Hi everyone,

version 1.4.2 brings with it several highly-requested features, a pretty nice rendering feature that wasn't really all that highly requested, an important bug fix, and many minor improvements and fixes. Let's start with the highlights.

Major New Features

• Water rendering update: water now optionally uses a pixel shader which distorts the reflections/refractions. We tuned this for most bodies of water in the game and it looks pretty neat.
• Added an "Auto Text Advance" feature. Note that there are a few events in-game where this will not apply since they require manual advance.
• Check and trigger achievements on loading saves. This means that if you e.g. import a save from a playthrough of a different version of the game, applicable achievements will now trigger. (Note: this mostly applies to collection-type achievements)

Major Bug Fixes

• Resolved an issue which could cause portraits not to be displayed in very specific circumstances. If you are curious about what happened there, here is an explanation by Alex:
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  Like many games, Trails from Zero uses a texture manager, a dedicated component that is in charge of loading, retaining, and releasing textures. The texture manager maintains a fixed number of slots, where each loaded texture occupies one slot. Slots can be reused once a texture has been released (i.e. is no longer needed). Textures are referred to by their slot index (ranging from 0 to number of slots - 1). However, a special value of -1 is used to indicate the absence of a texture. While -1 is handled correctly by the game, the message box logic suffered an off-by-one error, where slot index 0 triggered an immediate release of the corresponding texture. This unintended release caused the portrait to be missing. The game loads a handful of system textures at launch, which end up in texture slots 0 and a few subsequent ones. Originally, on other platforms, these system textures are only released when quitting the game; slot 0 can never be used for a portrait texture as it is already occupied. However, in the PC and Nintendo Switch version, these initial system textures are occasionally reloaded (released + loaded), for example when docking the Nintendo Switch or changing the text language. This reload can free up texture slot 0, which can then (potentially and rather randomly) be used to hold a portrait texture, in which case the off-by-one bug described above triggers.
• Implement a number of English localization fixes.

Additional Changes and Fixes

• Improve font rendering performance by avoiding unneeded copies and temporary textures. This might be noticeable on slower systems when a lot of text is displayed.
• Map geometry fixes on many maps, and some map collision fixes. Some of these are specific to ultra-wide monitors, but others are visible in 16:9 as well.
• Show correct button prompt in detective notebook for "Details".
• Add mouse support for the casino exchange menu.
• Made direct camp menu save button prompt clickable.
• Check whether detective rank is in a valid range when loading saves.
• Fixed crash when failing to delete saves.
• Allow cancellation of dialogs in the settings menu with the back button.
• Always apply framerate limit, even when VSync is enabled (or forced off). This is to prevent issues when VSync is off globally.
• Fixed an issue where battle character outlines could flicker with high FPS.

Note that you can revert to earlier versions of the game by selecting them in the Steam "Beta" menu.

As always thanks to all our QA testers who helped with this patch!

Cheers,
Peter "Durante" Thoman