Okay this is still in the initial phases and I am not ready to subject everyone to what is happening here. However, I think it's a major change that may effect the way the game works.
A lot of people complained about the mouse being stuck in the game window. I understand this, it can be frustrating. Add to that, the fact that I had to slow down the mouse because I was scaling the game window, it made many other problems. The reason I did this was to preserve the "pixel perfect" nature of this low resolution game. I really think it adds to the charm of it.
But I also hear you. I get that not everyone may care about this aspect of the game as much as I do. So I am trying a new system. This one does not scale the game window, it just scales the menus and fonts so they fit into the game window. The major difference is visible when you are moving, especially inside the dungeons.
The benefit is that I no longer have to lock the mouse pointer in the game window and there is no longer any need to slow it down. You can drag the mouse right over the game window and out the other side, and nothing will stop you! The negative side is that the game is no longer pixel perfect ... something I will cry about at night when I am alone.
If you zoom in, you can see the 3D areas are rendered in 1920 x 1080 resolution, and only the menus are 640 x 360. Another benefit to this is that movement is a lot smoother and does not flicker as much. I think it will be easier on the eyes for players, so I think this is probably the best option.
What's Missing?
So far I have it more or less working. However, I still have to figure out full-screen mode, which is currently disabled in this build. If you have a 1920 x 1080 monitor (or anything in 16:9 aspect ration, you will not even notice this. But if you have an ultrawide, or 4:3 monitor, you will be able to see your desktop around the game window for now.
I played around with the map to make it a bit more visible. You can see the mini map is hard to see, and the lines are now very thin. In the map menu (press "m") you can see that I have brightened it up and enhanced it to make it more visible. But the mini map is currently defying my efforts to make it look the same.
I will be working on these issues for the next few days. Until then, I will leave the default branch alone...
Try it Out!
I would love to hear your thought on this. Is it an improvement? Does it take away the game's charm? I am still ambivalent about the whole thing. This is a major shift, but I want to make something that works for the majority of players.
Go to "Cyclopean>Properties>Betas" and select the "testing" branch from the drop-down menu.
Other Fixes
There are some creatures that will never join your party. Previously, the game did not have a way to handle that, and it would produce a wrong message telling you that you don't have an alliance with (insert random creature name or just the letter S here). Now it will tell you that an alliance is not possible.
Also, if you picked an ally to fight an enemy, but changed your mind and decided to attack them yourself, the game would sometimes have the enemy attack the ally. If you had cancelled by clicking the "close" button, it would work as intended. But if you hit "escape" to close that window, the game still thought you had chosen an ally to fight with.
These are fixed in the testing branch.