The Proteus Effect 0.9.3 (Patreon)

Greetings! I'm finally done! Before I get into it, here's the links:

Windows 

Mac 

You'll notice there's no Linux release. I'll discuss the Linux situation at the end, but don't worry: I'm not dropping support for it!

All right, on to the release! This is numbered as a bugfix release, and it technically is in the sense that there's almost no new content, but there's more to the release than that. I'd been putting off a ton of bugfixes and tweaks, thinking that I'd fix them in the MZ port. Though I decided not to port the game, I still wanted to clean house on the project. 0.9.3 is basically a better, much cleaner base to build the project on in the future. Let's go through the changes:

Upgraded Engine

The biggest reason I wanted to port the game to RPG Maker MZ was because it offered much better performance. It turns out that I can manually upgrade key components of the current version of the game to improve performance, so that's what I did in 0.9.3. MZ games still run a little bit better, but performance is much improved. I think you'll find the game runs much smoother, especially on older hardware.

Encounter Improvements

I made improvements to a few minigames/encounters which I hope will make them more fun. The minions in the Tal'thelas dungeon now have a visual aid to warn you when they get close, which should make this part less annoying overall. (Note that some players with old machines may not see it.) I also made a few changes to the Flame Spirit fight which should make it more engaging and fun.

Typo and Bug Fixes

The game had accumulated a ton of bug and typo reports over time. I fixed the serious or easy ones as they came in, but that left a ton that were neither. Well, I've now fixed all bugs of which I'm aware, with the exception of the 'invisible wisp' bug from the Stone King fight. That one is extremely involved and I didn't want to delay the release any further, but all the rest are fixed. And there were a lot of them. There were also a number of typos, and I got them, too! The game should be good on this front, but if you see any bugs or typos, please report them!

There were actually a few serious bugs I didn't know about lurking in there; 0.9 introduced a bug that prevented bombs from flashing in The Dark Pits. There were some serious problems with the flu minigame. Going to certain areas would give you a black screen. The Keeble minigame would sometimes cause a crash. And several others. Now the game should be much more stable overall.

Continuity Fixes

You ever talk to some random NPC and someone who isn't supposed to be in the party at that time chimes in? Or an event occurs which assumes that something else has happened, but it hasn't? These sorts of continuity errors can be jarring and take you out of the flow of the story. Continuity errors weren't extremely common in this game, but I ended up fixing quite a few of them. Now there should be fewer things to suspend your suspension of disbelief!

Other Under the Hood Fixes

0.9 introduced a lighting plugin, but unfortunately it didn't work on everyone's system. I included a wonky workaround to disable it for those people, but it was a little bit of a pain to do. Well, the game should now automatically detect if it will work on your system, and disable it if appropriate. I expect this will fix most problems with the lighting, but if it doesn't, I've made changes that'll make it a little easier to straight-up force it to disable.

Longtime Mac players have probably noticed that sometimes new releases will refuse to find your old saves. The reason this happened is because the Mac version of the game handles saves differently than the Windows and Linux versions (the reasons are a bit complicated.) A plugin makes this change, but I have to leave it off for Windows and Linux and only enable when I'm deploying a Mac version. Well, sometimes I'd forget to do that, which is why it couldn't find your saves. That should all be in the past, though: I now leave it on all the time, but it only makes those changes if you're on a Mac. So no more wonky new releases for Mac users!

Other Quality of Life Fixes

• You can now find Ned Danger's books in any order
• You can now get most old H-scenes, even if Emily has joined you
• You can now save the game in Tal'thelas' room
• The 'invite people' objective from the Party Time quest will now fill in when you've invited everyone (lol)
• And many others

The Linux Version

I think the Linux version has been screwed up for quite a while. I finally spent some time trying to figure out what the problem is, and I've had some success in fixing it. I still don't know why it's having the problems it does, but I've figured out how to work around them. That's the good news. The bad news is that fixing it will require changing pretty much every piece of code I've written in the game, including little snippets scattered all throughout it. This isn't quite as bad as it sounds, though; I should be able to automate these changes. Writing the tool to do that will be a fair bit of work, however, and I've decided it's something I'm going to incorporate as part of a tool to automate the build process for the game. I don't have an ETA of when this will be, but I definitely plan to get it done before the 0.10 release.

Alternately, if there are any Linux people out there who are super-knowledgeable about Node, Chromium, V8 and/or nw.js, hit me up! We might be able to get this resolved without having to change my code!

So, Linux people may have to wait for a little bit, but don't worry - I'm not abandoning you!

Conclusion

This release has almost no new content, but it's still something of a milestone. It should be the best-performing, most stable and most bug-free release yet. I hope you enjoy it! Please let me know if you run into any issues. It's time to get back to work on 0.10 - thank you for your support!