Hello all, we posted a big update to Fantasy Strike yesterday, and while all the new content is great, the online play got pretty rocky. The two reasons are that we "cleaned house" in our project but cleaned it a little too thoroughly and deleted a few things we shouldn't have. You know, like if you threw out all your garbage and there was a support beam for your house in there. Second, we updated to a new version of the Unity game engine and it turns out it has a bunch of issues with visual effects.
So, we scrambled to fix things and here's a list of what's different:
ONLINE FIXES
--Fixed an issue that caused quickmatches to immediately disconnect at the start of round 1 if either player was in practice mode or arcade mode when they got their match.
--Fixed an issue that caused the rematch menu to stay on the screen after a quickmatch ended.
--Fixed a crash when Lum was knocked down from Rook’s air C.
--Fixed an issue that caused quickmatch opponents each seeing different stages for the match.
--The versus screen before each arcade match and also before an online quicmatch now plays the voiceover line for the opponent only, rather than playing voice for both simultaneously, on top of each other.
VISUAL EFFECTS
The new version of the Unity game engine that we started using in the last patch has many differences in how visual effects are handled, which introduced a lot of bugs in our project, unfortunately.
--Fixed Lum’s “on fire” state, such as when he’s hit by Jaina’s C. It didn’t really work right in the last update.
--Grave’s projectile now has its trail restored. (No gameplay change, the visual was wrongly turned off in the last patch.)
--Four or five fixes all of the form “in online games, don’t have visual effects flicker around crazily too much.”
TEAM BATTLE
--Winning a game of team battle as Midori in Dragon Form no longer incorrectly gives you Midori for your next game, too.
CHARACTERS
DEGREY --Changed shading on DeGrey’s skin and lightened the dark circles around his eyes.
ARGAGARG --Changed graphics for the small bubbles on his Bubble Shield super, but we didn't finish (we're still in the middle of making this effect). Sorry, these will change again next time.
Voices, Faces, and Team Battle -- Fantasy Strike Update: March 2018
This update to Fantasy Strike is live right now.
This is one of our biggest updates from a development standpoint. It contains multiple things that are each the culmination of months of work. Highlights:
--New Team Battle mode, playable offline and online in friend matches.
--All characters now have voices.
--All characters except Geiger now have facial animation.
--Even more performance improvements.
In addition to that, we have several balance changes, online desync fixes, a couple updated stages, and quality of life improvements for Argagarg, including lots of polish for how poison works on the lifebar. Plus, most hits in the game feel like they hit harder now.
TEAM BATTLE
New mode where you choose a team of 3 characters then play a best-3-out-of-5 match against your friend’s team. Here's a video of our lead developer talking about this mode:
https://youtu.be/ArTsK5yim7o
Each game, you’ll play a new randomly selected matchup.
You'll go through all your characters before repeating.
You must win with all 3 of your characters to win the match!
There's lots of variety in this mode. You'll play an even spread of many matchups, rather than usually playing the most unfair matchups as often happens in counter-pick systems.
VOICES
--All characters now have voices! This has been a long time coming, and suddenly it's all here. This includes combat moves as well as voice lines on character select and during the in-between screens of the new Team Battle mode.
--The announcer has also been updated. It's Rook's voice because Fantasy Strike is his tournament.
FACIAL ANIMATION
We'd like to explain the significance here because it's easy to miss from the outside. Updating our characters so they have the ABILITY to have facial animation is a separate step from them actually having facial animation. The first step, where they are capable of facial movements, has been one of the biggest technical hurdles on the whole project. It involved switching over to new animation rigs, but it also involved changing the models themselves to better work with the rigs. And these changes in some cases had rippling changes that affected many other things, such as screwing up all cloth animation, etc. This process has taken us many months and we're finally done with all characters except Geiger. (He's next.)
After this huge step was complete, we then worked on creating actual animations for the faces. Right now, this includes mostly subtle movements on the main menu, plus all the character select-related animations, especially since they now have voice lines that the facial movement needs to match. We've gotten to some of the win poses as well. These are the most prominent times we see faces, so we started there first. Future updates will include facial animation in other situations, such as during supers and yomi counters and so on.
PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS
--Menu screens have been optimized yet again, and now have better framerate. The boost you get depends on your hardware, but we estimate something huge, like 60% improved fps on high end computers and even more than that on low end computers.
--The Fox’s Den stage has been optimized and should have improved fps of at least 20%, maybe more.
