Hello everyone!
One of the worst bugs we’ve had in this game is at the end. It’s when performing the last action that triggers the final cut scene and animation, but the game gets stuck in a weird state.
It’s a mandelbug (like Mandelbrot fractal) in the sense that it’s very non-deterministic and its causes eluded everyone for a long time. The original fix was to move all the interaction positions so the player wouldn’t hit the exit by accident. This has apparently not been enough.
The current theory is as follows: When performing the action, the player moves to the proper interaction position. The engine checks if the player collided with the exit area to exit. Sometimes your computer causes a rounding error in this check. This confuses the execution of game scripting. It partially tries to exit and partially tries to trigger the cut scene, and the end result is getting stuck in a bit of both states. Because cut scenes don’t take input from you the player, the entire game seems locked up.
Now the exit is disabled altogether when performing that action. A solution that’s very simple yet obvious in retrospect.
A bug this elusive may still persist, though, so please do report any findings!
This new release (Download link here) has other fixes too.
The action menu and tooltips weren’t properly clamped to the screen. Sometimes the menu would open just a bit off, even if it didn’t require clamping. The tooltip also disappeared at times, like around the exterior of the UFO.
All of those should behave better now; please let us know if you see something that hurts your eyes.
You can also double-click on items for default interaction. This feature wasn’t too hard to implement, but all the more to design. The most useful default is to look at things, because that’s often the key to solving the puzzles. For a door, however, it would be to open it. But if a door isn’t automatically possible to open, what to do then?
We hope we got this good enough. We may change something if, or when, the Escoria framework gets features we want in A Lunar Adventure, but fiddling with the current defaults isn’t going to warrant a new release.
Performance when walking around the outside of the UFO should be just a bit better as well. We had some blowback in performance during development, but luckily A Lunar Adventure served as an excellent game to benchmark with.
