New beta available!

Hellooooo everyone.

As said earlier this year : I was pretty busy with personal things and I couldn't work much on SinaRun. Well. The great news is I'm still somewhat busy but managed to get some work done on SinaRun!

So that's nice. However the new update (1.5) still need some debugging, polishing and other things. Of course, I have testers but I figured it would be cooler if everyone could test and give feedback on the next update!

So there we go. Leaderboards and multiplayer are disabled in the beta

To use the beta branch simply go in the game Steam settings, 'Beta' tabs and in the drop down choose 'Beta Branch'. To go back to the normal version click the other button.

Now what's in this update you may ask? Lot of things! Maybe less than some of you expected, maybe more. Some of you will be happy, some will be crying! Actually it's a pretty bad update considering the amount of time since the last one..

Known Issues

• Some levels might look weird. Specially refering to the fog or colors
• This update introduce several anti-aliasing issues. I'll need to research a bit this because I'm not too sure how to fix it at the moment
• Level previews sometime doesn't represent the levels correctly (small visual issues)
• GUI Scaling is not finished and as such will cause issues at certain resolutions. Please report any issues!
• Shadows quality is somewhat lower than before
• Controllers might have issues on OSX and Linux
• Multiplayer is disabled in the beta (because it's broken)
• In a similar fashion to level previews : in the tutorial levels are not always represented correctly. While this is not intended, I don't particulary dislike it the way it is right now

Engine Changes

SinaRun now use Unity 5! Due to that many (non-intentional for the most parts) changes were made.
• Better performance all around! I didn't do many benchmarks but in the few ones I did the average FPS was much more stable and generally higher. Hopefully this is the case for everyone!
• Small visual changes! Unity 5 change the way fog work. Fog being used quite heavily in SinaRun it affect unintentionally how levels look. I tried to make them look as close as possible to what they used to look like but it was simply impossible for some (such as Slick Talk which use a big share of 'visual tricks' to look right). Addtional updates over time will come to fix the visual issues caused by the engine change but for the most part things work!

General Changes

• Added a new achievement (this was mostly to make 'environnement achievement' work. More achievement using this system will come in later updates)
• Maximum field of view is now 120
• The input settings now support mouse inputs. Which means you can now bind Jump to Mouse3 if you desire to! Scrollwheel is not supported as it doesn't work correctly in SinaRun since you need to hold the jump button to jump higher. Unlike CS:GO or Quake. But every button from Mouse0 to Mouse5 work!
• Added initial controller support. Please not that in addition to being unfinished this is only partial support and as such menus can't be navigated using controllers (yet!)
• The timer now start when the player leave the spawn position and not when the first key is pressed. This also means that on maps where the player start in the air, on a slope or anything that actually move the player the timer will start automatically (which is intentional for the moment)
• Added new settings to allow for X and Y axis to be inverted (I hope the guy who refunded the game because it was 'unplayable without invert axis' will rebuy it!)
• Default Field of View is now 85 (was 80 before)
• Removed the Equalize button in the input settings as it wasn't really useful and somewhat confusing
• Added new option to invert Sprint. If this is enabled you'll be running at sprint speed all the time and pressing the sprint button will slow you down to normal speed instead

Movement Changes

• Ground and Air Acceleration are now different based on if you're sprinting, running normally or walking. (As expected they are lower when not sprinting) This is a change I've wanted to do a loooong time ago (it's been in my todo-list for almost a year!) and now it's finally there. The acceleration while running normally is lower to prevent new users from being 'suprised' by the acceleration but still high enough to enable better players to stop sprinting when needed. As for the change to walking acceleration it's only to make it usable as the acceleration was waaay too high for it to be enjoyable when used. Recently I've thought about a few possible new mechanics that would still fit the minimalist style while adding new skillful options to runs. I'll have to look into it more and maybe it won't ever see the light of the day but I'll keep you guys updated!

UI Changes

• Added experimental GUI Scaling. Need a lot more work but this is a great start
• Reduced margin between elements in menus
• Made several small changes to make sure the menu was adapted correctly for every resolution with the new GUI Scaling stuff
• Added quick notes in some menus to inform users of certain things (ex : Times not being saved in Training Mode) It unfortunally didn't make it into this update but something I want to explore soon is tooltips for settings that can't be explained correctly in one line. Good examples would be "Clear Input on Reset" or 'Crease'. These two in particular can be kinda hard to understand.

Map Changes

• Added a new map : Elastic Light
• Added cool looking height fog to Wanderer Hideout and Elevated Highground. Might be a bit 'too much' but I kinda like it
• Made Red Things a little bit bigger to make it more playeable with the updated physics of SinaRun 2 (aka this game)
• Moved Community Interest into the 'Main Line' category. Doesn't need any changes I think!
• Removed outdated effects in classic maps (Fish eyes, film grain, weird glow etc) Slick Talk
• Improved overall performance
• Made a few visual tweaks to make it easier on the eyes (+ Unity 5 unintentional changes)
• Fixed a few floating platforms/pillars that weren't supposed to be floating
• General polishing (missplaced platforms, lack of decoration in certain area etc) White Roads
• Reduced Bloom (this might not be noticeable due to the engine change. I'll do further tweaks after feedback)

Tutorial Changes

• Made phantom platforms a bit more transparent so new players don't confuse them with real ones
• Made the same change to spawn position I did back in 1.4.3 (to other maps) to make it much much easier
• Moved the spawn position a little bit in the second part (Golden Opportunity part) to allow players to move a bit before falling off

Bug Fixes

• Fixed some minor typos in the English translation
• Fixed mouse not being hidden and locked correctly after alt-tab in game
• Fixed an issue where shadows distance was saved incorrectly and led to shadows being disabled
• Fixed some level previews having incorrect geometry or missplaced objects
• Fixed an issue where performance when viewing Spiritual Era level preview was unusually low
• Fixed not being able to rebind a key to the key it was already binded to
• Fixed Back button in the Keybinds settings not going to the correct menu
• Fixed RightShift being unbindable and Left and Right Alt not binding correctly (they previously binded to CTRL Left&Right)
• Fixed an issue where the keybind would get stuck in 'Key already binded' even though the binding actually worked
• Fixed View Full Leaderboard button not opening the right leaderboard in some cases
• (Maybe?) Fixed issues where weird effects would happen when looking at literally nothing (aka no particles, platforms etc on the screen) when anti-aliasing was enabled
• Fixed various very rare issues related to wrong times being sent to the leaderboards or leaderboards not working at all. More work will have to be done toward this in the future. I added simple stats collecting to help debug these issues in the future. Hopefully it all goes well