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The Proteus Effect 0.9.6 is Released!
🕑 Added 2021-06-29 21:32:40 +0000 UTCGreetings! I'm pretty happy about this release, but I want to make clear it doesn't have any new content. This release was mostly about improving stability, adding a new feature, and fixing bugs (including a pretty important one!) I'm going to talk a little about what's changed, but if you just want the links, they're at the bottom!
Changes
Lighting
The first and biggest change was getting rid of that troublesome lighting plugin. All the compatibility problems with recent releases were due to this plugin, and I think a lot of the instability problems some players experienced were, too.
Lighting isn't gone, though! I used that other method I described last time for some parts, but I wasn't able to achieve everything I wanted with it in all the scenes, so I supplemented it with a different lighting plugin. (Oh no!) This one shouldn't cause any compatibility problems - it even works in Canvas mode (the non-GPU-accelerated mode) so even folks with really old hardware should be able to enjoy the scenes as they were intended. This new lighting plugin seems to be much better written, so I'm hoping the stability problems some players experience will go away, too.
Autosave (and More Save Slots)
Just in case you do run into problems, though, I implemented an autosave feature. Autosave saves when you change maps - you enter a house, move to a different room in the dungeon, etc - with the following caveats:
- It won't save within 5 minutes of the last autosave
- It works on the vast majority of map changes (but not all of them)
I did the 5 minute thing for two reasons: first, one of the purposes of autosave is to get you out of trouble, so having a save from a few minutes ago is probably better than having one right before you ran into problems (because the problem might get preserved in a save.) Second, I wanted to minimize any lag people might experience as the system writes to your hard drive, particularly if you're playing on a slower HDD (spinning hard drive.) I didn't experience any lag, but I'm also playing on a pretty fast drive. Please let me know if you do!
Autosave will always save in slot 40 (there are 40 save slots now.) And slot 40 is clearly marked as "Autosave." As it stands now, you *can* manually save into the autosave slot, but I advise against doing so. Autosave will overwrite whatever's in slot 40 when it does its thing, so if you stick a save in there you'll eventually lose it. In a future build I'll probably remove the ability to manually save into that slot to prevent those sorts of problems.
There are a number of autosave plugins out there, but none of them did exactly what I wanted, so I ended up writing my own.
Bugfixes
This release also fixed several small bugs and one big one. The big one's a little embarrassing, frankly, and it's been with this game for a long time. You may have noticed that sometimes something won't work right (particularly after just loading a save) and that you'll need to leave that room and re-enter it in order to get it to work. I finally figured out the reason for this, and it's all because I misunderstood a rather subtle point about how the game engine works.
Mistakes of this sort are scattered all throughout the game, and once I finally understood what was wrong, I was horrified at the prospect of having to find them all and fix them. And I honestly didn't know *how* I'd fix them.
What I ended up doing was modifying the engine so that it now works the way I mistakenly thought it did. It's not a big change, it only took like 7 lines of code. And it worked - a supporter provided a save that let me easily reproduce this sort of problem (thank you, by the way!) and it went away after this. Of course, it's *possible* that doing this introduced other problems, but I don't *think* it did. My way of doing things was mistaken, but it was consistent. (If there are any problems, they're probably in the early game.) I doubt there are any problems related to this, but as always, if you find any bugs please let me know!
Engine Upgrade
Finally, I upgraded a major engine component to a slightly newer version. I saw a (very) slight performance improvement over 0.9.5, but I did this mostly in the hopes that it would help with stability (in case the older version had bugs that had been addressed in the newer version.)
Linux Users
Linux users can once again start the game by executing the file labeled 'Game.' For a while they (counterintuitively) had to ignore the Game file and instead execute something called 'nw' to play. Well, we're back to making sense around here. Hopefully we can keep it up.
Links
Conclusion
Whew! So there you have it. Hopefully this is the stable, good-performance, almost-bug-free build I always wanted 0.9 to be. I'm not holding my breath, but I'm hopeful. Now it's time to get back to work on 0.10! Please let me know if you run into any problems, and thank you for your support!
Comments
Proxxie
Thanks for the bug reports!
Proxxie
Yeah, there's a lot going on with that fight. I kinda wondered if I was introducing too much right at the start of it. And it's not obvious that the debuff drops off after one round without being hit (which is key.) I might need to rethink how I communicate that to the player.
OhioOkie
I believe it is. Though the 1st time through one doesn't know the best strategy to use to minimize the damage.
The battle is doable without any items But a bug i seem to have found was that if you failed the fight My game seemed to lock up? Resulting in using F5 to reset game. ( Might be due to controller?? But Overall fun game! There is a actual 3 part cycle to have noone die and use no items, Just gotta figure it out! Tip, Think about skill usage! On side note to Dev, There is an area during Bear quest where you can walk off the right of stairs (north map of human city) I find these things. heh...
dercas
Well, I AM left-handed. π
Proxxie
I'm surprised I haven't started hearing that before now lol
dercas
Hahahaha. Going back in time are we? From 0.9 to 0.1? lol....had to tease you.
Proxxie
The only healing items you can buy thus far are pretty weak, and there aren't any revival items for sale. Milk (from milking animals) is probably the best healing item you can stock up on, so make sure to milk those critters when you see 'em! There's usually something to figure out in the boss fights that make them easier; the Dranax fight is mostly about having Ana take the hits most of the time, but having someone else take one occasionally so that the stacking debuff wears off. The other characters can survive one hit from Dranax, it's just two that kills them. It's still pretty challenging in the beginning, though. In my own playthroughs, after first using a couple of weakens, I had Val start alternating between corruption and weaken. The DoT damage really adds up over the course of the fight (consume can help to finish him off, too.)
OhioOkie
The Demon battle was huge and hard. Where can one buy more revival potions? I had to use two of them to make it through the battle.
Proxxie
One more autosave caveat: it won't save within 5 minutes of launching the game.
