Energy Hook
Day Two Patch - Performance and Rift Fix
And the separation of church and state means that the Rift runs with forward rendering (which allows antialiasing) whereas it runs in deferred rendering for everyone else (which uses fxaa instead) ...
Bottom line, some performance improvement when you're not using a Rift.
Enjoy!
Energy Hook 1.0 has finally launched - note for Oculus Rift owners
But are these things ever *really* done?
In particular, already had this bug report: unlike the DK2, the Rift CV1 does not have a power button. Which means when Energy Hook boots up, it detects your Rift, and plays in that mode whether you want it to or not. (Meanwhile, you might be wondering while all you're seeing is black on your display.)
Right now, the only way to play *without* VR is to unplug your Rift.
I'm looking into a solution and hope to have one to you soon.
It's Finally Launching - Energy Hook 1.0, coming July 5th
(There will be a launch sale, of course!)
I am super-proud of Energy Hook; it's the best game I've worked on (and I include Spider-Man 2 and Die By The Sword in that list!) - a coherent vision that focuses on its visceral core gameplay with no extra fluff like combat or cut scenes. It is my magnum opus.
I can't believe I've been working on this game since 2012. It's been a long and winding road, launching my unorthodox kickstarter, releasing early builds to my kickstarter backers, putting the game in early access, supporting four platforms, VR, and the Steam controller.
And it's finally done. Just six days before you can have the final build on your machine.
Thanks to all of you who have been following the game over the years, for your feedback and patience. You rock!
-Jamie
Version 741 - Codename "Solstice" - is up
And for those of you who care what I fixed:
- Game freezes when holding the swing button down when you bailed doing a trick. (And, in theory, all the other assertion related freezes.)
- The last trick in a trick attack wasn't cashing in.
- Gave the wrong message when cancelling a trick attack.
- Sometimes would report a negative number of seconds when winning a race. (!!)
- After you fell to your doom during a race you'd restart on the activation disc and have to play it again.
Version 740, Codename "Solstice": CONTENT COMPLETE
That's right! Content compete! That means all the levels, challenges, and big systems are in there.
The style system overhaul is done.
Misty City is fixed and available.
You can easily replay your last challenge.
It's subtle, but I got some IK going on her arms instead of the canned animations. Now when she jumps up and swings her arms don't look wrong.
(And she holds on to that hook on the energy hook with her left hand. So that's what it's for.)
What I really want to hear about now are exploits! Can you get lots of points for doing something lame? Let me know.
Now, it's not quite feature complete, but the only big thing left to do is finish up the leaderboards in the front end, and get friends-list leaderboards going. And no promises but I'm going to try to get a control remapping thing in there. And then there's a handful of little things I'll try to get to. It'll be like sweeping up dead leaves.
Here's a more comprehensive list of what I've done in the past month:
- Added simplified satellite dish to New Atlantis
- Paced trick tutorials differently
- Better 'clean swing' detection
- Fixed exceptions
- Audio for style UI
- Made misty city available
- Show ranking as well as score in HUD leaderboards
- Put text on challenge portals to tell you what they are
- Fixed some tutorial message control display
- IK on arms
- Be more robust to missing database entries when unlocking backer rewards
- Respawn off disc when you eat it during a challenge
- "Cancel Challenge" and "Go To Last Challenge" in pause menu
- Animating trick UI
- Camera adjustments: less up-and-down bobbing.
- Shorter respawn times
- End of trick attack cashes in your last chain and displays your correct final score
- Adjusted scoring and detection for loop-the-loop
- Penalizes you for tricking on the same structure twice in a chain
- Balanced trick scores
- Lower gravity when doing poses
- Penalizes you for missing race hoops instead of making you go back
- Larger race hoops
Happy solstice!
Hotfix 720: 720 degrees of separation
But the main reason I'm putting this up is to fix some of the glaring bugs that @PurkisM reported - I fixed the borked wallrun challenge on Future Island, and made it so you couldn't skate along the ground and walls in your swan pose.
I also changed the in-game leaderboards to show your position instead of the top. Because that's what you care about the most, yeah?
Interim Update 666: Accessibility, Style System, and UI improvements
The things that might surprise you the most are the gamepad buttons are moved around: wall-running is on the right shoulder button, and the aerial poses are on X,Y, and B now. You can also click the right stick/steam controller track pad to jump. This lets you play with your right thumb controlling the camera most of the time, and you only need to let go to do poses.
Another surprise: it automatically fires your jump jets after a swing. This is like the 'standard mode' of Spider-Man 2 - great for newbies and gaining altitude, not so good for speed down a straightaway - it defaults to on, you can turn it off in the pause menu.
I'm still collecting results from the movement survey - it's not too late to take it.
It's not really version 666 but thanks to a problem with my automated build system that's what it's calling itself.
This is only up for Windows & Linux - poor OSX has to wait...
Without further ado, the obligatory bullet list!
- Instead of doing a little jump when you initiate a swing, you can swing from a standing position.
- Increased starting jump height
- Increased trick scoring
- Aerial poses instead of aerial tricks - hold them for more points
- Style points in your face
- More glowy translucent hud
- Antialias front end
- Auto-jump
- Fixed some issues with pause menu and front end with gamepad
- Can use the gamepad or mouse button to navigate past title screen
- Moved buttons around
- More forgiving about making you eat it when landing fast
Mini update: Steam Controller Support
It's important to remember that you should use Big Picture Mode when using your Steam Controller - otherwise it will go into mouse-and-keyboard emulation mode when playing and be rubbish.
Also, you can adjust the responsiveness of the track pad with the Camera Sensitivity slider in the pause menu.
Speaking of sliders, I added a field-of-view slider. On the one hand, this is important, because some people sit right next to their monitors and some people sit ten feet away, and the people sitting close need a wider FOV than the ones sitting far away for it to look right-ish. On the other hand, I worry that players will set the FOV as wide as possible because, "Hey! I can see more!" not realizing that makes the game look less cinematic/dramatic (and lowers framerate to boot). But I guess I'll just have to trust you!
And here are a few other things that made it into this build:
- You can turn the follow cam off completely - this is nearly unplayable with a dual stick gamepad but with mouse or the Steam Controller can give you more control. That's in the pause menu.
- You may have noticed the new achievement icons! Achievements need a little tuning still but almost there!
- New music track by Brian Luzietti! - and now the music shuffles instead of playing the same song over and over on a given level.
- Game detects whether you're playing with gamepad or mouse+kb and tutorializes appropriately.
- There was too much friction on walls, sometimes sucking the life out of your jumps. I believe it's now as low as I can make it without writing my own physics engine.
- Larger more readable menu text.
- Motion blur tweaks.
Enjoy!
Survey On The Current State of Movement
Please help me make sure I'm not doing that in a vacuum by taking this survey.
Thanks!