First of all thank you so much to those who have purchased the game so far!
It's now the end of September and I am still chugging away at gamepad support. I wanted to be as transparent as possible so here it goes.
I needed a break
I had a trip that was planned since the beginning of the year and also just needed a break in general to recharge a bit. I am back now but..
I also have not been well..
I started getting vertigo attacks on a daily basis at the end of August which have basically made it increasingly difficult to make progress. I am still managing to do so, but at a much slower pace. I am hopeful that things will improve here over the coming weeks as I seek more treatment, but I have to be mindful of my health while juggling all the things.
I underestimated gamepad support
Mix Universe is kind of like a weird RTS camera setup when it comes to the user interface. What I ended up landing on was giving the player control of the cursor in edit mode which allows for a lot move flexible UI layouts. You can still hit the D-pad to navigate the main UI's, but the cursor is much more intuitive for things like placing and connecting nodes. Because of this, there were many hurdles that I had to jump through which I wasn't expecting. Something as simple as, how do I tell UI buttons to be selected by fake cursors.. took much longer to figure out than expected. Basically this entire update has become a larger UI undertaking than I imagined.
To give you an idea of what this has grown to be, here's a seemingly neverending list of tasks to make using a gamepad feel nice.
The good stuff
Overall, there are a decent amount of things queuing up for the next update.
- Almost every UI element will have been updated in some way to try and ease the gameplay a bit.
- I've also gone through and made it so sliders for UI scale actually work properly and the UI automatically scales based on your monitor's DPI. Something like the steamdeck will have big buttons while a 4k monitor will have medium sized buttons.
- I've also been playing around with auto-focusing selection which can make node editing feel a bit more intuitive out of the gate (You can toggle this in settings)
- 1 2 3 4 buttons have images now.
- Other things like decreasing the amount your camera will freak out if you have hitches and various other bug fixes have come along too.
Here's a bit of what the new UI is starting to look like for the edit menu.
An example of the new sliders too.
So when is the next update?
I will be shooting for late October and will post another development update if that is to change. I am fairly confident I can deliver a stable update by then. IF you are curious or impatient, you can feel free to check out the experimental beta branch.
Please make sure to backup your MixUniverse folder in your documents directory before you do.
As always, thank you so much for being a part of this musical sandbox journey!
Community Highlights
supereaston391 has started an "Extend this" which has now gone through 5 changes. Feel free to make a new mix off of that_lightworker's 5th addition and keep the Extend this series going!
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3029986372
Also, it's cool to see a mix evolve from the tutorial mix to something with multiple layers also made by that_lightworker, definitely subscribe to it and check it out!
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3030381245
If you like Minecraft, this mix by Catalyst BBoi is a remake of C418's Wet Hands
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3028361517
There are a few other cool mixes you can see in the Recent Tab on the workshop!