NOWHERE Alpha 54 is now available for players who are preordering / alphafunding the game. As usual, you'll find the new download on your account page.
Windows, Linux and Mac OS X builds are available.
Changes:
- NEW: Full support for XBOX 360 Gamepads.
- NEW: Sound and music are back; shield absorber produces a dynamic effect (try colliding with walls).
- NEW: The menu has been simplified. A new settings menu allows to toggle fullscreen on/off.
- NEW: readme.txt contains a quickstart guide. Windows users beware: please open readme.txt in Wordpad (or any other editor), not Notepad for now. Notepad can't deal with UNIX line endings.
- NEW: A loading screen.
- NEW: Smoother transitions between menu and game.
- NEW: Logging output is always written to debuglog.txt
- FIX: On some systems, window resize events caused the game to crash.
- FIX: Shadermodel 1.30 was broken, which made the game fail with older Intel drivers.
Under The Hood:
- Support for libpd has been added to allow writing procedural audio soundtracks. libpd allows building complex synthesizer and effect DSP chains for dynamic acoustic feedback.
Known Problems:
- Fullscreen toggle: even though toggling fullscreen within the game works, some elements don't use the correct aspect or disappear. You need to quit / restart the game to make sure these artifacts are gone.
- Occasional small freezes on Linux and OSX are caused by the PyPy garbage collector. The GC can be tuned with environment variables. If you manage to get a good tweak, let us know.
- Restarting the game from the menu is broken. You need to restart the executable.
- Win32: XBOX Gamepad support is possibly broken and will be fixed in the next alpha.
- Win32: pthreadGC2.dll was missing from the release. Alpha 54b has been uploaded promptly.
Up ahead:
- Continous development on both editor and game as we move forward.
- Flesh out the colony in which the sentients will be living and create places where there's something to do.
- Drive the backstory forward and rearrange the gameplay around our new terrain techniques, starting with populating our space with the sentient swarm AI. The sentients are not hostile, but they inhabit the world, and interaction with them is a key element of the gameplay.
