U12 Status Report: Drowning in Bugs

Hello mates! The Baron here with a little bit of news to fill you guys in on what the heck is keeping U12 from dropping. Well...



We are being crushed by the amount of U12 bugs right now and every time we crunch down on one bug two more take its place. Unfortunately they are also the kind of bugs that make playing impossible / unfun, so sadly we can't just release and have people play while we fix them in a patch; things like Dungeon rooms being invisible, door portals being glitchy, performance issues, etc.

The most crippling issues are mostly stemming from three things -

As mentioned in the Road to U12 news, we remade the whole Dungeon technology to improve the dungeon generation and give the possibility to expand the system with new features later. It also allowed us to eliminate 3rd part copyright issues that were preventing modders from being allowed mod Dungeons. By remaking it ourselves, it meant we can just give modders the permission to do what they like since we then own it.

The whole undertaking was crazy, but things were looking really good at the end of last year. However, now that we are making builds we are only just discovering lots of things that broke and need fixing and it's the annoying sort of stuff that you don't discover until you spent a full day making a test build. We are slogging through these fixes now.



The other thing is Unity itself, which the game is built on. Unity brings its own whole host of issues, and when Unity updates it can introduce all sorts of new problems that take a lot of time to workaround, as is the current case.

But some good news here is that as we work on it we are taking a lot of time to improve performance issues. U12 is coming with a big improvement on memory usage, so that should feel really nice. You will hopefully see much better loading times too.

Finally, we added a silly amount of new dungeon rooms to U12 lol.



It was only supposed to be a small bonus for the update and then things got carried away as they always do with us. (image from u/Enchanter1101 ːer_heartː)

The good news here is that the new rooms look awesome and it should inject a bunch of fresh new life into Outpost while everyone is waiting on Crystal Hunt.





But the bad news is new rooms mean new bugs or other environmental issues to be found, diagnosed and fixed. To give you an example, one day a perfectly square chunk of the ocean went missing in one outdoor room. ːgoblinː Just.. gone, see ya later without rhyme or reason. This is the kind of things we are fixing in rooms.



So that's where we are folks, and why we are suddenly and surprisingly being blocked from a release when we seemed so close before... IT'S ANNOYING! ːeagleangryː



The guys at Warpfrog are really working hard on releasing though, so rest assured we will get there. KospY has aged about ten years in the past 3 months lol, so believe me that we are all eager to finish this and have the whole team move fully onto 1.0 update (rest assured we still have some of the team working on 1.0 right now).

But it's not all doom and gloom for U12! The stuff that is working is working really well, most notably breakables.



This is one of those feature additions that you are gonna find it hard to remember B&S before it because it lends itself so well to the game.





Breaking things is caused by force, so don't worry about tapping into things and finding them break really flimsily. It works really well and logically with the physics simulation. Gravity mage runs are super-duper fun to smash furniture.





Elsewhere, doors to siderooms are working well in Dungeons, although its sad still that we have no Crystal Hunt loot implemented yet (coming in 1.0). For now it will just be for fun and exploration.

By the way, I'm not sure it was ever mentioned there are trapdoors. ːpraisesunː



While the bulk of the team are working on fixing the torrent of U12 bugs, the rest of the team are polishing other things. One example is the UI...

It had long been on the cards to update the old book menu for UX purposes (many players didn't even realize the book menu had multiple options pages.. ːKScaredː) and make room for new options. In the last news we had posted a preview of the new UI, thinking "I sure hope players will enjoy this new clean redesign..."

We were legit surprised by reactions to the new look and the book nostalgia some of your guys had haha. But some folks pointed out something interesting - the clean look was a bit "too sci-fi" and didn't really fit with the aesthetic of B&S, which is something the old book did well. This was a really great point! We were focused on making a nice and clean menu with a good UX, but it's a great example for us of "missing the forest for the trees".

Well we heard you! We did a bit of switcharooing and were able to get the best of both words by adding a nice clean UI that allows for all the new options menus, while still retaining the classic B&S feel. Hope you guys like this one!



That's it for now, guys! I simply cannot wait for the day when I can drop the news that says "U12 is now available.

One last little nugget of news for Nomad players because I know Nomad players read these Steam news; some hope for you regarding the long awaiting scripted modding --

Some tests are being done on making complex mods run in-game and there has been some victories! Here is an example of the Mystic Hands mod by the legendary modder Lyneca being run in Nomad:



There are still bugs, still work to be done and I still don't have a release date, but this is great news as it is a proof of concept for the madness that is making advanced mods work on the Quest 2. This is a great milestone!