ONLINE FIXES
--Fixed two bugs that caused desyncs when playing Argagarg online.
--Fixed a bug with DeGrey’s ghost that could cause desyncs online.
--After a casual online match, the score screen now show buttons for: ready / change character / leave queue. If you choose “ready” then you are immediately put back in the matchmaking queue, without having to wait for the score screen to count down.
CHARACTERS
JAINA --Knee gives 2f less blockstun.
ROOK --Thunderclap (back+A) sucks the opponent in now, so that Thunderclap -> C throw is a lot easier to land.
--Thunderclap -> C against a cornered opponent no longer pushes Rook away for no apparent reason. Now leaves him very close, just like when you do it midscreen.
--Air super no longer has active hit frames the entire way down. Still has plenty, but it was just silly how long it was before.
--Air super now has a white highlight that shows the invulnerable frames.
--Ground super used to be listed as 0+2 frames startup (0 before the super flash, then 2 frames after). It was actually 0+4 though and the frame data was wrong. Now it has been changed to 6+0. The 6 frames of startup are invulnerable and though it cannot hit a jumping opponent or an opponent in pre-jump, the opponent can no longer jump out on reaction during the super flash. To compensate for this powerful property, the range has been reduced, though it’s still far (about the same range as his normal throw). The graphics for the throw whiff reach much too far and we will change these graphics if we decide to keep this functionality.
VALERIE --Fixed Valerie’s neutral B having shorter hitstun than f+B and back+B for no reason.
--Lips improved to look more like she used to before facial animation was possible for her. (This was really difficult, thanks.)
--Shading on her skin has changed to be softer (slightly less comic-bookish). This also causes her head shape to look a little different, the net effect is a rounder looking head that seems more like the shape it used to be before we added facial animation to her.
SETSUKI --Throw with hold B no longer faces the wrong way sometimes (or at least...fewer times?)
--Small technical errors with her lips have been fixed. She no longer has a thin black line around her lips and the shading on her lips is a bit better.
DEGREY --New character model that looks older, as he was always supposed to look.
--New animation for f+A. Now an elbow attack rather than a kick. The functionality is basically the same, so just an aesthetic change.
--We have temporarily turned off DeGrey's cloth simulation. It became unreasonably buggy in the latest version of the Unity game engine, so we'll sort that out later.
MIDORI --Fixed an issue accidentally introduced last build that caused that startup of Midori’s flurry punches (mash A) to be too short.
--Fixed ground B flying kick immediately canceling at the start for no apparent reason when Midori does the move with his back to the corner.
--Fixed Midori losing the poison highlight for no reason when reverting to human form while poisoned.
--Dragon form’s C throw has infinite hits of super armor rather than 2 hits.
--The dust that appears when he does his B kick is now timed correctly instead of appearing way too late.
LUM --Lum’s throw attempt now has the same frame stats as other characters.
ARGAGARG --New UI graphics for Argagarg’s poison counting down on the lifebars. You can now see how long until the opponent’s poisoned life will drain away. Very helpful! The lifebar also has a new visual effect when a victim takes poison from damage and another visual effect when a poisoned victim hits Argagarg and becomes cured of poison.
--Bubble shield super now show graphics of small floating droplets of water when you aren’t holding back and a big bright bubble when you are holding back. This makes it even more clear that when you aren’t holding back, the protective effect isn’t active. Note: we are still developing the effects for bubble shield so it's a work in progress, but already more readable what's going on.
--Argagarg’s forward throw against a cornered opponent doesn’t push Argagarg back ridiculously far anymore.
--Fixed a bug that let Argagarg's poison hit you and kill you even after a timeout, which could give Argagarg an extra round win from that "kill" if the poison damage (after the round ended!) took the opponent’s last hit point.
--When Argagarg is knocked down, walking into him now pushes him like with any other character.
--Hitboxes around Aragagarg’s feet during his jumps changed so that he is now more able to jump over projectiles.
--The practice routine animation after online matches now has non-placeholder visual effects for the fish splashing into / out of the water.
--Argagarg air C and bubble shield + air C bubbles can initiate a pop 10f earlier than before, at the start of the move.
--Bubble shield + air C now starts traveling sooner than the non bubble shield version.
--Bubble shield + air C, the C pop now has a bigger hitbox that better matches the graphics.
--Popping a bubble with air C or with Bubble shield + air C now highlights Argagarg in white, showing that he’s invulnerable during those frames.
