PATCH #6: Moving to the latest Unreal Engine

SORRY THE OLD GAME CAN'T COME TO THE PHONE RIGHT NOW. WHY? OH, CAUSE SHE'S DEAD!

We've moved to a new Unreal Engine version, and oh my god it's been so much work, but we're so happy with the result, and we hope you'll be too...

MOVING TO UNREAL ENGINE 4.26

Unreal Engine 4.24? Don't know her. We're all about that 4.26 now!
It comes with everything Epic engineers put into the update, and trust us, you do not wanna see that
list. Instead we're highlighting the bangers:

- IMPROVED PERFORMANCE
- IMPROVED STABILITY
- REDUCED MEMORY USAGE

Everything is just a bit more responsive, and quicker. You might not notice if you're running on the latest and greatest hardware, but for those of us who aren't that #blessed; you'll really feel the difference!

MUSICAL STATUES

Some of you with lower spec machines would load into Aspiration Gala only to be met by an entire level of frozen NPCs who wouldn't move, and better yet, block you in. Like some sick game of musical statues but at the end you can't leave.
NPCs travel on something called NavMesh, which is kind of like an invisible track for them. These need to be renewed every time anything gets moved or changed in a level, and last time we updated this level someone forgot to reactivate it. Well no more!

APARTMENT BATHROOM UPGRADE

Better toilet experience: The camera clipping issue should now be fixed!

ALONSO

Reports of Alonso rolling his eyes into his head in snarky / possessed ways. This took away from his sternness and was addressed with us re-exporting his animations. He's now spooky again.

FEAR AND LOADING IN UNION CITY

Snappier loading!!! It's barely noticeable but we're really happy with it and wanted to share!

NEW (SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT) ICON

Please only say good things, thank.

CLOUDSAVES

Enabled. Nice.

LINUX GANG

Do we have an update for you. Don't be mad!!! But due to the new Unreal Engine version not supporting OpenGL anymore, this is a Vulkan only club now, including brand new support for Vulkan ES3.1 which runs way quicker on low spec machines and brings your Linux experience on par with Windows & Mac gamers!

UI STUFF

Never underestimate the power of good UI! Which is why we continuously make refinements and additions to the way you experience our games

- CONTROLLERS

Controllers used to have some erratic behaviour. Especially inside the terminals.
Fun Fact: Using a controller often just means that the mouse cursor isn't gone, but hidden from view. That meant that on certain screens, things would already be highlighted, even if they didn't seem to be highlighted with your controller. This could make the controller feel like it was selecting items arbitrarily, which it wasn't - it was just interacting on what the invisible mouse was selecting. There was a particular occurrence in Reflections where you couldn't select certain chairs for no sensible reason. Using the controller is now much sleeker!

- ONBOARDING EXPERIENCE

Starting out playing the game is now much easier, smoother, and more intuitive! Time to turn your nan into a fan!


- TYPOS IN CREDITS

Pobody’s Nerfect

- WAIT WHICH GAMESAVE WAS IT?

Well guess no more! They come with timestamps now!!! Technology is incredible.

AND AS ALWAYS

Join our Discord: discord.gg/revolutionsoftware
We are on there all the time, and we'd love to see more of you there!

We love you all very much, and hope that this reflects in how much effort we continue to put into our games.

Lots of love, your team at Revolution

Update #7: New Features: Holo-Brooches, Steam Deck, and Polish

"In FEBRUARY?!" - I hear you cry - "But that's January's basement!"

And right you are! However our love to you all knows no bounds, no limit, and so we crawled out of the winter holidays, past the seasonal sludge that is Late Winter, and did our gosh darn best!

TL;DR:
I'm not reading all that just tell me what's up

New Features:

- Holo-Brooches
- Steam Deck
- Polish Subtitles

And of course tons of improvements:

- Gameplay
- NPCs
- Shaders & Renderers
- Tiny Tweaks here and there

Those of you up for a deep dive, let's go!!!!
Those of you who aren't, you're dismissed, have a wonderful weekend

NEW FEATURES

HOLO-BROOCHES

Heading to the Museum will now prompt a message that tells you that a Holo-Brooch has been unlocked! Once unlocked, you can start collecting!!

