Oct 11, 2018

The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep Patch 3

The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep - paul_inxile

Hello everyone!

Today, we are pleased to get you the latest patch for The Bard´s Tale IV: Barrows Deep.

Patch 3 introduces additional enhancements to graphic settings, character art, localization, as well as further addressing remaining issues like ability bugs, optimization of loading times, and stability across the game.

With Patch 3 done, please allow us a few personal words: Here at inXile, we are always committed to making quality RPGs, and we are totally devoted to what we are doing. The Bard’s Tale IV: Barrows Deep is a game that we poured our hearts into, and every single one of us is very sad that the release of the game we are so proud of was overshadowed by performance issues. Of course, we wish that we had caught these things at launch and have been working overtime to correct them as quickly as we can. For those of you affected, we are truly sorry for any bad experience that you might have had.

We hope you will enjoy the changes and if you do, we would be very grateful for a user review if you haven't written one yet. Of course, the same applies if you were forced to write a negative review in the past, but would be so kind to reconsider now if the issues that prevented you to enjoy the game were addressed in the meantime.

Thank you very much for your patience, and your ongoing support. It means the world to us.

With Patch 3 being released, we are now focusing on our original goal of enhancing the game by adding many additional features after launch. Legacy Mode, controller support, and grid movement will only be some of them and we will talk more about those items and more in the near future. Friends of Mac and Linux will also be happy to hear that we are working on those versions as well.

For details on this patch, please check out the notes below:

Stability:

Improved how our graphics benchmarking determined the correct graphics settings for your system.
Several optimizations for improved performance.
Players who played in non-English languages and encountered issues with placing cogs into gear puzzles and had their save files corrupted should now have working save files again.
Fixed a crash related to using Jarnel’s Eyes in certain dungeons.
Fixed a crash related to skipping the post combat screen after defeating Mangar for the 1st time.
Fixed several combat placement bugs across the game.
Fixed a crash in the Cellars of Kylearan's Tower caused by defeating Mangar and then defeating any remaining fights in the dungeon.
Fixed a bug relating to how push-blocks reset themselves after being pushed into a hole multiple time. They'll now properly reset each time Stone Remembers is sung.
Fixed a crash relating to using Mangar’s Mind Jab in the fight against Mangar.
Fixed several issues relating to certain performance actors not saving properly after escaping to main menu.
Fixed an issue in which players could not access vendors after reloading a save game under some circumstances.
Fixed an issue in which hidey bides wouldn’t work correctly if you exited the game before looting the cache or the cache reset itself.

Gameplay:

Fixed several issues where certain doors and puzzles were not saving when exiting to the main menu or to desktop.
Fixed a bug that caused Sharp, Keen, and Honed puzzle weapon boons to reduce your damage to 0 when you critically hit with a dagger or a bow ability.
The description of the Wrecking Ball passive has been updated.
Fixed a bug that caused 2-handed weapons to corrupt your characters stats when equipping and unequipping that item after purchasing skills.
Fixed a bug in which the bridge to the Orkan Rookery could get stuck if you ran into it while it was assembling.
Fixed a bug that resulted in Arthur de-spawning if you defeated the ritualists around him, but save/loaded your game before speaking with him.
Fixed several instances in which waypoints were not deactivating when you switched which quest was being tracked.
The Power Rush passive and status effect have a clearer description, and now correctly work with AoE abilities.
Lute of Compulsory Cavorting no longer has question marks in its description and its Drunk effect works properly.
Fixed an issue in the Sentry Tower that resulted in buttons on the 3rd floor getting stuck in the depressed position if you exited the game before they reset themselves.
Removed extraneous waypoints in Castle Langskall.
Fixed an exploit that allowed you to dupe items inside the merchant inventory.
Fixed an exploit in which you could duplicate items via offering statues.
The Guardian passive now has a clearer description of what it's doing.
Fixed an issue with status effects, like On Fire or Rend, stacking from different sources and not correctly calculating the effect. If two status effects aren’t the same strength, they’ll no longer stack on one another, and instead create a new stack.
Fairy Powder Bombs will now play their explosion when they detonate, and will no longer harm your own team.
Lowland Park Whisky now changes your next melee attack damage type to mental damage, as intended.
Traps in the Sulfur Springs are now more lethal.
Fixed a bug in which caltrops could trigger on dead enemies, causing caltrops to not trigger properly on living enemies.