--When you summon a river with C then jump, if you then press C at a time that can summon the river’s orange fish, that button press will now do so *without* also initiating an air C bubble. (If you want the bubble, just press C again quickly). This allows you to more precisely control when you want to air bubble or not, while still being able to summon the orange fish.
STAGES
--Valerie’s “Wall of Truth” stage has some spare paint cans laying around, and for visual interest, a bunch of paint spilled. Oops!
--Fox’s Den has a new ground texture, new foliage, and large trees to overall help with the aesthetics. It also has substantial performance improvements, so expect at least 20% better fps on it now.
MISC
--Lots of hits throughout the game now feel like they hit harder! Because each hit matters so much in our game, we figured it was ok to juice up the power of the hits more than you normally would. Try Grave's f+A double palm as a random example.
--The button config screen now has an option to turn the throw macro off, or set it to either J+A or A+B, and an option to turn the super macro off or set it to B+C.
--When you pick your character and color, it now says "ready" while you wait for the opponent to pick theirs.
FRAME DATA DISPLAY
--Fixed incorrectly calculated startup frames for several cinematic supers (Jaina, Setsuki, Valerie, Rook, Lum's ground supers, and Valerie, Geiger, Rook, Lum and DeGrey air supers), from incorrect frame rounding
--Fixed incorrect active frames for Lum's ground super.
--Fixed incorrect recovery frames for all projectiles, which were all 1 frame too few. (It could even incorrectly show "-1" of recovery!)
Character Spotlight: Midori
Master Ando Midori is a martial arts teacher who can transform into a mighty dragon. He prides himself on honor as well as grappling expertise. Learn about his gameplay in this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li6gp_S9vXs
Character Spotlight: Setsuki
Setsuki Hiruki is a ninja student at the Fox's Den school. She's fast, energetic, and enthusiastic. Gameplay-wise, she's a terrifying rushdown character. Learn about her gameplay in this video.
Steam Trading Cards for Fantasy Strike are now available!
For more information on what Steam Trading Cards are and how they work, check this information from Valve. Basically, they are fun cosmetic items that you earn just by playing the game, and they can be traded, bought, and sold with other players. Collect them all and craft some badges. Enjoy!
NEW CHARACTER: ARGAGARG -- Fantasy Strike Update: January 2018
This update to Fantasy Strike is live right now.
This is a big update because it has a NEW CHARACTER, a new stage, new button-macros for throw and super, faster walk speeds, and even more performance improvements. There are also several bug fixes and balance changes.
NEW CHARACTER: ARGAGARG
Argagarg is a water shaman and pacifist wise-fish. In gameplay, he’s a zoner and keep-away character. We won’t be able to create a video about him for quite a while, so we figured you’re rather be able to play him now than wait for that. Here are some tips about him:
Normal Attacks
--His back+A is a long-range anti-air attack. It has kind of low priority, but it’s still a good tool. If it counterhits a jumper, he can even combo to his long-ranged f+A punch.
--Neutral A is a,fast anti-air attack with a good hitbox. It can cancel to specials on hit or block.
--His forward+A is a long ranged punch. It can cancel to specials on hit or block.
--Jump A is a long range diagonal attack. On hit or block, you can cancel it to air C.
Special Attacks
--The B button spits a blue fish (made of water) that does no damage, but on hit will stun long enough that usually he can hit with forward+A.
--Hold the B button down to get a poison fish. This will travel through all enemy projectiles and not get destroyed (!) and it’s unblockable(!). It deals no immediate damage, but it poisons 2 of the opponent’s hit points. After a few seconds, they will lose 1 of those hit points, then after a few more, they will lose the other. You CAN stack this to poison 4 or 6 hit points, etc. If the opponent hits Argagarg while they are poisoned, they become cured of poison.
--C rushing river pushes the opponent away. During the river, you can press C again to summon an orange fish that hits for 1 damage. You can hold back / neutral / forward + C to get three different versions of that fish. You CAN do this move even if you’re doing another move, or in blockstun!
--Jump B is a pretty fast diagonally downward drill attack.
--Jump C is a bubble that lets Argagarg float forward or back. During the bubble, press C again to pop it for an attack.
Super Attacks
--Ground super is Bubble Shield. When the shield is on him, if you block a strike, the bubble automatically pops and can hit. Also, if the bubble is on you then doing jump C -> C will pop the air bubble with a faster, better hitbox.