Holo-Brooches are items Foster gets to equip as part of his outfit!
Previously only being a small aspect of the game, we've come up with a cute and elaborate way to make them more fun:

- More:
Before, the Holo-Brooch came in 3 standout designs;
Joey, Citadel, and Spankles. If you think those were cool, just wait to see how many there are now!

- New Design:
While they previously had a more muted appearance, we got our very talented UI dev Simon to give them a vivid spruce up;
New art, new shaders and "you can actually tell what they are" - wise words from the dev team.

- MINOS:
When entering MINOS terminals, you can now find a new tab that lets you keep track of your discovered Holo-Brooches.

- Where?? How???
Silly you'd ask! It's an adventure game!!! Explore, be weird with it. Live a little. Try out items where they don't belong. Have a snoop where you shouldn't. Click on things. Be a tiny bit unhinged, as a treat!

STEAM DECK

Currently working on getting verified on Steam Deck!
Not only does Beyond A Steel Sky fully support Steam Deck, this update makes sure everything is optimized to run as beautifully on it as possible!
Notice us Senpai (ꈍ ᴗ ꈍ✿)

POLISH SUBTITLES
To jest dobre, super dobre!
Don't worry, we left it to the professionals...
Beyond A Steel Sky now has Polish text localisation, dobrej zabawy!

Enjoy your new Features, and remember kids

GAMEPLAY

INTRO COMIC

- Skipping
Some of you smarty pants were switching control inputs while the intro was playing, and it glitched out to be unskippable!!!! I mean.. we fixed it but damn, kids these days, no chill. (Just kidding we love you)

- Tabbing out
Tabbing out during the intro also made the sound go out of sync with the animation. Sometimes the subtitles would even go missing. But no more!

FOSTER

- Multi-tasking
Foster used to have to stop everything he's doing just to pull the Hacker out?? Super useless. Walk and talk buddy, it's not rocket surgery!

- Going Viral
Big, BIG End-Game Spoiler, but very funny; So to line up character interaction with animation, we make Foster approach things from a specific angle or direction. You click on it, and he'll position himself in a way that we have the animation for. Makes sense, looks good, what could possibly go wrong???
Now, were you to approach the globe from a opposite direction because you entered the scene on the wrong side of the room for some insane reason (looking at you Speedrunners) Foster would cross the room to go to his animation trigger spot, walk straight through the Virus, and DIE. We now told Foster to never ever touch the virus. You really gotta spell things out, huh.

PUZZLE RELATED

- Woop Woop that's the sound of the Police
Spoilers ahead: In Recycling there is a puzzle where you need to crush your crowbar into a machine and if you do this a Security Droid should come to investigate. However, when saving and reloading in a particular way the Security Droid would just take the beeline for your ass, walls didn't exist to him, he was just coming for you. Terrifying. Also not true anymore.

- Hint States
Some Speedrunners would start being out of sync with the Hint States because things were done in such an overly efficient way, that we didn't account for (like using prior play-through knowledge and doing things ahead of time). We're onto you. I think we fixed it!...

- Cube Puzzle Camera Bug
A little spoilery: When you were on one Cube in the Cube puzzle, and held your joystick down to the bottom left, the camera would keep moving down, the time you'd move to the next cube you'd be just moved along horizontally, but the vertical (which you were in the - on, all the way down) became your new 0 and you were stuck seeing nothing during one of the most important scenes in the whole game. Devastating..

NPC SHENANIGANS

JOEY

- Double Joey all the way across the sky

I'll tell you a little secret. Every player model has a stunt double for the cutscenes. They're not the same.. And when one of them doesn't make like a tree and leaf you end up with two of them! - This also happened to Orana in Graham's Apartment! Thank you for reporting, this should now be fixed!

