June 19, 2022
Trials in Tainted Space
67 Comments

Long couple of days in the code mines for me – I was planning on writing a little bit more about what I’ve been working on the last week, but it turned out there was nothing ready in the merge-pile for fresh content ready to go out with this patch and I decided I had to rectify that. I’ll still touch on it a little, but it’s not going to be a huge Science Time With Geddy post like I was originally planning.

Now that we have Windows downloadable builds, the ask for a similar feature for Android has understandably ramped up. I could just throw down into that, but I wanted to try something a little bit different first. Browsers have a rather underutilized feature to essentially install a version of a webpage; I never saw the point that much in the desktop space, but it makes a lot more sense to be on mobile. Imagine if you could go to the play page on your Android or your iPhone, and there was a button you could tap on that would install the game, and you’d get a fully offline capable version of the game, with a shortcut in your devices apps to launch it, that would work without having an internet connection – but would update itself if you open it whilst you have an internet connection. No APK problems like we’ve had to deal with for years, no needing to root your iPhone (if that’s even an option with current-gen devices!). That’s what I’ve been working on this week. It’s not done yet, the job is turning out to be insanely fiddly, and time consuming, and there’s a lot of learning to be done to get it right – but I’m getting there.

Edit: Hotfix update changes listed below the main changelog!

TiTS 0.9.006:

  • Backers: Narc the Nurse-droid has a new quest that ultimately unlocks the ability to give her a dongle of her very own, and a few new scenes to go along with it. (Fr0sty & Gedan)
  • Public: Salvaging the Mastodon is now available to the public build. Get real friendly with all the people populating the Crash Landing bar, and two weeks after your most recent visit you’ll be getting a message requesting help…. (Slab, Leek & Fenoxo)
  • Electron builds should not immediately whitescreen. This was caused by unzipping the game into a folder structure that contained a # in the folder names somewhere. (Gedan)
  • The FZR Fire Suppression System’s mechanics have been tweaked. Previously it would apply a status that caused -50 evade and doubled damage from crushing attacks. On foes with no inherent evasion, this would result in a 4x damage increase. I’ve (Fenoxo) standardized the “Deep Freeze” affect so that triggering the 2x bonus damage consumes the status and reports it in text (and reduced the evasion penalty significantly). I’ve also tweaked a number of cold damage weapons to be able to apply the effect: Cryolizer, Entropy, and the Glacial Auger.
  • Frosty the Frostwyrm’s cold resistance has been increased somewhat. (Fenoxo)
  • The usual assortment of various bust tweaks and fixes across the game. (lOWERCASE_dONKEY)
  • Embedded image displays of very wide images should display better. Additionally images should render the same the first time they are displayed as every subsequent time they are shown. (Leek)
  • Busky’s shop interface has been moved to the new system. (Leek)
  • Mirrin had a bunch of formatting fixes that didn’t align with the games style standards fixed. (Leek)
  • Bizzy hasArmor crash fixed. (lOWERCASE_dONKEY)
  • Kiro & Kally doubleteam softlock fixed. (lOWERCASE_dONKEY)
  • A pile of dead code that also includes incorrect value assignments and logic tests have been hunted down and removed. This may clean up a lot of as-yet unreported strangeness in various places. (lOWERCASE_dONKEY)
  • Dong Designers color selection should work properly. (Leek)
  • Lorelei’s grab attack has been fixed. (Leek)
  • A bunch of Bothrioc stuff has been cleaned up. (lOWERCASE_dONKEY)
  • TechSpecs “Advanced Shielding” got nerfed a bit (From 20% to 10%) (Fenoxo)
  • TechSpecs “Charge Weapon” ability had its damage bonus lowered from 100% of intelligence to 66%. (Fenoxo)
  • TechSpecs “Rapid Recharge” passive had its shield change reduced from (int / 3) + 3 to (int / 5) + 3 (Fenoxo)
  • The code that drives applying damage was overhauled to help the game better track modifiers like “melee” or “explosion” without having it overwritten by display notes like “minimal.” This should make damage more accurate across the board when interacting with perks and abilities that hook into melee or ranged damage. It will also let us do things like making certain classes more resistant to certain types of attacks in the future – like giving Smugglers an evasion-style ability to reduce explosion damage. I had to change thousands of lines of code all across the game to do this. (Fenoxo)
  • A bunch of assorted other little one-liner fixes all over the place that I’m not going to catalogue otherwise this post will literally be about 200 lines long. (Leek)

TiTS 0.9.007:

  • Fixed the ship blowing up in combat (Fenoxo)
  • Mimbranes, ColourfulSucker, and Vanae had some fixe (Lowercase_Donkey)
  • Some Narc crashes got fixed (Lowercase_Donkey)