Shattered Haven 1.008 "Bonus Speed" Released!

[x4000]

Original: http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2013/04/shattered-haven-1008-bonus-speed.html

This one has some various fixes and tweaks, but the main thing is to make the Phoenix Forest a bit quicker to traverse on your first time through.

No levels have been removed, but two regular levels are now bonus levels, and are behind "combination doors" that you won't be able to open until much later into your adventure.  This gets you past two levels that were a bit frustratingly slow and/or fiddly, and into the coolest early part of the adventure, which is Stantonsburg, more quickly.

Shattered Haven is something that people who are playing it really seem to love, but we're really having trouble getting the word out.  If you play it and love it, please spread the word!  We can use all the help we can get.  A huge thanks to all of you who have already done so.

Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the  in-game updater itself, if you already have any version of the game.  When you  launch the game, hit the big "Play" button and then you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time.

[suigfdhuibsyret]

WOW, i'm stunned. Never seen a developper being this responsive towards the community. Thx for fixing my problem

[x4000]

My pleasure!

[Hearteater]

WOW, i'm stunned. Never seen a developper being this responsive towards the community. Thx for fixing my problem

Stick around.  Pretty soon you'll be thinking, "Four updates to three games in two hours?  They're...they're not human!!!"  But in a good way.  Not in a bad Cylon way.  Unless you like Cylons.

[jonasan]

First time with SH today. A new arcen title that i can play coop on 1 pc with my girlfreind = potentially brilliant. 

Interesting start and a nice feeling of a throw back to amiga days - two of us on one keyboard.

but unfortunately game seems to get stuck very early on..... or perhaps we're missing something...

     After defeating the first greys with the iron tacks, we passed to the next screen with the switch. We move the girl towards the switch and something red comes from the top of the screen. moves quickly down and halts half way down the screen kind of jerking from side to side randomly. Keeps doing it. all movement keys disabled. Can't progress.

Am I being dumb?

edit: also i seem to have graphical issues sometimes when i run the game like the sprites are strongly blurred. Restart usually fixes it so far.
oh and forgot to mention I'm running through WINE on ubuntu. Any one tried SH on WINE? working good? or could this be a possible cause of  the problems i'm seeing?

Thanks guys.

[chemical_art]

Unless you like Cylons.

Every day I give my toaster a hug.

[x4000]

but unfortunately game seems to get stuck very early on..... or perhaps we're missing something...

     After defeating the first greys with the iron tacks, we passed to the next screen with the switch. We move the girl towards the switch and something red comes from the top of the screen. moves quickly down and halts half way down the screen kind of jerking from side to side randomly. Keeps doing it. all movement keys disabled. Can't progress.

Am I being dumb?

edit: also i seem to have graphical issues sometimes when i run the game like the sprites are strongly blurred. Restart usually fixes it so far.
oh and forgot to mention I'm running through WINE on ubuntu. Any one tried SH on WINE? working good? or could this be a possible cause of  the problems i'm seeing?

Thanks guys.

Hmm, those really do seem to be WINE issues.  I've never tried it with that, and neither of those things are known issues.  Most likely you can fix the graphical blurring by tapping F3.  As for the squid jumping around like crazy, that sounds like some sort of internal timing problem, which is something that's going to be a pervasive issue in the game.

You might try turning on (or off) vsync and seeing if that will help.  You might also try enabling the FPS counter in settings (it then shows at the bottom of the screen) and seeing what you're getting.  A super high or low FPS can sometimes cause oddities, but even on pretty old hardware or unimpressive GPUs, you should be close to 60fps with this game.  It's extremely optimized, though not with Linux in mind.

[jonasan]

thanks for the suggestions chris,

graphical glitches seem to have disappeared on there own now - so thats good, but i'll keep F3 in my back pocket.

testing the video options now

FPS is around 15-18 with vsync off
and 18-22 with vsync on

testing the vsync option now as to whether it helps out with the squid

[jonasan]

Unfortunately vsync on or off dosnt help my squid! still gets stuck....


i can't move, i can use my items, i can view encyclopedia and goals, i can't view my inventory (inventory key pauses the game but dosn't display inventory), escape brings up menu no problem.

console says running at 15 FPS when squid gets stuck and just keeps on jerking. 

i tend to get reasonable performance on other games i run through wine and my graphics hardware isn't that old (512mb dedicated radeon laptop card). But to be honest never checked the FPS on AI WAR or VALLEY - going and do that now...

but that FPS i posted seems like WINE is slowing SH down to a crawl - seems i might be experiencing your second suggestion?

[jonasan]

Valley 2 - gives me around 28 FPS with just one or two bad guys

Valley (haven't got installed on this linux system)

AI WAR - 35-39 FPS (at new game start)

seems pretty low for SH to be getting 18-21    shame 

[x4000]

It seems that, for whatever reason, the linux build isn't handling render textures properly.  That's going to make the game incredibly jerky and so forth at 20fps or less. Most likely the fps being that low is the cause of the squid acting crazy.  I'd need to shift a few things to fix that, but if I do that the game is going to start playing slower, perhaps at 3/4 speed or so in your case, and that's not exactly going to be an ideal experience either...

Render textures seem to be the culprit here, though, unless you have a GPU with a incredibly low pixel fill rate.  But judging by your numbers on the other games, I think we can rule that out; the only difference here is render textures that actually result in lower draw calls than the other games, which is usually the big slowdown.  On most machines that get 30fps on Valley 2, they get closer to 60fps on Shattered Haven...

[jonasan]

sounds like a tricky one to fix. probably best if we go use the windows desktop then I guess

out of interest  - would that shifting of things you suggest mean it would be slower for windows users as well? because i imagine that kind of change to help users on an unsupported OS might not go over to well with everyone else.

also, has unity not come through with Linux support yet?

thanks again for the support - as always outstanding (i get issue, i have the lead dev for tech support in 20 minutes!!!)

[x4000]

sounds like a tricky one to fix. probably best if we go use the windows desktop then I guess

out of interest  - would that shifting of things you suggest mean it would be slower for windows users as well? because i imagine that kind of change to help users on an unsupported OS might not go over to well with everyone else.

It would only make it slower if you are running at a really superlow FPS, but yeah.

also, has unity not come through with Linux support yet?

Yeah, they sort of have -- it's in beta at least, I think.  But their 4.0 version that supports that has some other issues that cause game assets to load crazy slowly using our methods of doing it (runtime loading), and that's preventing us from upgrading.  It literally can make Valley 2 take 60-120 seconds to load rather than around 8-10 seconds, so it's a pretty big deal.

thanks again for the support - as always outstanding (i get issue, i have the lead dev for tech support in 20 minutes!!!)

My pleasure!

[x4000]

New version: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,12766.0.html