DQDX Patch #16 -- Version 2.2.0

Date: Fri, 17 May 2024
Defender's Quest: Valley of the Forgotten (DX edition) Game Banner
Genre: Indie, RPG, Strategy
Developer: Level Up Labs, LLC
Release Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2012
Hey everyone!

Here's a year end patch for the game.

Status:
Windows: YES
Mac: YES
Linux: YES

There's a lot of fixes in this one, which means there's also an opportunity for regressions. I like to think I've checked thoroughly, but please let me know if I broke anything that wasn't already broken and I'll do my best to address it.

The big two things I've tried to address this time around are general performance in battles, and navigation using the gamepad.

Changelog for Version 2.2.0 12/19 build:

Lots of battle optimizations:
- don't call unnecessary updates on enemies
- don't call unnecessary updates on effects
- cache results of effect palette swaps rather than doing it EVERY SINGLE TIME
- Fix occassional NaN values for a projectile's angle, which would trigger a while loop of SIX MILLION ITERATIONS (every update!!!!)
- Throttle how many times an enemy's HP bar can be redrawn per unit of time (so it's not wastefully spammed when playing at e.g. x16 speed)
- Cache results of scaled tiled bitmaps to reduce drawing time
- Increase capacity of QuadTree nodes
- Added surgical speed throttling -- if there's too many enemies on screen, x16 and x8 speed modes are disabled until you kill enough off. You'll only ever really encounter this limit on the endless bonus battles, and it should effectively *increases* framerate by not overtaxing the game.
- Replaced "hot" text fields in battle with bitmap text fields, which update faster and cause less lag
- Avoid playing multiple identical sound effects in rapid succession
- Preload enemies to avoid stutter on the first spawn of each wave

Other stuff:
- Fix controls menu bug where you can create invalid control configs in gamepad mode
- Fix black screen on exiting menu in battle if sprite mode has ever changed
- Fix auto-closing gamepad controls change popup
- Fix on-screen button prompts not updating on controls change in save slot screen
- Remove various problematic window resolutions from the video options
- Fix controls menu gamepad navigation
- Fix steam achievements not always reflecting what you have on Steam vs. what you have in game
- Make journal text default to latin font if it tries to do Korean/Japanese but finds an untranslated string
- Fix this crash - start a game in hero mode, try to recruit a character, and cancel out of the warning popup
- Add various crash guards
- Fix cursor crash in movies menu
- Add antialiasing to projectiles
- Lots of locale tweaks to fix bugs
- Show the text "loading" between screen transitions so it's not just black
- Fix German/Spanish text overruns in cutcenes
- Add back/forth cutscene actions for gamepad
- Fix cursor navigation of enemy tooltips on battle preview
- Switch journal to bitmap text so it loads faster
- Fix soft lock in party skill screen
- Fixed full-screen flash effects persisting after a screen transition
- Fix missing skill lock text in party menu
- Fix missing tutorial texts when navigating with the gamepad
- Fix broken symbols text in cutscenes
- Fix crash in party skills menu
- Fix cycle defenders & spell selection bugs
- Fix accessibility menu glitch (save slot specific options accessible outside of a loaded save)
- Enemies now selectable in gamepad mode
- Battle preview now shows a line crossing out already earned rewards
- Fix crash in controls menu
- Fix bug that shows incorrect character portrait when selecting an "ally" (computer-controlled guest character)
- Fix item sorting in party screen
- Make both flashing and screenshake in cutscenes respect the accesibility settings
- Fix wave block tooltip on wave block destruction
- Fix tooltip lingering when enemy is killed
- Fix boost disabled button placement in mcguffin menu in final battle
- Fix buggy gamepad menu interactions with spell menu
- If a name is entered in japanese/korean and the language is later switched to English or another locale, so that a text field with non-asian characters
ever attempts to display asian text, display the asian text using romanization (Hepburn or RROK) rather than display nothing at all (this does not change the underlying data).
- Optimize party screen so it's faster to navigate with the gamepad
- Fix some issues with gamepad navigation on the battle screen
- Switched to bitmap fonts for many screens - should be more responsive, particularly when using gamepad navigation
- Fix artifacts in berserker animation
- Fix enemy death animations
- Make color selections for healer, knight, mage, slightly less terrible
- Add dragon roar sound effect
- Add sound effect to indicate first and last enemy wave
- German, French, and Spanish translations now officialy out of beta, should be 100% complete.
- Fixes to the journal -- shouldn't have ugly overlaps and layout problems in
any of the locales now.
- New sound effects
- Fixed a few weapon icons that had some bleed-over
- Simplified Spell "Need PSI" and "Wait" overlays to be less buggy in other locales
- Fix monastery tutorial (keyboard vs. gamepad mode)
- Fix some of Ketta's battle portraits
- Fix battle dialog window position in some cases
- Remove OUYA/Logitech button icons so I have less things to maintain
- Fix knight's generic HD sprite icon
- Combined splash screen with loading screen
- Add James Gray, Lucas Pope, Syrenne McNulty, and Nilsen Filc to credits
- Remove old website links from credits
- Made gamepad button prompts have a subtle animated effect (for non-steam-controller mode)
- The new little twinkly star on the title screen is not a special secret, it's to
fulfill a boring requirement on consoles that no screen is ever entirely static

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