Had a small bug with a big impact last night. Unfortunately it was not a problem in the Unity editor, only after exporting the executable, so I completely missed it trying to get yesterdays announcement out in like 20 different languages! It was a quick fix though as soon as I woke up and saw people yelling at me =D Which is always much appreciated, no joke. Player reported bugs are my most precious commodity.
v 1.0.4.2 2023.07.02 - Fixed a post-export only bug causing skills to not load
You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.
(Please note that for non-English news posts, this has been translated with Google Translate and may contain grammatical errors)
Steam itself does not actually support 31 languages, so I cannot mark the game as available for all of the languages that have been added, but the complete list of supported languages is as follows:
Afrikaans Arabic Bulgarian (under repair) Catalan Czech Danish German Greek English Spanish Finnish French Hebrew Hungarian Italian Japanese Korean Dutch Norwegian Polish Portuguese (Brazil) Portuguese (Portugal) Romanian Russian Serbian Swedish Turkish Ukrainian Traditional Chinese Simplified Chinese
As the initial translations are made using machine translation there may be some words or phrases that can be improved in any particular language. Because of this, the language files are stored separately from the base game files in a folder called LanguageFiles, and can be editted directly. Soon I will setup a public git repository, allowing players to submit corrections to help improve the localizations for others. We also ran into a problem with the Bulgarian files, but will have them up shortly. We've also added a new function that will automatically switch to the language that a new players OS is using when they are opening the game for the first time, but that didn't quite make it into this patch and likewise will be added in soon.
If there is anything missing from the translations please let me know and I will make sure they get added into the system.
Happy Gaming!
Condensed patch notes:
v 1.0.3.1 -> 1.0.4.1 2023.07.01 - Vastly improved and expanded multi-lingual support - Made player fired arrow graphical components a bit slower and a bit larger - Improved the targeting reticle shader - Added over 30 new monster abilities including visual and audio effects - Upgraded target projector - Monster abilities can now show an indicating projector - Added or improved the audio and graphical effects of around 60 spells and abilities - Fixed a multi-player storehouse bug where special resources wouldn't show up - Fixed camera collision on cave entrances - Fixed an issue with buildings and facilities in dungeons - Fixed a problem where tombstones and buildings might not save properly in dungeons upon death or leaving - Fixed lighting not updating correctly when entering a world encounter as an mp host - Fixed lighting and sky breaking when leaving world encounter as an mp host - Fixed an item dupe glitch - Fixed a projector layering issue - Fixed a couple multi-player invisible equipment bugs - Fixed an issue with armor sometimes being invisible to others in mp - Fixed the harvesting tools of others being invisible in mp - Fixed resources not despawning after being harvested - Fixed a new resource respawn check method happening too often causing performance problems and crashes - Fixed scroll bars and text input problem in the start menus, character, and world creation - Fixed monster tier trying to calculate itself prior to level causing loot to drop as tier 0 - Fixed a bug with monster damage over time abilities - Fixed a bug that could lock player movement - Fixed a bug for persisting effects - Fixed a harmless multiplayer specific error - Fixed resources respawning inside of buildings - Fixed an error with shrines - Fixed an error with ward skills - Fixed loot disappearing with the clearing and removal of small encounters
You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.
There are just a few last minute things we're still tweaking with this build but the sale is upon us! So I'm going to push things as they are to beta, probably for less than 24 hours, and will push this branch to the live default build tomorrow to make room on beta for the full controller support branch that is also nearing completion.
I've never added the languages supported by Solace Crafting to the Steam page, because they only really supported each language 50-60%. We're now more like 95% and finishing up the last little bits, so tomorrow I will make a post in each language and turn on the tags in Steam. Not overly exciting if you're primarily an English speaker, but there are a LOT of gamers around the world that don't speak English. Once everything is in and working well, I will setup a public git repository specifically for the purpose of allowing community members the ability to improve translations in languages they are familiar with.
Real quick regarding myself and the lack of updates recently, I've had a lot of issues in and around my family that more or less prompted me to take some time off, and I made my annual visit to see my friends and family in the USA earlier than usual this year. Now, families members are all on the mend, the scary stuff is behind us, and I am back in the driver seat trying to properly piece together the work that Caj and Newbery have continued working on throughout my absence.
