Bug Reports Are In!

Sorry for being a day late with this update - I’ve been dealing with a bit of insomnia over the past couple of nights.

Firstly - I’ve gone through reports from our Playtesters.  The first Playtest version resulted in approximately 130 pages of bug reports - this latest version resulted in about only 43 pages!

Half of the remaining problems were a few controller issues - many of which have already been addressed, as of this writing.  The rest were a variety of navigation problems, misplaced colliders, back-end code, and visual tweaks.

Examples of bugs that have since been addressed are:

• Shadows that were far too heavy, even during daylight hours.
• Dim stars & moon.
• Textures that did not conform to local ambient effects.
• Inaccessible roofs.
• Trees growing on porches/docks.
• Insanely over-powered lighting.

What’s cool, is that in the process of fixing the bugs that the playtesters DID find, we found (on average) three bugs that they DIDN’T find, such as:

• 500-plus redundant colliders.
• 20-plus improper colliders.
• Two dozen nooks & crannies where the cats & NPCs would get stuck.
• Three hedges missing the proper collider tag, which prevented a cat from climbing them.
• 16-plus missing ground/object textures.

BTW; the most important of the above are the 500-plus redundant colliders - most of those were in the “Downtown” area, meaning that these areas will have 20% fewer calls - cementing Peace Island Landing as the fastest-running area of the game.  This is again significant, because it used to be the one place where performance consistently bogged down.

I was also able to find time to re-introduce a visual effect that had been somehow lost over the past two years of development:  volumetric rays of sunlight.  It’s a minor effect that adds a LOT of atmosphere and depth to the player’s POV.

There remain issues brought to our attention that we have yet to fully address - but that’s simply due to there only being 24 hours in a day.  We plan on releasing a final playtest build on July 3 - if you are a Patron and want to take part in this final stress-test, let us know by dropping us a line at PeaceIslandLLC@gmail.com - please include your Patreon handle (yes- we unfortunately must ask people to send an email - that’s how we keep our records straight.)

And yes- we’re STILL trying to get a Mac Playtest build out - I am VERY curious as to how much more quickly things will run, after all of the streamlining we’ve done over the past few months!

Postcard/Print premium shipments were delayed for a few days, due to a problem with our stamps.com account that we were not informed of, until it was a bit too late.  We finally got that settled, and the first 75 sets will be going out tomorrow - we appreciate everyone’s patience! (BTW: we use stamps.com, because we try to use our funds as economically as possible, and the service saves us hundreds of dollars on postage yearly.)

We’ll be back in six days - I believe that by then, we’ll have a LOT more to show off!