The Proteus Effect 0.9.6 is Released! (Patreon)

Greetings! I'm pretty happy about this release, but I want to make clear it doesn't have any new content. This release was mostly about improving stability, adding a new feature, and fixing bugs (including a pretty important one!) I'm going to talk a little about what's changed, but if you just want the links, they're at the bottom!

Changes

Lighting

The first and biggest change was getting rid of that troublesome lighting plugin. All the compatibility problems with recent releases were due to this plugin, and I think a lot of the instability problems some players experienced were, too.

Lighting isn't gone, though! I used that other method I described last time for some parts, but I wasn't able to achieve everything I wanted with it in all the scenes, so I supplemented it with a different lighting plugin. (Oh no!) This one shouldn't cause any compatibility problems - it even works in Canvas mode (the non-GPU-accelerated mode) so even folks with really old hardware should be able to enjoy the scenes as they were intended. This new lighting plugin seems to be much better written, so I'm hoping the stability problems some players experience will go away, too.

Autosave (and More Save Slots)

Just in case you do run into problems, though, I implemented an autosave feature. Autosave saves when you change maps - you enter a house, move to a different room in the dungeon, etc - with the following caveats:

• It won't save within 5 minutes of the last autosave
• It works on the vast majority of map changes (but not all of them)

I did the 5 minute thing for two reasons: first, one of the purposes of autosave is to get you out of trouble, so having a save from a few minutes ago is probably better than having one right before you ran into problems (because the problem might get preserved in a save.) Second, I wanted to minimize any lag people might experience as the system writes to your hard drive, particularly if you're playing on a slower HDD (spinning hard drive.) I didn't experience any lag, but I'm also playing on a pretty fast drive. Please let me know if you do! 

Autosave will always save in slot 40 (there are 40 save slots now.) And slot 40 is clearly marked as "Autosave." As it stands now, you *can* manually save into the autosave slot, but I advise against doing so. Autosave will overwrite whatever's in slot 40 when it does its thing, so if you stick a save in there you'll eventually lose it. In a future build I'll probably remove the ability to manually save into that slot to prevent those sorts of problems.

There are a number of autosave plugins out there, but none of them did exactly what I wanted, so I ended up writing my own.

Bugfixes

This release also fixed several small bugs and one big one. The big one's a little embarrassing, frankly, and it's been with this game for a long time. You may have noticed that sometimes something won't work right (particularly after just loading a save) and that you'll need to leave that room and re-enter it in order to get it to work. I finally figured out the reason for this, and it's all because I misunderstood a rather subtle point about how the game engine works.

Mistakes of this sort are scattered all throughout the game, and once I finally understood what was wrong, I was horrified at the prospect of having to find them all and fix them. And I honestly didn't know *how* I'd fix them.

What I ended up doing was modifying the engine so that it now works the way I mistakenly thought it did. It's not a big change, it only took like 7 lines of code. And it worked - a supporter provided a save that let me easily reproduce this sort of problem (thank you, by the way!) and it went away after this. Of course, it's *possible* that doing this introduced other problems, but I don't *think* it did. My way of doing things was mistaken, but it was consistent. (If there are any problems, they're probably in the early game.) I doubt there are any problems related to this, but as always, if you find any bugs please let me know!

Engine Upgrade

Finally, I upgraded a major engine component to a slightly newer version. I saw a (very) slight performance improvement over 0.9.5, but I did this mostly in the hopes that it would help with stability (in case the older version had bugs that had been addressed in the newer version.)

Linux Users

Linux users can once again start the game by executing the file labeled 'Game.' For a while they (counterintuitively) had to ignore the Game file and instead execute something called 'nw' to play. Well, we're back to making sense around here. Hopefully we can keep it up. 

Links

Windows 

Mac 

Linux 

Conclusion

Whew! So there you have it. Hopefully this is the stable, good-performance, almost-bug-free build I always wanted 0.9 to be. I'm not holding my breath, but I'm hopeful. Now it's time to get back to work on 0.10! Please let me know if you run into any problems, and thank you for your support!