Belated Valentine's Day Update

Feb 15, 2023

Many fixes. Network stuff, UI stuff, gameplay, etc. Added a controls menu and an in-game platform I call the "input switcheroo" to view controls and rebind controls, if you're using a keyboard. You can now start straight away at the Minigame Park, the Fork, or the Treehouse, which is cool.

The big news is that you can now also go beyond the gate, into the Air River, and play a demo of the first two biomes.

And the Flight to the Festival DLC page is now up on Steam.

-Max

P.S. Alright, so of course, many things are unfinished, so I won’t even bother listing those. I plan to release an official FoD Development Sky Map (aka road map) in my next update.

I will mention some significant known issues though:

• If you venture beyond the gate, sometimes, after completing the two demo stages, some clients will freeze at a black screen. Sometimes, everyone freeze. Sometimes, the game recovers if one person force quits the game.

• If a dog is flying back to the whale, it can go through walls and a player that joins might spawn on that dog and thus be out of bounds. You can drop out from your PopUp menu.

• Coins are not synced for joining players

• When the whale is landing, other players’ position might flicker a bit

• Sometimes, small tetris pieces are unbreakable/only appear for some clients

• Wingless dogs don’t take off when reaching an island border

• Kites destroy frame rate

• Moons spawn on top of each other

• Mop lady does nothing

• Long neck man does very little, it’s a semi secret, but there’s hardly anyway for you to figure it out atm

• Lawn mower is out of control

• (Throwing items is now done with mouse click or right trigger, not exactly an ‘issue’)

• And many more!

Some of the fixes in the past 7 weeks:

• Showing cursor when game menu opened when 0 players and hiding cursor when

• SpigQueen won't spawn key if gate is open

• Fixed Build-A-Pup being used by mouseless keyboard player glyphs

• Fixed BAP allowing you to make see-through dog

• Fixed BAP t9 clickableness

• Fixed searching for room name T9 input

• Adjusted menu options fill speed

• Added more instructions near treehouse

• Added controls display pressure plate in-game (with keyboard rebinding access)

• Added controls display in menu

• Fixed drifting gamepad input

• Fixed issues with treehouse bedroom

• Improved latency compensation for dogs, monsters, items

• Fixed a sandstorm issue

• You can now kick players out of your room

• Fixed unbreakable giant tetris blocks (but still tiny ones sometimes spawn)

• A few dog behaviors added, like follow the leader, meander, sniff & poop

• Networked the Flower Powers menu, but most Flower Powers not yet implemented

• Fixed some network race conditions in level transitions

• Regression fixed with dogs circling

• Regression fixed with Flower Cocoons

• Fixed saving/loading preferred/customized dogs

• Regression fixed for climbing ladders

• Fixed issues with whale’s belly

• Regression fixed for items disappearing on flipper shelf

• Fixed handling dog landing when transitioning between levels

• Fixed Zzz lingering by where whale was sleeping

• Fixed rebinding keys to already bound keys

• Fixed regression for dog starting to follow another dog when it’s the ‘pup’ in the BAP

• Fixed visuals for UI during night

• Fixed regression with the summoning pedestal and the rocks not being activateable sometimes

• Thorny vines on islands no longer affect flying dogs

• Improved UI flow for players who move with arrows

• Fixed whale summoning chess pieces and not just flock

• Removed System.Diagnostics.Process.Start calls and replaced where possible with Application.OpenURL

• Fixed Sternhalma (aka Chinese Checkers) array error

• Fixed a 2-players-1-keyboard issue

• Stopped every cloud being a rain cloud at the Fork

• Replaced treehouse island fencing

Alright, listen, these are only some of the commits going back to Jan 11. There’s about 3 more weeks to go through and I’m not sure this is interesting to anybody. If you want to hear about more things that I fixed/messed up and then fixed, ask and I will tell ya.

I never intended to go this long between updates. Sorry. This was a significant one, because it involved updating Photon and Rewired, as well as letting players spawn directly at the minigames or at the Fork, which meant letting them spawn without the whale, which meant tons of things that just assumed the whale was there were no longer valid. Then also letting players past the gate and through two levels also meant a lot more work.

If this proves pretty stable though, fundamentally, everything added should be fairly incremental. I make no promises about the timing of the next update, however.