--Air super is Giant Fish. Summons a huge fish that flies at the opponent and keeps them away, great for using when they are already poisoned.
Argagarg is one of the most difficult characters to play, not because he is physically hard to control, but because the power of his keepaway increases massively if you are good enough to actually keep them away until poison damage has a chance to tick. In other words “half” keeping them away isn’t half as good as fully keeping them away, it’s much worse than that.
Enjoy! He is our last new character for the foreseeable future. More new characters are entirely gated on our ability to pay for more development, so please help grow the community and then we’ll be happy to make more characters after launch.
NEW STAGE: FOX’S DEN
Deep in the forest, the Fox’s Den is a hidden ninja dojo where Setsuki trains. The school even has a semi-invisibility field, making it harder to find.
PERFORMANCE
--The performance during gameplay any time the camera moves away from the default side view has been massively improved. For example, when the camera moves during a yomi counter or a super. This used to drop framerate by about 50%(!), but will now drop framerate by very little, if any.
--Performance during menus (including character select) has been significantly improved (finally!).
--Reduced memory usage of all sounds in the game.
--Added new video option for turning fullscreen antialiasing on. Leaving it off is fine, as it's only a minor visual improvement (that costs like 10-12fps possibly), but if you have a great computer then try it.
GENERAL GAMEPLAY
--All walk speeds have been increased a lot (25%).
--There are new macros of jump+A as well as A+B for throw, and B+C for super. Also, the slop factor on these has been reduced so you don't get them accidentally as much as the old A+B command. This means that using default controls on a PS4 controller, for example, lets you use the left two face buttons for throw and the right two face buttons for super (you can still use the trigger buttons for throw and super if you want). Also, on a joystick, it means that your top row of buttons can be A, B, C and A+B = throw ; B+C = super.
CHARACTERS
JAINA --Fixed Jaina's ground super not triggering its cinematic when it hits the opponent in the very last frame of its final hit. (oops!)
VALERIE --Last month we had to remove her hair’s ability to animate, for technical reasons. This month, her hair now moves and bounces again. This movement now looks better than before, does not glitch out on lower graphics settings, and no longer clips through her body. The part where it no longer clips through her body is the kind of thing that is one line in patch notes for you, but the end of a months-long struggle for us.
SETSUKI --C -> C has 3f more landing recovery.
--Holding C causes the throw attempt to lock in a few frames earlier, so that you can’t hold C then way late into the move still be able to air super.
--Blockstun reduced on the first hit of B and hold B. (If she does the throw option, now Lum can block the first hit and hit back with neutral A.)
--The window to choose between hold B (throw) and B (kick) is 6f shorter than before. So you can’t enter the throw command then change to the kick at the last moment.
GEIGER --Jump A has slightly worse priority at the tip of the foot.
--Delayed Time Spiral (hold B) has 4f more recovery, and travels faster once it starts moving. This is not for the sake of nerfing or buffing the move, but rather to interact reasonably with his new faster walk speed.
MIDORI --Midori A,A flurry attack is safer, so that it’s not unsafe on hit against Rook most of the time.
--Fixed a bug with air B kick that would cause Midori to hover just above the ground for one second if the move was done late in a jump, just before landing.
LUM --Ground super now returns to gameplay cam almost instantly instead of over a period of 20 frames, so that it no longer allows the opponent to do moves off-camera.
--Fixed a bug that appeared last month in Lum’s super that caused the startup to be vulnerable one frame too early. It’s now back to being vulnerable starting on the same frame that it can hit, rather than one frame before that. (In fighting game slang, it’s back to being a “bad reversal” rather than “not a reversal”.)
--Fixed a bug when the opponent did an attack that touched one of Lum’s dice and also Lum himself. Before, such a hit would hit Lum, but deal 0 damage to him. Now, it deals damage as expected.
MISC
--In arcade mode, the ladder screen between fights has new sounds.
--When you’re in arcade mode, then play an online game and return to arcade mode, you now return with the same costume color you had before.
--Fixed a bug that randomly changed the music levels over the course of a session.
--Fixed a bug on the score screen after online matches that made the top of the screen black.
--Fixed a bug during the first frame of all super flashes. When an opponent’s super flash begins, if you input a move during the first 8 frames, you should be forced to do that move as gameplay resumes. This was true for frames 2 - 8 of the flash but was accidentally not true for frame 1.
--Added flag icons to the language settings dropdown menu, so it’s easier to tell the languages apart.
