Hotfix: Small cages weren't receiving explosion damage
Ukrainian localization v1.4.10: Українська!
NEW: Ukrainian localization of the game is now available
To change language, navigate to Menu > Settings > Language
Other Fixes included in this patch:
For the benefit of you few kindly souls who read my patch notes, I'm going to break with tradition and explain why this patch exists before I go on to explain what purpose it serves.
Back in 2015 when work on the game began, it seemed a cool and fun idea to create the entire user-interface using pure fixed-width text characters - as if the user-interface were a pre-GUI retro-console display screen overlay.
For example, these characters:
┏━━━━━┓ ┃━━━━━┃ ┗━━━━━┛
in-game are used to draw the EMU:
And the UI background isn't a black image.... it uses one or more of this character: █
So the UI in Ctrl Alt Ego is essentially a text buffer if you know what one of those is, with weird characters and rich-text markup to tweak colors and sizes.
It's been absolute hell to work with. Don't ever do it.
I have implemented so much weird mathematics to get the UI to lay itself out and resize correctly. It's been 9 years of pain. Localization added a whole new layer of pain on top... because now all my weird mathematics has to account for different fonts.
I'm saying weird mathematics, because I never really understood why i was having to synchronize background characters with the foreground drawing glyphs. They're all using the same font, I thought. The font is monospace fixedwidth, right? Why are there any calculations to do? Just render a background character in one layer, then render the drawing glpyh over the top of it and they should line up just fine, surely?
I have gone 9 years not really understanding why. 9 years! Mostly because I was too lazy (or too busy if I'm being more generous to myself) to drill down and try to understand what was going on.
Well a week or two ago, the publisher dev team working on the console ports discovered that the user-interface was rendering very strangely indeed in their console builds. Some characters were aligned very badly, and some characters were.... missing!
And, they informed me, and this is the punchline really, the characters I'm using to draw the user-interface aren't even defined in the font!
So what has been happening all this time - and that includes 2 years of the game being out there - is Unity (the game engine) has been quietly detecting the characters are missing and choosing a fallback font on the target system to use instead. That includes both on my development PCs and on player's PCs - I mean who knows what some players have been seeing all this time if their system isn't a fairly standard Windows platform.
And so that brings me to this patch. Basically I have gone through all the user-interface code to ensure it is using well-defined font characters. Can't have the game relying on chance to render the UI properly! This has meant having to change the look of the UI slightly in some cases (hopefully not very noticeably different though).
Controller glyphs and 'flying while carrying' bug-fix
Grabber > Upright is now additionally bound to Q (default), which means it's also now rebindable
Shift and Alt keys can now be re-bound, and can be used as toggles rather than keep-held-down.
Fix: Grenade blast radius wasn't always damaging everything caught in the blast due to a buffer not being large enough
Fix: A couple of inactive guard-rail pieces in Port 666 still had collision enabled
A MUM in Legacy Systems had turned invisible
Improvement: Added some fatter colliders to various vent pieces to reduce chance of physics glitching from inside vent to outside them (and so out-of-bounds).
Watch a wee enticer vid here: https://youtu.be/xj7qR--ClhY
The full campaign, with a twist:
2 object persistence technical fixes when crossing between levels
Patch Size: 7 MB
Ctrl Alt Ego ya está disponible en español
v1.4.3: ¡Español!
Navigate to Menu > Settings > Language to change language
Patch Size: 31 MB
Fix: Broken prompts In non-English version
Just a hot-fix to Major update 1.3: Tripwires were re-enabling themselves
Locations now have a simulated measure of GLOOM and HEAT, both of which impact location look and feel. Darker darks, less flat looking generally, greater lighting clarity.
Here's a 20 second video showing some selected before and after shots:
https://youtu.be/qTnMnxkpbsc?si=k660np17RiDD_Zry
The GLOOM setting can be adjusted. Look under Settings > Display > More
Set GLOOM to 0% to get back to the 'classic' look (i.e. how things looked before this update). Or increase it for a more moody vibe.
A tonne of unexciting under-the-hood changes to render frames faster. Pretty decent result - on an NVidia GTX 1070 (the min recommended spec) seeing a +50%-ish framerate improvement.
An important first-step towards console ports.
And should mean a much better experience playing on Steam Deck.
