Version A4 is Released!

Hello Testers,

This is a big one and it had its load of issues leading to it. First off, my venerable computer had an incident in the middle of rendering the August reward, which Required me to spend two days repairing it (Had to reinstall windows, DAZ and Visual Studio…) Getting everything to work right is a pain but I think I made it in good time!

So those two days of the long weekend were lost, making the week much less productive than I had hoped. Nevertheless, if you look at the release notes, this one is quite a big one. I’m fixing a whole bunch of bugs and issues that had been reported in the last few weeks as well as adding workarounds for missing content and adjusting game balance.

So, what should you look for?

Well, spamming shooters at the Pub won’t be as effective, but on the other hand the 2nd and 3rd effects of the spice will be stronger than before, so we might see a bit more growth in different characters and different attributes.

Also, working out will have more impact on the characters.

For those who test in a different date format than US-EN, I think the game has improved on date conversions, please report those issues with the action performed and the game number and your culture settings. Then let the game stand until I’ve tried to reproduce the error, that’s the only way I’ll ever be able to fix it for every possible occurrence.

Now, about the character avatars and the height workaround… The way the game was meant to play was, the avatar should reflect the attribute levels of the characters. That is still the case until you run into missing content. At that point the game selects an avatar of the same height (when available) and then uses that to show measurements.

1. You keep earning XP even if the avatar doesn’t show it, so if let’s say Olivia, keeps going to the gym, she still earns muscle XP but the avatar is stuck at the same level.

2. A counter has been created for missing content requests so instead of rendering in order of occurrence, I’ll be rendering in order of greatest demand. (reducing the need of the workaround for more of you faster.)

3. A counter has been created for the character strings, this one will be used to see what the most popular growth paths are and build cut-scenes accordingly. (If 90% of the time, Ava outgrows Oliver with then having bodies 57 and 34, while the other 10% is with bodies 58 and 61… The cut scene will show them with the avatars of the first path. Until I catch up and have time to render Path B.)

I’ve reset the missing content database to enable those features, so you’ll get some missing content messages now and then but that’s necessary to match the demands with the new game balancing. 

Happy testing everyone!

Game client: http://bit.ly/SetupFS