Greetings, tactics fans! I've got another update for you with a long-awaited graphical improvement and some bug fixes.
Our most visible change this update involves, quite literally, tables. Due to the way Unity's perspective camera handles 2D sprites, sprites near the edges of the area visible onscreen tend to skew outwards. This looks pretty normal for characters and objects that are relatively tall and narrow (like trees), but not so much for longer, squatter objects--like tables. As you can see, when those skew outwards, it looks like they're positioned counter to camera perspective:
You may recall that in the last minor update, I improved how "flat" sprites like traps are displayed. Tables aren't strictly flat, however--they have more dimensionality, and so required a different approach. Well, I finally took some time, got good (enough) at Blender, and figured out how to actually texture and export 3D models and get them working in-game!
This meant modeling a 3D version of the basic table, adapting the existing 2D pixel art for tables to create textures for every table variant in the game (basic, with food, with beer, with dice, with books, with map, with papers...), and importing them into the game. It sounds simple when I type it out, but this was days of work! And here's the result:
Pretty neat, eh? Now that I've now definitively fixed the issue of table sprites skewing near the edges of the screen, I can use this technique to address other such issues going forward (as well as to create brand-new 3D objects!) It's a small thing, but I'm quite happy about it.
But wait, there's more--let's run through some other improvements I've made to the game with this update:
-- a recent change in the code designed to prevent Together in Battle from connecting to Steam as though it were Telepath Tactics Liberated apparently broke achievements for Telepath Tactics Liberated. This is now fixed.
-- the mouse cursor is now fully locked, disabled, and rendered invisible when loading or starting a new game with gamepad controls enabled. This way, you can't accidentally mess with the cursor by bumping your mouse when in gamepad mode.
-- fixed: when in gamepad mode, the game was displaying a selection arrow over the new turn box at the start of AI-controlled turns, then leaving the cursor arrow onscreen after the new turn box faded from view.
-- fixed an exploit involving skills with an after-attack effect of "Can Move" (such as Lance or Bow) granted by a weapon with a remaining durability of 1. When using such a skill with a 1-durability weapon, it would break the weapon, after which the character could equip another weapon granting that same skill to use the skill a second time in the same turn.
-- fixed: the character creator was auto-marking weapons as equipped even if a different weapon was manually marked as equipped via "[E]" notation in the inventory field.
-- fixed: in cut scenes in gamepad mode, the Options button would sometimes inappropriately gain focus and open the options menu when selecting something else onscreen.
-- added in some code so the game can now detect if it's being run on Steam Deck. (This doesn't do anything just yet, but it will allow me to diagnose and fix issues with the the game when it's running on Steam Deck going forward.)
That's all we've got this time, folks. Thanks again for all your support!
Tactically yours,
Craig