Version 0.407 / 0.408

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This version is now out.  It's the hugest we've done so far in terms of both content and in file size (even more so than 0.405).  Lots of goodies here!

There was a larger gap between releases of 0.405 and 0.407 than normally we would want, but the multi-well functionality was a huge undertaking and broke a lot of parts of the game temporarily while we were developing it, so we wanted to make sure and get all that cleaned up and well tested before we made even a beta release of something so central as that.  Version 0.408 and other upcoming releases should be much quicker to arrive, as even the networking and VS modes won't touch as many parts of the game as the base multi-well functionality did.

Stay tuned!

Updates in 0.408:

- There was a bug in 0.407 preventing new players from doing much aside from updating the game (this is a beta, but we try not to let stuff like that slip through).  The update is a quick one, though, if you already have the game, and we're in the process of updating the installers to 0.408 to prevent anyone new from having that issue.

[Fiskbit]

-Rebalanced adventure level 26.

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-A new, more GPU-efficient method is now used for drawing and animating the weather.  This new method also lets us be a little more flexible with weather speeds and directional offsets, and fixes a few fairly subtle bugs that were previously present with the snow in particular.  In general, this now adds tiled uv animation to the capabilities of the Tidalis engine, which will be handy in general.

-The occasional blowing wind of the levels with weather is now more realistically calculated, making it look more natural.

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-When there is a a chain of at least 3 blocks active on the board, or when blocks are in the process of dying on the board, new blocks will not drop down from the top of the well unless the fast forward button is held.  This was previously the case already, except that blocks would still queue up while the chains were in progress, and then would all fall at once at the end -- now the block-falling process is fully paused during that time, and doesn't do any queuing up.

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- A new Night Marsh Variance theme has been added.

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- Tooltips now autosize and ensure that they are always drawn on the screen properly.

- Fixed a bug with the tooltip text not always showing properly.

[Fiskbit]

-Level 26 is now level 37.

-Levels 26, 31, 32, 47, and 93 have been added. Of these, only this new level 26 is currently available from the adventure map. The others can currently only be accessed through the level editor.

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-Adjusted the timing of the keyboard movement to be far less jittery.

-New night forest theme.

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-The way that background animation of theme layers, etc, is handle is now much different, and no longer accidentally goes faster when the mouse is moved or keydowns occur.

-Sprites in the theme editor now support uv animation on themselves.  This is now in use on the cavern waterfalls, which now flow.

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-It is now possible to flip sprites on the X or Y axis in the theme editor, as well as setting a rotation for sprites.

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-New special block: Apple. Can only be cleared by being eaten by an eater block. Otherwise indestructible even to other specials.

-Some special blocks are now immune to destruction from regular special blocks (becoming charred, or whatever else).  Those are currently just apples and turnips.

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-New Snowy Lowlands theme.

-New light snow weather type.

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- Fixed some graphical issues that were causing the numbers on blocks to show up slightly off-center.

- Basic multi-well co-op is now supported, although a lot more still needs to be done to get this as robust as we want it in the end.

- Wells automatically scale down in size now if they are on a screen that is too small to show them at full size.  This is particularly notable for the smallest screen resolutions and dual-well multiplayer.  The graphics degrade a bit when shrunk, and it causes a bit of a performance hit as well, but it at least makes it possible to play all of the modes even on the tiniest screens (though your eyes would probably thank you for keeping to larger screens if you're playing multi-well co-op with large individual wells -- simply no way around that one).

[Fiskbit]

-Levels 32-36 have been added
-Level 37 has received further rebalancing. Now, the win condition is easier and the lose condition is harder.

[keith.lamothe]

-added AllowedClearMethod to TotalBlocksCleared objective, involved tracking the clear method on the block (just an enum), since it's not possible to infer at any central block-removal time

-halved time-to-evaporate for ice and fire blocks at all difficulty levels

-no longer gives score bonus for clearing special block in line-clear mode

-no longer flashes fire or ice blocks because-its-about-to-evaporate in puzzle mode; since they don't evaporate at all in that mode

-changed editor level properties time-limit setting from slider to textbox (custom and quick game are still sliders)

-level editor objectives window now auto-positions the objective-specific controls to make more efficient use of vertical space