tree, but the landscape chunk hasn't loaded yet, so it's completely invalid.

The solution was to put in a mandatory delay of a few seconds between the level starting and the startpoint being randomised so the landscape has a chance to load in. But on slower machines, this loading can take a while, so as a backup, every time it tries a new location, it pauses 0.2 of a second with a new maximum of 150 attempts. This should give it 15 extra seconds to find a startpoint and for the landscape to load. If it still doesn't find a location, it falls back to the default position which will always have the chunk loaded.

Takedown issues

This is one I found while testing other bugs. You end up having to be very precise to get the takedown prompts. So the area the enemy has to be in has been enlarged, so it will trigger from a wider area. The second part is it also checks the enemy alignment compared to yourself, because the takedown has to happen from the rear. It was set to +/-35 degrees from player rotation, but that's been increased to +-65 which should just be on the limit of the enemy peripheral vision.

Lethal freecam

Another accidental discovery. When you switch to freecam, it freezes you in position. If you are jumping when you trigger it, you're hanging in the air until you leave freecam. The game counts it as falling the entire time, and you splat instantly. I've updated it so you can only trigger freecam while on the ground. Still, it was a fun bug.

Distance widget missing in forest

This was a victim of the new forest spawning system, so the trigger for the widget was moved to one of the last things done before play can start.

Items hard to find

Some comments were made that items were tricky to locate. This is a problem because the game spawns in quite a lot of items, they're just very low to the ground and can be easily missed. They now have a particle effect for visibility.

Ability to drop rocks from the sky

Thrown rocks spawn from next to the active camera. In the worldmap, the camera is in the sky. The ability to throw while on the worldmap has now been removed.

Other Bugs

There are more that have been reported but not yet resolved:

• Completing world map and re-entering Pineridge, after a few seconds, the level changes so you are back in the cage (unable to replicate - investigating)
• Enemies caught in plants can be interrupted with a rock
• Cum sometimes squirts in the wrong direction (random occurance - investigating)
• Player cannot move after deactivating freecam (tried various methods, but unable to replicate so far will keep trying)
• Male badger caught in plant rotated differently to plant (found once, but unable to replicate)

Finally

All bugs and bug reports are getting looked at and will hopefully all get resolved eventually. The main problem is quite often finding the bug to see what causes it. Often a bug is caused by a specific sequence of events which can be hard to replicate if you've only got the end result to work from.

For example, a previous levelchange bug was caused by completing a certain task then walking through what should have been a deactivated trigger that had been reactivated. This then meant the levelchange trigger to restart the Forest was active when it should not have been. This was then made worse by the trigger not having a check to make sure only the player was triggering it, so anyone going into it would cause the level change.

On it's own, all you had was the player teleporting at random shortly after visiting part of the town, but contextually, once that specific quest completed, it set off a chain reaction ending in a level change. What I'm trying to say is when it comes to bug reports, there's no such thing as too much detail on what the player did before the bug. Now saying it like that makes it sound like a perfect excuse to go "aha! you did something you shouldn't, it's your own fault". The simple fact is if the player can do it but shouldn't be able to, then that's the developers fault in the end.

So if you find a bug, don't be afraid to report it with what you did leading up to it, as that extra detail might just be the thing that makes it obvious what went wrong.