--Created a workaround for the very annoying bug in the Unity game engine that triggers when you’re in fullscreen mode, then alt-tab to another program, then return to our game. Before, this would secretly, silently set the game to your monitor’s native resolution, which could be massively too high to get good framerate. Now, you will return to the game at the same resolution that you left it.
Huge Performance Improvements -- Fantasy Strike Update: December 2017
Our gift to you all this month is performance improvements. This was really a team effort to vastly improve how well the game runs on any given computer. We expect a ridiculous 60% increase or more in fps for most players. We have also translated the game into 5 new languages, fixed several bugs, and did a few balance updates.
PERFORMANCE
--Dozens of improvement to performance. This includes making low level code more efficient, changing the way several visual effects work (they'll look the same though), changing the effects used on several stages (they'll look slightly different), and optimizing character models and textures.
--10% reduction in CPU usage, at least, from just low level code changes.
--We predict at least a 60% increase in fps on most hardware during offline play. (This is crazy.) The improvement during online play is likely to be even greater than this.
--Each of the four graphics quality settings (high / medium / low / lowest) has been revised. These revisions remove various performance hogs, usually in cases where there wasn't even a tradeoff. The "low" and "lowest" settings, on the other hand, previously used some bad tradeoffs. By choosing more carefully which things get disabled on low and lowest, we've made the game look a lot better on those settings. The character shadows on "low" look far better now than before, and the shadows in the background of stages, especially the tavern and dojo, look dramatically better on "lowest" now than before.
--Valerie and DeGrey's models and textures have been adjusted. There is no visual difference at all, but they should run more smoothly. For Valerie in particular, this also fixes the issue where moving to her character select box used to cause a long loading delay.
--Fixed an insane bug that periodically caused the number of function calls during input detection during online play to be 10,000 times higher than the usual number of function calls. This fix will significantly improve performance during rollbacks.
Note: Only a fraction of the above performance improvements apply to our game's menus. While the menus will run slightly better than before, if you still get bad performance in menus, bear with us as we continue the optimization process and please make sure to check your framerate in actual gameplay.
Note2: when checking framerate, please be aware of a bug in the Unity game engine that we're still waiting on Unity to fix. If you set the fullscreen resolution in-game, say to 1080p, then you alt tab to another program, then alt-tab back to our game, the resolution will silently and secretly be set to the native resolution of your monitor, which might be massively too high for running a game. If you alt tab back to Fantasy Strike, make sure to set the resolution back to 1080p or whatever you really want, in the game's video options. This is already in Unity's pipeline to fix, we just want you to know about the bug so it doesn't ruin any framerate tests you do.
LANGUAGES
--There are now FIVE new languages supported, other than English: French, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Norwegian, and Japanese. The game will automatically default to the language set in your Steam client, if it’s one of our supported languages (English if it’s not). You can also manually set the language in Options -> Game -> Language.
STAGES
--Added a new stage! Valerie's stage: Wall of Truth. A mural that Valerie painted magically appears in the first few seconds of the round.
SETSUKI
--Teleport kick (B button) can no longer cancel to super.
--The version of Flying Fox that comes from pressing C -> C has a new trajectory that is better able to hit jumpers and now knocks down if it hits a jumping opponent.
--Hold-C throw has 3 fewer active frames toward the end.
LUM
--Mini-Lum now doesn’t hit on way up (only falling and when on ground)
--Lum Dice now have 2HP vs strikes/projectiles (still only do 1HP damage each to opponent)
--In practice mode, when Lum is set to do “reversal” on wakeup or after blockstun, he will now do his super instead of doing nothing.
--Fixed a bug that made Lum’s roll too high priority as anti-air. (Note: no balance testing of Lum involved us using this move as anti-air, so his balance is fine without using this move in that way.)
--Lum's yomi counter now correctly disallows the victim from gaining super meter during its animation.
ARCADE MODE
--Before each match, there's now a fun screen that shows how many opponents are left and what stage you'll fight on next.
--When you lose in arcade mode, you now get a real menu instead of a weird looking black screen placeholder thing. The menu allows you to try again, skip to the next CPU opponent, or give up.
--If you're playing arcade mode, then enter an online match, you'll be returned to where you were in arcade mode after the online match ends.
PRACTICE MODE
--If you're in practice mode, then enter an online match, you'll be returned to practice mode with the same characters you were practicing with, after the online match ends.
