Just a very small patch. Fixing an issue where you would always get the default skin selected after restarting the game.

If you want some more details, here is an explanation:
It turns out I introduced a new bug when I optimized the load speeds in one other other patches.
The skin menu setup and initiation was big enough to be noticeable on my measures of the startup time, so I made it delay till actually needed.

However, in doing so, I made a small oversight in the skin selection loading logic which assumed that the preview model for the skin was already setup. Which it was not in this case. Leading to the loaded value being ignored. Resulting in the player always getting the default skin after restart.

That should now be fixed.

For more proper info on the other recent patch, here is a link to that one in case you missed it:
https://steamproxy.net/games/262390/announcements/detail/4330859498482084756

We've just rolled out another update focusing on refining the gameplay experience with added features, important fixes, and some quality-of-life improvements. It was intended to just address two bugs, but as I saw some streamers playing, I noticed a few additional things I wanted to fixːdeheadː

The big thing in this patch is the option to turn on rankings in the ‘Non-Competitive Mode’. So everyone who enjoys doing time trials and just wants to find some shortcuts, get a good run, and get scored on that can do that now without worrying about leaderboards, or the other aspects of the competitive mode.

• Ranking Support in Non-Competitive Mode: We've introduced an optional timer in non-competitive mode. Activating it will now allow you to see your personal rankings. This is designed for players who prefer to set personal challenges and goals without engaging with the competitive leaderboards.
  
  
• Mid-Level Timer and Ranking Toggle: You can toggle this setting on or off even during a level, making it easier to evaluate and opt in/out. (Unlike the old competitive mode setting for turning off the timer, it takes effect right away.)

• Menu Text Adjustments: The text for replaying cleared levels has been updated from "Start" to "Replay Level," making it clearer when revisiting levels. The button has also been adjusted in size and position.
  
• Shield Door and Gate Feedback: We’ve enhanced how shield doors and gates respond when shot, providing more noticeable visual feedback when damaged or turning on/off.

• Faster Hub and Level Select Loading: Load times for the hub and level select screens have been reduced. This was achieved by skipping the initialization of enemy effect objects that are not used in these areas. As these areas are loaded often it's just nice to have them load faster.

• Mouse Cursor in Photo Mode: Fixed an issue where the mouse cursor trail would remain visible in photo mode, ensuring a cleaner capture experience.
  
• Aim Assist Camera Fix: Resolved a rare case where a mismatch between the X and Y axes in the aim assist camera could cause math errors, potential division by zero, and abrupt camera snaps in rare scenarios.
  
• Steam Leaderboard Access Issue: Corrected a problem where leaderboards would incorrectly attempt to access data when the game was run without Steam, preventing visual errors and potential crashes in offline play.
  
• Camera Issue with Zero Lives Restart: Fixed a recently introduced bug where the camera could disconnect from the player after trying to respawn with zero lives in competitive mode, which was quite strange (though rarely game-breaking).
  
• Difficulty Animation Display: Fixed an issue where the difficulty animation might not display if you selected a level at the exact moment it was hovered.
  
• Rare Effect Manager Crash: Fixed a rare effect manager crash which could happen when effects were active as a level was unloading, due to resource release order.

That’s it for this time. Hope you enjoy it!ːdeboostː

• Mouse Pointer Options: We've added support for both hardware and software mouse pointers. You can now choose from a variety of pointer appearances and adjust the mouse trail length to your liking.
  • The hardware mouse pointer is enabled by default for faster response times. If you experience any issues, please switch to the software cursor.

• Options Window: To make room for these new features, we've widened the options window and added a new UI-focused tab.
  
• Reorganized Settings: Settings under the game tab have been moved around for better accessibility, making it easier for you to find the important options.

• Startup Time: Initially, the changes increased the startup time by 1 second, but we've optimized it further. Starting the game is now approximately 40% faster. On my PC it now loads and starts in 5 sec.
  
• Loading Times: General loading times are also faster as textures now load asynchronously, improving your overall experience.

