Hello everyone.
Many things took place with development over the last several days, and I feel confident to move the testing branch back over to the main branch and rolling it out to all players.
Minor adjustments are pending for localization. These are mostly correcting the orientation, as some translated words will cut off. Still, the logic otherwise presents the menu texts as they should be, so I'm confident to mark the initial testing as complete and merge it to the main chain, with a disclaimer that I will correct the final orientation issues by next patch.
Two issues that arose from playing through an already-completed game a second time were resolved, along with friction-based problems with specific obstacles. Also, the archway obstacle on courses was changed to not be quite as long of a tunnel (decreasing the odds the ball would get stuck halfway through and become troublesome to hit again). I took a second pass at file sizes for audio and textures resulting in an overall improvement of load times.
With regards to the handful of locations where the player will teleport down approximately one foot lower than expected, I've isolated the issue to two potential causes. Testing is underway to resolve permanently.
I am actively investigating locomotion via touch-pad (instead of teleporting), and if it's not included with my next patch, it will at least be in a testing branch. My main problem with this (beyond motion sickness) is that a sensible character controller should balk at going upwards at greater than a 45 degree angle. There are a couple ladders in the game world and I would prefer to not 'warp' the player from the bottom to the top, but I also don't want to give free license to climb up 90 degree cliff faces or the sides of buildings. I'm narrowing down the options to try to figure out the best solution.
Once locomotion logic is completed, I am then going to focus on setting up a render pipeline to improve overall graphics, which will be the center of my work for the next two to three weeks (with updates as code improvements warrant).
There's more to come! Hope you're all enjoying your time on the island!