BUG FIXES
--Fixed a bug introduced a month or two ago with all crossup attacks in the corner. Against a cornered opponent, jumping attacks that crossed up were never landing on the crossup side. An accidental force pushed the attacker away from the corner while in the air, making all such attacks say “crossup” (and blockable as crossups), but with the attacker then landing outside of the corner, rather than in the corner as they should.
--Fixed a bug that sometimes caused there to be too much glow / bloom on the versus screen before the fight starts.
--Fixed a bug in the options menus that caused sliders to sometimes not increase / decrease if you press and hold “left” or “right” on them.
--Fixed a bug in all music tracks that causes a hiccup a few seconds in, where each song’s intro transitions to the looping portion.
--On the button config screen, when you assign a key to one of the 4 movement directions, it now correctly unassigns that key from the other player.
--Fixed an issue that caused the video options, when in fullscreen mode, to show multiple copies of each possible screen resolution for no reason.
Enjoy a massive 50% discount this Black Friday week on all Sirlin Games products!
Have you had your eye on one of our titles?
This is the biggest sale Sirlin Games has ever had. From November 22nd to 28th, you get 50% off everything Sirlin Games sells. Yes, everything. That includes:
All our tabletop games at SirlinGames.com. Use the code CRAZY50 when checking out. Check out our top sellers here. Keep in mind that some products might sell out before the sale period ends, sorry!
If you're looking for a fancy gift, we suggest Pandante (either regular or deluxe), as it's joyful experience for both non-gamers and experts. Or, you could try anything else! Fantasy Strike on Steam is our newest and prettiest game. :)
Quick-fix update for bomb desyncs
Hello, today's quick-fix update is simply a fix candidate for online desyncs related to Lum's bomb.
Happy Fantasy Striking!
Game Update: November 2017 -- New Gambling Panda Character!
This update to Fantasy Strike is live right now.
The biggest thing in this update is a new playable character, Lum! We've been working on him for a long time, so we hope you enjoy him. Our other biggest improvements this month are technical in nature. We've improved performance pretty significantly by lowering CPU usage (though we still plan to improve performance even more in the future) and we now correctly handle sound effects during the "rollbacks" that happen during online play. We added a handy new way to add friends in the new "recent players" tab of the friend list screen, and we've done several balance changes too.
CONTEST!
To commemorate the release of Lum, we're giving away copies of his favorite gambling game: Pandante. It's the DELUXE version with professional quality clay poker chips!
To enter:
1) Follow us on Twitter @FantasyStrike 2) Tweet us your favorite picture/gif/video of a panda.
3) Make sure to include #PandasyStrike in your tweet.
We’ll enter you into a drawing to win one of 10 copies of Pandante Deluxe (more than a $100 value!). You’ll have until Monday, November 20th at 11:59pm PST to enter, after which we’ll be selecting the winners and contacting them via Twitter DM.
CHARACTERS
NEW CHARACTER: LUM!
--Lum is a Gambling Panda
--Lum is now in the game.
--Lum is based around item toss, his C button move that throws a random item onto the playfield. His ground super is a slot machine that spits out 4 random items, too.
--Try to cause chaos and make things happen.
We made a video to show you all about how Lum works:
https://youtu.be/4c9n40tCxAo
And our lead developer talks about the design side of Lum in this video, too:
https://youtu.be/O75tRHZMz_4
GRAVE --Grave jump A and jump B have more pushback.
--Grave jump B has more landing recovery.
JAINA --Flame arrow impacts now have a variety of different sound effects.
ROOK --Air super now requires the same minimum height for all supers (though DeGrey’s is an intentional exception). We don’t really know why it was allowed to be done lower than other supers. The net effect is that jumping and then doing it takes 5f more than before.
VALERIE --Her B,B,back+B retreat now retreats farther so it better avoids Rook’s and Grave’s supers when she baits them.
--Fixed a visual issue that caused the dust effects at the beginning of her C attack to appear too late.
SETSUKI --C tumbler has 12f projectile invulnerability at the start. This seems to have been accidentally removed last month.
--C tumbler (when holding the button down) no longer throws opponents who are in the air.
--B kick now breaks armor so that Rook can no longer beat both of Setsuki’s B and hold-B options by him doing C throw (or super).
--Hold B throw now has the same extra hit that B-kick has to prevent an option select any character can use to always jump / block correctly vs Setsuki’s hold-B / B mixup by doing the same set of inputs and letting the game give the optimal outcome.
