Dev Diary: January 23rd 2013

It’s been a while since our last update! Here is the state of our current projects:

  • As you might have noticed, an update for Avatar Farm Online was published past Friday, and had some nasty bugs that could lead to crashes and slowdowns. We noticed this before receiving any report, and couldn’t sleep (literally) until we located the issue and fixed it. We did a post explaining the issue , and we’ll submit the update as soon as possible (we can’t submit it until Friday). It will take some time until it’s approved though.
    • We also spent a whole day trying to fix other less frequent reported crashes and issues:
      • Fixed incorrect button layout shown in the How to play to sell/recycle items.
      • Fixed rare crash ( ArgumentOutOfRangeException – WorkToolTile )
      • Prevented rare crash ( NullReferenceException – PlayerStartWork ) (couldn’t find the root cause, but it will be ignored).
      • Prevented incorrect scores from showing on the leaderboard (couldn’t find the root cause, but they will be discarded).
      • Ensured data is saved when autosaving (A small pause can be noticed now on certain consoles). Should help with the farm lost issue.
    • If you have an issue with the latest update that’s not mentioned here, please report, as these are all we have been reported lately.
  • White Noise was also updated past week, and we received two reports since then, both of very rare cases. We’ve already submitted a bugfix update for these.
  • We’ve also continued work on White Noise Online:
    • We had a playtest session on Friday with three players, to check how the gameplay felt. Once a few technical issues were addressed, the game worked as expected, but…
      • The game has a feature to force players to stay together (more or less), you can go crazy if you get too far from other players. This mechanic was added to avoid players from exploring the whole scenario in a few minutes.
      • But, the game had no way to avoid the opposite: To force players to be a bit spread and not walk in a tight group. This means there were no chances of people disorienting and getting separated from the group (which we think will be the main point of the coop mode),  and the monster can be easily avoided if one player tries to distract him while the other players keep going forward.
      • We’ve added a new mechanic that allows the monster to appear closer to the group if the players walk in a tight group. It should help in disorienting the players, but haven’t been able to properly test it yet.
    • Content-wise, we’ve decided to restart work on the scenario we were working on. The idea was to increase the playable area since the original scenario was rather small, but we got too far and had to reduce it.
    • As for characters, they are almost ready to start rigging and animation. We’ll probably show some previews in the next dev diary :).

Tags: , ,

  • Raven says:

    when i make pets (cat or dog) on, then it laggs…

  • Leonides says:

    Wait so we can’t be far apart from each other in white noise??

  • WaaghMan says:

    Not very far. Otherwise exploring the whole scenario would be a piece of cake, giving the monster no time to even catch the players, no matter how powerful it was.

  • Zyxlamonde says:

    Hi,
    Warmblood Horse make me lost a lot of money… :-(. , No benefits .