- Joey clipping into Foster
When Joey is in his shell, flying he's a much taller than we accounted for. We now accounted for it.

- Rogue Joey Hat
Just floating around. Wild. We caught it though!

- "Improved Joey Shell Initialisation"
Better Joey. Strong Joey. Hunk Joey. Shiny Joey.

LITERALLY ANYYONE ELSE

- Reginald Poetry Reading
Got a few complaints that the turnout was bad. There are now more NPCs at the recital. Happy, Reg?

- Gang Gang
Bullies. They sometimes pushed players into a soft-lock by pushing the player off the NavMesh! Super mean. We gave them a talking to.

- NPC Triplets
SORRY! We realised that the rate of NPC twins and triplets was unrealistic and not immersive. Less of that. Hopefully.

SHADERS & RENDERERS

- Quick Textures
So when you load up a game the engine is trying to load up textures as quickly as possible by looking up what's in memory first before refining it later. This is why sometimes things look a little blocky before they become clearer as the game is finished loading up. Your game is basically "streaming" in the high quality textures by looking them up once needed. But from now on textures that are always needed, like Foster, will just exist with a high-end texture, no need to "stream" - that end result will just look like he's always his most handsome self.

- Well lit NPCs
So to save you all a lot of memory it's good manners to "bake" lighting into a level rather than calculate it in run-time. It's also good manners to always update it when you move or change anything in that level so it doesn't look wrong. I don't know like making NPCS IMPOSSIBLY BRIGHT IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT?? They look way less radio-active now.

- Aspiration Gala Black Screen
We fixed some Race Conditions on Aspiration Gala. Race Conditions are the order a program is told to load things in. When you enter a level there are a ton of things that need to happen at once and it will determine a hierarchy based on factors like your device, and your technical constrains. Sometimes these race conditions get loaded in the wrong order, which is 1. hard to identify, and 2. hard to pin down as it can be due to a plethora of reasons. But ladies and gentlemen, (and those betwixed) we got 'em.

- Less expensive stink
So, turns out the stink lines on the truck are hella expensive on the frame-rate.. We made it stink less for you. We did the same for mist in a few other places. Things tend to stink, and mist less. I think that's a fair way to summarize this.

- Desert Sun now casting more elaborate Shadows
Like for Telephone poles, and... rocks. Worth the 3080, wasn't it

TINY TWEAKS HERE AND THERE

- Game Saves
We added a visual distinction to game saves and autosaves!

- Loading Spoilers
If you moved the camera too quickly maps and things would load up in an order that could spoil some of the game (if for example something was hidden behind a wall) - We made note of these areas and we now play our cards closer to the chest.

- Performance upgrade: Hacking & Pausing
Okay this one sounds a little boring but it's a huge quality of life update! When you used to Pause or pull out the Hacker the game continued existing in the background. It now doesn't. It's GONE. It makes everything more responsive, more stable, AND it's a blessing on the battery

- What a Drag
When multiple game controllers were connected, dragging and dropping would sometimes go a bit bonkers. No more bonk.

- Better collisions
More solid Furniture. 10/10 would stub your toe!

- Deserters
You think it's funny running into the desert, out of bounds??? Well you're right, and now it won't glitch you out so much.

- Revolution Splashscreen
Now uses the updated logo! Very snazzy.

- Switching between languages
Switching languages willy nilly should NEVER MAKE THE GAME CRASH!!! And it doesn't...

- Subtitles
Sometimes the game got confused about where to put a subtitle; the speech bubble or bottom text. And then it did both

- Tweaked layout in places
Some stuff is now smaller, or bigger, or more consistent

- Pause Menu
A completely redone Help Screen UI for clearer, more useful information when using a controller.

HUGE THANKS

It's truly heart-warming to feel so close to you, and we want you to know that while Beyond A Steel Sky has been out for over a year, we still care deeply about your gameplay experiences.
So please don't feel shy, and reach out any time!

Lots of love from the whole team at Revolution Software

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