• Sound Device Bug: We've identified and fixed the real cause of a persistent sound device issue.
  
• Gate Colors: Fixed a bug affecting gate colors in the game.

If you encounter any issues, please let us know. As always, we hope you enjoy!ːdeboostː

• Fixed an issue with the difficulty indicator which had malfunctioned due to a prior update. Now it’s fixed and more thoroughly tested.
  
• Resolved a problem where hovering over a level, releasing, and then re-hovering at a specific timing could cause incorrect UI elements to display.
  
• Corrected a bug that caused leaderboards to display incorrectly for levels that have not been cleared.

I added a small mouse trail in the game when the mouse is visible. This is a countermeasure to a rare issue where some players were unable to see the OS mouse while in full screen. I have only heard and seen of two such cases, so it seems really rare. Though, as it is a pretty tough issue for such players, I wanted to add something simple which can indicate the mouse position even if you don’t see the actual mouse, as it should at least help a bit.

(In case people wonder why we use the OS mouse, it’s because it has the best responsiveness. If we sample the mouse and render it as part of the game graphics, it will likely be one frame behind. Which is why we have not been doing these things before.)

Currently this mouse trail is not configurable, but I will try to add some settings related to this next weekend/soon.

Addressed an issue where settings from a previous session would incorrectly reapply after restarting the game with different challenge mode settings. The settings will now persist correctly in all cases as I make sure to save the settings file after the reset has applied its changes.

Improved the reliability of the boosted wallrun start from wall slide state, which previously could at very specific circumstances fail and revert to a wall slide immediately. The chance of this was usually quite low, but quite frustrating when it happened.

I did a previous attempt to fix this without having time to investigate properly which sadly didn’t resolve it completely. This time a more thorough investigation to understand the full extent of it.

The details are a bit involved, but here is the full rundown for those who are interested. If you have too low velocity in a given frame during a horizontal wallrun, it will end and go into the slide state. Which is how it usually should be, except when starting from this slide state. This only became an issue if you had just the right slide velocity and pushed the right directions, as then the velocity impulse you get from starting the boost would be just enough to cancel out the slide speed and land you at almost zero velocity for the first few frames of the wallrun. This then would make the wallrun exist right away.

I have now made it so that it recognizes that you are starting from this slide state with a boost, which then gives you a leniency time to build up velocity before the velocity check kicks in.

With this fix I have never been able to recreate the bug.

The achievement for collecting all the story logs was set up for the 24 logs of the original game, and didn’t account for the logs you could get from defiance. Meaning players could get a strange and misleading achievement notification when going through the game. It is now updated to reflect this correctly. (This was intentional back in the days when Defiance was not free).

Finally I did another attempt at fixing the voice over when returning to the room. There still seemed to be some players who mid session changed to an alternative sound device and then were unable to hear the VO in the room. But they seemed to be able to hear the VO when manually triggering it from the log window in the room. So I made an attempt to trigger the sound differently now to see if it might help. But as I am unable to reproduce the issue on any of my PCs, I will have to make assumptions and test things this way without knowing for sure. I’m sorry if it were to cause any issues for anyone.

• The defiance level Expectations got a little bit of clutter removed at the start, which distracted from teaching the power wires setup for the generators.
  
• The defiance level Chains got a small addition and optional section at the sniper dodge area, aimed at trying to give another hint at the ability to dodge the snipers. We have other areas in other levels intended to teach this mechanic, but as players are never required to use it before here, a good portion of players can get a bit stuck on this part. Having this new area right next to where this mechanic is needed I hope will help this a little bit further.
  

That’s it for this time. Hope you enjoy it!ːdeboostː

This is a minor patch fixing 2 bugs.

1. Some sounds created from scripts didn't get their sample rate initiated correctly, so when they tried to adjust pitch they got bugged and turned off. This was so far only observed on the stationary charge boost sound, but this fix should address other cases too if there were any.
   