Etc.

A Sharpness post process effect and slider was added, which allows you to adjust how crisp or blurred the game appears.
Anti-Aliasing & Post Processing settings are now updated when you adjust your Effects Quality in the options menu.
Running the game in borderless window mode will now correctly match your monitor’s current resolution.
Greatly improved the user interface when playing with 4:3 aspect ratio.
Improvements to non-English localized text.
Several graphical updates in Baedish lowlands environment.
Fixed an issue where several settings in the Options menu weren’t properly saving.
Updated the mesh seen in the inspection window for staves and Lowland Park Whisky.
Street signs, offering altars, and elven altars now properly display in the correct language, based on your language settings.
You can no longer choose to not help the Selkie sisters. When destiny calls, you answer.
Fixed several backer quotes in the Main Menu.
Fixed a bug in which the music on the Main Menu would stop playing after completing screen calibration.
Fixed several typos in character dialogue.
Updated how fullscreen tutorials show text in other languages, better accounting for increases in text size after translation.
Adjusted the amount of time subtitles stay on screen.
Fixed several issues relating to localized text over-running its boundaries in the interface.
Added additional audio in a few areas where it was missing.
Updated Fairy Golf music so that it plays through the entire fairy gold arena.
The crafting menu now displays how many of a given item will result from crafting.
Additional decals, statues, and effects added to Skara Brae underground.

Known issues to watch out for until fixed:

If you escape to the main menu during the final animated scene in the game (the cinematic after defeating the final boss), your save file can get into a state in which you cannot complete the final step of the main quest. To avoid this issue, please allow all the animated scenes to play out without exiting the game.
We found that player’s have a small chance to suffer odd behaviors, including crashes, when using a practitioner’s dragon breath & conjurorer’s mark on groups of skeleton enemies.
Player’s zoning into Skyhenge for the first time have a small chance to experience a crash. This only happens on the first time transitioning into the zone.
Player’s summon creatures that last till the end of combat will create a checkerboard icon on the victory screen.
Tarjan boss fight can be completed without utilizing the hungering blade by using the melting boon from puzzle weapons.This is an exploit and not as designed.

The team at inXile

Oct 11, 2018

Early Access v1.04 Relesed

SpaceBourne - DBK Games

Changes and fixes are listed below:

1- Ship Improvements:

-New bonuses added to all ships
-All ship stats at market reorganized
-All ship prices are reorganized
-All ship prices lowered by %80 for Early Access players
-Added 2 new ship models (B-38 and AQ-011)

2- Difficulty settings are adjusted. Easy setting is now easier, difficult is more difficult. Normal setting is not changed in v.10.3.

3- “Required Level” tag is added to usable modules interface.

4- Loading times are reduced while starting the game, and in the game.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
• Although Galaxy Atlas shows passage between AR9 and DW1, there are no StarGates between those systems
• If you fail the war of Sisy, you restart from the middle of the encounter, and unable to escape.
• Reinforcements keep coming even after Sisy’s death.
• Player can enter Chambers after completing the False Prophet mission.
• In the Big Sister Bounty Contract, the target does not spawn in the system bartender provides.
• All As-04 Drone specs appear 0 in the market.
• Market prices becomes too low when characters leadership trait is too high.
• Ship’s armor and shield is lowered when a new map is loaded.
• In the “New Alliance” mission, when talking to Ukra on D9 station, she repeats her old lines and mission is stuck.
• Miner Family mission is created in all Duons stations.
• In the Worm Holes always same items are dropeed in each stage.
• When an enemy attacks while the drone is active, it runs away and does not return.
• When the language setting is changed in game the changes does not take effect until the game is restarted.
• There is an Aim Offset difference between First Person Mode and Third Person mode when Firing weapons

Note: The starting map is changed in order to fix the crashes while the game is starting. If the game is still crashing and you are getting the Microsoft Visual C++ error message; Please check if Microsoft Visual C++ is installed from the Windows Control Panel. If it is installed, please use the “repair current installation” option and restart the game.

