Alpha 1.5 brings support for both online and local hotseat play (realtime/splitscreen was already supported) as well as a new competivive game preset. You can now find all three game presets under the newly added join menu.
Hotseat turn-based play
This makes players in your session play in turns rather than realtime at the same time. This is available for either local or in online play, you can also take your local players into online sessions.
The way this works is you will always be in a 'specating' mode until its your turn. Upon taking your shot and waiting for your ball to come to a stop, the next player in queue will take their turn and you will watch them while you wait. This continues in a cycle until its your turn again. The order of play is firstly for the initial hole purely random, but from the next round onward its determined by score order. This means the leading players will always play first giving the advantage to players trying to catch up.
Quick Chat gains some improvements for this mode in mind when playing locally. When split-screen is disabled (such as this mode, and any state during regular) a local players chat will appear on the main screen with a indicator of who is 'chatting'.
New Join Menu
On this new menu you can see each of the game presets and pick one to quick join if a session is available. If no sessions are available of that preset type you will be prompted if you wish to create one. If you wish to see all sessions as previous then a button for that is present on this menu also.
New Level "Stroke Of Luck"
A new early game level has been added which takes you to trying to trick-shot through a windmill to reach the hole-in-one; if you fail you'll fall down a fallback hole left with a potentially awkward shot to reach the goal. Good luck ;)
New Customizations
Check out the new Swirl pattern, and Split pattern is back after being reworked! Each of these designs come in a full selection of colors, faceplates, and icons for rich presence.
Existing customizations Pool and Smiley Face have been updated and will recieve faceplaces as part of this update.
And all the other stuff...
There are so many minor quality of life improvements in this update, to name a few this would be the undo-shot behavior and improved out-of-bounds handling for practice mode, prompts added to several menu's, and the ability to vote skip on scoreboard. Be sure to read the full notes below as there is lots in there I simply haven't mentioned in this blog post.
Let me know of any feedback you have about the additions in this update and if you are enjoying the game please don't forget to add it to your wishlist.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1914980/Golfing_In_Aether/
Patch Notes
General
- Added turn-based play mode part of the competitive preset. You take it in turns to take a shot then spectate the next players shot. Order of play starts out as random for the first hole and then for following holes based on placement on the scoreboard at the end of the previous round.
- Added “Stroke of Luck” early game level.
- Added various backend optimizations to the sequence state.
- Fixed a state mismatch that could occur as a result of poor timing when joining a session.
- Added improvements to spectator camera reset behaviour when camera is transitioning pipes.
- Added improvements to session timer refresh rate to support turn-based mode of play.
- Added various improvements to the hole out camera focus behaviour.
- Added various improvements to how field of view switching is managed when it comes to split-screen games focusing on a single screen such as the scoreboard.
- Added improved handling of the player 1 ball during sequence. This ball will now be visible, other players including local will not. During hotseat the first player in queue to take their turn is visible.
- Fixed one of the two holes on “Mind The Gap” not granting shortcut XP.
- Added skip ability to the wait times on scoreboard. This works by requiring a majority of players to press the X button including the host. When this happens, the timer will be at max 10 seconds, including time already elapsed. If all players vote to skip this will be instantaneous.
- Added ability to undo your shot in practice mode when playing solo; instead of the typical reset method of checkpoint and then back to the tee, the ball will be placed at your previous position with no penalty added. (For leaderboards, if you are taking more than one shot it’s unlikely you will be anywhere near the top, so this won’t impact those).
- Added change to the choose profile menu so that if you have previously not chosen a profile for players 2 – 3 you will be displayed the create local profile option first rather than the primary profile. This is to highlight the feature better as some appear to have missed it.
- Added additional difficulty level of “Easy”. All “Normal” levels will be renamed “Easy” in practice. When selecting difficulty for a session, easy simply means levels will have the sloped hole etc. Normal and Hard remain as before. Easy will be the default difficulty of the race game mode.
- Fixed an incorrect rich presence issue when playing race game mode.
- Fixed a rare instance it was possible to enter more than one hole at once logically.
- Fixed incorrectly assigned ‘shortcut’ xp on one hole on mind the gap.
- Fixed resetting while transitioning a hole would lead to the reset ball still believing it was in a hole.