Pup bark (bach) gains an extra function... the sheer sonic force of the bach can now give objects a little jolt.
Other Fixes Fix/Change: Matey Boy recharger bots can now charge Pups when they're inside the little cages Fix: Slight visual glitch with Pup camera seeing its own eye when turning fast Tweak: Ceiling lights in Conscious Robot Services residential better shadows from the evil eyes Fix (hope): Added some safety colliders around Freight Workshop to prevent pups falling off the map Fix: There were a few DAD broken piece instances in Freight Workshop that needed updating (they weren't responding correctly to physics) A few Turkish translation fix-ups
Türkçe! The Turkish translation has arrived! New players (fresh install) will be prompted to select the game language. Or if you've already started playing and would like to switch, head to Settings > Language > Change Language
Other Changes
Русский The first translation of the game has arrived: Russian! Да, русский!
Why Russian? It's down to the superb efforts of a very helpful Russian player-turned-translator (SoSlowMan) - he's done an exceptional job - including going to great lengths to try to capture a flavour of the quirky British humour.
New players (fresh install) will be prompted to select the game language. Alternatively, if you've already started playing, head to Settings > Language > Change Language
More languages are coming!. Turkish and Portuguese (Brazilian) are getting closer by the day. After that, Ukrainian and Spanish. Hoping to add 'all' the languages eventually.
Other Fixes Fix: At The Cloud, don't show the taxi marker if taxi hasn't yet arrived Fix: CRS Corporate "Come back later" task was getting marked complete prematurely Tweak: Grab sound effect reduce volume slightly Probable Fix: Added fatter colliders to several vent pieces to reduce likelihood of physics glitches
Grab Toggle
Instead of holding the left mouse button down (or RB with controller) to grab and carry stuff, it's now a toggle, just like in all the other games.
It comes with its own audio and visual FX to help convey the idea that carried object behaviour remains physics driven (unlike most other games) and responds to bumps and scrapes.
Game Controller Look Acceleration
Game Controller revision: The last patch (v1.2.6) opted all gamepad users in to 'look acceleration' because wrongly assumed everyone would want that.
So there's now an option for it, and it's OFF by default.
Unfortunately this means there may be a few of you who when they get this update wonder why the game controller feels so different suddenly - to fix that head to Settings > Controls > Game Controller and enable Look Acceleration to get back to the feel of the last patch.
Other Fixes
Interact - If enabled, helps make interactions such as collecting juice and selecting small buttons a little easier by making the interactable object slightly 'sticky'
Combat - if enabled, your aim 'locks on' to sentient robots once you've got them in your sights
They're OFF by default i.e. you need to visit this screen and enable the options if you want them.
Note: These settings apply to game controller input only, mouse/keyboard input not affected.
'Look acceleration' now applied to game controller RS input so that fine and coarse adjustments should both now feel better. You may need to adjust the stick sensitivity (Settings > Controls > Mouse/Stick) to get the feel that suits you.
More consistent navigation in menus in terms of which elements get the focus
One can now select the Discord button in main menu with game controller
New: You can now collect multiple juice and batteries with a single interaction - hold down the use key and all nearby collectables will suck up.
Grabber rotate - made it more responsive (rotates the object faster)
Improvement: Bug arm is now a bit smarter and tries to get out of the way when collecting from openable crates (only if no tool equipped!)
Fix: A few instances of speech audio were restarting on pause/resume
Another day, another hotfix: Downloaded DADs were falling through the floor.
The tooltips / explanatory text had stopped showing up when looking at the difficulty settings screen when hovering over the options with the mouse - this is a hotfix for that. The Missions/Choose Gear screen was similarly affected. At least one Executor deployment was shouting too loudly due to being in the wrong audio mixer group.
Game-breaking fix: The transition from Merger -> Bug Free Zone was broken. Fix: task complete notifications background was oversized for some notifications Fix: Timing was wrong for one of PAM's speeches in CRS Science Improvement: Captions now line-wrap so at larger sizes they still fit on screen Fix: You could download yourself/stuff through the lift shaft wall in CRS Residential Fix: Eliminate exploit whereby you could download yourself through walls (thanks Dani Filth for explaining how)
The Conscious Robot Services floor directory screens were showing up blank since the last patch - this is just a hotfix for that
