May 9, 2022
Trials in Tainted Space
46 Comments

A weekend and a bits worth of digging into some spicy bugs, along with an opportunity to test somethin’ else cooking in the background – this is the trial by fire release for a behind-the-scenes feature that we’ll be using in the future.

Whilst we’ve been porting everything over to Javascript, we’ve used the module layout that the code has taken as part of the re-organisation to turn whole chunks of content off on a planet-by-planet basis. It hasn’t been perfect and it’s raised a few issues here and there but those are basically all down to the fact we moved from “everything exists everywhere” to nice little seperable blocks of stuff that we can glue together when the game loads. This is how we’ve been disabling planets for public releases that the backer releases still have access to, but our ability to do this was one hundred percent down to the convenient nature of those modules.

With Dhaal now going public, we no longer had that power (at least not until we get to adding another new planet…) – but having the ability to do side-by-side releases whilst maintaining a difference in content has been nice. So now we have a system we can use to handle it in a more granular fashion.

To wit, I coded a relatively small Ardia expansion and used the system to only enable it in development builds (and in the process built a custom VS Code extension…). There should, in theory, be no trace of it in the public and backer builds – but me talking about it is an invitation to see if you can find any trace of it regardless.

TiTS 0.9.000 Release Notes:

  • The version number is now a real number to demark our shift from predominantly porting, to primarily expanding. The number was selected to make it clear that the JS builds are much more recent than the last Flash build.
  • Public releases now have access to Dhaal. There should not currently be a disparity in content between backer and public versions.
  • Achievements have had a few fixes, and the historical unlocking system has been enabled. Their unlock state should save and load properly. (Gedan)
  • A collection of issues relating to the drop list and “reverting inventory” should be fixed. I think I understand the root cause of how this was happening, but it’s possible that I missed some edge cases about when it can happen. (Gedan)
  • Vendors that use non-standard credits should display this more obviously. (Gedan)
  • All instances of fractional credit display in shops should be fixed. (Gedan)
  • The Blade should no longer cause crashes in combat. (Gedan)
  • The Moondast map should once again consist of euclidean space. (Gedan)
  • The mail system now supports buttons related to the displayed content. (DrunkZombie)
  • A variety of bust displays have been tweaked around the game, too numerous to properly detail. (Lowercase_donkey & Gedan)
  • In some circumstances the inventory buttons can disagree with the item actually selected; an attempt has been made to avoid crashes caused by this, but the underlying mismatch may still occur. This is the root cause of “useFunction must be overridden” crashes. (Gedan)
  • Internal Tooling: A custom VS Code extension to help speed up the process of scene coding and a baseline for generating useful metadata extracted from the build. (Gedan)