Pre-Launch Update

Dear Shopkeepers,

It is time for the Pre-Launch Update as Winkeltje is inching closer to release. This time the update is focused on fixing bugs, correcting mistakes and setting the stage for the Launch Content Update. Read on for more information on what the next month or so will look like.

Price Increase

As announced earlier, the game will increase in price to $14.99 (or your regional equivalent) on the 4th of March. You can read the details in the initial announcement post.

Launch Content Update

As some of you know, we have been working on a large content update for the 1.0 launch. If everything goes well you can expect to see the Launch Content Update deployed on the unstable branch for public testing in the coming week. Since this is a large and important update for the 1.0 launch, we need to take the time to test and fix issues that we find to ensure the game is stable when it finally releases. You can help by playing on the unstable branch and report any issues you find in the #bug-reports-unstable channel on Discord. Instructions on how to switch to the unstable branch can be found in the #information channel on the Winkeltje Discord (https://discord.gg/winkeltje)!

Key Rebinding

A much requested feature has been key rebinding. After carefully analyzing the required changes we sadly had to come to the conclusion that at this stage we cannot take the risk to go for such a major change. The current implementation of user input & feedback (like the buttons you see on screen in the UI & Prompts) is very fragmented. Changing that at this point would be a multi-week effort in a lot of core systems which would introduce a huge amount of risk this close to launch. We're still looking at options and feedback to see if we can support limited rebinding.

New

• Audio - Updated the main menu music with a new theme track.

Changes

• Art - Bushy shaders should now get snow covered when outside and stop waving in the wind when placed inside.
• Art - Made the fire shader a smidge more yellow to closer resemble the feeling of fire.
• Art - Tweaked the table and chair colliders so chairs can fit underneath tables.
• Art - Tweaked the snow transition and snow materials to look better during the transitional period.
• Art - Adjusted the thickness of the centered structure beams on some of the wall pieces so they will not clip through paintings anymore.
• Art - Updated the shadowcasters on variant walls.
• Art - Reduced Solstice tree radius from 0.52 to 0.49 to make it easier to snap fit next to other assets.
• Art - Reduced the collider radius from the washing bucket to fit more tightly around the model.
• Art - Reduced the collider radius from the coat rack to fit more tightly around the model.
• Art - Made the darker leaves of bushes brighter to match better with other bushes.
• Audio - The restocking plop and thud sound effects are now in world space.
• Controls - Changing the wall masking preference using the keyboard hotkey should now be possible while the catalog menu is open.
• Effects - Updated the snow effect by covering the top of outside objects and masking out indoor objects.
• Farming - Community - Highlighting planters will now pulsate the seeds and crops in the inventory overview if possible.
• Language - Removed numbers from hybrid storage translations as a previous change to unlocking multiple furniture pieces has removed the confusion when unlocking several hybrid storages.
• UI - The crafting menu now has hotkeys to increase and decrease the amount of items to craft by using the Q and E keys.
• UI - Furniture labels will now also display the storage capacity of a furniture piece.
• UI - Buying or selling furniture will now list the furniture name in the transaction notification.
• UI - The scenario select should now scroll to, and focus on, the normal difficulty by default.
• UI - Scrolling through the credits using the controller has been made a bit faster and now supports d-pad navigation.
• UI - Fading between screens will now mention that the game is loading. This message is more for consoles that load slower than PC.
• UI - Improved the switching and navigating in the scenario select menu.
• UI - Moved the saving notification to be above the money counter.
• UI - Commerce UI will now close if you click outside of it.
• UI - Changed the direct selling message to include customer name.
• UI - Replaced the uninteractable sell button with a message when an item is not in stock in the direct selling prompt.

Fixes

• Achievements - Hard & Very Hard achievements would not trigger correctly. Reloading the save file should trigger these as intended.
• Animation - The crafting and planting animations played back in real-time causing issues when recording gameplay. The animations will now play back depending on the time between frames while respecting the time scale where appropriate.
• Animation - Restocking multiple shelves while walking should now animate from the player position.
• Art - The character customization scene was covered in snow during winter.
• Art - A customer should no longer display an outline of a disabled mesh.
• Art - Reduced the size of the roof colliders and lowered the height.
• Audio - The pre-game letter should have its writing sound playing again.
• Input - Community - Changing between 'qwerty' and 'azerty' keyboard preferences did not apply the preference unless the shop was reloaded.
• Lighting - Balanced the brightness of the wall mounted lanterns and lantern stand.
• Lighting - Updated the shadowcasters on walls to prevent light from leaking through.
• Other - SDK would initialize twice on PC.
• Other - When placing objects, they would move into view within 1 frame causing it to briefly appear and then move to its correct position.
• Other - Disabled menu hotkeys when in the character creator.
• Other - Potential fix for persistent.data sometimes not being writeable.
• Other - Added an additional check to ensure that whoever is fast enough placing & deleting a counter in 1 frame doesn't throw an error our way.
• Options - Options weren't correctly applied when going from the main menu -> game scene.
• Physics - Some NPCs were colliding with the doors which could result in very funky physics.
• Save - Old shops with customer data but without employee data could cause errors.
• Scenarios - Changed the Large scenario grid size to 16x14 for symmetry.
• Shop Builder - Fixed an issue where placing a double wall with a stone border in the middle would place a pillar.
• Storage - Slightly reduced the height of the collision box on the long and large pallets so that they may fit under a wall mounted lantern.
• UI - Initial crafting station interaction should now slot a crafting material if this is available.
• UI - The inventory overview item will no longer pulse when 'Show displayed items' is disabled and a customer takes an item.
• UI - Fixed a typo in the controls section causing a button prompt to appear as the Esc key instead of the E key.
• UI - You could still try to load invalid save files, even when you shouldn't.
• UI - Using left bumper in the scenario select menu would throw an error.
• UI - The initial fade from black in the main menu should now wait until the background scene is loaded in.
• UI - Updated Discord Rich Presence icon to the new one.
• UI - Community - Objectives marked as hidden should no longer count towards the total pinned amount.
• UI - Community - Removing the last of an item would not update the inventory overview.
• UI - Community - The inventory overview category and item sort were not applied when starting up the game.
• UI - Added an init check and moved a UI call to address a potential null reference error.
• UI - Loading a shop should now correctly apply the auto hide catalog preference setting.
• UI - The UI could occasionally be called before it was instantiated resulting in a critical error.
• UI - The top bar will now go up higher when hiding the UI to avoid the reminder icons showing when playing with a huge UI scale.
• UI - When opening a display it would not correctly select the first empty slot.
• UI - When using a controller, pressing X while having a display window open didn't do anything.
• UI - The bottom bar buttons should now enable in the right order when going through the tutorial.
• UI - The pre-game text should no longer flicker when loading into the next scene.
• UI - Appropriate button bar prompts should now be shown when initiating the tutorial.

Performance

• Performance - The Alchemy Station should no longer animate when not in view.
• Performance - The shop sign should no longer animate when not in view.
• Performance - NPCs using a rig builder component should now toggle the component before and after use to prevent overhead costs.

Hotfixes

• Placement - Repeatedly placing a bush could cause a null reference error.
• UI - Removed the 'Own' filter from the inventory menu as it was confusing and not very useful.

Update: v6699
Hotfix: v6702