--Fixed a bug that could cause the victim of Setsuki’s yomi counter to fly upward off the screen sometimes if the yomi counter was the last hit of the round.
--Fixed a bug during her B teleport move that would cause all character animations to become frozen if the opponent did a super on a particular frame.
--Added facial animation to more moves.
GEIGER --Air super duration slightly reduced (by 0.5 seconds).
--Gear projectile impacts now have a variety of different sound effects.
--Ground super distance travelled is quite a bit less. This is a nerf in some ways and helps in other ways. The reason for the change is to allow at least some safe zone from full screen where other zoners can throw projectiles without always being hit on reaction with Geiger’s time stop. Those characters could still win by rushing down, but the dynamics of the match were too constrained by TIme Stop’s reach, so the point here is to allow more varied gameplay, separate from whether it happens to end up as a buff or nerf.
DEGREY --Fixed the display of DeGrey’s neutral A (first hit) frame data to look sensible instead of wrongly implying that the first punch had two hits of its own.
MIDORI --Last month we fixed an issue that caused online games to desync if Midori blocked a move immediately after transforming into a dragon. Now, we have fixed a second issue that ALSO desynced the game in that exact same situation.
--Throwing as the Dragon now keeps the victim's block damage state intact so that it works like all other throws.
PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS
--We’ve done several optimizations which, in total, reduce CPU usage by a significant amount: about 15%! During online play, you might feel an even greater improvement than that would imply because online play’s GGPO networking basically multiplies the CPU usage (as well as multiplies the effectiveness of this new optimization). On the other hand, you might feel less than the 15% improvement would imply if your particular computer happens to be bottlenecked by the GPU rather than the CPU. (There are no GPU optimizations in this update.)
--Several full screen image effects (such as ambient occlusion, bloom, depth of field) are now disabled on lower graphics quality settings, especially on Lowest. This will help a wider range of computers to run the game at good framerates.
--Fixed several memory leaks. We discovered multiple technical issues that caused the game to slowly use more and more memory over time if you played for long time in a single session. This could result in worse framerate over time until you restarted the program. These issues are now fixed.
STAGES
--Morningstar Sanctuary has environmental sounds now.
MENUS
--The menus have new sound effects for navigation, and clicking on things.
--The friend screen (press tab to get to it quickly) now has an “add friend” button if you’re in mouse mode (rather than game controller mode). This lets you add a Steam friend.
--The friend screen now has a “requests” tab, which lists any pending Steam friend requests you have, as well as lets you accept/reject them.
--The friend screen has a “recent players” tab. Players you face online will show up here, and this tab allows you to easily add them as friends (so you can challenge them directly).
--The XP system has been more fully implemented. Note that XP is not something that ever affects the power level of your characters, it’s only an indicator of how long you’ve played.
--XP now shows up for each character on the character select screen for online play.
--On the versus screen before each online fight, the XP values shown are now correct, rather than incorrect.
--When you reach level 32, the XP system no longer bugs out, causing loud sounds as you wrongly gain dozens and dozens of levels instantly. Instead, it goes to level 100, then flips back to level 1, but gives you a “star” in addition to your level.
--After each quick match, the XP now correctly adds up. That is, it gives the correct values for each possible XP item and it now counts all three games you might have played vs that opponent, rather than only counting the final game in the set that you played.
MISC
--Fixed a bug that made the practice mode training dummy’s settings for wakeup action work incorrectly.
--The practice mode setting for wakeup action and after blockstun action, when set to “random”, no longer heavily favors doing a reversal rather than a throw.
--Sound effects now pause when you pause the game. This is especially good in the case of long sounds, as before they’d continue to play when you paused the game, then when you resume the game, the move making the sound would play out in silence.
--During online play, sounds now obey rollbacks. That means if a move starts playing a long sound on frame 1, but then online rollbacks cause that move to not even really show on screen, you will no longer hear the entire sound effect of the move that didn’t really come out. This was especially noticeable before in the case of playing “yomi counter” sound effects when no yomi counter actually happened on screen.
--Looped sounds (such as from Geiger's gear or Grave's lightning cloud) no longer accidentally play when the SFX volume is set to 0 or SFX are disabled.
--Fixed an issue during online play that would cause movement directions on the PS4 analog stick to do nothing if you attempted to manually map them to the d-pad directions.
--Fixed the problem of the game locking up if you were in the loading screen of an arcade match at the moment that you got a new online quick match opponent.
