Hi everyone, hope you're all doing well.
I have an update for you today. There are few visible changes to the game, mostly bugfixes, with the notable exception of a new feature: A Photo Mode. Here are the notes for Slipstream v1.2.4:
- Photo Mode. When activated, the screen will be frozen and the HUD disabled. This will allow players to take better screenshots of the game. Pressing the CONFIRM key will toggle the HUD on/off, and pressing up/down will switch between some photo filters: normal, pixelated, CRT, NTSC, VHS. If you had a save file prior to this update, the photo mode will probably be assigned to the F7 key. This is because this feature used to be available only in my personal Debug/Test builds, and I used the F keys for debug-only stuff. The new default/recommended binding is TAB. If you restore the default controls or create a new save file, the game will restore the correct mapping. On gamepads, it's mapped to the equivalent of a 'select/back' button. I believe it's the 'share' button on PS4/PS5 controllers.
- New localizations: Greek and Russian. This addition might cause an unexpected language change for some players because, internally, the game stores the selected language as an index, and since two new languages were added to the list, the index stored in your save file might point to a different language now. If you can't find the option to restore your preferred language, just delete the settings file (/AppData/Roaming/ansdorGames/Slipstream/settings-1.2.bin on Windows) and the game will restore the default settings.
- As usual, bugfixes and difficulty adjustments. Notably, I had forgotten to re-implement the "darkness" effect in Mystic Cave, but it's back now.
One last note: I'm working on new content to be added to the game in the future. I can't say much for now, but I'm making major changes to the engine under the hood, and this update might have a slight impact on the game's performance. The engine is doing a few more calculations (actually a few thousand more) per frame, to accomodate the new features. I didn't notice any impact on my own testing PC, and I hope it won't affect players too much, but if your computer struggled to run this game before, it might struggle a little harder now. Unfortunately it's a trade-off, I can't add more features to the engine without this. But it's unlikely that this will happen, the game has never been too demanding anyway.
I hope you enjoy, and thanks for playing Slipstream!