- Fixed logic issue involving resetting and tee state that can occur as a result of timing.
- Fixed logic issue involving detecting end of stroke taken and riding a water wheel.
- Added extended validation checks to scoreboard setup.
- Added backend optimization to ghost replay handling for leaderboards.
- Added improved behaviour to all settings menus so settings get checked to see if they’ve been changed before applying. This reduces any unnecessary I/O events occurring and ties into the new confirmation prompt added to check if you want apply settings without spamming you when you haven’t actually changed anything.
- Fixed instances where the ‘spectating’ player widget wasn’t updating the remote players stroke count correctly.
- Fixed instances where upon leaving a pipe such as on level “Crazy Golf” the camera would be through the wall.
- Added improvements to local player disconnect behaviour by reducing unnecessary functions being called after a player is removed.
- Added out of bounds behaviour change when playing solo in practice mode. When in this mode it will be as-if you have pressed the reset button (using new undo shot behavior), rather than continue on with time / state like in normal mode. There is little reason not to reset manually at this point and it saves you an extra button press.
- Fixed an issue where incorrect focus was applied to hole out camera.
- Added another quality pass to pipe exit camera behaviour to ensure is no inadvertent camera collisions. This will make things even more seamless and smooth.
Engine
- Added update to Unreal Engine 5 version 5.0.3 from 5.0.2.
Customization
- Added “Swirl” Customization in assorted colors.
- Added revised “Split” customization in assorted colors. This has been reworked to be inline with how other patterns are handled, it now features a faceplate and more colors.
- Added faceplate for the pool and smiley face balls.
- Added memory optimization for the beach faceplate, reducing required by 50%.
- Added various backend improvements for improved memory handling.
- Added improvements to pool and burger customizations so that text color is handled correctly for quick chat.
- Fixed various small issues with faceplates such as incorrect tiling/seamless behaviour on scoreboard.
Environment
- Fixed a small wall gap on “Crazy Golf”.
- Fixed a small wall gap on “See You On The Other Side”.
- Fixed a small alignment issue with a wall on “Getting Tee’ed Off”.
- Added edit to one of the bird sounds which had a reverb that didn’t fit the sparse tree environment it was placed in.
- Added improved collision accuracy to standalone rocks.
- Fixed a small wall gap on “Mind the Gap”.
Interface
- Added new join menu where you can pick from each of the session presets. If no sessions are found you will receive a prompt asking if you wish to create a session).
- Added improvements to Quick Chat in local play. When a split-screen disabled state is active, local players will be able to open the chat on the primary screen providing no chat is open at this time. This helps with the “Waiting for players” and Scoreboard menus. Hotseat will take advantage of this for most gameplay. An indicator of which player opened the chat during this state is visible.
- Fixed incorrect descriptions on the Custom Session menu.
- Fixed description not updating when navigating the session filter menu with a gamepad.
- Fixed wording of “Pause menu” to be “Game menu” in settings when accessing while playing.
- Fixed context of Main Menu button in the Game Menu.
- Fixed an issue where the hole out menu wouldn’t allow mouse click-through.
- Fixed an issue with the power accuracy meter where if not in use there was a tiny blue fuzz on some resolutions.
- Added improvement to the appearance of the HUD following sequence. The HUD will now fade in for the duration of a second in the final second of sequence.
- Added slight increase to the width of stat faceplates as this was inconsistent.
- Added confirmation widget to several menus for actions such as checking you want to quit, checking you wish to apply settings, or checking you wish to leave a session and return to main menu etc. Some actions such as mouse clicking on the quit button on main menu do not produce a confirmation prompt while pressing gamepad button back does; this is by design as its easier to accidently knock the B button on gamepad vs it would be to click that element
- Fixed a handling issue relating to player controllers in some scoring widgets.
- Fixed instance where level title could be present in memory twice.
- Added various tidy-ups to sequence widgets backend memory handling.
- Added improvements to garbage collection when ending a session / returning to main menu which will free up small amounts of memory.
- Fixed overall HUD colors option not working correctly in the local settings menu.
- Fixed incorrect button prompts in the local settings menu.
- Fixed an instance where the local settings menu wouldn’t exit correctly.
- Added improved behaviour for some category options such as overall HUD colors and overall graphics quality.