More soon!
v 1.0.4.0 2023.06.30 - Vastly improved and expanded multi-lingual support - Fixed a multi-player storehouse bug where special resources wouldn't show up - Fixed camera collision on cave entrances - Fixed an issue with buldings and facilities in dungeons. - Fixed a problem where tombstones and buildings might not save properly in dungeons upon death or leaving - Fixed lighting not updating correctly when entering a world encounter as an mp host - Fixed lighting and sky breaking when leaving world encounter as an mp host - Fixed an item dupe glitch - Fixed a projector layering issue - Fixed a couple multi-player invisible equipment bugs - Fixed an issue with armor sometimes being invisible to others in mp - Fixed the harvesting tools of others being invisible in mp
You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.
To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta.
My apologies for the gap in Steam news posts! April was a mad house for me including hospital visits, house problems, pet problems, and my family visiting from the US for the first time in 8 years! But my personal life aside, work carries on, and we've got quite a few things not only on the current beta branch, but more behind the scenes eager to move onto the beta branch once we can push these changes live.
The main feature of the recent several patches is the introduction of 30 new monster abilities, most including new audio and visual effects to go with them. This and the recent reworking of the majority of player abilities as well has introduced a few combat bugs that I am still trying to ensure get squashed before all of these changes are pushed live.
Once we are done with this branch, I will be introduce the first wave of full controller support, and we are also working on improved multi-lingual support as well.
v 1.0.3.7 2023.05.10 - Fixed resources not despawning after being harvested
v 1.0.3.6 2023.05.02 - Improved the targeting reticle shader - Fixed a new resource respawn check method happening too often causing performance problems and crashes - Fixed scroll bars and text input problem in the start menus, character, and world creation - Fixed monster tier trying to calculate itself prior to level causing loot to drop as tier 0
v 1.0.3.5 2023.04.28 - Added over 30 new monster abilities including visual and audio effects - Upgraded target projector - Monster abilities can now show an indicating projector - Fixed a bug with monster damage over time abilities - Fixed a bug that could lock player movement - Fixed a bug for persisting effects - Fixed a harmless multiplayer specific error - Fixed resources respawning inside of buildings
v 1.0.3.3 2023.03.28 - Fixed the UMA database having been inexplicably wiped - Fixed an NRE related to new controller support assets in the start menus
You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.
To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta.
Lot's of new spell and ability animations and sounds have been the main focus of this patch. I have had a crazy week, and apologize for not posting a bunch of fun pictures to go with this. Had some hospital visits and emergency house reform and all kinds of stuff, kind of back to normal on a sunny Tuesday now though.
Once these changes have been tested out more thoroughly I will push the changes live with some screenshots and more information.
For the record, full controller support is coming along nicely.
Happy Spring, and happy gaming!
v 1.0.3.2 2023.03.26 - Added or improved the audio and graphical effects of around 60 spells and abilities - Fixed an error with shrines - Fixed an error with ward skills - Fixed loot disappearing with the clearing and removal of small encounters
v 1.0.3.1 2023.03.08 - Fixed stuttery movement for ranged monsters / improved it for melee - Refactoring Monster AI - Fix for ability hotkeys not working
You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.
To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta.
New encounters and lots of bug fixes in this patch!
Most importantly, in my opinion, I'm glad to finally fix the in-game menu blocking hotbar keys fixed on the live branch. This has been causing frustration for people, when the escape menu, but not an actual window comes open and blocks the use of hotbar keys. This patch for one no longer opens the menu when you escape out of a window, but it will also automatically close if you press a hotkey while there isn't an actual window open.
Some new encounters can also be found throughout the world:
Over time the game has developed a lot of different systems, we're now trying to improve the quality of those systems and add more content to them. These new encounters are considered "small encounters" and can be found scattered throughout the over-world, including two treasure cache types that do not show up on the map.
Besides that and a variety of bug fixes and performance improvements we are well underway with full controller support. We used the start screen and all of the game settings and character and world creation as a good testing point for the coding. Everything is working well there on our end, though not implemented for end users, so work is now underway on the in-game content.
More to come!
