Rising Star 2 News

In an embarrassing turn of events, I discovered that the Windows version of Rising Star 2 has been using the 32-bit build option all along, resulting in many of the memory issues that people have been experiencing (resulting in hard crashes).

Rising Star 2 is my first game for Windows since 2007's Shady O'Grady's™ Rising Star, and my first Windows game using Unity as the engine. I had been working on mobile and web platforms most of the time in between, so technically this is a rookie mistake when it comes to making a Windows game in 2020.

Many people have reported that the game crashes when trying to start a new game. I was able to reproduce this issue on a friend's laptop that only has about 2 GB of video memory, and proceeded to do many memory optimizations.

In addition to general memory optimizations, the "Medium" quality level will use much less texture memory, and will be the maximum quality option on computers with less than 4 GB video memory and 8 GB system memory.

A bug was reported by a couple of players, where they couldn't get past a certain date in the game, and it was related to having two gigs booked on the same date, which should never happen. It confused the game into knowing what gig to do on that date. This always happens with one of the dates being a tour gig.

The update fixes the double-booked date by discarding the non-tour gig date and keeping the tour gig when loading the game. Also, a fix was put in the avoid the double-bookings in the future.

Here's how I think it was happening...
1. You have your manager set to book a tour.
2. NPC bands start booking their gigs. While doing this they also look to see if the player's band would fit into the gig as an opening slot. This will only happen if the player's band doesn't yet have a gig on the same date. If everything looks good, schedule a phone call to ask the player if he wants the gig.
3. The manager books tour gigs. However, one of these tour gig dates is the same date that the phone call from #2 is on.
4. The player gets the phone call inviting them to the gig, because when the phone call was scheduled, the date was free, but now it's not. The player clicks Yes and the double-booking happens.

Thanks to everyone that has bought the game already, and thank you very much for your patience with any bugs you encounter. I can usually fix the bug if I get the save game files that are affected, such as in this case.

In my younger days, I spent a lot of time playing music in local scenes in Michigan. My experiences, combined with my love of music and video games, inspired me to create the original Rising Star, which was released in 2007.

Throughout the years since the original game was released, I have received many e-mails asking for a sequel. Over two years were spent working on this project, and I'm very happy that you've decided to play it.

Rising Star 2 is arriving 13 years after the original game was released. What have I been working on in between? How did I decide to release a sequel after so long? Ask me anything!

Get on our Discord channel to chat https://discord.gg/ZRuDRg