This devlog won't contain any information about Unreal Table Ball, I'll have a separate devlog for that in the near future!
"What?" you may be asking, "I thought Table Ball Unity was now abandoned?". Well, recently I was made aware of some rather... annoying... bugs in the current build of Table Ball Unity, I felt it was only right to actually fix these bugs so that the game can run smoothly for everyone. However I've hit a bit of a snag, which I'll get into here.
So what are these bugs?
Currently there's a bug in the game affecting 11 of the games achievements making them unachievable. Since most of the people that play this game are achievement hunters I feel it necessary to fix this bug, however I'm having some rather major issues at the moment affecting my ability to fix this bug...
What's the issue?
Right now I'm unable to "build" the game, it gets to a certain point and then just gets stuck. I even left it running overnight to see if I was just impatient, but alas, over 26 hours later, it's still "writing assets". I've tried everything, I've cleaned up every "warning" Unity gives me, looked right through the code, and still cannot figure out what's preventing me from creating a build. I can't even test Steam integration in-engine, I've followed all the guides that exist and still cannot "pop" achievements when running the game in Unity.
What makes things worse is that I'm about to go on break from anything to do with Lockyz Media (something I do twice a year, the first one from May-June for about a month, and the second in December.) This means I have about a week to figure out what's going on, fix it, and then give you guys a build.
So... what will I do?
Well, I have a few ideas, a few things I'd like to try and see if I can get the game to build again,
1) I'm going to make a backup of the game, because some of the things I want to try have the ability to completely break everything.
2) I'll be completely re-creating the actual "game", copying over code and the games scenes to hopefully remove any assets that may be broken, this will mean making sure the new build contains all the packages that the game uses, like for example Unitys Input Manager, TexMeshPro (or whatever its called), and a few others.
3) If that doesn't work I'll attempt to update the engine to Unity 6. I'd MUCH prefer to avoid this at any costs, I highly disagree with quite a lot of the changes to Unitys TOS from Unity 6 onwards (changes that aren't present in Unity 2022's TOS), I'd also like to avoid having to rewrite some of my code to work with Unity 6.
4) If I cannot get the game working in Unity 6, what I may do instead is simply remove these achievements until such a time that I can get Unreal Table Ball to a point that it can completely replace Table Ball Unity, which is not expected until Q3 or Q4 2026 (so in about a year), or such a time that I can actually fix the issue in Table Ball Unity. Obviously I'd create a way to allow you to "save" your achievements to file, so that you can regain these achievements when they're re-added and able to be earnt again. I'd make this available through the main game branch, it'd be available for a couple months before the achievements are removed so as to allow enough time to "save" them (since I cannot access achievement status when the achievement doesn't exist).
Other Bugs
I've recently opened up a new Bug Tracker that'll be used for future bugs and suggestions, if you've encountered any other bugs, or would like to make a suggestion, please feel free to make a post in Our Bug Tracker, you will need to make a Discord account to interact with our bug tracker however.
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Thanks for reading,
Robin Painter
Lead Developer