2. When changing between challenge mode and non challenge mode on the level select screen through the hot key, the UI could get buggy at times. This should now be better. There might be a small pop, but the resulting state should be bug free.

Thanks for reporting issues when you find them! It's thanks to the reports we can find and fix bugs like this.

That's all for this time.

Hope you enjoy!

Due to a request, we just added a new setting to alter the render style. We know that some players dislike the cross hatching style and how it applies to the game. As it is a pretty strong effect and applies to large portions of the game, we can understand where they come from. In fact, this is part of why we added a bunch of rendering settings for Super Cloudbuilt. We just never patched in any such feature to the original game before now, which is something we really should have done earlier.

This is nothing as fancy as the Super Cloudbuilt modes, but there are now 3 presets available.

As always, if you have any issues with the game, don’t hesitate to let us know!

Enjoy the patch and thanks for playing!

This patch addressed three bugs, added one minor feature, and one tweak to a level.

First of all, the bugs.

• A bug when switching or using different sound devices was fixed.
  
• It appears there were some oversights when optimizing audio playback before. The sound device was not changed properly for all threads, and some sound resources also got buffered and reused, but did not get their device changed properly either. Making some sounds disappear completely when changing audio devices. There were many cases like this, but some examples include the voice lines played when returning to the room, some UI sounds especially in the result screen, and the player boost and weapon sounds.
  
• One more similar bug, is that the 3D audio device settings only got set up for the default device, so all 3D sounds would disappear or get low volumes when another device was used. I am surprised this was not noticed and fixed before now, as it must have left some of the players with very empty sound space. However, the main player character sounds are not actually 3D, so it would not have been quite that obvious.
  
• There was another bug with the level select menu when using gamepads, where the preview hover view of a level would not activate at times. Leading to some strange visuals when using gamepad controls in that menu.

As for the minor new feature, it is a dark theme of the in game UI. As I was looking at the UI code for one of the bugs, and had considered selectable UI themes for SCB, I figured I wanted to give it a quick test here. By default it is turned off, but can be selected in the game options.
Finally, the level tweak was to improve readability in Redeployment. One of the jumps down was easy to miss, as it didn’t really look like something was in that direction. Especially since there were other blocks looking more enticing to the side. We added some panels and two pickups to more clearly signal that there is a path here.
Some further logging was also added, so if bugs were to occur, we can get some more data on it.

If you have any issues with the game, don’t hesitate to let us know!

Enjoy the patch and thanks for playing!

Fixing reliability of leaderboards.

This is a small one, but important. There were some issues with the reliability of leaderboards, especially in the custom levels. This update has overhauled some aspects of the leaderboards, making steps retry if they failed, and such things. I also added a bunch of thorough logging to quickly find issues if there were to be any in the future, and a leaderboard ID is displayed in the leaderboards at all times to verify its state.

One issue was discovered in the level restart logic as well, where it for custom levels would reuse some logic used for the main game levels, and limit an index range incorrectly. Leading to leaderboards being disabled for custom levels after restart if you had more than 50 custom levels downloaded, and were unlucky. (Thanks ESin for the help identifying this!)

If you have any issues with the game, don’t hesitate to let us know!

Thanks for playing!

Some smaller patches to just improve quality.

Achievement for clearing all fog levels were patched to also work on other modes than the competitive “regular” mode. If you have cleared the level in the non competitive mode, it should now also count towards the achievement completion.

Another achievement for managing to avoid damage on the top of the tower in the level “escape” was patched to also work in the 2020 mode, and the non competitive mode. Before it required the competitive regular mode to work.

Various texts/tool tips were updated to fix typos or bad spelling.

The options menu popup descriptions are fixed to not be pushed under the bottom border of the screen, which could happen in some really wide resolutions when the text was long. (If you still find issues with this in your setup, please let me know what resolution you are using, and what text it happens on)

That is all for this time, and I’m sorry some of you have had to wait a bit for fixes here. Things were/are quite busy, but I’ll do what I can.

If you have any issues, don’t hesitate to let us know!

Thanks for playing!