v0.5.4.1 - Bug Fixes and more Beginner Levels

It’s 0.5.4.1 Why are we delivering this patch in parts? What does this mean for you, the player? Does Veronica from my math class actually like me, or am I reading their signals wrong? Well, we’re going to answer a few of these questions, at least. For now, let’s talk about 0.5.4 part 1.

Never rolled an animal in a ball before? Good. That’s normal. But it means you might have some trouble playing this game… Twilight has been hard at work to make a new set of beginner levels to help players new to the genre develop some animal-filled ball rolling abilities. Crue has also been hard at work improving the menus experience for controller players. It’ll be a lot easier to adjust your bindings through the in-game menus, now.

What’s going on?
So as far as Patch 0.5.4 goes, what’s going on? What do we have behind the curtain that didn’t make the cut for this release? To start, we’ve gutted all of the engine’s math, and substituted it with our own! Because, historically, any time we’ve run into a problem with an existing system, our solution has been to remake it from scratch. This is an insane practice, and you shouldn’t use us as inspiration.

So, we’re implementing something called Fixed Point Math. Most 3D math is done using ‘floating points’, which are a computer’s way of representing a number with a fraction. But they aren’t always deterministic between different computer types - doing the same calculation across different processors might have a slightly different result. Fixed Point Math will eliminate that divergence, so what happens on your computer will happen in the same way on your buddy’s computer, and their buddy’s computer, ad.infinitum.

Having this level of consistency in our math is no easy feat, but it makes things like replays and multiplayer possible. Your gameplay, replays, and your friend’s gameplays will all sync up perfectly based on inputs alone. This is all in service of allowing us to have stable, low latency replication, alongside consistent replays. And if we do it right, you won’t notice a difference in how the game plays or feels.

It isn’t ready quite yet, though… we have to replace a lot of math in our code, and it’s long and tedious work. Consequently, we opted to split what would be patch 0.5.4 into three parts. Part 1 is more levels, and open communication about what we’re up to. Part 2 is finally getting Fixed Math in your hands, and then part 3 will be the long awaited multiplayer update. We hope you’re as excited as we are, until then please enjoy the new levels.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask us on Twitter, or on Discord!

• Uses stage config v0.3.0
• Uses course config v0.1.0

Added

• 15 new beginner friendly levels
• Added left and right arrow graphics to the options menu
• Added checkbox graphics to the options menu

Changed

• Changed the Ball Trails button to say coming soon when clicked
• Wormholes which aren’t being actively rendered now use an opaque material

Fixed

• Fixed a bug that caused some levels to display a soft lock message after restarting a stage from the pause menu
• Fixed being unable to navigate off the Customize Ball Window with a controller
• Fixed being unable to adjust controls in controller mode