After a couple of weeks with unofficial builds and no major issues Mac builds are now officially supported!

• Make Mac support official.
  
• Add new visible stage to Melting Pot to make it possible for players to debug a scenario where a few players were getting stuck in an infinite loop there.
  
• Fix example code block rendering issues with text wraps, particularly noticeable with translated comments.
  
• Add Russian full Primer translation & almost complete function documentation translation.

This week's update lays the ground for improving localization.

• Add information about the current status of partial translations into the game settings menu. This should give a better idea how well a given language is supported.
  
• Dependency updates & code cleanups.

Game translation is divided into 6 sections Interface, Tutorials, Company mails, Primer, Function docs, Colony mails.

All game translations made by the community at big-ab-games/robo-instructus-translation. Work to extract the game text is still ongoing. Initially only the Interface & Tutorials texts were ready to translate. But now Company mails, Primer & Function docs texts are available.

The new translations are written in a simple markup style.


Could you translate that? If so raise a pull request at big-ab-games/robo-instructus-translation or send me an email.

Mac builds are available on Steam since 1.7, though not yet advertised. This is still true with 1.8. The game, and demo, should download and work on mac. I'd still like to see more reports on how well it's working before I start officially supporting mac. So let me know if the game is working for you.

• Native Mac builds are available on Steam.
  Mac support is not yet final or advertised on the store page as I'd like for the builds to get a little more testing. Let me know if they work! Report any issues at #229, mac builds are also available there for testing.
  
  
• Game settings can now be selected from the menu during unlocks.
  
• Optimise compute loop, lowers CPU usage / increases max speed performance a little.
  
• Export discrete gpu hint symbols on Linux & Mac for multi-gpu setups.
  
• Allow some usages without render hardware acceleration, mostly for mac testing.
  
• Auto pick low render settings when lacking hardware acceleration.
  
• Update dependencies & steam sdk.
  
• Support "Primer" translations. Awaiting community translation work, see big-ab-games/robo-instructus-translation

• Rework editor key hint to use non-mono font with better support for translated text.
  
  
• Switch up threading to compute & handle window events on main thread & render off main. Lowers CPU usage. Required to run on mac.
  
• Fix some deprecated OpenGL shader usage.
  
• Updated translations
  
  • Add de, fr, ru editor key translations.
    
  • Add partial sv, pt-BR editor key translations.
    

Thanks again to the contributors over at big-ab-games/robo-instructus-translation. Head over there if you'd like to help improve the game's translations.

I'm currently having a look at building the game for mac. Check out the issue if you'd like to test the early build. #229

• Add the `pause()` function that when called will pause the code execution in a similar way to the pause button.
  
  
• New message unlock when starting The Ring about `pause()`.
  
• New message unlock when starting Orienteering related to direction data stores.
  
• Show editor keys hint when the editor is empty.
  
  Currently just English awaiting translation in big-ab-games/robo-instructus-translation.
  
• Improve audio format detection logic, may fix sound with some hardware.
  
• Tweak snow pipeline to avoid larger floats that can cause rendering inconsistencies.
  
• Update dependencies & compile with rust 1.37.
  
• Update Русский interface translations.

Thanks again to the contributors over at big-ab-games/robo-instructus-translation. Head over there if you'd like to help improve the game's translations.

• The game's OST composed by Richard Thomson is now available for all game owners.
  
  • Steam: Available in the "soundtrack" directory next to the game files.
    
  • Itch: Available as a separate downloadable.
    
  • Format: ogg vorbis.
    
    • Main Theme (1:24)
      
    • Ice World (3:26)
      
    • Underground (3:59)
      
    • Deep (3:21)
      
    • Lava (3:41)
      
    • Overworld (2:37)
      
• Improve Français interface translations.

Thanks again to the contributors over at big-ab-games/robo-instructus-translation. Head over there if you'd like to help improve the game's translations.

Scores can now be compared with your friends & graphs now show the global lowest/best scores in each category. Read more in today's devblog.

• Compare best scores against Steam friend scores to the right of the score graphs (shows only when friend scores are available).
  
  
• The left most graph bar range will now start from the global lowest/best score.
  
  
• Fix parser allowing `else` in incorrect places when nested inside an `if`.
  
• Add new Português-Brasil company message translation.
  
• Update Chinese interface translations.