Condensed live patch notes: v 1.0.2.14 - > v 1.0.3.0, 2023.03.07 - Added 4 new small encounters. Goblin totems, Buried Treasure (several varieties), Abandoned Goods, and Imp Rifts. - Added shrines that can grant temporary buffs - Upgraded dungeon generation to a wave function collapse method - Added common room to dungeons with food spawning tables - Now automatically combining meshes in dungeons to improve performance - Disabled the menu opening when hitting escape while another window is open - Now allowing player input to no longed be blocked by the MenuUI unless a window is actually open - Fixed storehouse not gathering town resources properly - Fixed several world encounter teleport, entrance/exit bugs - Fixed town storehouse errors with special resources - Fixed heals throwing an error when monsters are selected - Fixed melee skills locking up player movement in some instance - Fixed basic melee attacks unintentionally using an outdated range check causing blank swings - Fixed bug causing markers to not disappear after clearing an encounter - Fixed a null ref error in TargetUI - Fixed an error when casting buffs on enemies - Fixed a variety of potion effects and skill/spell effects cast by others not showing up in multiplayer
Latest changes to beta: v 1.0.3.0 2023.03.07 - Added common Room with food spawning tables - Refactored, sped up, and added multi-threading to dungeon wave function collapse decorator - Now allowing player input to no longed be blocked by the MenuUI unless a window is actually open - Fixed a null ref error in TargetUI - Fixed an error when casting buffs on enemies - Fixed shrines serialization and behavior in sp and mp - Fixed bug causing markers to not disappear after clearing an encounter - Fixed a variety of potion effects and skill/spell effects cast by others not showing up in multiplayer
v 1.0.2.19 2023.02.18 - Fixed several serialization and data management issues for the new small encounters - Fixed input being blocked in some cases for MP clients
v 1.0.2.18 2023.02.17 - Fixed storehouse not gathering town resources properly - Fixed several world encounter teleport, entrance/exit bugs
You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.
We've been having some hardware difficulties over the past couple weeks slowing things down, my apologies for that. There are still some small bugs to work out in the new dungeon generation methods introduced in this patch, but there is also a number of fixes and upgrades so I wanted to go ahead and push things out as they come.
Most notably the escape button when used to close the main in-game interface was also opening the escape menu in the upper right which blocks movement and action input. This was causing a number of people to think their controls had stopped working, not noticing the menu was open. This has been fixed so that escape will only open the menu when there are no other windows open.
We've also added a number of new small encounters throughout the world. Previously there were only the monoliths with stone elemental guards. Now there are imp rifts, goblin totems, treasure caches, abandoned goods, and shrines, as well as the monoliths. Still some tweaking going on with the spawn rates and overall multiplayer performance of these.
I also wanted to mention that work on full controller support was started a little while ago. I know there were quite a few people that had confused my talking about the "player controller" with controller support. It's been on the todo list forever, and though I'm not a controller player myself, I'm excited to see not only how it is received, but also what kind of new opportunities that may open for us down the road.
v 1.0.2.16 2023.02.15 - Added 4 new small encounters. Goblin totems, Buried Treasure (several varieties), Abandoned Goods, and Imp Rifts. - Added shrines that can grant temporary buffs - Fixed new storehouses data not properly transferring to clients in MP - Fixed a number of MP specific problems with beta 1.0.2.15
v 1.0.2.15 2023.02.08 - Upgraded dungeon generation to a wave function collapse method - Now automatically combining meshes in dungeons to improve performance - Disabled the menu opening when hitting escape while another window is open - Fixed a dungeon trap visual bug - Fixed town storehouse errors with special resources - Fixed an error in target acquisition method
You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.
To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta.
Had a couple big problems reported I was able to smash. Throwing up a quick hotfix to squash them.
v 1.0.2.14 2023.01.25 - Fixed heals throwing an error when monsters are selected - Fixed melee skills locking up player movement in some instance - Fixed basic melee attacks unintentionally using an outdated range check causing blank swings
You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.
Had some problems with new characters not properly assigning the basic attack to skill slot 1 upon creation, along with no sort of click to engage auto-attack, causing fully understandable frustration for some players. This patch, among other things, fixes the "Basic Attack" skill (found under the general skills tab) not being assigned for new characters, but also adds the ability to simply right-click on targets within range to engage auto-attack. I've also fixed auto-run as well as Q and E for keyboard turning.
The player controller overhaul was a huge undertaking, and I ended up releasing it a bit early causing us to take on some pretty nasty reviews due to the bugs. Hopefully this patch cleans up the majority if not all of the player controller related bugs, but I also take solace in the knowledge that we shouldn't have any hurdles from here on as far reaching as a player controller update is.
