Early Access Update Femtiofem (55)

build id: 5EA16C27

nornware AB is happy to announce a new update to Space Beast Terror Fright.


COMMUNITY RESPONSE TO USER PLANS
First of all I would like to express my extreme joy and satisfaction at the level of community engagement in regards to the ability to share user plans since Early Access Update 54. The sheer number of plans as well as the fantastic creativity you all have shown is fantastic, and it really gives me a great sense of accomplishment and that all the work put into the editor and the new back-end has been well worth it.

Thank you all! XD


USER PLAN SIGNATURES
As some of you may have noticed in the last update, any user plans that weren't created by yourself or one of your Steam Friends would simply display as the author. The reason for this is the fact that I'm storing user plans in a third-party back-end (not via Steam's systems), and hence I'm not allowed to do look-ups to get user information via the steam id of the user who created the map. This is by design and really a good security feature on their part.

In order to play nice with GDPR I've opted to not try to hack around this but rather change the user plan format to store a signature field where the user can optionally sign and / or describe their creation. It is of course completely optional to do this - signing a map is a post-creation step just like flagging it as public (via "my plans"), so there is no requirement to do this if you prefer not to.

As part of the technical work to achieve this change the existing user plans needed to be moved to new storage, and this achieved via a batch conversion process. I will be doing the final conversion just prior to rolling out this update in an effort to catch all the latest user plans and modifications.

The legacy storage is still intact however, so if you feel that the conversion process managed to miss something that you created at the eleventh hour before the update please email me (contact@nornware.com) with the name of the user plan and I'll sort out the conversion.

The new storage format is technically much more robust to changes in the data formats, so I don't anticipate the need for any more large scale conversions like this.


NEW USER PLAN SELECTION SCREEN
Due to the great influx of user plans I've invested in a new selection screen for user plans that is more reminiscent of the "my plans" screen available via the editor. It uses most of the screen, shows plan previews in the large / pretty format, and also displays more informative tool-tips. I've also implemented a number of sorting / filtering options that should help with managing the large number of user plans that are already in the system.

I anticipate that it might be a good thing to have a free-text search field as well, not least if users start signing their maps in a consistent manner.

I've also seen at least one instance of maps being named in a way that suggests the desire for "user campaigns" - I assume the intent is to create maps that are meant to be played sequentially, with the requirement to finish them in order. I'm definitely interested in supporting something like this if there is demand for it.


UNLOCKABLES / LORE / DATABANK
Coming out of some of the technical work with the new user plan storage format I had the idea of some of the Datacores including "secret information" that you could randomly roll as the result of a download. This led in turn to the implementation of "unlockable lore" in the game, which at this point is mainly all the history / development information pertaining to S.B.T.F. that I could find, some of which is quite ancient by this point. I don't know how interesting this will be to the average user, but it certainly amounts to a lot of stuff, so I chose to use that as a "lore" component to the game.

There is now a Databank button in the main menu which will take you to a screen that shows a large number of unlockable pieces of "lore". Initially none of it viewable, but as a result of playing the game in a normal manner there is always a chance that you will unlock a piece of lore / databank entry with each Datacore download. There is an accompanying audio cue as well as a text notification that flashes at the top-center of the screen when this occurs, and after that once out of mission you can peruse this information via the Databank interface (use the scroll wheel + shift).

I would optimally have liked to have more game-relevant / in-universe lore / story stuff to unlock, but that would certainly be a lot of work to write - just collecting and formatting all the stuff that I "had already produced" was a massive undertaking of several full workdays.

In any case I hope that at the least the simple act of unlocking this stuff will add a sense of progression to the game, and even if you have no interest in reading it all simply the goal of unlocking all of it will cater to the (possible) completionist inside you.

The Databank is a completely local feature, and as such functions in all modes as well as in both local and multiplayer. If you ever want to reset your progress, simply delete this file:

C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\nornware\sbtf\lore.txt


KNOWN ISSUES

• In multiplayer mode, user plan signatures (if present) are only displayed for the party host, not for other party members. Signatures however work properly in local mode.
  
  
• Surrounding the airlock with alt-walls in a user plan will cause erroneous geometry to be generated.
  

MISCELLANEOUS

• BUGFIX: Enabling chat input when in-mission could cause input lock-ups when playing user plans.
  
  
• BUGFIX: Potential crashes when quickly switching leaderboard weeks on the CotW Leaderboard screen.
  
  
• BUGFIX: Hosting a party with non-empty chat input could crash in multiplayer.
  
  
• BUGFIX: Random breaches could spawn in airlock.
  
  
• BUGFIX: Slush memory increased from 1MB to 2MB - certain maps with large numbers of active sentries / simultaneous Beast deaths could cause overflow crashes in particle systems.
  
  
• BUGFIX: The game is now robust for the user plan back-end being unavailable.
  
  
• Navigation of linebroken text is much improved - this applies to both multiplayer chat as well as user plan signatures.
  
  
• The holotable map display has been tweaked to be closer to the surface of the underlying geometry / no more floating.
  
  
• Sparks for fences now have better / matching colors.
  
  
• The replay library now shows progress in percent while parsing the replay files on disk.
  
  
• The menu background world is now faded in at startup.
  
  
• The menu background world is now slightly darkened in relevant screens to improve readability (Mission Setup and Databank).
  
  
• There is something strange going on in panic rooms these days...
  

As always, thank you for your support and patience.
/nornware AB c/o johno

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