Thanks again to the contributors over at big-ab-games/robo-instructus-translation. Head over there if you'd like to help improve the game's translations.

This update addresses a bunch of issues I've noticed since release. This should be a nice improvement for optimisers. More details in today's devblog.

The translations have also improved thanks to the amazing contributors. All game translations are made by the community at big-ab-games/robo-instructus-translation. I've recently added all company message text there. If you're multilingual and want to help, please do!

• Prevent graph squashing by filtering out score outliers. Scores which are 2.5 standard deviations worse than the mean will be hidden by default. All scores can be toggled back on by clicking Show outliers.
  
  
  
• Show score comparison with your best, or previous best. Hover over the new +/- numbers to get an explanation.
  
  
  
• Persist Change Game Speed overlay tutorial until clicked to ensure this isn't missed.
  
• Prevent some edge cases with frame buffer dimension != window size.
  
• Increase dark stage run size power limit.
  
• Tweak score hover text padding.
  
• Add some basic dark stage failure tracking to help track down the harder edges players are hitting with dark stages.
  
• Fix snow shader issues, particularly with Intel GPUs, that cause the snow to repeat too much and ends up looks very wrong.
  
• Fix minor z draw ordering issue in the credits.
  
• Improve translated overlay shadow rendering.
  
• Extract company messaging to the big-ab-games/robo-instructus-translation. These messages are now ready to be translated by the community.
  
• Update robo-instructus-translationto 0982a3a.
  
  • Add Português-Brasil language support, interface & store description translations.
    
  • Add Deutsch company message translation.
    
  • Add a bunch of new & missing translation pairs to all languages.
    
• Add dark stage failure overlays to explain what this means.

The game is out, but the weekly updates are not over! I'll be looking to further improve the game, fix issues and react to feedback.

One thing I noticed confusing some is how the score bars work. This image tries to clarify what the bars mean.

So basically if your score sits in the lowest bar you should be decently satisfied that it's a good one! Notice in the image the solution is actually the most optimised one, as this level is very simple, so in reality no-one got better than 3525/9/9.

• Update robo-instructus-translation -> `5f93370b` improves de, ru & zh-CN.
  
• Use robo-instructus-translation repo credits.txt in the game credits.
  
• Squash menu option labels when they are too large to fit on the screen, ie after translation (looking at you "Вертикальная синхронизация").
  
• Improve handling of some sound system initialization panics, in these rare cases instead of exiting the game keep running with sound disabled.
  
• When sound is disabled show this in the Audio menu.
  
• Add experimental fix for sound system failure due to invalid default output format.
  
• Fix some overlay tutorials showing over the code reference when they don't make sense there.
  
• Show game speed tutorial even if you ignore the previous tutorials in Keep Going!.

• Fix primer & message typos.
  
• Prevent some edge cases where initial code scroll line is incorrect.
  
• Fix world width miscalculation that can cause rare level title misalignment.

Now available for Linux & Windows. For the story behind the solo-development of the game checkout Robo Instructus: Behind The Scenes.

• Use lz4 compression on all textures & fonts. Reduces binary size.
  
• Linux: Compress dwarf debug data. Reduces binary size.
  
• Fix some narrative copy errors.
  
• Add robot falling animation.
  
• Fix dark stage compute speed on probe levels.
  
• Remove reveal unknown tile on fall (no longer needed with fall animation).
  
• Fix dark stage button showing red on visible stage fall.
  
• Fix robot fall after launch animation.
  
• Fix error underline & selection overlapping code entry.
  
• Widen errors when they are very close to the right edge so the messages are readable.
  
• Fix selection code entry overlapping.
  
• Fix escape & double-click handling when in menu & in company inbox.
  
• Fix rare render bugs caused by outdated buffer usage after resizing the game window.
  
• Optimise gaussian screen blur effects, these now scale with _Effects_ setting & are generally twice as efficient.
  
• Rework stat graphs colours, fonts, sizes and tweak alignments.
  
• Fix some holes in _Optimizer_ & _Serial Optimizer_ achievement logic.
  
• Hide probe pause button when probe has stopped but robot is still running.
  
• Optimise usage of frame instant for fade effects.
  
• Fix startup resolution / buffer mismatch that can cause game render size bugs.
  
• Steam: Use steam API to set initial game language.