Looking forward
I also wanted to share a bit about what we've lined up for the near future: - A new procedural dungeon generator to improve the current undead and goblin dungeons and make adding new dungeons quick and easy. - New and revamped small encounters, adding variety to what are currently only the stone elemental guarded monoliths. - Improved enemy combat AI. - Monster classes & abilities. This system is already implemented on a few mobs, for example some rock elementals spawn as a ranged class and throw rocks. I have laid out a plan for around 36 new monster abilities, including hero specific area attacks to be implemented to animals and monsters. - Monster equipment randomization. Some monsters will randomize their equipment when spawned based on their class to increase variety. - Monster champion & hero damage and health rework. - Improved loot tables, including adding sockets to global loot. - Runes. Several new types of sockets attainable as loot. These may also be dropped as recipes using the Masonry profession instead of Enchanting to add more use for stone and Masonry in general. - Full controller support. Work on this started today and aims to make menus, crafting, hotkeys and all functions within the game possible with a controller. - Further town capabilities, including resource transferring, trading with currency, and food production. - Nutrition system & improved cooking. I have planned out a simple yet pretty deep set of systems designed to compliment one another for nutrition and cooking, and have only to implement them into the game. Note that these will only be beneficial, offering a way to further increase a characters performance through their food and drink. - Fishing. - NPC towns. The spawning and randomization of these is already mostly implemented, but I want to add more functionality to these NPC towns before we switch them on, such as trading and possibly questing. - Revising the multi-lingual support. There are a lot of holes in the current multi-lingual system that for the most part simply need to be added into the current, working system, along with some organization to make the game fully multi-lingual.
I also paid for some work on building piece revisions and prepared 9 new textures to expand upon the current wood and stone, but unfortunately the work was very low quality and pretty much unusable. I was hoping to get some of that up for the Base Builder Fest, so ongoing, but they really need to be redone properly. So I've pushed work on that area to the side for the moment, but I will definitely be adding more building textures, and likely the ability to color buildings freely, along with some other building and town building specific upgrades in mind.
There are a number of other things on the back burners, but I don't really want to blab about things that may or may not be scrapped. For the most part, all of the functions mentioned above are things we're actually working on and hope to have ready for testing in the near future!
How to report bugs
I also wanted to real quick mention fast that this is still primarily a solo developer project, massive though it is. I have some paid freelancers working on the things I tell them to, but it is not part of their responsibilities to monitor customer support, and I cannot yet afford hiring someone to manage things like that and social media and marketing and 7-8 other things. It's up to me to find, verify, and organize bug reports, and that can be very time consuming sometimes.
If you do run into something that needs my/our attention, the best way is to either add it to the bug-tracker, linked at the bottom of this and every news post, or to post in the #bug-discussions channel in our Discord server, also linked at the bottom of every post I make.
More important than where though is how. If you run into an error, opening up the console with F1 will show a print out of what caused the error. Often a screenshot of this is enough for me to go straight to the problem and fix it. If you can further provide the following details it often makes fixing the problem much much easier for me: - What version were you playing - Did it happen in single-player, or as a multiplayer client, or as a multiplayer host. - What were you doing and what did you expect to happen - What happened instead of what you were expecting And honestly any other details can sometimes provide a massive clue into what happened. It is and always will be in my highest interest to find and repair any and all bugs as soon as I can, but sometimes it takes hours just to figure out what really went wrong. That's the price of such a big project being developed and run by so few people (mostly just me! XD ), but solid bug reports are a serious godsend, and are always very much appreciated.
Patch notes
v 1.0.2.13 2023.01.24 - Enabled right-click to target enemies + engage auto-attack - Updated a number of tutorial steps - Improved Blink skill - Disabled small encounters, monsters, and hostile animals from spawning in the starter area (250m radius by default) - Fixed autorun immediately cancelling itself - Fixed Q and E (default keys) not turning the player properly - Fixed the quest helper not engaging automatically when tracking a quest or starting a new character - Fixed weather particle generators not initializing collision quality properly - Fixed several harmless startup errors client side when connecting to a server - Fixed a multiplayer client specific undead & goblin dungeon bug - Fixed Charge and Jump Back skills not working with new controller - Fixed new characters not properly starting with basic attack in skill slot 1
You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.
Still some bugs I'm hacking away at. My apologies again that these made it through to the live build, there was so much we changed over the last three months, it was really hard to try and catch everything.
One sort of bold change with this patch is that the cursor is now confined to the game window for both windowed clients and for those using multiple monitors. This was a requested feature and should be no different for full screen players/single-monitor players, but if we need it to be an option which method we use I can certainly add that.
There are still some problems with riding in boats, climbing ladders, and getting stuck on joined 45 degree angle slopes, like multiple stairs pieces joined together, and pausing the game sometimes causing the player to get stuck in a dance. Newbery our controller guy is looking into those for me.
I am looking into obelisk damage, ranged attack direction and line of sight, dungeon enter and exit problems, as well as some problems with potions.
v 1.0.2.11 2023.01.10 - Fixed a storehouse bug deleting leftover resources when withdrawing - Stopped a different harmless storehouse warning from throwing an error - Improved mouse lock/unlock logic - Now confining the mouse cursor to the game window for multi-monitor users - Fixed auto-harvest in multiplayer - Fixed town resources not harvesting properly - Added tab target cycling to the key bindings settings
You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin, or you can verify file integrity to trigger it.