Oct 11, 2018

Dev Blog 11/10/18

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord - Callum

Greetings warriors of Calradia!

Game development can be a tricky business. Sometimes an existing technology or tool just doesn’t do quite what you want it to do or it isn’t as efficient as you would hope. This leaves you with a difficult choice to make: change your design or create your own bespoke solution.

This is something we came to realise while working on the User Interface (UI) for Bannerlord. Previously, we were using a combination of Flash and Scaleform to create our UI, which is actually a pretty common method in the game industry. We would start out by creating the UI in Flash, before using Scaleform to make the UI work in the game. Technically, both Scaleform and Flash functioned perfectly and provided us with the capability to implement the UI in the way that we liked. However, it wasn’t too long before we noticed some issues with the overall process of creating and implementing the UI that we thought needed addressing.

To start with, the process was actually quite slow. Any changes to the UI had to be made in Flash, before being implemented in the game to be tested. As the screens grew in complexity, the .swf file generation would take longer. And with each change we made, the game would need to be reloaded to see the result. Even a small change, such as moving an element 5 pixels to the left, would require going through this entire process.

Additionally, Scaleform and Flash are both third-party frameworks that we had limited control over. The difficulty of changing and modifying these systems, depending on our needs, made us question the effort that we were putting in just to make it work.

Eventually, we realised that the time and energy we were spending on UI was really holding us back, and the only way to have a UI that would fit our vision for the game would be creating our own UI library. After all, some problems are just opportunities in disguise!

Now, that was a really scary prospect because we had already invested thousands of man-hours into the existing UI. Fortunately, early in the development process, we had decided to use a paradigm called MVVM to create the UI. This meant that part of our code was in neat C# classes that did not depend on any specific UI library, and we would be able to re-use this part of our work even if we had to re-do the rest. Yay!

Next, we had to decide what our new UI library would be like. We came up with a list of requirements:

The new library had to be fast and snappy. Our engine team worked really hard to shave off a single millisecond from our render cycle and they wouldn’t appreciate the UI wasting away their savings with poor performance.
The new library also had to be very easy to work with and make changes on the fly. It would preferably use a text-based specification file format, such as XML, since text-based files make collaboration by multiple developers so much easier.
The system had to make it easy to create highly interactive UIs.
The UI layout had to be independent of how it would look visually. This would allow the UI designer to work independently from the artist.

We decided to name our new UI framework Gauntlet (for no other reason than we thought it sounded cool!). With Gauntlet, we can make changes on the fly. This means we can edit a screen without closing the game once, with no file generation or any additional steps needed. When we make changes to the .xml file of a screen, we see the results as soon as we save that file. And because we have full control over the system, we can make changes to the system as our needs demand it.

So how does it work? Well, the system is actually pretty simple. We couple a .xml file to a screen in the game, which the game loads when the screen is opened. All of the layout information for the screen is specified in this file. We can also reference other .xml files in each .xml, which means that if we create a UI element that we know we are going to use more than once (i.e. in other screens) we can just refer to that element. This allows us to make changes to the file and have these changes occur anywhere that we reference this .xml.

We also have a set of separate XML files that specify how various elements will look, much like CSS files are used for HTML pages. This skinning system is very powerful and the artist can easily specify every detail about how a UI element will look and behave. For example, a button can change colour when the user moves the mouse over it and it can go through an animation when the user clicks on it.

Inventory screen .xml

Inventory screen in-game

We hope that Gauntlet will come as a welcome addition for our modding community. In Warband, editing the UI was always a bit of a headache and there were some limitations that couldn’t be overcome. With Gauntlet, modders will have total control over each screen, with the only limitation being their imagination.

In next week’s blog, we will talk to Assistant Designer, Cihan Şekercioğlu. If you have any questions you would like to ask him, please leave a reply in the comments and we will pick one out for him to answer.

Discuss this blog post HERE

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